Cabin Fever (7 page)

“You’ll be good enough. You know the game inside and out. Some of those guys you played with, they did it all with God-given talent. It was easy for them, but you busted your ass to get there, and you kept busting your ass to stay there. You know what it takes to make it even when you’re not the most talented guy in the world. That’s the sort of thing you can teach to kids. They’ll hire you for that reason alone.”

Brad sat quietly, staring at the fire and feeling a little stunned. His father was not a man who offered praise frequently. Brad could remember every time his father had ever said he was proud of him, and he could count those moments, too, on the fingers of his right hand. If his father was so sure that he’d make it that he was willing to say so out loud, then there must be something to it.

He had been reluctant to talk about his dream of coaching because part of him was afraid that it was a fairy tale. Now, though, in the warmth of his father’s matter-of-fact approval, he started to believe for the first time that it might really happen the way he dreamed it would. Brad was feeling a little excited, for the first time in a very long time.

8

Sarah sat at the counter in the diner, a fork with a piece of pineapple on it raised halfway to her mouth while she used the other hand to flip through email on her iPad. Her box was full, as usual, but there wasn’t anything that really needed a reply. There were at least 20 messages from former employees, colleagues, and business associates who were shocked – shocked! – at what happened, and were not-so-subtly digging for more details that they could add to the rumor mill. There were two inquiries from headhunters who wanted to know when she would be ready to re-enter the job market. Sarah was glad to know that she was still marketable, but after all those years of being her own boss the idea of working for someone else gave her a headache. And finally, there was one email after another from suppliers, would-be-suppliers, and just plain spammers who all wanted to sell her something but somehow had missed the news that she was no longer in position to buy anything beyond lunch. Apparently they were so busy making the pitch that they couldn’t take the time to think about who they were pitching to.

She deleted almost all of her messages without replying, except for one from Vijay with the subject “Call me?” that she didn’t yet have the heart to open. Either it was more bad news, in which case it could wait a little longer, or it was good news, and frankly she didn’t want to dive back into the grind quite yet. The slower pace of life in Tall Pines was beginning to grow on her. She didn’t want to spend the rest of her life here, necessarily, but she could see the appeal of not always being in a hurry, and she wanted to enjoy to at least a few more days of wandering, strolling, and listening to the wind in the trees.

She closed the iPad’s cover and got back to the fruit in the bowl. She hadn’t ordered a croissant this morning, though she desperately wanted to. Just the fact that her pastry cravings were already so intense warned her away; she couldn’t afford to get addicted to those things. She still needed to fit into her business suits if she was going to be in job interviews soon.

A long sigh to her right signaled the arrival of Duane, right on time. For all of his rumpled demeanor, Sarah had learned that he was scrupulously punctual, and that he always ate breakfast in the same seat at the diner. If she wanted to share in his uniquely misanthropic style of conversation, all she had to do was sit down at one of the adjacent stalls and wait for him to arrive.

“Morning, Duane,” she said.

“Mmmm,” he grunted in reply. Duane wasn’t much for conversation until his coffee arrived. Right on cue, Bessie arrived with a cup and set it before him with a wink.

“Morning, Duane” she said with the smile Sarah now knew was reserved just for him.

“Good morning,” Duane mumbled, then something he saw in Bessie made him squint and tilt his head sideways. “Did you get your hair done?”

Bessie eyed him warily. “I might have. You like?”

Duane looked her up and down. “I do. I liked the old hairstyle, too, but I think I like this one more.”

Beaming, Bessie headed back to the kitchen. “How does the news look this morning?” Sarah asked him, though she knew the answer already. It was the same answer every day.

“Amateurish. Sensationalistic. Depressing,” he replied, though she could see that he was reading each article carefully. Duane might hate the state of journalism, but it was only because he was so deeply invested in it. He was like the sports fan who yells at the team for losing but would never dream of giving up his season tickets.

“Are you going to write about any of it for the local paper?” she asked.

“Mmm. Maybe. It’s always a question of what touches on the people around here. Like this story –another Wall Street fraud. It’s a safe bet that no one in Tall Pines invested in the fund, so do I write about that? Probably not, unless I’m trying to stir up outrage. Which sometimes I do, but it can’t be a daily diet or I’ll drive readers away. So mostly I scan for stories that are important and meaningful that people probably haven’t already heard about from someone else. Which is tough today – with the Internet, seems like everyone knows everything. Or at least they think they do.”

Sarah smiled. “You don’t think much of technology, do you?”

Duane waved his hand dismissively. “It’s not my thing. Not my generation’s thing, not really. Oh, I can see the value in it. Wikipedia, we didn’t have anything like that when I was young. You can find most anything with Google – though a lot of it you wish you hadn’t found! And that Facebook, I try to get on there once a week or so. My granddaughter likes it, and I like that I get to hear from her, I get to see pictures of her. That’s all nice. But there’s so much of it, and it seems like it changes every day. I figure something out on Tuesday, and on Wednesday they’ve replaced it with something else and I need to start all over again. Makes my head hurt.”

Sarah grinned. “That’s true. For a lot of digital properties, change is good for its own sake. They feel like, if they don’t keep evolving, they’ll be left behind. They’ll seem out of date, and out of date in Silicon Valley is death. When I was working there, it was hard to stay out of that mindset. I had to keep reminding myself: work towards what you already know to be good.”

“What did you do there?”

“I had a company. We were working in e-books.
 
We had a lot of ideas around how to extend the traditional book format – make it interactive, make it more social, tie it into recommendation system on the back end so that as soon as you’re done reading one book we’d have a list of five others that you might enjoy.”

“And?”

“And it didn’t work out. I did some things well, and other things not so well. In the end it was the other things that were more important. I learned some hard lessons.”

"Sometimes that's the best you can do. So are you going to get back on the horse?"

"Eventually. Not yet, though."

"You waiting for something?"

"Maybe. Inspiration? I don't want to just get back in it, I want to get back in with the right opportunity and the right people. Especially the right people. I haven't figured it out yet."

"Well, if you need something to keep you busy while you wait for a voice from God to tell you what to do, I can always use some help around the paper."

"Oh, yeah? Like what?"

"Like feature writing. Do you write?"

"I write."

"Can you give me ten inches on a lost dog?"

"That sounds like the first line of an absolutely filthy joke."

"I'm serious. Talk to the woman, write up the story, and I'll print it in the paper. Unless you have something better to do?"

"You have me there. Right now I'm not sure what to do with myself. I eat, and then I read until it's time to eat again. I could use a change."

"So write the article. You'd be doing me a favor, and you'd spend some time with a nice lady who's probably pretty lonely right now."

"Why is she lonely?"

"I guess you'll have to go talk to her to find out. Mrs. Williams. She lives in a white house at the corner of 4th and Elm. Do you think you can find your way there?"

"There are maybe five streets in the entire city. I think I can figure it out."

"Splendid. Have it to me by 5:00 tomorrow."

"Yes sir," Sarah said, feeling like she'd been more than a little conned. Why did she agree to this again? Oh, we'll, what she'd said was true enough -- she really didn't know what to do with herself in the time between breakfast and dinner. After the fast-paced life in San Francisco, even a few days of peace and quiet were starting to drive her a little crazy, and she knew she couldn't take much more of this without jumping into her car and driving back to the Bay Area. But it would be a mistake to go back before she did what she'd come here to do, so for now she just needed to keep herself busy while she figured the other stuff out. If keeping busy meant talking to an old lady about her lost dog, then, well so be it.

9

Winifred Williams’ living room was an odd mix of comforting and depressing. The couch and easy chair were plump and inviting, and from the wear and tear Sarah guessed that both had been used for more naps than could easily be counted. There were flowers on the curtains, flowers on the carpet, and a mantelpiece above the fire that was absolutely crowded with pictures and keepsakes from a long and seemingly fruitful life.

But still, as Sarah took a spot on the couch, she could not quite keep a dark and rather sad feeling from seeping into her chest. The curtains were pulled wide but it was still dark inside the room, and shadows collected in the corners as if they were spiders building their webs. Winifred – or Winnie, as she insisted on being called – was clearly an industrious housekeeper, and there was not a trace of dust anywhere to be found, but everything in the room – the furniture, the carpet – had the frayed edge of items you might find in a garage sale, and the air in the room was heavy with what Sarah had thought of as “old lady smell.” She felt guilty about the rudeness of her thought processes, though, and so Sarah smiled weakly at Winnie and took a sip from the glass of water the woman had just brought her.

“So,” she started, “I hear that you have a lost dog.”

“I do,” Winnie nodded, taking a glance at one of the pictures on the mantel that showed a man on a bench, one dog at his feet and the other seated next to him on the bench. All three of them were smiling broadly at the camera. “Well, actually I don’t. You don’t really ‘have’ a lost dog, now do you? The problem is I do not have him.”
 

Sarah smiled. “Right you are. Is that the dog in the picture?” she asked, nodding in the direction of the mantelpiece.

Winnie stood up to take the picture and brought it back with her to the couch. “Yes,” she said, looking at it fondly. “This is Frank and the boys. This must have been taken … oh, about ten years ago. Castor is the one on the ground, and Pollux is the one on the bench. It’s Pollux who’s gone missing now.”

“Castor and Pollux?”

“Yes, Frank picked out their names. From mythology, you know. I always thought it didn’t make much sense, because Castor and Pollux were supposed to be twins and of course these dogs didn’t look anything like each other. But they couldn’t have loved each other any more if they had come from the same mother. They were brothers in their hearts, Frank was right about that.”

Sarah reached out and gently took the picture from her. Castor looked to be some sort of husky, while Pollux was a Rottweiler. “They’re very cute. I didn’t hear another dog when I came up, though. Is Castor…?”

“Castor passed away a few years ago. He stepped on a rusty nail when we were out walking, and the infection spread to his heart. That was hard.” Winnie’s voice took on a sad note, and she clutched her hands together in her lap.

 
“And your husband?” Sarah asked, dreading the answer.

“He passed as well. It will be one year this September. He fought hard, but in the end the cancer got the better of him. Now it’s just Pollux and me.”

Sarah paused to catch her breath. The shadows in the room seemed a little deeper than they’d been before. She’d come here today expecting to gather the details of a trivial story, the sort of thing that would be printed only in the pages of a newspaper that reported on a community in which nothing important ever happened. But this story was starting to break her heart, and she swallowed hard over a lump of sadness that formed in her throat.

“How did he … Pollux, did he get out of the yard or something?”

 
“No, I was walking him, and I let him off leash – which I know I shouldn’t do, but he looks so happy when he can run around and sniff at everything, and even now that his hips aren’t so great anymore I can have trouble keeping up with him. But he always comes when he’s called … well, he usually comes. Only this time he saw a squirrel or some such and took off after it through the bushes, and I called and called but he didn’t come back.” She sniffed quietly, then gave a little laugh to clear the air. “You must think I’m silly, worried so much about a dog.”

“No, not silly at all! You love your dog, and you’re worried about him. Why should there be anything silly about that?”

“I do worry about him. It would break my heart if he didn’t come back. Frank was always the dog person, I’m more of a cat person, but now Pollux is all I have left. Frank loved those dogs like his own children, and I loved them too. I know it’s not forever, Pollux is getting old, but I’m not ready to say goodbye yet. Anyway, I was hoping that if the newspaper wrote something up about it, then maybe someone will remember seeing him somewhere and we’ll be able to get him back home.”

Sarah nodded earnestly. “Yes. Yes, that could happen. At any rate I’ll do my very best, Mrs. … Winnie. We’ll find Pollux,” she added, and hoped that it was true.

Winnie smiled and stood, reaching out her hands to clasp Sarah’s between them. “Thank you, Sarah. I know you will. Are you sure I can’t get you anything to eat? Or maybe a cup of coffee.”