Relatively Honest

by Molly Ringle

  Best of all, when I followed my parents to Whitecrest on our second day, and took the grand tour, I snagged glances and swapped curious smiles with a handful of pretty girls. Having forsaken my home for the allures of the American female, I reasoned that I at least deserved to meet some. Meanwhile, my insecurities over my foreign appearance vanished: aside from having darker tans, the American blokes I noticed looked about like me. That likely left me with the advantage, given the accent.

  But first I had to tie off the old threads back home. On our third day in Oregon I hooked up my laptop and emailed Miriam, telling her we had arrived safely. Two hours later she sent back a response, all one incredibly long paragraph, telling me how much she missed me and what she had done each hour since I left, and something or other about her sister’s romantic problems (I stopped paying attention around there). It seemed an essay assignment to answer that in full, so I put it off a day, then finally typed:

  Hey Miriam,

  Can’t write much at the moment, as I’m dreadfully busy with unpacking and then repacking for university, but thanks much for your sweet letter. Hope all is well with you, pretty girl.

  Daniel

  If you must let them down, let them down with charm, I say.

  On the fifth day, after a late breakfast by myself, I walked down the winding road to Whitecrest. My parents had already taken up their posts as acting managers of the new resort. They spent nearly every day there, meeting the employees, planning the upcoming ski season, inspecting rooms and facilities, and suggesting improvements. By visiting them at work I could often get free postcards, and I thought it would be nice to send one to Miriam. In addition, I had overheard my parents discussing the problem of chambermaids flirting with guests on work time, and naturally I needed to step into the middle of that.

  Behind the reception counter sat a fellow in a white polo shirt bearing the Whitecrest logo. The logo featured a skier and a tree on an imminent collision course with one another. According to my mother, the skier was supposed to be dodging the tree, but I could never see it her way. This Whitecrest employee, who looked to be about my age, was tilting back his chair and talking to a girl with a towel around her shoulders, who stood at the counter with her back to me. I liked the look of those long bare legs. I hoped she was one of the chambermaids, though I was not about to complain if she was merely a hotel guest.

  The bloke looked at me as I approached. He was clean-cut, with straight brown hair and an arrogant glint in his eye. “Hi. Can I help you?”

  The girl turned, interrupted in the middle of a sentence. “Sorry.” She smiled and stepped aside to surrender the counter. “Go ahead. I’m not here on official business.”

  Ordinarily I was pretty quick with the flirty conversation starters, and could have batted back half a dozen suggestive replies to her greeting. But this girl’s face, in diabolical league with that American voice, tangled up all my words for a minute. She had a cloud of strawberry-blonde hair drifting in carefree summery waves down to the level of her chin. Her eyes were a light green-brown. Sunglasses rested on top of her head, and a blue-flowered swimsuit left her shoulders bare except for thin straps. I’ve always appreciated a well-done makeup job on girls, but this girl appeared to be clean of anything except a sheen of lip balm for the August sun, and looked stunning exactly as she was.

  Concern brought her perfect eyebrows together for a moment. “I’m sorry – do you speak English?”

  I found my voice. “Yes. I actually do. Er—” I glanced at the bloke behind the counter. “I’m Daniel Revelstoke. My parents work here.”

  Naturally this bloke – Patrick, said his blue plastic nametag – knew the names of the two English people who had arrived and taken over management. He improved his posture. “They’re out schmoozing some Japanese guys. Driving them up the mountain, trying to get them to hold their company retreat here.”

  “Ah. Never mind. Just thought I’d stop in and say hello.” I turned sideways again to view the girl sharing the counter with me. “Are you both in the employ of Whitecrest, then?”

  “Not me,” she said. “I’m just here to harass Pat.”

  “Yeah, right,” Patrick said. “You’re here because there’s a pool.”

  Her eyes twinkled at me. “It’s true. I’m trespassing. Don’t tell your parents.”

  I winked. “Secret’s safe as houses.”

  She pulled the faded towel back up over her shoulder from where it had slipped. “So you came to America with them to visit?”

  “More than a visit. I’m starting at University of Oregon next month.”

  Patrick groaned.

  The girl’s face brightened. “Same here! I was just telling Pat that he doesn’t need to go so far away –”

  “And I was just telling Julie,” he interjected, “that U of O is a craphole and she should come with me to Boston.”

  “I’ve been accepted at a craphole?” I said. “What terrible news.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” said the girl – Julie. “You can get a good education anywhere. Some places just charge more.”

  “And some girls,” said Patrick, “have no consideration at all for their poor boyfriends, thousands of miles away, pining for them…”

  She laughed. “No one forced you to apply to Boston.”

  Patrick appealed to me by pointing a Whitecrest ballpoint pen in my face. “You have a girlfriend, right? You know what I’m saying.”

  I produced a smile of commiseration for him. “I did have a girlfriend in London, but no longer. We agreed it wasn’t going to work out over all that distance.” I stepped aside just in time: the pen flew past my shoulder.

  “Don’t listen to him!” Patrick said to Julie, who was laughing again.

  She didn’t seem too concerned about the prospect of being thousands of miles away from her boyfriend, and I didn’t bother feeling bad about the distance comment. She would be better off anyway without a twit who threw pens at new acquaintances.

  And she was going to my university. Not his.

  “So – Daniel, is it?” she said.

  I pulled my attention back to the Whitecrest lobby. She still hardly knew my name. I had a lot of work ahead of me. “Yes.”

  “When are you going down to Eugene?”

  “Monday next, I think.”

  Patrick snorted. “‘Monday next,’ ‘safe as houses,’ – yeah, he’s English, all right.”

  Julie draped an arm behind the counter, found a new pen, and flicked it at him without taking her gaze off me. “We’ll be going down then too. Patrick’s keeping me company for the first week, since he doesn’t have to be in Boston till later.” She lifted her fine eyebrows at me. “So if you’d like a ride…”

  I didn’t even look at Patrick. He was already six feet deep with a headstone over him. “I would love a ride.”

  Chapter 3: The Mysteries of Mum

  THE NEXT day I went for a walk in the forest, carrying a stick to prod piles of rocks with, to warn any rattlesnakes of my presence. Now I almost hoped I would see one. One week in Oregon, and I was already relaxing and stretching into my new backdrop. And I knew perfectly well how to account for the upswing in my mood.

  I was tempted to stroll to Whitecrest and hang about the swimming pool, in case Julie returned for a dip. But I held off. Before long, she and I would be together in Eugene for months on end, while Patrick was away in Boston. I had a rule of never actually fooling about with anyone else’s girlfriends (I drew the line at kissing), nor did I cheat on any girlfriend of my own. But there had been quite a few girls who had broken up with their boyfriends in order to be with me. I counted in my head as I batted at tree branches along the forest path: six, no, seven of my twelve girlfriends in the past had been attained that way. Shall we go for eight of thirteen, Julie?

  When I got home I was damp with sweat, and went to the kitchen for a glass of water. The windows were open and a warm breeze swirled through the house. It brought snippets of my mother’s voic
e from the verandah overlooking the backyard. I could only hear a word here and there. I went to the sliding glass door, which was also open, and peered out. She stood at the railing, talking to someone on her mobile phone. Her back was turned to me. She had changed out of her work clothes and into shorts and sandals and a linen shirt. Her straight, tidy hair moved in the wind. I had inherited its color – a brown that was almost black – but not its texture. There I had inherited my father’s: wavy and unruly.

  I glanced around for Dad, but didn’t see him. The new car hadn’t been in the driveway, so it was possible he had gone out to fetch supper.

  “I know,” Mum said to whoever was on the phone. “I would like to come and see you now that I’m here. Then perhaps this all wouldn’t feel so clandestine. Though I suppose it must, until I talk to my family.”

  What the bloody…?

  I hoped I had completely misinterpreted her words. She didn’t sound affectionate, just honest and somewhat regretful, but then even if grown women were talking to lovers, they tended not to giggle like teenaged girls. Dear God, did my mother have a lover?

  She turned sideways, caught sight of me, and looked startled. I put a smile on, looked out at the mountains, and sipped at my water, pretending I’d heard nothing.

  “Well, I must be going.” She sounded more businesslike now. “We’ll talk later. Thank you. Goodbye.” She switched off the phone and bustled past me into the house. “Didn’t hear you come in! You rather startled me.”

  “Phoning Robert Redford, Mum? Letting him know you’re in America now, in case he needs anything?”

  “You’re very funny, aren’t you?” She put the phone in her pocket. “Just someone about the resort.” She collected a handful of papers and envelopes from the dining room table, and went off down the corridor.

  I walked out onto the verandah, rested my water glass on the wooden railing, and stared out at the Cascade Mountains. But I was no longer daydreaming of luring girls away from their boyfriends, and I was no longer smiling.

  BY THE end of supper, an even more upsetting possibility had occurred to me. It scared me enough that I decided to ask Dad about it. I followed him outside at twilight, when he was going out to the driveway to affix the new registration stickers to the car. As he knelt by the back bumper and rubbed a spot clean on the number plate, I asked, “Dad…is Mum ill?”

  “Ill?” He sounded surprised. “No, I don’t think so. Why?”

  “Honestly, is she? Don’t hide it from me if she is.”

  He applied the sticker with his thumb, and smoothed its corners. “To my knowledge, no, she isn’t. Once again, why do you ask?”

  “I heard her talking to someone on the phone, and I thought it might be a doctor. She was saying something about feeling she had to keep secrets from her family, needing to talk to us. At least I assume she meant us, by her ‘family.’”

  “Oh, well, that could have been a number of things,” Dad said, but now he sounded puzzled. He was done with the sticker, but still knelt on the pavement, staring in abstraction at the bumper.

  Yes, I thought, like maybe she’s being unfaithful to you. But I definitely did not want to suggest that. “She was just acting sort of strange,” I said.

  He rose slowly, and swiped his knuckles across his five-o’clock shadow. That was a feature I hadn’t yet shown signs of inheriting. My shaving shadows still took a full two days to appear. “Well, you know,” he said, “women of her age do go through certain changes. If she was talking to a doctor, there’s always that.”

  The idea of talking to Dad about menopause was too horrible to think about. I took a step backward and starting speaking quickly. “True, suppose there’s that. Never mind, then. Thanks, Dad.”

  I went back inside and immersed myself in flipping through the University of Oregon course prospectus. Uncomfortable though it made me, Dad’s suggestion did seem possible, and I felt a little better. Still, whatever Mum had been talking about today, she clearly hadn’t told him. And that kept me worried.

  You have other things to worry about, I told myself. For example, what classes are you going to take this term, Daniel? Why not think about that? Concentrate! Decide!

  I focused on the course descriptions in front of me, and picked up a pencil to mark ones that looked interesting.

  THE DAY before I was to leave for university, Mum drove me into Bend to shop for clothes and supplies. The bigger and more practical shops were all there, not in touristy Sunriver.

  “I have someone to meet about Whitecrest,” she told me as we parked near a department store in the middle of town. “I’ll walk down and see them while you do your shopping. Shall we meet back here in two hours? Will that give you enough time?”

  “More than enough. I’m not a girl.” Too many times now, I had followed her around in exhaustion while she shopped endlessly.

  She scrunched up her nose at me, and we went our separate ways.

  An hour and a half later, I was back at the car with my bags of bedding, socks, and instant noodles. She was still not there. I had a spare key to the car, so I unlocked it and stashed my stuff, and then went to sit in the shade on a bench near the shop. I watched passers-by for a while, hoping to get lucky and run into Julie French. In my brief conversation with her and Patrick, I had obtained her last name, and learned they both lived in Bend, and went to Sunriver for skiing or hiking, or for a summer job in Patrick’s case.

  But I recognized no one until Mum returned, walking down the street in a hurry. Before she saw me, she stopped in the middle of the pavement, seemed to remember something, turned round and rushed off again. It suddenly occurred to me that her “meeting about Whitecrest” might not actually be a meeting about Whitecrest at all. I jumped to my feet and, I hate to admit, stalked my mother through the streets.

  Within a few minutes she entered an office building. It was a rather cheap one, I saw as I reached it. It looked like it had once been a shop, with display windows on the ground floor and what might have been flats on the floor above. We also did not seem to be on the finest street in Bend. Litter peppered the gutters, and all the windows needed washing. I stepped up and read the lettering on the glass door: Bill Manning, Private Investigative Services.

  Puzzled, I looked in. I could see my mother’s back through one of the storefront windows. She was picking up her bag from where she had evidently left it, on a chair in front of a man’s desk. He was standing, grinning at her while she explained. He was thin and middle-aged with greasy gray-brown hair, but then you never know what women will find attractive. They chatted for half a minute, then shook hands. The man clasped her shoulder in a friendly-looking way. This was not some stranger who had just now happened to find her bag; I felt sure of it.

  Seeing that my mother was about to leave the office, I scurried away and jogged back to the car before she could come out. While I sat there catching my breath, I wondered in bewilderment: Had my mother hired an investigator? Or was my mother seeing an investigator? Neither option appealed. I hoped I was getting it all wrong.

  In a few minutes she reappeared, waved to me, and unlocked the car. “Get everything you need?”

  “Yes.” I climbed in, and we both rolled down the windows as she started the car. The August heat made me dizzy. “Who was it you had to meet?” I kept my eyes on the road.

  “Just someone interested in booking rooms, for the resort.”

  “Didn’t know you’d make house calls for that.”

  “Well, they’re considering quite a lot of rooms. For the ski season, you know. A special party.”

  It could have been true. It was possible. But reading the lines between the things women said had become a study of mine, and I fancied I had got pretty good at it over the years. And though I hated to think it of my own mother, she seemed to be lying.

  That evening I found myself alone with Dad on the verandah, tending to steaks on the gas grill. “If someone wanted to book a whole suite of rooms at Whitecrest,” I asked him, �
�would you need to go and meet with them specially to arrange it?”

  “Don’t see why.” Dad prodded a steak with a fork. “They could call reception for a reservation.”

  “For a large event, even? Would they have to talk to you or Mum personally?”

  “For a large event I suppose they’d have to meet with someone, but most likely it wouldn’t be us. It would be Christa, our events coordinator.” He leaned back to avoid a sizzle of steam. “Why? Did someone call here with a request?”

  “Oh – no. I was just thinking about it. For my classes.” I was going to be majoring in Leisure Studies, the program for the hotel managers and golf-course-owners of the future, so as to follow in my parents’ footsteps and use their connections for an easy career. Dad seemed to believe my excuse, and returned his attention to the steaks. But I was more troubled than ever. Mum was up to something behind Dad’s back, not to mention my back. She had seemed withdrawn and distracted for weeks, now that I thought back on it. And tomorrow I was leaving, to live in a city a hundred miles away, where I could not keep an eye on whatever was developing in my normally reliable little family.

  I’m so worried, I imagined saying to Julie French, with my head resting in her lap. My mother might be ill, or dying, or about to divorce my father, and here I have to cope with it on top of surviving my first year at university in a strange country. And I don’t even have a girlfriend to talk to…

  But my scenario didn’t work in helping me fall asleep. The trouble seemed too real, and Julie seemed too indistinct. I had only met her the once. I could barely even remember her face.

  Chapter 4: Away to University

  THE NEXT day my parents were posing me in front of the house for a photo, making me hold up my University of Oregon course prospectus, when a blue two-door Toyota from the early ’90s drove up and stopped at the curb. I tried to fling the book away onto my luggage, but Mum barked at me to keep holding it and keep smiling. So, posing like a complete git, I let her take the picture while Julie and Patrick got out of the car and stood grinning at me.