Long Road to California Read online

  Chapter 3

  Caleb in Texas

  It’s dinner time at my sister’s house and I’m surrounded by women. Nothing new, I should be used to it by now – raised up by these two, my single mom and slightly older sister. Married for going on 20 years now to Nina, with her even longer. Only Lucia is missing from the picture, my little girl, the one of all these ladies who at least used to look up to me.

  Dee’s husband and kids missing from the scene too, I suppose. The kids, high schoolers, already off on some secretive pre-Friday night dance ritual. He works. Like all the time, kind of makes a point of how very engaged he is in commerce, how big an office he dwells in, how much attention he must devote there. Nina tells me I’m oversensitive, that he’s not this way out of spite for my lack of gainful employment.

  The dude has always been like that, I suppose. A bit of a blowhard. We can talk sports, he knows his stuff pretty well. The local teams at least. Never picks up a ball or glove himself though, I’m pretty sure. Does not set a foot in the kitchen until dinner is served. Dee says that’s the way he was raised, that it’s a Texas thing. She’s become quite the expert on all things Texas over the years here. To hear her drawl, you’d figure she’d been born and raised here, not Visalia.

  Mom doesn’t seem to have caught the Texas bug, though she’s been here going on ten years now. She and I bookend the broad kitchen table while Dee and Nina put the finishing touches on the food. I catch Nina giving me a look, like why don’t you do something here, but we’ve been through this. We both know I can cook or lay out the dishes just fine at home. With Dee, though, my little boyhood brat tends to surface. I goad her without trying. And since we’re guests in her house, better I follow the house rules: men, children and old people sit while the women work.

  Mom, that would be the old person. Which is ridiculous, she’s all of 66. I watch her taking furtive sips from her wine glass, looking if anything like a child who’s being allowed to sit at the grown up table. But she’s assigned herself to be a helpless old lady for some time now.

  Gotta feel a little bad for Mom, really. She was a 1950s gal who sought nothing more than a traditional life. Went to college long enough to snag my dad, married and had us two by the time she was 21. But oops, it was the ‘60s, and Dad took off for peace and freedom and taste of the wider world. Mom took back her original name for us, and that was about the extent of her independence. She took her alimony and child support, and pretty much went from him to turning to little boy me for anything mannish around the house. Yeah, age like 9, I was wielding the tool set, getting phone instructions on the water heater from Dad.

  She never remarried. When Dee hooked up with Harlen and moved here to the Lone Star state, Mom set her sights on moving in with her, I think. It took some years and they compromised on an adult only complex down the road, but you can see what she’s angling for: she and Dee, companionable ladies sharing a kitchen, shopping together, being mistaken for sisters.

  I should be more sympathetic to Dee. She’s doing the lion’s share of dealing with Mom, the emotional stuff. Yes, I moved her out, did the literal heavy lifting, bankrolled it back when I had money, but that was a long time ago. I watch Dee now, fussing over the food. She and Harlen are pretty much solid steak eaters, while Nina and I mostly avoid red meat. She’s cooked a salmon, trying to balance out Harlen’s love of everything charred and Nina’s quiet but obvious urbane taste for things delicately seared and flavorful.

  Dee really is starting to look like Mom, it occurs to me. And awfully middle aged, in a frowning, pastel suited way that neither me or Nina will ever have. I plan for us to go directly from jeans and tees and hiking boots to Grandma Vera’s graceful wrinkles and teensy footfalls. Nina, aside from being the better cook not to mention technically older than Dee, defers to her, with a patience I rarely glimpse at home.

  Nina is a couple years older than me, which bothers her, tickles Dee, and which I rarely even think about unless in this context. But Nina – it’s a cliché, I know – seems ageless. I look at her and I just see her. The woman who came on so strong the moment we met, who seemed like a force of nature, a damned pretty one, even when all she was doing was interviewing me about my softball team.

  She claims to have kept her professional demeanor during our first rambling talk, and even when I first asked her out. Yeah, professional, her working for this dinky outdoors mag that was half way to folding even in the late 1980s when people still read magazines. Doesn’t matter. What matters is that I recognized something about her, the way you see the ball leaving the pitcher’s hand that you know you’ll hit out. Or the team that’s going to take it all the way, something about how the players come together even at the start of the season. I recognize that stuff. That’s how I saw her, pretty much from the start.

  This trip we’re making, it’s her thing. Least I can do after managing to sink us so bad with my endlessly stupid decisions. Decision plural – not enough to quit my old job, I had to invest the remainder of our spare cash into my brilliant start up. With the late launch, that has us rolling out invitations to homeowners just as the foreclosure crisis went down.

  Nina says she was a partner to the decisions, that it wasn’t just me. But it was. I know that. Nina thinks I’m jonesing to spend these weeks cruising along the path that Grandma Vera and company took a zillion years ago to support her photography, and out of family interest and everything. Honestly, I’m mostly glad to be away from home for awhile. Not having to face cousins at family gatherings who snicker at the city boy and how he’s fallen on his face. Not potentially meeting guys I steered into investing with me at the Berkeley Bowl.

  Harlen’s loud car sputters and dies in the driveway, and like Pavlov’s dog, Dee pops open a beer for him. She offers me one too, and I take it, though it’s some crappy light stuff.

  In he strides from the garage, calling, “Hi kids!” to the assemblage. He reaches Dee, and swings her for a stagy smooch. “Delilah!

  “Harley!” Dee practically swoons. I watch Mom and wonder if this makes her miss Dad. Or all the years when she might have had another man but had just us.

  Nina brings out the food. Her expression is carefully neutral, non-judging. I used to wonder, sometimes, if she wished for more of that traditional romantic type stuff. She says not, and I’m inclined to believe her. In part from times like this, how she has to keep from meeting my eye, from mocking them.

  “Caleb, you’re over here by Mom,” Dee instructs me.

  I heave myself up. Wince as just a small piece of pain shoots up my leg, radiates out from my bum knee. Ease down by Mom and just the residual is left, the phantom pain from those few steps. When does it hurt, the docs ask, as though the fact that it doesn’t always hurt means I’m mostly good, right? Sitting is fine, even light walking after the first several steps. But dare I try to do the things that are central to my life – running the bases, dodging backwards to field a ball, climbing around landscapes, squatting, carrying a load of soil? It’s been excruciating. Not to mention any more younger sports like skiing, forget it.

  It was already getting bad, losing cartilage, whatever. And then I injured it a few months ago. Kept off it while the tendons healed; tried to exercise in the pool at the gym and by hand weights. Didn’t have to worry about my work suffering, because hey, what work. I’ve had cortisone shots and gotten a whole routine of stretches to do. A brace for being on my feet for longer periods. It’s improving, slowly.

  Mostly I try not to think about it. Even the shooting pain, it’s just this thing that I notice and try to set aside, like unwanted chatter when you’d rather be alone.

  Which is not the case now, I tell myself. I don’t get to see this end of the family that often, it’s a chance to catch up. That’s certainly what Dee thinks. We got all caught up with them and their two earlier. Now, as usual, she wants to know the blow by blow of each o
f our dozens of cousins and second cousins in California. Mom has three younger brothers, all of whom have reproduced. And Grandma Vera’s older brothers had five kids between them, Mom’s cousins who are around her age or a bit younger. Most of them have kids, a sea of cousins and kids of cousins from tots to forty somethings, stretching down the central valley.

  Fortunately Nina puts her encyclopedia-like mind to good use in memorizing key facts about each and every one. Personally, I feel like I’m doing well if I can connect the right names to faces and parents of the spawn at our regular family picnics. I mean it would be fine except that they keep changing – this one getting a job with an animal shelter, that one with a sudden interest in school sports, another out of the closet and proud. The younger ones growing tall and gangly, the teens turning into adults, hooking up and reeling more family in.

  And what do they say about me, these quick capsule descriptions, I wonder. What did Dee and Harlen tell their friends about our visit – oh, our little charity case, my poor brother and his terrible investment. Calls himself a landscape architect; hasn’t worked in a dog’s age. We set him up delivering our old truck, just to give him something to do. Nina, the wife, got a mind of her own. Non-traditional. (This because she dares think for herself, have opinions.)

  Make an effort, I tell myself. Throw in a couple stories I recall about the cousin who’s at Cal, second string on the baseball team. Thanks to him I’ve had to add the Cal Bears and the Pac 12 standings to my line up, along with the Giants and As. And my own softball team, the Dead Gophers, which I’ll be sitting out all season. Best can be done there is seeing if anyone remembers to post the scores on the league website.

  Harlen counter brags about his son trying out for basketball. Mom randomly praises Dee and me both. We eat and chat. Nina wants to know everything Mom knows about the people who made the trip west from Kansas with Grandma Vera. And the people they met along the way; she found some strangers in one of the pictures and she’s on a tear trying to work out who they are. Mom knows pretty much no more than we do, and says so.

  I wonder how soon will be too early to push on into the family room, manipulate Harlen into showing off his big screen TV. At least if we catch a Ranger’s game, we can see the scores. It’s early in the season anyway. Teams just showing what they’ve got, like teenage kids, big but lots of growing still to do. I’d like to follow, but nothing critical is going on just yet.

  To get the ball rolling, I help carry the dishes back, rinse them for the dishwasher. Nina slips in to help, but immediately corrals me into taking a quick walk around the neighborhood. The sun is setting, the light pretty. She gets antsy this time of day, wanting to capture a perfect moment, something lovely and fleeting. Regularly the resulting images don’t live up to her expectations.

  She’s probably had a good dose of ladies talk from this afternoon too, while I was out getting the truck serviced and the camper set up. We have a list of approximately 500 more items to purchase tomorrow at Walmart. The store of choice in these parts, and also for the poor; we snicker about it, but we need the bargains. We can load up and be set for a couple weeks of eating and the whole trip’s camping.

  “We’ll be back in twenty minutes,” I promise Mom, who starts to fret like a momma duck when the brood splits up around her. “Nina wants to take pictures. I’m going to check out the yards.”

  That’s a polite way of saying I can’t believe what passes for landscaping around here. The climate is basically arid, so please explain why Dee’s neighborhood is full of wide green lawns, clearly major jobs to keep watered and mowed. Expensive. Useless, too, you never see a kid playing catch out here. We’re the only pedestrians in town. Not a native plant to be seen, though I’m hard pressed to think what might qualify.

  I follow Nina. She follows her camera. “You’re doing that face,” she says, laughing.

  “Look at this. They might as well stick in pink flamingos.”

  “Shh, they’ll hear you.” She moves down the sidewalk, head tilted, looking at the spindly trees and rejecting them.

  “You know, if you’ve got the slightest little incline that passes for a hill around here, you might want to work with it. Just saying.”

  “Did you see the garden gnomes?” She points.

  Yup, a neighbor has gnomes, and maybe a hobbit house for a mailbox. A flower bed that might have last been weeded when Bush was president. “This is painful. I want to give them a free consult just so I don’t have to see this a second time.”

  “Well, get used to it,” Nina says, snapping a shot of the biggest gnome. “It’s only going to get more rustic from here.”