Читать книгу Blind Shady Bend - Adina Sara - Страница 12

THE TERRIBLE SOUND of Winston’s brakes announced his arrival, but no kids came running to greet him, like they often did. They must be out back somewhere, he could hear their voices through the trees.

He found Robin sitting at the kitchen table, his head in his hands. Pale. The gray pall of age settling around his son’s eyes, taking the years away too soon. Not a boy any more yet not quite a man, he was coming up on thirty. Vera gone already fifteen years. While she was ailing, the boy was just starting to break free of her hold, finding the legs to stand on his own. Of course Winston didn’t pay much attention to the boy in those terrible months, but he seemed to be fine, going his own way. And then teetering over, crashing at the loss. Winston could almost put his finger on the boy’s problems, started early but sealed when his mother passed. And maybe he could have done something different. Been a better father. But how?

No use figuring it out anymore. What was done was done. Robin was a father himself now, saddled with the two kids and still a kid himself, that scraggly hair of his still in his eyes. Look at him, Winston thought, studying the figure slumped at his kitchen table, wearing a man’s hard boots, tool belt spread across the table top, no woman around to object.

“Tired, son?”

Robin was too tired to answer, but nodded. Winston knew. He saw plenty from the sidelines. If it were up to him, he’d have insisted the mother take her share of raising the kids but Robin didn’t even know where the woman was. Off to Denver last anyone heard with her guru, laying her healing hands all over the place while her own children screamed for a mother’s touch.

Winston wanted to touch his boy who was now a man, sitting in front of him, the big strapping hunk of him, wrap his arms around him and squeeze his troubles away. But it was too late for that.

“Anything you want son?”

“Something cold. Screaming headache.”

Winston poured a glass of orange soda and put it in a tall glass with ice cubes. It was always Robin’s favorite. Vera wouldn’t let him have it with all that sugar, but after her death, Winston stocked up on it, bought it in cases, along with those jerky sticks filled with nitrites. Sometimes for no reason, he’d toss the boy a jerky stick or some of that sweet soda and they’d share a wordless smile, a “she should only see us now” kind of secret. Some good things had come from the years without her.

“Thanks Dad,” and as he reached for the glass, both sets of their fingers interlocked around the cold wet shape, and they felt the warmth seep through the cold.

Robin took a sip and the cold and sweet shook him out of his slump. He started talking, offering more details than his father was accustomed to hearing. Turns out the Peardale job fell through. All he really had to do this weekend was a few hours finishing sanding the Sampson’s porch railing, and then over to the Jaekel’s to set the fence posts. It was turning out to be one of the few short Saturdays he’d had in months, and with his dad already committed to taking the kids for the weekend, maybe he could take some time for himself, maybe drive out to Sterling lake, take a rowboat out past the weekend fishermen, past the kids in their rubber tubes, past the smart asses with their drop lines and homemade worms no rainbow trout would take a second look at. He’d go past them all, drop the oars down, where the loons and marsh birds nest, and lie there, naked to his shorts, shaded by the whip grass, let the boat snag up in the thicket and not give a damn if it ever broke free.

“Wasn’t Peardale that big spa job?”

“Contractor said they might be getting divorced. Holding off on the hot tub deck remodel for now. It was going to be a lot of work. I was counting on the money, but I could really use a day to myself.”

“Well this might cheer you up. I got some news about the place across the road. Remember that motorcycle guy who lived there when you were a kid? He’s the one who was killed in that motorcycle crash a few months back. Turns out he left that old abandoned place to his sister. At least that’s what Pete told me. Says he got it straight from Lundale. The place is a dump. Got me to thinking she might need some help fixing it up. Year’s worth of work at that place, easy.”

“Daaaad” the sound that came out of Robin’s mouth was more of a bleat than a word. “I told you not to go making plans for me without asking me first.”

The boy had a lazy streak in him. Here was an opportunity you’d think he’d jump at. But Winston could never tell his son anything. Vera had done every this and that for him, told him he was special when he wasn’t, really. Content to sit around and whittle with that old pocket-knife with the carved elk head handle, he had found it at Pete’s, or came by it on his own somehow, and claimed it with a vengeance.

“What does he like to do?” Winston would ask Vera, as if only she knew the answer to their son’s mind. “Likes to whittle is all I can see, and nothing ever comes of it either.”

But that was not true. Robin had finished an owl’s head while still in grade school, and it actually looked like an owl, with softly curved feathers and one eye that seemed to stare back. Also a raven carved from manzanita, the deep red bark giving it life if you held it under a translucent moon. There may have been others. Winston kept them in a box in the toolshed. He couldn’t bring himself to throw them away.

“I didn’t make any plans for you, just saying it might happen, that’s all. Wouldn’t it be something? Right across the road?”

“Right across the road” it sounded like Robin was saying, hard to be sure since he talked with his hands over his mouth. Still, Winston took it as a sign to keep talking.

“Think about it. Whoever gets that place will need to do something with it, can’t imagine they’d just leave it to rot. I’m just telling you, there might be something there. You should call Lundale, look into it. You have to take the lead on these kinds of things, son.” And just as the words came out, Winston knew he had gone too far.

Robin stood up, righted his chair, it seemed that the headache was gone, or temporarily pushed aside, it was hard for his father to tell.

“I’m going for a walk,” he announced, without so much as looking back.