The Secrets She Keeps (12 page)

—

“I didn’t stare at his ass!”

“I saw you!”

“Shaye. Stop. I did not.”

“You stared at his a-ass,” she sang. “For-est service a-ass.” She stood at the open refrigerator, looked at the expiration dates of a mayonnaise jar and a bottle of mustard.

“Enough.” I wished she’d shut her mouth, I really did.

“It was a nice ass! You can
look
.”

I wasn’t the looking type, for one. Not at all. I was the type who believed you never should go grocery shopping while hungry, first off, because you’d surely go home with a sheet cake you couldn’t handle. “I’m going to see what’s taking Nash so long, while you remember how to be more appropriate.”

“She says she has a ham down there.”

“Nash,” I called.

“In the cellar!”

I spotted the stoop of her back and the tidy braid against her T-shirt, as she hunted around on a shelf in a dark corner. “How can you see down here?” There were cane chairs and wine barrels and an old radio. There were metal folding cots and yellowing board games. Oh, how we accumulate stuff. A spiderweb snagged my cheek, and I swatted it away.

“I forgot. Harris gave me a ham. He cured it himself.”

“What, did it have some disease? Ha-ha.”

She turned around, stood upright. She held it in her arms, a package wrapped in newspaper. “I knew it was down here somewhere.”

“How long have you had that?”

“It’s fine! It’s got six more months, at least!”

I took the ham from her. That thing was heavy. She took the stairs back up, pausing at each. I could hear the effort in her breathing. Well, of course there would be signs.

“You okay, Nash?” I said this to her back, because I was too much of a coward to ask while meeting her eyes. I regret that. I should have held her hands and used the real words and showed her I wasn’t afraid, even though I was afraid. I was too scared to even call the thing by its name.

“The lungs.” She tapped her chest, two thuds. “Turns out you don’t even have to smoke a damn cigarette. I guess something’s going to get you.”

“You shouldn’t be alone out here.”

“I’m not alone. Harris is here. And right now I’m fine. This is how it goes. I know it well enough from my own father, my mother, Aunt Geneva, Eve down the road, you name it.” She paused, catching her breath. It was a long list. “There’s something wrong, and you find out. Then you got time before it gets worse. I’m taking advantage of that time. Nothing more to say.”

We reached the top of the stairs. She stared me down in a challenge, and so I nodded. She was right, at the heart of it. This is where we were, and words wouldn’t change that. I guess my practicality came from somewhere, because it sure didn’t come from my mother. I plunked the meat on the counter. “Harris cured this ham,” I told Shaye.

“What of?” She chuckled.

Nash sighed.

Shaye sniffed the mayonnaise, just in case. “Whole or half, Nash?”

“I don’t want a sandwich. I am thrilled to see you both, I am. You can stay for the rest of your lives, if you want. But I have my
routines
.”

“Here’s your
routine
,” Harris said as he kicked open the screen door with his boot. He dumped a huge box on one end of the table. “Jesus Christ. Look at this. What’re you, writing a book?”

Maybe we all should have moved out there years ago, the way people aged. There was nothing frail or vulnerable about that old cowboy. His gray hair was short and buzzed, matching the stubble on his cheeks, and he was stocky and still ruggedly attractive. When he leaned in to give Shaye and me a hug, he smelled the way an old man should, some mix of heat and motor oil and wood chips.

“Where was that? I’ve been waiting for it. Hands off,” Nash said.

“On the porch! For God’s sake, you don’t have to shove. Glad to see you’re finally digging in to that ham.”

“We got a delivery and the darn dog just laid there?”

Tex panted in a bit of shade on the kitchen floor, unoffended by Nash’s remark. He looked spent, actually. His tongue lolled out of his mouth, as if it lacked the necessary energy to stay inside where it belonged. We’d interrupted his routine, too.

Nash wrapped her long arms around that box. “Enjoy your lunch, all.”

“Give me that,” I said. It was too heavy for her to carry, but, more than that, I wanted to see who it was from.

She shot arrows at me with her eyes to set me straight. A ham was one thing. When it came to guarding our secrets, though, we were all titans, if sometimes weary ones.

—

Shaye set a sandwich in front of Harris, while I poured us iced teas. “Finally, we can talk about her behind her back,” Shaye said.

“The mustang guy came by again,” I told Harris. “He’s worried she’s going to sue. He said she threatened. Used the word
attorney.
I thought maybe that’s what all the boxes and paper were about, but she denied it.”

“She’s not gonna sue. There’s nothing she can do, and she knows it and they know it. She’s just being a crazy old lady, and they’re just making nice so she doesn’t become a pain in their backsides,” Harris said. “They’re going to be neighbors for a while. It’s starting. I saw the semis coming. Parked out by the lake now.”

“Semis?”

“You should see all the stuff. They’ve got to set up corrals, first off. Takes a few weeks.”

“I don’t get it,” I said. I took a huge, satisfying bite. “I mean, she doesn’t want the mustangs gone, but she’s hated them for years. And if not the horses, what’s all the mess about? What’s the big operation?”

“We could
help
, if she didn’t insist on all the furtive stuff,” Shaye said, hogging the bag of chips. “What’s with people your age and all the skeletons in the attic? We keep our skeletons where they belong, right out on the front lawn.”

“That’s for sure. I don’t want to see your damn skeleton.” Harris had his phone on the table beside him. Not only were the old people deeply wrinkled and still beautiful here, they were also incredibly technologically current. Thomas’s mother had gotten confused when she used the microwave. “All that reality TV, Jesus.” Harris shook his head with disgust. “We never had reality TV.”

“You never had
TV
,” Shaye said, cracking herself up. She rolled the top of the bag of chips shut and slid it my way. “Get these away from me.”

“I don’t know, girls. It’s nice to think she has some plan she’s carrying out. I thought so, too, at the start, but I’m not sure anymore. You know what was in that box?”

“You looked?”

“Of course I looked. A box comes from Leonard Petit in Beverly Hills and I don’t know any Leonard Petit in Beverly Hills, I’m gonna look. I watch out for her. And apparently Leonard Petit is some weirdo who collects movie stuff. It’s a box of pictures. Picture after picture, stills of old black-and-white films. Can you imagine how much she paid for that? Leonard Petit had the sale of his life.”

“I didn’t know she was a film buff,” Shaye said.

“She’s not a film buff! That’s what I’m saying. She’s a reader. TV is barely on. This is exactly why I phoned your mother—the boxes, the packages from places in Montana and Los Angeles when she doesn’t know anyone there, and, hell, all the woo-woo stuff about
signs,
and her temper…And it’s even worse than that. I wouldn’t have called otherwise.”

“Worse, like how?” Shaye asked.

“I caught her burying something. By the side of the lake.”

“What do you mean?” Shaye said. “Burying what?”

“A book,” Harris said.

“A book?” I said. I couldn’t imagine this. It made no sense, but aside from that, Nash loved books. As Harris said, she was a reader. She had turned one of the rooms, Monte Carlo, into a little library, and I always knew what to get her for her birthday.

“Well, what happened?” Shaye said, and put her foot on mine under the table. This was bigger than both of us.

“You know I come by most every day. See if she wants me to drive her anywhere, pick up whatever she might need. Visit a little.”

“How long has it been since she stopped driving?” I asked.

“Oh, years,” Harris said. “Maybe she never did. She’s always been terrified of it. But I came by that day, and she wasn’t here. I looked around, looked everywhere. I thought she’d…Well, it gave me a scare, I’ll tell you that. I found her by the lake. She seemed
off,
to put it mildly. She had a shovel, and she’d dug a hole. The ground out there…It was hard. Middle of winter. The hole was shallow as a beauty queen, but still. There was a book in it. When she saw me, she got mad. She made a huffing sound and said,
Oh, never mind.
She took the book out and wiped it on her jeans.”

“What was the book?”

“Damn if I know. Old red leather, some classic, that’s all I could tell. I asked her, I said,
What are you doing, sweetheart? What are you burying that for?
And she said,
Same reason anyone buries anything. To say goodbye.”

“Someone died,” I said to Shaye.

“Summer of 1951,” Shaye said to me.

“Girls, this is the kind of thing that happens with old-timers. Or maybe it’s the cancer. I want this to make sense as much as you. I do, I do.” The words sounded like a vow. His eyes filled. Jesus, I couldn’t bear to see a tough man cry, I couldn’t.

“Oh, Harris.” Shaye put her hand over his.

“Some secret mission? Nah. After all these years, I doubt there’s much I don’t know about that woman. You know what I think? All that
work
she’s doing? I think it’s like that movie where the guy loses his mind. You know the one.” He snaps his fingers.

“
The Shining
?” Shaye said.

“Not
The Shining
!” I said. “She’s not stalking around with a kitchen knife.”

“Where the guy has notes tacked up everywhere…” Harris shook his head, tried to get the name to come loose.

“I don’t know,” I said. All I could see was a book in a hole out by the lake.

We were quiet. Harris looked sad, and my heart was breaking because so much was ending. I held the cool glass to my cheek.

“A
Beautiful Mind
,” Shaye said.

“That’s the one. What do you think of this ham, huh? Isn’t it great? It’s all in the aging.” Harris wiped his mouth on a paper napkin.

Shaye got up and propped open the kitchen door with the flour canister. “It’s so hot here, I don’t know how you guys can stand it,” she said.

—

I checked out all the features in Shaye’s car. Eric liked everything big, not just televisions; that SUV was bigger than Thomas’s and my first apartment. The seats were plush leather, and there were dials to warm your seat and set the temperature and shoot off the rockets in the event of a nuclear war. It was a mobile movie theater, too; DVDs were stacked in the center console. “Why don’t
you
go out,” I said. “I’ll just get in the backseat and watch—” I did a quick shuffle through the movies. Action-adventure and more action-adventure. “Never mind.”

“Do you think she was trying to get rid of us, or what?” Shaye said. “She slipped me a five-dollar bill and told me to have a good time.”

“She slipped me one, too.”

“I feel bad staying if she doesn’t want us.”

“I know. But now we’ve promised Harris to see what we think. What do we do if we find out he’s right?”

“If he’s right, there’s no way she can live out there alone.”

“I hope he’s not right,” I said.

“Do you really think there’s a reasonable explanation for what he told us? Come on, Cal.”

I didn’t, so I just studied all those buttons and the ways they might improve my life.

Finally Shaye said, “I don’t want to go home.”

I imagined my own house and felt a hit of longing for the place, the three brick steps to the lovely blue door, the stairwell with its smooth, polished wood railing leading up to the bedrooms. Even with the slope of the upstairs hall, there was still my own room,
our
own room, my own pillow, and the drawer where my pajamas lay folded.
Folded pajamas
—what beautiful words. They beckoned.

I
did
want to go home, to my cave, my hovel, my place of safety and rest, but that’s not what it was now with Thomas and not what it had been for a while. I wanted my house minus Thomas, or at least the recent Thomas, the Thomas who stayed in the shower forever, with his head tilted as the spray went on and on at his back. I’d ask him what was wrong, and he’d say,
Nothing!
in the way that meant
something.
Amy would come back from a car ride with him, rolling her eyes and saying,
God!
at his mood. A mood can become an ogre in a house, an ugly creature you must placate and feed. You needed to build a shed for it out back and toss it raw meat.

“Me, either,” I said.

“The kids are having the time of their lives. Emma caught a fish. Can I say how much it bugs me when they have the time of their life with their father?”

“Of course you can.”

“The official line is how glad you are that they have a good relationship with the other parent, but, really? He does one good thing and it’s like he just gave them a million dollars. My good things are bread crumbs. They don’t even notice.”

“They’ll notice later. They’ll see all that.”

“I don’t even want them to see, but I want them to see, you know?” The windows were down. Shaye popped in a CD. Some girl-power music, played loud. “Up yours, sailing trip. Stick it,
theater,
” she yelled out the window to the endless miles of desert.

“I haven’t been to a bar in years,” I said.

“Well, it’s time we changed that.”

I met Thomas in a bar. Little Red Hen, in Seattle. We were both barely twenty-one. He was there with a group of friends, and so was I. All these years later, we still got together with Dave and Larissa, who have four kids now, and, of course, with Thomas’s oldest friend, Richard, and his husband, André. Richard was ordering a round of beers when I first saw Thomas at the table next to ours. He was the shy one in a plaid shirt; Oh, he was so adorable. My friend Patty had spilled her drink, and Thomas was the one who helped her wipe it up. Her boyfriend didn’t even notice. Thomas was so
nice
. He smelled good, too. Sometimes I’ll smell that cologne again, drifting over from some stranger, and I’ll feel an ache of nostalgia.