The Bargaining (4 page)

“What'd she do to you, baby? Did the mean lady hurt you, Alfredo?” he says.

Alfredo is of course Alfredo di Stefano: history's most transcendental soccer forward ever, at least according to Rob. He could name his precious truck after no one else. Thus completes the vaguest of pictures I have of my stepbrother: a soccer ball, long arms and legs to match the rest of his Gumby body, and a 1993 black Ford Ranger pickup, his pride and joy for no good reason.

April extends her arms to take in the sight of me. “I would
have come home right away,” she says, finishing the thought I'd forgotten she started.

“I just got here,” I say.

“Well, I've got dinner planned,” she says, then squeezes my arms. “Things are going to get better now. I have a very strong feeling.”

“Because of dinner,” I say, and the corners of her mouth twitch.

“That's typically where it starts,” she says.

April releases me and trots inside with Rob close behind, her sandwich board and rolling briefcase filling his arms.

“She's making chicken Kiev,” he says.

“I didn't know she cooked,” I say.

“She doesn't,” he says.

I've never really been susceptible to the discomfort of silence. People talk about that awkwardness that follows long breaks in conversation, but I've never seemed to notice them.

Until now.

“Could you pass the salt?” my dad asks, his water glass lodged firmly in his paw, his lumberjack body hunched in an effort to make up for his size at such a small table. He sips from it every few seconds. My mom used to tease him that no one was going to steal his water. And he would laugh and
keep holding on to it. Clearly, there were things she said that Dad never fully believed.

“It's good, Mom,” Rob says. He's lying, of course. We're all lying just by eating it. We're only encouraging her to keep doing this, but it's obvious none of us is going to be the first to get honest.

“I never realized how relaxing cooking can be,” she says, her face still glowing and damp from the steam of the kitchen.

“Mmhmm,” Dad says behind his water glass. I can't tell if it's agreement. Dad's one of those men who would be horribly intimidating to a guy I brought home. If I were the type to bring a guy home to meet my dad. If I were the type to have a dad at home at all.

“And it's so simple when you have a recipe,” she says.

I suspect it's even simpler when you follow the recipe, but I don't dare thicken the silence by bringing that up. I just shove my plate away instead.

Dad notices, but his eyes don't get past my plate. I try very hard to remember the last time he looked at me. Not at my arm or my sweater or the hair caught in my earring. At me.

“We had a great turnout for the broker's open today,” April says to the table, but the only one really listening is Rob.

“Cool,” he says.

“Yeah, it is,” she agrees. And her enthusiasm is genuine, which is what has always puzzled me. Not because she loves her job. It's great she loves buying shitty houses and fixing them up and selling them for tons more money. It actually sounds more exciting than Mom's job, which has something to do with surveys. What surprises me about April's enthusiasm is that it's everywhere. She gets excited about lots of things.

When my dad dropped the bomb that he was getting remarried, and that The Other One had a son a year younger than me, a ready-made family for Dad to plug right into, I thought I'd hate them all. It was easy to hate from a few states away. Dad had already given me ample reason, and April made it pretty simple with her birthday cards signed “Your Evil Stepmother”—as though she
got
me. I suppose her being a mere seventeen years older than me lent some credibility to that assumption. And then there was the replacement kid—Rob. April's son that she had super young, so Mom says, who never made an appearance in my life outside of the annual family picture they'd send me, with Rob always looking a little confused.

“I have some other news,” she says.

None of us asks her to share it because we know she's going to anyway. My dad is still staring at my plate in the middle of the table.

“My bid on the Carver House was accepted!”

April slaps her hand down on the table in victory, but she only succeeds in jolting Dad and me out of our respective meditations.

“Hot damn, it feels good to win!”

“Is that the one near Tacoma?” Rob asks her, and I hear his teeth close around something crunchy. I don't know much about chicken Kiev, but I know it's not supposed to be crunchy. He seems to know that too, because I can see his hand curl around the napkin by his plate.

“I wouldn't call it near, but yeah, it's south of here. My first historic project. If I can flip this sucker into a bed-and-­breakfast, oh the investment potential! It's a little off the beaten path, but I'm thinking it should appeal to the outdoorsy types.”

“You don't know anything about historical renovation,” Dad says. A statement of fact that should be discouraging, but April just shrugs.

“It can't be that much different than what I've been working on,” she says. “Pull out old plumbing. Put in new ­plumbing.”

“Right. That's all there is to it,” Dad says, and now he pushes his plate away too.

“Oh, don't get surly. I know you know everything there is to know about HVAC and heating and cooling,” April says,
making my dad's business sound somehow adorable. “But I'll never learn if I don't try. And I've wanted a historical project for ages. I can't wait to pick out light fixtures! I'll have to do some serious antiquing.”

Every time she starts a new sentence, April lifts out of her seat a little. I keep thinking she's going to stand up and start running laps around the table, but she stays put for now.

“That's great, babe,” Dad says.

Babe? I can't . . . I just can't.

“You don't do fake enthusiasm very well,” she says, but smiling. Because nothing bothers April.

I see Rob take advantage of their exchange to spit his last bite into his napkin while April stares at my dad the way Mom never did.

As though summoned, my phone lights up, rattling the whole table while my mom's picture adorns the screen. In front of the empty chair at the end of the table, she looks like a dinner guest arriving late, after everyone had given up hope she was ever coming.

We all stare at the phone until it stops buzzing, the missed call indicator the only thing left when she's done interrupting.

April picks up where she left off, some of her earlier enthusiasm diminished, but the breath behind her voice
is still electric, as though she's talking on top of a layer of ­carbonation.

“Renovation starts in June.”

“What?” my dad says.

“Cool,” Rob says.

I say nothing.

“I know. I know. You have your big job in Vancouver, so you're defecting for the summer,” she says to Dad.

Then she turns to Rob. “Soccer clinic goes until August fifth. You'll leave before we do and come back after we come back.”

We?

She turns to me. She smiles. She knows I have nothing. “Which is why Penny will be coming with me to Point Finney.”

And now it's my turn to answer.

“No.”

“Now before you say no—” she says.

“No,” I say again.

“You think you can renovate a place in two months?” Dad's eyes bulge in that way they used to when my mom would correct his grammar. “Anyway, you and I should be the ones talking about this, not you and Penny.”

“Seriously?” And now I see, for possibly the first time ever, a pissed off April. “So when you said to treat her like family, you meant treat her like
your
family?”

Dad leans in. Finally, a familiar look. I actually find a little comfort in the recognition. “We'll talk about it later.”

“See, that's where I think you're wrong. We won't talk about it later. We'll kill the conversation right here, at least if you have anything to do with it,” she says, skirting dangerous territory with Dad. If I learned anything from his fights with my mom, it's that he doesn't respond particularly well to being told what he's doing.

The tinnitus is creeping in again.

Rob leans over to me. “Do you like soccer?”

“Nope,” I say.

“Do you like soccer better than being in here right now?”

Outside, we kick the ball back and forth on the grass with the soundtrack of Dad scrubbing dishes vigorously and April nagging him to the brink of his demise.

“You know she's gonna win, right?” Rob says.

“She's never gone toe-to-toe with me before,” I say, already losing faith in my dad's prospects. “I'm like this super hybrid between my mom and my dad. She doesn't stand a chance.”

Rob stops the ball under his foot. “When I was little, I hated chocolate.”

“God, you were one of those kids?”

He holds his hand up. “Spare me. I came around
­eventually, but that's totally a product of my mom's determination. She made me a chocolate cake for my fifth birthday, and I flat out refused to eat it. I sat there and stared at it until the candles burned down. She left it on the table the rest of the day. I didn't know she threw it away that night, though, because for every day that summer, there was a chocolate cake sitting in the middle of the table, untouched. She baked a new cake every day and left it there for me, but I thought it was the same cake she just left sitting there, waiting for me to eat it. I couldn't understand why she was so determined to make me like chocolate until I started going to all kinds of birthday parties the next fall.”

“And they all had chocolate cake,” I say.

Rob kicks me the ball. “She didn't want me to be the kid who wouldn't eat the chocolate cake. I don't know. Maybe she thought that was the harbinger of death or unpopularity.”

“Maybe she didn't want you to be an ungrateful little snot,” I say.

“Same thing,” he says. “Either way, you're going to Point Finney in June, so be ready to get your hermit on. I heard it's got a population of, like, five.”

“That's comforting. Thanks, Rob.”

“She's also going to make you take up an extracurricular at school between now and then. She's big on extracurricu
lars. They build character or something. She's already started talking about it to Dad, so it'll seem like it was his idea. But that's all her.”

This I can't bear. I'm already being hijacked to the Pacific Northwest backcountry for the summer. By my dad's—excuse me,
our
dad's—teenager of a second wife. She's in there with him right now, talking about me like I'm hers to talk about. And she's choosing my hobbies, too?

“She can try,” I tell Rob. “She can sure try.”

NEWS TRIBUNE | TACOMA, Feb. 22, 2004—Efforts have slowed in the search for four youths who went missing January 19 in Point Finney.

In a mystery that's shaken this sleepy town northwest of Tacoma, residents are beginning to lose hope that the children will be found.

“It's just so tragic,” says Claire Schuman, a lifelong resident of the former lumber town. “Nobody feels safe right now.”

Mike Marlboro agrees. “My wife and I won't even let our daughter walk to the store up the road anymore.” Marlboro, whose family has lived in Point Finney for four generations, owns a house less than five miles from where the minors were last spotted.
“The things they say about those woods, I just won't risk it.”

Anna Riley (12), Jack Dodson (14), and brothers Russ (11) and Blake (12) Torrey of Point Finney have been missing for 34 days. The youths were last seen together around 3:00 p.m. on January 19 behind Keller-Finney Middle School in Point Finney. First reported missing by Joy Riley, Anna Riley's grandmother, authorities issued a missing children alert the same day. Using a shoe determined to belong to Russ Torrey, police canines tracked the boy's scent to the southern tip of the Kitsap Woodlands Reserve before the trail went cold.

“I've been working for this department my entire eighteen-year career, and I've never seen anything like it,” says Sergeant James Meckel of the Pierce County Sheriff's Department. “Normally we'd see some evidence, some indication of abduction or foul play. But we haven't even recovered a footprint. Not a trace of them anywhere beyond that shoe.”

Search teams are gearing up for their 35
th
day of searching, this time scouring the area of the region known as the Center Thicket, widening their cov
erage beyond the perimeter. “There's not much in there,” says Sergeant Meckel. “No one's lived in those woods for a while, and it's hard to contain a search area that wild.”

Asked whether they'll be able to continue searching if the snow that's called for on Tuesday falls, Sergeant Meckel is reluctant to give specifics.