Hale Maree (2 page)

“
Maybe they’re just talking
smack because they’re super drunk,” Sher says. I can hear the
frightened pity in her voice. It makes me cringe. She adds, “Dude,
they totally have to be. I mean, who has arranged marriages in the
United States? I mean, we are in the new millennium and shit,
right?”

#

I un-prop my chair from the doorknob in the
morning, but I feel kind of sick. It’s that icky feeling of waking
up, thinking everything is okay, and then realizing it’s probably
not. I scope out the hall, listening for foreign snoring or signs
of wreckage, but the apartment seems in order and I hear the coffee
pot burbling. Someone is around.

I creep down the hall and catch sight of my
dad at the table, his head cradled in one hand as he looks over the
paper. I let out a relived sigh. If he’s looking through the want
ads, it’s got to mean that all the business talk and
backroom-vagina-deals are off. He scours the Help Wanted ads every
morning, over his cup of sobering coffee, but gives up by the
afternoon and heads off to the bar. It’s a familiar
rinse-and-repeat cycle.

“
Hey, Dad,” I say, after I
check for visitors and find none. “How are you feeling?”

He looks up from his paper with his sad
hound dog eyes, and the father that I love, the one who I stick
around for, is here, his coffee mug at his elbow. He never waits
for the pot to finish before stealing a cup.

“
Hey, honey,” he says,
motioning to the seat across the table from his, “come talk to
me.”

“
Sure,” I say, dropping into
the opposite chair. Dad folds the paper and pushes it to the side
of the table, takes a deep breath, and lets it out. I hold my own
breath, so whatever’s left of last night’s keg, still on his
tongue, doesn’t pummel me.

“
I got good news,” he
begins. I lift my eyebrows encouragingly. Sometimes good news means
he’s found under-the-table work and, sometimes, it means the lights
won’t be turned off, but the heat will. I wait to hear if there is
a bad news chaser, before I commit to any excitement.

“
Me and Otto Maree were out
talking last night,” he says.

“
I know. You were here.
Eating soup. Remember?”

“
Oh yeah.” My father smiles
and, for a second, his eyes meet mine, before diving back down the
length of the table. “Well, we got to talking and we came up with a
plan.”

“
A lawn cutting business,
right?” I say, but my gut is doing sick little somersaults. I know
they talked about cutting grass, but it didn’t seem like that was
what they were really talking about.

“
Right. Lawn cutting. I
guess you heard most of it, eh?”

“
Not everything.”

“
Mmm,” he grunts. “Okay,
well, I made a decision. Otto’s got a good bit of money
and...”

“
How do you even know him?”
My dad always thinks everyone else has a ton of money. I assume
it’s because, in comparison to us, they do, but even a guy with
twenty bucks in a savings account is rich in my dad’s
eyes.

“
We grew up together. Our
parents were neighbors, good friends. We were buddies back in the
day, but when I left high school to bust my ass in the factories,
Maree went off and got his degree. He’s done really good for
himself. He’s got some money, and he’s decided he wants to help me
out, since we’re old friends. He wants to make an
investment.”

“
Dad,” I sigh. These
investments, no matter who they’re with, never work out well. My
dad’s tried flipping houses that nearly trapped us beneath their
epic financial failures. He’s sold ‘green planet’ soaps, magazines,
and used computers from the back of his car. He’s tele-marketed,
and he’s collected scrap metal. Nothing’s worked, and pretty much
every time he’s tried, we’ve ended up a little worse off than we
were before.

“
I know what you’re going to
say,” he says. “But don’t say it. Not this time, honey. This isn’t
pie-in- the-sky kind of work. This is real, blue-collar stuff. We
might not end up rich, but we’re definitely going to get ourselves
out of the red for good this time.”

“
Cutting lawns,” I repeat,
hiking up a doubtful lip. He frowns.

“
You got to have some faith
in this one, Hale. This is an old friend. Our families go way back,
and I know it’s going to work. Otto’s got money to invest and I’ve
got nothing to do but work, so it’s a perfect arrangement. He’s
gonna set me up with a van, and a trailer, and all the stuff I need
to do lawns.”

“
This doesn’t sound right,”
I say. “What’s he getting out of it?”

“
Money.” My dad shrugs, but
he looks away as he sips his coffee. “He just wants to give a good
ol’ friend a hand, and I’m taking it, Hale. Damn it,
we’re
taking it. And
that’s another thing I have to talk to you about.”

My stomach does a back flip, the kind that
fails mid-leap, and my guts fall straight into my feet. I think of
the whole Hale’s-a-virgin-Oscar’s-not-a-beater-let’s-have-grandkids
discussion from last night. My dad rubs his nose a couple times
with his palm. He does that when he’s trying to think of how to
explain something to me that I’m not going to like. I take a deep
breath and start for him.

“
I heard you talking to that
guy,” I say.

“
Honey, it ain’t what it
seems like,” he says, rubbing his nose again. “Well, it is, but I
made a deal and we’re going to do it. Aside from anything else,
this is our last chance, Hale. For both of us. It’s not like I got
a fancy degree. I don’t even got my high school diploma. But Otto
Maree’s got a lot of money and I was in the wrong spot at the right
time. This is gonna work out. It can get us both off the state aid,
and it can get us on our feet for good. He’s got to know he can
trust me, so we’re forming more than a partnership here, baby,
we’re forming a family alliance.”

That’s what they’re calling this. A pretty
face on an ugly deal.

“
Why is it so important that
he trusts you?” I ask. My father gets a really distant look in his
eyes, like he’s looking through my head at the wall. When he
doesn’t answer, I say, “Are you seriously thinking I’m going to
just marry some guy I’ve never even met?”

My dad straightens up in his chair. His old,
blue, terry cloth robe droops to one side. He flexes a fist on the
table, and I see the muscles respond all the way up to his neck. My
dad’s a powerful man, and even though he’s never once laid a hand
on me, he’s put a fist through the wall before. Well, one time. But
it’s stuck with me and makes me worry that he’ll do it again, or
that at some point, he’ll make a mistake and put it through me.

“
You’re gonna meet Oscar
soon,” he says, with a strained, but gentle, tone. He flattens his
palm on the table when he catches me staring at his hand. “But this
is it, Hale. We’re beyond broke. There’s nothing. We’re going to
end up homeless in another couple weeks, unless we figure something
out. What’s happened with Otto, well, it’s awful to say, but it
couldn’t have happened at a better time for us.”

“
We can figure
something
else
out,” I say, but he shakes his head, and I can tell he’s not
going to give in. He’s glued this ridiculous idea to his brain, and
there is no pulling it off.

“
This is already figured
out,” he says, his voice dropping to a growl. “It’s already
happened, and it’s not so bad if you just think about it the right
way. It’s our one chance, and you gotta see it for what it is. You
play your cards right, and you won’t be eating out of soup cans all
your life. You won’t have to worry about ever being homeless.
You’ll have a house and a family and...”

“
And a life I didn’t want!”
I snap. My father rubs his chin.

“
Hale,” he says softly. My
dad, the guy he used to be before my mom couldn’t take it anymore
and left us both, suddenly reaches over the table and puts his big,
bear-paw of a hand on mine. “I’m pretty sure the one we’re living
right now ain’t the one you want either, honey. But this is the
best I can do for you.”

#

I’m in the truck with a box of lawn-cutting
fliers on my lap. My dad got a zillion of them copied off, and he’s
bent on plastering them all over town. The name of the new company
is Simmons and Maree Lawn Services, but due to lack of space, it’s
now S & M Lawn Services, and I can see loads of problems with
that. My father, however, doesn’t. He’s sitting behind the wheel of
a brand new Silverado that we could never afford, even if we
stopped eating for a year, and there is a trailer attached to the
back, with sparkling new lawn equipment that squeaks as we fly over
the bumps in the road. We’re going to drop off the lawn crap at Mr.
Maree’s house and see his loser son, Oscar.

Oscar. The name only conjures up fuzzy green
monsters and fat, sloppy, old men now. What kind of name is Oscar
anyway? My God, I want nothing to do with this.

My father got me out of bed at eight this
morning and announced that we were handing out fliers for his brand
new business today. I said, “No.” He grabbed hold of my sheets and
yanked them off me. He carried them out of my bedroom, and told me
I wouldn’t get them back until I started cooperating. It’s the most
we’ve said to each other since ‘the talk’ two days ago.

When I finally threw on some clothes and
appeared in the kitchen, my father gave me a look up and down, and
frowned.

“
You aren’t going like
that,” he said.

“
Good, because I didn’t want
to go at all,” I said. He sighed. It wasn’t one of those ‘we’ll
see’ sighs or even a ‘you’ll see this is for your own good’ sighs.
It was a ‘you better get your ass moving’ sigh, and, out of my
father, a sigh like that wasn’t something to be ignored or
argued.

So, I’m sitting beside him, not talking to
him, watching out the window, with his massive box of kinky- named,
business fliers on my lap.

“
This kid, Oscar,” my father
starts, and I cut him off.

“
What a loser name,” I
grumble. He must be high from the new car smell, because he happily
ignores my grumbling and continues.

“
Otto says the kid’s a
looker.”

“
Of course he did. It’s his
kid! Who cares anyway? I’m just a cow in this.”

“
What are you talking
about?”

“
You’re treating me like an
animal,” I snap. My father looks away.

“
I’ve never met Oscar, but I
assume he’s a good man.” My father’s tone is sober. Maybe he’s
finally coming to his senses.

“
But you don’t really know
and you’re still telling me to marry him.”

“
So you’ll have a life!” he
explodes.

“
That I don’t want!” I
explode back. I fume out the window, as my father pulls the truck
onto a dirt road that winds back through trees to a house. No, this
isn’t just leading us to a house. We’re squeaking down the road of
the Maree’s
estate
.

“
Nice, huh?” My father lets
out a low whistle. “Didn’t I tell you?”

“
Tell me that you’re trying
to sell me down the river in exchange for a truck and tractor?
Yeah, I think you mentioned it.”

He doesn’t bother to respond, but instead,
steers us to the epicenter of the half-circle driveway, right at
the front door. He puts it in park.

When my father honks the horn, a chiseled,
young man steps out, onto the porch. While the hard sculpture of
his body definitely catches my eye, it’s his dark gaze, sifting me
from this rolling scenery that sends a sharp tingle straight
through the center of my stomach.

The gorgeous stranger moves down the brick
steps to my father’s open window and my breath disappears. He moves
like smoke, easy and graceful—like smoke that could get in my head
and make the world seem fuzzy.

He leans his palms on my dad’s open window.
The stranger’s eyes flick to mine, and his lips twitch a tiny grin
of acknowledgement, before his gaze switches back to my father.

“
You Oscar?” my dad asks.
The man nods and puts a hand through the open window to shake my
father’s. His eyes flick back to mine, and pause, as he answers in
a dark chocolate kind of voice, “That’s me.”

Sludge drops into my stomach, crushing the
butterflies. The idea of what my father wants me to do makes any
interest I have in the handsome stranger disappear. I turn my face
away, looking out the passenger window at the manicured bushes
around a ridiculous waterfall. There are three angel statues around
the edge. A bright red speck catches my eye. Someone’s dressed the
middle angel in a pair of striped, red underwear. I snort a tiny
laugh.

“
I’ll just grab my phone,”
Oscar says. I turn back as Oscar jogs up the front steps and
through the front door of his house. Smoke in the wind. I’ve got to
clear my head.

“
What’s he doing?” I
ask.

“
Getting his
phone.”

“
I heard that, but why’s he
getting it?”

“
He’s coming with
us.”

“
No, he’s not.” I say, but
my father smirks.

“
Sure he is,” he says. “And
from the looks of him, you got nothing to complain about, Hale.
He’s a nice looking guy. He sounds responsible.”