Dark Water - Laura McNeal [5]
We turned and headed toward the gate that Uncle Hoyt welded in adult education classes before Robby or I was born.
“Here we are,” he said, steering us under the sign that said LEMON DROP RANCH in loopy iron letters. When I was little, he would always sing, Where troubles melt like lemon drops, away above the chimney tops, that’s where you’ll find me.
In Rainbow, see.
We drove under the arch, gravel popping under the tires of Hoyt’s truck as I moved into the future, where I would be Perla and Amiel would sign my name by opening the oyster shell of his two hands and extracting a small invisible pearl, his long expressive fingers turning into a nest and then a bird, undulating so that you forgot his hand was a hand at all.
Six
My mother and I lived uneasily that year in my uncle’s guesthouse, the oldest structure in Rainbow. The cottage was the original homestead of a pioneer named Lavar Mulveen, who came to Rainbow in the thirties to raise olives but ended up planting alligator pears, an early, fanciful name for avocados. I hated Lavar’s rusty bathtub and dysfunctional toilet, but I liked how the porch was a big extra room, which my mom and I had fitted out with an old wicker sofa and a lamp and even a needlepoint rug that Robby and I bought at a garage sale for three dollars. Everything that reminded us of my dad we pitched: his sports memorabilia (not true that you can get a fortune for old baseball cards), his record albums, his ultra-lux leather sofa, his ultra-lux glass-and-steel office furniture, the model train layout his dad built and which was like a tiny green kingdom in our garage when I was little, complete with creeks and forests and bridges and houses and barns. We smashed it to pieces, my mother and I. I was King Kong and she was Godzilla. In case that seems slightly hysterical, I’ll tell you how he left.
It was a Friday in January, and on this particular Friday we were expecting my father to fly home from Phoenix, where he was turning apartments into condos, something you can’t do in a farm town like Fallbrook. He’d be gone for about a month at a time, and for those weeks it was like my mom and I were roommates. We never made our beds and we didn’t keep to any kind of a schedule and we watched girl movies after I finished my homework, and then my dad flew in and we cleaned everything up and my mom cooked fancy food and it was like they were dating each other in the type of movie we liked best.
At least, I thought that’s the kind of movie it was until I came home from Greenie’s on January 12. I’d made my bed in the morning, and the night before I’d helped clean the bathrooms and iron napkins and pick popcorn bits out of the lux leather sofa. I knew my mother was making lobster Newburg and bananas Foster. I knew she’d bought a new dress at Talbots because I helped pick it out.
I came into the house, the one on Macadamia Drive with a stained glass window of a hummingbird by the front door, and I saw that my mom had left pots and pans and food all over the kitchen. “Mom?” I said.
She was sitting extra still on the couch, like taxidermy. It’s hard to describe her because a parent is so close it’s like trying to see the glasses you have on. But she was a spunky, forty-five-year-old version of the woman in the wedding picture. She still had long blond hair and blue eyes that matched and tanned freckly skin and the sort of cheerleader nose I didn’t inherit. She wasn’t as thin as she used to be or as my father seemed to want, but she still looked nice in the linen dresses and blousy shirts she liked to wear. What was odd, at this moment, was that she was not even looking at anything. Normally,