Six Feet Over It (7 page)

“Are not!”

“Then why don’t you ever go to their houses? Talk to them on the phone?”

I lean back in my black chair. “Kind of busy. Graves to sell.”

“See, that’s what I’m saying! This sucks, you shouldn’t be here all the time.”

“No, it’s not … I mean they’re busy, too. Cheerleading.”

“Your friends are
cheerleaders
?”

“Yes! I can broaden my friend horizons if I want. We see each other at school; that’s our thing. It’s our jam.” I wrap the story up with an even-breezier-but-still-not-so-breezy-it-sounds-fake laugh, which to my ears does not land but seems to work for Kai.

She smooths silver York wrappers on her knee, folds some tiny origami.

“And you’re positive …” She leans back in the chair and gives the office another once-over. “This is okay?”

“
Yes,
God!”

She’s as eager to be convinced as I am for her to be.

“Well,” she says. “You need more light. Get a lamp.”

“Yeah.” I exhale. “Definitely, you’re right. Floor lamp, maybe. I’ll tell Wade.”

She pinches the corner of a wrapper, holds up a York crane. “Ooh, you could get Grandpa to send you the wagon wheel!”

Grandpa’s love of the American West is expressed primarily via his extensive Willie Nelson eight-track tape collection, his cowboy hat and boot wardrobe, and the wagon wheel: an actual wheel from a covered wagon suspended above his and Gramma’s dining room table, wired for electricity and fitted with a bunch of red glass globes. Eating beneath it this past summer felt like being in a saloon; it made us want to toss peanut shells on the floor and spit at the stove. I smile, until the wagon wheel yanks me back to the yellow letter, and the sting of missing Emily—but then a van comes through the Manderleys. Kai sits up, turns to see who’s here.

Rivendell.

“Oh cripes,” I whisper, hunkering down in my chair.

“What?”

“Nothing. Flowers. Go soak your leg before it falls off. I’ve got homework.”

She drops a fistful of tiny, shiny cranes on the desk calendar and lugs her backpack off the wingback.

“Don’t work too hard.”

I wave Ovid at her. “Yeah. It’s tough.”

She reaches across the desk to squeeze my face and kiss my cheek. A sweep of cold air rushes in and she closes the door behind her, still safe. Still happy. Unburdened by me.

Through the windows I watch her slowly walk the road, her beautiful curls tucked snugly beneath a warm, wool knit hat, blue stripes the color of her eyes. At the veterans section she limps her way through the headstones to the Rivendell van to shake Elanor’s dad’s hand, his wispy ponytail carefree in the wind. Balin of the dice hops from the van, and she shakes
his
hand. I wait for Elanor to climb out, a flower van clown car—but not today. The three of them chat. Kai laughs. Balin’s face stays fused toward hers despite their hilarious height difference, even while lifting pots of flowers to the graves. Man, that guy is lanky. Dark curls fall all over his face. That whole family needs haircuts, stat.

TODAY IS EMILY’S BIRTHDAY.
December thirteenth. One guilt-spawned choice of where to spend summer vacation and I’ve traded all the rest of her birthdays for Kai’s.

Dario is down in a grave in Serenity. Real Nice Clambake is out with her sister, Shirley Jones belting from the boom box at the top of her Broadway lungs. I figure out how to use my pencil with bulky warm gloves on, then pour myself wholly into a stack of stapled algebra work sheets.

Ducks quack once in a while.

Wind whistles and moans around the office eaves.

Emily’s face is flushed, peeking around the open door.

My heart stops.

“Hi!”

Elanor.
Elanor’s face.

“Busy?” She steps in, hugs herself warm. Black tights today. Gray skirt, black-and-purple-striped sweater, voluminous wool scarf, swimming-pool blue. The boots.

I rub my temples. She’s a ninja. Stealthy.

“How’ve you been? Is that homework?”

“Yeah.” I look past her out the window to the Rivendell van half hidden in the babies’ pines. That thing is so quiet, it’s like a flipping golf cart. She picks up the work sheets.

“Yikes. I
hated
algebra. How is it?”

“It’s algebra,” I say.

“The teacher nice?”

“He’s …” She waits. For all the talking she does, she is an eager audience.

“He’s also the football coach,” I say.

“Why?”

“Budget issues, I guess.”

“Okay.”

“He wears bicycle shorts.”

“To
class
?”

“And he’s kind of a person who definitely should
not
be wearing any kind of shorts in public. Or ever.”

She smiles. “Gross.”

I am amazed at all the talking I’m doing. Nervous chatting but also … I’ve been wishing I could tell someone, anyone, about Coach Petty since the first day of school. Kai’s got no sense of humor when it comes to mocking athletic coaches of any kind, and Wade and Meredith—yeah. That’s not happening.

“My mom does all the math with us,” Elanor says. “I shouldn’t say I hated
it.
It wasn’t the algebra; it was that I had to do it with Balin and he will
not
sit still for more than five seconds. But we’re finally back on separate stuff. Geometry is fun.”

“You’re
done
with algebra?”

She tilts her head sheepishly. “Eh. Homeschooling. Just goes faster. You’re obviously good at it. Lucky.” She sets the pages before me. I shuffle them back in order.

Does she have to be so nice?

“Okay,” she says at last, closes the door behind her, and slides conspiratorially into a wingback. “What is
up
with Balin and Kai?”

Strange to hear her speak Kai’s name … Wait, what the—

“Balin and what?”

She leans forward, eyes wide. “I
know
! Kai seems so …
smart.
She’s so bright and sunny and then Master Gloom and Doom is all shlumping around her but she doesn’t seem to mind—like, at
all.
I don’t get it! What’s going on with that whole thing?”

My mouth works the air but no words come. Luckily Elanor’s got plenty.

“I mean, what does she say? Does she
like
him?”

“I …”

“Because I’ll tell you what, ever since she started coming around—”

“Wait—who’s coming where?”

“
Kai.
To Rivendell. I absolutely love her, but it makes zero sense she’d even look at him, and maybe she’s just being nice, but … what if? It’s insane! I love her haircut. Makes me want mine short, except it would never look as good; her eyes are
gorgeous.
”

“It’s not a haircut.” The sharpness in my voice surprises me.

She is still. For a second.

She messes with her blue scarf. “Oh. Well … how come you don’t come with her?”

“I don’t … where?”

“Rivendell! Oh, Leigh, I wish you would. I mean, I know you’re totally busy; Kai says you’re working all the time—and I love her to bits, but mostly she hangs out with Balin. It’s like she’s there
just
to see him, but if you came with—”

“When is she there?”

“After school, I guess? Afternoons.”

The pulled muscle, strained, whatever—she has not been at practice helping the coach like she told me; she’s been at Rivendell. Flirting. With hair-in-his-face Balin.

“Except this week she said she’s back at track practice so instead she came on Saturday. Sunday, too. And of course Balin never says anything to anyone about anything. Acts all know-it-all and chipper. Drives me nuts.”

Saturday
and
Sunday.
Just going for a slow run, get this muscle back in business, might be a while …

I want so badly to be happy for her.
Just
happy, not happy-slash-jealous. I should be thrilled she’s got one more good thing, a happy secret thing all her own. But then … all those endless days holding her hand, lying beside her, rinsing the bucket, and the second she’s well, she’s gone? Secret friends and crushes and doesn’t even tell me, let alone invite me along, not that I would go, but that’s beside the point. And sure, Emily was a secret, too, but still it stings. The York I am chewing is now imprinted with what my current author-boyfriend Thomas Hardy would call “the bitter taste of her betrayal.”

“So does she?”

I pull my eyes from a middle-distance daze. “Does she what?”

“Like him—
like
like?”

“I have no idea.”

Again my voice is harder than I intend. Elanor looks at her lap.

What is my problem?

“But,” I offer lamely, “I’ll let you know if I find out.”

She recovers. Brightens.

“Well. If you ever have time to come with her … or by yourself, you know, if you want. Weekends are so long, if you came we could—I don’t know, mostly I’m working but it would be more fun with—together. You think?”

She stands, straightens her apron down over her skirt, goes to the window. Real Nice Clambake is still out there. Elanor smiles.

“Every Wednesday since I was a baby, she comes to us on her way here. Takes whatever’s in season, roses, carnations, filler flowers, whatever. As long as it’s pretty.” She turns to me, pulls her scarf snugly to her throat. “All right. You’ve been assigned your recon mission: Let’s get to the bottom of this Kai/Balin business before they get completely stupid and force us to deal with the repercussions of the misguided ardor of their unsavory teenaged loins—God, can you imagine?”

Homeschool vocabulary.

I laugh. Can’t help it. “Gross …” I sigh.

“I know, right? God.” She spins out the door, closes it against the chill wind, waves through the window, and mouths the words,
Come over!
I watch her trot toward the van, then turn instead to cross the grass and the land mines of headstones to Real Nice Clambake. Hugs her. They talk, laugh about something. Even slightly stooped with age, Clambake is taller than Elanor.

The office silence is really loud.

Emily would have been nice to Clambake, too.

Aside from straight-up spelling it out to Elanor,
Please forgive me, you seem incredibly smart and nice and I am so very lonely and thank you so much for wanting to be my friend even though I’ve been nothing but weird and rude to you and while I would also dearly love to get out of the graves once in a while and repot bulbs with you at your beautiful nursery, and that is not me being sarcastic, it truly would be a relief and a fun way to spend an afternoon, I’m afraid I’ve got this suffocating fear that getting to know you and having fun with you would betray my loyalty to my best and only friend who is gone anyway, and also what if we did become friends and you disappeared, too, and also if I become friends with you it might take away from the attention and care I must ceaselessly give my sister or she will get sick again and die because PS, I am a patron saint of death, so for your own good you should probably avoid contact with me or you’ll never make it out alive, so thanks a ton, but as you can tell I’ve kind of got a full plate of psychosis going on right now, if it ever lets up I will for sure give you a call, how’s that?
I’m not sure how else to convince her I am not a good candidate for friendship. I’ve been dismissive at best, at worst unkind, but she doesn’t seem discouraged. At all.

Her impossible likeness to Emily is strange and awful and not her fault, but still here she is, a Lego brick fit of an Emily replacement and I cannot. I will not.

I’m not good friend material.

I’m not good person material.

A COLD MONDAY,
I’m in the office with Thoreau (
Simplicity, simplicity!
), cementing a kinship with him as I hide from humanity in my very own Walden beside the duck pond. The drowsy hum of the space heaters does not mask the sound of a van through the Manderleys. I drop below the desk, grab
Walden
and the York bag, and make a pillow from my coat to hunker down for the duration.

A knock at the door and I squeeze myself tighter into the leg space beneath the desk. I don’t have the energy for this today.
Elanor, please go away,
I will her from my hiding place.
Please, please,
please.

“Hello?” The door opens and someone steps inside—
seriously?
—but it is not her voice, not Elanor.

“Hello? Are you open?”

I rush to stand, forgetting I am crouched in a cubby, and slam the top of my head into the bottom of the desk.

Stars.

“Hello?”

Two youngish women stand in the doorway, purse straps securely on their shoulders, one with a short, sensible shag haircut and the other, the helper, holding tight to Shag Haircut’s arm.

They watch me crawl up into my chair. I gesture limply with a pen. “Found it.”

Out the open door there is no Rivendell van. Dario nowhere in sight. No Wade.

“Excuse me,” I say, “just one second. Have a seat and I’ll be right with you.” I dash out the door and around behind the Dumpster, where I rub my throbbing head and run my fingers through the mess of tangled homework hair falling in my face, tie it into a ponytail, and curse Meredith’s threadbare, boldly lettered
Over 40 and Feelin’ Foxy!
T-shirt that I have chosen to wear this day.

“Sorry about the cold,” I say, rushing to close the door. I crank the stupid space heaters to ten, regret the very unprofessional buzzing and humming as they warm up, and slide into my seat behind the desk. In my best fake-professional sensitive voice, I ask, “How can I help you today?”

Shag Haircut’s husband is dead.

“And do we currently have an active file for your family?”

Because Active File = Pre-Need = Easy. Please oh please oh please …

At Need.

But at least simple. Practical. Like her haircut. Standard burial, anywhere near a tree would be nice.
Seriously, people and their stupid trees.
Single depth, single headstone. They go for a bronze marker, a pricey but attractive choice. Details of pine boughs and cones beveled into the corners; name, birth, and death, beloved husband, father. Young father. Oh jeez. I write neatly, fill in boxes and lines, date every page.

The paperwork is done and it is time for my stomach to get all nuts because oh, God, I have to take them on The Walk, but night is moving swiftly in. I open my mouth to suggest (beg) that they do it tomorrow morning, with Wade, but Shag Haircut beats me to the punch, insisting we go find a grave
right now.

The women stay close beside me. Shag looks nowhere but at the damp grass; the helper, who turns out to be the sister, makes pedestrian awkward Helper Small Talk: Boy, it sure is cold lately, but thank goodness for the afternoon sun, how do I like working here, what school do I go to, asking without asking
Just how old are you and why are we having to deal with you instead of an actual cemetery professional?

I keep the women hiking all over Wade’s “Let’s get it filled!” Poppy Hill. Shag Haircut peers suspiciously over the worn wooden fence that borders our neighbor, the Gold Country Retirement Villa (one of our best customers), shakes her head, marches on.

The sister and I exchange a look and are at once united in a singular mission: get a grave picked out before nightfall.

Too late.

Shag suddenly stops walking and falls apart right there on the lawn. The sister drops beside her on the cold, damp grass, and I stand stupidly, watching them cry beneath the trees and the now very nearly black sky.

They weep and weep and I do nothing. What am I supposed to say? What do I do?

Desperate for anything, I force my eyes down and read the headstones at my feet.

Here is an elaborate, intricate landscape surrounding some guy’s relatively smallish name and death date, featuring a boat speeding along making waves on the glassy surface of a lake. Was his death boat-related, or had he simply enjoyed waterskiing and fishing and other freshwater activities?

Shag cries.

Oh, look, here’s a
Beloved Wife, Mother, and Grandmother
—but the dates indicate Beloved was just thirty-one years old when she died. Thirty-one and a grandmother? Two generations of blatant teenaged sex going on in
that
family.

Most of the graves in this row are pretty standard. Older people. Eighty, ninety, Our Dear Mother, Grandmother, Wife of William, Husband of Ethelyn, Moose Lodge President, Father, Grandfather, pictures of trees, angels, a dove and a pony, Daughter, Granddaughter … a dove and a pony a dove and a pony a dove—
wait
—Wait. Wait. Wait.

Wait.

My stomach is ice.

A dove and a pony. The name carved in granite. The dove and the pony. I stare so long, my open mouth is dry. I choke on the cold air rushing down my throat. Who put this here? I do not understand what is happening. The dove and the pony.
All this time, right here with me. Am I awake?

Shag Haircut sobs and wails.

“Don’t go,” Emily pleaded beneath the table tent last summer. “I won’t survive without you.”

“What will I do without
you
?” I sighed. “I beg them every day; they’re
making
us go.”

Wade and Meredith would not give in. No summer with Emily, just a Greyhound bus ride with Kai over the river and through the woods.

Gramma and Grandpa live three hours away in Pixley, a tiny hamlet even farther inland than Hangtown and hotter, which consists of a few homes dotting the sagebrush-covered high-desert countryside and a downtown made up of a mini-mart, a post office, and a bakery.

“Gramma and Grandpa love you!” Meredith insisted. “They’re thrilled to have a whole summer with you!”

If she exchanged the words
a whole summer with
for
free labor from,
she’d be right on target, because what we actually spent the summer doing was cutting wood. Cutting and stacking wood. Sunrise to sunset. In Pixley it snows a ton every winter and most of the houses don’t have central air, so to keep from freezing to death, fires must be built and stoked to burn pretty much twenty-four hours a day, all winter long. The minute Kai and I arrived, the wood gathering began in earnest.

We piled into the cab of Grandpa’s blue Cherokee truck, crammed tight together on the fake leather bench seat. Grandpa drove. Gramma sat next to the passenger door clutching the handle white-knuckled and checking the lock every five seconds. She never learned to drive, and the mystery of it all just horrified her. She craned forward, tense, making sure Grandpa stayed on his side of the road and calling out helpful tips every now and then: “Jesus Christ, do you have to go so fast, Wallace?” and urging him to “Put on your blinker!” even though the turn we needed to take was at least a mile ahead. She pulled a tissue from her bra and mopped her damp brow as Grandpa gunned it to forty-five in the sixty-five miles-per-hour slow lane.

I was forced to straddle the gearshift, a long stick with a ball on top. Gramma warned me every single time we got in the truck, “Don’t touch that! If you touch that, we’ll crash. Don’t even
look
at it; that’s not for you. If you touch it, the engine will break and we’ll die!” And so I sat, knees apart, feet off the floor. I imagined my skin barely brushing the thing and the truck falling apart around us, sending us all scraped and bloody across the highway.

Amplifying the general mayhem of the trip were the antics of Rene, Gramma’s tiny, yipping, stinky French poodle. He ran all over our laps, freaking out and licking us, Fu Manchu snout stained brown from a diet of cooked liver, beef bouillon, and Oreo cookies. I held my knees up, turned my face again and again from his liver lips, and by the time we reached the forest my legs were burning with muscle spasms. The moment the engine stopped (“Wait till Grandpa takes the key out; there’s electricity in the motor, and the car will explode if you open the door while it’s running. Just
wait
!”), I climbed over Kai and Gramma and fell out into—

Deafening silence. The noise of the road gone, only still air now, and deep black forest soil. Trees. Hazy rays of sunlight through elegant, towering pines, dust spinning like diamonds. A bird sang, took flight. A quiet creek splashed over rocks somewhere close. Bumblebees buzzed. I inhaled deeply.

And then Grandpa revved up the chain saw.

For the next six hours we were a well-oiled machine: Grandpa cut a pie-shaped wedge from one side of a thick pine trunk, then moved around to the other side to cut straight through. For a moment the giant hovered, balanced precariously on itself, until a great shove from Grandpa’s shoulder and a shout to Gramma (who every single time chose the
exact
spot where she
knew
the tree would fall to bend over and start picking up kindling)—“Jesus Christ, Irene, get the hell outta the way here it comes!”—and Gramma dove from the advancing shadow of the falling tree just in time to watch it slam onto the soil.

“Goddamnit, Wallace! You nearly
killed
me! You would just love that, wouldn’t you? You’d be the happiest man in town; you’d just clap your hands if I died, wouldn’t you?
Wouldn’t you?
” Grandpa shook his head and got busy cutting the tree into rounds, which Kai and I raced to gather. We rolled them to the truck, heaved them up and in. All day long Grandpa felled trees, Gramma accused him of attempted murder, Rene ran around pooping, and Kai and I loaded the rounds.

The scream of the chain saw, the sharp splintering of wood, the sweet tang of pine sap, a heavy, brief silence, then the rush of air through green needles, the sharp, deep thud of tree against soil. Over and over and over until dusk, until the truck was full.

Another death ride back to their house, where Gramma called Meredith to report, “Your father tried to kill me today—
again.
” Then she settled on their black vinyl sofa to watch TV and work on a tablecloth-size version of
The Last Supper
rendered entirely in white crocheted thread. One hook, thin thread, years and years of devotion. Kai and I took long baths using gallons of Gramma’s Prell shampoo and climbed, sore and exhausted, into twin beds where Gramma sat at the foot to listen to our prayers, a confusing but required recitation. According to Gramma, when we lay us down to sleep, we must pray the Lord our souls to keep; that if we should die before we wake, we needed to pray the Lord our souls to take. Then we said “God bless …” followed by a litany of names, names of every person we knew or had ever met
and
the pets, because if we didn’t include them, God wouldn’t bless them, and if they should die tonight, they would go to Hell and burn forever thanks to our negligence. I said Kai’s and Emily’s names twice.

Kai, thrilled to be off the couch and not dead
and
have the strength to run for miles and lift wood, fell instantly asleep each night, while under the blanket with a flashlight I wrote letter after letter to Emily, wide awake in the dark, missing her and her mom, missing the ocean, still hearing the sharp splintering of wood, the rush of air through pine needles, the heavy thud of trees against black soil. Over and over and over, again and again, trees and trees and trees until morning.

The next day was for splitting and stacking at home. Grandpa split the rounds, releasing a sweet ooze of sap and fat white grubs, and we ran to stack the pieces. Splitting, stacking, running for more. The sky was burning pink when we finished for the day, cords of wood, ten feet by six feet by three, stretched up beyond the well pump behind the house.

We stacked eleven cords of wood that summer, all of it very unintentionally Montessori of them—these people who, to be fair, as kids themselves had Grapes of Wrathed it from Missouri to California when the effects of the drought and Great Depression had reached the Ozarks and therefore knew the value of good day’s work, so who am I to judge. But the satisfaction of a job well done was giving way, at least for me, to the monotony and heat, to wishing for more than one day in a row in life that had more to offer than Kai’s nausea or endless manual labor.

I daydreamed about swimming with Emily, roasting marshmallows on unwound coat hangers around a campfire, while in real life Kai and I lugged armload after armload of worm-filled wood in the suffocating heat, day after day.

Except Saturdays. On Saturdays we didn’t go to the forest, and we didn’t have to stack, either. On Saturdays we piled into the death-mobile to buy milk at the store and pick up the mail at the post office. The third Saturday in June marked three weeks of Wood Stack Camp, and Grandpa decided to get the mail first, then Gramma and Kai went into the store for milk and dog kibble to supplement Rene’s liver. I waited with Grandpa and Rene in the truck and he pulled from the pile of bills and catalogs a bright yellow envelope addressed with cursive black Magic Marker penmanship.
Emily, at last,
my heart thumped. Four letters I’d sent her, all unanswered.
Did she forget me? Maybe Girl Scout camp doesn’t have mail.
But here it was; here she was! Grandpa tossed the yellow envelope at me. Not Emily’s writing after all—Meredith’s perfect cursive. I tore it open, devoured the only sentence,
Didn’t you know this girl?