“It was,” I said, holding her eyes. I was remembering her as a child, black hair in braids, like Pocahontas, dimpled knees, the plain constricting chute of a little girl’s dress, but a dress that was pink or moss-green or Lake Tahoe blue. “I just hosed off.”
“Hard work, huh?” she said, looking off over my shoulder as if she were addressing someone behind me. And then: “Can I get you something to drink?”
“It wouldn’t be milk, would it?” I said, and she laughed.
“No, no milk, I promise. I can give you juice, soda, beer — would you like a beer?”
The dog sniffed at my leg — or at least I hope he was sniffing, since he was so black and matted you couldn’t tell which end of him was which. “A beer sounds real nice,” I said, “but I don’t know how you and your sister are supposed to feel about it — I mean, beer’s not white.” I let it go a beat. “Or black.”
She held her smile, not fazed in the least. “For one thing,” she said, “Moira always takes a nap after lunch, so she won’t be involved. And for another”—she was looking right into my eyes now, the smile turned up a notch—“we only serve Guinness in this house.”
We sat in the kitchen — black-and-white tile, white cabinets, black appliances — and had three bottles each while the sun slid across the windowpanes and the plumbago withered over its hacked and naked roots. I don’t know what it was — the beer, the time of day, the fact that she was there and listening — but I really opened up to her. I told her about Janine, my second wife, and how she picked at me all the time — I was never good enough for her, no matter what I did — and I got off on a tangent about a transformative experience I’d had in Hawaii, when I first realized I wanted to work with the earth, with the whole redemptive process of digging and planting, laying out flowerbeds, running drip lines, setting trees in the ground. (I was on top of Haleakala Crater, in the garden paradise of the world, and there was nothing but volcanic debris all around me, a whole sour landscape of petrified symbols. It was dawn and I hadn’t slept and Janine and I stood there in the wind, bleary tourists gazing out on all that nullity, and suddenly I understood what I wanted in life. I wanted things to be green, that was all. It was as simple as that.)
Caitlin was a good listener, and I liked the way she tipped the glass back in delicate increments as she drank, her eyes shining and her free hand spread flat on the tabletop, as if we were at sea and she needed to steady herself. She kept pushing the hair away from her face and then leaning forward to let it dangle loose again, and whenever I touched on anything painful or sensitive (and practically everything about Janine fell into that category), a sympathetic little crease appeared between her eyebrows and she clucked her tongue as if there were something stuck to the roof of her mouth. After the second beer, we turned to less personal topics: the weather, gardening, people we knew in common. When we cracked the third, we began reminiscing about the lame, halt and oddball teachers we’d had in junior high and some of the more memorable disasters from those days, like the time it rained day and night for the better part of a week and boulders the size of Volkswagens rolled up out of the streambeds and into the passing lane of the freeway.
I was having a good time, and good times had been in precious short supply since my divorce. I felt luxurious and calm. The shrubs, I figured, could wait until tomorrow — and the trees and the grass and the sky too. It was nice, for a change, to let the afternoon stretch itself over the window like a thin skin and not have to worry about a thing. I was drunk. Drunk at three in the afternoon, and I didn’t care. We’d just shared a laugh over Mr. Clemens, the English teacher who wore the same suit and tie every day for two years and pronounced poem as “poim,” when I set my glass down and asked Caitlin what I’d been wanting to ask since I first left my card in her mailbox six months back. “Listen, Caitlin,” I said, riding the exhilaration of that last echoing laugh, “I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, but what is it with the black and white business — I mean, is it some sort of political statement? A style? A religious thing?”
She leaned back in her chair and made an effort to hold on to her smile. The dog lay asleep in the corner, as shabby and formless as an old alpaca coat slipped from a hanger. He let out a long, heaving sigh, lifted his head briefly, and then dropped it again. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, “it’s a long story—”
That was when Moira appeared, right on cue. She was wearing a gauzy white pantsuit she might have picked up at a beekeepers’ convention, and she hesitated at the kitchen door when she saw me sitting there with her sister and a thick black beer, but only for an instant. “Why, Vincent,” she said, more the governess than ever, “what a nice surprise.”
The next morning, at eight, Walt Tremaine showed up with seven black men in white jeans, black T-shirts and white caps and enough heavy machinery to take down every tree within half a mile before lunch. “And how are you this fine morning, Mr. Vincent Larry,” he said, “—or is it Larry Vincent?”
I blew the steam off a cup of McDonalds’s coffee and worked my tongue round the remnants of an Egg McMuffin. “Just call me Larry,” I said. “It’s her,” I added, by way of explanation. “Moira, the older one. I mean, she’s … well, I don’t have to tell you — I’m sure you can draw your own conclusions.”
Walt Tremaine planted his feet and wrapped his arms round his chest. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said, waxing philosophical as his crew scuttled past us with ropes, chainsaws, blowers and trimmers. “Sometimes I wish I could get a little simplicity in my life, if you know what I mean. Up in a tree half the day, sawdust in my hair, and when I come home to my wife she expects me to mow the lawn and break out the hedge clippers.” He looked down at his feet and then out across the lawn. “Hell, I’d like to pave my yard over too.”
I was going to say I know what you mean, because that’s the sort of thing you say in a situation like that, but that would have implied agreement, and I didn’t agree, not at all. So I just shrugged noncommittally and watched Walt Tremaine’s eyes follow his climbers up the biggest, oldest and most venerable oak in the yard.
Later, when the tree was in pieces and the guy I’d hired for the day and I had rototilled the lawn and raked the dying fragments into three top-heavy piles the size of haystacks, Moira, in her beekeeper’s regalia, appeared with a pitcher of milk and a tray of Oreo cookies. It was four in the afternoon, the yard was raw with dirt, and the air shrieked with the noise of Walt Tremaine’s shredder as his men fed it the remains of the oak’s crown. The other two oaks, smaller but no less grand, had been decapitated preparatory to taking them down, and the tea tree had been relieved of its limbs. All in all, it looked as if a bomb had hit the yard while miraculously sparing the house (white, of course, with whiter trim and a dead black roof). I watched Moira circulate among the bewildered sweating men of Walt Tremaine’s crew, pouring out milk, offering cookies.
When she got around to me and Greg (black jeans, white T-shirt, black cap, white skin), she let her smile waver and flutter twice across her lips before settling in. We were taking a hard-earned break, stretched out in comfort on the last besieged patch of grass and trying to muster the energy to haul all that yellowing turf out to my pickup. We’d really humped it all afternoon, so caught up in the rhythm of destruction we never even stopped for a drink from the hose, but we couldn’t help but look guilty now — you always do when the client catches you on your rear end. I introduced her to Greg, who didn’t bother to get up.