All You Get Is Me (5 page)

Steve is singing the praises of green garlic to a woman in a big sun hat who’s never heard of it. He’s practically telling her it will cure cancer. She buys two bunches and he tells her with a wink she’ll be back next week for more. I’m pretty sure she will. I hand a bag of the first zucchini of the season to a woman and count out her change. Out of the corner of my eye I can see Forest approaching. I’m not sure he’ll remember me, but when our eyes meet I see a light go on.

“Hi,” he says. His eyes dart quickly around and I realize that his mom, or maybe even his stepdad, must be somewhere in the crowd.

I smile and offer him an apricot. He smells it and then drops it into his book bag.

“Not in there, it’ll get smooshed.”

He digs around and retrieves it but he holds it awkwardly in his hand.

“Eat it,” I encourage him. “It’s food. Surely they have it on your planet?” I weigh a bag of fava beans and take three dollars from a woman.

He looks extremely uncomfortable. “Hey, um. I know this is weird but I wanted to tell you how sorry I am about that woman.” He’s still holding the apricot in midair.

“Sylvia. Her name was Sylvia.”

“Right. Sylvia. I know you were there and I’m sorry about it all.” He lets the hand with the apricot drop to his side.

“Sure.” I feel a pang of guilt. My dad would flip if he saw me fraternizing with the enemy, let alone flirting, if that’s what I’m doing. I don’t know what’s wrong with me but I can’t help myself. I wish my hair wasn’t tied back with a rubber band meant for bunching asparagus. I wish I wasn’t wearing my dad’s shirt. I wish I’d at least bothered with mascara. I look every bit the person I’ve been trying to avoid for two years. I look like a farmer’s daughter. I could die. Steve glances over at me and I give him a “don’t tell my dad” look. One he’s all too familiar with. He nods quickly.

I change the subject. “Hey, was that you at the swimming hole yesterday?” I immediately regret using the phrase “swimming hole.” That’s hardly what it is and I sound like a total local yokel. I may as well be wearing overalls and pigtails and sporting a blacked-out front tooth.

“Yeah. I saw you there too. I hope I didn’t creep you out. I wanted to let you know I was there but then it was too late.”

I shrug. “No, it was cool. You didn’t have to leave.”

He smiles a little and then he just stares at me. I brush my hand over my face quickly. It’s entirely possible that I have food lodged somewhere.

“What?” I’m desperate to know what he’s staring at.

“Oh, um, nothing. I was just looking at your eyes. They just turned the most amazing shade of blue.” He blushes.

My eyes change color? I’m quite certain that they don’t, and while we’re on the topic of amazing eyes?
Right back at ya, buddy
. Out loud I say, “Thanks.”

“Oh, honey, there you are! I’ve been looking everywhere for you!” Suddenly his mother appears out of nowhere, her torpedo boobs leading the way. Forest’s sea-glass eyes narrow slightly. Our moment is abruptly over. He moves away from our stall with a nervous glance in my direction. Steve is watching us and he puts two and two together. His gentle face clouds over.

“Man, someone’s got a lotta nerve coming around here.”

Forest’s mom seems to have made a speedy recovery. She has a tiny bandage above her perfectly shaped right eyebrow, and one of her eyes is a little purple underneath but she’s got so much makeup on it that you can barely notice it. In fact her whole face looks fresh from a cosmetics counter makeover. Her eye shadow perfectly matches her aqua velour tracksuit. The effect is a sort of desperate Heather Locklear look. Seeing her, I feel rage rising up in me, like I could close my hands around her throat and squeeze until she stops breathing. She hustles Forest away. He’s still holding the apricot in his right hand. I feel cheated. I crave more of him. After they disappear into the crowd I have to wonder what Connie Gilwood would want with a farmers’ market when she seems hell-bent on trying to kill every farmer she comes in contact with.

Steve and I get seriously caught up in the business of selling vegetables because as the two p.m. closing time approaches, every pound we sell is a pound we don’t have to load back on the truck. We end up having a good day, selling out of almost everything, which hardly ever happens.

On the drive home Steve starts firing off questions at me about Forest. He wants to know “what’s up with that guy,” in a protective big brother sort of way.

“Nothing,” I say. And that’s the truth. There’s nothing to tell. Steve’s got some crappy noisy garage band CD playing on the stereo. These days it just seems way too easy for anyone out there with a guitar to make a CD. I tolerated it on the way to the market but now I’m tired and dirty and hating myself for not wearing mascara and hating myself more for caring about mascara. I’m also, for the first time ever, thinking that eight dollars an hour doesn’t seem like nearly enough for what I do.

“Hey, can we take this crap off? It’s giving me a headache.”

“C’mon, Roar, it’s great.”

I press the eject button on the stereo and when the CD slides out I grab it and hold it out my open window.

“I’m dropping it.”

“Don’t, Roar, it’s my only copy.”

With my free hand I flip through my dad’s CD case on the seat between us.

“Bob Dylan?” I ask.

Steve sighs. “Which one?”

“
Nashville Skyline
or
Blood on the Tracks
.”

“
Blood on the Tracks
.”

I pull his crappy CD back into the cab and put it on the seat. I take the Dylan CD out of my dad’s case and put it into the player. Steve grins at me.

“Well, aren’t we in a mood today.”

I pull the rubber asparagus band out of my tangled hair and hang my head out the open window, letting the wind take hold of it.

When we arrive back at the farm, my dad, the farmer, actually appears to be doing farmwork. He and Miguel are out in the field working on a fallen fence. Steve goes out to join them. In a couple of hours he’ll head to Berkeley to visit Jane. He’s off on Sundays and he usually spends them with her.

I walk heavily up the stairs to my bedroom and pull off my dirty clothes, leaving them in a heap on the floor. Rufus joins me, curling up on the rag rug next to my bed. I slide between the cool sheets and think about Forest. He wanted me to know that he was sorry about Sylvia. What does that mean? Does it mean that he wants me to know that he understands that what his mom did was horrible? I’m pretty sure that the story she must have told him isn’t the whole truth, but by now he must have heard several versions of it. There isn’t anyone in a fifty-mile radius of this place who doesn’t know a version of it. He’s probably drawn his own conclusions. I think about this until I eventually drift off to sleep.

I wake to the sound of my dad speaking Spanish on the phone downstairs in the kitchen. I look at my bedside clock. I’ve been asleep for a little over an hour. From what little Spanish I know, I figure out that he’s talking to Sylvia’s sister, Wanda. His tone goes from hushed to insistent and back to hushed. He says good-bye to her the way you do when the person on the other end suddenly has to hang up because someone walked into the room who isn’t supposed to hear. I know that my dad’s not done with her, though.

When I appear in the doorway of the kitchen he smiles at me strangely.

“What?”

“You look more like your mother every day.” He looks at me with a combination of sadness and pride.

“I do?” I ask, as though I don’t already know this. I have her thick black hair and her blue eyes and even her lips. I see her in my face every time I look in the mirror.

“How’d the market go?”

“Good.” I scratch my head and yawn. “Didn’t Steve tell you?” I pull the lemonade out of the fridge.

“Yeah. I guess.” He looks distracted. “Hey, I was just talking to Sylvia’s sister, Wanda, and I think I’m going to give Sylvia’s husband, Tomás, a job here on the farm. Steve’s back at school in September and I think we’ve got enough work for an extra man year-round now.”

I shrug. “Sure, okay.” I hardly give it a thought, but then it occurs to me that if Tomás is actually here working on the property it would be easier for my dad to badger him into filing a civil suit against Connie Gilwood. Hmm. I smell a rat.

“Hey, it’s just about the work, right? You’re not going to get all lawyery on him, are you?”

“Nah, not at all. I just think he’ll be happier here and I’ll pay him what he’s worth. It’s the right thing to do.” He looks away as he says this.

I think about Forest and I feel my own pang of guilt. I take my lemonade out to the back porch and sit in the rocker. The sun is dipping low in the sky and a soft cool breeze has just come up, ruffling the leaves on the big oak above me. Steve drives by in his Jeep on his way to Berkeley. He toots his horn and waves. He holds up a CD for me to see, the crappy garage band CD, I assume. He grins mischievously. I glare at him and he blows me a kiss. He looks like a guy who’s about to have a lot of sex. Rufus escorts him to the gate and then trots back to the porch, where he lays down with a sigh at my feet.

Chapter 5

S
torm dips a fry into a puddle of ketchup that almost exactly matches the open-wound shade of her long fingernails. The sun through the diner window bounces off a ruby ring on her middle finger the size of the Hope Diamond. It’s a family heirloom. Her great-great-grandmother brought it over from the old country (is there really just one “old country”?). Storm stole it from her mother’s jewelry box this morning. She wears the key to that box on a silver chain around her neck. She had it copied at the hardware store several months ago and then she put the original back in its hiding spot under her mom’s modest collection of lingerie. Now she has free access to the family jewels, which, she maintains, is her birthright.

My own fingernails, I notice, as I cut into a grilled cheese sandwich, are raggedly cut with overgrown cuticles and dirt underneath them. I try to remember the exact moment I stopped caring about them. The truth is, I never cared about them like Storm cares about hers. My mom and I used to paint our fingernails together but we could never seem to stick with one color and we ended up with hands that looked like a box of crayons. Storm’s fingernails are sharpened into perfect points that she uses to punctuate her sentences. They’re like her exclamation marks.

I’m telling her about my encounter with Forest.

“Listen, Roar, we don’t live in Manhattan. There aren’t a thousand Starbucks, a million gyms, and a dry cleaner on every corner. We don’t go ‘clubbing’ all the time.” She punctuates “clubbing” with finger quotes.

I don’t bother telling her that even if we did live in Manhattan, I wouldn’t be caught dead in any of those places.

“So, what’s your point?”

“I’m getting to it. There’s dick-all to do around here, okay?” She tabulates our town out on her fingers. “There are three restaurants, one of them serves edible food and you’re looking at it. There’s a post office, a hardware store, a library, a grocery store, a beauty salon, a gas station, a car dealership, a feed store, and . . .” Storm starts a staring contest with a little girl dressed in her Sunday best sitting with her family in the booth across from us. The little girl loses. Her curiosity may have been piqued by Storm’s Sunday best: a pair of striped kneesocks that stop at midthigh, a thrift-store sequined mini in pale blue, cut off unevenly with a pair of scissors, and four-inch platform sandals. Her hair is pulled back into a single braid and her mouth is a slash of deep red. She’s wearing colored contact lenses that make her eyes look lavender like Elizabeth Taylor’s.

“. . . don’t forget Red’s Recovery Room,” I add. Red’s is our infamous town bar, especially popular on Thursdays for karaoke night.

“Right. And you’re surprised that he turned up at the farmers’ market? It’s the social event of the week around here. It’s not like your planets aligned or something.” She waves a fry matter-of-factly, dashing any hopes I may have that Forest may actually have been looking for me. I’m not sure I understand why she won’t give me this; I mean, would it kill her? She leans back, satisfied. “That’s my point.”

Millie stops by our booth with a fresh pot of coffee and fills our cups. Millie’s diner used to be the busiest place around for Sunday brunch. She uses fresh local ingredients that she buys directly from the farmers. She often buys eggs and seasonal vegetables from us. She used to run a farm with her husband till the marriage went up in smoke. She moved into town and started the diner. The farmer she used to be still lingers on her face. Her skin is tan and her cheeks are ruddy. She has strong sinewy arms and a wide, easy smile. She’s the real deal. Her diner is an extension of her personality. I like the bottles of real maple syrup on the tables and the little cow-shaped pitchers of cream for the coffee. The place reminds me of a diner out of a fifties movie where everyone is deliriously happy and oblivious to the real world. There’s even an old jukebox with the original vinyl 45’s in it. About a year ago, they built a Denny’s about five miles away in a brand-new strip mall off the interstate and a lot of the after-church crowd started going over there for Grand Slam breakfasts. Millie still gets her fair share of the locals, though, and now she has more time to get out of the kitchen and talk to customers.

“Damn shame about Sylvia,” she says, shaking her head. “How’s your dad, Roar?”

“He’s okay. He’s trying to help out with her family, maybe get a lawsuit together.”

Millie looks around quickly. “Some folks around here have been saying that your dad’s stirring up a hornet’s nest, but I say we should do right by those people. A woman is dead, a mother no less. Why should it make a difference if she’s legal or not?” She puts a hand on her hip and juts out her chin. I automatically move my hand to my camera on the seat next to me but I know that Millie would never stand for a photo. Whenever I see a face that moves me, I go for the camera; it’s like I’ve got an itchy trigger finger.