Dark Water - Laura McNeal [13]
“Night, Pearl,” she said, and went on with her vigil.
Eleven
My father hadn’t called me for a month. He sent little e-mails about loving me and missing me and hoping we could work through this, but when I didn’t respond, he gave up. It bothered me that he gave up so easily, and then one morning I opened the mail.
“Mom?” I said. “This says our health insurance has been canceled. Can that be right?”
My mother was sitting on our porch with my uncle Hoyt, eating mulberries from a bowl. “Let me see that,” my mother said, and her face tightened so that the two lines between her eyebrows nearly met.
My uncle took the notice from her and found a pair of reading glasses in his pocket. He unfolded them and started to read.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Hoyt asked my mother. “I could have paid it.”
“The bill doesn’t come to me,” my mother said. “It goes to Glen in Phoenix.”
“Why didn’t he pay it?” I asked.
“He didn’t pay it,” my mother said in a trembling angry voice that made her spit out each word like the seed of an especially bitter lemon, “because he’s a selfish, cowardly—” She stopped. I knew the psychiatrist had asked her to refrain from criticizing my father in front of me.
“I think the word you’re looking for, Sharon,” my uncle said, folding the bill decisively and sticking it into his shirt pocket, “is spineless son of a bitch.” No one ate any more mulberries after that. Hoyt stood up and went home.
The weather had turned gloomy, too. The blue skies of April are followed by what locals call Gray May, which to me sounds like this cranky, complaining girl you want to slap because she’s such a whiner. One good thing had happened, though. A few days later, Hoyt told me that Esteban, the grove manager, hadn’t found anything bad to say about Amiel, and Amiel could come every Friday.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Nothing to thank me for,” he said. “I’ll have to let him go if he doesn’t work out. The talking thing might be a problem over time. If they don’t get to trust him.”
“Oh,” I said, worried again.
I decided that if I wrote Amiel a note, maybe I could learn more about him and pass this information on somehow. This assumed Amiel could even read the Spanish I put together like a blind person arranging colors.
Juggle = hacer malabares; engañar; trampar
Engañar = to deceive
Trampar = to trick
I arranged and rearranged the words until finally, on a gray misty Friday morning before school, I stood on the driveway, a folded note in my sweaty hand, and I hoped it said:
What is your favorite food?
Where did you learn to juggle?
Would you please tell me how you lost your voice?
While I was standing there, my cell phone startled me, and I found myself staring at my father’s name on the screen: GLEN DEWITT.
I ran my fingers over the edge of the paper and watched the foggy edges of the grove. I listened for the whir of Amiel’s bicycle, and the phone rang again, then again, until I finally said a grudging hello to my father.
“Pearly girl!” my father said. I could imagine him wearing a perfectly starched pink shirt. Cuff links. Obsession for Men cologne.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“The office,” he said. “You ready for a surprise?”
“I don’t know,” I said. A surprise could be dinner at which he would introduce me to the woman or man who must have been eating with him for all those months at La Vache and the French Laundry while he was so-called missing us.
“This is a pretty damn good surprise,” he said. “It’s a place.”
The purple jacaranda tree was blooming its head off where I stood. Jacarandas can make the whole world look like a Technicolor dreamland, as if Walt Disney had decided everything green should be purple.
“Just think of the place you’ve always wanted to go,” my father said, waving his own Technicolor wand.
I pictured, because I couldn’t help it, the Eiffel Tower. Every August, Agnès, Robby, and Hoyt went to Paris to visit her mother, and although they