Falling for June: A Novel (13 page)

17

T
HE MORNING SUN
slanting in through the hayloft window woke David first. They were lying on the hay and June’s head was on his shoulder, her arm flung over his bare chest.

He looked at her face; she was so peacefully asleep that she appeared almost childlike, with her hair splayed out on the soft golden hay. Then she opened her eyes, and there was that smile that had simultaneously captured his heart and saved his life that day on the roof. A rooster crowed somewhere outside.

“Isn’t that a lovely sound,” June said.

“Much better than waking up to one of Sebastian’s mix tapes,” he replied.

She laughed. “I know, right? But that won’t be happening any longer. I’m not doing any more stunt camps.”

“Why not? It seemed like the students all loved it.”

“Well, we were turned down for the insurance renewal, for one thing. That, and Sebastian needs to go back.”

“Go back where?”

“To where he’s run away from.”

“You mean LA. Why’d he run away?”

“That’s his story to tell, darling, not mine. But right now I’d like to make you a deal. You promise to hold off your accounting report until I’ve had at least two cups of coffee and I’ll make
you a big country breakfast. I’ve got some eggs and bacon left from the stunt camp supplies to cook before they go bad in the icebox.”

“I don’t know,” he said, “I feel bad about eating bacon.”

“Oh, it’s okay,” she said, “this is Canadian bacon.”

“Canadian pigs don’t count?”

“Of course,” she said. “Pigs of every nationality count. These are slaughtered on old man Lou’s farm and no one does it more humanely than he does. What I meant, though, silly, is that it’s leaner. I thought you were worried about the fat.”

David glanced down at his belly. “What are you saying?”

“Nothing. I like your belly.”

“But you admit I have a belly?”

“I should hope so,” she replied, reaching down and rubbing it. “Otherwise how will any woman ever find her way into your heart?”

“Is that why you’re offering me breakfast?”

He thought he saw the smile leave her eyes. He knew he had seen correctly a moment later when she spoke.

“David, I don’t want to give you the wrong impression. I’m not really at a place in my life where I’m interested in a long-term relationship.”

“That’s fine,” he said, lying. “I’m not really looking for one either.”

“Good. Then we can just let last night be what it was: two adults making each other feel good.” Then she leaned up and kissed his cheek. “And you did make me feel good. Very, very good. Now, let’s go see about some coffee and some bacon.”

He had a hard time focusing on their conversation over breakfast. All he kept hearing was her saying, “
We can just let last night be what it was.
” But it wasn’t just two adults making each other feel good, at least not for him it wasn’t. It was something much deeper than that. And David knew it because he knew he
would be content to simply be around her the rest of his days without ever getting to make love to her again. He just felt right when she was near, as if just the sound of her voice could somehow fill the void that had haunted him most of his life. Now he wished he could go back to that pile of hay and wake up earlier and just hold her for a little while. Instead, he was watching her finish her second cup of coffee and wondering exactly how many more minutes until it was time for him to leave both her and Echo Glen. He was still wondering this when Sebastian walked in, followed by the three-legged Labrador.

“
Hola
, comrades,” he said.

“Look who smelled bacon,” June said, feeding a scrap from her plate to the dog.

“I smelled coffee,” Sebastian said. “Although I’d give anything for a
café con leche
and a sweet roll. You Americans eat like farmers.”

June ignored his comment, biting into a piece of bacon and smiling across the table at David.

“We’re just fueling up because David here is about to deliver the bad news about my finances. Aren’t you, David?”

David went over and got the main ledger and brought it back to the table. Sebastian poured himself a cup of coffee and joined them.

“Well,” David said, clearing his throat, “you want the good news or bad news first?”

“Good news,” June said. “It’s always best to soften the blow, I think.”

“The good news is I found a way to trim your monthly budget by nearly half. I got several creditors to agree to freeze interest and take a minimum monthly payment.”

“So, no more bills in the bag?” June asked.

“No more bills in the bag. Also, you have Echo Glen set up as a nonprofit, which is really smart, I might add.”

“My old accountant helped me do that. He’s not nearly as smart as my new one, though,” she added with a wink, “and he’s moved away.”

“Well, he was right to have you do it. But you’re not using it correctly and it’s costing you a lot in unnecessary taxes. You can lease back the property, which you personally own, to the nonprofit and make all your housing expenses, including your entire mortgage, tax deductible. Of course, the mortgage is past due and that’s not good.”

“Is that the bad news?” June asked.

“No, that’s hardly the bad news,” he said.

June gripped the edge of the table with both hands. “Okay, I’m ready.”

“The bad news is you’re bankrupt.”

“We are? I mean, I am?”

“Yes. It looks like you have some income from a pension, plus the few donations you get for the nonprofit, but that all together with the profit from the stunt school is still far lower than your minimum expenses.”

“I told you we need to do another stunt camp,” Sebastian said. “I know we can get more students, with or without that newspaper article.”

“We don’t have insurance any longer, Sebastian.”

“Maybe David here can help us find some,” he said.

“That’s hardly the point,” she shot back. “You need to return to Tinseltown and you know it. I can’t have you here knowing that you’re just being silly and running away from where you should be.”

“Sebastian doesn’t run away from anything,” he said.

“Oh, come on, Sebastian, how long have I known you? And stop talking about yourself in the third person. We’re all friends here.”

“Maybe,” he said, “maybe not.” He stood and dumped his
coffee out into the sink. Then he turned to David and reached out his hand. “It has been my pleasure to meet you, comrade. As long as the sky is above your head, the world beneath all our feet will be a better place.” Then he bowed and walked out.

“You’re being kind of hard on him, don’t you think?” David said to June once Sebastian was gone.

June sighed. “Maybe. But I care about him a lot, and he sometimes needs tough love. And I guess I do too. Thank you for the work you’ve done, David. I really appreciate it. Is everything there in the ledger? I think I’ll look it over this week and give my situation some thought.”

David set the ledger on the table and patted it with his hand. “It’s all in there for you. You might want to have a real CPA look at it, since my specialty is really auditing inventories. If you do find someone, and he or she has any questions, my number and everything is on the first page. Home and work.”

Then both of them seemed to sense that the conversation had come to a close, and they rose and looked at each other across the small table.

“I guess I should get going,” David said. “Work will be wondering if I’m alive.”

June nodded but didn’t say anything.

She came around the table to him, and for a moment he thought she was going to shake his hand, which would have broken his heart, but she hugged him instead. He bent to smell her hair. It might have been a silly thing to do, but he wanted to commit her scent to memory. She smelled of lavender and hay.

“Thank you, David,” she said, still hugging him. “You’ve been a blessing to have around these last few weeks.” Then she pulled away and looked up at him. He would have sworn she looked as sad as he felt, but he couldn’t be sure if it was over their parting or the depressing news he had just delivered. “I’ll miss you, and I know Sebastian will too.”

He wanted to tell her that he’d miss her too. He wanted to say that he didn’t want to leave. He wanted to find the courage or simply the words to somehow tell her how he felt. What he said was, “I can’t even imagine what it will feel like to sleep in my own bed.”

“Probably pretty good,” she said.

He nodded, but not convincingly so.

She followed him to the door and said good-bye. Then she stood on the porch and watched him go. His car was parked in the gravel lot behind the bunkhouse and it was a long walk with her eyes on his back. He stopped before rounding the corner and she was still standing there watching him.

“I hope to see you again, David Hadley,” she called. “But not on any roofs, okay?”

He smiled and waved. She waved back. Then he rounded the bunkhouse corner. Before he started his car, he closed his eyes and made a secret wish. When he pulled out, he thought she might still be on the porch. But she wasn’t. The porch was empty and the door was closed. He sat looking at it for a minute or two before he pulled out and drove away from Echo Glen. He looked once in his rearview mirror, just in case his secret wish had been answered, but only the eyes of a curious ostrich and an old three-legged Labrador followed him down the drive.

18

H
E LOOKED SO
damn sad telling me about leaving June and Echo Glen that I couldn’t help but think he was saying good-bye to them all over again.

“I can’t believe you just left,” I said. “I mean, shouldn’t you have told her how you felt or something?”

“I thought you didn’t believe in love,” he said.

“Well, I don’t. But things obviously worked out for you two. I mean, you got married, right? How did that happen? And what was Sebastian running from? And how did she manage to save Echo Glen?”

“You ask a lot of questions,” he said. “That’s good. It means you’re listening and you have a curious mind. But we’re losing daylight, so how about I keep going with the story and I think your questions will all be answered for you soon enough. And then we’ll get to my proposal for you.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “So, you had just left Echo Glen.”

“I remember. I might be old, but I’m not senile. And how could I ever forget? It ripped my heart out when I left . . .”

David’s life was waiting for him just as he had left it, which was a problem when one considers that his world had grown too big for his small routines and tiny apartment.

He returned to the office on Tuesday, after having missed two full weeks and a day, but everything was different. Instead of passing his desk as if it didn’t exist, his coworkers would stop and look at him with curious expressions. All day he heard pithy lines welcoming him back from people who had hardly ever acknowledged him before.

“Wow, you look different, David. Really different.”

“You ought to bottle that flu you had and sell it as a youth serum, that’s what I say.”

“Did you lose a lot of weight? It looks like you did. I always say I’m just one good stomach flu away from fitting into my graduation suit again.”

“You look tan. Are you sure you weren’t convalescing in the Caribbean?”

At five o’clock he changed into workout clothes in the office bathroom and went to climb his stairs, hoping it would bring some sense of normalcy back to his day. But it didn’t. He hardly broke a sweat now, and when he reached the top he had no desire left to even check if the door might be unlocked. He felt as though he had outgrown his life like a hermit crab does a borrowed shell, walking around naked in a world that no longer fit. He walked up the hill to his apartment without even glancing at the liquor store, and he sat in front of a turned-off TV and tried to re-create his time at Echo Glen on its blank screen. And he thought about June too. A lot.

He remembered her scent, always lavender mixed with a hint of the outside. He recalled with perfect clarity her tight-lipped laugh and the crow’s-feet that surrounded her smiling eyes. Later, he went down to the convenience store and bought a pint of lemon sorbet, just to try to re-create the night he had sat beside her at the fire. But it wasn’t the same and he tossed it out after only a bite, retiring to his bed to see if he couldn’t revisit their lovemaking in his dreams.

But dreams eluded him, as did any sleep. Even her socks no longer comforted him, and why would they, for had he not held the woman herself in his clumsy arms, and had he not felt her lips pressed against his own?

In the morning he watched the news as he got ready for work, and when they broadcast an update on the containment of the forest fires in Snohomish County, complete with aerial footage shot from a helicopter, he stared at the screen, hoping to catch a glimpse of Echo Glen. He was haunted by the image of June wading naked into that creek, and it struck him as peculiar that the most important moments in one’s life often passed unrecognized as such at the time. He wished he had stood at that window longer; he wished he had gone to her instead of letting her come to him.

The week passed as David worked with a renewed energy, hoping to lose himself in the very spreadsheets he used to hate. He climbed his stairs, sometimes twice, and he walked home at the end of each day and did his best not to think of anything at all. At this he failed, and he thought nine hundred thousand times an evening about June.

Saturday morning he got in his car and drove out of the city. But he did not take the exit for Echo Glen. Instead he passed it by and drove farther north, into his past, to a place he had long since forgotten all about, or so he liked to pretend.

The house was there as if nothing had happened. As if his mother had not gotten sick and moved to a care center closer to him; almost as if his father had not died in the accident all those years ago. The yard was mowed, thanks to a neighborhood kid to whom David sent a monthly check, and the flower baskets were planted with purple geraniums by a thoughtful neighbor who knew David’s mother had loved nothing more than seeing hummingbirds visit her porch. This small gesture wet David’s eyes and reminded him to believe in
the general goodness of people before choosing to see the bad.

He parked his car and got out. He stood on the porch and looked out at the street he used to roam on his bicycle, riding long into warm summer evenings until the streetlights came on one by one and he heard his mother’s call to come home. What he wouldn’t have given to hear that call again. Or perhaps in a way he had, for here he was. He opened the door and went in.

His mother had done little to change the house since he had left it for university at the age of nineteen, and he had done nothing since she left it the year before for the care center. It was a time capsule filled with memories, memories and photos of a once-happy family that had been ripped apart on a cold November night.

David went into the living room and stood looking at the old carousel rooster that they had driven that evening to pick up. It was a sad reminder, but one that neither he nor his mother could ever bear to sell. One of their first customers when they had reopened the shop wanted to buy it. His mother quoted an outrageous price, and when the man agreed to pay it, she changed her mind and told him it actually wasn’t for sale. They brought it home the next day and it sat in their living room, a reminder of what David had done. It had not been restored, as had been his father’s plan, but was in the exact condition it had been when the wrecking crew recovered it from the ditch. How could a stupid rooster come out unscathed, David wondered, while his seemingly immortal father was suddenly nothing but a lifeless figure whose son cried over him on a cold November road, begging him to wake up? His mother reassured him that it wasn’t his fault, but although his mother was an honest woman, David in his teenage wisdom knew she must have been lying just the same. He remembered that day as if it were yesterday, which for him, in a way, it was.

His father had come home excited. His business was Amer
ican antiques, but his hobby was restoring carousel figures. He had spent much of his adult life tracking down the fate of the figures from a scrapped carousel in the town where he had grown up in Tennessee. And he had finally located the one he had been looking for. It wasn’t the bucking horse or the prancing panther that all the other boys had raced to claim before the rides began. No, for David’s father it was the old rooster. He said it reminded him of his own father, who loved roosters so much he would sketch them.

After locating it in an old antiques shop just a four-hour drive away, over the mountain pass in Leavenworth, he had written the shop’s owner and struck up a deal to buy it. And so he and young David set out to pick it up.

David would never forget how happy his father had been when he set eyes on that old rooster again. It was as if he were reliving his childhood, running his hands over the old wood, the flaking paint. The man had it mounted by its pole in a metal stand, and as soon as they had sealed the deal and he had been paid, my father climbed up on top of it and sat on that rooster like a kid. David had never seen his smile so wide. And he was still smiling hours later when he asked David to drive so he could get some rest. They said because he wasn’t wearing a seat belt he likely died instantly, and David liked to think that maybe it was true. Maybe he died with that smile still on his face, he thought.

David left the living room and went into his old bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror. He saw a boy looking back, and he reached out and brought his hand to the glass, as if to caress the boy’s cheek. He wanted to tell the boy that it wasn’t his fault. That he was not to blame. But he couldn’t. What he did manage to say was something the boy had desperately needed to hear.

“You’ll be all right,” he said. “Everything will turn out okay, I promise.”

And in that moment a weight he’d been carrying dropped from his back. At long last he could find no guilt in that face, only the sadness of a boy who had lost his father too soon. He knew he owed this newfound ability to forgive himself to Echo Glen and to June, and he made a decision on the spot to honor the gift he had been given with a gift of his own.

He was no longer looking upon the boy’s face in the mirror. Instead, he was seeing the man that boy had become. And for once, the man was smiling. He was still smiling when the Realtor knocked on the door.

“I was wondering about that old rooster,” I said.

He had paused to take a drink of his water. He looked over at the rooster where it stood by the window, almost as if coming back to the room from a deep reflection and seeing it anew. “Objects are important,” he said. “They remind us.”

“Sometimes I wish I had something of my father’s.”

“You didn’t keep anything?”

“There wasn’t much to keep. The only thing he collected was wine, and he drank himself to death on that. About all there was left were bills and a giant antique wine cask with about five thousand corks in it. I don’t even know why he saved them. Although looking back, maybe I should have at least kept that cask.”

“What did you do with it?” Mr. Hadley asked.

“I loaded it on my old rusted wagon, the same one my father used when I was a boy to deliver his wine orders, and I towed it with my bike all the way down to the bay. I thought maybe I’d make a nice gesture of dumping the corks into the water and watching them float away. But it turned out to be a huge mistake.”

“Why? What happened?”

“It’s embarrassing.”

“Well, you don’t have to tell me then.”

“No, I’ll tell it. I’ve never told anyone before, though. What I did was I dumped the corks into the water. All of them. Then I sat back on a rock to watch them bob in the tide and float away. But I wasn’t the only one watching. A flock of seagulls saw them and came wheeling over from the piers and started diving and eating the corks. At first I thought it was funny. But then I saw one choking and I realized it had a cork stuck in its throat. Aren’t they the dumbest birds? But anyway, dumb or not, all that wine had killed my old man, but I’d be damned if I’d let it kill a bunch of seagulls too. So I waded out into the water and started collecting all the corks.

“There was no way, though. There were too many. I got maybe a couple hundred of them, but that’s about it. Well, plus a pretty bad case of pneumonia. I only stopped because someone had seen me and thought I was either crazy or trying to hurt myself, or both. I was crying pretty good and splashing around, chasing away seagulls and throwing corks up onto the bank, when a coast guard skiff eventually came over and ordered me out of the water. I wouldn’t get in the ambulance unless they agreed to take my bike, but I forgot to mention the old wine cask and I never did go back for it.”

When I finished Mr. Hadley just looked at me from his chair, as if he were waiting for more. But there wasn’t any more to tell. He wasn’t laughing either, even though I had hoped it would be funny.

“You know what,” he eventually said, “June would have really liked you.”

I blushed a little, but I didn’t say anything. What can you say to a thing like that?

“So you don’t have anything from your childhood?” he asked.

“Not really. Just an old photo of my dad from a log-splitting contest he won, and one of my mother that she sent after she left. And I have that old clipping of my dream condo in Miami, of course, but let’s not get into that again.”

That made him laugh. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll let up on Florida. They did give us Key lime pie after all. And they have manatees. Who doesn’t like manatees?”