So why aren’t you taking care of it? he didn’t say. That would reduce the boy—young man—to stuttering.
Sam was a good kid, but he was a lot more respectful of authority and his elders than his father had been at that age; Ralph wasted a moment on a mental sigh for the Bay Area in the sixties. If what he heard on the news was true, the current generation FirstSide didn’t care about anything but money. Certainly the music they were making over there was pretty well crap these days; disco had been bad, and it was all downhill since then except for Al Stewart and that Enya chick. Of course, what you heard on the news wasn’t necessarily true, and that was truer here than on FirstSide.
The really disappointing thing was that the Stones were still touring, when they’d promised not to.
“Ah… it’s someone from the Thirty Families, Dad: I saw her ring. A girl, seventeen or so—a real pretty girl. She’s, ummm, upset. I think I’ve seen her here before, but not since I came back from the militia. She said she wanted to talk to you.”
Fucking draft, Ralph thought, but absently.
His eldest had been away for most of the past two years, doing his national service—with fairly frequent visits back home, since the Commonwealth wasn’t that big. You were more likely to end up doing construction work than fighting, anyway.
“Yeah, I’ll take care of it, Sam,” he said. Can’t be anyone else. There weren’t many teenagers from the Families who knew him well; he was a suspicious character, after all.
The office was an adobe cubicle with a sloped tile roof supported on Douglas fir beams; it had been the bedroom-living room-storage back when he started building the place. You went out the back door to a covered porch and across the courtyard to the long low block that held the kitchens. He did, slapped some sandwiches together, and drew two mugs of beer before he went out onto the front-side patio with its trestle tables and benches and umbrellas—all furled now. The patio had been laid out around a coastal live oak with a trunk four men couldn’t have joined hands around. Leaves rustled in the great gnarled limbs above, and in the eucalyptus grove that he’d planted between the patio and the road; they had a spicy, medicinal scent that mixed well with the remnants of cooking. It was dimly lit and slightly chilly, and the stars overhead were very bright; a new moon rode like a silver ship toward the west.
Ralph deliberately let the screen door clatter a little as it shut. That gave the girl at the far table time to scrub an arm across her face and get composed.
“Hey, princess,” he said softly. “Sorta late, ain’t it? Been a long while since you dropped by.”
Adrienne Rolfe looked at him and smiled. Her shoulders slumped a little in relief, although her face was still streaked by tears. They’d been friends for quite a while; he’d always had a sympathetic spot for a teenage rebel, and she was smart to boot; he’d tutored her a little in physics.
“Not many places a girl can go to get a drink and a sandwich at night around here,” she said.
Ralph laughed as he set the tray down and swung onto the bench across the table from her. That was an understatement. There were a couple of lights in the hills behind him, farmers in the valleys leading southward from the strait, and the ferryman’s house down by its pier on the water, and that was pretty well it, short of the radio beacon on Mount Diablo. The ferry didn’t run all night, either—either Adrienne had come down from Napa by the last run, or up from Rolfeston.
He took a sip of the beer and waited, his fingers idly tracing the initials someone had—probably with immense effort—carved into the tough canyon oak of the table’s surface. Adrienne ate a bite of the sandwich in a halfhearted fashion, then set it down and blurted: “Aunt Chloe’s dead.”
He reached out awkwardly and patted her hand. “Bummer,” he said. “Total bummer. She was a good sort.”
Getting her as an occasional customer certainly helped me get the café off to a good start, he thought. For someone in the Families, she was a good sort.
In a noblesse-oblige sort of way. She’d certainly helped save Adrienne from her parents, which counted as a good deed any way you looked at it. He listened, making occasional sympathetic noises as the girl talked about the swift illness—some form of rapid-spreading marrow cancer. Apparently there hadn’t been much pain, which was proof of some substantially good karma on Chloe’s part; he’d had relatives go from cancer in ways that a benevolent God wouldn’t have inflicted on Nixon.
Well, maybe on Hitler, he thought.
“And she left it to me,” Adrienne said, choking back a sob.
“Left what, princess?” he asked.
He hadn’t known Chloe well—nodding-acquaintance level; she was one of the Thirty Families, and a Rolfe collateral, at that—but everyone knew about her. Her habit of taking in strays, in particular; he’d have been surprised if she hadn’t left the girl something. Enough to be independent of her parents; her father, Charles Rolfe, in particular was uptight beyond belief, a serious pickle-up-the-ass type of establishment authoritarian. Chloe hadn’t liked him either; their feuding was legendary, and he thought it was partly to twist his scrotum that she’d let Adrienne take lessons with the disreputable and borderline-subversive Ralph Barnes. And Chloe hadn’t had any kids of her own.
“Left me Seven Oaks,” she said. “Everything, her share of the Family trust money as well as the land. Not even when I’m of age, but right now. There’s some lawyers, but they’ve only got a—what do they call it—a watching brief.” She raised her tear-streaked face. “What… what the hell am I going to do with it, Ralph? I never imagined—”
“Whoa!” he said in surprise. Then, more slowly: “Do you want it?”
“Yeah,” she said frankly. “I mean, Seven Oaks is where I’ve spent most of my time since the blowup with Dad; it’s more home than Rolfe Manor. The folks there are my friends. But how’m I supposed to handle all the, oh, the decisions, and keeping things going—”
“Hey!” he said sharply. “What did I tell you?”
“Ah… ‘You can try and maybe fail, or not try and always fail,’” she said, and managed a grin. “Yeah. You know, you and Granddad think a lot alike about some things.”
“Now you’re getting nasty,” he mock-growled. “And remember, you don’t have to do everything yourself,” he said. “Listen…”
When they’d finished talking he got her another beer, which made her sleepy. “Sam!” he yelled over his shoulder as she yawned and stretched.
The young man stuck his head out of the kitchen entranceway, with a crock of olives still balanced on one shoulder. He was a good kid—no head for math or the sciences, but smart and steady. And polite, although he couldn’t hide a certain gleam at the sight—Adrienne was wearing a pretty tight sweater. His own approval was purely avuncular, or so he told himself.
“Tell Jeanne to get one of the rooms made up, would you, Sam?” he said.
It wouldn’t be the first time he’d put Adrienne up—first time in a while, though, since she left home for good and Chloe took her in. Christ, she was carrying a doll first time I saw her. Where do the years go? He shook his head at the thought and went back to his office. Not quite his bedtime, and his mind was too wired for sleep anyway; he poured himself a quick bourbon and water to help himself unwind—at times like this he still missed pot—and sat down with a scientific journal from FirstSide to pass the time, and a CD starting with “Spanish Train” in the background.