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“Who is with Molly?” he asked. “I thought you weren’t going to New York until next month.”
“My mother is staying at the house…much to Molly’s chagrin. ‘I am not a child, I don’t need a baby-sitter.’ Anyway, I wasn’t supposed to be here, but they’re having a reception for me. I thought it might seem churlish not to show up.”
Deanna would never change, he decided, giving up and switching the subject to one that might be more productive. “So what’s this about her charging up your credit cards?” he asked. Deanna had mentioned this in an earlier call to him at the hospital, but he hadn’t had time to discuss it then.
“The new woman who’s handling all of my business affairs called to question some purchases,” Deanna said. “Specifically a three-hundred-dollar surfboard. She said she didn’t think I was the surfing type.”
Phillip carried the phone out to the balcony. The ocean was dark and calm. He sat down, leaned his head back against the glass of the French door. “Did you talk to Molly about it?”
“I’m in New York, Phillip. And, quite honestly, I’m losing patience for all this. What more could we possibly do for the girl? I haven’t had a minute and I don’t expect things to get better. You have no idea how completely exhausting these tours are. I’ve said I’ll cut back and I will, but for now if you could take care of things—maybe have her for a few weeks, just to give my mother a break—I’d really appreciate it. I told you, didn’t I, that I think it’s a boy again?”
“Specifically, why do you think there’s a boy this time?”
“Call it a mother’s intuition.”
Silence, Phillip decided, was the only tactful response.
“And, I just know it’s one of those damn scholarship kids,” she went on. “She gets these goofy ideas that it’s up to her to save the world. I think she may have pawned my tennis bracelet. Before I left, I turned my room upside down—”
“Did you ask her?”
“No, Phillip, I didn’t ask her. I’m striving for tranquility in my life and confronting Molly would be counterproductive—”
“Of course. Hell of a lot easier to let her pawn your jewelry.”
“I didn’t say she was pawning it, Phillip, I just said…oh, never mind. I don’t know why I even try to discuss anything with you. All I know is I’m sick to death of it all…I don’t care how politically incorrect it sounds, we’re paying God knows how much to send her to the best damn school in the area and she’s hanging out with…gardeners—”
“Gardeners?”
“I don’t know,” she said irritably. “The mother’s a gardener or something. Molly said something about her selling vegetables. Hold on a second…okay, the boy’s name is Brett. He’s called several times. Here’s his number.”
Phillip took a deep breath. “What am I supposed to say? Leave my daughter alone because you’re the son of a gardener?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Phillip. You’re the brain surgeon, you figure something out. I’ve got a book due at the end of next month and my agent is pressing me for updates. I really don’t have time for around-the-clock monitoring, nor, quite frankly, the inclination.”
“Give me the number again.” He took the phone back inside, jotted the number on the cover of last month’s New England Journal of Medicine, ended the call and, with no idea what he was going to say, dialed the boy’s number before he could talk himself out of calling altogether.
An answering machine.
“Hi, there, you’ve reached Zany Zoe at Growing My Way,” the recording said. “Asparagus and apples, beets and broccoli, carrots and cauliflower…well, you get the idea. Leave a message if you want to place an order, or drop by our stall at the Seacliff Farmer’s Market.
He hung up without leaving a message.
“OH, THESE ARE LOVELY, honey.” Janna, at the door of Arnie’s Seacliff Heights condo, took the bunch of mauve and pale blue larkspur Zoe handed her. “Hi, Brett, sweetie.” She embraced her grandson in a quick hug. “God, you get more handsome every time I see you. Got a girlfriend yet?”
Brett grinned. “Can’t talk about it,” he said with a sly glance at Zoe.
“Tell Grandma,” Janna said in a conspiratorial whisper. She’d evidently just come from the nail salon. Her nails—French tip—glistened in the sun-light, the aroma of fresh polish wafting all about her. Janna was fifty-eight but told everyone she was forty-five. A stretch, but on a good day, in the right lighting she could maybe pass. Tonight, she wore a cream linen pantsuit that flattered her curves and her hair was short, blond and artlessly unkempt, as though she didn’t drop big bucks to keep it looking that way. People were always telling Janna that she looked more like Zoe’s older sister than her mother and this thrilled Janna to no end.
“Come on.” Janna cocked her head at Brett. “Don’t be coy.”
“Three,” Brett whispered back. “But don’t tell mom.”
“You little devil,” Janna chuckled.
Zoe folded her arms across her chest. “Maybe you can get some of them to help out about the place. Weed the flower beds, clean out the animal pens, stuff like that.”
“You’re no fun.” Janna swiped at Zoe’s arm. “Your cousins are in the den watching videos,” she told Brett. “And Arnie’s barbecuing salmon steaks out on the patio.” She waited until Brett left, then brought her face close to Zoe’s. “Sweetie, please, please remember, don’t get into…you know, the housekeeper thing. Arnie thinks I lived for years in England.”
“Was I born there?”
Janna eyed her for a moment. “Please don’t be difficult, honey. This means a lot to me.”
“I’m not. If we’re going to have a revisionist history night, I just need to have my facts straight.”
“You know, Courtney was perfectly fine with this. I don’t understand—”
“Was Courtney born in England?”
Janna sighed. “Oh, just forget it, Zoe. I’m sorry I mentioned it. I didn’t think it was that much to ask. Your skin’s broken out, by the way,” she said as she carried the flowers into the kitchen. “A big blotch on your neck.”
Zoe’s fingers moved automatically to her neck. Eczema. An irritating—literally—skin rash that appeared if she ate anything with fish in it, or got stressed about something, like whenever she dealt with her ex-husband. Of course, it was a whole lot easier not to eat fish than it was to avoid dealing with Denny.
Just as she was leaving the house, he’d called to say that he wanted to take Brett to the desert over the July Fourth weekend. She’d said no. One, it wasn’t his weekend to have Brett, and two, the idea of Brett tearing around on his father’s dune buggy terrified her. Brett, of course, wanted to go. “You never let me do anything fun,” he’d complained as they drove over to the barbecue. “It’s not fair.”
“Life’s not fair, honey,” she’d said. At that moment, her left arm had started itching. By the time they got to Arnie’s place, she had tracks up and down both arms, and the backs of her legs were burning like crazy.
Now she could smell the fish Arnie was cooking on the patio. Had it even occurred to Janna to mention her daughter’s allergies? Probably not.
Her sister, Courtney, came into the kitchen, cell phone at her ear. Courtney’s two kids from her first marriage, a boy and a girl, were several years older than Brett. The boy, Eric, parked cars at a Seacliff steak house, where his sister, Ellen, was a cocktail waitress. “They’re both working in the service industry,” Courtney was always explaining, “while they decide upon their future directions.”
Translation, they’d both dropped out of junior college after a few semesters, and Ellen had moved in with her boyfriend. Not that Courtney would readily admit that: she’d recently remarried and worked as a receptionist in a travel agency, prompting Janna to describe her—without a trace of irony—as “my ambitious daughter.”
“Okay, bye,” Courtney said into the phone. “Love you, too. Big smooches, I won’t be late.” She hung up and gave Zoe a quick hug. “Hey, your skin’s all broken out.”
“I know.”
“Arnie’s cooking fish,” Courtney said sotto voce, as she adjusted her pistachio-colored sarong and white halter top. To ensure that they showed off her figure to best advantage, Zoe thought. Tall, wheat-colored hair and thin, that was Courtney.
“I’ll eat salad.”
“Oh, my God.” Janna, arranging the larkspur in a vase, clapped a hand to her mouth. “I forgot all about you, Zoe. Arnie wanted salmon and—”
“Don’t worry about it, Mom.” Janna would self-flagellate for the rest of the evening, and Zoe didn’t want to hear it, especially since nine times out of ten Janna served fish when she invited them to dinner.
“Ever tried Benadryl?” Arnie appeared in the kitchen, carrying a platter of salmon. “That would clear it right up.”
“Yep.” She looked at Arnie, who was wearing white pants, the stretchy waist kind that older men played golf in, and a yellow polo-neck shirt with, naturally, Seacliff Country Club embroidered in discreet small lettering above the breast pocket. “Doesn’t help.”
“I could always keep it under control.” Janna had started assembling a salad, overlapping circles of cucumbers, radishes and tomato on a bed of finely chopped lettuce. “I just didn’t have time to be constantly after you to do it.” She stood back to survey her handiwork. “That’s the best I can do with iceberg. I meant to ask you to bring some of your little lettuces, Zoe.” She turned to look at her daughter, frowned and leaned over to lightly stroke the top of Zoe’s head, much as she might have petted a small dog.
“Woof,” Zoe said
“Did you have it cut again?”
“Just the bangs. Did it myself. Attractive, huh?”
“Honey.” Janna’s expression was strained. “Why do you do this sort of thing? I’d give you the money for a decent haircut.”
Zoe raked her fingers through her hair. She’d paid last month’s overdue feed-store bill with the forty dollars—or however much haircuts cost these days—she’d saved by not going to the beauty shop.
“I like it,” she said.
Janna shook her head. “You have absolutely no vanity.”
“Is that a good thing?”
Arnie was banging around, opening cabinets, setting out glasses. “Pay a million dollars for a place, and the damn doors don’t shut properly. Say Zoe, d’you check out that entrepreneur site I told you about?”
Zoe ate a cherry tomato from the salad. “No.” Through the tomato, it came out dlo. “Hey, did anyone catch Phillip Barry on TV?”
“Zoe’s content to just muddle along,” Janna told Arnie apologetically. “Courtney’s my ambitious one. She takes after me. She knows that success doesn’t come seeking you out, you have to actively pursue it.”
“They might put me on commission,” Courtney explained as she leaned against the counter. “I saw him, Zoe. Phillip Barry. Actually, I often see him around Seacliff.” She looked at Arnie. “We know the Barrys from way back.”
Janna loudly cleared her throat.
Courtney grinned. “Oops.”
“The Barrys were neighbors of ours,” Janna said. “For a while.”
“We used to play with their kids,” Courtney said. “Phillip was…what, three or four years older than me?” She looked at Zoe. “Remember cannibal?”
“Vaguely.” Zoe turned to look out of the window. Brett and his cousins sat on the edge of a frothing hot tub. Brett was saying something and the other two were laughing. Ellen lifted a leg and splashed hard, showering Brett with a spray of water. The scene, obviously full of good-natured fun, seemed light-years away from her childhood memories.
One year, it seemed the Barry kids and Courtney had spent the entire summer playing cannibal in this great big metal bathtub. She could still see Phillip Barry’s hateful smirk. He’d looked straight at her arms with their big red blotches and said, “You’ll poison the pot.”
And then the other kids had all laughed, even Courtney. “Screw you,” Zoe had said. “I wouldn’t go in there for a million dollars. I don’t like Barry cooties in my food.”
Zoe stayed at the window, watching Brett, who had moved to sit next to Ellen. They were all laughing now. She wondered what they were talking about. Had Brett told them about this girlfriend his father had mentioned? Probably. She suddenly felt shut out, and somehow extraneous.
“The other kids wouldn’t let Zoe play cannibal,” Courtney was telling Arnie. “They thought her rash was contagious. Remember that, Zoe? How you got so mad?”
“Not really,” Zoe lied. Even now, she ached for the fierce little kid she’d been then. Locked in the bathroom, crying and scratching her legs and arms until she drew blood. Maybe Phillip Barry was God’s gift to medicine, but she could only think of him as a grown-up version of a horrible, snobby boy with a knack for cruelty.
“Oh, her skin wasn’t that bad,” Janna said. “It just flared up now and then because she forgot to put stuff on it. Remember all those salves I used to buy? If you’d just used them the way you were supposed to, you wouldn’t have had the flare-ups.”
Zoe turned from the window to stare at Janna. The scaly, oozing outbreaks at the backs of her knees had been so bad that it hurt to walk. Every day had been like that. Sitting on her bike, gears disengaged, a hand against the wall to keep her stationary, frantically pedaling around and around to unstick her legs. Had her mother really forgotten all that?
“Well, let’s talk about something else,” Janna said brightly. “Arnie, hon, what do you think Zoe could get for that house of hers if she put it on the market?”
“PAM SAID you should take Saint-John’s-wort,” Brett told Zoe the next morning as she was sweeping up the shards of a coffee cup she’d accidentally knocked off the counter. “She said it helped her when she was getting mad about everything.”
Zoe practiced deep breathing. Okay, breaking the coffee mug hadn’t been an accident. It was more like leftover anger from the night before. And hearing Pam’s name this morning did nothing to improve her mood. Pam, Denny’s twenty-eight-year-old surfer-chick bride. Pam wore neon-colored bikinis and bodysurfed. Last week in a late-night phone call Denny had asked Zoe if she could get by with half of the monthly child-support check because he wanted to surprise Pam with a trip to Hawaii to celebrate their three-month anniversary. Zoe had sweetly suggested that he do something anatomically impossible with his surfboard.
After Brett went off to school, Zoe slipped on her gardening clogs and went outside to augment the soil in the flower beds. Physical work to shake the surly, disgruntled aftertaste that family matters tended to leave in her mouth. An hour or so later, she looked up to see a guy in bib overalls and a straw hat pulling down the steep driveway towing a horse trailer behind a battered white truck. By the time she reached him, he’d unloaded a tan-and-white Shetland pony from the trailer and was leading it toward her.
“Heard from the feed-store guy that you keep a few animals.” He patted the pony’s neck. “This one here’s looking for a home. Used to give kids rides in a petting zoo, but she’s getting along in years. Ready for retirement,” he said with a laugh. “Know exactly how she feels.”
“Hold on.” Zoe ran into the house, grabbed a carrot from the refrigerator bin and brought it back for the horse who accepted it eagerly. She watched it, chewing contentedly with big square teeth, orange goo oozing from the side of its mouth. Cute, she thought. Blond bangs like a schoolgirl’s hanging over big brown eyes.
“You already have four goats, a sheep, three dogs and a litter of feral cats that you need to get fixed,” the voice of reason pointed out.
Kenna, Brett’s black Lab, was at her side doing some exploratory sniffing around the horse’s hind-quarters. At the bottom of the property, she could hear the two other dogs—Domino, part wolf according to Brett, and Lucy, a big shepherd mix she’d rescued from the animal shelter—barking at the goats. Last weekend, she and Brett had spent three hours stringing up an electric fence around the goats’ pen. The dogs were curious more than anything, but they alarmed the goats, which Zoe didn’t think could be good for their milk or the cheese she eventually wanted to produce. All those stress hormones.
“Gentle, too.” The guy wanted her to make a decision. “Loves kids.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Zoe said. “Warn the neighbors.”
The guy gave her a look—the same look her sister Courtney always gave her when she figured Zoe had to be joking but she didn’t find it especially funny. The horse finished the carrot and Zoe extended her fingers for it to lick.
“Got into some poison ivy?” The guy gestured at tracks that ran down her left arm and bloomed into a red cluster on the back of her hand. A new crop had appeared in the aftermath of Janna’s dinner.
“Yeah.” She shrugged. Easier than explaining what it really was. Without thinking, she began to scratch and then caught herself. She studied the horse. She was bony, her sides caving with each breath, but her perky cream mane was curiously touching. As if the horse was doing her best to be cute. Zoe realized she was hooked.
“Don’t horses need a lot of grooming?” She gestured around at the overgrown lawn, the roses sprouting bright red hips, the vigorous crop of dandelions. Brett was supposed to keep the grass cut, but constantly getting after him to do it was sometimes more trouble than dragging out the mower herself. “I’ve got more than I can do just to keep up with all this.”
He shrugged. “Get someone to help, why don’t you?”
Zoe eyed him briefly. “Money?”
“Oh, that.” His teeth, when he grinned, were roughly the size and color of the pony’s. “Yeah, what’s it they say? A necessary evil.”
She stroked the pony’s nose. “What does she eat?”
“Alfalfa, Bermuda. Some feed. Nothing fancy.”
“Expensive?”
“Nah.”
“What d’you think, Kenna?” She scratched the dog’s neck. “Think your master will groom her? Feed her? Keep her pen clean?”
“She’s yours for fifty bucks,” the guy said. “And I’ll throw in a bale of alfalfa.”
“Thirty,” Zoe said, visualizing her checkbook balance.
“Done.”
Nothing like buying a cheap horse to make you feel better, she decided later as she raked straw across its pen. It was things like this, unexpected gifts almost, that confirmed her belief that even if marrying Denny McCann hadn’t been the smartest move she’d ever made, it was also no cause for regret.
The biggest reason, of course, was Brett, but, shortly after Brett was born, Denny had managed to convince her that buying three acres of undeveloped land in northern San Diego County would be a good business investment.
The plan at the time had been for Denny to build houses on the property, one for them and then three others that he’d sell. “We’ll be set financially, babe,” he’d gloated. “I won’t ever have to work again.”
Omit the words, “have to,” and the second part at least was true.
Back then though, blissed out by the joys of new motherhood, not to mention sleep deprivation, she’d been pretty much indifferent to the idea of buying property. If Denny thought he could make it work, then fine.
While the first house—their house—was being built, she and Denny and Brett had lived in a trailer. Before ground was broken for the second house—actually before Denny had completely finished their own house—he’d succumbed to the charms of a young bank teller.
Zoe had kicked him out. He hadn’t taken a whole lot of convincing and, in a fit of conscience or guilt, had signed over the property to her. “You’re going to have to make the payments though,” he’d told her.
But of course.
The house, a gray two-story wooden structure, vaguely ramshackle New England in style, with a long back deck and steeply sloping roof now seemed so completely hers she could hardly remember her ex-husband’s role in its inception. Kind of like his role in creating their son, really.
Three acres of land and she knew every inch of it, from the gully at the bottom of the property that sometimes flooded after a heavy winter rain, to the faint pale green sheen on the distant brown hills that appeared after the first rains of the year. By early spring her land turned as lush and verdant as Ireland, lasting until about June, when the green faded to gold.
She loved it in every season. Like right now, walking through the beds of tomato plants, the pungent smell of ripening fruit, the sun warm on her back, Kenna trailing at her heels on the off chance that some food might be involved.
“You are getting way too smart for your own good,” she said.
“Woof.”
“Sit.” The dog sat, almost quivering with anticipation, her eyes on Zoe’s hand as Zoe reached into a huge old mailbox on the potting table in the middle of the garden. Dog biscuits. Kenna’s tail was going crazy now, her front feet dancing a little jig. “We’re happy, huh Boofuls?” Zoe threw the biscuit and watched the dog carry it off. She always got a kick out of how furtive Kenna looked as she trotted off with the prize. Gotta hide this real good, she could imagine the dog thinking. Never know when someone might get a taste for Old Roy peanut-flavored dog biscuit.
Some of the branches of the plants were so heavy with tomatoes that they were touching the ground, and she decided now was as good a time as any to do a little cleanup. As she went into the garage for twine and nippers, the phone rang from inside the house.
“Hello,” she said, breathless from running to catch it.
The line went dead.
Zoe stared at the phone and felt her newly improved mood begin to slump. This had been happening a lot lately. Nothing there when she picked up the phone. Once a girl had asked for Brett.
“May I tell him who’s calling?”
“Oh, he’ll know.”
“Maybe I’d also like to know.”
Click.
Brett tell you about his girlfriend?
She and Brett seemed to be fighting over everything lately.
You want to end up like your father, Brett? Is that what you want?
If she had a dollar for every time she’d stopped herself from blurting that question, she’d be a wealthy woman. And as much as she’d like to credit her restraint with something high-minded, like fairness at all costs, the main reason she never asked her son if he wanted to end up like his dad was a suspicion that Brett might say that turning out like his dad would be pretty cool. A garage full of toys—surfboards, water skis, a cluster of dirt bikes; summer weekends vrooming across the water in a sleek white powerboat, winter weekends snowboarding in the local mountains. A hot-looking babe for a wife. How bad could that be?
A more pertinent question might be Do you want to end up like me?
Last month she’d attended her twentieth high-school reunion. Reluctantly. Her friend had practically had to drag her there. “Come on. It’ll be fun.”
Right. Wearing heels was never fun and neither was anything else about the evening. Like the emerald-green silk dress she’d bought from Second Time Around that clung like a fretting child to her legs, or the large, laminated and hideously embarrassing picture of herself at eighteen, or Evelyn Something-or-other, Ph.D., former class valedictorian, who had droned on about how reunions were a chance to catch up on one another’s lives.
“A reunion is an opportunity to examine our own life narrative,” Earnest Evelyn had told the assembled crowd in the San Diego Hilton ballroom. “A chance to consider the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and how we became that person. Always remember though,” she’d cautioned, “reunions can also threaten the integrity of those stories by subjecting them to the scrutiny of others, to friends and acquaintances whose memories of the past and of us may be altogether different from our own.”
That bit at least had gotten Zoe’s attention. In fact she’d fallen asleep thinking about it. Less about how she got to be the person she was—she could pretty much work that out—than why her version of who she was, which she was quite satisfied with, thank you very much—seemed so out of whack with the way everyone else saw her. Who exactly was fooling whom?