“You shouldn’t have done it!” Her protest exploded as the garage door rolled closed. I parked the car exactly where I’d found it. With any luck, Deborah would never notice that I’d used the hide-a-key and gone out for a drive. In reality, extricating the car had been a lengthy procedure involving trickle-charging the battery overnight with an ancient battery charger I hadn’t even realized I owned, then carefully backing the car out of the garage and creeping slowly down the street. Since my recent spate of heart trouble, my reactions had gone downhill, I had discovered. Driving was more of a challenge than I’d thought it would be, but I was determined. I was not, however, receiving any cheers for my efforts now.
“You shouldn’t have lied for the boy, particularly after what he did to you. Why would you lie for him?” I demanded. “It isn’t right that you should be responsible for the books, and since that neophyte of a principal won’t force the boy to pay for them, then I will. I’ve already told the principal to give you new ones tomorrow, and—”
“I’m not your little charity case, all right?” Epiphany exploded from the car, slamming the door behind her. “I don’t need you taking care of me.”
“A girl who is afraid to go home at night does need someone’s help.” I climbed from the car, my legs weak after the afternoon’s excitement. “A . . .”
Friend
came to mind, but I didn’t use the word. “An advocate, at the very least.”
She didn’t answer at first, just stood there with her fingernails sinking into her hair. “I’ve
got
a mama, okay? I don’t need another one. And don’t say anything to her about this, either. She doesn’t want to know.” Without waiting for my reply, she went into the house, the
slap-slap
of her flip-flops echoing against the walls. She was in the kitchen next, slamming the pots and pans. I let her be and stepped outside, because Terrence was in the driveway, and I wanted to speak with him about something. I had an idea.
After I came in from conducting my business with Terrence, Epiphany seemed to have cooled down a bit. She was preparing some sort of boneless, skinless, nearly chickenless chicken breast. Another of Deborah’s healthy meals, no doubt.
“I think we should go to a restaurant and pick up something,” I said, hoping to make amends for having embarrassed her at school. I wasn’t wrong in what I’d done, but it had offended her. Having dealt with Deborah and Roy as teenagers, I might have known. “We could both stand to get out of the house.”
“Don’t think I don’t know you’re not supposed to be driving that car.” She flung open a drawer and began rummaging for utensils. “If Deborah finds out, she’ll have a fit for sure.”
“Considering the rest of our crimes these past few days, I think the car is the least of our worries,” I pointed out. “And Deborah won’t be by this evening. She has a symposium overnight in Fort Worth. I’ve promised not to do anything that can be construed as an attempted suicide while she’s gone.”
Epiphany stiffened, bracing her arms on the counter. “That’s not even funny, okay?”
It occurred to me that I hadn’t, in quite some time, considered potential means of hastening my own death. Epiphany and the mystery of the seven chairs had changed the roads my mind traveled. “Let’s go out for something to eat before Terrence comes by.”
“Terrence?”
“He’s agreed to loan us his laptop computer this evening. He had to run to an appointment just now, but he’ll be back in forty-five minutes to show us how to attach it to the Internet. It uses cellular communications.”
Epiphany’s face brightened with enthusiasm, and if she was still angry with me, it didn’t show. “Cool. All right. But if we’re going somewhere, I’m driving. You ran up on the curb three times on the way home, and slow as you go, one of those construction trucks might come along and wipe us out.” Switching off the burner, she set the pan aside, wiped her hands on a kitchen towel, and moved to the doorway, her hand held out in buoyant anticipation. “Where’s the car key?”
“Have you a license?”
“I’ve got a learner’s permit,” she replied haughtily, and patted a bulge in her pocket—a wallet, I guessed. “I passed driver’s ed.”
“That gives me the utmost confidence,” I said, and we proceeded with our newest mission.
After thirty harrowing minutes, we’d accomplished the trip to Stump’s Barbecue and back. When the doorbell rang, we were sharing supper, and I was telling Epiphany about Fat Boy’s Barbecue near Cape Canaveral, which still glittered in my memory. “Many were the times we held a late-night meeting at Fat Boy’s. I think that’s why we beat the Soviets. We had Fat Boy’s, and they didn’t. If the KGB had known, they could have dressed their spies as waitresses and stolen all our secrets.”
Epiphany grinned as she stood up to answer the door. “Maybe I can put that in my report. We’ve got to work on that after a while, okay?”
“Most certainly,” I agreed, admiring the fact that, despite a lack of supervision from her mother or encouragement from the school, she was a conscientious student. “We can use Terrence’s computer for that, as well.”
After a short lesson from Terrence, Epiphany and I busied ourselves with our work. As with most puzzles, it was challenging. The neighbors and relatives named in my mother’s photographs were mentioned in death indexes and electronic copies of old obituaries, but the information led us no farther. Frances Gibbs was too common a name and was contained in so many entries that discerning our target was like searching for a needle in not just one haystack, but many. We created notes and charts to continue narrowing our search.
Finally, I insisted that we proceed to Epiphany’s school project. After having caused a stir in the principal’s office, I did not want to be responsible for keeping her from her homework.
“Can I look up a couple more things first?” she asked, and flipped the sheet of paper. On the back, she’d made some notes that I didn’t recognize.
“What are these?” I turned the paper and squinted through my glasses.
“Just something for another project.” She moved it farther away from me. “I have to find out where these places are.”
“For a school project?”
“Sorta.” Her answer was oddly evasive.
“Well, I can tell you who Greg Nash was.” Reaching across the table, I tapped the paper, where she’d written,
Greg Nash Park
. “He was a baseball player with the Tampa Tarpons, minor leagues. Played in the company of greats like of Johnny Bench and Catfish Hunter. Could knock the skin right off the ball, but every time he’d move up to the big leagues, he’d drink himself right back down to the minors. I think the team owners finally figured out that he just couldn’t handle too much money in his pocket at once. You know, the sad thing about him was that he was having his best-ever season in the majors when he died in a hotel fire.”
She cast a glance my way. “How do you know all that?”
“Annalee and I lived in Florida for almost seven years before we moved away for another job,” I reminded her. “Deborah was small then, and Roy was born there. We lived in a little cabin on Switch Grass Island. Beautiful place right on Lake Poinsett—sat up on piers over the water. You could fish off the back porch.”
Memories flooded my mind, raindrops falling faster, faster, faster, bigger and heavier. A deluge. I quickly forgot my reason for bringing up those days on Switch Grass. My mind flew away from Blue Sky Hill. “The fishermen woke us each morning about four a.m. as they trolled through the channel with their fishing boats. Nearly drove us batty the first few months we were there, but finally we grew accustomed to the racket of the boats coming and going, and we learned to love the place.” The mention of the boats caught a tether in my mind, brought it back to the original question. “Living on the water, we had a small boat, and many of our friends owned boats, so when we had a little time off, we packed our coolers and trailered the boats to this or that park for a picnic or an overnight campout. If we were near a town where a minor league team was playing, we’d pile into one of the cars and drive to the game—have a hot dog and enjoy the entertainment.”
“So you think Greg Nash Park is in Florida?” Epiphany’s interest grew intense. “I mean, you sure?”
“Hard to say,” I answered. “I suppose a park could have been named for him in whatever town he hailed from, but he played in Tampa. There was a park not too far from the ball fields at one time. I don’t recall much about it, except that the facilities were fairly rudimentary—picnic sites, a great deal of sand, a bit of playground equipment. We once mired Annalee’s Volkswagen Beetle up to the axles trying to back up to a picnic table. It was just the four of us that day. Roy was howling in Annalee’s arms, and Deborah was crying in the backseat. Annalee didn’t have another bottle for the baby, and there wasn’t another soul in the park. Then the sky broke open, and the rain poured down, and we thought we were goners, for sure.”
I laughed to myself, my mind in the past again. How drastic that situation had seemed in the moment. “That day was Roy’s introduction to 7UP. It was always his beverage of choice, and Deborah’s as well, after that.” In my mind, the memory was clear and beautiful, like an aged Polaroid suddenly regaining the brightness of its original color. I saw Annalee curled in the passenger seat of the little Bug, her hair falling over her shoulder, Roy in her arms, water draining down the glass in tiny rivers all around them. Nowhere to go, because we couldn’t.
I’d taught Deborah how to play Rock-Paper-Scissors, to quiet her. Before long, we were laughing despite the rain.
I smiled now at the memory, a glorious moment that had slipped by unnoticed, like a pearl in the sand along the edge of a path.
Epiphany folded the paper in half and set it aside. “You oughta tell Deborah about the 7UP. She might not even know why she likes it.”
“I’m sure her mother told her that story many times.”
The conversation ran dry, and finally Epiphany turned back to the computer. “I guess we better do the research for the project about the rockets. I can look up my other junk later.”
I studied her for a moment longer, wondering what was going on behind that inquisitive face of hers. There was more to her interest in Greg Nash Park than just a school project. As we started to work on her report, I found myself mulling the possible reasons, but I didn’t question her further. We talked, instead, about things that pertained to her report—my days as a young man, my position at Hughes. “We started our work on the
Surveyor
out in Culver City, California,” I said. “It was an adventure, but I was secretly afraid. I was going off into the world on my own, taking on a huge challenge, and with a wife and child to support. But Howard Hughes had put together a crackerjack team. That was one thing he believed in—hiring the best people and letting them do their jobs. He was nothing like the history books say, by the way. You get a sense of a man when you work for him. He encouraged, gave us the room to perform to our potential, to attempt the impossible. We were doing things that had never been done. We needed someone to do the believing for us, at first, and Hughes did. Because of that, we landed on the moon. Those were amazing times, Epiphany. That was my Camelot. I was young; exciting things were happening. I was in love, just starting out in raising a family. It was as if the world were exploding all around me, everything lit up with bright colors.”
Epiphany stopped writing and looked at me. “How’d you meet your wife?”
“I doubt that information will fit into your project.”
She doodled wistfully on the corner of the paper. “I was just wondering.” She shrugged, as if to indicate that it didn’t matter.
The past tugged a smile from me. “I was never much of a ladies’ man,” I began, and Epiphany rolled an unsurprised glance my way.
“Nah, really?”
“Do you want to hear my story or not?”
“I asked, didn’t I?”
I took a sip of my root beer, swilling it around in my mouth and thinking of where to begin. The rush of fat and calories from our barbecue supper was catching up with me. I’d begun to feel foggy and tired. “It was back when I was in college. I went out one day to buy a pennant or sweater or souvenir of some sort to send home to my mother for her birthday. I walked into a little store and quite literally reached across the counter and ended up in a tug-of-war over a burntorange scarf. When I looked up, the most beautiful girl was hand in hand with me. I suppose, at first, she assumed I might be picking out a gift for a girlfriend, but being a resourceful fellow, I quickly let her know I was shopping for my mother’s birthday, and I enlisted her help. Everything she suggested, I vetoed for some reason or other, so as to keep her there shopping with me. She did confess later that she’d never seen a boy so worried about finding the right gift for his mother, but my ploy worked. I kept her attention until I’d finally worked up the courage to ask whether I might take her for ice cream, as a thank-you for her help. When she agreed, I couldn’t believe my good fortune. This girl, this beautiful young woman, wanted to spend time with me. We talked for hours, sitting at a corner table in the ice-cream parlor. Once I had the seat next to her, I was afraid to leave even long enough for a trip to the men’s room.”
Epiphany giggled. “Well, that must’ve got rough after a while.”
“Ah, Epiphany, the things a young man will do when he’s smitten by a pretty girl. Nothing else seems to matter in a moment like that.” The jubilant feeling of sitting at that table with Annalee and the sounds of the campus were suddenly as real as if they’d happened yesterday. I could see her eyes, the carefully painted bow of her lips, her beautiful smile. Her laugh jingled in my ear. “You’ll know that sort of feeling one day.”