by Ruthie Knox
“I always liked flying with you,” she whispered.
“Your mom did, too.”
“I miss her.”
This wasn’t true.
The truth was, she’d never allowed herself to miss her mother. She’d been too busy blaming her for dying. Blaming her father for letting her die, divorcing her, failing her.
She’d been too busy burying her anger, hiding her pain, and promising herself that if she loved freely and openly, she could fly.
She could be happy. If she just figured out how not to feel anything painful or deal with anything hard.
But here she was in this shiny new beautiful airplane, and she didn’t have any choice but to look down and see the real shapes of everything she’d left behind her on the ground.
Here she was, with her father.
“Tell me about Grandma,” she said.
And he asked her, “What do you want to know?”
CHAPTER THREE
Roman picked up a jar of cherry salsa from a crowded shelf and checked the price, though he had no intention of buying it.
Grandma Tommy’s Country Store wasn’t his kind of shopping experience.
Ashley would get a kick out of it, though. She would sink sample pretzels into every open jar of dipping sauce. She’d probably drip sauce on her wrist or her fingers and then suck it off, smiling, and make him taste. She’d force him to tell her which ones he liked.
They’d end up at the checkout together, their basket piled high with jars of cherry preserves, cherry salsa, chocolate-covered cherries, spicy mustards, and dipping sauces.
It would be one of those Ashley things where she transformed the tacky and mundane into the spectacular.
He took the jar off the shelf again and weighed it in his hand.
He walked to the front of the store and found a red plastic basket.
Esther was there, flipping through a rack of tourist T-shirts. Roman tipped a package of chocolate cherries into his basket, looked at it, and tipped in a few more. He’d give some to Noah’s kid, maybe. One for his assistant, Pete, who was always eating something sweet.
He’d save a package for Heberto. Throw him for a loop.
“Are you shopping or just killing time?” he asked Esther. As a local, she was unlikely to be interested in souvenirs. It had been Carly and Nana who’d wanted to stop here. They were on the other side of the store now, looking at wind chimes; he could hear Dora’s chirping voice and Jamie’s low tones in response.
“To be perfectly honest, I’m avoiding Stanley,” she said.
Stanley had stayed outside on a bench. “Is he bothering you?”
“He asked me to marry him.”
“He did? When?”
She waved her hand, as though the details were unimportant. “You were off with Ashley.”
“What did you say?”
Hangers scraped over metal as Esther continued flipping through the rack, and Roman found himself impatient for an answer. Stanley was a pain in the ass, but he was Ashley’s pain in the ass, and Roman had to admit, Stanley had grown on him since their argument. He had a few good qualities among all the bad ones.
“He wants me to move to Pennsylvania,” she said.
“Is that impossible?”
She wrinkled her nose. “Can you see me living at a campground?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ve never been camping.”
“It’s a nice place. Pretty.”
“You went there with Ashley.”
“Yeah.”
She flipped a few more hangers.
“Let me know if you see anything Ash might like,” he said impulsively.
Esther paused, then backed up a few shirts and pulled a gray V-neck off the rack. It was a woman’s style, sporty, with pink stripes on the sleeves and swirly pink letters that read Door County. “This one.”
“Is it the right size?”
“Yes.”
He put it in the basket. “Anything else I need to have?”
She peered in his basket. “You should get some cherry jam. And they have a great spice rub for grilling chicken. Do you grill?”
“No.”
“Are you going to see her when you get back to Florida?”
“I hope so.”
“If you do, you should buy a grill. She’ll make sure it gets a workout.”
Roman smiled, thinking of what it might be like to have Ashley in his life. Inviting her friends to his condo to grill chicken. Although it wouldn’t be chicken, it would be tofu or something. Could you grill tofu?
“Where’s the spice rub?”
Esther led him down a few aisles, trailing her fingertip along vacuum-sealed plastic packages until she found it. She handed him one, and Roman took it. Then he took half a dozen more off the shelf.
“You’re in love with her,” Esther said.
His head bobbed up and down, overeager. He didn’t care. “Yep.”
Esther crossed her arms, gazing at him. She had small, pert features in a broad-planed face, the most notable of which were her cheekbones: rounded knobs set far apart, giving her a raw sort of nobility.
“You’re not a scumbag, are you?” she asked.
Roman suppressed a laugh. “I don’t think so.”
“Because Ashley’s been with enough scumbags.”
“I have a job. I could take care of her, if it came to that.”
Esther’s eyebrows drew together in a frown. “Let’s get you some jam.”
She led him to another aisle, and Roman followed, bewildered. She wasn’t what he’d expected. He’d thought Esther would be an old white lady with curly hair, a Mrs. Claus type who would clasp Ashley to her bosom and soothe her. But Esther was just … Esther. Small, tidy, and blunt.
“Hold out your basket,” she said. Roman did, and the weight in the crook of his elbow increased as she filled it with jar after jar of preserves. “How many people are you shopping for?”
“Four.”
She added a few more jars. “That should do it.”
Somewhere near the register, Dora screeched, and Roman heard Carly trying to calm her down.
“I knew about the sale,” Esther said. “Susan told me.”
“Oh?”
It was all he could think of to say.
“She told me about you, too. She liked you.”
“She drove me crazy,” he confessed.
“She drove everybody crazy. She was maddening.”
“But you two were close.”
“She was my best friend.”
“Why do you think she did it? To Ashley?”
Esther looked away, then back at him. “I don’t think she had one reason. Susan wasn’t … She didn’t make plans that way. She focused on what was right in front of her. She needed money, and there you were, offering to buy the place she’d promised to Ashley. She felt guilty about selling it, so she didn’t tell Ashley. That was a solution, for Susan. I told her it wasn’t right, but she was her own conscience. She didn’t listen.”
“But when she got sick. How could she not let Ashley know?”
“There isn’t any dignity in dying. It hurts and it’s ugly and it smells bad. Susan didn’t want that girl anywhere near it.”
“Didn’t she think about how Ashley would feel, though? Didn’t she know it would break her heart?”
“Susan wanted things for Ashley. She wanted her to feel at home in the world. To have adventures, live a big life. She never wanted to be a mother to her. She wanted to teach her how not to need one.”
“I don’t think it works that way.”
Esther smiled ruefully. “I don’t think so, either. But Susan was Susan. We were friends a long time. I never once changed her mind once she’d made it up.”
The basket bit into his arm, heavy and poorly balanced. He thought about Ashley. What she might have asked if she were here.
“Did she love her?”
Esther’s smile faded. “Susan loved Ashley as much as she was capable of
loving anyone. She gave her everything she knew how to give.”
He weighed the answer in his heart.
It felt correct. Awful, but correct. The Susan Bowman who Esther described was the same woman he’d known.
Roman nodded. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
An awkward few seconds passed, and he wondered if he should head for the checkout. Round up his flock and get them on the road to tonight’s campsite.
Tomorrow, he would leave them. Stanley had told him he wasn’t ready to return to Pennsylvania, but he could buy a plane ticket when he was.
Nana and her family would spend some more time on the road before they made their way back to Ohio in the mobile home.
Carmen had been oddly silent on the subject of her flight. Roman suspected she was in no hurry to get back to Miami. He planned to offer her a ride.
“You could visit, you know,” he said.
When Esther’s eyebrows lifted, he clarified, “Stanley. In Pennsylvania. See how you like it.”
She stared at him some more.
“I mean, if the reason you’re avoiding him right now isn’t that you’re disgusted by his proposal.”
“I’m not disgusted.”
“Okay. So. You could go visit.”
“I could.”
A few seconds passed. Roman cleared his throat and thought, Fuck it.
“You should,” he blurted out. “If you think you could love him. Because it’s not like these kinds of chances—they don’t come along every day. None of us are getting any younger. And he’s a good guy, in his way. He obviously cares about you, or he wouldn’t have come all this way, and if there’s something there …”
He trailed off.
Esther reached out and gripped his arm, squeezing it for a moment before letting go. “Maybe I will.”
When she turned away, he caught the hint of a smile on her lips.
This wasn’t his specialty—making these kinds of offers and arrangements or having such unscripted, unsettling conversations. It was Ashley’s.
But he thought he was doing okay so far.
CHAPTER FOUR
At nine-thirty the next morning, Ashley stepped from her father’s car into the Sunnyvale parking lot.
Shielding her eyes against the sun, she looked for signs of life—familiar faces, movement—but the property was still and silent.
There was no one around. The cinder-block office building sat squat and dark as a toad, and along the path between it and the parking lot the landscaping crawled over the edging to invade the space between the pavers.
She heard the mindless cry of a seagull and the faint pounding of the surf into the beach. The fronds of the palm tree fluttered in a breeze that brought the scent of the ocean, smoke, decay.
A red-and-white piece of paper trash blew across the parking lot in front of her, catching on the car tire for a moment before it spun away.
Ashley felt desolate as a child who rode her bike out to the fairgrounds, only to discover the circus had vanished in the night.
She hadn’t prepared herself for this.
She wasn’t ready yet to see Sunnyvale—a place she’d so long thought of as magical—stripped naked and abandoned. Even though she was the one who’d asked Mitzi, last night, to send the protesters home, she’d nonetheless expected to find them here, her vibrant group of friends, awaiting her arrival.
From the opposite side of the car, her father cleared his throat. “Looks pretty grim.”
“Yeah. You think they all left?”
“Smells like smoke. They’re probably on the beach.”
“At the fire pit.”
“That’s my guess.”
Maybe they’d sat out there all night—Mitzi and Gus, waiting for the sun to come up.
“You coming?” she asked.
“I should get back.”
But there was something in his eyes. A hesitation, as though he didn’t know what he wanted. Or he couldn’t bring himself to say.
In the plane yesterday, he’d told her some of his memories of Sunnyvale.
He remembered a sad, cynical mother who had left for ten months when he was an adolescent and returned happier but uninterested in parenting him.
They’d tried to talk about Ashley’s own teenage years, but it was difficult. When the conversation began to grow rancorous, she’d backed off. She didn’t want to fight with him anymore—not if she could help it.
She’d realized something: it had never been necessary for him to come after her. He could have found a way to get her on the phone. He could have sent an aide or driven to Sunnyvale directly to wield his own influence over the protesters.
Instead, he’d spent all this time on her. Why?
His mother was dead. She’d lost her grandmother. Neither of them dealt well with heavy-duty emotional stuff. Maybe this was his way—his ham-fisted and kind of shitty way—of reaching out to her.
If so, she didn’t want to be responsible for shutting him down. Not this time.
“I think you should stay,” she said. “Do this with me.”
He stood there for a long moment, watching her.
She shoved her hands in her pockets and watched him back.
The wind blew her hair in her face. She didn’t get angry, and she didn’t wish he were anyone other than who he was. Her father.
Her complicated, frustrating, only father.
After a minute, he closed the car door and put his keys in the pocket of his black trousers.
They walked by the pool in silence. Ashley reached out a hand to stroke the smooth skin of the palm tree.
“Hang on a second.”
She needed to stop, just for a moment, and be here.
She needed to hunker down in the spot where she’d spent the better part of two days, so that she could look out at Sunnyvale and see it.
Really see it.
And when she did that—when she slid her back down the tree trunk, letting her shirt ruck up, until she settled into the mulch and felt the cool metal of the padlock against her fingertips—the view was familiar.
But she had changed.
The swimming pool sat vacant. The puddle where the Key deer had stopped to drink had vanished, leaving behind a brown stain and a series of rings to mark the stages of its evaporation.
The eight unoccupied rental units had bleached under the bright sunlight, their colors reminiscent of a set of cheap pastel chalks left out in the rain by some careless child. Crumbling now around the edges, soft and degraded, they wanted only the press of a fingertip to demonstrate the extent of their decay.
Tufts of grass pushed insolently through the webbed lines of cracked cement around the pool.
Ashley looked at all of it, and she thought, This is what Roman saw.
He would have seen that grass and thought about how, over time, it would break up the pavement. How the deer would turn the pool into a seasonal lagoon, nudging aside bits of detritus with their soft noses to get at the fresh water stored beneath. How human scavengers would follow. They’d find this place and strip the wiring for copper, break the windows, steal any fixtures that remained.
Roman would have seen all that, but Ashley hadn’t.
And now, even if she tried, she wouldn’t be able to stop Sunnyvale’s deterioration. She lacked the resources and the determination.
She lacked any kind of vision, but Roman’s was perfectly clear.
The real miracle was that he’d seen this place for what it was, had known there was nothing worth saving at Sunnyvale—nothing but ghosts and memories, which couldn’t be packed away in boxes—and he’d gone along with her anyway.
She loved him for that. For being a man who would always have a space blanket in his car to offer the shivering refugee who’d padlocked herself to his tree.
For being Roman, who understood love better than she did, even though he’d never had it.
“Is this where you did it?” her father asked.
&n
bsp; “Yeah.”
“What did you think you’d achieve?”
She looked up, but she couldn’t read his expression. His head blocked the sun, his face cast in shadow.
“I think I was trying to stop time.”
Tomorrow or the next day, the concrete would be broken up and scraped away by scarred steel blades, the earth beneath leveled and filled, smoothed over and left fallow, waiting for whatever would be built here next.
And that was okay.
It was sad, but it was okay.
Her father’s chin lifted as he gazed up toward the palm fronds. “I used to try to climb this tree.”
“I guess not all your memories from here are bad.”
“I fell out of it and broke my arm.”
The snort of her laughter caught her by surprise, and a slow smile spread over his face.
“I guess it would seem funny,” he said. “To you.”
She let her head settle back against the tree and looked at the sky, swallowing because she was right at the tipping point between laughter and hysteria.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get this done.”
He held out a hand, and she took it, allowing him to draw her back to her feet.
They found Mitzi, Gus, and Noah on the beach, gathered around a bonfire. Noah raised one arm aloft and held it there to acknowledge their arrival.
Ashley hugged Mitzi first, then Gus. Noah extended a hand, but Ashley ducked it in favor of a hug and a kiss on his cheek.
“What’s up with the fire?” she asked.
“We’ve been keeping vigil,” Mitzi said.
“It seemed wrong to leave,” Gus explained. “Even though it’s over.” He looked at Ashley. “It is over, right?”
“Yeah,” she said. “But it was good of you guys to do this.” She meant not only the fire, but also the occupation, the vigil, all the help Mitzi had given her.
“So that’s it?” Mitzi asked. “You’re going to give up just because your dad says you have to?”
“It’s not like that. It’s not mine to decide about. It’s Roman’s.”
“You have him by the balls, though. You could make him do the right thing.”
Ashley glanced from Mitzi’s flashing eyes to Gus’s uncertain smile, then to Noah, who dipped his head and shook it once, slowly, back and forth.
