“Maybe he needs support, not saving.”
“There have to be laws against throwing a dying man out.”
“You can’t fix everything.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s not our job to save the people we love, Elliot. It’s our job to love them through whatever it is they’re going through. Maybe he just needs someone to be with him while he makes this final transition. It can’t be easy alone.”
“Maybe you’re right. But I didn’t say I loved him.”
“You didn’t have to say that either. It’s obvious that you do. And who could blame you? I haven’t even met him and I already love this guy.”
“Would you like to?”
“Like to what?”
“Meet him.”
She looked down into her empty mug. “Would you like me to meet him?”
“I told him I’d come out this weekend, but to tell you the truth, I’d rather not go alone.”
She looked back up at me and smiled. “Then I’d love to meet him.”
The drive seemed longer than usual, even though I’d done it now several times. Estrella sat beside me, watching the trees get lashed by high winds that sent the last of their golden leaves whirling across the highway in gusty dervishes that seemed to dance all the faster as we blew past.
I cracked the window and lit a cigarette.
“I didn’t know you smoked,” Estrella said.
I blew a lungful at the cracked window and watched it get sucked out into the gray morning. “I don’t.”
“I don’t either,” she said. “Can I have one?”
I handed her the pack.
She lit a cigarette and inhaled, immediately coughing out the smoke and waving her hand in front of her face to fan it away. She tossed the cigarette out the window.
“Guess you weren’t kidding,” I said.
“I haven’t smoked since trying it in high school. It’s just as bad as I remember. And you shouldn’t smoke either.”
She reached and snatched the cigarette from my mouth midpuff and tossed it out her window too. Then she crossed her arms and looked at me to see if I’d protest. I wanted to appear upset, but I couldn’t help but smile.
“I’m not really a smoker either,” I confessed. “I only bought them the other day. I’m not sure why. I was walking past the 7-Eleven and saw a group of friends smoking together. They looked like they were having fun.”
“It’s 2014,” she said, “people should know better.”
“It’s been a rough week for me at the office.”
“Why’s that?” she asked.
“I don’t know. My head just isn’t in it. I went on just three sits and I left every one of them without a deal. Two I told to apply for mortgage modifications, the other I told to sell their house themselves since they seemed to have equity.”
She looked at me, confused. “What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing,” I answered, “as long as you don’t mind going without a paycheck. You may not know this, but I’m very good at my job. Or at least I used to be.”
“Did you ever think maybe you’re just worried about all this stuff with Mr. Hadley?”
I was beginning to notice that she had a way of always cutting right through the crap. I liked that. For a guy like me it was important. I could bullshit myself for days before I’d stand up and face something.
“I feel like I’m going to a funeral,” I finally said.
“Me too,” she answered. “But let’s make the best of it. I’m looking forward to meeting him.”
He opened the door to greet us even before we got out of the car. He was wearing his corduroy pants and knitted sweater, the same ones he’d had on the first day I’d arrived.
“He doesn’t look too bad,” Estrella said, eyeing him out her window before opening her car door.
“He puts on a good show,” I said.
And I was right too. His cane was nowhere to be seen as he welcomed us in like old friends. He hugged Estrella, winking at me over her shoulder to let me know that he approved.
“Elliot told me you were as smart as paint, but he said nothing about you being as gorgeous as a spring day too.”
I closed the door behind myself. “That’s because I’m an enlightened twenty-first-century man who doesn’t objectify women, Mr. Hadley. So enlightened in fact that I would never use a saying like ‘smart as paint.’ ”
He laughed. “If it was good enough for old Captain Silver, it’s good enough for me.”
Estrella smiled at his literary reference. “Never mind Elliot, Mr. Hadley,” she said, “I rather like being complimented by men. Although let’s hope your stories and motives are truer than the old one-legged sea captain’s were.”
“Ah,” he said, “I see you’ve read Stevenson.”
“Of course. He’s one of my favorites.”
Then Mr. Hadley reached out his arm in a theatrical pose and recited a line of poetry: “Under the wide and starry sky, / Dig the grave and let me lie: / Glad did I live and gladly die, / And I laid me down with a will.”
Not to be outdone, Estrella finished it: “This be the verse you ’grave for me: / Here he lies where he long’d to be; / Home is the sailor, home from sea, / And the hunter home from the hill.”
And just like that, they had hit it off. So much so I could hardly pry them apart for the next two hours.
Mr. Hadley gave her the tour, showing her the carousel rooster in the living room, the paintings in the kitchen, June’s studio with its view of the creek. He even made sure to show her the bathroom, pointing out his pink-padded toilet seat. She commented on his sweater and he blushed, telling her that June had knitted it for him. Then Estrella told him about her mother’s quilting and about her fond memories of knitted scarves for Christmas.
“Oh, June loved Christmas too,” Mr. Hadley said.
“Show her the wedding picture,” I suggested.
So he did, along with the matador costume in the closet. Estrella wanted to see more pictures of June, so the three of us sat down together on the couch and looked through his photo albums. It was like picking up where Mr. Hadley had left the story off and getting current with the rest of their lives together at Echo Glen.
There were lots of photos of June, mostly around the farm with her animals, and in each one her spirit leaped off the page as if she were there in the room with us, not only alive, but more so than any of us three would ever be. And as her physical condition deteriorated in the pictures over the years, this look of wonder never left her eyes. There was a great image of her and David dressed up in 1920s formalwear while floating down the river on inner tubes. David held an umbrella over them to shade them from the sun while June dangled her feet into the water and sipped a can of old Rainier Beer. Her timeless smile haunts me still. Later, there were photos of June in her wheelchair, painting.
Estrella asked about a photo of June reading to a child in a hospital bed. Mr. Hadley told us that as her condition worsened it was harder for her to spend as much time caring for animals—being largely confined to the wheelchair—so as they wound the animal shelter down, she took up visiting the Everett hospital and reading to children in the cancer ward. She always read them the same book, he informed us: Peter Pan. He suspected this was both because she loved the story so much and because it was the one book she had completely memorized and could recite word for word even as her ability to read was slowly stripped away by the advance of her disease. He would later read it to her himself, he told us, after her voice had finally gone, leaving behind only the smile that never seemed to fully disappear from her eyes. In fact, the last image in the album was a photo taken by someone else of her lying on the daybed in her studio, looking longingly out the window at the path that led to Echo Glen. David slept in the chair beside her with a copy of Peter Pan on his lap.
; He lingered on this photo before closing the album, his fingers gently resting on the page as if he might be able to reach into the past and touch her once again. I saw tears well up in his eyes, but I couldn’t tell if he or Estrella saw mine.
“She was a magical woman,” he said, almost to himself. “A magical woman indeed.” He closed the album and looked up at us. “She loved this life right up to the very end, but she had no fear about leaving it behind. She thought it all one big adventure. I buried her with that book so she’d have Peter and Wendy to keep her company until I could join her. You know, Elliot, I ended the story where I did because I wanted my life here with June to remain private. But the truth is she was such a mighty spirit no one person could ever hope to keep her to himself. And it would be a crime to try anyway.
“I’ll never forget the afternoon I came home early from an accounting job I’d taken in Marysville—finally deciding Seattle was just too far to drive—only to find her in the stables frozen in a corner. She couldn’t move a muscle and had been there most of the day. I knew she had been downplaying her symptoms to spare me worry, but I had no idea how much. I carried her to our bed, crying the whole time. ‘Why her?’ I asked, begging God to answer me. ‘Of everyone in the world, why her, why her, why her?’ You know what she told me later that night when she finally came around? She looked at me and smiled, asking, ‘Why not me?’ That was my June.”
When Mr. Hadley finally closed the album, there wasn’t a dry eye between us. But we were all smiling despite our tears. Then he took up a binder that he had brought out with the albums from his room. At first, I thought it was another photo album, but it wasn’t.
“Now I have some things for you to sign, Elliot,” he said, pulling out several documents and handing them to me.
There was an article making me the trustee of Mr. Hadley’s living trust, and another making me an officer and stockholder in the Echo Glen Corporation.
“Don’t get too excited,” he said. “There’s no real money in the company or the trust. You won’t get business cards either. This is the entity that will own the private cemetery. It’s just a formality. A bothersome bit of red tape that will allow you to file for the cemetery license after I’m gone.”
I don’t know why I hesitated, but I did. Seeing my name on official documents made me nervous. Not because of the responsibility so much—I’d handled similar arrangements when my father had passed—but because it implied that Mr. Hadley would not be around to fill the role himself.
“I still plan to pay you that twenty-five thousand I offered you from my life insurance,” he said, apparently sensing my hesitation. “No one should do anything for free.”
I shook my head. “I’m not taking your money, Mr. Hadley. I’m happy to do it.” I picked up the pen, filled in my address, dated the documents, and signed them. “There,” I said, passing them back, “now I’m the proud owner of a cemetery.”
I glanced over at Estrella and she smiled.
Mr. Hadley put the forms back in the binder.
“The rest of this in here is stuff you might need after I’m gone,” he said, patting the binder in his lap. Then he paused, looking at Estrella. “Is this okay to discuss?” he asked.
“Go ahead,” she said. “It’s fine with me.”
He carried on: “My birth certificate. My will. Insurance policy information. There are bank statements, as sad as they are. And there’s contact information for the home burial people who will prepare my body here at the house. I put Mr. Thorpe’s son’s contact info in the back. He’ll dig the grave. Make sure he doesn’t try to bring that digger up there and ruin the whole hill. He’s lazier than his dad was but he’s a good man. Just ask him to dig it by hand.”
It seemed strange to hear him talk about having his own grave dug, but if it was at all strange to him he didn’t let on.
“That should be everything,” he said. “Everything except the death certificate.” Then he turned to Estrella. “I used to be an accountant, you know.”
She smiled. “Yes, Elliot told me.”
“I do have one question,” I said. “Let’s say thirty years from now I pass away—”
“Thirty years?” he asked, cutting me off. “More like ninety years the way medical science is moving.”
“Okay, sure. But in however many years, when I pass, who will be responsible for the cemetery?”
“Be a fun project maybe for your grandkids,” he answered.
“What if I don’t have any kids?”
“You’ll have kids,” he said. “I can tell.”
“You can?”
“Well, no. But I can tell you’d be a good dad.”
“Really? I’ve never thought about it.”
“Most men don’t until it happens,” he said. “But yes, you would. Don’t you think so, Estrella?”
She nodded. “He’d make a great dad.”
“You’re lucky I’m a married man, Elliot, or I might just try to steal this one away from you. She’s a keeper.” He closed the binder in his lap. “But there’s nothing to worry about with the cemetery. June and I will be pushing up grass on the hill, blanketed in waterfall mist and fallen leaves. Forgotten to the world, as it should be. This is all just a formality to get them to issue a license, and then you can forget about us and let us be.”
We all sat quiet for a minute, the weight of what we had just been discussing settling in. I could hear the cat clock ticking on the wall. It was past noon already.
“You know what I would love?” Estrella said. “A chance to see Echo Glen. Elliot showed me the painting you gave him and it looks so beautiful.”
“That’s a great idea,” Mr. Hadley said. Then he turned to me. “Would you mind taking her, Elliot? I’ve already been. And besides, I could use the time to make us all some lunch.”
I knew it had sapped a lot out of him to go through the photo album and the documents, and I’m sure he had been worn out even before we started after showing us around the house. But I think he mostly didn’t want Estrella to see him struggling up the path with his cane. He was a sweet man, but he was a proud man too.
“I’d be happy to walk her up and show her,” I said. “But I thought maybe we’d all go out to lunch. I can drive us. There’s a great little diner I passed by just in Darrington.”
He looked surprised at my suggestion, and I thought for sure he would turn it down. But he nodded.
“That’s Clancy’s old place, before he passed on and his lazy kids sold it off to some clown. I’ve not been, but I doubt they have anything nearly as good as a Hungry-Man Salisbury steak dinner with home-style mushroom and onion gravy. But I’ll go along if that’s what you two want.”
“How about you, Estrella? Diner or Hungry-Man?”
“Hmm . . . ,” she said, thinking. “I kind of feel like pie.”
Mr. Hadley raised an eyebrow. “The Hungry-Man includes a chocolate brownie.”
“As tempting as it is,” she said, “I vote for the diner.”
He nodded, accepting his defeat. Then he plucked up his energy and rose from the couch to return the photo album and the binder to his room.
“You kids have fun. I’ll be waiting when you get back.”
It was the first time we’d held hands, although I’m not sure which of us made the move. It just seemed like halfway up the path our hands kind of came together. The wind had died down and the sun was peeking through the trees. It felt nice, even though it was a chilly fall day.
“I really like Mr. Hadley,” Estrella said.
“Yeah, I could tell. It’s pretty clear he really likes you too. And you know what, so do I.”
“Uh-oh,” she said. “Is that why you just let go of my hand? Because you only date girls you don’t like, remember?”
“No, I let go of your hand so I could get a head start.”
“A
head start on what?”
“On racing you the rest of the way.”
I took off running ahead of her up the path.
“Hey!” I heard her call from behind me, closing in. “That’s not fair. You cheated.”
She was faster than me and had passed me by before we gained the bend that turned in to Echo Glen. When I arrived she was standing there looking up at the waterfall.
“It’s so beautiful,” she said breathlessly. “I can see why a person would want to spend forever here.”
“Come on, I’ll show you where June’s buried.”
We climbed the low hill to the oak tree and stood looking down at the headstone together. Estrella read it out loud.
“ ‘Just beyond the second star to the right and straight on till morning.’ It’s from Peter Pan, isn’t it?”
I nodded. “I’m not surprised it was her favorite story. She kind of reminds me of Peter Pan a little. I wish she were still around to sprinkle some of her fairy dust on us. Wouldn’t it be fun to fly the way she did?”
“Well, let’s hope she’s in Neverland never growing old.”
I pointed to the space beside the stone. “I guess that’s where Mr. Hadley will be buried. It’s strange to think about, isn’t it? That he’s here now, but soon he’ll be down there. It seems cold and lonely and impossibly horrible.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe you’re looking at it wrong. It looked to me like they had great love and a great life, and that’s more than most people ever have. Besides, I’ll bet it’s nice here when the sun comes out and warms the grass.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But I still plan to talk him into waiting. I met with a real estate attorney and she thinks it might be possible to force the bank to accept a deed-for-lease situation, as long as he can make the original mortgage payment. That way he can stay as long as he needs.”
“But I thought he couldn’t afford the payment.”
“He can’t. But I can. At least long enough to give him some time. I’ve been saving for awhile.”
“Yeah, but that’s for your condo, right?”
Falling for June: A Novel Page 26