Goodbye from Nowhere

by Sara Zarr

  He talked like Kyle had been in on some conversation he hadn’t been, but with Grandpa sometimes it was better not to say much.

  “So,” Grandpa went on, “I guess I’m trying to repent by building some living quarters that are halfway decent, for anyone who works here in the future.”

  Pico started barking and growling. Kyle went over and got down on his knees so he could see under the bunk. A decomposing ground squirrel lay on its side. He pulled Pico away by the collar and told Grandpa, “I’ll get everyone started on this after breakfast.”

  “Which will be ready soon. Let’s not keep Grandma waiting.”

  Kyle got the desiccated squirrel out with a stick, pushing it along the floor, then outside, flinging it as far as he could into the surrounding trees.

  Grandma Baker got very extra with summer farm-week breakfasts.

  Biscuits. Eggs, with cheese and without. Bacon and veggie bacon. Home fries, cubed melon with mint from the garden, sliced apples, and fresh pear juice from their own trees. Pinto beans, too, almost always pinto beans with breakfast, a tradition straight from Grandpa Navarro and Aunt Jenny. And coffee cake, because breakfast was followed by breakfast dessert.

  Kyle didn’t see Emily. He wanted to tell her about the plans for the bunkhouse, his idea about making new tables from the old materials, what Grandpa had said about being greedy.

  Or just see her, because he wanted to hold this image in his head of farm-week breakfast and Grandma’s kitchen, and she should be in that picture.

  His dad sat on a stool in the corner of the kitchen with his phone and pocket notebook, doing some work with his pre-breakfast phone privileges. Kyle wondered how the night had gone for his parents, if they’d really slept in the same bed or if one of them had snuck down to the basement. How would it feel to lie there, arms and legs touching, with someone you’d sort of broken up with?

  Kyle grabbed a plate from the counter and got in line.

  “Eliseo first,” Grandma said, waving Grandpa Navarro over.

  He looked the same as always: Wranglers and boots and a long-sleeved collared shirt. He rarely came out of his truck to join in at meals or stay long. He’d do his rounds on the access roads, making sure all the systems were working and that the people leasing land were doing everything right. “I’m giving Martie cuts,” he said now.

  Martie spun around and sashayed to the buffet. “Navarro privileges!”

  Taylor came in and stood behind Kyle. “When we get our phones, I want to call Megan,” she said in a low voice.

  “Where’s Mom?” Kyle asked.

  “Still getting ready in their room. I don’t think they even change clothes in front of each other anymore. Alex and Emily went to give Larry an apple.”

  Oh, shit. Larry. The last living horse from when they were kids. What was going to happen to him? He was too old to ride now or pull anything. He just kind of hung out.

  They got to the food. Kyle tucked bacon into a biscuit and starting eating that while he loaded the rest of his plate. Someone put bluegrass music on the outdoor speakers, and Grandma came in and out, weaving through everyone while holding her spatula and telling them not to make a mess.

  Kyle wanted to remember this. How Grandma ruled the kitchen, made every meal a feast, and how the cousins and aunts and uncles crowded in. Some cranky before they’d had their coffee and food, some using their cheerfulness as a weapon against the cranky ones. How the sun came in through the glass doors and left patches of light on the cabinetry.

  Grandma interrupted his Instagram moment by sidling up to Kyle to say, “Too bad about Nadia.”

  So Uncle Mike had spread the word. Which was fine. Better than Kyle having to tell every single person who asked over and over again. Ugh, where was Emily?

  Then, as if he’d made her appear by force of will, there she was, coming through the patio slider with Alex. She had on leggings and a long-sleeved T-shirt and knit cap.

  Her eyes her eyes her eyes.

  He needed her to see him, see what he was feeling about this moment in the kitchen and the family and all of the years, the loss of it all, the loss of how the sunlight hit and how the biscuits smelled and of everyone together, right here.

  He needed her to see it all exactly like he did, and he’d know he wasn’t alone.

  She smiled at him.

  She put a hand on her chest and held one arm out, and sang to him across the kitchen, from Oklahoma! “Oh, what a beautiful mornin’! Oh, what a beautiful day!”

  Aunt Brenda put up her hand. “No singing yet. Please.”

  “You two,” Uncle Mike said. “I’m gonna miss this.”

  “We’re not breaking up the family,” Kyle’s dad said. “Just selling some land. Okay?”

  “He speaks!”

  “Yeah, Bren, I do. And I say, don’t be sentimental about property. You learn that in real estate and construction. We had a fine childhood here, but that was a long time ago. It’s over. We’ll have holidays somewhere else and . . .” He looked around the kitchen. “What?”

  “God, Jeff,” Aunt Brenda said. “Read the room.”

  After breakfast, a bunch of them loitered on the patio. Kyle and Emily were at the table eating coffee cake, and it felt completely normal and not loaded with all that stuff he felt in the kitchen. The intensity in his mind around Emily was this bright sun that sometimes burned and sometimes, like now, was simply and gently warm.

  Taylor sat with Martie on the wicker love seat in the shade of the patio roof. They were playing with Pico, trying to get him to dance on his hind legs and shake hands.

  Great-Aunt Gina called to them from the other side of the patio, where she and Uncle Mike sat. “That’s a service dog, girls. He should be inside with your grandfather.”

  “He’s out here, though,” Martie muttered to Taylor, and took Pico’s front paws in her hands. “Dance, doggie, dance!”

  “He’s like, ‘I don’t want to be a service dog—I want to be a ballroom dancer!’” Taylor said.

  “You can see in his eyes that’s his true dream.”

  “If I had my phone, we could be making the most popular video the internet has ever seen.”

  Martie laughed. “Like you can’t get your phone.” Then she glanced at Taylor and said, “What, you don’t know where they are?”

  “Uh, no?”

  “Me neither,” said Emily.

  “Nope,” added Kyle.

  “Guys.” Martie sighed. She whispered, “They’re in an old pickling crock in the big pantry. Behind one of those ten-pound bags of beans.” She looked at Kyle. “Your mom was in there for like half an hour last night. I can’t believe you didn’t notice.”

  “Yeah, well, she’s pretty skilled at sneaking,” Kyle said. Taylor glanced at him with a raised eyebrow.

  “It’s easy to get to the phones,” Martie said. “The only problem is that Grandma is in the kitchen so much.”

  “Except for right now,” Taylor said, nodding over to where Grandma had dozed off in a chaise.

  Taylor bent down and picked up Pico. “I’ll take him in,” she called to Great-Aunt Gina.

  “Just point him in the direction of Grandpa’s room. He’ll know what to do.”

  “Wait,” Kyle said. “We need to start on the bunkhouse. Who even cares about phones?”

  “I just want to see what’s up with Megan. I have no patience.” Taylor whispered to Martie, “Do you want yours?”

  “Nah. I just checked it like an hour ago.”

  Taylor tucked Pico under her arm like a football and went inside. Kyle said to Emily, “Be right back.” He followed Taylor in.

  She set Pico down. “Go to Grandpa,” she whispered. The dog looked up at them, panting. “Go see Grandpa.” She pointed toward the front of the house, where Grandma and Grandpa’s bedroom was, then gave him a nudge with her foot. He finally got the hint and trotted off, his nails clicking on the kitchen tile.

  There was a small pantry right in the kitchen, but the one Marti
e had been talking about was a narrow but deep room you entered from the laundry area. Grandma kept all the bulk and backup food there, like the produce she canned herself, as well as big bags of flour and dried beans and potatoes and onions and stuff. The knee-high crock was right where Martie had said it would be.

  The phones were in a pile, with kitchen towels underneath and around them. Taylor found hers near the top, but it wouldn’t power on. “Dead battery. Which is something that happens when your phone is in a jar for twenty-four hours, abandoned and unloved. Maybe yours has life.”

  Kyle didn’t want his. He liked how things were. Being there, being with Emily. Forget everything else. Pictures of Nadia lived in the phone. Texts with her. The workout tracker app he was still on with the team. All the evidence of his former life.

  “Hurry up,” Taylor whispered. “Do you want to get caught?”

  Fine. He did actually want Megan there. But when Kyle found his phone near the bottom of the pile and it still had life and there was nothing from Megan, no replies to his texts from yesterday morning, he was pissed. Literally the least she could do was say she wasn’t coming.

  Taylor grabbed at his phone. “I’m calling her.”

  Kyle held his arm up and out of reach. “She’s not coming, Taylor. She doesn’t want to be here. Trust me, I laid on all the think-of-the-cousins shit I could. It’s not happening. She doesn’t care.”

  Just then, another one of the phones buzzed and lit up.

  Taylor reached in to retrieve it. It had a green polka-dot case. Their mom’s.

  The screen lit up again with a string of messages from a number with no name.

  Just touching base about the thing.

  Is the thing still on? LMK.

  If we need to resched, call my office. ;)

  Kyle felt sick.

  “That has to be him, right?” Taylor whispered, pressing the button on the phone to try to unlock it.

  Jacob’s dad.

  They heard the kitchen screen door slide open. Taylor grabbed Kyle’s arm and dragged him into the powder room off the kitchen.

  “I bet I can guess her code,” she said

  “Don’t.”

  “She’s used the same one forever. ATM, gym padlock, home security system—”

  “You think it’s that code?” Kyle said, incredulous. One seven seven seven. It had no significance other than being easy to remember.

  She tried it. Strike one. Relieved, Kyle said, “Let’s just put it back.”

  “Hang on.”

  “You’ve got one more shot at this. Three times, and she’ll know someone was messing with it.”

  “Actually, you get six tries. I’m not saying I broke into my roommate’s phone, but I’m not saying I didn’t.”

  “The thing,” the message said. What was the thing?

  “Try seven seven seven one,” Kyle said.

  “So you do want me to do it.”

  He did. He didn’t. It wasn’t going to help anything. Also it was, like, wrong.

  “Curiosity is overrated,” Kyle said, repeating Grandpa from that morning.

  “No, it isn’t. I’m doing it.”

  Mom’s home screen icons filled the phone face.

  “Oh my god,” Taylor muttered.

  She clicked on the messaging app and scrolled through screens and screens of texts while Kyle read over her shoulder.

  Their mom and Jacob’s dad seemed to think they were speaking in code, disguising their conversation as some business thing, but it was all so obvious. After reading a bunch, it became clear that “the office” was his house and “the boss” was his wife and “my assistant” was Jacob. Like, Have to resched; my assistant came home early from school.

  “‘From school.’ What a fucking idiot,” Kyle muttered.

  So “the thing” was that they were planning to meet up this week. This week. Farm week. As in, he was or was going to be in Santa Rosa, about a half hour from the farm. Like they’d planned it all so that Mom could sneak off and visit him while being here.

  After all that bullshit about one more farm week, make it good, don’t ruin it. His mom saying on the swings that she might make different choices, knowing what she knew now.

  Tell him not to come, then, Mom. Call off THE THING.

  “This is so disturbing,” Taylor said.

  “Try looking his wife in the eye.”

  “Jeez. Get your shit together, Mom.”

  From the texts, they saw his name was Troy. Kyle wanted details beyond “Troy, Jacob’s dad.” He took the phone and copied the number the texts were coming from, then pasted it into the search engine for a reverse phone lookup. The first few hits just said, “Verizon customer in Santa Barbara, CA.” But then one came up on a directory of app designers looking for gigs. There was a name, and there he was.

  Troy Partel. Goofy grin and wire-rim glasses and big teeth.

  “You should really close your mouth when you smile, Troy Partel,” Taylor muttered.

  His bio read:

  Troy Partel has eighteen years’ design experience with employers and clients such as Oracle, Yahoo!, and Royal Semiconductor, as well as numerous smaller companies, start-ups, and individuals. End-to-end design services starting with your app idea to final delivery. Flexible rates based on your needs and company size. Troy lives in beautiful Santa Barbara, California, with his wife, son, and golden retriever.

  Ugh.

  He did more searching and found Troy Partel’s Facebook page, and through that found his wife’s, and there was Jacob’s smiling mom from the parking lot that day. Anna Partel in her profile pic with Troy on one side and Jake the Quake on the other and the dog in front of them, on some hiking trail somewhere, all smiling and happy and—

  The bathroom doorknob rattled. Taylor, startled, grabbed the phone and put it in her pocket.

  “Just a sec!”

  Kyle flushed the toilet and Taylor looked at him. “What was the point of flushing? We still have to walk out together and now it looks like we were having brother-sister toilet time.”

  “I have to go!” It was just Alex, calling through the door.

  Kyle exhaled and opened the door.

  “What are you guys doing?” she asked

  “Family conference.”

  “I beat Emily at backgammon! I never beat her!”

  “That’s great, congratulations.” Taylor gave Alex a high five.

  When they heard Alex lock the door behind her, Taylor darted back into the pantry, lifted the lid of the crock, and threw their mom’s phone back in.

  5

  KYLE TRIED to concentrate on organizing the bunkhouse teardown without being a bossy asshole about it. The texts between his mom and Troy Partel scrolled through his mind. They shouldn’t have looked at her phone. The more stuff he knew, the more he worried that he was supposed to do something about it. What was the tipping point between not doing something about a situation and doing something?

  He watched Emily pulling nails out of boards. He wanted what she had—her kind of calm, her steadiness. Like no one could knock her off her feet. For a moment, watching her, he felt if he could just, like, soak her up so completely that he could be him and be her and always be able to access those Emily things he needed so much. . . .

  Well, that’s creepy AF, he imagined Megan saying.

  He threw himself into the job. His instincts about how to approach the job felt right—getting the roof off and the materials sorted into reusable stuff and then stuff to take to the dump. After a couple solid hours of work, Taylor said, “It’s too hot to be doing this.”

  “We should have started earlier,” Martie said. She threw a piece of one of the rotting roof beams onto the pile of stuff for the dump. “No dicking around after breakfast tomorrow like we did today.”

  Alex came over and showed Kyle her hands. “I have blisters. I’m going back to the house.” He said fine and she ran off.

  “That’s not fair. If she’s done, I’m done.” Martie
took off the work gloves she’d borrowed from her dad.

  Taylor gave Kyle a look. “It’s almost time for our phones. I’m calling Megan once I get mine plugged in.”

  “Okay, well, bye, all you quitters,” Kyle said.

  When Taylor was gone, he asked Emily if she was leaving too.

  “Are you?” she asked.

  “Not yet. I want to do some more sorting.”

  Emily wandered around the site, collecting nails and adding them to the pile of hardware. Kyle snuck glances at her, wondered what she was thinking. “We got a lot done today,” he said when he couldn’t stand another second of waiting for her to talk. “Considering the late start and all.”

  “I guess it doesn’t take that long to completely destroy childhood.”

  “Nope,” he said. “It’s pretty fast.”

  “What your dad said in the kitchen earlier was like . . . whoa. Do you think he really doesn’t care about the farm? I mean, ‘Don’t get sentimental about property’? What was that?”

  “He cares. Just like he cares about my mom and stuff. But he doesn’t like feelings. Which I’ve been realizing might be a Baker family trait.”

  She bent down to pick up a nail. “That’s funny, because after my mom got her tattoo, my dad said maybe she should take a break from drinking and working and having all these big dramatic experiences so that she can see how she actually feels about her life.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Nothing, because she was on her way out to a rehearsal.”

  “Then there’s Uncle Mike, who’s awesome, but he never seems sad or angry or cranky or anything. That’s not possible, right?” Kyle asked. “To never have a bad feeling?”

  “No, not possible.” She crawled along in a squat, collecting more hardware.

  “So, I found out a new thing about my mom this morning, but if you are totally and completely sick of hearing about it, I’ll keep it to myself.”

  “You can’t say that and think I’m not going to want to know.”