The Return of Jonah Gray

by Heather Cochran

  But the liveliest discussion remained Jonah Gray’s impending audit, now just two weeks away.

  Just act all unpredictable when you get in there. Those people can’t handle it if anyone isn’t an automaton, like they are.

  Or pretend you don’t speak English very well.

  Women like it when you use humor. Get her laughing.

  Now you’re assuming that she’s a woman. LOL!!

  I know the type. Pissed-off, frigid, man-hater, humorless, bean counter.

  That’s where Jonah stepped in. Hey there, he wrote.

  No need to get mean. We’re talking about a real person here who is just doing her job. Besides, as my date with the IRS approaches, I’ve been trying to be open to the positive side effects of this experience. It has forced me to contemplate the financial, professional and personal choices I’ve made. It has prompted me to revisit past decisions and think about why I did what I’ve done. I’m a different person now, and as I look back, I am awed by the mountain range I’ve slogged through to be here. As for Ms. Gardner, maybe we’ll all be surprised. Maybe she’ll be delightful. Maybe she’ll even be understanding. I know what you’re thinking, faithful readers—that poor Mr. Gray has begun to go round the bend. Or else I’ve decided to plead temporary insanity. Don’t think it hasn’t crossed my mind!

  I wondered how much headway Susan had made with his file. I found myself regretting that I’d reassigned it to her. Why had I been so compulsive? I wasn’t a compulsive person. Hell, I was the opposite. But this guy—or the whole situation—brought out an emotional reaction in me that I wasn’t accustomed to. Why had I worried so much about my impartiality? Given my father’s diagnosis, a friendly audit would surely be a welcome distraction. And yet I’d gone and transferred his case to Susan. So he was married. Did that mean he wasn’t worth knowing? I tried to remember whether Susan had any plants in her cubicle.

  My father’s study overlooked the back patio and the pool. From where I sat, I could see my mother patiently picking bugs off her broccoli plants. I looked back at Gray’s Garden and clicked to the form Jonah provided, the one that allowed anyone to join the fray. Even better, no e-mail account was needed. Just a screen name.

  My mother is having issues with broccoli, I typed. She thinks it’s loopers or something. Any easy suggestions? I know next to nothing about gardening. I smiled to myself as I signed off, J-E-F-F-R-I-N-E.

  On Tuesday, the Truckster was ready. My mother called me as she drove it out of Duncan’s shop. “It’s practically purring,” she said.

  “That’s great. And my keys?”

  “Safe and sound. I’ve got them in my purse,” she said. “I figured you’d want to stick around until I brought your father home from the hospital.”

  My mother had spent a lot of energy on my father’s homecoming. She had caterers prepare a week’s worth of his favorite meals. She had put new linens on the bed. She had bought bouquets of fresh flowers for every room. No expense had been spared, which of course had me agitated.

  I’m not saying that my father didn’t deserve some TLC, but it seemed apparent to me that he hadn’t come clean with my mother about their financial situation. At least, I wanted to think that my mother wouldn’t have gone to such extravagant length shads he known better. I had also checked with Dr. Fisher about the costs of my father’s radiation therapy, due to begin the very next day. And I had double-checked my calculations, twice. They couldn’t keep this up. Their funds were nearly gone.

  As soon as the front door opened, I could hear her chattering on about the home nursing service.

  “Won’t it be wonderful knowing that someone will be here, twenty-four hours a day if we need it, to keep an eye on you?” she asked. “And these people are professionals.” She sounded relieved—then again, my mother had always taken comfort in the prospect of spending money. It was part of the problem.

  For some reason, it irked me just then, as if she were trying to buy her way out of his illness. Wasn’t she willing to take care of him at all? Sure, I hadn’t exactly offered, but he’d certainly accept her help before he accepted mine.

  I followed their voices into the kitchen and found my mother pulling a bottle of champagne out of the refrigerator.

  “It’s eleven in the morning,” I said.

  “Your father’s home,” my mother said. “Time to celebrate!”

  “Should he even be drinking? He’s on some pretty heavy pain-killers.”

  “Jacob, you’re not planning on driving anywhere, are you?” my mother asked. “So it’s fine, dear.”

  “Dad, you’ve got to tell her,” I finally said.

  “Tell me what?” my mother asked. She was smiling, as if she thought I might have news of a trip or a party.

  “The insurance, your finances,” I said. “The fact that there’s no money.”

  “What are you talking about, Sasha?” my mother asked.

  My father began to push himself away from the table. “Maybe no champagne for me,” he said. “I’m a little tired.”

  “Now,” I insisted. He was already losing strength. It only took one firm hand to keep his chair from moving. “It won’t get any easier,” I said.

  “Sasha, I will not have you treating your father that way in his fragile condition. The man just had brain surgery, for goodness sake!”

  “You can’t afford the in-home nurse,” I told her.

  She looked at me as though I were still a child. “Maybe this service costs a bit more than you’re comfortable with, but it’s important.”

  “Fine. You can choose. It’s either the home-care nurse or the radiation therapy. Not both, and don’t say that you’ll pay out-of-pocket, not with Dad not working, not if you want to stay in this house after—” I realized I had said enough. I felt like a heel.

  My mother looked at my father, who looked at the floor.

  “So it’s true,” she said, when he didn’t look up. “But the help,” she murmured. “Jacob, why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I didn’t think it would come back,” he said. “And when it did, you seemed so worried.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she snapped. “So what does that mean, that the two of us are stuck in this house for the next, however long? Is that the way you envision it?”

  “I haven’t envisioned—” my father began, then stopped.

  “I’ll come on weekends,” I said. “I can help. And Blake is here. I’m sure Kurt will pitch in when he can.”

  “It’s not the same. These are trained nurses. We’re not equipped to do what they do.” She turned to my father. “How could you let this happen? Didn’t we have a deal?” She shook her head and left the room, the champagne unopened on the counter.

  My father looked at me. “That’s why I didn’t tell her,” he said. “You really think it’s better now?”

  “What about using some of the money in her trust?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t you think she would want you to?” I asked.

  “It’s off the table, Sasha. Your mother stuck it out with me. I’m not going to leave her in the poorhouse.”

  “Cutting back and making a few compromises isn’t asking her to—”

  “I was to provide a life without compromise,” he said. “That was the deal.”

  “Come on, how realistic is that?”

  My father just looked at me. “What would you know?”

  I spent the rest of the day keeping my opinions to myself, skimming leaves from the pool and wishing that my mother had given me my keys back before she’d roared off in my father’s car. In the afternoon, when my father was asleep and the house was quiet, I found my way back to Gray’s Garden.

  He had written back. In the discussion area, I noticed a new thread about loopers.

  With such an unusual name, I can only imagine you to be the same Jeffrine I had the pleasure of speaking to a while back. I’ll keep the circumstances of those conversations away from prying eyes. So your mother has looper
s. Or at least, her broccoli does. Well, since you’re not much of a gardener (I won’t hold that against you, yet), you might not know that broccoli is a member of the brassica family, which means that it started out as a wild cabbage…

  He went on at some length about the pests that prey on plants in the cabbage family, then he suggested ladybugs and a bacterial spray. The answer itself didn’t mean much to me, though I printed it out for my mother. But he had remembered me—or, he had remembered Jeffrine, which would have to do for the moment.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I KNOW THEY SAY THAT ABSENCE MAKES THE HEART grow fonder. But sometimes, absence can also reveal the waning of once fond feelings. Time passes and it’s a surprise to realize that you haven’t missed him, or her, or the place or the job that once felt like a match. Believe it or not, I used to look forward to going to work. Every audit felt like a new challenge, tested me, pushed my understanding of the tax code to new levels. I never knew who I would meet, what life I’d be investigating or what I would learn from it.

  As I stepped back into my cubicle on Wednesday afternoon, the fourth floor sounded the same as ever. The ringing of phones, the flutter of paperwork, the hum of voices trying to maintain a modicum of privacy in a cubicle. But the rush and promise of those sounds were lost on me. I no longer worried about my mounting pile of unanalyzed audits. I didn’t care enough to worry. I looked around my cubicle and felt nothing but an itch to get out of there.

  I was clearing off my desk, readying to visit Fred Collins, when my phone rang. I considered letting voice mail pick up, but I realized that the call might contain news of my father. I grabbed the receiver.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Finally you pick up the phone. I’ve been calling for the last three days. I want to talk to you about Jonah Gray,” a man said.

  I closed my eyes. “Why am I not surprised?”

  “I want to tell you something. I had this cycad, see, and it was dying. Dying! You know how much a cycad’ll run you?”

  “I don’t,” I admitted.

  “A pretty penny, is how much. Tens of thousands, can be how much. I get so worried and I don’t know who to turn to, and a lady at the nursery says, have you talked to Jonah Gray? And I says, who the heck is Jonah Gray? So she gives me his number and I phone him up, oh, I was in a state. I phoned him up on a Friday night. Poor guy, he works all week, and still he takes my call, listens to what’s going on, says he’ll come by. He lives two hours away if a minute. But he makes the drive so’s he can look at the cycad up close.”

  “That’s awfully generous,” I agreed.

  “That’s what I’m getting at,” he said. I waited for him to continue, but he didn’t.

  “So what happened?” I finally asked.

  “Oh, it was dying.”

  “Couldn’t he do anything about it? Couldn’t he save it? I thought he worked magic with plants.”

  “Well, he does. Sometimes. But every plant’s got a lifetime, just like a person. Some are long, some are short. But there’s only so much you can do to extend it. He knew that. Other people, they kept telling me to fight it. Add this. Add that. Jonah talked to me about how old the plant was—and how California probably wasn’t even a state when it was young. That’ll give you perspective, huh? And it made me think, ‘I gotta let it go.’ I just thought you ought to hear that.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “You probably think us plant folks are loony-tunes, carrying on about greenery like this,” he said.

  “No, I don’t,” I told him. “I’m not sure that it matters what you care about. Maybe it’s the caring itself that matters.”

  When he heard about my father’s relapse, Fred Collins was very understanding. He assured me that he would distribute all the pending files on my table to other auditors around the department. “You concentrate on other things.”

  “They’re going to hate me,” I said. “All that extra work.” As I said it, I realized that I was trying to make myself sound concerned.

  “It’s the least we can do for a lifer like yourself.”

  “Except one,” I said. “There’s one case that I passed to Susan, but I’d kind of like it back.”

  “Are you sure?” Fred asked. “This isn’t going to be easy. Don’t feel you’ve got to do it on my account.”

  “Just the one,” I said, writing down Jonah’s Social Security number. “I’d like to finish it.”

  “Suit yourself. I’ll let her know.”

  The elevator couldn’t come fast enough. I didn’t want to run into anyone else I knew, didn’t want to be forced into small talk or see any of the auditors who were now going to have to shoulder my workload. Then the doors opened.

  “You’re back!” Jeff Hill said. He smiled broadly, as if he were thrilled to see me.

  “I was just heading out,” I said.

  “So you’re not back.”

  “Not quite.” I stepped into the elevator. He made no move to get out. “Going down?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he said. “How was your vacation?”

  “I wasn’t on vacation.”

  “Oh,” Jeff said. “Well, you missed an exciting few days in the archive department,” he said.

  “Really?”

  “I guess that wasn’t a very good joke,” he said. “I meant it as a joke.”

  “Oh, right.” The doors opened onto the lobby and we both stepped out.

  “I suppose I shouldn’t keep you,” he said. “Though the idea is tempting.”

  “I need to get going.”

  “I’ve been meaning to ask whether you’d want to grab dinner some night next week. You’ll be back next week, won’t you?”

  “I should be.”

  “Got any evenings free?”

  “I imagine I do,” I said. I had lost all sense of what my life looked like. All I knew was that I wanted to be out of the building, and saying yes seemed like the quickest route.

  “Well, great. How’s next Thursday? Shall we aim for next Thursday?”

  “Next Thursday should be fine.”

  “I’ve been driving by this one restaurant for a while now, but I’ve never been in. It’s called Hunter’s. I hear it’s good.”

  “Hunter’s,” I said. It was the same restaurant where I was due to meet Uncle Ed and Marcus that very evening.

  “Have you been there before?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Do you know it? Is it clean? Would you rather go somewhere else?”

  “No. It’s fine. Thursday. Hunter’s. It all sounds just fine,” I said.

  When the doorbell rang an hour later, it was Martina. She gave me a big hug made awkward by the large cardboard box she was holding.

  “Sweetie, I’m so sorry. How are you holding up?”

  I shrugged. “I’m okay. Shouldn’t you be at work?”

  She pushed the box into my hands. “I brought you something.”

  “I can see that. What is it?”

  “To keep your energy up,” she said.

  I opened the box and saw that it was filled with individually wrapped servings of beef jerky. “You brought me meat? This is your new account?”

  “It’s a new concept in jerky. I made sure you got all five flavors.”

  “I appreciate the gesture.”

  Martina sniffed the air. “What’s that smell?” she asked, wrinkling her nose.

  “Smell?”

  “Bad fish, maybe?”

  I nodded. “It’s a long story. It’s not so bad in the bedroom. You want to come and help me decide what to wear?”

  She shrugged. “What impression are you going for? What’s Marcus like anyway?” she asked, following me toward my closet.

  “He’s got to be twenty-five, twenty-six now. I should know when his birthday is,” I said.

  “But what’s he like? Is he anything like Kurt?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve always imagined him as one of those guys who’s kind of mad underneath, even when he’s smi
ling. He’s not going to tell you, but you’ll feel it.”

  “Really?”

  “Of course, I haven’t actually seen him since he was eleven.”

  “Eleven? Then how can you—”

  “He’s got every right to resent us,” I pointed out.

  “But if he wants to have dinner—”

  “Uncle Ed is the one who was pushing dinner. For all I know, he strong-armed Marcus into it.”

  “But is he smart? Is he funny?”

  I shrugged. “He’s never really applied himself, as far as I know. I don’t know if that’s because he’s lazy or irresponsible or just one of those guys who thinks the world owes him a favor.”

  “At least you’re looking on the bright side.”

  “Well, why has he shown up now?” I asked. “Why move all the way to California? What does he want?”

  “You’re worried about your father. That’s why you’re being like this.”

  “Maybe.”

  Martina smiled.

  “What?” I asked.

  “So many questions. Didn’t I say that you were like that reporter? Whatever happened to him?”

  “I stopped thinking about him because he’s married. You know that.”

  “Really. You stopped thinking about him.” I could tell she didn’t believe me.

  “He thinks my name is Jeffrine,” I admitted.

  Martina frowned. “Is he an idiot?”

  I shook my head. “If there’s an idiot in this situation, it’s got to be me.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  LOOKING THROUGH THE FRONT WINDOW, I COULD SEE them sitting at the bar. It was easy to make out Uncle Ed’s broad back and his familiar tweed sport coat. But I stared at the young man beside him. I knew it had to be Marcus, though I couldn’t see his face and wasn’t sure I would have recognized him anyway. I could see that he looked leggy and narrower than Ed, more wiry. He wore a leather jacket and jeans. He had dark hair. But that was all I could make out.