1
E
XILE WITH A
K-
TEL
S
OUNDTRACK
June 2010
F
or the very first time in her entire life, Jordan West hated summer. Summer usually meant freedom—from school, at least. She wasn’t the school type. Her mom had always told her that these were supposed to be the happiest years of her life, which was so not comforting. In Jordan’s opinion, school was an extralong basic training for life as a brainless office hemorrhoid.
But summers had always been great. In summer, the only classes she’d had to worry about were the ones that her mom had always arranged for her, and they were fun. Last year she’d gone to an arts camp, which had been a little like boot camp, too—but boot camp for art freaks and weirdos. Her people.
In summers past, she’d only had piddling little responsibilities to tend to—like taking Dominic and Lily to the pool or movies, or baby-sitting them when the ’rents weren’t around. Actually, Nina had been the one who usually did the baby-sitting while Jordan hid in their room, drawing, or occasionally sneaked out to a friend’s house. But Jordan always got equal credit for baby-sitting because Nina never narced on her. They’d been a perfect team, she and Nina. Jordan could be bad, knowing Nina would drag her back from the dark side when necessary, and in return, just enough Jordan had rubbed off on Nina to keep her from being a nauseating Little Miss Perfect.
But now there was no Mom, no Nina, and summer stretched before her like a long, hot prison sentence. She’d thought getting out of Austin would bring some relief. She had begged her father to let her stay with her grandparents this summer. But bad as her life in Austin had become, with memories and guilt assaulting her everywhere she looked, it was beginning to seem like heaven compared to living with her grandparents in Little Salty.
What had she been thinking?
She hadn’t been thinking. That was the problem. No one was thinking anymore—just reacting, and she was the worst of them all. For the first time in her life she slept fitfully in rooms all by herself, going to bed crying, waking up headachy and dazed. Life was something she never could have imagined a year ago, or even a few months ago. Even her grandparents’ house and the little town they lived in, which when she was a kid had seemed fun to visit, now felt suffocating, almost unbearable.
The first thing each morning, her grandmother checked the newspaper for coupons. Coupons ruled their world. A coupon could mean a trip to Midland, even if it was just to buy canned green beans, two for ninety-nine cents. Granny Kate refused to let Jordan stay in the house alone—as if Jordan was nine years old again—and so they both had to pile into the Ford Focus and drive thirty miles of dreary country road listening to
The Best of Bread
and Barry Manilow, because Granny Kate’s musical taste, which apparently had never been cutting edge, had fossilized sometime around 1978.
Jordan knew there was good music from way back then because Jed Levenger, her really cool art teacher at camp last year, had played the Rolling Stones in the studio all the time. But no way you’d hear Mick Jagger coming out of Granny Kate’s car speakers, any more than you’d hear Cannibal Corpse or Rancid. The Ford Focus was an easy-listening bubble of pain.
During these drives, Jordan sometimes wondered if Jed was still teaching at arts camp. It wasn’t that she had a crush on him or anything—Jed was as old as her father and sort of sloppy and grizzled looking. But he was the first—and only—real artist to say that she was talented. Although maybe a guy teaching at a rinky-dink arts camp couldn’t be considered a real artist. Still, he wasn’t a hemorrhoid. He wasn’t a normal adult who was all food-work-food-sleep.
Once they arrived in Midland, she and her grandmother would hit the grocery stores. “Stocking up,” Granny Kate called it, though it was hard to figure out what calamity they were preparing for. After shopping, they would splurge on lunch at Applebee’s. Big treat. Granny Kate was usually unnaturally chipper as the waitress seated them. She’d hum “Copacabana” as she inspected every single item listed on the menu, even though they both knew she was going to order the pecan crusted chicken salad. She always ordered the pecan crusted chicken salad.
The worst part came after the ordering was over, when the two of them would sit across the table from each other, straining for something to say. Once, right in the middle of the noontime crowd, Granny Kate had stared into Jordan’s face and burst into tears. It had been awful, and so embarrassing. People had actually turned in their chairs and gaped at their table. And then Granny Kate had wailed out an apology to the room and honked her nose into her napkin like some kind of crazy woman.
And Midland days were the good days.
When they didn’t go to Midland, they stayed in Little Salty. Jordan would crawl out of bed, usually sometime during
The View
, and Granny Kate would jump up and pop a couple of Family Dollar frozen waffles into the toaster, all the while fussing about what a late sleeper Jordan was. Then the day’s schedule would be laid out—usually involving some grisly combination of bridge club, errands, church, and Jazzercise.
As far as art was concerned, the best Jordan could hope for was that Granny Kate would be taking her afternoon nap during the Bob Ross reruns on PBS. The show would lull Jordan into a trancelike state as she sat on the couch and ate bowls of ice cream. Bob Ross was the best company available in Little Salty, and he was certainly more effective than that stupid counselor she’d been sent to back in Austin, after the accident. All the shrink had ever done was stare at her in a condescending way that absolutely convinced her that everything was all her fault.
Bob Ross was better. That soothing voice. Snowy white mountaintops and happy little trees. Happy little world where nothing bad happened.
At six-fifteen every night, her grandfather would come home. Pop Pop was a pharmacist who had been on the cusp of retirement as long as Jordan could remember. She suspected his reluctance to hang up his white smock had something to do with the coupon-and-Jazzercisey alternative. It seemed unlikely that he would ever quit now that his home had become funereal as well as tedious.
When Jordan had first arrived in Little Salty, after that first wince of greeting, Pop Pop had tried to put a happy spin on things. “I’m sure you’ll liven us up!” he’d said, giving her a big bear hug. It was the first time anyone had touched Jordan in three months.
But she hadn’t livened things up. In fact, she had a hunch that her arrival had actually bumped up the gloom quotient. The grandfolks tried to hide it, but she could tell her presence made them uncomfortable. And sad. She occasionally felt their eyes on her, searching for someone who wasn’t there. When she met their gazes, they would snap to and guiltily turn away.
Jordan despaired. Was this how it was going to be from now on, forever? Were people always going to look at her and remember someone else?
One night she finally lost it. The eruption occurred during a typically silent dinner. Nothing but cutlery against china and the loud ticking of her grandmother’s kitchen clock could be heard. No one talked here during meals. There was nothing to say. Jordan started to feel stir-crazy and punchy. The tension of it all caused her to giggle.
Granny Kate, who had been lost in thought, glared at her. The glare seemed horrible because there were tears standing in her grandmother’s eyes. It wasn’t hard to guess what—who—she’d been thinking about.
Jordan sprang suddenly from her chair.
“I’m sorry!”
she yelled, tossing down her napkin.
“What for?” Pop Pop asked, mystified, like a man who’d just been shaken out of a dream. “What’s going on?”
“I’m sorry that I laughed!” she raged. “I’m sorry that I’m me! I’m sorry that I’m here!”
Even as she shouted the words, Jordan couldn’t believe this was her. But she couldn’t help herself. Anger and sadness had been corked up inside her for months and spewed out in a Krakatoa of fury.
“We
wanted
you here,” Pop Pop argued.
Granny Kate remained noticeably purse-lipped and mute.
“But now you’re sick of the sight of me,” Jordan said. “Don’t you think I am, too? Do you know what it’s like to not be able to look at myself without thinking about my dead twin sister? I wish I could break every mirror in the world!”
She ran to her room and slammed the door, but immediately felt sorry. And so dumb. This wasn’t her. This was some screwed-up teenager throwing a melodramatic fit, like in one of those hokey old after-school specials. She needed to strangle her inner Kristy McNichol and get herself under control.
This was when she needed Nina. Nina had always been able to shake her out of these emotional explosions. If Nina were here, she would have sat on the edge of the bed, cross-legged and calm, while Jordan stomped around the room punching pillows and howling about how screwed up everybody was. Then, after Jordan had tired herself out a little, she would have ventured a thought or two.
What are Granny Kate and Pop Pop supposed to do, Jordan? It would be really weird if they didn’t look at you
at all—that
would piss you off even more. They can’t help it.
Jordan snorted, as if Nina had actually spoken to her. “They probably can’t help blaming me, either.”
She lifted her head, tilting it to hear some reply. But Nina’s voice was gone.
Of course it was gone. She would never know what Nina felt. Nina was dead. Their mother was dead. And it was all her fault.
She flopped on the bed and cried herself to sleep, and she slept right into the next day. When she finally staggered out to the kitchen again, Barbara Walters was on the television talking about Lasik surgery, and her grandmother was just dropping two Family Dollar waffles into the toaster and singing “Can’t Smile without You.”
Nothing had changed. Nothing was ever going to change. It was so depressing that she sank down in front of her plate and almost started crying again. If only there was someone to help her. If only Nina were there.
If only she could stop thinking about Nina.
Then she remembered. In junior high they’d had to write a paper on a historical figure they admired. Jordan had picked John Adams from a list of suggestions, scribbled a few boring paragraphs about him during lunch before class, and had received a D. Nina had picked Gandhi, and she hadn’t just typed a five-page paper including pictures and an index of links to Web sites, she’d also spent weeks talking about him, and watching that boring movie, and plastering the room they shared with inspirational quotes. For a month “Be the change that you want to see in the world” was taped to their closet door.
At the time, Jordan had rolled her eyes, because the only change she’d wanted to see was a world where she didn’t have to do dumb papers. But apparently the quote had penetrated her thick skull, because it came back to her now.
If she wanted her life to be different, she was going to have to make the changes herself.
As she gnawed on waffle number two, she started to devise a plan for the next trip to Midland.
“Any good coupons in the paper today?” she asked her grandmother.
2
G
RACE
, I
NTERRUPTED
A
t first, no one could hear the phone ringing. Small wonder. The decibel level in the duplex was just short of what it would have taken to have the cops called on them, but loud enough to have traumatized Grace’s two elderly and mostly deaf cats. In addition to the saxophone quartet playing “Powerhouse” in the small back room, the kitchen was crammed with people talk-shouting over the noise—friends, friends of friends, and a few strays with way too much beer in them. In the smoke-filled living room, where four card tables were wedged between all the other furniture, the long-awaited Tournament of Stupid Games was in full swing. Grace didn’t recall Mousetrap being such a noisy enterprise, although heretofore she’d only seen it played by the under-ten set, and sober.
It was Amber who finally heard the ringing, perhaps because her current Twister position cocked her ear in the right direction. “
Grace!
Your phone!”
Grace realized she would never be able to carry on a conversation down here and made a dash for the stairs, just missing the card table where the Operation round of the game battle was raging. A few inches to the right might have upset the outcome of hours of ferocious competition.
By the time she reached her upstairs bedroom, she was out of breath. She toed the door shut to block out the noise from below and picked up the phone. “Zoo! How can we help you?”
“Grace?”
Every trace of high spirits was flushed out of Grace’s body in a rush of worry. “Steven? What’s wrong?”
Her oldest brother wouldn’t call her unless there was an emergency. Frankly, she was a little surprised that he had called her for any reason. She usually communicated with him now through his wife, Denise, who was also a partner in his medical practice.
“The thing is . . .” He faltered, and she held her breath in dread. “Dad’s had an accident.”
“Oh, God.” She collapsed forward. She’d been braced for bad, but now that the bad had arrived, she still felt like Jell-O inside. “What happened? Is he okay?”
“It was a car accident. That is, a Chevy Tahoe hit him as he was walking across Guadalupe near campus.”
“On, the drag? But is he—?”
“His leg’s broken.”
“Oh, no.” Even as she said it, though, she felt relief. It could have been so much worse.
On the other hand, a broken bone was no picnic at any age. And it had to be especially trying for a seventy-six-year-old man. Especially a peppery seventy-six-year-old man who was used to being independent.
“Poor Dad!” she exclaimed.
“No kidding,” Steven muttered. “Felled by a Chevy! I can’t imagine what he was doing on the drag. It’s not like he has a reason to be anywhere near campus anymore.”
Pondering why the victim of an auto accident had positioned himself in front of a car and gotten himself run over was typical of Steven. It wasn’t a case of blaming the victim so much as assuming the victim had indecipherable motives for wanting to be maimed.
“When did the accident happen?” she asked.
“Yesterday.”
“Yesterday?”
The reproach was duly noted. “He was okay, Grace. He’s just been in the hospital.”
Just
been in the hospital! Spoken like a surgeon. A hospital was a second office to Steven—a humdrum bone repair shop.
So for a day her father had been laid up in a hospital bed with serious injuries. During that same day she had been blithely absorbed in planning for this party, a housewarming of sorts. Ben had just moved in to her duplex on Friday.
“I’ll call Dad right away,” she told Steven.
“Good . . .” He hitched his throat.
A throat hitch from Steven meant that he wasn’t quite finished. Grace waited for it.
“Actually, I was wondering . . .” The hitch again. “The thing is, I’m worried about when Dad gets discharged. He’s not going to be a hundred percent. He’ll need home care. I was thinking about hiring someone . . .”
Hired home help. Lou Oliver would never go for that.
“It would be a different matter if things were normal here,” Steven continued. “But I’ve got this blasted conference in St. Louis coming up this week, and Denise . . .” He paused a moment and began again. “Denise . . .”
Grace leaned forward. “Steven? What’s happened?”
He coughed. “The thing is, Denise . . .”
During their recent phone conversations, her father had been muttering about Steven and Denise having problems. The bust-up must have come, which would explain the reason Steven’s brain was short-circuiting every time he said her name. Highly charged emotional situations often affected him that way.
“Oh, Steven. Have you two split up?”
“Yes.”
“When did it happen?”
“Friday.”
And Denise seemed so perfect for him. In fact, she was exactly like his first wife, Sara. The two women both had bulldozer personalities, which seemed to be what Steven gravitated toward.
Poor Steven. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s fine,” Steven said. “I’ll have to leave Orthopedic Partners and start my own practice, though. I don’t know what I’ll call it. Orthopedic Loner or something.”
“Why should you have to leave?” she asked.
“Because Denise and Jack—Dr. Gunther, the other partner . . . He and Denise . . .”
Oh, God.
He coughed again. “Anyway, I’m speaking at a conference this week. And since there’s no question of Sam helping out . . .”
Sam, a journalist, was stationed in Beirut.
“I know it’s a lot to ask, Grace. . . .”
“I’ll come down right away.”
Now that she had agreed, Steven seemed doubtful. “But you’ve got your thing there. Your CD thing . . .”
Her “CD thing” was her life. Music stores were a sputtering business model, but so far Rigoletto’s was still clawing at the ledge of profitability by its fingertips. It helped that she had specialized. The store had practically no other brick and mortar competition in town for the dollars of classical music obsessives. It also didn’t hurt that she’d cleared a room in back where she brewed good coffee and had live music on weekends.
“Ben can baby-sit Rigoletto’s for a while,” she said.
“Ben? Really?” He sounded surprised.
“Really,” she assured him. “I can leave tomorrow.”
“No, I meant, you’re really still with
that guy?”
The one time Ben had met her Austin family, he hadn’t exactly made a big hit.
That was another reason it had taken them so long to move in together—although not the biggest. Mild family opposition had added to Grace’s hunch that they weren’t fated to be. A fate deficit was a goofy reason to put off doing the couple thing—she knew that—but she couldn’t help it. Beneath the realist face she showed the world, there lurked a mushy center of romanticism. She blamed this on an early addiction to the Brontës, which gave her the unrealistic expectation that there was a man wandering the world who would become attached to her with a fervent, though preferably not doomed, devotion. All her life she’d kept an eye out for her Heathcliff, her Rochester, a man who would be able to hear her heart’s desire if she opened the window and called his name on a stormy night.
Instead, she’d been sent Ben, who a lot of the time didn’t hear her when she said something from across the living room. But they had been together for two years. Maybe it wasn’t devotion, but even dogged inertia had to count for something. In five months she would be thirty. Most of her friends were married, with kids. She didn’t want to look back at fifty and realize she’d wasted her life waiting for Brontë man.
“I’m still with him,” she told her brother. “And thanks to
that guy
, I can swing a short trip without having to shutter the doors.”
“Well, that’s useful, I guess,” Steven said. “This is a load off my mind, Grace. The family owes you one for this. Big time.”
She shouldn’t have felt pleased by the pat on the head, but she did. Most of her life she’d been an Oliver in name only, a sort of satellite Oliver in her own orbit ever since her mother had hauled her halfway across the country, married again, and started a second, happier marriage. And a second family that Grace had never felt completely a part of, either. Her Oregon half siblings were a decade younger and looked on her almost as a different generation. And while she loved her mother and stepfather, they had a habit of chalking up anything she did that they didn’t approve of to the Oliver in her, as if her blood were tainted.
Grace’s too-brief visits to her dad had been the highlights of her adolescence. She loved hanging out in the old house in her dad’s neighborhood, which was so different than the various suburbs her mother had dragged her to. And she loved her dad, with his starched shirts, sharp tongue, and brittle exterior, all of which would melt away as he discussed a book he loved. They filled their holidays together with chess games, which she always lost, and rambles across central Texas in a never-ending quest to find the ultimate barbecue joint. All to a soundtrack of their mutual favorites: Telemann, Mozart, and Chopin.
But those visits had been few and far between, and usually too brief to make her feel that she actually belonged there. She always clicked with her brother Sam, but he had moved away early, and the difference in her and Steven’s ages meant she really hadn’t had a chance to get to know him all that well. When the time had come to decide where to settle, she had decided to stay in Oregon, which over the years had become her natural habitat. But she’d always felt a tug toward her native city, too, and the old house of her earliest memories. And her dad.
“I’ll be there tomorrow,” she promised.
“To Austin?” Ben stood amid the party debris, flabbergasted. “When did this happen?”
She briefed him on Steven’s call and her travel arrangements as she surveyed the kitchen, which looked as if all its cabinets and drawers had been turned guts’ side out, like something from a horror movie. It would take all night to get the place in order.
Her flight was at ten. Eight hours from now.
“Why?” Ben asked, bewildered even after she had explained it to him. “Just because the guy has a broken leg?”
“He’s not
the guy
, he’s my dad. And he’s seventy-six.”
He immediately looked contrite. “Duh—of course. Sorry.” He focused on a point on the counter, thinking. “What about the store?”
“Could you handle it for a couple of weeks?” Ben had been working at Rigoletto’s for two and a half years. It was how they had met.
“
Me?
But there are orders to deal with, and bands, and employee problems.”
“What employee problems?” she asked.
“Well . . . for one thing, Amber’s leaving.”
Now it was Grace’s turn to be shocked. “What? Who told you that?”
“She did. Just recently. She’s going to grad school in Washington.”
“When?”
“In the fall.”
“Why didn’t she say anything? To me, I mean.”
He looked uncomfortable. “Well . . . you’re the boss. I’m not.”
“I know, but . . .” She swallowed, trying not to feel hurt. It was ridiculous. They were friends; she was happy for Amber. Who could blame her for not wanting to spend the rest of her life as a clerk in a CD shop?
Still . . . People didn’t get accepted into grad schools overnight. This had to have been in the works for a while. Months and months.
“And what about the cats?” Ben asked, continuing to take stock of his own troubles.
“What about them? You just feed them, and change the water.”
“They’re old and vomity,” he said, “and they have to eat that special food, and Heathcliff has his medication, and I really don’t think the little one likes me. She’s always giving me that glassy stare.”
As if they could help being old. And surely Ben knew the name of her cats by now?
“Her name is Earnshaw, and she stares at everyone that way,” she ground out between clenched teeth. “She has cataracts.” She took a deep breath before she went all angry mother bear on him.
Air in, air out.
Ben had a point, after all. She was accustomed to her geriatric cats, but they were a handful. “I’ll lay up lots of food tomorrow morning,” she promised, “and write out a schedule for taking care of them, including all the vet info.”
“This is so nuts.” He reached for her hand. “We’ve been planning my moving in for years—and now here I am for less than two days, and you decide to pick up and go.”
“The timing’s awful,” she agreed. Although, to be honest, they hadn’t actually
planned
this for two years. They had
put it off
for two years and finally caved in to the inevitable. “But we have years ahead of us, and my dad needs me now. It’ll just be a week. Maybe two.” For good measure, she added, “Three, tops.”