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  “I’ll call and talk to her about it,” I said, and then apologized profusely to Richard, privately admiring his composure. He was accustomed to issues like this. I’d met him while testifying as an expert witness in a case. He was a lawyer for the opposition. My side won. He didn’t hold it against me, fortunately.

  “I’ll take care of it. I’ll have her here tomorrow.” My words brought on that feeling you get on your first ski trip when you realize you’ve accidentally turned onto a double black diamond slope.

  “The drop-dead date is eight days away. The broker offer expires February fifteenth.”

  February fifteenth. February fifteenth . . .

  The day after Valentine’s Day. Valentine’s Day was a week away, and Richard and I hadn’t even talked about it? That was odd, considering that Richard was a planner, and in Seattle, restaurant reservations on Valentine’s Day were a must. Maybe this little silence wasn’t purely accidental. Maybe Richard had something special in mind, a surprise.

  Could there be a certain little trinket attached to the hush-hush Valentine’s Day . . . maybe something that comes in a little ring-sized box? We’d been dating six months. Having turned thirty-four last month, alone in my apartment with a cat that wasn’t even my own, I was feeling the nudge. Richard was six years older than me, ready to find someone and settle down. He’d said so sometime early in our relationship. It was one of the things I liked about him. Neither of us had time to play the games that went with dating.

  I found myself staring out the window, idly picturing an upscale apartment, two kids. . . . Would they have dark hair like Richard’s, or auburn hair like mine? My caramel-brown eyes, or Richard’s gray ones? Short and stocky, like Richard’s family, or lanky like mine? Wavy hair like mine, or straight hair like Richard’s? They’d be good at math. Both Richard and I were good with numbers. . . .

  I realized he was waiting for me to reply on the broker issue. “So the offer expires the day after Valentine’s Day, then, right?” Hint, hint.

  He didn’t pick up on the nuance, unfortunately. “Yes. Right. February fifteenth.”

  “Got it.” First things first. Right now both of us were focused on the property deal. Between all the confusion about easements, ancient surveys, and my mother’s failure to update the deed after my father’s death, we’d come way too close to letting the offer expire.

  I took a deep breath, then exhaled. “Don’t worry.” Which, of course, is what people say when they are worried. “If I have to go down there and drag my mother back here myself, I’ll do it.” The words held the false bravado of a schoolyard bully who’s really afraid to fight. The last, last, last part of my life I ever planned to revisit was that terrible high-school year in Moses Lake. I’d shaken off the Texas dust sixteen years ago, and nothing short of the apocalypse would ever drag me back there again.

  Truths are first clouds; then rain, then harvest and food.

  —Henry Ward Beecher

  (Left on the wall of wisdom by Andrea Henderson, new Moses Lake resident, and Mart McClendon, local game warden)

  Chapter 2

  Famous last words—nothing like planning a last-minute trip to Texas to make you eat them. One should never underestimate the power of twisted family ties and well-meaning church ladies bearing casseroles. Apparently, the Moses Lake ladies had discovered my mother at Uncle Herbert’s place, and they’d pulled out the frozen funeral casseroles and the slice-and-bake cookies. They had shown up at Harmony Shores armed with food, ostensibly because widowed men like my uncles shouldn’t be trying to cook for company. In reality, of course, they were there to figure out what, exactly, was going on at the former funeral home, and in what way it involved the town’s ex-pariah, my mother.

  The story, as my mother related it on the phone, grew more bizarre from there. Apparently she’d flown in on a whim, after arranging for a graduate assistant to cover her classes. It sounded like she’d been in Moses Lake overnight with the uncs (suddenly she was using the family pet name for my great uncles, to whom she had never given the time of day before). I wanted to ask her what she was thinking, taking off for Texas the day before she was supposed to be in Seattle. But trying to understand her thought processes was like contemplating infinity. It tied your brain in small, painful knots. Her actions were typically based on vague feelings, a sense of karma, or the advice of some spiritual advisor she’d met on the Internet.

  When I called, she was walking along the lakeshore, “ . . . just thinking,” she said, as I rummaged around my office, stacking the Itega files all in one place, just in case I had to fly out of town to round up my mother. “Uncle Herbert found some boxes in his basement that were ours. Apparently, they’ve been stored here all this time. I wanted a few days to check it out, and then there’s the estate sale issue. It’s not easy for the uncs, having so many memories tied to the place. . . .”

  She trailed off, and I thought we had a dropped connection, but then she started talking to someone who was there with her. I gathered that the pastor from Lakeshore Community Church had just dropped by to say hello and to pass along the phone number of a mortician who might want to buy the surplus caskets, casket stands, skirts, and various other funeral equipment in Uncle Herbert’s basement.

  “But . . . I thought all of that had been cleaned out. Uncle Herbert and Uncle Charley are supposed to be moving this week.” Right after the papers are signed. It was a sad fact of this entire process that Uncle Herbert and Uncle Charley had to relocate closer to younger members of the family. They seemed to be handling it well enough, though, and as people age, difficult decisions have to be made. I needed to get my mother out of there before Uncle Herbert’s son Donny found out she was meddling and a family war ensued. Donny and my mother had practically come to blows over the Moses Lake property numerous times in the past.

  “Listen, Mother, the plans have already been made. You said you didn’t want to handle your portion of the paperwork via fax, so Richard made arrangements for you to do it here, in person. He waited all morning for you to show. I don’t understand why you’re holding things up. You know that Uncle Herbert and Uncle Charley need the money, and you know they can’t stay in Moses Lake by themselves any longer. You’re just making things harder for everyone.”

  “Oh, they’re fine. We played Chicken Foot last night.” As usual, Mother was floating around somewhere in the fluffy cumulus nimbi. She sounded alarmingly relaxed. Not at all like someone about to head for the airport. “They’re enjoying the casseroles. We’ve been writing down a few of the family stories, even.”

  “You’re doing what?” The last thing we needed was everyone hanging around the funeral home, waxing nostalgic about the good ol’ days. “What do you mean, you’re playing dominoes? There’s supposed to be almost nothing left in the house, and . . .”

  I was momentarily at a loss for words. I imagined my mother camped out with my uncles in the massive Greek Revival house, where back in the day, you could turn a blind corner and unwittingly bump into coffin stands and body boards. My mother hated Uncle Herbert’s place on Harmony Cove as much as she hated everything else about Moses Lake, which was why she’d fought like a banshee when my father had been offered the opportunity to supervise the construction and implementation of the Proxica plant upriver from Moses Lake, near the little Mennonite town of Gnadenfeld.

  Mom had finally given in and let my dad accept the transfer—but only because my grandmother was in a nursing home, in the final weeks of her life, and my grandfather had been diagnosed with congestive heart failure. My dad was needed in Moses Lake, and so we picked up our lives and went. For me, a math-and-art-class-loving chick accustomed to a big-city high school in Philadelphia, it seemed like the end of the world. I’d long since lost interest in going with my father on his cross-country trips to visit his family in Texas, and all of a sudden I was being told I’d have to spend my senior year of high school and graduate from tiny, podunk Moses Lake High. I hated my father for subjecting me
to such a hideous reality. I made sure to communicate that in every selfish, immature way I could.

  Sometimes, life turns upside down, and you never get the chance to say you’re sorry.

  “Listen, the offer on the property expires next week.” I pointed out.

  “I know,” Mom answered, and I wondered at the strange, melancholy rhythm of her voice. Was Moses Lake wrapping its watery veil around her again, dragging her down the way it had in the months after my father’s death? “So there’s not any rush, really.”

  “Except that Richard did a ton of the work on the deeds as a favor to me, and he was expecting you today.”

  Mom exhaled. “Oh, Heather, men are always doing you favors. They love to do favors for you. It makes them feel like they might have a chance of cracking that shell.”

  “Richard is different.” I refused to slide into yet another relationship conversation with my mother. I really did. She was the one with men bobbing in and out of her life like horses on a carousel. She was always holding court—discussing art, or literature, or theater with men from grad-student age on up to those with full professorships. She’d been in and out of love more times than I could count, the only constant being instability.

  Just as she was working up what, undoubtedly, would have been some critical analysis of Richard, formed during their limited phone and email conversations over the real estate deal, I heard laughter in the background. A man’s laugh. A familiar laugh.

  “Mom, who’s there with you?” My mind raced through the connections. My mother wasn’t in Moses Lake alone. “Is Clay there? Is that Clay?”

  Mom didn’t have to answer. Suddenly the trip to Moses Lake made some sense.

  Clay was there. He’d found out about the sale of the property and seen fit to involve himself, and now he was in Moses Lake, hanging out and giving Mom advice. My stomach clenched at the thought. Clay’s involvement in the deal could be a game changer, and not in any good way. My little brother had been floating idly through college and law school for a decade, while taking occasional breaks to climb Mount Hood, or get his scuba-diving certification, or spend a semester in some tiny South American country, working with an earthquake relief team. So far, Clay seemed perfectly happy to move at his own aimless, relaxed pace, while Mother contributed financial support from the nest egg left behind by our dad’s life insurance policy. At twenty-seven, Clay didn’t seem in any rush to take care of himself.

  “I’m coming down there,” I said, but the show of bravado was intended only to make my mother snap to her senses. Surely she knew that Moses Lake, in terms of emotional stability, wasn’t the best place for her to spend time. “Really, Mother. It isn’t good for you to be there. What could you possibly be hoping to accomplish?”

  “Maybe putting some ghosts to rest.” Suddenly the lightness was gone from her tone. She sounded gravely serious. “They don’t just go away on their own, you know.”

  A sick feeling leeched from the pit of my stomach, darkness spreading over me like a splash of ink. How was it that she could still do this to me? It was as if she knew where the painful spots were, and she could probe them whenever she wanted. “I’ll be there tomorrow. I’ll help you ship whatever boxes you want to ship, and then we’re coming back here and doing the deal as planned.”

  A long pause left me hearing my own pulse thrumming, and then she finally answered, “Well, if you must know, there’s another offer we want to look at, Heather. There’s really nothing you can do here. I’ll call you in a day or two.”

  My insides were rolling now, my mind whirling ahead. “What offer? An offer from whom?” There was no way that could be true. No one else was going to come along and pay the price the broker was offering.

  “I really can’t explain it all. . . .”

  “I’ll be there in the morning.” Rubbing the ache in my forehead, I tried to think through the details. It was Wednesday. I could tell Mel I needed a couple personal days to see to the family matters related to the land sale. Mel wouldn’t be happy about it, as personal wasn’t really in his vocabulary, but I had enough unused vacation stacked up to last me until spring.

  I mentally fast-forwarded through the Mel confrontation, then considered the practicalities. I’d have to book a flight, arrange for a rental car, look at a map, and figure out the route from the airport to Moses Lake. It would probably be easier to fly to Dallas and drive from there, rather than taking a commuter flight to Waco. . . .

  “You’re not bringing Richard along, are you?” Mother’s question collided with my thoughts like an asteroid, leaving a fiery trail. Why would she care whether Richard was coming along? Unless . . . Unless she’d already made up her mind to bug out on the land sale, and she was afraid I might use Richard to try to strong-arm her into it. Maybe my brother was giving her some sort of amateur legal advice. Exactly how far had Clay gotten in law school before his last side trip on the highway of life?

  The question nagged and nipped as I reiterated that I was coming down there to straighten things out, then said good-bye.

  Within an hour and a half, I’d cleared my impending absence with Mel, booked a flight, returned to my apartment, and thrown together a carry-on bag.

  I ran into Trish as I was lugging my carryon and laptop case down the stairs. She was ferrying a pizza box to the three-bedroom unit she’d moved into after she fell in love with the guy down the hall and got married. Now she was on the fast track to family life, having had three kids in four years. Since she’d given up ergonomic building design for mommyhood, we had most of our conversations in the stairwell at odd hours.

  “Whoa, where are you headed?” she asked, holding the pizza like a platter.

  “Texas,” I grumbled, feeling pathetic and like I needed someone to feel sorry for me. I would never have let anyone see that but Trish. We’d met while working long hours at our first jobs out of college. She’d ridden the merry-go-round of family issues with me before.

  Leaning against the stairway railing, she rested the pizza on the banister. “Your mom didn’t show, huh?”

  “Of course not.” I gripped my forehead. I already had a headache, and my mother was still hundreds of miles away.

  “I don’t know when you’re going to learn not to expect anything from her.” She punctuated the sentence with a disgusted smack. “Can I do anything for you while you’re gone? Want me to water your plant?”

  “I’ve already killed the plant. I watered it. Really. I mean . . . I think I watered it.”

  Trish rolled her eyes and opened the pizza box. “Here, take a slice of pizza, so you don’t end up like the plant.”

  I thanked her, we hugged good-bye, and I transported myself to a flight bound for Texas, by way of several irritating layovers. Oddly enough, I didn’t even think of calling Richard until I was high in the skies over Idaho. I dialed his number during a layover in Denver. He took the news well, which actually disappointed me a little. I was tired, frustrated, and irritated, and I suppose I wanted him to get manly and protective, maybe tell me it was brave of me to try to deal with this alone but he was hopping the next flight out.

  Then again, why would he? Richard had no idea of the history that lay in Moses Lake because I’d never told him. No one in Seattle knew, except Trish. The best thing about living halfway across the country from the past you’d like to forget is that you’re not obligated to reveal it to anyone. You really can leave it all behind. As far as Richard knew, Moses Lake was just an ancestral family place to which I had little attachment, sentimental or otherwise.

  “I have a boatload of work to catch up on this weekend, anyway.” Richard’s words brought another unexpected letdown—as if I were dangling over a cliff, sinking a little lower and a little lower as he let out the rope. Maybe it was the whole Texas thing, but I was feeling uncharacteristically needy. The sensation was foreign and unwelcome.

  I cradled the phone on my shoulder, juggling my laptop, purse, and carryon as I took a seat at the gate for my next f
light. Outside the window, a Colorado moon shone on new-fallen snow. I wanted to walk out the door, catch a cab, and head for the mountains—lose myself in their cottony peaks and have a vacation. “I know. I’m sorry my mom wasted your time today. It’s her world, and we’re just living in it.”

  Richard chuckled, and I fell into the warm sound of it. He had such a nice laugh. “I like your mother. She’s . . . artsy. A free spirit.”

  I was momentarily silenced. I like your mother? Traitor. “Thanks for being so nice about it.” He wouldn’t like her if he knew her better, would he?

  “It’s fine, really. I can understand her attachment to the family home.”

  He could? Richard understood my mother? “It isn’t even her hometown. It was my father’s. She never wanted to spend time there when I was a kid. She and my grandmother hated each other.” I sounded like a harpy, like one of those bitter family members on Dr. Phil.

  “Well, you know, the older people get, the more sentimental they feel about things. They have that sense of time slipping away.”

  I blinked, watching snowflakes swirl in the pocket of protected space near the Jetway. This didn’t sound like Richard at all. “Are you okay?” I leaned away as a guy in a rumpled business suit took a seat next to me.

  “Yeah, it’s the birthday thing, I think.”