Jay shrugged. Nothing he could do about his father right now, anyway. He’d wait until Thanksgiving, only four weeks away. Then he’d see.
7
Ellen Cameron, her husband Mitch, and her three children-Thad, Josh, and Colin-were already at Abe’s place when Jay and his family arrived just after noon on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Their brass-toned Ford van squatted dead center in the two-car driveway, forcing Jay to angle alongside the curb.
“Look’s like it’s going to be a family reunion, after all,” Jay said to Linda in what he hoped would come across as a light, optimistic tone. Linda and Ellen did not get along that well. Linda and Mitch in one house were even worse. And those three kids of Ellen’s-it would help if someone had bothered to teach them discipline and self-control somewhere along the way. Most of the time they behaved like what Linda referred to as a bunch of wild-eyed, foul-mouthed hooligans. Jackanapes, would have been Abe’s word, Jay thought, although Dad would never have applied it to his grandsons. Still, Jay had no trouble agreeing with Linda on the point. He sighed. He already wondered if agreeing to get together as a family had been a big mistake.
“We’re here,” he called over the seat to where Elizabeth and Anna cuddled together asleep. He reached back and gently shook Elizabeth’s knee. “We’re at Grandpa Abe’s.”
Elizabeth sat up and began the more lengthy process of waking Anna. Jay killed the engine and glanced up at the house. The hair on the back of his neck prickled.
It was a shambles.
Abraham Morris had always been a proud man, but more than anything (except perhaps his collections), he consistently prided himself on one thing-having the neatest yard in the neighborhood. Mattie and he had loved kneeling side by side, working with rich black soil. They loved plants and flowers and shrubs and trees, loved neatness and growing things. Jay remembered summer after summer, his bare back baking to a golden brown in the heat as he and Ellen had bent over weeding in gardens, trimmed lawns twice weekly, raked, swept, pruned-whatever was needed to make the place neat (whatever place it was-because of Abe’s job they had moved far more frequently than Jay had found comfortable).
But this…
Except for a ragged fringe of green along the edge closest to the sidewalk, there was no lawn. As the yard sloped slightly upward to the foundations of the house, the desolation became worse. The few straggling clumps of St. Augustine grass and Bermuda grass-normally impervious to almost all attempts to eradicate them-quickly died away completely. In the middle of the yard, the ground was bare, naked earth packed to concrete-hardness. The cold shadow cast by the house obscured skeletal remains of what had once been roses. The canes might have been bare simply because it was November and because the weather had been unusually cold for this part of Southern California, but Jay knew at once that he was looking at more than just normal winter kill. Those plants were dead. No amount of judicious pruning and feeding and watering would bring them to bloom the next spring.
In what should have been narrow borders of color along the sidewalk there was more desolation. Irises were nothing more than clumps of wilted, brittle brown and yellow spears, and the chrysanthemums, short stubs of blackened growth without leaves or greenery.
Along one edge of the driveway, a ragged clump of dense shrubs covered in unattractive grey-green leaves provided the only break from the sense of utter devastation.
Jay shook his head wonderingly. The house was in bad shape, too. This close he could see the paint peeling from the stucco wall as well as from the hardwood trim around the eaves, the windows, and the doors. A hairline crack started four or five inches above the foundation line, midway beneath the front bedroom window and jagged continuously for six feet or so to the corner.
Jay whistled under his breath.
“What’s wrong,” Linda asked, shooting him a worried, questioning look.
“That,” he said, nodding toward the yard and house.
“I know,” she said. To herself she wondered what Mattie would have thought about the state of the house and gardens. She was probably spinning in her grave like a top, Linda decided.
By that time, though, the girls had unwound their tangle of coats and books and toys and were piling pell-mell out of the car. They pounded down the sidewalk, oblivious to the deadness around them. They skirted a leafless bougainvillea that should have overhung the entryway with masses of scarlet brilliance but now grew more like the wall of thorns from Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty than anything else. They were knocking excitedly on the front door before Jay and Linda were even out of the car.
Ellen’s oldest, Thad, opened the door. He’s grown up, Jay thought as he glanced up and saw the fifteen-year-old towering over his girls, his hair long and greasy and blond and unkempt, and the glint of something gold dangling from his left earlobe.
“Hey, it’s the insects,” the boy called over his shoulder, his voice a vibrant bass.
He’s only grown up physically, Jay amended. Mentally he’s as immature as always. A nasty little boy squashed in an almost-a-man’s body.
The girls filed by their cousin, their enthusiasm dampened by his crude welcome. The incident didn’t bode well for a pleasant Thanksgiving weekend.
8
Abraham Morris met his younger child and the boy’s family with a slow smile. He spoke little, beyond a soft, “Good to see you, Jay.” He gave Linda a brief peck on the cheek, but seemed unusually aloof around the girls. Elizabeth looked worried and disappointed when Grandpa virtually ignored her, but Anna squatted in a corner and watched Ellen’s two younger boys fighting over a PlayStation console that couldn’t have been out of its box for more than a couple of hours. The Styrofoam packing material lay scattered across the living room like stark white bones in a desecrated graveyard.
Jay shuddered at the image.
Josh and Colin tugged simultaneously at one joystick; a second lay unnoticed in the middle of the floor. Jay picked up the joystick and held it out.
“You don’t need to fight over that one. There’s another one right here.” He thought nothing of the action, but Ellen shot him a vicious glance that clearly said keep out of my family affairs, I don’t tell your kids what to do, do I?
Jay and Ellen hadn’t gotten along well for a long while now, but even he was startled by the vehemence implicit in her expression. He dropped the joystick and turned away from the squabbling boys.
The rest of the day quickly disintegrated into family quarrels over trivialities that left Jay exhausted by the time he finally got to bed late Wednesday evening. He and Linda shared a three-quarters width rollaway bed Abe kept in the closet of the back corner bedroom. Ellen and Mitch had apparently decided-as always-to act on a first-come, first-served basis. Jay had not been the least surprised to see their suitcases already laid open on the queen-size bed in the middle bedroom, between Abe’s and the one Jay and Linda inherited by default. Jay’s girls were sleeping in the first bedroom, just across from the master bath and next to their Grandfather’s room. Ellen’s three boys had finally sacked out in the family room, their bulky sleeping bags and stacks of clothing cluttering most of the floor space.
The remaining bedroom-tucked between the corner room and the living room-was too tightly packed with the bulkiest and most cumbersome of Grandpa Abe’s books and collecting equipment for anyone to sleep there. Jay had glanced in earlier that evening and noticed with increasing alarm the thick coating of dust on the dead-grey filing cabinets, on the microscope, on the taxidermy table, on the ends of the thick books that had served his father for a lifetime of identifying the specimens of rocks and plants and animals and insects he had collected from nearly every part of the Western United States.