“Let’s not talk about this, okay? You want to hire an attorney, you can go right ahead. I told you to do that the first time we spoke. You have a copy of the will. You have the hearing date, and you can do anything you like.”
He turned without another word and moved around the back of his car to the driver’s seat. He got in and slammed the door.
It took him two tries to get his car started, but then he peeled out with a chirp.
Anna was right. The guy was a drama queen.
I unlocked the Mustang, tossed my duffel into the backseat and my shoulder bag in the front. I got in, started the car, and pulled out of the slot. Such was the thrilling climax of my twenty-four-hour sojourn in Bakersfield.
By 10:52, I was driving west on California Street toward the southbound on-ramp to State Route 99. There were two more delays coming up but I didn’t know that yet, so I was excited about getting home. Bakersfield had been a bust. In the main, I’d accomplished my goals, but in doing so, I’d stirred up a nest of hornets. Two of Dace’s three kids were hopeless. I couldn’t convince them their father had been dealt a bad hand. As far as Ethan and Anna were concerned, his leaving me the money had only fanned the resentment they’d carried for years. How else could it have turned out? Of course they were angry. Of course they responded with more of the same.
There were other elements in play. It would be disingenuous to claim I was above caring about $595,350. I’d never been close to that much money in my life, and while it wasn’t really mine, it was certainly a subject worthy of consideration. Briefly, I fantasized about what would happen if I disregarded the terms of the will and divided the inheritance equally among the three. How far might that go toward healing the rift? Nowhere. Ethan and Anna would blow their portion and then expect Ellen to fork over hers until that was gone as well. Ellen would agree because she felt guilty about the two of them, an attitude they’d fostered in her over the years.
I toyed with the idea of handing over part of the money—say, $100,000 divided three ways instead of the half a million plus. The flaw there was that if I thought they were entitled to a little bit of money, why not the whole amount? Either it was all right or all wrong. Acting in opposition to Dace’s wishes was clearly wrong, regardless of Ethan’s threats or Evelyn’s maneuvering. Money aside, from their point of view the crux of the problem was Dace’s love affair with hooch and his refusal to give it up. In his children’s eyes, he’d died preferring alcohol to them.
Driving south on the 99, I hadn’t even cleared the city limits when I caught sight of the highway sign for the Panama Lane off-ramp. The name jumped out at me because I’d seen it in my paper search for Choaker Lane where the Millhones had lived in the early forties. When I’d consulted the city map, the address was too far off the beaten path to worry about; at the time, Ethan Dace was uppermost on my mind. Now I was in range of the house where my father had lived and the question was this: did I care enough to delay my trip home?
Nah, not so much. The Millhones were long gone, and getting back to Santa Teresa mattered more to me than exploring sites of historical family significance. I was curious, but going five miles out of my way seemed irksome when all I wanted was to put distance between me and Bakersfield. On the other hand (I was always thinking in terms of this “other hand” horseshit . . .), who knew if I’d ever be here again? Henry would ask what I’d learned and I didn’t fancy telling him I’d jettisoned the search. He wouldn’t chide me, but I’d be chiding myself for not taking advantage of the occasion while I could.
I signaled my intention, took the off-ramp, and pulled over to the side of the road at the first decent opportunity. I was annoyed. Why couldn’t I go back to being an orphan like I’d been all my life? Had I ever once complained about it? No, I had not. I’d taken a certain peevish pride in being without close family. Now my lone-wolf status had been taken away and I resented the loss, even if it had always been entirely delusional on my part. As it turned out, I was embroiled in the same dysfunctional mess as everyone else I knew.
I opened the oversize map, which was thirty-six inches by fifty and printed on slick, heavy-duty paper that was awkward to unfold. Once I wrestled it into submission, I ran my eye down the page and traced Panama Lane both east and west. The delicate lace of intersecting streets defined a succession of neighborhoods. This must have been farmland once upon a time, perhaps much of it still was. The burgeoning city had spread out in all directions as the inhabitants multiplied. Through the windshield I was looking at the same flat landscape that characterized the entire area, which was pockmarked with housing developments that finally gave way to open fields. Choaker Lane was farther east, close to the north-south axis of Cottonwood Road.
As I drove, I kept an eye on the passing street signs. Having committed myself, I could picture my spotting the old homestead. Perhaps I’d park and get out. I might knock on the door to ask the current occupant if I could make a quick tour of the rooms. It was possible the present owner had bought the house from someone who knew when it was built or how many hands it had passed through. I slowed in anticipation of my turn and took a left, checking house numbers as I proceeded from 4800 down to the 4600 block with a mounting sense of dismay. There was no 4602. The entire neighborhood was gone. I pulled over to the curb.
Where the Millhone house had once stood there was a settlement of condominiums; identical six-story stucco structures, arranged in a staunch grid spread over twenty-five or thirty acres. The few trees I saw were young and newly planted. The streets that branched off of Choaker Lane had been named after New England states—Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. If the colony continued to expand, the Eastern Seaboard might be called into play, starting with New Jersey and running all the way down to Florida.
I pulled away from the curb and proceeded along Choaker until I reached a set of ornamental gates. I turned in and cruised the roads that ran between the monolithic buildings. There wasn’t much to see since they were all identical. My grandparents’ house had been erased, as had the houses on either side—as had the homes extending for six or eight city blocks in every direction. Even the soil had been excavated and carted away, so any relics—arrowheads, sun-bleached bones, the caps from old soda bottles—were gone now as well. I could take a metal detector and scan the surrounding area for two square miles without turning up so much as an old spoon.
This is your reward for denial, I thought. You decide you don’t care and the family home vanishes. The irony wasn’t lost on me. The Universe was having a little tee-hee at my expense. Whereas the Kinsey branch of the family was chockablock with cousins, aunts, and uncles, even an ancient living grandmother, the Millhones had disappeared. As further punishment, I was now saddled with a cluster of second or third cousins related to me tangentially through Rebecca Dace, and I was far better acquainted with that bunch than I wanted to be. I’d also inherited the family corpse, a dead guy whose last rites had fallen to me. The only upside I could see was that the Daces made my mother’s side of the family look like bastions of mental health.
I headed back to the 99 and took up my southbound journey. Forty miles outside of Bakersfield, I checked my watch. It was 11:45 and I was starving. I hadn’t bothered to eat anything before I left the hotel. I’d been more interested in getting the journey under way than in feeding my face. How foolhardy was that? I’d never make it to Santa Teresa without something to eat. I wouldn’t arrive until midafternoon and by then I’d be gnawing my own arm. I pulled my shoulder bag closer and fumbled through the interior, but all I came up with was a sugarfree breath mint of no known nutritional value. At that very moment, I realized I’d forgotten to call Henry to advise him of my estimated arrival time. That did it.