by John Saul
How could she be smiling?
As if there could be—ever would be!—anything to smile about again.
Right up until last week Julie had still refused to believe her mother would go through with it. But now here she was, sitting in the front seat of a car that barely ran, with her kid sister in the backseat and everything they owned packed into a trailer that made the car sway so badly on every turn that Julie thought she might have to throw up.
Except there hadn’t been any turns for the last hour.
No turns in the road, no towns, not even any signs to read except the ones that told you what kind of gas or pukey food you could get at the next exit.
With a sinking heart she caught a glimpse of the latest sign to flash past, for a place called Kettleman City, then heard her mother confirm her worst fear: “Almost there. Pleasant Valley’s only seven miles west of 1-5.”
Out of the corner of her eye Julie saw her mother getting that disgusting wistful look on her face again. That was almost as bad as the encouraging smile. “Of course, it’s not like when I was your age,” her mother said, “and we were so far off the main highway that you never saw a stranger from one year to another.”
“I bet you still don’t,” Julie said. “Why would anyone want to get off the freeway around here?”
Once again she gazed out the window at the endless miles of flatland that made up this part of the San Joaquin Valley. To the east, the Sierra Nevada mountains weren’t visible at all; in fact, there wasn’t even a horizon—just a sort of blurry spot where the brownish-green of the fields blended in with the brownish-blue of the sky, so indistinct that you couldn’t quite tell where one left off and the other began.
Not like L.A. at all, with its hills covered with houses from the floor of the San Fernando Valley right up to Mulholland Drive, where the really big mansions were, and where Julie used to dream of living. Now she wondered if she’d ever even get a glimpse of those huge houses on Mulholland Drive again.
Or see her friends, either.
Or anything else she’d been familiar with all her life.
It had been bad enough five years ago, when her dad had died. For a while she’d thought it might have been better if she’d died herself, she missed him so much. For almost a year she’d cried practically every night, and sometimes, when she was alone and something reminded her of him, she still cried. Then they’d had to move out of the house in the hills above Studio City, and she’d had to start sharing a room with Molly. That was pretty awful, but she’d gotten used to it, just as she’d gotten used to the fact that her dad wouldn’t ever be coming home again. They all had to get used to things being different, but at least she hadn’t had to change schools, and most of her friends hadn’t cared that she lived in an apartment now, instead of a nice house with a pool.
So at least she’d still had her friends, and gone to the same school she was used to, and done the same things.
But now what was she supposed to do?
Now nothing was the way it should have been.
She stared bleakly at the little town they were coming into.
If you could even call it a town.
There wasn’t even a shopping mall!
Just a bunch of frame houses sitting side by side, all looking alike, without even any fences between their yards.
They passed the school, and with a sinking feeling Julie saw that the elementary school was in the same building with the high school. Great, she groaned silently. Just terrific! She and Molly would be in the same school.
“Look,” the nine-year-old piped from the backseat, as if she’d read Julie’s mind. “The school’s all together here. We’re going to be in the same one!”
“I can hardly wait,” Julie muttered, then felt her mother’s eyes fix disapprovingly on her and wished she’d kept the words to herself.
“Now come on, honey, give it all a chance.”
They were driving through the downtown area now, and Julie had to stifle another groan as she spotted the movie theater.
One screen? Was that really all it had?
Hadn’t they ever heard of multiplexes here?
Two more blocks, and they left the town behind. Once again there was nothing to see but the broad expanse of cropland, now backed by some hills rising in the west, with a few clusters of farm buildings here and there. Paralleling the road was an endless row of huge stanchions supporting high-power electric lines.
“You know, it still isn’t too late, Mom,” Julie said, deciding she might as well try one last time to talk her mother out of this terrible mistake. “I mean, like we could just stay a few days, and then go back to Studio City. I bet you could get your job back, and I could get one, too, and then we could even afford a better apartment!”
Her mother didn’t even glance her way, let alone answer her.
As the fields rolled endlessly by, bringing them closer and closer to their destination, Julie’s spirits sank still lower.
She would die out here—she just knew it.
And why?
Just so her mother could get married again!
It wasn’t fair—didn’t her mother even care how miserable she was?
Well, if it got too bad, and she hated it too much, there was still one thing she could do.
She could run away.
Maybe, just maybe, she would.
Karen Spellman sensed the darkening of her daughter’s mood, and finally, if surreptitiously, glanced over to see her slouching against the passenger door. Should she say something? But what good would it do? Each time she’d tried to talk sensibly with Julie, her daughter had refused to listen, standing with hands planted on hips, shaking her head and repeating over and over how stupid she thought her mother was. But despite what Julie thought, Karen was still certain that what she was about to do would be the best thing she’d ever done.
Her life, which had seemed to end that night five years ago when Richard Spellman had died, was about to begin again.
And it had all started with a letter from someone she barely remembered. A letter she’d been about to discard when a tiny voice inside her head had whispered that going to the reunion might be fun.
Fun?
A reunion of her class at Pleasant Valley High, fun!
Unpleasant Valley was what she and her mother had always called the town in which she’d grown up, and the week after she graduated from high school, she left for Los Angeles, a check from her mother carefully folded in her purse.
“I saved it from my household allowance,” Enid Gilman had told Karen almost twenty-one years ago. Her mother’s thin lips had set bitterly as she once more rehearsed what her life might have been like had she not married Wilbur Gilman and settled down in that godforsaken town lost in the barrens of the San Joaquin Valley.
Karen had listened willingly to her mother’s familiar lament of growing old with all her dreams unfulfilled, all her aspirations withered away under the unrelenting glare of a sun that seemed to burn the life from everything it touched.
Turning her tired face away from the sunlight, Enid had pressed the cashier’s check into her daughter’s hand. “It’s not much, but it should get you started. You go do all the wonderful things I didn’t do.”
And Karen had tried.
She’d found a little apartment in Hollywood, found a job as a waitress, and set about the business of becoming the movie star her mother had always dreamed of her being.
But it hadn’t happened, and Karen—finally out of Pleasant Valley—had quickly shed the illusions her mother had nurtured in her for the first eighteen years of her life.
She was pretty, but not nearly beautiful enough to make it on her looks alone. Thousands of girls had hair as dark and luxuriant as hers, eyes as blue, and figures as good. She’d realized within a week of arriving in L.A. that her mother’s appraisal of her had been wrong: even if she’d been the prettiest girl in Pleasant Valley, which she doubted, she certainly wasn’t going to catch any eyes a
t the studios. Still, her mother’s voice ringing in her mind, she’d enrolled in acting classes, faithfully trudged through the rounds of agents and casting directors, patiently listened to Enid’s assurances that stardom still loomed just beyond the next corner.
Two years later, when her father finally died of heart failure while dozing on the porch of the tiny house in Pleasant Valley, her mother had moved to Los Angeles.
For a while Karen and Enid had lived together. And within a month of Enid’s arrival, it became clear to Karen that the dream of stardom was far more important to her mother than to herself.
When she married Richard Spellman, Karen had been more than happy to give up the struggle. To her mother’s unending, undisguised disgust, she’d settled down to have children and make a home for her family.
“You’re going to throw your life away, just like I did,” Enid had wailed. “Do you want to end up like me, worn-out, with nothing to show for a whole life? You could be a movie star, Karen! Don’t waste yourself the way I did!”
Karen had refused to argue, refused to pay attention to this sad, bitter woman who, Karen now saw, looked far older than her years.
For more than a decade Karen’s life had been almost perfect. First Julie had been born, and six years later Molly came along. Then, five years ago, her whole life had come apart. Richard had been driving her mother home after a long and not-too-unpleasant dinner on the terrace next to their pool. He’d just pulled onto the Ventura Freeway when a drunk driver smashed into his car, killing both Richard and Enid.
Karen had barely begun to deal with the shock of the two deaths when she discovered that Richard’s estate couldn’t begin to cover their debts. Within a year she and the girls had been forced to move into a cramped apartment that, tiny as it was, had been barely affordable on what she was able to make by going back to work as a waitress.
Los Angeles began to grind her down.
Karen worked hard, fitting classes in with as many shifts in the restaurant as she could manage, and was finally able to leave waiting tables behind her, going to work as a legal secretary in one of the big firms in Century City. But no matter how hard she worked, she couldn’t quite get ahead. Rents always went up just as fast as her income, and she never quite managed to get herself and her daughters out of that first cramped apartment they’d moved into after Richard died.
And every year the streets grew more violent, the traffic more congested, while the schools the girls went to declined.
The last few years, Karen had been afraid to go anywhere, as the drive-by shootings came steadily closer and the gangs moved in. L.A. had become a war zone.
When she discovered that Julie had started experimenting with drugs, she hadn’t been terribly surprised. The surprise was that she’d been able to put a stop to it.
Life had ground on, getting a bit harder every day. It left her recalling Pleasant Valley with more fondness than she’d ever thought she could summon for that quiet, sunbaked place.
Then she’d come home one day and found the invitation to her high school class’s twentieth reunion.
Twenty years? Had it really been two whole decades since she’d seen the town she grew up in?
Instead of throwing the invitation away, she put it on the refrigerator door.
For a week it had stayed there, held in place by a magnet shaped like a ladybug. She found herself wondering what her hometown might look like as seen through her own eyes instead of her mother’s. What the kids she’d grown up with had become. Not that she’d had many friends as a child; Enid had seen to that, discouraging her from becoming close with any of her schoolmates, and forbidding her outright from associating with any of the farm kids who came into town for school every day. Indeed, she’d grown up in a farming community without ever having set foot on a farm!
In the end, it was the realization that she actually knew very little about the town she’d grown up in that made up Karen’s mind.
“You can take care of Molly, and I’ll only be gone one night,” she told Julie. “And there’s twenty dollars in it.”
For Julie, the bother of taking care of Molly was counterbalanced by the promise of freedom from her mother—not to mention the twenty dollars. She accepted the job with no argument, and Karen had sent in her reservation for the reunion.
The town was exactly as she’d remembered it.
Familiar.
And strangely comforting in its familiarity.
And with comfort came dawning realization: she had never hated Pleasant Valley at all. It had been Enid who hated it.
As she embraced old classmates and renewed old acquaintances, Karen realized that she still had more friends in Pleasant Valley than in Los Angeles, even after having been gone for more than half her life.
Friends who treated her as if she’d never moved away at all.
And one friend—Russell Owen—who had suddenly become more than just someone she’d known ever since kindergarten.
After the reunion, all through the gray California winter, he drove the 200 miles down to L.A. to see her each weekend, and at spring vacation she brought Molly up to see the town and Russell’s farm.
Julie, totally involved with her friends at school, had refused to come, and in the end Karen let her stay in the apartment by herself.
And now, six months after the reunion, she’d driven back to Pleasant Valley yet again. This time to stay.
Though Julie had cried and protested, Karen stuck to her guns.
“If you’d gone up at spring break with Molly and me, you’d know it’s not anything like what you think it is,” she told Julie. When her daughter tried to continue the argument, Karen put an end to it by reminding her of what had happened at her school only a few months earlier—a student had opened fire on a teacher, killing the teacher and three teenagers before finally turning the weapon on himself. “At least in Pleasant Valley you’ll have a pretty good chance of surviving high school,” she said. She’d reached out and pulled Julie close. “Come on, honey, it isn’t the end of the world. In fact, if you just give it a chance, it could be the beginning of something wonderful for all of us, not just me. That’s all I’m asking, sweetheart. Just give it a chance. Okay?”
The argument had ended, but as they’d driven through Pleasant Valley a few minutes ago, and Julie saw the town where she would finish high school, Karen felt her older daughter’s smoldering anger flare up, though so far she’d confined her feelings to a few muttered grumblings.
Molly, on the other hand, was bouncing in the backseat, clutching the ragged teddy bear she’d refused to leave behind and chattering in high-pitched excitement about the colt she was going to see as soon as she got to the farm.
Next week, Karen thought, despite Julie’s attitude toward Pleasant Valley, she was getting married.
Married to a man she’d grown up with, who had spent his entire life farming half a section of prime land in Pleasant Valley.
Her mother, Karen was certain, must be spinning in her grave, even angrier than Julie.
And Julie, from what she could see as she ventured a glance at her daughter out of the corner of her eye, was plenty angry—angry enough for herself and her grandmother, too.
The car left the paved county road and began bumping farther west along a rutted dirt track that followed a straight line between two emerald-green fields. “Does it get any worse than this?” Julie asked. “I’ve been afraid the car was going to die ever since we came down the grapevine three hours ago.”
“What’s the grapevine?” Molly demanded from the backseat.
“It’s what they call that long steep grade we came down near Gorman,” Karen explained to her younger daughter. And if this doesn’t work out, I’m going to need a new car just to get back to L.A., she thought to herself. “And no, it doesn’t get any worse than this,” she told Julie. “In fact, this is Russell’s driveway.”
Despite her determination not to be impressed by anything in Pleasant Valley, Julie’
s eyes widened. “You mean all of this is Russell’s?” she asked, surveying the expanse of fields all around them. “How much land does he own?”
“Three hundred and twenty acres,” Karen replied. “The buildings are right up ahead.”
A quarter of a mile away, Julie could make out a large barn, a silo, and a few smaller buildings. Then, separated from the outbuildings by a large yard dotted with immense old walnut trees, she saw two houses.
The smaller one, only a single story high, resembled a rectangular box with a front porch tacked onto it.
The other one, though, was much larger and looked sort of Victorian, with a large covered porch that wrapped around both the sides of the house that she could see. There was a big picture window, and several gables breaking the line of the steeply pitched roof above the second floor. At one end there was even a corner room that appeared to be in a turret, its windows glazed with curved glass that matched the nearly circular walls.
The house was painted white, and trimmed with black, gray, and a deep burgundy that matched the roof.
“Is that …?” Julie began, but left the question hanging, not daring to let her hopes rise to the point of finishing the thought.
“That’s Russell’s house,” Karen told her, a smile playing at the corners of her mouth. “The little one is his father’s, where Russell grew up.”
“No fair!” Molly cried from the backseat. “You said we were going to tell her the little one was ours!”
“Russell built the big one just after he got married,” Karen told Julie, ignoring Molly’s protest. “They were going to have half a dozen kids, but—”
“What happened?” Julie interrupted, her eyes narrowing. “Did she decide she didn’t like it, being stuck way out here in the middle of nowhere?”
“No,” Karen said, her voice cool and her eyes staring straight ahead as she carefully slowed the car, still not used to the feel of the trailer. “She died, just like your father.” As soon as she uttered the words and heard Julie’s shocked gasp, Karen wished she could retract them, but knew it was too late. She reached out and took Julie’s hand. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I guess I didn’t have to put it quite that way.” Julie’s eyes were glistening, and Karen knew she was thinking about Richard. “If you hadn’t managed to change the subject every time I tried to talk to you about Russell, or if you’d been willing to get even a little bit better acquainted with him, you’d have known what happened.”