More Than Anything (25 page)

On the last trip, I take a closer look into the living room and see his shotgun leaning against the wall, between the sofa and side table. Could be he just likes carrying it around the house. Could also be he was thinking about using it.

Every step I take to the door seems like I’m pushing through molten lead. I don’t know whether my dad saw the gun, but he’s as calm as ever. I exhale with relief when I step across the threshold and can’t make it to the car fast enough, where we’ve piled the boxes up next to the trunk. I whisper to my father as we near it.

“You see the shotgun?”

He doesn’t say anything, telling me everything I need to know. When he sets the box down, he leans into me. “Keep that cop here while I load up, okay?”

He doesn’t sound especially alarmed, but something about his tone moves me to Melody’s side in record time. The cop’s a younger guy, maybe early thirties but in good shape, probably a jock in school who still works out every day. Just Melody’s type, I think, and then correct myself. Most decent-looking guys are Melody’s type.

“How are you today, Officer?” I ask, and Melody beams a high-wattage smile in his direction.

“It’s Jeff. Officer Jeff,” she says, pronouncing the word officer like it’s rife with sexual possibility.

“Hello, Officer Jeff. I’m Sage. Can I ask you a question?” I say.

“Nice to meet you, Sage. Shoot.” He’s got a pleasant voice with the local twang, subtle, but if you grew up here, you recognize it.

“If I was to tell you that the guy in the house has a shotgun by the couch, would it worry you?”

His eyes narrow, and the smile leaves his face. “No law against having a shotgun in your own house.”

“That’s what I figured. I mean, it would only break a law if he went on a berserk killing spree with it, right?”

“Are you saying he threatened you?” Officer Jeff asks quietly, his hand reflexively dropping to his pistol as he eyes Ralph in the doorway.

“No. I’m just asking if you find it odd to have a shotgun next to the couch when you’re expecting company. I don’t remember that being part of the way we greeted visitors, but maybe the local custom’s changed?”

“Maybe you should hurry up and finish up here,” Officer Jeff says, now all business, any hint of friendliness replaced by stress.

“My thinking exactly. I just wanted you to know why I’m a little on edge. We should be out of here in a minute. I really appreciate you staying till we’re away safely.”

My message delivered, I return to help my dad with the last of the boxes, which have to go in the back seat, since the Dodge’s trunk isn’t big enough to hold them all. Once they’re loaded, we go back to where Ralph is standing. The fury on his face isn’t hard to read.

“Nice gun you got there, Ralph. Keep it handy, do you?” my father asks.

“You two think you’re pretty slick, huh?” He spits by my dad’s feet. “This isn’t over.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Ralph. It is over. We’re out of your life now. No need to hold any grudges, is there?” my dad says, his tone an unmistakable warning.

Ralph fixes me with a dark glare before his eyes dart to where Officer Jeff is watching him. He leans in close enough that I can smell the sour tang of perspiration on his shirt and the faint odor of tooth decay.

“This isn’t over, you little bitch. You think you’re all that, don’t you? You’ll see.”

My dad steps forward. “What was that, Ralph?”

I force a smile that’s cold enough to freeze Ralph’s blood. “Nothing, Dad. Ralph was just wishing me luck, and suggesting that I buy a firearm for my eighteenth birthday, just like the ones my bodyguards carry. Excellent suggestion, Ralph. I bet I’m a crack shot in no time.”

My dad nods. “Ralph should concentrate on having a nice life, because the prison system’s full of guys who threaten to hurt people. Especially underage girls in listening range of their father.” His smile is as dangerous as a crocodile’s. “But no need to explain that. You take it easy, Ralph. We won’t be seeing any more of you, I’m sure.”

Ralph doesn’t say anything, merely glances back at the cop a final time and goes back into the house. The door slamming is as loud as a grenade, and I have to keep myself from breaking into a run back to the car.

“Melody, come on,” my dad calls, and she wastes no time returning and climbing into the passenger seat. He almost floods the engine when he starts it, and it starts with a groan. As we back out of the driveway, the last thing I see is Ralph watching us from the grimy window, his face a mask of rage.

We pull over at a rest stop and sort through the boxes. Most of it’s junk – her clothes, which are Kmart bad; boxes of knickknacks that would have been at home in a high school version of
The Stepford Wives
; a jewelry box; and stacks and stacks of papers and photographs. Apparently Mom didn’t get with the whole computer revolution and scan her images, and the result is a hundred pounds of fading shots on cheap photo paper.

I’m not especially interested in the papers, which are garbage as far as I can tell. This was a woman who didn’t throw anything away, exhibiting the packrat tendencies of the mentally ill I’ve seen on a reality show. Page after page of newspaper clippings of local events, sales, coupons, scrawled reminders cheerfully ignored, I’m sure…a litany of the collected leavings of a disturbed mind.

I open the jewelry box, sort through the jumbled stuff, and find the one item I can remember her wearing when I was a child – a silver charm bracelet. I try it on my good wrist and it’s a fit. I have no use for the rest of the junk – cheap earrings and costume jewelry. There’s absolutely no hope that her wedding ring is in the box. Ralph would have pocketed that immediately since it was the only thing of value she would have passed on to me.

I’m still a little freaked out over the whole Ralph-with-gun thing, and his threat is ringing in my ears as I consider the sad collection of trash that represents everything my mom accomplished and accumulated in almost forty years on the planet. I’ve always believed that we shouldn’t get too attached to our material possessions, but this is plain pitiful.

My dad’s sorting through the photographs and comes across a bunch of us together before he went away. Me standing in a half-full backyard plastic pool with floaties on my arms, me at a birthday party with a bunch of kids who I can’t remember except as annoyances, me and mom at a water park, me riding on his shoulders, no more than six or seven years old.

“Those were the good old days, honey,” he says. “Happier times.”

“Yeah. But she was already drinking pretty heavily by then, wasn’t she?”

He nods sadly. “When you were about five, she was already overdoing it, and by the time you were eight, she was becoming actively abusive and violent. It’s such a shame. She could have had a good life. A lot of things probably would have been different if she’d laid off the bottle.” He pauses. “Thank God you don’t like to drink. In the music business, there are drugs and alcohol everywhere. You’ve seen how they can ruin your life.”

“I have zero interest in killing myself with anything. The world’s dangerous enough without me doing something stupid,” I assure him. He’s morose, and I realize that when he’s thinking about what could have been different had my mom been sober, he’s not just thinking about her death, but also the whole ugly chain of events the drinking touched off. Her abusive behavior is what ultimately drove him out of the house to live with his cousin, which turned into six years in the pen. It resulted in me running away from home, and with her hooking up with that shitbag Ralph.

Everyone pays a high price for the addict’s habit. It’s not just the person doing the drug, be it alcohol or something else. Everyone around them pays and pays, and it colors the reality of those who are close to them. The destruction spreads like ripples on the surface of a calm lake, where even the tiniest act has far-reaching consequences.

I shake off the melancholy and show Melody my bracelet.

“That’s pretty cool,” she says. “Nothing else you want to keep?”

I shake my head. “Nah. All she’s left me is a chest full of bad memories. This is the only thing I associate with better times, so it’s all I want.”

Melody studies my face. “You’ve got to be hella sick of that collar by now, huh?”

“You have no idea.”

“Didn’t have a designer version?”

“This is the designer version.”

She grimaces. “Ooh. How much longer do you have to wear it?”

“The doc wasn’t clear. He just smiled and said I’m young so I should heal fast. Makes me wonder what kind of codgers he’s used to seeing.”

We both look over at my dad. I hope he didn’t hear me. He gives no sign of it.

“Ralph’s a real piece of work,” she says, more a comment than a question.

“That’s the tame version. He totally threatened me. Gave me the evil eye, told me it’s not over, tried to scare the crap out of me.”

“Did it work?”

“Hell no. I told him I’m buying a gun.”

“Nice. But you’re not really, are you?”

“Nah. How would I travel with it? I’m going to be on tour soon. Or on the other side of the country. No, Ralph’s just a lowlife trying to feel powerful by scaring teenage girls. But he’s got another think coming.”

Melody nods. “You don’t really scare easily.”

“No, I don’t. I’ve seen things on the street that would turn his hair white. He’s a nothing.”

“You have to admit the shotgun was a ten on the loony scale.”

“Yeah. Maybe he was thinking of going all OJ, but the cop scared him out of it.”

“If you’re lucky, he’ll get wasted and use it on himself,” Melody says with no trace of viciousness. Just matter of fact. Like it would be nice if we made it home quickly, or I got upgraded to first class.

“Idiots like him never hurt themselves. They’re all about hurting other people. Sometimes I think that’s why he stayed with my mom. She was destroying herself, and he felt superior around her. Says a lot about him, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah. A real charmer. But how about Officer Jeff? Tell me he isn’t cute in a kind of backwoods overalls kind of way?”

“If you go for the farm stuff.” I shake my head. “You didn’t give him your phone number, did you?”

She smiles. “I told him if he ever comes down to the Bay Area and wants to spoil a girl with food and liquor, he knows who to call.”

“I gather your being only seventeen never came up,” I say dryly.

“Don’t ask, don’t tell. Besides, he’s a cop. There’s probably some kind of exclusion for them, right?”

We pack back into the car and continue south. By the time we make it to the bridge, it’s getting dark and the fog’s rolling through the mouth of the bay.

My dad drops us off at Melody’s and promises to keep the boxes until I have more time to finish sorting through them. I don’t tell him to just burn it all. I can tell he’s working through some emotional issues the photographs rekindled, and he doesn’t need my smart mouth making things worse for him.

“Sure, Dad, that would be cool. Once I’m done with the record maybe I’ll come back up for a few days before I go back to New York.”

He looks surprised. “I didn’t realize you were planning to live there. I thought maybe you’d stick closer to home.”

Home? If he means him, I’d rather fly back a few times a year than stay in California just for that. No, home is wherever Derek is, and right now that’s New York. None of which I say.

“I’m still paying rent on Jeremy’s. And the city’s pretty cool. I like it. Way different than anywhere else I’ve been.” Considering my total life experience outside of Clear Lake amounts to living on the streets of San Francisco, passing through a few places on the trip east, and five blocks in Los Angeles, that’s not saying a lot; but it’s true that I enjoy the vitality of New York. And I’m not really leaving anything behind.

“Well, you might feel differently after you’ve gone through a winter there. Gets seriously cold,” my dad offers, and I shrug. We’ll see.

“Looks like I’ll be on tour a lot, so it kind of doesn’t matter. I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.” I lean into him and kiss him. “Sorry I was such a butthead about flying up here.”

“No problem. It’s always good to see you, sweetie. Good luck with the rest of the recording.”

Melody made her mom promise not to invite half the Haight over to stare at me like a circus freak. We have a quiet dinner, just the three of us, Mexican food that’s mouthwateringly good. I’ve got a morning flight, so after watching TV for a few hours and bagging on all the celebrity basket cases, we go to bed, chocolate residue smeared on our faces like preschoolers, where we giggle about nothing until midnight. The only time it gets serious is when Melody probes about Derek, but I can handle that. I’ve already filled her in on our four days from hell, which she was appropriately supportive about.

“I’d have found a way to skin that cat,” she chides.

“Melody, I was pulled out of a car that was upside down. I was one massive bruise. It hurt to breathe.”

“Slacker.”

“Seriously. If there had been a way…”

“So you’ve decided to do this, right? You’re not going to chicken out at the last minute?”