The Grandfather Clock (6 page)

“
Well, I believe it now.
The Christie saga is over.”

“
I told you it was,” I
said, pulling into my parents’ neighborhood.

“
Good for you, man. Good
for both of you.”

“
And Frank,” I
added.

“
God help Frank
Murray.”

“
So, did I have any
important mail?”

“
I forgot to get
it.”

My dad insisted on getting in nine
holes of golf first thing in the morning. I tried to claim
exhaustion from the drive, but he wouldn’t be swayed.

“
You’re 35 years younger
than me. Besides, you should stretch your legs. We’d play 18, but
your mother made us brunch reservations at Casa Del
Sol.”

Casa Del Sol was their country club
restaurant where it appeared they dined far too often. Not to be
confused with some fancy club of blue bloods, the Del Sol Golf
Estates provided “Affordable Active Living” for the fifty-five and
up crowd. Santa Fe has a serious love affair with adobe style
architecture. Just about every structure is some variation on
squares with rounded edges and clay colored paint. Banks, grocery
stores, McDonald’s, and just about every housing development have
embraced an architecture honoring the style of the indigenous
people. I picture the most boring Home Depot paint aisle in the
United States, with 900 different shades of terracotta. Del Sol
Golf Estates is on board.

Richard and Meryl Chance made a two
bedroom attached adobe villa their home. The roof is lined with
false rainspouts, while tan rain gutters do the real job. My dad
had even taken to wearing a leather belt with turquoise beading. I
wore borrowed golf shoes and an Aetna golf shirt that was probably
part of my dad’s retirement gift package. We teed off at 8:03 and
the sun was already baking us.

I don’t golf. At one point, I golfed
regularly, solely because someone told me that it would be good for
my career. Somewhere along the way I hung up my clubs. I couldn’t
bring myself to spend 5 to 6 hours on my day off doing something I
wasn’t wild about. I did enjoy golfing with my dad. He was the
least competitive golfer I’d ever seen. He played three times a
week but rarely kept a real score, and reacted to errant shots the
same as great shots.

We duffed our way down the first
fairway. I poured a lukewarm coffee over a cup full of ice. It was
truly a beautiful place. The desert, the mountains, and the green
grass made an idyllic combination.

My mom had saved a big plate of pot
roast for me the night before and we stayed up talking. I brought
them up to speed on the break-up, complete with the late breaking
news from Sam about Frank Murray. If my mother had been depressed,
ending my engagement was the news she needed. I still could read
tinges of sadness, but it was good to see her functioning. I could
tell that being normal took some work, but her laugh was coming
back. She wouldn’t look at the clock lying in the back of the van.
She didn’t want to sit in the living room where the pictures of her
mother sat. She said she went in there in the mornings on good
days. Just telling me this made me feel better, knowing that she
recognized what she was going through.

“
I really wish you’d stay
a few days,” my dad said, pouring green sand into a
divot.

“
Me too. Rental van has to
be back. And work...”

“
How is work?”

“
I’m thinking about
quitting,” I said.

He raised his eyebrows. “Are you sure
that’s a good idea? You have a lot of change going on in your life.
What will you do?”

“
I don’t know. I’m burned
out with that place. You know, I’m not with Christie, I assume
she’ll stay in the apartment, so why not, I don’t know...
go?”

“
Go where?”

“
I don’t know. Nowhere
maybe. I like it there. I have good friends. I’m just not attached
to the job right now.”

We hiked up to the green, trying to
locate our last shots.

“
You know, son, Vince told
me you turned down his job offer.”

“
That didn’t take
long.”

“
Well, it’s a good
business. Job security. Freedom. He’d let you buy in. Part
owner.”

“
I know, Dad. It was a
really generous offer. It wasn’t easy to turn down. But I don’t
know, he’s got a good thing going. He doesn’t need me there
monkeying things up.”

“
Just tell me you’ll think
about it.”

“
I will. For you. But
don’t get your hopes up,” I said. “And don’t tell Vince I said I’m
thinking about it, or he won’t let it rest.”

“
I won’t.”

“
Don’t tell Mom
either.”

He just looked at me. He didn’t keep
anything from her. Even the most mundane news. They really had a
beautiful relationship. In my eyes, they were the most solid thing
in the world. They were together on everything in every
way.

“
Mom seems like she’s
getting better,” I offered tentatively. We had never talked about
her state of mind.

He feigned confusion. I gave him a
direct stare and he relented. “She has her ups and downs. I think
it really hurt that she wasn’t there.”

“
She tried,” I
said.

“
I think it hurt, too,
that her mother refused to move here. She could have lived with
us.”

“
That was never going to
happen,” I said breathlessly.

“
It was complicated,” he
said. “Son, don’t worry about us. Live where you want to live. Do
what you want to do. Just come visit. Bring the grand babies. Call
on Sundays.”

I smiled. It was that
simple.

We played seven holes and my dad hit a
drive into the rocky rough and suddenly declared, “That’s about
enough.” He didn’t even pick up his ball. We cut right through the
neighboring fairway to the restaurant.

Every day is brunch at Casa Del Sol
and my mom surprised me with her eagerness to show me off to her
friends. Over Eggs Benedict we ribbed my dad for his sorry golf
game and they opened up on their reservations about Christie. Their
critique was less about her, and more about me. My mom said, “You
are so easy going. You are really like your father. She, she just
stressed you out.”

She was right.

“
Nice girl,” she
said.

“
Not really,” my dad said,
mid bite.

“
She’s young,” my mom
said.

“
Well, it was a learning
experience,” I said. “I will be more careful. I feel more relaxed.
I feel good.”

With plans to leave early on Saturday,
I spent the rest of the day just relaxing. I caught an afternoon
nap, we visited a neighbor, cocktails at five. We drove into Santa
Fe for Italian and watched a ball game when we got home. My dad
fell asleep at nine o’clock. In the kitchen, my mother pulled me
aside.

“
Michael, I want to thank
you. For taking the clock. For coming here. It’s good to see
you.”

I hugged her.

“
I couldn’t see the clock
get sold. I have a few boxes of other stuff.”

She interrupted, “I’m not ready to
look at those. But I will be. Maybe next time.”

“
It’s okay, Mom. Be sad.
But try to... I don’t know... try to think of yourself,” I said
feebly.

She looked up at me. She looked the
same as she did when I was ten years old. She kept her hair dark;
she wasn’t ready for old age. She smiled with a tear in the corner
of her eye.

“
I’ve got something for
you,” she said, reaching into a kitchen drawer. “You are spending a
lot of money on that van. Gas. Plane ticket. Hotels.”

“
Mom, no.”

“
Michael, I won’t take
‘no.’ My mother left me almost everything. No reason you should be
burdened taking care of that big old clock.” She pulled out check,
already written. “This is for a boost. Quit your job, or stay. Do
what you want. This isn’t much, but it’ll help.”

It was a check for $10,000.

“
Mom, it’s too much. I’m
thirty years old. I can’t take money from you.” But she held up her
hand and walked away. I knew that when she was decided, it was
decided.

I made a mistake the next day. In an
attempt to impress my dad, I left their house at six-thirty in the
morning. So when I hit Dallas before five o’clock, I had designs on
making it as far as I could so that I could be in New Orleans by
noon the next day. A Saturday night in New Orleans before
completing the drive on Sunday sounded like the perfect ending to
the trip. I knew a guy who used to be with Globe Bank who lived in
New Orleans. Brian Pierson and I had attended a seminar in Chicago
together and skipped the company-organized trip to a Bulls game in
favor of seeing The Black Keys. I texted Brian from Dallas with
hopes of sleeping in Shreveport.

I was jarred by the sudden pounding of
highway reflector and the blast of an air horn, as a semi passed
going twenty miles an hour faster than me. I swerved back onto the
road, nearly over correcting. The top-heavy van rocked side to side
and forward. Sweat poured over my body and Cheap Trick’s
“Surrender” emerged from the noise. I was barely 90 miles beyond
Dallas. My adrenaline pumped for another twenty minutes until I
could go no further.

In my mind, Dallas was the end of open
road. From there on, the cities and towns would be frequent. But I
was in the middle of nowhere. Somewhere between Dallas and a town
called Tyler. My tired mind debated pushing to the next motel, but
I pulled off where some sort of farm access had been cleared. I was
about 100 feet off I-20, close enough to hear the traffic. The line
from a Tom Petty song came to mind as I fell asleep across a back
seat, listening to cars roll by like waves crashing on the
beach.

I woke suddenly around one in the
morning, shocked at how soundly I’d slept. I scrambled out of the
van, my bladder about to burst. The line of cars was sparse. A
thunderstorm put on a light show to the south, and the stars above
were brilliant.

Then I heard steps.

They came from the other side of the
van. They were slow. Steady. Confident. My heart pounded. This was
Texas. Everyone carried guns. I had no gun. I crouched by the rear
wheel, attempting to hide my feet if the person were looking under
the van. The steps paused, then moved again.

“
Who is it?” I yelled in a
comically stern voice, cracking. Another step.

And then I ran. I don’t know how far.
Maybe fifty feet. Halfway to the road, in a diagonal so that I
could start to see the opposite side of the van. There was a ditch,
and a farm fence. The distant lightning illuminated my pursuer. A
lonely cow.

“
Oh shit,” I laughed,
gasping for air. Before this trip was over, I was going to have a
heart attack.

I walked back to the van and used my
phone to snap a picture of the cow. A twenty-four-hour McDonald’s
north of Tyler fueled the next leg of my trip, along with the five
hours’ sleep and cow-triggered adrenalin.

I watched the sun come up over the
Mississippi River. Tired, but rejuvenated. The river represented a
return to home in a way. The remainder of the drive east would be
familiar territory; I’d made the six-hour drive from Tallahassee
more times than I could count, and it was another four to St. Pete.
It would be a long day on Sunday, especially if Brian and I stayed
out late. But it was manageable. The home stretch would be
easy.

I had parked the van in a large lot
along the river that I knew well. After a moment of Zen watching a
barge pass, I walked down into the French Quarter. I followed my
instincts to Johnny PoBoys. It was a place I could always find, but
could never give directions to. I ordered a Gatorade to fight the
dehydration from a night of coffee stops and junk food. I ordered a
bacon, egg and cheese po boy and walked to Jackson Square. A few
people read their morning newspapers, and the occasional jogger
strode past. It was warm. I took a seat on a bench and ate my
breakfast slowly. It had been over a thousand miles of driving
since I’d last seen a bed, or even dined at a table.

I wandered the streets a bit, waiting
for a reasonable hour to call Brian. I remembered a small hotel
that I’d crashed at once during the Sugar Bowl. I knew it was along
the river, but couldn’t remember the name. As with most everything
I know in New Orleans, I found it by feel. The French Market Inn
had a great location, lots of charm, and fortunately was a little
rundown, so it was reasonably priced. By the light of Sunday
morning, maybe it was more than a little rundown.

A young woman with dyed black hair
greeted me. She looked like the day shift hadn’t arrived yet. She
wore a dusty black shirt that had lost its shape. Her crooked
nametag read “Andrea” and wanted to tear a hole where it was
pinned. She looked at me blankly.

“
Can I help you?” she
asked in a thick southern accent.

“
Do you have any rooms
available?” I asked. “Right now?”

“
Yeah. I got one.
$69.”