What I Remember Most (30 page)

“I bet she missed being with you.”

“I hope so.” He smiled wryly. “I was not an easy kid, but we got along well when she was sober. Laughed all the time. We spoke Spanish only. She wanted me to be fluent and not to forget where my ancestors came from.”

“Sober?”

“She had problems with alcohol. Every three or four days she’d drink until she passed out. I grew up watching her conked out on a couch hoping she would breathe. She would retch over the toilet. She would stumble and fall, she would cry and cry, I’d have to put her to bed. She entered rehab, straightened out, fell back in to addiction, went back to rehab, and got cleaned up again.”

“I’m sorry, Kade.” I pictured that scene. I knew what it was like to live with an alcoholic. Unpredictable. Often abusive. Neglectful. People tiptoeing around, managing the situation, hating what the alcoholic was doing.

“I am, too. She’d had a horrible home life herself. She came from Mexico. Her family had been poor, way poorer than we were in L.A. She lived in a hut, no running water or electricity. Her father used to beat her and her sister. Her mother died when she was five. She was shot in the middle of a drug fight. My mother and her sister came to America when they were children, and by the time she was fifteen, they were out on their own. Better to be out on their own than living with their father, that’s what she told me.

“I’m sure she was an alcoholic by the time she was twenty, based on the stories she told me. I used to be furious with her for drinking, but now, as an adult, and understanding where she came from, I don’t judge her as harshly. My dad was gone a lot, she worked all the time, and she could never shed her past. Her system was shot. She’d been beat down too hard by life and had a tough time getting back up. She died of liver cancer years ago.”

“Were you out of prison then?” We stopped and stood in the middle of a bridge and watched the stream bubbling and churning.

“Yes. I took care of her the last six months up here in Oregon. I flew her up.” I saw a film of tears in his eyes. “She was a different person by then. Hadn’t had a drink in five years. She could not apologize enough to me. Every day she told me she was sorry. Sorry for not being a better mother. Sorry for not being there for me. Sorry for the addiction, and the men she drunkenly ran in and out of our house when my dad was in jail until I bashed one of them up at fourteen because he hit her. That was it for the men. She didn’t bring any more home.”

“I’m glad you had that time, Kade.” My throat tightened. I felt for his mother. Who knows? Maybe I would have been an alcoholic with her life, too. Always easy to judge someone else.

“Me too. It helped a lot.” He ran a hand over his eyes.

I wanted to hug him tight, but I didn’t. “What was your father like?”

“He was running drugs. No one who is a good person does that. He was dealing death to a whole bunch of people. Destroying them, their lives, their families. Teenagers, mothers, fathers, friends. I dabbled in drugs myself when I was in my teens. Nothing serious, and for some odd, inexplicable reason, I didn’t become hooked. But he was the person out there dealing the drugs. I was probably taking the drugs that my dad was bringing up from Mexico.”

“Straight up the highway,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Did he not get that? That he was possibly dealing death to his own son?”

“He always told me not to get into drugs, never to try them.”

“How do you think he justified that to himself?” I tried not to be pissed, but I had known kids on drugs when I was younger, two who overdosed. It was tragic. A waste. It never needed to happen.

“I don’t think he even tried. A drug dealer tells his own kid to stay away from drugs but actively deals them to other fathers’ sons, other fathers’ daughters. It burns me up whenever I think about it. I hate that part of him. Hate that greed and selfishness.”

He started walking, his pace quick, and I walked beside him. A branch heavy with snow cracked and fell to the ground in the distance.

“Was he Mexican like your mom?” It started to snow, light flakes. They landed on Kade’s black hair.

“No. American. Blond hair, blue eyed. My height, my build. He came from a solid family, too. His father was in the aerospace industry, and his mother was a teacher. He had an older brother who ended up owning a successful technology business. Who knows why my father turned out as he did. I think he liked the danger of being in the drug trade, the excitement, breaking the law, being a rebel . . .”

“And the money.” Money for the lives of children. What a sick deal.

“Without a doubt. He would come and see us when he wasn’t in prison. I remember he read me stories, I rode on his back, he taught me how to ride a bike, he talked to me the whole time, and when he left he always gave my mother an envelope full of money.”

“He was kind to you when he was around?”

“Yes, he was. And to my mother. She hugged him when he came in, hugged him when he left. He often spent the night. She cried when he left. I think they loved each other. They were soul mates, but my father was a lousy husband because of the drug running. I remember a few times I ended up in the emergency room. Needed an appendectomy once, football concussion, my first knife fight where I had some cuts on my chest, and he came in, hugged me, hugged my mom. Stayed around for a few days, then took off again, that pile of cash in the envelope in her purse.”

“Sounds like he had two sides to him.” I was crushed. Sad for Kade. A father who was more out than in. A father who would rather sell drugs than be a dad. How hurtful to Kade.

“Without a doubt. I’d heard he would off people who challenged him or threatened his business. But then he would come to our house and beg my mom to bake him her chocolate cake. She’d smile and laugh, he’d kiss her, hug her, and she’d make the cake. Then we’d all sit down and eat chocolate cake together.” He laughed, but it was filled with pain.

“I remember eating dinner with him, too. He would tell my mom he loved the burritos or the enchiladas, tell her that no one cooked like her, then he’d get up and use the phone, swear like you wouldn’t believe, in both Spanish and English, threaten to put someone in the ocean. He’d tell someone else to get the delivery in or start running, something like that, then he’d slam down the phone, sit down with us, reach for my mother’s hand and say, ‘Yours is the best steak I’ve ever had, Consuelo. The best. What’d you put on it? I tell everyone, you are the best cook in the world.’

“And he and my mother would then launch into a discussion about steak, spices, burritos, enchiladas, her Chinese food—she made outstanding Chinese food—and that would be that. My father also liked talking to my mother about her garden. In spring she would show him her plans for the garden. He always made sure that she planted string beans, zucchini, three types of lettuce, three types of tomatoes, carrots and corn. When that garden grew in, he would come over, at night, and she’d send him back out with his bag full of vegetables.

“I laugh now when I think about it. Mighty drug kingpin leaving his girlfriend’s house with a basket full of vegetables, but that’s what he did.”

“Who did he live with?” I asked, but what I was thinking was, “How dare you hurt Kade, hurt your son, by not being a dad to him.”

“He lived on his own. He told me a couple of times that he would never live with us because people were trying to kill him and he didn’t want us in the crossfire. From anyone else, that would have sounded like pure bull, but from him, it was the truth. My father had enemies, no question.”

“And he’s still in jail?”

“Yes. This last sentence was his longest. Almost out.”

“Have you seen him?”

“Yes. I fly down twice a year. He’s a changed man. Humble. Broken. His whole life, wasted. He could have done something, built something, helped others. He had the American dream in terms of opportunity—a well-off and caring family, a college education, and he blew it. This last stint did him in. His mother died of cancer when he was there and he couldn’t be with her, take care of her.”

I didn’t say, but thought, what an irresponsible and selfish person.

“I’ve had to do a lot of thinking about my dad. He hurt people. He hurt his family, he hurt us, he hurt others. I used to go and visit him when I was a kid in Los Angeles before I went to prison, too. We weren’t at the same prison. We joked, rather blackly, that the jail mixed up our hotel reservations.

“He wrote me a letter and told me to leave L.A. when I was released from jail, to stay out of gangs and not become him. I wrote him back and said I had already decided to go. Later I realized he was also probably afraid that I would be the victim of a crime, a deliberate hit on him. Jail changed me. Who I was when I went in and who I was when I came out were different people.”

I wondered how different I would be when I walked away from those bars. Would my hatred for Covey and what he did to me turn me into some bitter woman I didn’t want to be? Would I have a mental breakdown in there? Would I be bashed up by Neanderthal Woman, or would I turn into a basher? I have been hit enough in my life, and I would not put up with that again.

“Who were you when you went in and who were you when you came out?”

“I was an angry, rebellious kid, run by my emotions, when I went in, and I was a more reflective, calmer, grown man when I left. I learned how to make furniture in prison. I took a whole bunch of college classes, earned two degrees, actually, in accounting and business, and I studied how to run a business. I worked out, stayed tough, did not take any shit, and planned a life for myself that did not involve gangs, knives, fighting or, most especially, jail.”

“And your life turned out so well.” What a story. Drug dealer for a father. Alcoholic mother. Running in a gang. Arrested. Jail time. I pictured him in the degrading, dangerous pit of jail, with its barbed wires, strip searches, confinement . . .
as a teenager
. I was all choked up but tried to hide it.

“Grenady, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” I turned my face away and watched an osprey. Two tears fell. “Damn,” I muttered.

He stopped me on the trail and made me face him. “What is it?”

I made a gaspy noise and put my hands over my face when more tears spouted out without my permission.

“Why are you crying?”

“I’m not crying.” My heart hurt.

“Yes, you are.”

“Not much.”

“Why? Did I say something that upset you?”

I wiped my cheeks, then another round fell. “I was thinking of you as a kid with your mom, and dad, and being in that neighborhood, being in a gang, getting stabbed and shot, going to prison, and it made me sad.”

He was stunned, I could tell. “You’re crying because of my childhood?”

“Well, yeah. It wasn’t like you were at Disneyland the whole time.” My tone was snappy. I impatiently brushed away a snowflake that landed on my eyelashes. “You have a problem with that?”

He was silent for a minute. “No, Grenady, I don’t have a problem with that.”

“So quit asking if I’m crying.”

“I’ll do that.”

“I don’t like being pestered when I cry.”

“I understand. I won’t pester you.”

I sniffled, then handed him the bag of chocolate chip cookies. “Don’t let me have any more.”

He held another one out. I took it. Couldn’t help it. I love chocolate chip cookies.

That night, on my own deck, Liddy neighing below in the barn, I was again killed by guilt.

Kade had been honest about his past, and I had not. He’d asked a few questions about my childhood and my marriage, over the three days, and I had danced around the answers, then said, “I don’t want to talk about that, so quit asking.” He respected it, and we moved on. But I had not taken the opening to be truthful. There was so much to hide.

I tapped my fist against my head, then opened my hands. Those light, tiny scars stared up at me, as if asking me to be honest.

It was all about me. Me, me, me. I wanted a job. I liked the people. I liked Kade.

What I wanted.

What
Grenady
wants.

I don’t like myself sometimes.

Not at all.

I’ve got a moose up my butt and I’ve got to get it out and get moving in a better direction.

I stared at the forest on the mountain, a few wisps of fog clinging to the tops of the trees. I would not go in there at night for anything. Never. You can get lost in a place like that.

Like you can get lost in life.

The first models of the oversized rocking chairs were done. We had an All Hendricks Meeting, as Kade called them, for the unveiling. Tim had put drop cloths over them, three over the largest ones.

Drum roll . . . Ta-da!

They were fantastic. The seats were wide, the backs extra tall—one back six feet tall—the scrolling intricate. The rocking chair that looked like it came from
Alice in Wonderland
with the curving back was super fun. There was a poppa bear, momma bear, and baby bear chair, too.

We clapped and cheered, and Kade yelled, over the noise, “Nice idea, Grenady.”

Eudora took photos and put them up on the website the next day. They sold immediately.

Kade opened a new section on the website for them. The page was titled “Wild Rocking Chairs.”

I was pretty darn pleased he used my last name.

Eudora said, “I once sat in a rocking chair at a sheik’s home overlooking the gulf. It didn’t look anything like these. His had gold handles. There was gold all over, in fact. And no kidding, a harem. Teenage girls. Appalling. He wore too much aftershave and thought he was suave. He was so arrogant, he didn’t know how ignorant he was.”

What?
“Why were you there?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “Making new friends.”

“You needed new friends in a harem?”

She rolled her eyes. “I would never be in a harem.”

Rozlyn said, “I bet I could put Leonard on that Papa Bear rocking chair, climb on top, and rock him all the way to heaven.”

“I’m going to hope you get that chance, Rozlyn,” I said.

“Me too,” Eudora said. “Although the rocking sensation might make you dizzy. It did me.”