Falling for June: A Novel (11 page)

“Woohoo!” David shouted into the wind. “I’m flying, June. I’m really flying.”

They were hanging side by side beneath the wing and she turned to look at him. “Yes you are, David,” she said. “You’re flying and I’m proud of you.”

“Thank you, June. Thank you.”

He was almost crying now, it was so beautiful. He felt as though he were among the stars. Weightless and free; at long last a guiltless reprieve. The moon lit the hills and glinted off the distant river. Sweeping out beneath them he saw the valleys and the fields. He even saw Sebastian’s bonfire, just a little spark way, way below. And had he had better vision, he might have even seen Sebastian himself standing in front of the fire and smiling as he watched them cross the moonlit sky above, sailing out into the night like two wide-eyed adventurers, together in joint harness, suspended beneath a common wing borne on the winds of hope.

13

H
E WAS STARING
off out the kitchen window, but I could’ve sworn by the faraway look in his eye that it was that moonlit sky that he was actually seeing and not the afternoon rain falling on the fields.

“We landed right there,” he said, pointing out the window. “I’ll never forget it either. Gliding in, my feet brushing the tops of the grass, touching down. She had hardly unhooked me and I was hugging her and thanking her. I had never felt so alive or so happy in my life.”

“Sounds like a pretty epic experience.”

“You really should try it sometime.”

“Hang gliding at night?”

“You might start with a tandem flight during the day. I think they still offer them at Cougar Mountain. That’s closer to you anyway. I’m assuming you live in the city.”

“What gave me away?”

“Your wingtips.”

“You mean my shoes?”

“When you took them off coming in from the barn I noticed the soles were sidewalk worn. From walking to work, I assumed. Mine used to look the same way. I lived on Pill Hill.”

“I live in Belltown.”

“Well, we might have ended up neighbors then if I hadn’t been seduced away from the city by Echo Glen.”

“Don’t you mean seduced away by June?”

“Oh no,” he said, shaking his head. “June never needed to seduce anyone. I fell for June the moment I laid eyes on her. Everyone did. You will too. June was just being June, rescuing me the same as she rescued everyone and everything she ever met that needed a second chance.”

“Okay, you’re really stringing me along now,” I said. “I know you already think my generation has no patience, but how did you two finally get together?”

“I see you’re like me in that you like to read the last page first. But I’ll get there, I promise. I’m just telling you the story as it happened, young man. I do appreciate you taking the time, Elliot Champ. Especially on your birthday.”

“It’s no problem. I’m enjoying it, actually.”

“And I haven’t forgotten about that twenty grand I promised you could earn either. I’m getting to it as well, but storytelling is like everything else: the older you get, the longer it takes. And right now I’m due for a little bathroom break.”

He used his cane to stand himself up, and then he shuffled off down the hall. I almost reached for another MoonPie, but I’d had three already, so I picked the Polaroid up off the table instead. I know it sounds silly, but the photo made me a little sad about my childhood. My father was never big on taking pictures, never even owned a camera that I knew of, and this Polaroid of me was the first birthday photo I ever had, outside of some clown at the office posting something the year before on the Foreclosure Solutions Facebook page. But that doesn’t count. I slipped the photo into my pocket and stood to stretch my legs.

The painting I had noticed earlier caught my eye again, the one with the waterfall. It occurred to me that it must be Echo
Glen. It looked just as June had described it to David in his story. And now I knew where that path led, the one I had seen through the living room window, just on the other side of the creek. It led to Echo Glen. I wondered if the old man would let me go up and see it sometime. You know, if I ever came back for anything, maybe to help him move or something. Don’t think I was getting sentimental, though. I’d done it before. Helped people move. If you wanted to close deals, you had to do what you had to do. Besides, it was a better way to spend a Saturday than out golfing with the jokers from my office.

I had wandered back into the living room and was looking out the window at the creek and the trail beyond when Mr. Hadley finally came looking for me.

“There’s nothing like sitting on the toilet for ten minutes because you’re too old to stand,” he said. “I should have taken them up on the catheter.”

“Okay, a little too much information,” I said. “But thanks for the mental image.”

“Oh, you’ll find out eventually, young man. If you live long enough, two things are guaranteed to happen: you lose people you love, and going to the bathroom slowly takes over the hours left in your dwindling days. Haven’t you ever seen the line for the bathroom at a funeral?”

“No, I guess I never gave going to the bathroom much thought.”

“You will. You have a lot of time to think about these things sitting on the toilet, I’ll tell you. About the only thing that has me questioning the existence of God is the fact that He or She decided to thread the urethra through the male prostate gland. That and cable news. Who would design such stupid things? Should we sit in here and get back to the story? That chair there is the most comfortable.”

I don’t know why he thought that old chair was so comfort
able. If he ever sat in it himself he’d die there, it was so hard to get out of. “I think I’ll sit on the couch,” I said.

“Suit yourself. Can I get you tea, or maybe another RC Cola, before we start?”

“No thanks,” I said. “After our little chat about prostates I’d like to hold off on using the bathroom for as long as I can.”

“Sorry about that. Those MoonPies get me on a sugar high and I start blabbering. I’ll probably be snoring in another ten minutes or so. So where was I? Oh yes, seducing June. Well, after hang gliding I found the courage to knock on her door the next morning. I even made her laugh with a very clever accountant joke. Would you like to hear it?”

“Sure,” I said. “I’d love to hear an accountant’s take on humor. Unless it’s something silly like why is number six afraid of number seven.”

“I don’t think I’ve heard that one,” he said.

“Six is afraid of seven because seven eight nine.”

It took him a second to get it, then he laughed. “That’s pretty good.”

“What do you mean? It’s terrible.”

“Well, if you think that’s terrible,” he said, “I’m definitely not starting the story with mine. How about we begin instead with the hippies waking up Echo Glen by blasting that ungodly bus horn and rounding up their missing fellows by screaming out a roadkill announcement . . .”

14

D
AVID STAGGERED OUT
from the bunkhouse, thinking it was some new playlist on Sebastian’s wakeup speakers he was hearing. But it was altogether too early to be getting up for stunt lessons, and not even Sebastian could have dreamed up an alarm like this.

The bus horn was blasting and Clarence, the hippie who had offered David the joint the night before, was hanging from its open door and repeatedly shouting, “Hidy-ho! We gotta go. Roadkill on the radio. Hidy-ho! Hidy-ho! We’ve got roadkill on the radio.”

The door to Sebastian’s hayloft apartment burst open and he stepped out onto its balcony wearing a robe. He yelled something but it was impossible to hear over the honking. He reached inside his apartment and grabbed his bullhorn and used it to shout down to Clarence over the noise.

“What’s all this racket down there, comrade? Some of us are trying to sleep.”

Clarence said something to someone inside the bus and the honking stopped. Then he looked up at Sebastian. “Roadkill, captain,” he said. “You wanna come along?”

“Come along where? What’s this talk about roadkill?”

“We got a dead deer on the police scanner, man. Someone
hit one out on Dansville Road. We gotta get out there before animal control. We gotta get it while it’s fresh. Living off the land, man. Gettin’ while the gettin’s good.”

While he was talking, Sebastian stood gazing down on him, mumbling something privately and shaking his head. He appeared to David almost like a disappointed father looking down on a child.

“You live off the land all you want, comrade, but don’t you dare come back here with some dead deer to skin.
Me comprendes?
June will not have you scaring the other animals.”

The kid shrugged. “Whatever you say, captain. We would have shared the meat, though. If it’s a good-sized deer it’ll last us a week.”

By this time other hippies had begun appearing from the bushes and the trees, heading for the bus—some of them in various states of undress that led David to believe they had been sharing more than just joints the night before—and they all looked bedraggled and cold, shivering in their rags. When the last of them had boarded the bus, Clarence leaned out again.

“Hey,” he called up to Sebastian. “Is there any chance we could get our bird back, man? We don’t kill nothing ourselves or anything like that, but I’ll bet my head that thing lays some serious eggs.”

Sebastian turned without answering and disappeared into his apartment.

Clarence glanced at David, who was standing nearby, watching. “Guess that’s a no,” he said. “Sure you don’t wanna join us, man? Living the dream.”

David shook his head. Clarence shrugged and withdrew into the bus. The door closed, the engine started, and the bus pulled away. But for all their rush to leave, it hardly moved above an idle as it rolled down the drive. And it was rocking
something awful too, as if maybe those on board were fighting, or possibly dancing. Who knew?

It honked one last time and David watched its taillights disappear into the gloom. He would see that bus some ten years later parked on four flat tires alongside the river several miles up the road. He stopped to say hello then, and to let them know that the ostrich was healthy and doing fine. But he found that only one aged and tired hippie remained, and although he resembled Clarence, if it was in fact him he’d long since boiled his brains, and he remembered nothing about an ostrich or even Echo Glen.

With the bus gone and the ranch quiet again, a few students wandered off to the showers while the others drifted back to the bunkhouse to catch whatever little bit of sleep was available to them before Sebastian’s speakers blasted them officially into the third and final week of stunt camp. But having no desire to be violently woken twice in the same day, David stood outside the bunkhouse in the dim light of dawn, just breathing the clean country air and listening to the quiet whisper of the creek. He had been away from work for the longest stretch in probably twenty years, and it felt really good. Maybe his crazy ex-wife had been right about his needing to take a vacation after all. David smiled. He had not thought of his ex-wife without resentment since their divorce, but when he’d thought of her just now he’d felt nothing but peace.

David noticed the lights were on in the house and something gave him the courage to go up. June answered the door with wild hair and an afghan blanket wrapped around her shoulders. She had reading glasses on and a pencil stuck behind her ear.

“You look more like a hippie than the ones who just left,” David said.

“Oh, is that what all that racket was?” she said. “They’re not
really hippies, though. That bus has been trolling around these parts for years, picking up the county’s disgruntled youth. Most of them grow out of it eventually. Would you like to come in?”

“If you don’t mind. I thought maybe I could use your phone to call my office. They’ll be expecting me if I don’t.”

“Sure,” she said, stepping aside to let him enter. “I’ve got coffee on.”

She brought him in and showed him to the phone. It was on a desk that sat in front of a bay window in the living room. The window offered a view of the creek. A desk lamp was turned on as if June had been working there recently, and the desktop was strewn with paperwork and mail. A ten-key calculator had a tape two feet long hanging from the roll.

June went to retrieve coffee and David dialed his office. He was hoping to get voice mail for his boss’s secretary since it was so early, but she answered. David instinctively began coughing and speaking in a low, raspy voice.

“Hi, Lindsay, I’m afraid I’m not going to make it in again.”
Cough
cough.
“Yes, yes, it’s very bad. Contagious.”
Cough cough.
“Wouldn’t want to infect anyone. Yes, maybe out all week. No. No need to call and check on me. Okay. Charlie can handle my quarterlies that are due.”
Cough.
“Thanks.”

When he hung up and turned around, June was standing behind him with two mugs of coffee. She handed him one.

“Maybe instead of stunt school you should enroll in real acting lessons,” she said, grinning. “That was really good. I thought for sure you might die before you had a chance to get off the phone.”

David blushed. “I know it’s silly, isn’t it? But I really do have weeks of vacation time saved up, so I don’t feel too bad.”

“Well, you should use it,” she said, raising her eyebrows as if lecturing him. “Working to make a living is noble. Working to avoid living is tragic.” Then, after taking a sip of her coffee, she
said, “Hey, you said you were an accountant, right? Do you have any professional advice on how I can turn around a struggling stunt camp located eight hundred miles from Hollywood and make a small fortune? Me and the animals would thank you.”

“Well, in my professional opinion, as an accountant, to make a small fortune in your line of business is easy. All you need to do is start with a large fortune.”

He laughed at his own joke, but June didn’t appear to think it was very funny.

“Come on,” he said. “That was a pretty good joke.”

“Maybe for an accountant,” she said, shaking her head. Then she giggled. “Okay, it was pretty good. And true too. If you only knew. Money. Ha! What’s it good for?”

She was standing close to him and she smelled like lavender. He noticed she wasn’t wearing any shoes again and he wondered if he should have offered to take his off at the door. For some reason David felt suddenly nervous. He sipped his coffee, nodding to the cluttered desk. “Looks like maybe I caught you working.”

June sighed, waving her hand at the desk as if wishing it away. “I’d rather be out in the barn with the animals. And you can tell by my growing pile that that’s where I’ve been too.”

“What’s in the sack?” David asked. “Fan mail?”

He was referring to a large black-plastic garbage sack sitting on the edge of the desk and stuffed with what looked like letters and other mail.

“Yeah, right,” June said. “
Fan mail.
That’s a laugh. That’s how I pay my bills.”

“Those are all bills?” He almost choked on his coffee.

“Yes. Some of them are several months of the same bill, of course. I feel so bad about having to decide which ones to pay that I just put them all in the bag. Then I blindly draw them out and pay them one at a time until I’m out of money.”

“You pick which bills to pay out of a hat?”

“Out of a bag, but yes. That way it’s random chance, you see. And when the bill collectors call, I just explain it to them, and I tell them that they’re in the same bag with everyone else. Sometimes they get nasty, but then I threaten to not put them in the bag at all. Susan down at the feed store got pretty smart and started sending duplicate bills to increase her odds. But they’re pretty good about floating us down there. They love animals as much as we do.”

“You do realize that I’m an accountant and this is driving me crazy, don’t you? How do you balance your books? How do you keep track of your debits and credits? Pay taxes? Plan?”

“I keep a checkbook, silly. I’m not completely helpless.”

“Do you want a hand?” he asked. “I could organize all of this for you in no time. Put it on a ledger spreadsheet that you could easily look at and understand. See everything. Maybe things aren’t as bad as you think.”

“Maybe they’re worse,” she said.

“Not knowing is worse.”

She looked to be considering his offer, so he pressed her.

“Come on, I do this for a living. I could even call some of the bill collectors and get them to freeze interest. Saying you’re an accountant goes a long way sometimes, you know. Although I’d be doing this strictly as a personal favor, since I don’t keep up on my CPA license.”

June looked at the cluttered desk. “When would you have time even? You’re already calling in to work sick.”

“I’ll start today. Right now.”

“What about stunt class? I think Sebastian’s doing fire again today.”

“My eyebrows are just growing back. Plus, we both know I enrolled in stunt camp pretending to be a reporter just so I could talk to you, as embarrassing as that sounds to say out loud.”

There was a pause while June considered, looking at the piles of paperwork on the desk. They heard the music come on the speakers outside as Sebastian woke up his students.

“I hate that he does that,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s not good for the animals. Especially not for the horses. But he means well. He has a good heart.”

“What do you say about me helping?” David asked, not letting her change the subject. “I’d really rather not have to set myself on fire today.”

She sighed. “Sebastian will be disappointed.”

“Sebastian will understand. He has a good heart, you just said so yourself.”

“Okay, but only if you let me pay you.”

David laughed. “Pay me how? Are you going to put me in the bag?”

“No,” she said, sticking out her tongue. “I’ll pay you in glider lessons, and I’ll pay you in food.”

David toasted her coffee mug with his.

“You’ve hired yourself an accountant.” Then he rubbed his belly and added, “But I’ll warn you, you rarely see skinny accountants for a reason.”

June smiled. “Good. I’ve got cinnamon apples baking in the oven right now, and I make great lemon garlic ice cream, as you know.”