Emory’s Gift (21 page)

When we got to the checkout line, Yvonne was manning the cash register. She touched her hair when she saw us approach and gave my father a big grin. “There you are, stranger,” she said. “I haven’t heard from you in a while.”

Good,
I thought to myself.

My dad sort of shrugged and looked uncomfortable. Yvonne started ringing up our purchases, giving my dad smiling glances. Then her eyes suddenly widened and she gave my father a surprised look. “Did you get a dog?”

chapter

TWENTY-TWO

MY dad and I were exchanging horrified expressions, Yvonne’s question dangling in the air between us. We couldn’t have looked more guilty if we’d been caught sticking up a bank.

“Thought I would someday,” my father stammered, which sounded insane even to my ears.

Yvonne cocked her head at him. “So you’re buying the dog food…,” she said.

“Yeah,” my dad replied, nodding. Didn’t everyone run out and buy a hundred pounds of dog food when they were
thinking
about buying a dog?

“It’s for a friend,” I said, master of the truthful untruth. My father gave me a grateful look.

“Right. A friend named Emory,” my dad responded.

Yvonne shrugged. Then it seemed to occur to her that she should be showing me some fake affection so my dad would want to marry her. She beamed at me. “Charlie, what is your favorite dinner?”

I thought about it. “Steak,” I answered, keeping my answer short in case there was some sort of trick lying in wait behind the question.

“And how about you, George?”

My dad blinked. I could tell that he, too, suspected there was some reason for this interrogation.

“I guess steak is as good an answer as any I could come up with,” he agreed carefully.

“You’re not buying any steak today, though,” Yvonne pointed out.
That’s right, Yvonne; you caught us! You are so smart!

“Yeah, well…” My dad shrugged.

“Well, I have an idea,” Yvonne said. I felt intimations of doom. I did not want Yvonne having
ideas.
“How about I get us a couple of steaks and bring them over tonight.

“I’ll make a salad and my famous baked beans,” she continued.

I couldn’t imagine how dumb you had to be to believe you somehow had attained celebrity status for opening a can of beans. As far as I knew, Yvonne was famous for one thing, and that was ringing up the purchases at the grocery store.

“Well,” my dad said.

Yvonne was smiling at him and I knew we were sunk.

“Okay, that would be great,” he said.

“I’ll bring beer,” Yvonne said. “The whole meal’s on me.”

“No, you should let me pay for something,” my dad protested. But Yvonne was insistent. This way, I knew, we’d be in her debt forever. My dad would have to buy her an engagement ring because he owed her for the beer.

Yvonne was as good as her threat, showing up with a couple of bags of groceries and wearing a medium-length skirt with a big belt buckle. If Yvonne fell in the water with that thing on, the buckle would drag her to the bottom and I would not employ a single one of my junior-lifesaving skills to save her, not even if Kay were there watching.

Earlier, when we first got home, Emory had, to my father’s astonishment, eaten nearly half a bag of dog food in one meal. Then he lumbered off into the woods, which made me happy, since as far as I was concerned the novelty of cleaning up bear pies in the yard was long over. I made a mental note, though, to keep the back door open and listen for dogs.

Yvonne hummed around in the kitchen, opening cupboards, not asking me anything. I was in charge of peeling potatoes to mash. I watched her and hated her for the silent judgment I saw in the way she explored my mother’s system, feeling her think that oh no, she’d never put the spatulas
here,
and why in the world would the cheese grater be over
there
? In the end, though, she surveyed the room, the whole house, with a satisfied contentment, as if the place already belonged to her.

When she made her celebrity beans, she opened the cans, poured them into a baking dish, and put brown sugar and some ketchup on top before sliding them into the oven. There, I knew how she did it; so I guess I was famous now, too.

Her presence made me sullenly angry at my dad, so I wasn’t talking to him, and I didn’t want to talk to Yvonne, so I concentrated on my potato peeling as if I found the whole exercise to be more challenging than I could manage. If Yvonne had been a real cook, I reflected, she’d have made potato salad like my mom. That was famous. Everyone in town knew about Laura Hall’s delicious potato salad, which was chockfull of mysterious secret ingredients and not ketchup.

Yvonne was stooped down, looking on a lower shelf for something or maybe just snooping, when I looked through the window over the sink and saw, to my horror, Emory come plodding into the yard. The smoke from my father’s efforts was wafting around and Emory had his nose up, tantalized. My father couldn’t see the bear because the grill was on the back deck.

Yvonne stood up.

“Miss Mandeville!” I blurted, so sharply she whirled, blinking, emitting a quick, “Oh!”

“You, uh … this is so nice of you to cook dinner,” I babbled.

She stared at me as if unsure she had heard me correctly. Then she smiled. The darn bear was still completely visible in the yard and if she turned back around our secret would be out. “Why, thank you, Charlie.”

“Would you like to see my room?” I asked desperately.

Her grin was even wider. “Sure, that would be nice.”

I shocked both of us by reaching out for her hand. I just couldn’t take the chance that she would turn back to the sink, not even for a moment.

I walked her into my room and acted like I was doing a museum tour, showing her my model airplanes, my junior-lifesaving certificate, and everything else I could think of. I was running out of ideas and was practically ready to show her my underwear drawer when my father suddenly appeared in the doorway. He looked a little frantic.

“Hi!” he said loudly.

Yvonne smiled at him and touched her hair. “Charlie was just showing me his room,” she told him.

“So you’ve been back here what, several minutes?”

“Yes, probably four or five minutes,” I said.

Yvonne looked back and forth between us, a little puzzled by the conversation.

“So, okay, then,” my dad said.

“We were just in the kitchen and I was looking out the window over the sink,” I told my father, “and then I asked Miss Mandeville if she wanted to see my room.”

“Ah.” My dad nodded. “Steaks are done. I put them in the kitchen.”

“I’d better get the beans out of the oven,” Yvonne said. “Everything else is ready.”

I gave my dad an intent look, which he interpreted correctly. “I put everything away in the pole barn that needed to go in there,” he said to me.

The whole thing rattled me so much that when I set the table I didn’t think to put out a place for Yvonne. At least, that’s what I assume my father thought. Yvonne didn’t remark on it, even though it was pretty rude. What she did, instead, was grab her own plate and silverware and settle down into Mom’s seat at the table. When I saw this I gave my dad a stare that was full of hot accusation, and he pursed his lips uncomfortably.

“Yvonne,” my dad said, then stopped because he wasn’t sure what he wanted to say.

Yvonne blinked at him, smiling, and then the smile faltered when she saw the expression on his face. Suddenly her eyes widened. “Oh!” she said.

She moved her place over and some of the tension went out of us.

After the steaks I did the dishes in silence while Yvonne and my dad watched television. Yvonne laughed out loud at
Sanford and Son,
which offended me for some reason. My mom never laughed at the television; she would just smile when something struck her as clever. It seemed a lot more classy than the guffaws Yvonne was blowing out like gusts of cigarette smoke. When something struck her as particularly hilarious she dropped her head on my dad’s shoulder as if she were having some sort of sudden neck dysfunction.

I wanted to go see Emory after I did the dishes, but instead I sat at the table to do my homework. I didn’t want to leave the two of them in the living room together.

Yvonne and my father watched
The Rockford Files
and then
Police Woman
and then sat and talked. My dad caught me yawning and rubbing my eyes.

“Off to bed, Charlie,” he said.

“Good night, Charlie,” Yvonne said before my dad barely had the words out. She gave me her big grin because we were buddies now. I gave them a surly look but didn’t try to argue with my dad.

I went to bed determined to stay awake, vigilantly monitoring the hallway for traffic. If Yvonne went back to my mom’s bedroom with my father I knew I would run away and never come back. I would live in the mountains with Emory while he hibernated, and there would be a legend about a boy who ran wild with a grizzly bear.

Of course, I’d sneak back into town to see Beth from time to time.

I drifted off to sleep and then awoke around one in the morning, angry at myself for dozing off. I slid out of bed and crept into the living room, where there were still some lights on.

My father was sprawled in the big reclining chair, and Yvonne was in the chair with him, sitting in his lap, her head on his chest. They were both fast asleep. I stood with my arms crossed, pondering what action to take. I wanted something dramatic, like maybe banging pots together or firing off a shotgun. Or even bringing Emory inside to snarl in Yvonne’s face, to scare her so bad she never came back.

In the end, though, I did nothing at all.

Yvonne was gone when I woke up the next morning. I went about the business of my breakfast without a word, punishing my father with silence, but it was so much like every other day I wasn’t sure he got the message. And Emory was gone, too—he’d eaten the dog food but, as I would figure out years later, needed a more varied diet than what he could get in the pole barn. As it would turn out, he spent the weekend foraging and only returned to the couch at night.

The phone didn’t ring much in the house, so when it did and I went to answer it my father followed and stood looking at me with a questioning look on his face.

I said hello and for a second there was no response, and then I heard Beth’s voice.

“Charlie?”

I waved at my dad that the call was for me. He cocked his head, not leaving, curious who it was. I turned my back on him, the cord wrapping around my torso.

“I’m glad your phone got fixed,” Beth was saying.

“What?”

“Your phone. I’m glad they fixed it. That is why you haven’t called me, because your telephone has been out of order, right?”

I found myself grinning. “Was I supposed to call you?”

“I don’t know, Charlie, were you supposed to call me?”

“Um…”

“So anyway, I was just checking to see if your phone was working. Bye, Charlie.”

She disconnected. I stared at the phone in disbelief.

“Who was that?” my dad asked.

“Beth Shelburton.”

“Oh-h-h,” he replied, drawing the word out so I’d know he was jumping to all kinds of conclusions. I felt my face flushing.

“It’s not what you think,” I told him icily.

He nodded. “Okay.”

“She was just checking to see if our phone was working.”

That one puzzled him, too. “Okay,” he said again, sounding less sure of himself.

That was Beth; she had the ability to confound even men as old as my dad.

I walked out of the kitchen as if the entire incident were behind me. I went out to the pole barn, but Emory was gone, probably out eating fifty acres of huckleberries. I scuffed my feet on the driveway a little and then went back into the house and asked my dad for the Shelburtons’ phone number.

Her brother answered and then, with a taunt in his voice, called out to Beth, telling her it was a “boy” on the phone and making all sorts of irritating love noises in the background while she picked up the receiver. There was a short scuffling that ended in a muffled gasp—it sounded as if she had hit him in the head with something heavy.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Beth.”

“Hi. Who’s calling, please?”

“It’s me. Charlie.”

“Why,
Charlie,
what a nice surprise!”

She just had a talent for making me grin like an idiot.

That Monday at school I determined that after English class if I sprinted I could make it to her history class and walk with her to her math class and then race back for
my
history class. We’d have three whole minutes of conversation together. It was clearly worth the effort.

The novelty of having a boy call quickly went away for her little brother, since I had rung Beth six or seven times that weekend. We talked about a lot of things, but we didn’t talk about Emory, or about my mother, or about Dad and Yvonne. I wanted to, though. I was ready to confide in Beth, but the truth is that she kept me so off balance I never felt like the conversation was mine to control.

I was on the phone with her when my dad came home Monday evening. He hadn’t said anything about my sudden fondness for telephonic communication, but he couldn’t help but notice all the activity, since the only place I could talk from was the kitchen. I planned to ask for a telephone in my room for Christmas.

I heard a car pull in our driveway, but Beth was telling me something about gymnastics, so I left it up to my dad to investigate. He went to the front window, then turned and looked at me.

“You’d better get off the phone.”

I said a reluctant good-bye to Beth and hung up, joining my dad at the window. What I saw made my heart freeze in my chest.

Herman Hessler, the Fish and Game agent, was back, and he had two more agents with him. There was also a sheriff patrol car.

The Fish and Game agents had rifles.

chapter

TWENTY-THREE

THE expression on my father’s face and the stiff set to his spine as he opened the door to confront the Fish and Game agents was very familiar to me. I’d seen it more than once as my father had headed in to see Mom’s doctors. He was ready for the worst, steeled against it.