by Marc Hess
“It’s the way my whole life’s been going.” She wasn’t digging for his sympathy. “A complete goddamn wreck.”
“Don’t you worry, Willow. I’ll take care of this. It will all work out.”
“You?” Willow pulled the vehicle registration from the sun visor and opened the door. “All of it?” Her eyes accused him of everything as she stepped out, her long Bavarian dress falling almost to the street.
Stepping carefully around the hissing radiator, the police officer with her clipboard came around to the hood of the truck, followed by the beach-hat lady. Besides the sunglasses, the beach hat lady had on way too much lipstick. “Oh. I am so, so very sorry about all of this.”
“All of this?” Willow handed her license and registration to the cop. “I ain’t got no insurance. Couldn’t afford none.”
“Oh!” The beach-hat lady seemed offended.
“That’s a ticketable offense in Texas,” the female cop said without looking up from her clipboard. “Are you the owner of this vehicle?”
“No. It’s my dad’s truck. Right here.” Willow gestured to Carel and, turning to him, “We never got around to changing the title, neither.”
My dad. Carel flushed for a moment—like he was embarrassed. Or proud. She still called him Dad. Everyone around him was fretting about the accident or chasing goats, and Carel stood amid the chaos, taken aback by the sudden surprise of fatherhood.
“I’m talking to you, sir.” The police officer brought him back from his moment of bliss. “I need to see your driver’s license.”
“Oh, yes, ma’am.” Carel whipped out his wallet and passed the card to her. “See here. The names are the same.”
A look of suspicion rolled out from under her visor.
“Look here. We’re both Geisches.”
No one got a ticket for the car accident, but Carel got one for uninsured vehicle and another for expired plates. With two pygmy goats wrangled up and the other run off, tow trucks were called to haul off the cars that were insured. Mrs. Lang drove off with her goats and some new dents, leaving Carel and Willow standing there together, so ironically mismatched but so typically old Fredericksburg—a pressed-jeans cowboy and the St. Pauli Girl.
“I’ll call Jock to fetch the truck. He’s just down the street here.”
“What? You think we got some farm stuff out here? He doesn’t have a tow truck.”
Carel was already dialing. “Yeah, but he’s a ranch boy.”
Sure enough, Jock Ritzi got there pretty quick, riding an old, well-worked John Deere tractor right down Main Street. The cops didn’t like having to deal with a slow-moving farm tractor while they were trying to get the traffic moving again, but with the help of Carel and Deputy Ortega, they winched the front wheels of the truck up against the tractor. Looking more like a broken parade float, their handiwork attracted a group of tourists who snapped photos.
“Hey, Jock,” Willow called out over the rumble of his tractor. “I’ll get you paid for this, but I can’t make it right now.”
“Ah, don’t worry about it. It’s the family rate.”
The old John Deere chugged off down the street, lugging the old truck behind, like some oversized worker ant heading back to its queen. It dragged its load around the corner, and the show was over.
Carel jerked his head. “Come on. I’ll give you a ride home.”
“It’s not far. I can walk.”
“Dressed like that? Everyone will stop you and expect you to fetch them a beer.”
Willow smiled at that. “Yeah. Okay. You got a point there.”
Carel held the door open and, gathering up her skirt, Willow climbed into the front seat. He wheeled out into the street, so incredibly aware of the mountains that stood between them. Nothing was said. No topic seemed safe.
Willow clung tightly to good manners, her eyes straight forward, fixed on nothing she hadn’t seen all her life—holding it all in.
Carel thought, And I did that to her.
Willow reached up to her head with both hands and shook her hair loose. Maybe so she wouldn’t seem so exposed to him. It took an effort not to stare at her. He choked on an urge to tell her how sorry he was, to explain his version of the story, but every word he thought of seemed false or insincere. The left turn onto Washington Street brought a knot into his stomach. What could he say?
The truck pulled up to the gate of the old Hilss farmstead.
“Just here is good.” She turned her eyes to him. “You just might get shot at, drivin’ up too close.”
He wanted to think that was a joke, but he couldn’t read her.
“Really,” she said with a smirk.
“Well, I’d deserve that.” He shrugged. “Listen. I know I’ve been awful in so many ways. There is so much I need to make up for. But the thing I botched up the most … The worst thing I ever did was not taking care of you.”
She cocked her head like a curious puppy, studying him. He didn’t know her well enough to read her feelings. She didn’t seem bitter.
“I did a lot of people wrong, and I think I can make amends for some of it. Your mother’s house, for instance.” He winced. “But with you, Willow, and all the … Well, I don’t know how to make that right. And I really want to. Somehow.”
A tiny smile betrayed the softer side of Willow. She reached out and lay a hand on his forearm. “I can only imagine how fucked up things are for you right now. But I just got my paycheck cashed, and there are some people waiting on this money.”
She jumped out of the truck, and Carel watched her tromp all the way to the front porch. She never looked back.
• • •
Max’s fingers were quivering as he reached for the gate latch at the Altdorf Biergarten. That surprised him. Nervous? He was simply dropping by to visit with his daughter again—at their habitual time, in the late afternoon heat. After their fair night epiphany, she would be eager to hear him out. Or maybe not.
He took his usual seat under the veil of the oak tree at the far end of Willow’s section and readied himself for the purpose of this visit. The one thing he could do, as a father, was spare her from the wad of family poison bundled up in—what did his father call it?—the “sin that transcends generations.” She would understand that it was not his fault. So why should he be apprehensive?
She took her sweet time getting to him. Abandoned with his thoughts, Max wondered if she was deliberately avoiding him. He was patient for a while, then annoyed with her. Finally it occurred to him that whatever she was doing may be something he deserved. Any other customer would have walked out.
Finally, she made her way to Max’s table, bringing him a tall stein of Spaten Optimator.
“Sorry about the wait. I just had to get some stuff out of the way so we could talk.” Willow scooped the skirt of her dirndl under her knees and took a seat in the chair next to him, close enough for a cozy chat but not so close that they would appear to whisper. “I’m on a break now.”
She was nothing but a puzzle to Max. Now he realized that he’d had it wrong. She wasn’t keeping her distance; she was allowing room for him.
“I thought you may want more of an explanation about the other night,” he began, getting right to his mission with an unfamiliar paternal tone in his voice. “At the fair, I mean. It must have been something of a revelation to you.”
“Nah.” Willow stopped him with a shake of her head. “It’s okay. Really. I’m cool with that.”
“Did you know?”
“No. Not exactly.” She shrugged and turned her soft eyes away from him. “Anyway, what does it matter now?”
Max let those words echo for a moment. “There’s a lot more to it. It goes way back to things that went down with your grandfather, my dad, and Carel’s Uncle Victor …”
He saw she was tuning out, glancing back at her tables and scanning the fence line for a distraction.
“It’s not just me and Carel,” he pressed on. “You need to know. It’s a trap that cou
ld come around and bite you, Willow.”
Her eyes came back to him, but she wasn’t buying into his sense of urgency. “It’s just a bunch of old stuff. I know what I’m doing. I’m going to be leaving all that here.”
“You taking off?”
“Yeah. I know you probably came back here to catch up with your long-lost daughter and all.” She changed courses on him again. “I wish I had more time with you. I really do. But it’s time for me to blow this town.”
The blend of sarcasm and sweetness in her tone tipped him off balance. “Well, good. I think that’s a good thing.” He forced an unconvincing chuckle and reached for his beer. “You’d probably expect that old Road Trip Ritzi would get behind that one.”
At the same time he toasted her decision to leave, he was desperately aware that this may be his only chance to spill the family beans. He groped for the words that would take this conversation back. She needs to know, right?
She leaned into him. “I’m gonna let it all stop here. I’m not taking any of this with me.”
Let it all stop here. He was beguiled. A little voice from way back in his head told him she was right, told him to just drop it. Just let her go. Did she really have to know?
What if the curse ended here?
“I got no problem with anything that went down way back when,” she was saying, “The problem I got is with my truck. It’s down at your brother’s shop right now.”
“Jock?”
She cracked at him for being so dopey. “Ya got any other brother I don’t know about?”
“You never know in the families around here.” He could see that she missed the irony in that remark.
He gulped down another mouthful and looked past Willow to a group of bikers coming into the beer garden, all decked out in leather even in the summer heat. Here, he realized, was where he could actually slip the grip of his father. He could put an absolute end to “the sin that transcends generations.” He could reduce his old man to irrelevance just by keeping his own mouth shut. Could it really be that simple?
Willow’s eyes bounced from thought to word as she spieled on about some tourist who had pulled out in front of her truck and how embarrassing that was. “I was, like, standing out in the middle of Main Street in this friggin’ Halloween costume,” she grumbled. That was when she saw it, she told him: She was going to either be penned up like Mrs. Lang’s goats back there, or run off like that other one. “The one that got away,” she explained.
Max watched her passions flow, although he wasn’t quite following her story. He sipped on his Optimator and let the truths and sins that he had carried in with him slip into the dark crevices of his pocket, where they could be forgotten. Those nasty secrets could die right here.
In that same pocket, he found his car keys. “Well, if you’re really getting out, take my car.”
“What?”
“The Challenger. It suits you. You’ll like it. Just get out there and get after things.”
“Me, in your precious hot rod?” she taunted him. “You’re shitting me.”
He twisted the car key off his key ring. “Yeah. Look at it as your inheritance. It’s the least I can do.” He sat back and basked in the radiance of her grin. “You can take my place. Be the new Road Trip.”
“What will you drive?”
“Aw, I’m back home now.” He gave her a wry smile. “No one’s going to take me seriously until I get a truck.”
• • •
“They say they’ll be more than happy to take me on at Crossing Creek Realty, so long as I bring along my listings.” Cora Lynn was back and forth between the kitchen blender and the outside patio. She didn’t stop talking when the door shut behind her.
Carel stood in the sun without a hat, watching heat waves shimmering off the town below, basking in an odd stillness. He didn’t turn his head when his wife buzzed back onto the patio.
“Of course, the problem is that we had to give up them listing agreements to the bank. But if I got myself registered under another brokerage, I could still get the seller’s side of the commission. Did I leave that paring knife out here? You know, the cute one we use for slicing up limes. I don’t see it anywhere.” And she was through the door again, her voice lost in the whir of the blender.
The pastures below were burnt and yellow. The sun ricocheted off the tin roof of the old Hilss farmstead, stinging Carel’s eyes. He was remembering the summers he spent in that house before air-conditioning, when Cora Lynn walked into his daydream with a couple of salt-rimmed margarita glasses.
“It’s too hot to be out here, sugar boots.” She passed one to him. “Let’s go inside.”
He had come home early that afternoon to drop the latest bombshell on her. But now, with her there, passing him a margarita glass, he could only say, “It’s August, darlin’. It’s supposed to be like this.” Maybe this was not the right time to tell her.
She started talking about a hair appointment she had coming up, and how she might come home with a different look. “Just warning you ahead of time. You know how you hate surprises.” She lured him over to sit at the shaded table that was just a tad cooler than standing out at the balcony rail.
Surprises? There would be no better time. When he found a gap in her words, Carel blurted, “I saw Vader and a bunch of his lawyers this afternoon.”
“Did you show him your better manners this time?” She wrapped her words around a cute little smile.
Her wit charmed him, and he regretted opening this door, but still … “Yes, I did,” he said with an artful chuckle.
“Well, did you get better results by behaving yourself?”
“As a matter of fact, I did.” He nodded with a closed-lip grin. “I worked a pretty clever deal.”
A hopeful Cora Lynn smiled for him to continue.
“I gave them this house in an even-steven exchange for the note on the Hilss place down there.”
He watched her expression melt. “You don’t mean Mari’s place? We’re not going to move down there.”
“No. It’s still Mari’s. Willow’s too, I guess. Now it’s just”—he reached for the legal term—“unencumbered.”
Cora Lynn stared at him like a stunned mullet.
He leaned toward her. “It was the right thing to do, darlin’. Her family’s had that place since this town first started. To hand that farmstead over to a bunch of auslanders would be … well, a blow against the family traditions of this town.”
“And you’re givin’ up our house for that?” She started to rise out of her chair. “Did you put any thought into what we’d be doing? Did you think at all of talkin’ to me about it?”
He stared hard at her. “You would have argued me out of it. It didn’t require your signature. I owned it before—”
“Well you gotta get it back.” Cora Lynn sat back down. “You have to undo this, Carel.”
“Already got it signed, notarized, and sealed. It’s done.”
“God!” Cora Lynn shook her head and her hands like she was casting off evil spirits. “I raised my boys in this house!”
“I did think about you.” His voice was thick with calm deliberation. “I thought about how you would feel if I’d gone and done something like that to you.”
“You didn’t do it to me. I don’t care about your ex-wife!” Cora Lynn shot to her feet. “You’re married to me now. And when you go and do stupid things like this … Well, we’re both screwed. Damn it, Carel!”
“I didn’t think you would want to be married to a man that could just take some property he didn’t really own, someone who could go so far as to put a family out of their home. I didn’t think you’d want to be married to someone like that, darlin’.”
“Oh, don’t you darlin’ me.”
He held her with a firm look. “And I don’t want to be somebody like that.”
She broke away from his gaze. “Was it Willow? Did she talk you into this? That little Jezebel is just working you!”
Carel flinched at that jab. He sipped at his margarita. “Willow doesn’t even know.”
Cora Lynn fumed across the patio, pulled open the kitchen door, and shot him a deadly stare. “I can get me a job with Crossing Creek Realty and find my own place to live. But I don’t know what you’re gonna do.” The door swung closed behind her.
Carel stared at his unfinished margarita, thinking that there might have been a better way to go about that. But … what the hell. I got it done. He just hoped that she wasn’t going downstairs to get one of his guns.
The door flew open a moment later, and Cora Lynn stepped out, unarmed. “You better go and make up a list of whatever we got left, mister. ’Cause you and me gonna be splittin’ it right down the middle. Texas is a common-law marriage state.”
Bam! The door slammed hard this time.
• • •
Then Carel had his sister to contend with. On the phone, Jeanie told Carel that she and her daughter were heading back to Austin. “Join us at Lincoln Street,” she urged. “You can say good-bye to your niece and share a parting glass with me.”
“Sure.” His voice was amenable but not enthusiastic. “I’d like to see you all off, but I won’t be able to contribute any juicy gossip about my wife walking out on me.” He immediately realized those words were unfair to Cora Lynn. “I just don’t have any answers.”
“Why, big brother, do you think I’d be fishing for gossip?”
“Because it’s you. And because there is wine involved.”
“It’s where we live. There’s always wine involved.”
“Just don’t go away blaming everything on her.”
“Oh. I never assumed it was her. I grew up with you, remember?”
Thea and Gerdie were sitting with his sister under the arbors at Lincoln Street when Carel walked in. That pissed him off. He was hoping for some one-on-one time with Jeanie, not a public dissection of his recent woes. His disappointment was quickly disguised when his niece ran to him, hugging her cheek against his thigh and squealing, “Uncle Carel! Uncle Carel! Mommy’s friend gave me a new kitten for going away.”
The kitten was a knit sock that fit over her hand and had buttons for eyes. Carel knelt to Caitlin, tugged on the puppet’s ears, and cooed with the child while shooting disparaging glances at his sister. For their part, the klatch of magpies smiled approvingly from behind their wine glasses at the uncle-niece playtime, without so much as a change in the pitch of their mile-a-minute chitchat.