“I’m sorry I went about things this way,” she says. “Cully and I—”
“Were you his girlfriend or something?” My tone is sarcastic, insulting, as if the possibility of them is something laughable, if not horrific, though if he were alive I’d be happy to see her accompany him through the door. “Or I guess his girlfriend’s name began with an L,” I say.
“What?” she says, and looks like she might cry. “Did he say that?”
I feel bad, like I’ve told on him. “No,” I say. “Not to me. Were you his partner?” I ask. “Partner in crime? Have you come for the money?”
“Money? What?” She genuinely looks confused by my questions, which comes off as a rather sweet expression. She tilts her head and flexes her jaw, and now I’m confused.
“How did you know him?” I ask.
“I was a waitress at the Pub,” she says, but she looks like her mind hasn’t caught up to where we are yet. “We crossed paths. I’d see him parking cars. He’d come in a lot. He liked sweet potato fries.” She looks down.
“Were you a customer?” I ask. “Is that it?”
“A customer?”
“I know everything,” I say. “About the pot. About his little business.” I realize I’m using my spoon as a pointer. “You don’t have to pretend.”
“I’m not pretending,” she says. “I didn’t understand. But no, I wasn’t a customer. I’ve never even bought pot before.”
“Well, aren’t you a good girl.”
“It’s not that,” she says. “I just . . . never had to.”
I stand up straighter to gain some height.
“Because you’re a girl,” I say, remembering how boys would buy everything. “Wait until you get old, then you’ll have to buy from the help.”
She looks so sadly confused, like she’s been beamed into Siberia. She isn’t eating anymore. I’m scaring her too much. I uncross my arms and place them gently on the counter.
“I was talking about my friend—she buys from her yardman—never mind.” I sigh. “So who were they? Who would buy it? How would he do it? Go to all the restaurants, the schools? Was he known for this? Did everyone know that’s what he did? Was he the town dealer?”
“I don’t know,” she says, and she genuinely looks unsure. “I don’t think he was a known guy or anything. Some people . . . ”
“What? Go on.”
“Some people just go in on a big amount and sell it. It wasn’t, like, his career or anything.”
My eyes well up with tears. “Really?” I say. “So, he wasn’t troubled or . . . he wasn’t the weird dealer guy—”
“No,” she says. “Nothing like that. He just . . . had it sometimes. It wasn’t a big deal. I mean, sorry, I’m sure it’s a big deal to you.”
“No,” I say. “I mean, it is, but I feel better.”
Growing up here, it was Franklin, Sean, and Josh S., Sunny, and Skip. The dudes with the weed. Now one’s a developer, one’s a lawyer, Skip owns a restaurant here, and Sunny’s an engineer. I have no idea what happened to Franklin.
“Tell me all you know,” I say, calmer now. “Don’t worry about me.”
“He’d sell to people around work sometimes,” she says. “Mainly at the restaurant, or people would come get their cars parked and leave money in the glove compartment while they went to the Pub or bars down the street. Cully would park, take the money, replace it with . . . it. Or they’d just pull up, get what they needed, and leave, drive-through style.”
“Drive-through style,” I say.
“It was smart,” she says, shrugging.
“Smarter if he provided burgers and fries to go with it,” I say.
She relaxes a bit.
“This was only once or twice though,” Kit says. “I promise. I don’t think it’s that uncommon.”
“Okay,” I say, and part of me truly feels relief and I wonder if I’m allowed that. Kit looks at the sandwich, then at me. I can tell she really wants to take a bite.
“So you knew him from work,” I say. “Why did you have his day planner?”
I see her swallow. “He left it at our friend’s house and I was going to give it back to him at work. He . . . I wasn’t able to do that.” She looks down, tucks her hair behind her ear. “After he died I kept it. I didn’t know what else to do with it. Then earlier this week I saw your show. I saw them make some announcement you were coming back and they mentioned Cully.”
I saw the announcement on TV as well, Katie saying, “We’ll be welcoming Sarah back to the show tomorrow. Her son, Cully, is in our thoughts and prayers.” Katie shook her head, looked down, then back up at the camera, and solemnly announced the upcoming interview with a jewelry maker who specialized in turquoise.
“I didn’t know you were his mother before that,” Kit says. “I was about to leave for Denver, for this . . . thing I had to do, but instead I found myself coming here. I guess I just wanted to see you first, his family. To see if you were okay. I felt I should return his things. I got stuck in a bad plan. I just said a lot.”
“So you didn’t know I was his mother before?”
“No,” she says. She sniffs and looks up.
“You didn’t know him very well then.”
“Well,” she says, but hesitates.
“Well what?”
“The people I’ve met here . . .” She proceeds cautiously. “It’s not like we really talk about one another’s mothers. We barely ask about each other. You just hang out. You just . . . start.”
I know exactly what she means. When Billy landed here I didn’t think to ask about his roots and he didn’t ask about mine. No one does, really. You get here and you’re a blank slate. You just start.
“Did you know him well, then?” I ask.
“I think so,” she says. “Maybe. Who really knows, you know?”
“What does that mean?” This line of conversation is soothing to me.
“I mean we all let people know us in different ways,” she says. “We didn’t know a lot about each other’s backgrounds, but maybe that means more. I don’t know what I mean. We were friends. I liked him a lot.” She holds her head in her hands.
“So he brought his calendar to parties?” I ask.
She rights herself again, then slouches. “It was in his backpack. Here’s his backpack.” She gestures to the chair beside her. I hadn’t noticed her bringing it in.
“So, what was it like?” I ask. I want to sit down but not next to her.
“What was what like?” she asks.
She begins to eat again and she chews louder now, which unreasonably makes me feel like a good host.
“The party,” I say. “What was the party like?”
“It wasn’t really a party, just a normal . . . gathering.”
“What’s normal?” I lean into the counter. I want to get comfortable. I want to hear a story. Parents, no matter how much they think they know, never really know their weekend children, their nighttime children. I once thought I was the exception, that I knew him better than most mothers know their sons.
“This is normal,” she says. “We do this. We sit and eat. We drink beer instead of milk from cereal bowls. We watch TV instead of the snow.” She looks behind her. “Or a fireplace.”
“How old are you?” I ask.
“Twenty-two,” she says, as if this has just dawned on her.
It’s probably past midnight. I think, Do you know where your child is? Where she’s been? Where she’s going? She takes a bite of the sandwich, leaving a smile of bread.
“Cully would come home smelling just like you,” I say. “Like beer.”
“I’m sorry about all of this,” she says.
“Me too,” I say. My neurons are having a disco in my head. I can’t believe we’re here eating children’s cereal. “I’m sorry for the inquisition. Sort of.”
“I deserved it,” she says. “And didn’t mind it.”
She taps her fist against her head. She sips some cold milk from
the cold spoon.
“It’s late,” I say.
She sighs. “I know. I need to go.”
I look outside at the snow unfurling gently yet plentifully. I will never tire of this kind of snowfall.
“You’ve had quite a night.” I walk to her side of the counter. I look at the backpack on the bar stool beside her and place my hand on it.
“So I can drive home now?”
I take her bowl to the sink. “You can sleep in the room downstairs,” I say. “I just cleaned it today. Come. I’ll show you.”
I wait for her to stand up.
“I can’t sleep here,” she says, but she stands, and when I walk she follows me across the living room.
“Why can’t you?” I ask. “You crashed into my garbage cans. This is much more polite.”
“I don’t want to intrude,” she says.
“You already have,” I say lightly. “Intrusion, check.”
She follows me down the steps.
“There’s more to this,” she says.
I look back at her on the steps. “Oh, God,” I say. “Your nose.”
She wipes her nose, looks at the blood on the back of her hand.
“Did you hit yourself when you crashed?”
“No,” she says, making her way down the steps like an Ambien zombie. “I’m always getting bloody noses even though I’m acclimated. I don’t belong here.” She sniffs, then presses the shirt under her sweater to her nose.
“Don’t do that. Let me get you tissue.” I walk to the bathroom across from Cully’s room. “Bathroom’s right here if you need it,” I say, then come back out with a box of tissues. She’s sitting at the bottom of the steps, squeezing the meaty part of her nose and looking down.
“Look up,” I say.
“You’re not supposed to do that,” she says. “Tilt your head back and you risk the chance of blood running down your esophagus and into your stomach.”
“Oh,” I say. “That’s right. You might go to medical school?” I stand in front of her, feeling helpless, and also thinking of all the times I had given Cully the wrong advice, responsible for blood running down his esophagus.
“I might,” she says. “My dad’s a surgeon. He’s pushing for it.” She glances at me while keeping her head down. “He thinks my future looks malignant.”
“You seem pretty sensible to me,” I say. “Well, sometimes.”
I try once again to pawn off the tissues. She takes the box and stands, then looks at the one she was squeezing her nose with. “All done,” she says.
I gesture to the room, slightly panicked in the way I am when someone drops by and I’ve got personal things strewn about.
“Here you are,” I say, looking at the room through new eyes. It’s a formidable room, and does look a bit like a guest room now, which is pleasing. I refrain from doing anything B&B-host-like, offering a mint or turning down the bed, or pointing out the closet and drawers.
“Let me get you another shirt,” I say.
She looks awkward in this space, like a customer in a dressing room, waiting for the saleslady to hang up her clothes and go. I move to the boxes lined neatly by the door and open one to look for a shirt, then consider that this wouldn’t be right.
“This was Cully’s room,” I say, thinking she should know.
She nods as if she suspected this.
“The bedding is new,” I say.
She nods again, smiles—I think, politely—and then she seems to wilt a bit. “Sorry, I’m so tired.” She walks to the bed, slides off her boots, and gets right in under the covers before I can offer to lend her pajamas. I tell myself not to offer pajamas or ask if she’s sure she doesn’t want to change her shirt at least. I need to go.
“You shouldn’t be cold,” I say. “It’s always warm down here.”
The snow falls past the window in a graceful slant.
“Thank you,” she says, and looks near tears. “I don’t feel well.”
“I know,” I say.
She starts to take off her sweater, but she’s struggling from her position so—I can’t stop myself—I help her get it over her head, and I hold on to it, draping it over my arm, but my feeling of trying to be the gracious host slides into something else.
“Kit, you could have gotten hurt tonight,” I say. “Think, okay? Think before you treat your life so lightly.”
“I’ve been fine so far,” she says, and it sounds like she’s talking in her sleep.
It’s a response that surprises me, for its quickness and its sassiness, but also maybe because of its intimacy; it’s something you’d only say to someone you knew well. Her retort reminds me of being ten, skiing alone, riding the chairlifts, going fast down the blues, and then the black diamonds, falling a lot, sometimes hard; or at thirteen hitching rides from strangers to get home or to Vail or Loveland Pass to ski. The drivers were teenagers, worried mothers, men, lots of men. I remember a man named Eagle in a Camaro, who talked about war and would pat my leg after saying things that were meant to be funny.
At fourteen I started drinking with all my friends—wine coolers at bonfires—and we’d always ride in the backs of trucks driven by very stoned, very drunk boys. At sixteen a specific incident happened where I was hurt and at first too proud, too ashamed, to ask my father for help.
Everyone who’s alive can say they’ve been fine so far.
I know she’s trying to sleep, may even be there already, but I ask, “Did you tell Cully something about your dad and Emerson and a hoofprint?”
She doesn’t open her eyes, but she smiles. “Yes,” she says.
“You told it to my dad today. He had heard it before from Cully. He must have liked the line.”
“That’s sweet,” she says, and I have a feeling that if she wasn’t his girlfriend she may have wanted to be.
“Good night, then,” I say.
I watch her for a moment. She grips the edge of the blanket that she’s pulled up to her chin. Her mouth parts. She’s sinking into sleep. I shake myself out of it. For a moment I was almost at peace.
Chapter 11
Billy arrives when my dad is on the phone. He circles the room as if in a museum—he looks at the furniture, gets close to the pictures, running his hand along the spines of books on the shelf by the fireplace. He was here for the service but probably didn’t absorb a thing then. I watch him from the stove and tell him what happened last night.
“Was she drunk?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say. “She said she found out who I was, then came to give it back to me, but got nervous. Here. Come look.” I gesture to the calendar on the counter, and he picks it up then sits down next to my dad.
It’s strange seeing them side by side. He flips through the calendar while my dad talks on the phone, a business call about things that are not his business.
“All in a twist over the boreal toad,” my dad says on the phone. “The lynx I can understand, but a toad? I mean, come on. They’ve been around since the dinosaurs. Their time is up.”
“He shouldn’t have retired,” I say to Billy.
“Ever consider the idea that he didn’t want to?” Billy asks.
“He wanted to,” I say. “They always want to, then never know what to do with themselves.”
I walk over with his black coffee, place it down on a Colorado Homes magazine, which my dad has scribbled notes on. On the cover of the magazine is a loft in Keystone shaped like a mailbox. The heading: “First-Class Delivery.” I imagine the writer striving for the perfect mail pun. Priority Living. First-Class Package. Stamp of Approval. It’s sad imagining the writer settling on this particular one.
“Why did he move in?” Billy asks, quietly.
“He sold his house and wanted to move into a condo. I told him to move in with us until he found the right one. And now . . . we’ve gotten used to one another.”
Billy takes a sip of the coffee and looks back down at the calendar. I sit down next to him to look over his shoulder.
/> “Your birthday’s in there,” I say.
“I saw that,” Billy says. “Funny he has this.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“I mean it’s funny because I gave it to him,” he says. “Just one of those free things I got somewhere. I didn’t think he’d use it.”
“When did you give it to him?”
“In November,” he says, without hesitation, looking at me. “He came down for my birthday.”
“Oh,” I say.
I imagine him driving those five hours, window down, heater on, music blaring.
“What did you guys do?” I ask.
Billy turns the pages. “Um just, you know, drove around. Went for a ride.”
“Went for a ride on what?”
He looks up from the page. “Motorcycles. I took him on the Million Dollar Highway.” His look dares me to be angry with him, and I know that I can’t. There’s no point. He rode a motorcycle. He lived.
“He must have loved that,” I say.
Billy’s eyes are glassy. “I did,” he says. He closes the calendar. “This doesn’t seem that hard of a thing to hand over.”
“Shy, I guess.”
“Or she had more to say,” Billy says.
She must be nervous to come up the stairs, especially with all of us here. I’d always dread this part of being a guest in the morning—the tentative yielding into the house’s normal traffic. She’s not a guest, I remind myself.
I get up to finish making us breakfast, sort of amused, sort of charmed by this situation: a girl who was connected to Cully. There’s a comfortable clamor in the room, the smell of bacon and coffee, as if we are just all normal people doing normal domestic things. I smile to myself thinking of Cully on a motorcycle, that stretch of road through mountain passes. He must have laughed out loud.
“Where did she sleep?” Billy asks.
“In his room,” I say.
“Really?” He rubs his jawline with his thumb.
“It was empty,” I say. “Why?”
He avoids my hard stare.
“No, nothing,” he says.
Why did I let her sleep there? he’s wondering and now I am too. Why not on the couch? At the time I didn’t even think about it and wonder if this is good—if it has become what I intended it to become, a spare room. I place strips of bacon in the simmering pan. I drank a lot last night but am experiencing a nice energy. My house is full.
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