Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [116]
I’ll be crying soon, too, Lewis thought.
“I’m worried about her, though.” David sounded calmer than Lewis would’ve ever thought possible. “She’s been cramping badly. I’m afraid she might lose the baby. I was there at the office when Burt came and gave her the news. It’s a big shock.” David took a deep breath. “She managed to call Joe and Yvette, but that’s it. Can you handle the house for a while? And maybe get ahold of Perrin?”
“I’ll call a house meeting,” Lewis said. “And I’ll call all the Old Bastards. I can do that. It hasn’t hit yet. I know it will, but it hasn’t yet.”
“Thanks,” David said. “Because I want to stay with Libby until her parents arrive.”
When Lewis hung up, before he went to tell anyone the news, he walked out of the back door of the kitchen. Across the driveway was a grove of Washington navels just blushing orange, and overhead the sky was streaked with high gray clouds. The late-afternoon light was soft and slanted. Lewis cried just a little, skimming off the first thin foaming-up of grief. “Red,” he said in a reasoning voice, as if calling him to reconsider this last, drastic action. The sky shimmered. “Red,” he said again, as if Red were indeed close by. Oh, the dark, leathery leaves, the spherical fruit, the trajectory of a swallow! The more Lewis looked around, the more exquisite everything seemed, those wispy clouds, the fine sparkle of mist and dust. He could see the glint of pale golden sunlight on everything—dried blond weeds, granite rocks, even on the pollen and motes in the air; all of it was shining, shining, as if Red’s love had burst upon the world and settled evenly, briefly, over everything.
HUNDREDS of the farm’s sober alumni and every recovery professional in a fifty-mile radius showed up at the Blue House for the AA meeting that night. The ballroom was SRO. Barbara, Celia, and Kip had driven up from Los Angeles. Lewis stood against the front wall and watched people arrive, greet each other, hug. Everyone looked stunned, their faces swollen, their movements awkward.
About ten minutes after the meeting started, David slipped in beside Lewis. “Libby’s still in the hospital,” he whispered. “She started bleeding and the doctors are afraid she’s going to miscarry.”
Julie Swaggart led the meeting. She told everyone that Red had suffered a massive heart attack; it was unlikely he would have survived even if he hadn’t lost control of the truck. He was probably dead before he crashed.
Julie said Red embodied experience, strength, and hope for all alcoholics. She said he’d been as dear and necessary to her as her own husband and children. “I remember when I first saw him in meetings. He was around forty and still limping from his accident and trying to sort out his life. He was so sweet and lost. Worried about his son, and couldn’t decide if he should continue practicing law. …
“Six years later, when I came to work for him, he’d become the Red Hornet. Couldn’t sit still. Coffee, cigarettes, and go-go-go. He used to say, ‘Julie, everybody should be happy to hire the alcoholic. They have to do the work of three people to feel as good as one.’ But he always made time for the men. Whenever I couldn’t find him, I knew where he was—glad-handing the sorriest guy at the house, the one everybody else had written off as a lost cause.
“Red imprinted everybody he met,” Julie concluded. “And his imprint was love.”
She called on a man named Luke, a little bald guy who had been one of Round Rock’s first residents. “Oh, we had a ball here that first year,” Luke said. “I did the cooking when Ernie wanted a night off. Everybody pitched in, with everything. Red was just one of us. Red and Frank. Sure, Red supposedly had his own place over the other side of the ranch, but most mornings we found him sleeping in the library.
“We’d go into Buchanan for meetings, and on the way to and fro we’d stop in at the Copper Coffeepot with Frank. Always the Copper Coffeepot. And every goddamn time, even if he’d just done it two hours ago, Red gave the waitresses five bucks to sing Frank