The Return of Jonah Gray

by Heather Cochran

  I was saved by my mother’s own train of thought, still moving. “I’ll tell you what he’s like. I bet he’s just like his mother.”

  “I don’t think I met her,” I said.

  That wasn’t precisely true. I did have one memory of Eloise Johnston. I was probably four or five, and in my father’s office, coloring on a ledger pad. A woman had walked in and bent down to ask what I was drawing. The rhythm of her voice was the same as my dad’s, and as she bent, her black hair fell around her face, so that she had to pull it back with one hand. Then she stood, and I watched as her red shoes crossed the carpet. I had never seen red heels before. They looked terribly exotic.

  “She was a piece of work, I’ll say that for her. Always after something.”

  “And you figure Marcus—”

  “Fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree,” my mother said.

  “I don’t know. You and I have our differences,” I ventured.

  “Fine. We’ll bring him here and you’ll see. Ed will see. It’ll be a disaster, I’m telling you. It’s like asking the fox to guard the henhouse, as your father would say. But how do I refuse?” She sucked one last time on her cigarette, then stubbed it out.

  “Does, uh, Blake know?” I asked. I realized that I didn’t know if Blake was aware that he even had a half brother, much less that it was Marcus. That was how little we had spoken of him in recent years. Sure, they’d been to a ball game, but Ed could have introduced Marcus as a colleague or friend. I hadn’t noticed any big resemblance between Marcus and Blake that might have created suspicion.

  “He knows,” my mother said, her voice flat. “Your father told him. I thought he was too young for it, but now…” She petered off, then stood and turned toward her garden, a series of black shapes in the nighttime. I wondered whether she knew exactly which amorphous shadow corresponded to which plant. I had a feeling that she did.

  “I never knew that Gardner—our last name—doesn’t come from garden,” I said. “It comes from a Saxon word about war. Did you know that?”

  “Is that right?” She didn’t sound interested. “I only married into the name. That’s more your concern.”

  “Back in the den, you said something about Gardner men,” I said. I had been wondering whom else she was referring to. We’d never been close with my father’s father—especially not after the move to California. And he had no brothers.

  My mother sighed.

  “Is it anything I ought to know?” I asked.

  “Apparently Kurt didn’t get back to Stockton until Sunday morning. After the anniversary party. It’s a drive, but it’s not that long a drive.”

  “And Lori thinks—” I began.

  “Lori knows,” my mother said. “A wife knows.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  AT WORK ON FRIDAY, MY MIND KEPT DRIFTING. Marcus’s tattoos. My mother’s cigarette. Rotten salmon. Kurt at the anniversary party staring at the waitress’s legs. The new scar on my father’s scalp. Loopers. It was a mess in there.

  A slap of papers jarred me back into my office. I looked up to see Susan standing before me, hands on her hips. She had dropped an armful of file folders across my desk.

  “Satisfied?” she asked.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Listen, Sasha. I was as sorry as anyone to hear that your father is ill. Truly. That’s got to suck. But first you give me this talk about time management and hand me this file. Then I get started on it, and now you want it back? How am I supposed to read that? Do you hate me or something? Are you trying to get me fired?”

  “No! No. Of course not. It’s not you, Susan. It’s the return.”

  Susan frowned. I could tell she didn’t believe me. And why would she? When had a single return ever meant more to me than any other?

  “I’ve got to go. It’s all in there,” she said. She turned on her heel and left. As she did so, the pile of papers shifted, sending half of the sheets to the floor.

  Down on my knees, on the hard industrial carpet, I began to gather Jonah Gray’s life back together. Pages of previous returns were mixed with bank statements from the past year, IRS work sheets and various tax schedules. Even out of order, I was glad to have him back.

  I was looking forward to the opportunity to leave my family and its messiness behind, even for a few hours a day. Instead, I could spend time exploring the life of a man so genuinely upstanding and generous. Whatever had happened in his life in the previous July, whatever had prompted him to leave so much behind, at least it was unrelated to what was currently whirling about my own family. As such, Jonah Gray’s audit seemed like a life raft.

  Peeking out from beneath my bookcase, one slip of paper caught my eye. It was a notification of a stock sale—the liquidation of Jonah Gray’s entire account, to be accurate—from the previous year. But that didn’t make sense. When I had scanned through his return the first time, I had noticed that he’d kept his stock accounts untouched when he moved from Tiburon. I remembered thinking how that made sense, especially if you were moving to a city called Stockton. Okay, maybe I am a kook, but that was the mnemonic I used to remember that he hadn’t declared any stock sales. The notification I had just found made clear that he should have. Not declaring the capital gains amounted to tax evasion.

  I dropped the paper and leaned back against my bookcase, shaking my head, exhausted. Enough. I was beat from the night before, from the days before, from the news of Kurt’s dalliance, from the idea of Marcus moving in, and from a gnawing sense that I should have been the one to offer. Now, Jonah Gray had lied? Was there no safe harbor left?

  I brought my hands up to my face and let the tears come, crying for how small I felt and because I wasn’t doing more for my father and because I couldn’t. Because people didn’t like what I did for a living and because Kevin at the Escape Room never came back and because I’d pushed Gene away and everyone at work thought I was a freak and what the hell was so wrong with me anyway? And because I’d found the one piece of paper I didn’t want to find, the one that revealed a side of Jonah Gray that I would have given anything not to see. Why couldn’t I have overlooked it? What use was my mind if it only made me miserable?

  It felt like the last straw. He was married, but perfectly willing to flirt with me on the phone. He skipped out on his life in the Bay area—and no one had been able to provide me a reasonable explanation for that. He had plastered my name on his Web site, as if it were some digital dartboard for strangers to hurl insults onto. And now he had evaded paying capital gains taxes. How much more proof did I need that it was time to forget this guy?

  I looked up to see Jeff Hill walking down the hallway, his head bobbing above the cubicle walls.

  “Jeff!” I called out.

  He stopped immediately and turned around, arriving back at my cubicle as I scrambled to my feet.

  “What if we went to dinner tonight instead of next Thursday?”

  “Tonight?” he asked. He seemed a little uneasy with the idea. Or maybe he was thinking about all the germs that I’d picked up while on my office floor.

  “Do you have other plans?” I asked. It suddenly felt very important to accelerate our dating schedule.

  “No. I guess not. Do you still want to try Hunter’s?”

  “Perfect.”

  “Say, seven?”

  “Also perfect,” I said, giving him my best smile. “I’ll meet you at Hunter’s at seven. And that’s a definite affirmative.”

  He looked at me as though suspicious of my sudden enthusiasm. Then he nodded. “I’ll see you then,” he said. “That’ll be nice.”

  As soon as he left, I called Martina.

  “Have you even tried the jerky yet?” she asked.

  “Speaking of jerks, I’m done with Jonah Gray. Just so you know. Done. Absolutely done.” I told her about the stock sale I’d found. “All these people have been on me about what a hard a year he’d had. How awful it has been at 530 Horsehair Road. Well, he’s not the only one who’s had a h
ard year.”

  “I think maybe you’re upset about more than this journalist guy,” Martina said.

  “I tell you, I’m done with him. I don’t know what I thought I saw there, but forget it. Forget him.”

  Martina didn’t respond.

  “What?” I finally asked.

  “Nothing. I’m just surprised to hear you go from sixty to zero so quickly. I figured this guy was going to mean something, since I’ve never known you to be so drawn in to an audit. I’m sure you know what’s best. You just aren’t usually so, well, compulsive.”

  “I’m not usually dealing with tax cheats either.”

  “Well, you are, actually. But I agree that you’re not usually interested in them romantically. Did you say 530 Horsehair Road? And that’s Stockton, right?”

  “Why?”

  “I’m just looking up his zip code.”

  “Oh, no. I don’t want to play that game. He’s not my boyfriend.”

  “Did I say that he was?”

  “And he’s not some hottie you met at a bar.” Whenever Martina would meet a guy—whether at a bar or party or while traveling—she made sure to ask his zip code. Some people were interested in a person’s job or background or astrological sign. For Martina, zip codes were her measure of compatibility. As a marketing professional, she loved how people cluster in groups—those who drive similar cars, read the same magazines, watch the same television shows, attain the same levels of education. It was fascinating, if a little scary, how much she could determine about the character of a relatively small swath of land.

  “Why does it matter? You don’t like him anyway, right?” I heard her typing and after a few seconds, I heard her say “Huh, that’s interesting.”

  “What is?”

  “Does he hunt?”

  “Hunt?”

  “A lot of people in that zip code hunt.”

  “He gardens,” I said.

  “There’s a high likelihood that he drives an RV.”

  “An RV?” I asked.

  “My grandfather drives an RV,” Martina said, sounding a little defensive.

  “Well, this guy is only a couple years older than we are. I don’t know what he drives.”

  “Maybe a tractor.”

  “A tractor?”

  “They’ve got a lot of farmers in that area. He probably eats dinner early. Is he Filipino?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “There are a lot of Filipinos there, too.”

  “Ricardo’s Filipino. He’s from Stockton.”

  “I told you, this stuff is better than palm reading.”

  Begrudgingly, I found myself wondering whether Jonah Gray was like the other people in his zip code. That would have meant, as Martina explained, that he was a hard-rock music fan. That he watched daytime television and game shows, belonged to a veterans’ club and bought collectibles by mail. And that he was more likely than people in other areas of town to own a pet bird.

  Don’t get me wrong, all those traits were fine, but they didn’t exactly describe the men I’d been drawn to in the past.

  “It doesn’t matter anyway,” I said. “He’s married with a kid and a tax evader to boot.”

  “Then it doesn’t matter if he has a bird,” Martina agreed.

  That night, right at seven, I met Jeff in front of Hunter’s. As we walked inside, I found myself looking toward the bar. It seemed remark able that only a few days before I had been introduced to Marcus in there.

  “The dining room is this way,” the hostess said, seeing me glance in the opposite direction.

  “Oh, I know,” I said.

  “When I asked you, you said that you hadn’t ever been here before,” Jeff said.

  “Just once. Earlier this week, actually.”

  “That’s how I remember you,” the hostess said. “You were here with that adorable guy. The one with all the tats.”

  I felt Jeff Hill watching me.

  “Marcus,” I said, to both of them. “Family stuff.”

  “Wow, I would not have guessed that,” the hostess said, bringing us to our table. “You guys were, like, totally different. Tell him to stop in again. He was totally hot.”

  “My half brother,” I explained to Jeff.

  We sat and Jeff immediately began centering the salt and pepper shakers and his utensils. He looked up at me. “You don’t mind, do you?”

  I didn’t mind. I didn’t find it particularly sexy, but I didn’t mind. “Do what you need to do,” I said.

  “So how many brothers do you have?” he asked.

  “Three,” I said. It was the first time I’d included Marcus in the count.

  “But one’s a half brother. So really, two and a half.”

  “Which rounds to three,” I pointed out.

  As I watched Jeff read the menu, I wondered whether our date was a bad idea. As a rule, I avoided office romances. Of course, Jeff wasn’t a coworker in the manner that another auditor would have been. The archive department was two floors down. But the rule had provided a ready excuse when I’d been asked out by Lance (whose breath would have kept me from saying yes anyway), by Brad (funny, but he’d never shut up) and by Troy (who had asked out every woman on the floor within a week of taking the job).

  So why had I said yes to Jeff? I wondered, as I watched him frown at the entrées. Was it because he was new? Because Ricardo thought he might be right for me? Because everything else felt so fragile and foggy and he was so steady and evident?

  Jeff closed his menu and set it on the table. “I’m so glad you agreed to come to dinner,” he said. “I want you to know that I don’t usually date people I work with. I never once dated a cop when I worked for the Oakland P.D.”

  I smiled. Maybe I would find that we had other things in common, too.

  “So, I’m going to get the venison. What about you?” Jeff asked.

  “I was thinking about the linguini,” I said, closing my menu.

  “Pasta in a game restaurant?” he said. “The duck looks good, doesn’t it? Why don’t you try the duck?”

  “Okay, maybe the duck,” I said.

  “You look great in that color by the way,” Jeff said.

  I looked down at my blouse. “In this blue?” I asked.

  “What color would you call that? Sort of a whitish blue?”

  “Um, light blue?” I said.

  “You should wear it more. It makes your eyes look really beautiful.”

  Jeff looked at the hostess, who was headed back to her podium by the door.

  “Our hostess isn’t happy in her job,” Jeff said. “It figures. Can you imagine having to be nice to people all day?”

  “Why do you think she’s unhappy?” I asked. “She’s been smiling each time I’ve seen her.”

  “But look at her when she’s not with a customer. She doesn’t smile then. She stops smiling as soon as she’s alone.”

  If I leaned back in my chair, I could see her, standing near the entrance to both the bar and the dining room, waiting for the next party of two or three or four to arrive. Jeff was right. She was slumped against the wall, picking at her nails, her expression grim. But as soon as the door to the restaurant opened, her posture straightened and a smile pasted onto her face.

  “I see what you mean,” I said. “That’s too bad.”

  “How’s that bad? She could be an actress,” Jeff said. “She’s very good at showing people what they want to see. Most people can’t make the transition so quickly.”

  “Do you always analyze restaurant staff?” I asked.

  “I like figuring out what people don’t know they’re telling me,” Jeff said. “I was really shy as I kid,” he went on. “People barely talked to me, so I sat and watched a lot. You know, when I wasn’t collecting insects.”

  “You don’t seem shy,” I said.

  “I’m better now at asking for what I want,” he said. He smiled at me.

  “So what have I told you?” I asked. I found myself
nervous to know.

  “Something’s going on with you,” he said. “Everyone talks about you like you’re the most on-the-ball person in the office, but you’re not, are you? Not right now at least.”

  I felt my eyes begin to well up. I shook my head.

  “I mean, that’s fine. I don’t need to know why. I respect your privacy. But you asked, and well, I could see it.”

  “What gave me away?”

  “Your desk.”

  “My desk?”

  “It’s been cluttered since I first met you. I don’t think it usually is.”

  “It’s not,” I said. For some reason, it was important that he believed me.

  “I didn’t think so, because you don’t have piles.”

  “Piles?”

  “See, there are messy people, but you’re not one of those. You don’t leave old food containers around. Then there are cluttered people. But really cluttered people usually have some organizing principle that you can see if you look carefully. You know, defined piles, stacks of reading, overstuffed file folders. But you don’t. Your bookshelves are neat and organized. Your photographs don’t have any dust. It’s like you’ve only let your desk go in the past month or so.”

  “All of August,” I said. “It’s true.”

  “I hope I didn’t upset you,” Jeff said. “You asked.”

  “So what’s your desk like?” I asked, though I had a feeling I knew. I looked at the salt and pepper shakers, precisely arranged.

  “It’s organized and clean,” he said, “but you knew that.”

  The rest of dinner was surprisingly easy. Jeff seemed relaxed—at least, as relaxed as I’d ever seen him. He told one or two decent jokes. He asked about my friends. He held definite opinions, but they tended to complement my own, and it was a relief to be with someone who wasn’t scared of making decisions.

  He walked me to my car after dinner, and there, under the fluorescent streetlights, he leaned in. Though I hadn’t quite made up my mind about him, about what I wanted or didn’t want to happen, I found myself kissing him. It was nice, actually. He had made the decision for the both of us, and it was reassuring to feel someone’s arms around me, so solid and certain. Reassuring isn’t necessarily the wrong reason.