She went into the house and a couple of minutes later Stan and Rosie came out.
“Rosie put the stereo on and we practiced a dance.”
Stan looked flushed and excited. Rosie leaned against the railing that ran along the outside of the stoop and stared out at the meadow. She sighed and her eyelids drooped a little.
“Can you hear the wind in the trees? I can hear it. Sometimes I wish it would blow through my head like that, then all my thoughts would be untangled. Like ribbons.”
Stan looked uncertain. “I gotta go now, Rosie.”
She turned from the view and kissed him on the cheek and wandered back into the house. Stan called goodbye as the screen door bounced against its frame.
We climbed down off the stoop and started back toward the car. Stan was quiet and I wondered if the whole thing had been too much for him.
“Everything go okay? You still like her?”
“You bet. I hope she doesn’t think I’m a dumb-o.”
“Didn’t look that way when she said goodbye.”
“Yeah, I know! And in the house, when we were dancing, she kissed me on the lips. It made my head spin round.”
My father dropped us back at the house and went into town to finish off his working day. Stan and I took the pickup over to the garden center to check out the warehouse we’d just leased. Bill Prentice wasn’t there when we arrived, but the manager, Rachel, had a set of keys for us and a business card for a plant wholesaler in Sacramento.
The warehouse stood to the side of the garden center at the end of a short white-gravel driveway. It was made of pressed steel and had a row of corrugated fiberglass skylights down each side of its roof. From its front entrance the view was as beautiful as that from the garden center-a sweep of meadow, a line of trees, the river on the other side of the road, and then forested hills marching back into the distance.
Stan and I unlocked the sliding door that formed part of the front wall and went inside. The layout was simple-a single open space with a small office built into the back left corner. The concrete floor was dusty and the air in the place was hot and stale. The fiberglass panels let in a diffuse light that made the place feel vaguely churchlike.
“Wow, Johnny, this is it! This is the beginning of everything. I can’t believe it.”
“Believe it, man. The papers are signed, no one can take it away from us, not even Bill if he changes his mind.”
“I’m going to be something, Johnny, something!”
We poked around for a bit, talking through what the best way to arrange the place would be, how we were going to kick off the business.
“I got a great idea for that, Johnny. What we’ll do is get a whole lot of leaflets and put them in all the stores’ letter boxes and all the rich people’s houses. Advertising is essential. We better call those plant people too. And we have to tell Dad.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“He’s going to feel a lot better about me now.”
I wasn’t sure that my father would see things in exactly the same light Stan did. I could already hear how it would waste Stan’s hard-earned money, how it was irresponsible of me to enable this fantasy, how it was a lousy idea…
“Listen, Stan, let me tell him, okay? I want to make sure he doesn’t get the wrong idea about what we’re doing.”
Stan shrugged.
“Okay, Johnny, if you want.”
We locked up the warehouse and headed back to the pickup. On the way we dropped into the garden center so Stan could grab a Coke. While we were there Rachel asked us if we could take a couple of flowering plants around to Bill’s house. He was working from his office in the town hall and wouldn’t be coming into the garden center. He wanted them delivered to his wife that day.
Bill and Patricia Prentice lived a half mile north of the garden center on a plot that was almost the size of a playing field. The house was a large white single-story Californian with green shutters and a brick driveway that made an S from the road up to the front door. Patricia’s olive Mercedes was parked carelessly under a tree in front of the house.
There was no answer when I rang the bell beside the front door. From inside the house I could hear the babble of a talk radio show. I rang a couple more times, but no one answered.
“Maybe we should just leave the plants out front.”
“But she’s got to be here, Johnny. Her car’s here. She just can’t hear us because of the radio. I don’t want Bill to get mad because we didn’t do what he said.”
I tried the door. It was unlocked and swung open to show a foyer tiled in white stone. We could have left then, it would have been easy enough to do. We were only dropping off a couple of plants, after all. But there was a feeling about the house that didn’t seem right to me. A car out front, a radio on, someone who should have been home…
Stan and I stepped through the doorway. After the heat outside the house felt cool. From the foyer I could see into a sunroom on my right and, directly ahead, a large living room. It was from there that the radio noise was coming. The blinds in both rooms were down and the light in the house was muted and didn’t fully dilute the shadows that pooled in corners and under furniture. Air-conditioning whispered through vents near the ceiling. There was no one in either of the rooms.
Stan shouted nervously, “Mrs. Prentice, it’s Stan! We’ve got some plants!”
When no one answered we put the plants beside the door and with Stan glancing about apprehensively and holding onto my sleeve we went through the living room and turned right into a long hall that followed the rear wall of the house. On our left, as we walked along it, there were windows that must have looked out onto a back garden, but these were shuttered and I could see only thin strips of sunshine around the inside of the frames. On our right there were three doors. Two of them were closed, but the last was open and it was through this that we found Patricia Prentice in what was obviously the master bedroom of the house.
There were curtained French doors at one end of the room and a large bed with a white cover and a wide space of pale carpet. Against one of the walls there was a writing desk and a chair, and against another a wide-screen TV made a sound like surf, its screen effervescent with static.
Patricia Prentice lay on top of the covers of the bed. She was wearing clothes similar to those she’d been wearing the day I’d seen her with my father-a knee-length skirt, a peach-colored blouse, black patent leather sandals, one of which had fallen from her foot. It looked like she’d gotten up that morning and dressed to look nice.
Perhaps when she lay down on the bed she had composed herself, positioned herself elegantly on her back, her arms folded across her breasts, legs crossed at the ankles. Perhaps… She looked anything but composed now. She was curled on her side and her clothes were twisted about her body as though she had slept through a fever. Her tongue was swollen and dark and stuck obscenely through lips that were drawn back over her teeth. A blot of milky vomit had collected around her neck and the lower half of her face. The back of her skirt was wet.
On a nightstand beside the bed there was a collection of empty Halcion blister packs and an empty half-bottle of whiskey. Beneath the bottle there was a slip of notepaper with a single line of writing: I waited as long as I could.
When my mother died in her car my father had insisted on a closed coffin to spare Stan and me the sight of her injuries. So I had never seen a dead body before, but I could have told anyone who asked that Patricia Prentice was dead beyond any hope of resuscitation. Even so, I checked for a pulse in her neck. Her flesh was too cold and too solid and I had to steel myself against its touch.
“Should we do mouth-to-mouth, Johnny?” Stan was rubbing his hands rapidly back and forth across his chest and his voice trembled.