Read The Roots of the Olive Tree Online
Authors: Courtney Miller Santo
I wish I could be the woman you thought I was and I wish you’d tell me what a cham-cham is or at least promise to show me when you come back to Kidron.
xxC
From:
Amrit Hashmi [email protected]
Subject:
letter
Date:
May 23, 2007 10:32:19 AM PST
To:
Callie [email protected]
Cham-Cham,
Your letter arrived yesterday. I cannot begin to write down all the ways that I feel about you, but please know that it is more than my interest in your family. My lovely Padra who died so many years ago never had what we had. You must understand that, your husband, too, gave you some but not everything. I am overwhelmed by the emotion and I don’t trust myself to even say this to you on the phone. My first wife and I, we were strangers when we met and we had the passion of youth on our side that blinded us to how little other connection we felt.
But you, with your letter. I won’t write it, but to answer your question, yes we have so much more together than I’ve ever had before. And as much as I want to be with you, there is work to be done. Important work, research that will change so much for you and your life. I can see the message light on my phone blinking and the e-mail will not stop dinging at me. I will see you soon and we will have a heart talk. One that will explain what is between us.
xxA
From:
Callie [email protected]
Subject:
too long
Date:
May 27, 2007 9:58:43 PM EST
To:
Amrit Hashmi [email protected]
Darling,
Every night after we talk, I think of a dozen other things that I should have said to you. It is sweet to hear your voice, but it all feels so insubstantial. I lied earlier. I didn’t get out of bed the entire day. I said it so that you wouldn’t think me weak, but I just took my pills and drifted in and out of sleep. I reread the letters you’ve sent me and I looked at all the magazines in the house. My mother tried to get me out of bed. She started nice in the morning with homemade cinnamon rolls, but by the time she went to bed, she had resorted to idle threats. Anna told her to leave me alone.
Tell me more about the sequencing. I don’t understand any of it, but I do hope that some good comes from it. If not for us, then for somebody else. Do they have some disease that our DNA could cure? Do children age rapidly like that dumb movie with Robin Williams? Can you cure that? I should try to understand more of what you’re doing.
Please come soon.
xxC
From:
Amrit Hashmi [email protected]
Subject:
research
Date:
May 30, 2007 6:13:29 AM PST
To:
Callie [email protected]
Cham-Cham,
Forgive me for not responding earlier. As I said on the phone, there is so much to be done before I can come for my visit and explain it all to you better. You maybe know about ambrosia? It is a drink for the gods that the Greeks said if man took even a sip of he could attain immortality. We have an Indian word for this drink—it is
amrit
. A common enough name, but one picked by my parents for sentimental reasons. They told me that the best way to ensure immortality was by having children. My mother used to take my face in her delicate hands and kiss me all over—declaring that I was the perfect mix of my father and her and that it was my job to make my own children who would be a mix of my parents and also of me and my wife.
But you know about this sorrow. There were no children. We found out that I could never give Padra the babies she wanted when we were in Spain and I had first started working with this idea that an organism could achieve biological immortality.
You can see where this is going. There are so many little steps from you and your family to ambrosia. But I believe it is possible. I know that if we can figure out why people age and why some people age far slower than others, that we can find a way to extend our lives. Do not tell anyone this. The study of aging is so new and fraught with moral dilemmas. To others I talk about cures for the diseases of age, but we all know, we all understand, that if we can cure the things that kill people, then we can cure death itself.
I could tell you so much more about sirtuins and the keys they hold to keeping our cells young, or about the idea that so much of what goes wrong in the body is completely attributed to inflammation. But what good will that do you? What I want to do is good old-fashioned science. I want to study you and your mother and her mother and find out what makes you age so slowly. Maybe it is proteins or maybe it is some mechanism that we haven’t found yet, or don’t have the capability to find, but that is what I’m doing, what I’m looking for.
I miss you with all my heart.
xxA
A
full month passed before Calliope set foot in the Pit Stop. She tried in the days just after Deb’s escape to return to the store, but every time she worked up enough energy, the cold stopped her dead. Nothing made her leg hurt more than chilly weather. That excuse and others allowed her to spend weeks sitting with Erin and her baby boy, Keller, on the porch, watching the north wind stir the leaves in the orchard. At first, Anna and Bets tiptoed around them, but gradually their patience waned. She and Erin made promises to each other. “If I wake up and can’t see my breath, I’ll . . .” they’d say and rattle off a list of all that had been left undone. Nature gave them until mid-June, when the sun finally warmed up and the talk in Kidron turned from Deb’s escape to fruit set.
The warmth rejuvenated Calliope—her smiles came easier, and she needed fewer pills to control the pain in her leg. After two or three sunny mornings, she began to wake up buoyed by the possible. With this attitude, she arrived at the Pit Stop well before Nancy, who’d been acting as manager during Calliope’s absence. The morning sun streaming into the front windows exposed a film of filth that had settled over much of the store. The Pit Stop needed a good cleaning. Calliope examined each square foot, making note of the grime between jars, dust underneath shelving, and scuff marks on the linoleum flooring.
“I see you took the poster down,” Nancy said as Calliope inspected the few cobwebs that occupied the front corners of the store. At the request of the police, Nancy had put the wanted poster with Deb’s picture up in the window. If Calliope had been there, it wouldn’t have gone up, but Nancy often mistook herself for the owner and made decisions that weren’t hers to make. She was sure she’d eventually find an excuse to hang the posters back up.
“It felt right,” Calliope said, rubbing away the last traces of tape on the window with her fingernail. “She’s never going to be found.”
“Nobody’s looking all that hard. She not only broke her parole, she stole from us. Do you know how much she took? How much was in that safe? What’d you tell the police—some smaller number, I’m sure,” Nancy said, putting on the glasses that hung from a chain around her neck. The cashier, although she was the same age as Calliope, managed to look years older.
“We told the police everything we could. Erin’s taken her mother leaving again hard. She hasn’t left the house in weeks, and then I keep finding her asleep in the living room, the baby at her nipple and an atlas open on her lap. She’d give the world to not have had her momma run, and a little more to at least find out where she’s gone to.”
“That granddaughter of yours has been through too much for one lifetime,” Nancy said.
“I should have warned her about Deb—about how you can’t let someone else failing to live up to your expectations ruin you. I spent most of my life feeling like I was somehow responsible for my daughter, that I was as guilty of killing Carl as she was. And then when she ran, somehow this time she took all of that guilt I had with her. I just worry she left some of it behind with Erin.”
“She’s got the baby now. That should help,” Nancy said, looking over the top of her glasses in a way that made Calliope feel like the pain pills were letting her mouth run on. Nancy had been around a long time, and Calliope was sure she had her own thoughts about the Keller women.
“Do you feel that way about your grandbabies?” Calliope knew asking this was mean. Nancy didn’t have any children of her own. She hadn’t married until she was in her late fifties, but her husband, an Elvis impersonator, had six or seven kids of his own.
“We feel how we feel,” Nancy said, with a tremble in her voice that could have been emotion or the suppression of a cough.
Calliope nodded. Nancy’s stepchildren were all bastards, born by women stupid enough to think that sleeping with a man who looked like Elvis was near enough to the real deal. Nancy treated all his kids like they were hers, but they didn’t always reciprocate. Over the years, she’d seen Nancy try to make amends for her husband, spending most of her salary on gifts for them and the grandchildren. Mr. Elvis, as Calliope thought of him, was retired now and only put on the jumpsuit to do a monthly show at the American Legion up in Redding.
“How are things with you and the doctor?” Nancy asked, as if sensing Calliope’s thoughts had turned to relationships. In the years since Calliope’s husband had died, Nancy had become a confidante. The cashier knew about the few flings, one-night stands, and affairs that Calliope had gotten herself mixed up in over the years. She heard details Calliope was too ashamed to share with her family, especially her mother. Bets’s morality was rigid and passionless. Nancy, despite being reserved, listened to Calliope’s confessions as if they were teenagers. And yet, this time, Calliope held back many of the juiciest details of her relationship with Amrit.
She and Amrit had made love on the night he first arrived in Kidron. From the moment she’d heard his voice on the phone, Calliope had known she would sleep with him. Seeing him, that first day, sitting near him on their too-soft couch that rolled people toward one another, heightened her desire. During their excruciatingly polite lunch conversation, she’d elicited his room number and then after her mother and Anna had finally gone to bed, she drove to the motel, put on a fresh coat of lipstick, slipped on four-inch heels, and knocked on his door. She never once considered the possibility of rejection.
Amrit had been married for thirty years to a dutiful wife. They’d had no children, and she’d died quite unexpectedly from an aneurism the year she turned fifty. He told Calliope this and more after the fifth time they’d made love. That day he’d confessed that he and his wife had never been together unless they were in their own bed with the lights off. Calliope laughed, and then realizing that he might misunderstand her joy, she took his hand and confessed that although she’d been with too many men in too many places, what she felt with him was entirely different. While they spoke, he traced the outline her hardened nipple made against her thin silk blouse, and before their stories were finished, they’d undressed and made love in the front seat of his rental car in an abandoned field with a view of Mount Shasta.
The passion Calliope experienced with Amrit made what she’d felt for her own husband, and for the other men she’d slept with, seem like mere excitement. After he returned to Pittsburgh, she found she couldn’t drive anyplace without getting lost. Landmarks she’d used her whole life to mark intersections took on new shapes to her eyes. The elm at the corner of C Street and Polk now looked like two trees twined together, and the house with the blue door at the corner of Main and F Street seemed to morph from a two-story ranch to a slatternly Colonial in the space of just a few days.
The relationship was more than physical. He’d called while the plane was moving from the runway to the gate and told Calliope he thought he’d fallen in love with her. Still, she’d not confessed this to her mother or grandmother, or even Erin, who she thought, now, would have understood the relationship. She’d visited him twice so far, both times making up excuses about wanting to see two of her children who lived in the Northeast. She’d flown into New York to spend Christmas and a few days with her eldest son’s family and then claimed she needed to attend a conference in Pittsburgh, so she could spend the rest of the week with Amrit. In March, she’d flown to D.C. to visit her middle son and claimed an allergy to a cat so she could stay in a hotel in Alexandria with Amrit, who drove down to meet her.
Before her relationship with Amrit, Calliope could never understand how her daughter could have loved her husband more than her own child. But what Amrit awakened inside of Calliope made her aware of the possibility of such selfishness. There were times, like when they were in the hotel elevator and she couldn’t stop herself from pressing against him until they were both breathless. At that moment, getting caught didn’t matter, being embarrassed didn’t matter—she needed him too much to stop. But Deb was gone, and she’d never get the chance to explain to her daughter that she was finally beginning to understand why she shot Carl.
There was no one else to tell. She felt that if she kept it to herself, it would be safe. Nancy, because she was privy to Calliope’s affairs, was dangerous. She feared that if she told Nancy any of the truth of her feelings, that the woman would somehow make her feel foolish, point out that there was no difference between Amrit and the contractor she’d slept with a few years ago, who’d only wanted to convince her to sell the Pit Stop to his brother so he could replace it with a Jack in the Box franchise. So Calliope had told her own family almost nothing, and admitted to Nancy only that Amrit was something new for her old bones.
Nancy took her glasses off and said, “It is difficult to stay in love over long distances.” She spoke in such a way that Calliope began to wonder why her cashier had married late and who she’d loved before she found Mr. Elvis.
“Who mentioned love?” Calliope asked.
Their conversation was interrupted when a young family came into the store, filling the place with conversation. Calliope smiled at Nancy and then went to the storeroom, calling out to her stock boys as she went, “Roberto. Pedro.”
They stopped stacking boxes and shuffled to her. She motioned for them to follow her and started to explain to them in Spanish about the mess. She wasn’t fluent, and as she walked she stumbled over the words. She felt her mind spin, like loose gears, and then catch when she found the first word she needed.
Sucios.
Filthy.
She stopped to point out the grime that was apparent on the nearly empty shelves and leaned heavily against one of the poles that distributed the weight of the roof. She’d gone too long between Vicodins, and the throbbing that had been present since she woke had turned into a stabbing pain. The older boy looked at his younger brother and then cleared his throat.
“We can speak English, if that’s easier for you,” he said. His brother nodded.
“And honestly we’d be happier if you called us Robert and Pete. My friends call me Petey, but I don’t like that so much.”
His brother laughed and punched his arm. “You should call him Petey.”
The muscles in Calliope’s thigh began to strain to keep her upright. Most people didn’t understand her pain. They were used to healing—to scar tissue knitting itself over wounds and the gradual ebb of pain. The tissue in her leg, after the crash, became infected. The doctors kept carving off bits of her calf, claiming to have gotten the last remnants of dying tissue and muscle, only to have to go back weeks later and take more. When they were done, there was a fist-size concavity on the outside of her lower leg. The pain had never ebbed.
“It’s okay if you want to speak to us in Spanish,” said the younger boy. He looked worried, and Calliope thought that she must be grimacing.
“I didn’t realize,” she said, trying to recall what her backroom manager had said when he suggested he hire the boys. “When Juan hired you—”
“Keep speaking Spanish to Juan. His English is awful,” Robert said.
“And he evidently can’t keep a clean store either.” She sent Pete to get a bucket of soapy water and showed his brother how dirt hid in the crescents of space between the jars and cans.
“They should make rectangle containers,” the boy said, grabbing a rag from his brother.
She took a stack of inventory logs to her office, which was an elevated space near the front of the store. Calliope was short and had spent her life looking between people in crowds. After her husband, Greg, died, she’d had the walls, which used to go to the ceiling, lowered. The Pit Stop had been his idea, the location hers. In her childhood, the building had housed a Lucky’s. Greg never liked that no matter what they did to the place that it still felt like a grocery store, but Calliope always felt at home there. By the time she reached the office, she could no longer hide her limp. She pushed the swing-gate set into the half-walls that surrounded her office and eased into her ergonomic chair. There was a small supply of pills in her desk. She fished one out and swallowed it dry.
From the space, she could see the entire store. The tasting bar took up the middle portion of the store, and the aisles around it were divided by country of origin, with the largest section devoted to California and, specifically, Kidron. The far corner of the store housed a small lunch counter, and around the perimeter of the store were the novelty items—olive soap, olive wood, postcards, and kitschy olive-serving devices. They didn’t sell as well as the olives themselves, but the markup on them was high. Plus, many of the items were from local artisans, and she sold those on commission. Louisa Ramirez, with her olive wood roses, did well for herself. She had to come in every three days or so to restock the delicate flowers. Lucy Talbot’s
Olive You
platters weren’t doing so well. Calliope couldn’t remember the last time she’d sold one. She’d have to consider offering Louisa some of Lucy’s space.
The truth was that in the last few years, the Pit Stop had become a money pit. The spring storms had been especially bad for business. The rain kept those on I-5 in their cars—stopping only for gas and a quick spin through a drive-thru for lunch. On years when the winds from the south were gentle and the flowers stayed on the trees, visitors felt they had time to spend. They drove along the streets near the orchards and lingered in Calliope’s store, asking questions about olives and growing techniques, and always those conversations led to purchases.
It used to be there were very few retail places to get specialty olive oils and products, but the Internet had made what Calliope had to offer less exclusive. She sometimes saw customers scan a bottle of oil with their phones to compare prices. She’d lost contracts with some of the local suppliers, who now found it more lucrative to sell their olives themselves. Despite all of this, she couldn’t shake the feeling that a turnaround was coming. What was it they said? There are no second acts in life? Well, Calliope knew for a fact that the women in her family not only got second acts, but sometimes even thirds.