All You Get Is Me

by Yvonne Prinz

  All You Get

  Is Me

  Yvonne Prinz

  For Rick and Kristie Knoll of Knoll Farms in Brentwood,

  California, who inspired this story

  Just before the crash, I was watching you

  Thinking how time hasn’t changed

  Even half of what it promised to

  —Joe Henry

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Acknowledgments

  Also By Yvonne Prinz

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  My mom always promised me she would keep me safe, and then she disappeared.

  My dad made no such promise.

  Five a.m. on a Tuesday morning, mere days after school has let out for summer vacation and I’m already getting into a delicious groove of sleeping late. I’m cruelly torn from a deep, luxurious sleep by my dad, pounding on my bedroom door.

  “C’mon, honey, up and at ’em.”

  No. NO! Go away. My cheek is resting comfortably on my pillow in a warm puddle of drool and I’ve completely forgotten that I’m working the market today. Why did I say I would do that?

  “Roar?” He says my name now, knocking lightly.

  “Okay, okay, I’m up,” I mumble.

  I hear his leather boots on the old wooden stairs leading down to the kitchen. I slide out of bed, one limb at a time. One foot hits the cool plank floor, then the other. The farmhouse is chilly right now, but as the day wears on, the early summer warmth will creep slowly into all the corners of this house. It never gets really hot in here, though; we’re protected by an ancient, enormous oak tree that leans over the old roof with its muscular arms providing much-needed shade in the long, hot afternoons to come. The same tree also diabolically twists its gnarled roots into our plumbing so that every couple of months muddy brown water bubbles up through the drains and into all of the sinks and the claw-foot bathtub upstairs. It’s beyond gross. We have Jesus, our Roto-Rooter man, on speed dial.

  Rufus butts the bedroom door open with his snout and clicks across the wood planks to say good morning. He’s an early riser and a fantastic afternoon napper. Bits of dog food cling to his mongrel beard. He nuzzles my face with his nose and I ruffle the fur on his soft head, which smells slightly of skunk. Rufus is a country dog. I am a city girl. Rufus has lived here on the farm all of his life and I have lived in the city all of mine until two years ago last spring when my dad up and bought a farm like he was running out for a quart of milk. I’m pretty sure I’ll never forgive him for that.

  I stand up, yawning and stretching, and peer out my bedroom window into the darkness. It looks like midnight except for a ribbon of pale blue marking the horizon. A light shines over the gravel driveway next to the house. The old brown pickup (like Rufus, it came with the place) is parked there, weighed down with our early summer vegetables and fruit: fava beans, dandelion greens, fennel, green garlic, arugula, baby potatoes, and the first of the apricots. Steve and Miguel and my dad loaded it after it cooled off last night. Steve, a UC Berkeley grad student, fast-talked his way out of doing his regular farmers’ market shift because he and his girlfriend, Jane, are going rafting on the American River. This is Steve’s second summer working with us, and lucky for him, I’m completely in love with him so I said I’d cover for him today. He promised me a mix CD featuring some indie bands he’s been listening to.

  Out beyond the apricot orchard, which is thickly planted between the knobby trees with garlic, runner beans, and horseradish, a light burns in the window of the bunkhouse that Miguel and Steve share. My dad fashioned it out of one of the several outbuildings on the property. It gets pretty hot in there by August but Steve’s from the desert and Miguel’s from Oaxaca, Mexico, so they’re both pretty okay with the heat. Steve is here from late May till late August, and Miguel is here until he saves enough money to buy a little piece of land back in Mexico to build a home on. Miguel sends almost every penny he makes home to his wife, Magdelena, and his two boys, Carlos and Marco. Their photos are Scotch-taped next to the pillow in his bunk. Carlos and Marco have bright dark eyes and matching wide grins with big teeth and ears that they haven’t grown into yet and Magdelena smiles shyly and wears a delicate gold crucifix on a chain around her neck.

  My dad is crashing around the small kitchen, preparing his standard breakfast: a giant latte (featuring organic local milk and fair trade coffee that he buys from an Italian guy in North Beach who roasts his beans to perfection) and a big bowl of granola from Sally and Jim, our half-crazy neighbors up the road who make it from scratch and sell it to health food stores. My dad trades them for apricots, which they dry for the cereal. As I brush my teeth and pull my hair into a ponytail, I can hear Dad foaming the milk on the espresso machine, a monster of a thing, left over from our life in the city. It takes up most of the counter space in our kitchen and cost us about as much as our secondhand tractor. Of course, I never even used to think about the cost of things till we became farmers. Now everything comes down to that.

  “Hey, sport,” my dad says way too cheerfully when I appear in the doorway of the kitchen. “Can I fry you an egg or two?”

  I shake my head. “I’ll just have toast. I don’t want to wake up too much.”

  I slice a big chunk off a loaf of bread and wedge it into the toaster. My dad hands me a jar of homemade strawberry jam from the fridge, the kind where you can still see the whole strawberries. When the toast pops up, the edges are burnt. I slather it with butter and jam and sit down at the old table. My dad pours me a glass of orange juice and sits down across from me. National Public Radio drifts in from the stereo in the living room. Rufus curls up under the table and we both use him as a footstool. I bury my bare feet in his soft fur and he groans. I crunch my toast and my dad slurps his latte and spoons granola into his mouth while he reads yesterday’s New York Times. He won’t get today’s until this afternoon. Country life.

  I glance at a brochure from a solar panel company sitting on the table next to a jar of honey. My dad has ordered solar panels for the roof of the barn but we probably won’t get them up until after the summer growing season because the roof needs repairs. Once they’re up we’ll have enough free power to run the tristate area but we’ll probably be paying off the panels forever.

  At six o’clock we finally get ourselves out to the truck, which doubles as my dad’s office. Papers and receipts are stacked under both visors, and the dusty seat is littered with clipboards, pens, CDs, a carrot, a screwdriver, and a baseball cap. I put my camera down on the seat between us. It’s a Nikon FM with a Nikkor thirty-five-millimeter lens. I don’t go anywhere without it. My dad slips his insulated coffee cup into a carrier he installed in the dash, above the stereo that he also installed. He pulled it out of the old black Mercedes sedan that he drove in his pre-farm days, which is now gathering dust and pigeon poop in the barn. He says I can have it when I learn to drive. What he doesn’t know is that I already know how. Steve taught me in his Jeep. I just need a license, which I’ll get the minute I’m sixteen, two months from now.

  My dad starts the truck an
d it groans to life. He grinds the gearshift into reverse and we back out and roll past the farmhouse on the gravel driveway. Even though the pretty flowered kitchen curtains ruffle in the breeze, the house still always looks to me like the house in a southern Gothic thriller. The kind where the farmer goes insane and everybody ends up dead with a pitchfork through the brain.

  The sun is all the way up now and Miguel already has the tractor out.

  He’s hooked up a flatbed trailer to the back of it and he’s heading out to the vegetable patch. Steve’s Jeep is already gone. My dad pulls up next to Miguel and asks him in Spanish if he can collect the eggs from the chicken coop and let the chickens out. They roam free during the day, eating bugs and pooping everywhere. Every organic farmer knows that chicken poop is the best fertilizer on earth. The chickens are my chore but I’ve been spared today. The coop is off behind the barn and it smells like sweet rotting grain, and even though I feed them every day, the chickens seem to resent me. I’ve given them beautiful names like Gretta and Frieda and Mona and Astrid. I praise their work, the simple perfection of the eggs they lay, but I get nothing from them. It’s like they know I’m a fake. I don’t belong here and they’re onto me. Luckily Rufus doesn’t share their dim view of me and he trots along beside the truck like a Secret Service guy running next to the president’s motorcade, ready to take a bullet for me.

  Miguel calls out “Adios” to me and waves. He calls me by my full name, Aurora. Everyone else calls me Roar. I wave back. We stop at the entrance to the farm and pull out onto the road that will eventually take us to the freeway. Rufus stops there and watches us disappear before he turns around and heads inside for a nap. I’m pretty sure that my dad and Steve have a lot to talk about on these long drives. They have tons in common, even though Steve’s a lot younger than my dad. They’re both very political and love to talk about how this country’s going to hell in a handbasket, but they can go from that directly to which Jimi Hendrix album rocks the hardest.

  No such luck with me. I start to doze almost immediately. Tom Waits is playing on the stereo. He’s singing “Hold On.” It’s beautiful and sad. My head bobs along with the rocking of the old truck as my dad navigates his way along the winding road. He and Steve do the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market in San Francisco twice a week, so my dad knows every bump and curve in the road.

  I jerk awake to the sound of my dad cursing. “Goddamn development people!” he says, watching his side mirror nervously.

  I look in the mirror on my side of the truck. An SUV is behind us, inches from our rear bumper. A blond woman is at the wheel and she’s honking her horn. There’s no shoulder on this road and it’s full of sharp turns and blind corners. Since they started building housing developments on some of the land north of us there’ve been a lot more people using this road. My dad, a man with a big opinion about everything, considers the development people to be sort of an alien invasion, a blight on the land in the form of Costco-shopping, SUV-driving breeders, people who have to commute hours to the surrounding cities just to go to work. He believes that humans have lost their way in the world, that they’re so far removed from the land that they don’t even recognize it when they see it anymore. Pretty big talk for a guy who became a farmer about twenty minutes ago. The small farmers around here have started organizing themselves against the developers, with my dad at the helm. He knows that zoning laws are quietly being manipulated to accommodate the builders and he’s not about to sit still for it. When we lived in the city, my dad was a human rights lawyer, so trust me, no one’s better at getting up in your face than he is. Still, even though they enjoy the occasional victory, it’s mostly a losing battle here and all over the country as farmland is being sold off to developers because farmers are giving up the struggle to survive.

  The woman behind us is getting more and more agitated by the second. In my mirror I can see her lips forming curse words and her manicured fingernails death-gripping the steering wheel.

  We approach a short straightaway, which is followed by a curve that dips down into a valley of dense forest for about half a mile. The SUV pulls out from behind us to pass, crossing a double solid yellow line. As it approaches the driver’s side of the pickup my dad touches his brakes to let her pass but she slows down as their windows line up and gives my dad the finger. I watch her hateful sneering face and I think, Lady, you may live to regret that. As she turns her attention back to the road I see her face change to horror as an oncoming pickup truck appears on the road directly in front of her. My dad swerves off the road and slams on his brakes but there’s nowhere for him to go. We watch, frozen, as the woman yanks her steering wheel hard to the right, narrowly missing the front of my dad’s truck, and slams almost head-on into the oncoming pickup. The noise is unbearable. The pickup whips around, changing directions, and its back end flips over the embankment into a small ravine. The truck comes to rest upside down with all four wheels still spinning. Tom Waits is singing about getting behind the mule. The SUV has rolled over too and skids to a stop in the middle of the road. Suddenly it’s dead quiet.

  My dad throws the truck into park and digs his cell phone out of his shirt pocket. He thrusts it at me.

  “Roar, call 9-1-1. Tell them where we are. Tell them it’s bad, okay?”

  My dad runs across the road to the edge of the ravine and surveys the wreck.

  My hands shake uncontrollably as I press the numbers into his phone. I give the annoyingly calm emergency operator our information in a trembling voice and I beg her to tell them to hurry. She tells me that help is on the way and I should stay on the line till it arrives. It’s all I can do not to scream, “HURRY UP!”

  My dad has lowered himself down the edge of the ravine and he’s making his way to the passenger side of the truck. A baby is hanging upside down in a car seat. My dad jimmies the door open and the baby starts to cry. He undoes the buckles and grabs her to keep her from falling. I take the phone and sit on the edge of the ravine. I won’t let myself look at the driver’s side.

  “Is she okay?” I ask.

  “I think so.” He takes her into his arms. She’s plump and dark skinned, wearing a pretty little sundress with a few drops of blood down the front. My dad scrambles up the bank with her. She’s calm now and she seems to be okay. He hands her to me. I put her in my lap and rock her a bit, telling her everything will be all right even though I’m pretty sure it won’t. I wipe the tears off her cheeks with the sleeve of my sweatshirt. She searches my face with her big dark eyes, trying to figure out if she knows me. I check her for injuries but all I can find is a greenish blue goose egg on her forehead. I glance over at the SUV. The driver isn’t moving and there’s a trickle of blood on her forehead.

  After what seems like a lifetime but is actually a couple of minutes, I hear the wail of sirens. I tell the operator they’ve arrived and hang up the phone. By that time my dad has worked his way over to the driver’s side of the overturned truck and he’s talking to the driver, a woman, in Spanish and holding her hand. The paramedics leap into action. One of them gently takes the baby away from me. She starts to cry again. A policeman pulls up behind the ambulance and a fire truck follows him. The cop deals with the cars that are starting to back up behind the accident and the firemen assess the scene and pull out a stretcher to lower into the ravine. The paramedics work on the SUV driver. They pull a gurney over to her and attach a cervical collar around her neck before they ease her onto it.

  My dad scrambles back down the ravine, next to the stretcher, and speaks quietly to the woman as they maneuver her out of the ravine. He tells her that her baby is fine and that she’ll be fine too. Her eyes are closed and I can’t tell if she’s breathing. Her left arm is crushed and she looks like she’s lost a lot of blood. We stand there helpless and watch them load her into the ambulance. My dad turns to me, wiping tears from his eyes. There’s a smear of blood on his cheek.

  “Roar. Go get your camera.”

  “Is she going to be okay?”
>
  “I don’t think so. Go get your camera and take some pictures of the truck and the SUV, okay?”

  “Okay.” I run to the truck and grab my camera. It’s loaded with black-and-white film and I’ve got about half a roll of film left. My dad distracts the cop, explaining what happened, and I shoot off the rest of the roll. I get the mangled truck, the SUV, long shots and close-ups. I don’t photograph the victims, though. I won’t do that.

  The police want my dad to come down to the station and file a full report but he says he wants to go to the hospital first to see how the woman is doing. They seem okay with that and one of them takes down his information on a little notepad. We climb into the truck and drive slowly to the hospital, arriving long after the ambulance. The scene where the doctors yell and the nurses grab at things that can jolt a person back to life is all over by the time we get there. The police from the scene are wrapping things up in that overly officious way they have of making you feel guilty even if you haven’t done anything. On their way out they remind my dad about coming to the station and I can see his back go up. He’s never been great with cops.

  The waiting room is calm again, perched for its next disaster. My dad talks his way into where the woman and her baby are. I sit down in a turquoise vinyl chair and try to watch late-breaking CNN news on the TV mounted above me because it’s a whole lot better than the image of the accident that keeps creeping back into my head. My hands are still shaking, my throat is tight, and tears keep rolling down my cheeks. Every few minutes I look anxiously at the double doors that my dad disappeared behind. The receptionist looks up at me sympathetically. I wipe my face on my sleeve. She decides not to say anything. This isn’t the first time I’ve been to this emergency room. You wouldn’t even believe the things that can go wrong when you live on a farm. I have a scar on my knuckle from accidentally putting my hand through a glass window in the barn. I had to get seven stitches. That was a mess. Another time I was here with my dad and Steve when Steve fell out of the hayloft on his ankle. He had to get it X-rayed. He says he slipped. I think he was stoned. I read a story once about a farmer who severed both arms in a piece of farm machinery and he actually had the presence of mind to dial 9-1-1 with a pencil in his mouth. You’ve really got to hand it to that guy. I think they even put his arms back on.