“Thought you’d come by the café for dinner.” Jane sank into the old couch where the contours of her butt were clearly imprinted.
“Wasn’t hungry.” Grace’s lips barely parted; her head didn’t move. “I’m going to Seattle.”
“So you say.” Jane had heard this before.
“No, I mean it this time.” Grace sat up and pushed her chair back, the legs scraping on the linoleum. “Moving on Saturday.”
“’Bout time you figured it out.” Jane closed her eyes and propped her feet on the coffee table. “What have I been telling you? This place is dying. You need to get away. Hell, I need to get away.” And Grace knew it was true.
Since the moment she’d learned about Warren’s accident, Jane’s hatred of logging had consumed her. Nearly every day she had some sort of confrontation with one of the men she’d known all her life, men who had treated her like their own sister, men she’d gone through school with, even men she’d slept with. At first, they gave her room, ignored her verbal slaps in their faces. They knew how close she’d been to her brother. Hell, they felt his loss like a deep wound themselves. But time didn’t seem to be mellowing Jane’s rage.
Clett Tolfson, Shauna’s dad, had confronted Grace one evening when she’d stopped by to see Shauna. “You tell your aunt she can’t hope to make it without no loggers, Parrot. That’s bullshit she’s spouting. She needs to shut up or folks are going to forget who she is.” This wasn’t a surprise, but it stung just the same. She knew her aunt wouldn’t care, but Grace never passed the message along.
“Hey, wait. I’ve got something I’ve been saving for you.” Jane roused herself from the couch and began rummaging through the drawers in the kitchen. Grace felt a sudden chill.
“I think I’d had a one too many beers when I wrote this, but hey. Here it is.” Triumphantly, she pulled a sheet of crumpled paper from the back of the junk drawer. “Your recommendation.”
Grace felt her shoulders drop and realized she’d been holding her breath. How ridiculous. Annie’d been gone fourteen years. If her mom had left something for her, Grace would have found it long ago. And Warren had had little that wasn’t already his daughter’s. Anyway, Jane didn’t have a sentimental bone in her body; she would never have kept something of Annie’s all these years. What had she been thinking?
“You wrote me a recommendation? When?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I was just playing around. Dreaming of the day we—by that I mean you—would move on.” Jane handed Grace the paper and picked up a pack of cigarettes from the counter.
Grace A. Tillman has worked as a waitress and sous chef at the Hoot Owl Café in Prosperity, Washington, for __ years. This café is a venerable institution in the Cascade Mountains where connoisseurs of true American cuisine come from miles around for a fine meal. Grace has long been an essential part of the ambiance that makes the Hoot Owl an exceptional dining experience. Customers have regularly commented to the management that while they enjoy the food, it is Grace’s inviting and courteous manner that brings them back. Any establishment where Grace works will be enriched by her presence.
Hire the girl. You won’t be sorry!
“Jane! I never realized you knew so many big words. And you even used my proper name!” Grace laughed. “I especially like the last line. That’s sure to get me a good job!”
“Like I said, I think I’d had a bit to drink that night.” Jane grinned. “I left the number of years blank—I was hoping it wouldn’t be more than five. But the rest is all true, isn’t it? I especially like the ‘venerable institution in the Cascade Mountains.’” She made quote marks in the air with the first two fingers of each hand and raised her nose to point toward the ceiling. “We serve ‘true American cuisine,’ don’t we?”
She opened the refrigerator and pulled out two bottles of beer, handing one to Grace and with a heavy finality plopped herself into the chair opposite her niece. “Anyway, we did. I think we should drink to the damn Hoot Owl.” She twisted off the beer cap and raised her bottle. “It’s the end of an era. All wrapping up neat and tidy. I’m finally getting out of here and so are you. The Hoot Owl can just die a natural death. No tears for that one.”
Grace stared at her aunt. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out.
“You OK?” Jane leaned across the table and looked closely into Grace’s face. “Honestly, this can’t be that big a surprise to you.”
“I know. But if you go, and the Hoot Owl closes, what can I ever come home to?” Grace immediately regretted having let this slip out—it was too raw, too real. Too honest.
Jane leaned back in her chair and took a long swig from her beer. “Oh, hell, Parrot. This whole town is your home, your family. You know any time you show up, they’ll throw a party. Not like me. Once I leave, they’re going to seal up the entrance. They’ll be so glad to see me gone, it’ll be a town holiday. And, believe me, I ain’t ever coming back. And, you might as well know, Sherrie Thomas is getting evicted from her house and that woman needs a break. Since there’s no way I’m going to sell this place, she’s going to move into your room as soon as you leave. I don’t know, maybe she’ll want to take on the café. But I doubt it. Once I get my shit together, though, I’m out of here and I’m renting this whole place to her.”
So that was it. Grace was about to cross a threshold and once she was on the other side of it nothing would be the same. Ever. It was time to grow up. A twinge of panic raced through her.
“Wow.” Grace walked into the kitchen and stared out the window into the trees.
“Come on, kid. Let’s celebrate!” Jane called to her.
Grace turned back to her aunt and drank a deep swallow of her beer.
“Here’s to Seattle!” Jane shouted.
“Bye, Momma. I’m sorry,” Grace whispered to herself.
***
Grace woke early on Saturday. Her friends wouldn’t be by to pick her up till noon. If Shauna had her way, they’d all be up, packed, and on the road by dawn. But Jenn, who slept fitfully, was not a morning person. The three friends had long ago reached a compromise that was uncomfortable for all of them but allowed them to be a trio—Shauna and Grace would wait, Jenn would hurry, and everyone would complain. This friendship may have looked odd from the outside, but without it none of them would have made it through high school.
Both Shauna and Grace had had serious boyfriends who had threatened to tug apart this feminine connection, but the three had forged a bond as children and annealed it in early adolescence through the fires of family tragedies and limited options.
Jane was already at the café. The hollowness of the house made Grace restless. She needed to walk. She grabbed her daypack, always filled with a sketchbook and pencils, and went to take a last inventory of her hometown.
Folks moved away from Prosperity with some regularity, but newcomers rarely moved in. Houses, even empty ones, became stand-ins for the families whose lives unscrolled within them: the Nybergs; the Parkers; Mrs. Sammy and George; Paul and Fiona; Mary and the Kevins, senior and junior; Doc Janson.
When the Nybergs left, Mel Parker and his wife, Casey, tried to keep both their houses up for a while. “Can’t let the whole street fall to ruin or none of us will ever be able to sell,” Casey grumbled when Grace saw her mowing the Nybergs’ lawn. But that didn’t last long.
“It’s hard enough keeping the forest from taking back your own yard,” Mel had told Jane as he sat drinking coffee in the café and staring out at the gray mist.
George Sammy had to put his mother into a rest home down in Cooper when she started swearing at him and refusing to eat. He’d never been much for home maintenance and once his mom was gone, he didn’t bother at all. The motorcycle he’d won in a poker game still leaned against the side of the house, its seat green with moss and blackberry vines winding through the spokes.
Doc Janson, who wasn’t a real doctor but had trained as a medic in the war and could set your arm if you broke it in the woods, spent
his time making chain-saw statues of bears and eagles. Not the artfully carved totems of the Makah or Tlingit—coastal Northwest Indians who used hand tools to carve myths from sacred cedar. Doc Janson yanked his Husqvarna into action and tried to make something out of the stub ends of trees he cut for Jackson. These splintered caricatures crowded his yard—the wilderness viewed through a fun-house mirror.
As she passed each house, Grace rehearsed this litany of the neighborhood. Taking much greater care than she had with her clothes, Grace gathered these belongings, these scraps of memory from each of the homes she knew so well and stuffed them down in the bottom of her bags. You never knew when you might need the comfort of George Sammy’s rusted bike to get you through the strangeness of the city.
The trail climbed steeply through Jake Oliver’s woods. After half a mile, it leveled for a stretch that ran snug along the side of a granite boulder, a giant piece of Ice Age litter. This was where she had felt the pain of her father’s death settle deep inside her; the day after the funeral she and Jane had sat here together, each leaning against this cold stone, as they began to face life without Warren. This was where Grace had recognized the depth of the sibling bond between her father and her aunt.
In the fog of her grief, Jane had told Grace the rambling story of how, as a six-year-old, Jane had wandered alone into the thick dampness of this same forest. A curious child, Jane loved all those small, scurrying things—the chipmunks and mice, spiders and garter snakes, and especially the rummaging birds jabbering in the brown cedar bows that carpeted the floor of the woods.
It was a day like so many in her childhood, neither parent watching over her as she wandered among the trees. Creatures were twittering and scratching and Jane followed the chit-chit of one bird—the insistent, irritated, raspy one—that seemed to have something to tell her. She followed as it darted among the fallen leaves and detritus. The sun sparkled off bare branches. She moved deep into the shadows before she started to feel cold, before she realized she was lost.
It was Warren, her big brother —only seven at the time—who missed her. And it was Warren, her hero, who tracked her childish whimpers into the darkening forest, and it was Warren, her only real guardian, who led her back home. No one registered her absence until he was gone too. Their mother lay in bed as always, calling for them.
“Daddy was in his usual drunken stupor, and when he couldn’t find either one of us, he started in on Mom; he didn’t need much of an excuse. By the time we crawled out from the trees, Dad’s yelling and beating on Mom had roused the neighborhood and there were a lot of folks standing around calling our names.”
As the Jane and Grace sat leaning against the boulder that day, Jane talked on and on about Warren. Grace had been a willing receptacle for her aunt’s memories, yearning as she always had for pieces to the puzzle of her family.
“Your daddy should never have gone to Vietnam. He wasn’t cut out for it and it changed him. Sure, he was tough, star of the football team and a logger, all that. But if anyone had encouraged him, he could have been a doctor or something.
“When I was a kid, I’d get carsick at the drop of a hat. Warren kept a handkerchief and a jar of water in the backseat of that old car we had. Our daddy would insist on driving us down the mountain on some drunken adventure and Warren would sit next to me, holding my hand. When I started to feel sick, he’d wet the handkerchief and put it on my forehead. Daddy wouldn’t even stop the car.”
“What happened to him in Vietnam?” Their shared grief made Grace bold. If she could keep Jane talking, maybe she’d finally learn why her father never spoke about Annie.
“Oh, same thing that happened to all those poor jerks who went over there. None of them should have gone. At least he came back in one piece. We were all grateful for that. And now, after all that, I just can’t believe it was a goddamned tree that took him.” Jane began to sob then, and the opening Grace had sensed slid closed on the flood of her aunt’s tears.
Now, as Grace lowered herself to sit beneath the firs next to the boulder, she took her sketch pad from her back and began to draw. Over the next hour Grace filled the paper with a scattering of images: George Sammy’s motorcycle, the trees around her, the boulder, but also a hand—rugged and strong, hinting of violence—and a small female figure with long flowing hair that covered her face.
***
When she got back to the house it was almost noon. Shauna’s old pickup pulled up in front just as Grace opened the door. Shauna shouted to her from the cab, “There’s some room near the tailgate. Throw your stuff back there. You said you didn’t have much, so we took you at your word.”
Jenn laughed and jumped out of the truck. “Don’t listen to her. There’s plenty of room. Give me that.” Jenn, looking awkward in her thin-heeled sandals and sheer yellow dress, ran up the steps to grab a bag from Grace. “Can you believe it? We’re finally getting the hell out of here.”
Jenn swung Grace’s bag up into the truck bed, betraying her attempt to look delicate and girly. Of the three of them, Jenn may have had the greatest need to get out of Prosperity. Confrontations with her alcoholic father had grown increasingly violent in the months since Warren’s death. The two men had served together in Vietnam and Grace’s dad had been the only one in town who could calm Glen Huff down when he was on a tear. Grace was afraid for Jenn and had more than once thought she’d rather have lost her father than have to endure what Jenn was faced with.
“Hold on just a sec,” Grace called to her friends. “I need to say goodbye to Jane.” At that moment, her aunt came out of the front door looking stricken, her face flushed. “Parrot, Rose is on the phone for you.”
“What is it? I told her I’d call as soon as we got settled.” Grace looked over her shoulder at her friends. “I just wanted to give you a hug, Jane. We’ve gotta go.”
“I know. But you need to take this call. I’m sorry. It’s important.” Jane sighed. Her words came out heavy with disappointment. For a moment Grace stared at her aunt, bewildered.
“Oh no!” Grace’s heart began to thud with dread. She took the two porch stairs in a single leap and dashed into the kitchen.
“Girls,” Jane continued down the walkway toward the truck. “I’m afraid she won’t be going with you, at least not today.” She reached into the truck bed and pulled out Grace’s bag.
Inside the house Grace stood holding the phone to her ear, her forehead pressed against the kitchen wall.
“He did what? Oh, Rose, I can’t believe it. I’ll be right there. I’m coming right now.” She hung up the phone.
Jackson Dyer was dead.
Grace was bent over, a withering powerlessness engulfing her, when Shauna and Jenn came into the kitchen.
“Oh, my god. Jackson’s dead? Shit. My folks are going to go nuts. This whole town is.” Shauna grabbed Grace by the shoulders. “I know you loved him, but we can’t let this stop us, Parrot. We can come back for the funeral, but we have to go now or we’ll lose our place.”
“Look,” Jenn’s words poured out in a panicked rush. “If Jackson is dead, we really need to get out of here before the shit hits the fan. This town is dead for sure now.”
Grace shook her head. “I can’t. Rose needs me.” Tears were running down her face now. “Dammit,” she whispered.
Shauna grunted. “Listen to me, Parrot. Rose a great lady, but you can’t let this stop you from leaving. If you have to stay right now, stay until the funeral. We’ll be back for that and we’ll take you with us when we go back to the city. The next day. You hear me? Your room will be waiting.” She bent down and pressed her forehead against Grace’s. Then the three young women threw their arms around each other and hugged. Grace closed her eyes and tried to soak in the energy from her friends. She was going to need it.
Jenn broke away first.
“I’m so sorry, Parrot.” Then she looked at Shauna. “We gotta go. My dad is going to use this as an excuse to stop me from going, I just know it. I can’t stay.
”
“Yes. Go. I’ll see you at the funeral.”
Jane stood away from the group. At her feet were her niece’s belongings. “Let’s go,” she said. “Rose is up there by herself.”
Grace nodded, turned away from her friends. She grabbed her bags and threw them in the bedroom. “Yeah. Let’s go.”
***
When Grace and Jane arrived at Rose’s house, they found her sitting on a stone bench at the back of the garden where an apple tree’s newly sprouted leaves held individual drops of the previous night’s rain suspended, like tears unwilling to fall. Rose stared into those leaves, weariness coloring her face. Jane put her hand on Rose’s shoulder. “I’m going in the house and clean things up, Rose. Parrot’ll stay with you.” Grace wrapped her arm around Rose and let her own tears flow. Rose held out her open palm to collect the droplets as a breeze passed through the branches of the tree.
“We planted this tree the spring after Jake died.” She spoke without lifting her head. “Jackson loved its apples. Always said they were little Jake’s gifts to us.” She sat up straighter and turned to face Grace. “He refused to go through the pain, the slow dying. He didn’t want me to have to watch that. There was nothing I could say.”
Grace nodded silently. Everyone knew once Jackson had decided on a course of action, no one could talk him out of it. Rose sighed. “If he hadn’t been so worried about the mill and all that, maybe he would have hung on. He kept up a good front, but he lost faith in himself.”
Rose’s words were inflected with doubt and confusion. “‘Let the young guys figure it out,’ he said. When I heard that, I knew he was done.”
The two women sat silently until the stone’s chill worked its way into their bones. “How did he…?” Grace asked, as they stood and headed back to the house.
“Oh, I should have known he wasn’t taking those pain pills the doc kept prescribing. He never took pills, not even an aspirin. I just fooled myself. He must have stored them up somewhere.” The exasperation in Rose’s voice was heartening to Grace. “I hate to think about telling people.”
What We Take For Truth Page 4