“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “No matter what they do, the two youngsters will be starving. And I’ve never known Francis to turn down a meal, either.” I paused and glanced at the slow-moving clock. “And then there’s me.” That brought a wide grin from my grandson. “I’ve got a meeting at three, by the way.”
“You’re kidding,” Buddy said in wonder. “No, I guess you’re not.” He thumped a heavy wrapped cut of meat onto the counter. “We’ll get you fed in time for that.” He turned with his hands on his hips. “Come Tuesday night, is it like somebody suddenly throws a big light switch? Do you suddenly get your life back? The phone stops ringing, all that sort of thing?”
“I fervently hope so,” I said. “In theory, the sheriff-elect takes office in January. But I told Robert that when he wins the day after tomorrow, he gets the keys to the executive washroom right then and there. Tuesday night. That’s it. It’s his.”
Buddy laughed. “And what if what’s-her-face wins?”
“Leona Spears? She’s not going to.”
“Famous last words.”
“They would be, too. If she won, I’d be intensely unhappy, because I’d have to rethink the whole thing. I’m not sure I’d toss the keys to her. I might have to wait until the last second on January twentieth, and in the meantime, hope for an earthquake or something of the sort.”
“We’re going to eat at exactly two-thirty,” Tadd said, not one to be easily derailed from his mission with talk of politics. “If the Guzmans’ plane is late, that’s tough.”
“He has spoken,” Buddy said. I watched his son poke at the fresh leg of lamb as if seeking out a weak spot.
“You’re not going to have time to cook that whole thing between now and two-thirty,” I said, but I should have known better.
Tadd picked up a package of eight stainless-steel skewers. “Lamb ka bobs,” he said, beaming.
“Christ, you bought those, too?”
“No. You had ’em inside the grill,” Tadd said. “The package had never been opened. Neat-o.”
“Neat-o,” I said. “I didn’t know I had ’em. Anything else you need?”
“Just a really good knife,” Tadd said. “So I can hack this thing up.” He patted the leg of lamb affectionately.
I turned and pulled open a drawer, viewing the helter-skelter of implements lying at rest. “Define ‘really good,’” I said.
“Something that won’t snap halfway through a cut and shear off his thumb,” my son said, and I detected a note of parental concern. Apparently it was one thing to have a teacher tell you that your son was a culinary arts genius, and another thing entirely to turn over to the kid all the edged weapons without a single apprehensive pang.
Tadd chose a big old heavy thing that had been his great-grandmother’s, then settled in with the knife and the sharpening steel to bring the edge up to his specifications.
Buddy and I retired to the living room, with nothing to do but talk and watch the clock…and perhaps keep one ear cocked toward the kitchen in case a sudden gasp from the chef alerted us to a missing digit.
At 12:30 the phone rang, and for the next twenty minutes I talked with my eldest daughter, Camille. More accurately, I listened to the high-powered recitation of life in Flint, Michigan.
Somewhere in midparagraph, I realized that she had asked me a question.
“Pardon?” I asked.
“I said, have you heard from Kerri and Joel?”
“Ah, no. But then it’s early. Probably tomorrow. Or maybe even Tuesday,” I said. My youngest daughter Kerri would find a working phone only with difficulty in the Peruvian village where she lived-less than ten miles from where her mother had been born and raised.
My oldest son Joel and I didn’t see eye to eye on a lot of things, and it wasn’t just because as president and CEO of BetaComp International, he was on the other end of the income spectrum from Kerri. It’d been nearly two years since I’d last heard the sound of his voice…and even on that occasion, his secretary had put me on hold for ten minutes. Hopefully, Joel Gastner was finding happiness peddling whatever computer component it was that BetaComp manufactured.
“Big doings planned for Tuesday night?” Camille asked.
“Not if I can help it.”
“What”-she laughed-“no victory burrito at the Don Juan?”
“Nope. They’re closed all day Tuesday, the bastards. But we’ve got the last laugh. Tadd’s here, and he’s cooking up a storm. You want to talk to him while he’s still got all his fingers?”
“Sure, but put Buddy on first,” Camille said. “I need to talk to him before I forget what I wanted.”
“Buddy,” I said, and held the phone out to him. “It’s Camille. She wants to talk to you.”
“Of course she does,” my son said, and took the phone into a quiet corner of the living room.
“Anything I can do?” I asked Tadd, bending over his shoulder as he labored.
He shook his head. “Just havin’ fun,” he said.
“Well, I’m glad you are. Tell your dad when he gets off the phone that I’m out back. I’m going to get some air.”
The kitchen door opened without a pry bar, and I brushed aside a couple vines that had spent all summer trying to come inside the house. As I stepped outside into the cool air, I saw that the back door of the garage was ajar. The grill had been hauled outside to sit in the sunshine, lid open to allow the spiders a chance to escape before Tadd touched off the gas.
The dry cottonwood leaves crackled overhead and underfoot. There had been no ripping wind whistling around the house to do my raking for me, and the leaves made a nice, deep blanket over the patio bricks. With hands thrust in my pockets, I ambled out away from the house.
The first cottonwood stood less than thirty feet from the back door. Fully four feet in diameter, its trunk bulged in a series of nodules and carbuncles as if the very weight of the tree was compressing the lower wood. The tree shed limbs regularly, some of them crashing onto the roof of the house. I craned my neck and looked up. The limb that hung thirty feet over the kitchen was gunmetal-gray and without a stitch of bark. At its base, it was more than a foot in diameter.
“Whatcha lookin’ at?” Buddy asked. He let the screen door close gently in deference to the rusted hinges.
“That limb.” I pointed. “It’s drawing a bead on the kitchen.”
“That’ll be exciting,” he said, glancing up. “Camille’s telling Tadd how to make an instant marinade for the lamb,” he added. “Anything is possible, apparently.”
“Your son is amazing, Buddy.” I touched his shoulder. “Take a walk with me?”
“Sure.” The two of us strolled out into the wilderness of my backyard. A trail of sorts took us through the grove of cotton-woods. Far enough away from the house that roots couldn’t reach the waterlines, the vegetation became a hodgepodge of whatever could survive-grasses mixed with New Mexico locust, elm, cholla, creosote bush, three or four species of acacia, and stunted juniper.
“This makes a nice buffer for your place,” Buddy said. “Gives you some privacy.”
“I guess it does,” I said, and stopped at a small grove of twisted oaks, none more than twenty feet tall.
“I remember when those were just sprouting,” Buddy said. “Me and Billy Spaulding used to shoot the tips off with our BB guns.”
“The two Wild Bills,” I said. “Whatever became of him, anyway?”
“Don’t know,” Buddy said. “We graduated and that was that.”
I nodded and took a deep breath. It was too easy to slip into a quagmire of reminiscence. The last thing I wanted to do was spend three maudlin days letting the past take over my life.
“Do you have any objections if I sell this land?” I said suddenly.
Buddy looked surprised and followed me through a thick grove of elm saplings. “Why would I mind?”
“I just thought I’d ask, is all. No sentimental attachments?”
Buddy laughed. “Attachments? No. Other than that this is where you live. If you move somewhere else, that’s fine.” He chuckled again. “You can run, but you can’t hide, Dad.”
I didn’t tell him that was the second time in forty-eight hours I’d been told that-the first time by a pretty bartender at the Broken Spur. I stopped within view of Escondido Lane, the village street that circled the back of my five acres. Just beyond was the embankment that rose up to the interstate. The earth along Escondido was still freshly torn up after the village had put in a new water line to service the neighborhood to the east of me.