Things I Want to Say (27 page)

In some ways, her father, for all his sullen silences and uncooperative moments, was easier to deal with than Tom.
Having been away from home so many years, she no longer had a fixed role in his life, so there were fewer expectations to live up to.

She sipped iced tea and ate the last of her sandwich. She’d expected to learn a lot about her father while she was here; she hadn’t counted on learning so much about herself. For instance, she drew an inordinate amount of satisfaction from the knowledge that whenever she and her father disagreed about something, she was sure to have the final say in the matter. She told herself this was a petty, mean attitude, but there it was. She wasn’t always a sweet, nice person. Maturity had taught her to take comfort from that. There was peace in accepting one’s faults. Accepting others’ faults was more difficult, as she was learning with her father, and Del, and Tom and even Casey. She hadn’t had any luck changing their behavior, but silently accepting it felt wrong, too. What would it take to find her voice and tell them exactly what she thought?

More importantly, how much would the truth cost? Was it a price she was willing to pay?

Pay attention.

“I am, Grandpa.” Casey refrained from rolling his eyes. After all, the old guy couldn’t help it if he had to type everything instead of talking.

But his grandfather wasn’t the most exciting person to be around even when he wasn’t sick. Not to mention that having a
conversation
with him was like being back in school. But it wouldn’t kill Casey to humor him. He leaned over the old man’s shoulder and studied the spreadsheet on the screen. “You were saying something about the way birds are classified. Families and stuff. I remember that from biology class.”

His grandfather stabbed at the keyboard once more, his one-fingered typing surprisingly fast.

Class = aves

Phylum = chordata Subphylum = vertebrata

Orders = passeriformes (passerines) and non-passerines

He looked at Casey to make sure he understood.

“So every bird in the world is either a passerine or a nonpasserine?” Casey asked.

The old man nodded.

23 Orders, 142 Families, 2057 Genera, 9,702 Species

Casey nodded. “I got that. And you’ve seen close to eight thousand of them.”

First you learn the orders, then the families, and soon.

Casey frowned. “But why? I could just learn the names of the birds themselves. Why wouldn’t that be enough?”

The old man glared at him, his eyebrows coming together, jutting over his beak of a nose. He looked like a caricature of an angry bald eagle. His hand shook as he typed.

There is a correct way to do this. You must learn the orders first.

“If you’re going to get all cranky, I’ll leave and go watch TV or something.” Casey took a step back. He got enough grief about stuff like this from his mom and dad. He didn’t have to take it from somebody he was trying to help, even if it was his grandfather.

Sadie sat up when Casey moved, and looked at him expectantly. The dog was the best thing about his summer so far. She followed him everywhere and had plopped down next to Grandpa’s desk as if she’d been living here all her life.

The old man continued to scowl at him, then his shoul
ders sagged a little. He nodded and beckoned Casey to him once more.

All right. We’ll learn names first. But the orders are interesting. When you know the names, you’ll want to know the orders, too.

“Fair enough.” Casey sat on the corner of the desk and watched as his grandfather highlighted the cells of the spreadsheet.
Ailuroedus buccoides,
White-eared Catbird.
Ailuroedus melanotis,
Spotted Catbird.
Ailuroedus crassirostris,
Green Catbird.

The old man stared at the funny Latin names like it was some hot porn site or something. He was so enthralled, he’d probably forgotten Casey was even there. Which was okay with Casey. He leaned down and scratched Sadie behind the ears and studied the man at the computer, thinking how odd it was that this was his mom’s dad. They didn’t look much alike; Mom took after Grandma in the looks department, which he guessed was good. Grandma still looked all right for an older lady. Even before he had the stroke, Grandpa hadn’t been all that handsome. He kept himself neat and clean, but he didn’t care about stuff like clothes or hairstyles.

But Mom did
act
like her father sometimes. When she was at the landscaping office, working on something on the computer, she had the same kind of intensity Grandpa had now. And she showed her emotions on her face the way Grandpa did. One look in her eyes and you knew she was happy or angry or upset. She never had to say a word.

Uncle Del looked a little more like his dad, at least around the chin and nose. But Casey couldn’t imagine someone more different from Grandpa than his mother’s brother. Del was real outgoing and friendly. Mom said he was a con artist, so maybe the friendliness wasn’t always real, but he sure wasn’t the type to spend days alone in the jungle looking for some
rare bird the way Grandpa did. And if Uncle Del was mad or glad about something, he’d tell you right to your face.

When Casey looked at his mom and her brother that way, he had to wonder how they ever ended up with the same parents. Then again, he and Matt were plenty different. Matt was the smart, responsible one—just like Dad. Casey thought of himself as the more creative type. An artist, except that he didn’t paint or play an instrument or anything like that. Dad couldn’t understand him at all, so they clashed all the time.

Mom was easier to get along with, but even she wished he were different sometimes. More ordinary, he guessed. Easier.

Easier for her, that is. He couldn’t imagine anything harder than trying to fit into a mold that wasn’t right for you.

Grandpa tugged at his sleeve and cocked his head. Casey listened and heard a melodic, gurgling song. Three slow notes,
gluk, gluk, glee!
“I don’t recognize it,” he said.

Grandpa motioned toward the window, and gave Casey a gentle shove toward it. He shuffled to the glass and looked out. The call came again.
Gluk, gluk, glee!
This time, he saw the chunky, soot-colored bird with the shiny brown hood. “Brown-headed Cowbird,” he announced.

Grandpa nodded, his mouth curved into a crooked grin. He turned to the computer and clicked on anew file. Casey’s List was the heading at the top of the page.

“I guess I should add it now, huh?” Casey leaned around the old man and typed in the name of the bird and the time, date and location where he’d seen it. Grandpa added the Latin
Molothrus ater.

Casey nodded, and admired the new entry. So far the list Grandpa had made for him had only about a dozen birds on it. He’d done it mainly to humor the old man. But he had to admit, it was kind of fun, seeing a bird and noting all the information about it. He didn’t know anybody else his
age who could identify half a dozen birds, much less more than ten.

Grandpa smiled, and patted his hand. Casey returned the look. At least some people in his life were easy to please.

One of Karen’s earliest memories was of standing beside her brother’s crib, making faces and laughing with delight when he smiled at her. Even as a baby, he had charmed everyone who met him. He had grown into a sunny child and a willing accomplice in her elaborate games of make-believe.

When had that changed? Had adolescence formed this gulf between them, or had the divide come earlier, when she realized that Del’s easygoing nature made him more popular than she would ever be? When he charmed teachers into overlooking neglected homework assignments while she served detention for turning in a paper a day late, had that made her see him in a different light? When he borrowed money and failed to repay it, dismissing her attempts to collect with a lopsided smile and a lazy shrug, had that been the final straw?

She caught glimpses of the sweet boy she’d loved even now. On Saturday, he and Mary Elisabeth came to the house with a stringer of catfish and a paper sack of tomatoes, still warm from the vine. “Dinner’s on us,” he announced, holding up the fish.

“All right!” Casey shut off the television and joined them in the kitchen, Sadie close on his heels. To Karen’s surprise, Casey had kept his promise to look after the beast, and Sadie slept each night on the floor beside his bed.

“Del said his daddy loves catfish,” Mary Elisabeth said. “And the tomatoes are from my neighbor’s garden.” She began opening cabinet doors. “I’ll cook, if you’ll show me where everything is.”

“Oh, you don’t have to do that.” Karen hurried to intercept the young woman as she hefted a cast-iron frying pan from the drawer beneath the stove.

“Let her cook, sis.” Del steered her toward a chair at the kitchen table and set a long-necked bottle of beer in front of her. “Take a load off.”

“You got anything in there for me?” Casey bent and poked around in the blue-and-white plastic cooler Del had deposited by his chair.

“Nothing for you, sport.”

Karen studied the bottle in front of her. Sweat beaded on the brown glass and chips of ice clung to the label. She’d been up half the night with her father, who’d developed a worrisome cough, and weariness hung on her like a lead shirt. She couldn’t remember when she’d seen anything more enticing and refreshing than that beer.

She raised the bottle to her lips and took a long drink, a sigh escaping her as the icy, slightly bitter liquid rushed down her throat. Del laughed and sat in the chair across from her. “I’d say it’s been too long since you let your hair down.”

She started to point out that people with responsibilities and some sense of duty didn’t have time to
let their hair down,
but the words stuck in her throat. Maybe he had a point. Life couldn’t be one big party, as he seemed to try to make it, but neither did it have to be a constant grind, as hers too often was.

Casey slid into the chair between them. “Where’d you catch the fish?”

“Mayfield Lake.”

Karen arched one eyebrow as he named a body of water owned by one of the wealthiest families in town. “Isn’t that on private property?”

He grinned. “Not if you know the back way in.”

His expression was such an exaggeration of fake innocence, she couldn’t help but laugh. “And of course, you know the way.”

He glanced toward Mary Elisabeth, who was stirring cornmeal and spices in a bowl, humming to herself. Then he leaned toward Karen, his voice lowered. “I went around with the youngest Mayfield girl for a while. She knew all the places on their land where nobody would bother us.”

She took another quick swallow of beer to distract herself from thinking about just what her brother and Miss Mayfield had been up to that they didn’t want to be bothered. “You haven’t asked about Daddy,” she said.

The lines around his eyes tightened and he bent to retrieve another beer from the cooler. “I was going to. How is he?”

“He had a rough night. A bad cough kept him awake.”

“He’s better this morning,” Casey offered. “I think something just went down the wrong way. He still doesn’t swallow good sometimes.”

Karen glanced toward the string of fish, wet and silver in the sink. “I don’t know if fish is such a good idea.”

“We’ll mush it up for him. It’ll be okay.” Del popped the top off the bottle. “Where is he now?”

“He’s asleep. I’ll send Casey to wake him up in a little bit.”

“Don’t bother him. He probably needs his sleep.”

Something in the overly casual way he said the words
made her look at him more closely. “You act like you don’t want to talk to him.”

“It’s not like we can have a conversation.” He stared across the kitchen, the muscles along his jaw tense. “Even before he had the stroke we didn’t have a lot to say to each other.”

“No, he was never much of a conversationalist.” She wondered, sometimes, if all those years of sitting silent, watching birds, had taken away the habit of talking.

“I know what you’re thinking.” Del pointed the lip of the bottle toward her. “You think since I live next door to him, I ought to be over here all the time, checking up on him and playing the dutiful son and all. Well, he didn’t want none of that and neither did I. Except for our genes, the two of us don’t have anything in common.” He set the empty bottle down with a thump.

The bitterness in his voice surprised her. She’d been so focused on her own problems with her father, she hadn’t thought much about Del’s relationship with him.

Her eyes met Casey’s, and he quickly looked away. Had Del’s words reminded him of his own uneven relationship with Tom? Her husband rarely hid his frustration that Casey didn’t share his interest in the landscaping business or in working on projects around the house. Casey never said anything, but he must have felt his father’s disappointment keenly.

It didn’t help matters, though, when neither of them would consider the other’s point of view—not unlike Del and Martin. “It’s not true that you have nothing in common,” she said. “You’re both stubborn.”

“Oh yeah?” He cocked one eyebrow. “I’d say it runs in the family.”

“Del, you need to skin these catfish so I can cook them.” Mary Elisabeth confronted him, hands on her hips. She’d tied a dish towel around her waist as a makeshift apron. The
towel hung down longer than her shorts, so the effect was of a striped cotton miniskirt.

“Aw, sugar, I’ll do it in a minute, don’t worry.” He reached out and pulled her close, one hand cupping her bottom like he was testing the firmness of a melon.

“I’ll do it.” Casey jumped up and pushed back his chair.

“You skinned catfish before, boy?” Del asked. “It’s not like cleaning one of those Colorado trout, you know.”

“I know.” He rummaged in the drawer under the phone and came up with a thick-handled knife. He retrieved an enamel dishpan from under the sink, then picked up the stringer of fish. Sadie stood at attention, ears cocked, nose twitching. “You want fillets or whole?” Casey asked. “Fillets,” Mary Elisabeth said. “They’re big fish.”

When he and Sadie were gone, back door slamming behind him, Del turned to Karen again. “He doing okay?”

“Casey? Why wouldn’t he be okay?”

He shrugged. “Seems kind of funny, him showing up here all of a sudden. I mean, what kind of summer is he gonna have, playing nursemaid to a sick old man?”

“He said he wanted to stay with me.” She bristled. Did Del think she’d set out to ruin her son’s summer?

“Yeah, well, maybe he’s a nicer guy than I am.” He opened another bottle. “Wouldn’t be hard to do, according to you.”

“At least he’s trying to help.”

“And I’m not.” He lifted the beer in a mock toast. “Just doing my best to live up to your low opinion of me.”

Where had he mastered the art of throwing all blame squarely back on her? He infuriated her, but there was enough truth in his words to choke off her angry reply.

And she didn’t want to argue with him right now. She wanted to sit here and let the alcohol buzz smooth out all the rough edges of her emotions. They could have one afternoon together that didn’t end in a fight, couldn’t they? Maybe it
was a fantasy, but if anyone deserved a break from harsh reality right now, it was her. Why not pretend, for a little while, that everything was as fine and happy as she used to fantasize it could be.

Casey had just cut the head off the largest fish when the back door opened and Mary Elisabeth stepped out. “Hey there,” she called, and headed toward the picnic table where he was working. She’d taken off the dish towel apron and held an oversize pair of pliers out in front of her like a bridal bouquet. “I thought maybe these would help,” she said, stopping beside him.

“Yeah, thanks.” He took the pliers, trying to remember what he was supposed to do with them.

“The easiest way is to use the pliers to pull the skin back, and sort of turn it inside out.” She smiled, and tucked her hair behind one ear. She had about five earrings in each ear, a row of sparkling stones curving up from the lobe.

“Right. I remember now.” He gripped the leathery fish skin with the pliers and tugged it back, aware of the muscles in his arms bulging with the effort. He’d taken off his shirt to keep from getting it dirty, and because it was hot out. He hoped she didn’t think he looked like a pale, skinny kid.

“Hey, you’re pretty strong.” When she wrapped her hand around his bicep and squeezed, he almost dropped the pliers, but managed to hang on to them and the slippery fish.

“Thanks,” he choked out, and tossed the now-naked fish into the dishpan. Sadie sat next to the table, eyes focused hopefully on the pan.

“How’s the pup working out?” Mary Elisabeth raked her long nails through Sadie’s hair. The dog half closed her eyes and swept the dirt with her tail. “Del said your mom wasn’t too happy about him bringing her over.”

“Aw, she’s pretty much over that now. Sadie’s a great dog.”

She smiled at him again, and it was as if someone had turned the sun’s heat up a notch all of a sudden. He could feel sweat running down the small of his back. He started on the next fish and she moved closer. She wasn’t wearing a bra and her nipples showed through the thin material of the tank top. He had to force his gaze back on the fish, or risk cutting his thumb off. “Not bad for a Yankee boy,” she said as he stripped the second fish.

“I’m not a Yankee.”
Or a boy,
he wanted to add, but of course to her he was. How old was she, anyway? Probably twenty-five or so, at least.

“My daddy always said anybody who lived north of Amarillo was a Yankee to him.” She laughed and climbed up onto the table and sat facing him, her feet on the bench. The muddy scent of catfish mingled with the sweet flower smell of her perfume.

He didn’t know what to think of her. Was she flirting with him, or was she just one of those women who flirted with everybody? He tossed a third fish into the dishpan. Probably the latter. It wasn’t like she’d be interested in him or anything.

“So how did you meet my my uncle Del?” he asked.

“He came into the water department to pay an overdue bill. While I was processing the paper work, he started telling these really corny jokes. Like, what weighs five thousand pounds and wears glass slippers?”

“Um, I don’t know.”

“Cinderelephant! Or, what’s large and gray and goes around and around in circles? An elephant stuck in a revolving door.”

“And you thought this was funny?”

She laughed. “They were so silly. And he had such a funny look on his face when he told them. He had us all in stitches. There’s nothing a woman likes better than a man who can make her laugh.”

He filed this away for future reference, though he wasn’t sure how many women would be wowed by elephant jokes. “So that’s what the big attraction is between you two—the fact that he makes you laugh?”

“Del is a man who doesn’t let others’ expectations interfere with his happiness. He’s carefree, and I admire that.”

He tossed a fish into the dishpan and picked up the knife again. “Mom says he’s irresponsible.” She said that about Casey, too, and she had the same sour look on her face when she said it. But Mary Elisabeth didn’t make it sound like such a bad thing.

She sighed. “Yeah, sometimes he is. But you have to take the bad with the good with people, you know?”

A loud trilling sounded nearby, accompanied by the flutter of wings. They looked up, and Casey spotted the flash of red and black on the end of a branch of the pine tree overhead. “Cardinal,” he said.

“Does everybody in your family watch birds?”

He turned back to the fish he was filleting. “Not really. But Grandpa is teaching me some things.”

She looked toward the house, her expression sad. “It must be hard for him, not being able to talk or move very easy.”

“Yeah, I imagine it’s no fun.”

“I mean, it must be worse for someone like him. He’s spent his whole life watching creatures that can fly.” She looked up again, her head thrown back, neck arched, emphasizing the smooth hollow of her throat. “Birds must be about the freest things in the world, and there he is stuck in a crippled-up body.”

The tenderness of her words surprised him. Why would she care about his grandfather, a man she didn’t even know? And why would someone who could be so poetic about birds be hanging out with his uncle Del? He couldn’t figure this chick out.

He tossed the last fillet in the dishpan. “They’re done.”

“You did a great job.” She hopped off the table and picked up the dishpan. “Thanks.” She walked back to the house, hips swaying. He watched her go, feelings stirring up in him like sand on a creek bottom.

Sixteen was about the most miserable age to be, he decided. He was too young to do anything about his out-and-out lust for his uncle’s girlfriend, and too old to pretend such feelings didn’t exist. He was too young to be truly on his own, and too old to be happy spending the summer with his sick old grandfather and his mom, who acted as if she’d forgotten how to smile. Going back to Denver wasn’t an option; he’d feel guilty for deserting his mom, and once there he’d end up fighting with his dad anyway.

He was screwed no matter what he did. He’d spent a lot of time looking for away to make things better, but he couldn’t get around that one truth: right now, it sucked to be him.