by Garth Stein
“Oh, hey,” my father said cheerfully. I couldn’t help but notice the blue binder open on his lap.
“Oh, hey,” I echoed.
He looked up at me with the expectant look of the impatient, like he wanted me to ask him a question and be gone, or else just be gone. But I didn’t go and he didn’t stop looking, his neck twisted around the way a dog looks at you when you say, “Biscuit?”
“I came for my lemonade,” I said.
“Ah!”
My father relaxed because I had made a socially appropriate request and, apparently, I had no agenda other than to acquire a glass of rosemary lemonade. I poured myself a glass and noticed that Grandpa Samuel had a sour look on his face and his jaw was set. His eyes were narrowed and fixed on the railing before him. And then, as if on cue, a black sedan emerged from the other side of the ridge and headed down the gravel drive toward the house. I sipped my lemonade and waited. The car drew closer and then was upon us. It stopped and was consumed by the cloud that followed cars that crossed the meadow.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
My father forced a smile.
“Why don’t you run inside and see if Aunt Serena needs some help with dinner,” he said.
“No, thanks,” I replied, and I sipped my lemonade, which was always perfectly cold and tart enough to make a satisfying pucker.
An older man got out of the sedan. He was carrying a well-worn satchel with a Swiss Army badge on it. I noticed the details. (“Good writers see everything,” my mother has always told me. “Not simply the clothes a person is wearing, but why he is wearing them.”) This man wore a dark suit that buckled at the shoulder, indicating he had bought it when he was thinner. He wore a wide necktie, which appeared to have been knotted in 1974, a giant fist of silk bound tightly, as if tied by Midas himself. He walked around the back of the car, and I saw his shoes, which were old and worn, the rubber gone and the leather of the heels going. The scalp beneath his thinning hair was tanned. He had traveled far for little compensation, this man, and he was tired. He just wanted to go home. But there was a job to do—there was always one more job to do—and it was his job to do it.
“He’s here,” my father said to Grandpa Samuel. “We’re going to sign the papers now, okay?”
“Okay, okay, okay,” Grandpa Samuel grumbled. “We’re going to sign the papers.”
“Just sign them, okay? And I promise, you’ll be taken care of.”
“Who will take care of me?” Grandpa Samuel snapped. “You?”
My father held the binder toward him as if to offer proof, but Grandpa Samuel waved it away dismissively. My father gestured for the stranger to join us on the porch, which he did. My father pulled a manila folder from the back of the binder and handed it to the stranger, who opened it and looked at the pages contained within.
“Okeydokes,” he said. “I’ll need a driver’s license.”
“He doesn’t drive,” my father said. “There’s a passport in there.”
“Does he travel internationally?” the man asked with a smile. His version of a joke.
“No,” my father responded flatly. “He got it for this purpose.”
“A state ID card would have sufficed. Less effort on your part.”
“Will the passport work?” my father asked testily.
The man’s bushy eyebrows rose, and, thusly chastened, he inspected the contents of the folder. Nodding, he extracted a black notebook from his satchel, opened it, and began entering data from the passport. Then he looked at Grandpa Samuel.
“Do you know what you’re signing?” he asked.
“Yes, we do,” my father interjected.
The man shook his head, still looking at Grandpa Samuel.
“Do you know what you’re signing?”
Grandpa Samuel nodded.
“It’s a power of attorney,” the man said. “It’s significant.”
“I’ll be taken care of,” Grandpa Samuel said almost angrily. “Everything will be taken care of.”
“In a manner of speaking,” the man replied skeptically. He turned to my father. “Does Mr. Riddell know what he’s signing?”
“The gutter is broken,” Grandpa Samuel said. “The window is swollen shut. The roof leaks. We have worms in the walls. The pool is broken. The pipes are clogged. The foundation is cracked. It will all be taken care of.”
The stranger arched his eyebrows again. When he did his jaw dropped, creating hollows in his cheeks. An odd look.
“He knows,” my father said. “I explained it all to him. I’m not sure why he’s doing this.”
“I can’t notarize something if he’s not aware of the impact—”
“Please notarize it,” my father said. “That’s why you’re here. That’s why Dickie sent you. My father knows what he’s signing; notarize it and let’s get on with things.”
The man sucked his teeth and I could see a little crescent of tongue pinched between his uppers and his lowers. He held the papers out toward Grandpa Samuel.
“Do you know what you’re signing?” he asked again, so patient and so even with his tone.
Grandpa Samuel looked at the papers hazily, as if he were trying to focus.
“Because he told me to,” he whispered, pointing a finger at my father.
“It’s a power of attorney,” the notary said. “It means that you’re signing over your decision-making ability to your son. Do you understand what that means? It means he can act on your behalf without consulting you. Do you agree to that?”
Grandpa Samuel wiped his chin, and I read his T-shirt: SOMETIMES I WONDER, “WHY IS THAT FRISBEE GETTING BIGGER?” THEN IT HITS ME . . .
“My son told me to sign it,” he said. “Because I do what he says because he knows better. He’s always known better.”
“Come on, Samuel,” my father protested.
“If you listen closely, you can hear her dancing,” Grandpa Samuel whispered to the man.
“Who?” the man asked.
Grandpa Samuel looked up at my father.
“I was supposed to be the one,” he said. “But it was you.”
The notary squinted at Grandpa Samuel and groaned skeptically. He looked from Grandpa Samuel to my father several times. Then he handed the folder back to my father and put his black book in his satchel.
“I’m not satisfied,” the notary said. “I don’t believe he understands the implications of this document. I’m afraid I can’t notarize it for you.”
My father took an intimidating step toward the man.
“Are you kidding me?” he snapped. “When I go bankrupt, notaries are everywhere, willing to notarize anything. Anything that takes my money away from me, my business, my house. No questions about that. But now? Now a notary has a conscience? You’re joking, right?”
“Good day, Mr. Riddell,” the notary public said, shouldering his bag and heading to his car.
“You’re kidding me!” my father shouted at him. “Today is the day a notary public gives a damn about who’s signing what? Are you serious?”
When he reached the trunk of his car, the man wheeled around and glared at my father.
“This is my job, Mr. Riddell,” he said. “I take it seriously. Your father doesn’t understand the ramifications of that document. My job is to testify that all parties understand the contents of the documents and are not signing under duress. If you’ve had other experiences with other notaries, well, that’s something I can’t control. I can only control myself, Mr. Riddell. I will stand by my belief that your father should not be signing a document like that unless he understands the ramifications. I refuse to be bullied by you.”
The man opened the driver’s door.
“How do I get him to sign it, then?” my father shouted. “He’s ill. He’s demented! He may never understand.”
“You go to court,” the notary replied over the roof of the car. “You have him declared incompetent—non compos mentis. Doctors will testify. The judge will designate you
custodian. Then you will have that power. I will not notarize a power of attorney without knowing that all parties understand what’s going on. Good day to you, sir.”
“Good day to you, sir?” my father muttered to himself as the man drove away. “Bad day to you! A very bad day to you, sir!”
I could tell that what was going on was serious, but I had to work hard to stifle a laugh at my father’s curses. The car drove away, and my father looked after it angrily. He slapped the manila folder against his thigh and shook his head. He glared at Grandpa Samuel.
“I guess fucking with me is what you do best, isn’t it, Dad?”
“Why did you do it?” Grandpa Samuel replied with a hiss.
“Someone in this house had to be a man,” my father said. “And it clearly wasn’t going to be you.”
He snatched the big blue binder from the chair and went inside, slamming the door after himself.
Grandpa Samuel relaxed a bit. He sniffed once and picked up his lemonade. He rocked back and forth and, looking out to the sound, took a sip. He retreated to his Zen world and lost track of me entirely. Or maybe not. Maybe he’d retreated into the hedge maze of his dementia. I wasn’t sure.
I went inside after my father, down the hallway to the kitchen, but before I entered the room I stopped. I listened from the threshold. My father was talking with Serena. I did not reveal myself but instead listened in.
“Oh, Jones, what were you thinking?” Serena said, exasperated. “If it were that easy, don’t you think I would have done it already?”
My father didn’t say anything. I heard movement. Serena moving around in the kitchen, preparing dinner.
“I brought you here so you could work your Jones magic,” she continued, making tsking sounds and sighing with disapproval. I could easily picture her. Removing a dish from the oven and kicking the door with her foot so it slammed shut with a great whump. Blowing at a wisp of hair that dangled in her face. Chopping a carrot on the chopping block with great insistence. Tack, tack, tack, tack, tack.
“What did you expect?” I heard her say.
“Why can’t we just have him declared non compos mentis?”
“That’s not as simple as it sounds. Doctors get involved—many of them! Batteries of tests, analyses, competency hearings, judges, review boards. Just think of the time, not to mention the money! No, we must do it this way. But you can’t act rashly; you must be deliberate about the goals you wish to achieve, and then you must set intermediate goals and so forth, in order to build your victory convincingly. Thoroughly. You must lay the groundwork. Surely, you can’t expect to achieve your objectives without laying the groundwork.”
“The groundwork!” my father scoffed.
“The groundwork, Brother Jones,” she scolded. “The groundwork!”
More chopping. An onion this time. A zipping sound—or maybe something like sandpaper: a tearing, abrasive sound—before the snap of the blade on the block. Yes, that was it. An onion. Little sprinkles of caustic juices spraying invisibly into the air and wafting into her eyes to make her cry. She sniffed and made another cut. Shuuut-tuck!
“You need to reconcile with him,” she said. “You need to forgive him and allow him to forgive you—”
“Forgive me?”
“None of us is without guilt, Brother Jones. Except, perhaps, me. But that’s only because I was so young, I hadn’t yet lost my innocence.”
“Then why don’t you do it?” my father lashed out. And I knew that was where she wanted him to go, because there was a dramatic pause, during which, I was sure, she wiped the blade of her knife and carefully set it down.
“Because I’m here,” Serena replied in an even tone. “Because I’m the one who stayed behind. Because I’m the one who dresses him and bathes him and feeds him. I take care of him when he’s sick, and I allow him to treat me meanly when he’s not. Because he needs me, and because needing me makes him hate himself and his own limitations, which makes him treat me with contempt. So I am his enemy. I am the lightning rod of his hatred.”
“That’s an awful lot of words,” my father said. “A wall. A tsunami of words.”
Serena sighed with disappointment.
“Is this how you treat Rachel?” she asked. “With such dismissiveness? I can see why she would leave you.”
A pause followed, which included more shuffling, and I wasn’t sure what was going on; the sounds were vague and confusing to me. Then Serena said, “Before dinner?” and I realized my father was helping himself to the medicine.
“I hate this place,” he said, and I heard the cap unscrew. I heard the liquid pour. “I hate my father. I hate everything about this world. Let’s forget the whole deal. I’ll join the Peace Corps and spend the rest of my life handing out mosquito nets in Africa, Trevor will go off to live with Rachel in England, and Dad can sit on the front porch with a drool pan, staring into the sun. Who cares.”
“Oh, please!” Serena cried. “You’re such a waffle! After spending all this time on the outside, you should be honed razor sharp, Jones! You should be an axhead, looking to strike! If anything, we owe it to the world to wipe this place off the face of the planet. It’s our duty to obliterate the brutal history of our forefathers, who raped and pillaged this country for profit. I have no doubt Elijah would be proud of us for trying to do something with this land. We’re trying to make something of ourselves, Jones, unlike the other Riddell underachievers who’ve wandered these halls, like Daddy, like Grandpa Abe, shuffling and muttering to themselves. We are not going to let our fate be determined by them; we will not be victims. We will determine our fate for ourselves. Now buck up, boy. Get to work! You have to convince Daddy this plan is for the good of the family.”
I liked that line: “You’re such a waffle.” Was that what my father was? A waffle? A pancake with grand aspirations? A weak person who flopped back and forth as if saturated with maple syrup? Someone who always chose the path of least resistance?
They’d stopped speaking, and I sensed they were onto me. I heard Serena’s footsteps so lightly on the wood floor. I wondered if she was walking toward the hallway—maybe she’d heard me and was sneaking up on me—I looked for the quickest exit and spotted the door to the servants’ stairway. I ducked across the hallway, opened the door silently, slipped inside, and closed the door as fast as I could without making a sound. With my heart pounding, I took the stairs quickly and quietly, up and into the darkness out of sight, and then I stopped and tried not to breathe. The door opened below me. I measured my breaths so I wouldn’t be heard.
“I know it’s you,” she said boldly, though she couldn’t see me and wasn’t sure I was really there. Her voice reeked of doubt. “I know you’ve been listening. You’re good, but you’re not that good. Don’t think I don’t know everything you do here, because I know everything.”
She paused, and, still, I didn’t move.
“Dinner is in thirty minutes,” she said, finally. “Be prompt.”
The door closed and I was free to breathe again.
– 9 –
THE MOUNTAINS OF CALIFORNIA
When the ringing phone woke me up the next morning, I was swallowed by a wave of melancholy. It was our third day at Riddell House, and I felt as if a great chasm had opened up between our world and the world outside of The North Estate.
I went downstairs. The house was empty. The phone rang with a relentless tempo, and the ringer was so loud that the space between rings was filled entirely with the echo of those rings. I found the black phone on the telephone table in the kitchen. I lifted the receiver midring and held the device to my ear. I heard a click and hissing, and I forgot to say anything.
“Is anyone there?” I heard through the earpiece. It was a tiny voice. A woman. “Hello? Is anyone there?” I heard sounds of confusion and rustling, and then, dimly, perhaps words said to someone else in the room: “The ringing has stopped. Maybe I’ve been disconnected.”
It was my mother. Through a magic
portal, she had found me. She had reached halfway around the world—or maybe she went through it. Maybe the telephone cable linked us directly through the center of the earth; like with a tin-can phone, we were connected by a taut umbilical cord.
“Mom?” I croaked in my morning voice.
“Trevor!” she exclaimed. “Trevor, is it you?”
“It’s me,” I said, feeling my melancholy lift so quickly I was almost giddy.
“Can you hear me? You’re very dim; be sure to speak up.”
“I can hear you.”
“It’s your birthday!” she shouted. “My baby! Fourteen years old! How does it feel?”
“The same.”
“Not at all different?”
“No different,” I said. “But I’m glad you called.”
“I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. I wish I could be there with you to help you celebrate, but I’m afraid this phone call will have to do.”
She told me about her world in a flurry: her father had a cold; her mother’s fish and chips were too greasy; her sisters still resented her; her brother pulled her hair when he passed behind her chair. I tried to think of something I could offer her, but nothing seemed appropriate. I wanted to be upbeat and match her enthusiasm, but all I could think of to tell her about were my misgivings, my concerns, my lingering questions about Riddell House. And I definitely didn’t want to tell her about my fear that I would be forced to spend the rest of my life with her in Penzance while my father handed out mosquito nets in Africa.
“What about your aunt and your grandfather?” she asked. “I’ve never met them. What are they like?”
“Well, Serena. She’s . . . weird.”
“Can you be more specific?”
I thought about it for a moment. “Not really. It’s just a feeling.”
She laughed. “Okay. How about Samuel?”
“He’s weird, too. But in a different way.”
“I see.”
“Say, what do you think of this?” I asked, struck by a thought: my mother was an expert at crossword puzzles. “Grandpa scribbles things down all the time. Ideas that come to him or something. Serena says they’re gibberish; she says he does it because he has Alzheimer’s. But he wrote this Post-it note at dinner. It said, ‘muir.’ M-U-I-R, and then M-T-N-S space C-A. I can’t figure it out. What does it mean?”