What You Have Left (8 page)

This was in late September, and after the funeral, I proposed. She was only twenty, and I didn't want to rush things, but I wanted her to know I was there for her. We were out on the bluff, watching the sun go down. She slipped the ring on her finger and inspected it in the twilight.

“Does it fit?”

“Did you know,” she said, “that half of all marriages end in divorce?”

“But that means the other half don't.”

She put the ring back in the box and stared off across the soybean field Cal had turned into a driving range after he retired, the same field where her mother mastered a McCormick Farmall tractor at the age of fourteen. “I've been thinking,” she said, “that I'd like to find my father.”

“I'm asking you to marry me,” I said.

“I know.”

Holly's passed out on my bed and I want to be curled up next to her, but first I have to get the truck off the street in case the police are looking for it. Outside, it's crazy hot for November, even November in South Carolina, sunlight blazing down through the bare branches. The pickup is slouched against the curb, one tire almost flat, the wind-shield spattered with insects. I pull it around back and let the rest of the air out of the tire, just in case she gets any ideas about hitting the road again. Then I check the bumper, bracing for the worst. But while there are dents and scrapes and a new
MURRELLS INLET IS FOR LOVERS
bumper sticker, there's nothing to suggest she did anyone grievous bodily harm.

In the glove box, underneath an empty whiskey bottle and a pile of gas receipts, I find her notebook. Inside are lists of names, addresses, phone numbers—the paper trail of her search. She started looking for Wylie the day after I asked her to marry me. By then she'd packed a suitcase, locked up the farmhouse, and moved into my apartment. At the time, I
thought that meant something, but it turns out all it meant was she didn't want to stay on the farm. She was supposed to be in school, but she'd skipped the first few weeks to look after Cal, and by the time he died it was too late to enroll. Maybe that was part of the problem: too much time on her hands. She spent mornings on the balcony with a bottle of wine, making phone calls and scribbling notes, calling anybody and everybody who might have a clue as to Wylie's whereabouts. When her mother died, he'd been working as a claims adjuster, so she started with the insurance agency and went from there, making her way through a list of garages, car dealerships, and boardinghouses. It seems Wylie had become something of a drifter. He also took up the habit of driving drunk, a habit Holly now sees as her birthright. The first time he landed in jail was 1979, down in Myrtle Beach. After he got out, he took a job serving papers for an attorney, a fraternity brother from his time at Carolina, but soon he went back to working on cars. Spartanburg, Chester, Florence—the list went on.

Funny thing is, for all his moving around, he's never strayed very far from home. Holly takes this as a sign. “What's keeping him here if not me?” she said one night. “I mean, why not move to some state where you're not the DUI poster boy?”

“If you're the reason,” I said, “then why doesn't he come around?”

Camden's only forty miles away, but the traffic is heavy on I-20, and it's noon by the time I pull off Highway 521 and flip through Holly's notebook to double-check the address. The garage sits between two empty lots about a mile down the
road from the military academy. As I pull up to the full-serve island, I'm relieved to see no police tape, no body outlined in chalk—just a sleepy Union 76 station with a handful of cars out front waiting to be fixed. Still, it's no guarantee some mechanic isn't laid up in the county hospital with a busted leg.

An old guy with a cheek full of tobacco is working on a red convertible. When he sees my car, he wipes off his hands and heads over. “Fill 'er up?” he says.

“Please.”

He puts the nozzle in and asks me to pop the hood. If he's the mechanic Holly talked to, it's clear he hasn't been hit by a truck, but I want to be sure. It seems too dicey to come out and mention her, so while he's poking around the engine, I get out of the car and tell him I'm looking for Wylie Greer. He wipes the dipstick clean, gives me the up and down.

“You a bill collector?”

“No,” I say. “Just an old friend.”

He spits onto the asphalt. “He used to work here,” he says, turning back to the car, “but now he don't. Spread the word.”

So he's the guy. I imagine the relief on Holly's face when I tell her she's in the clear. And then, curiosity getting the best of me, I decide to take a chance.

“That girl this morning,” I say. “She's his daughter.”

This gets his attention. “No kidding?” he says. “Girlie nearly run me over.”

“Really?” I apologize for any trouble Holly caused, hand him twenty bucks, and tell him to keep the change. Then, as I'm explaining that Holly hasn't seen her father in years, another mechanic comes walking out of the service bay.
Even before I look, I know it's Wylie. I can picture him hanging back in the shadows, listening, waiting to make sure I'm not whoever it is he's hiding from these days— parole officer, tax man, his own daughter. “Thanks, Gene,” he says, taking a rag to my windshield. “I'll finish this one up.”

From the start, Holly said if I loved her, I'd help her find her father, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. I just went off to work each day, telling myself I was giving her space, hoping she'd hurry up and find him or else give up—mostly hoping she'd give up. I resented the time she spent making calls, writing letters, poring over that notebook. Some nights, when I came home beat from the old house I'd been working on, she hardly seemed to notice I was there. I told her she was wasting her time, that Wylie would have found
her
if that's what he wanted, but after a couple drinks, she'd tell me I couldn't possibly understand, seeing as how I still had a father in my life. Then she'd start making excuses for Wylie, saying how brokenhearted he must have been over losing her mother. I kept quiet, but I pictured a guy who never wanted a kid in the first place, a guy who'd turned tail and run first chance he got.

Which is why, standing there at the gas pump, I'm so surprised that Wylie chooses to show his face—and even more surprised when he invites me to lunch at the diner down the street. He offers to drive, tells me to leave my keys in case Gene needs to move the car. At the restaurant, we settle into a booth and order the special, barbecue hash and coleslaw.

“Well,” Wylie says, “you're no old friend of mine, so you must be the boyfriend.” He reaches across the table to
shake my hand. He has Holly's freckles and red hair. He doesn't look like a guy who lives at the bottom of a bottle. His eyes are clear. His grip is a crescent wrench. “She send you up here to look for me?”

I still haven't decided whether finding him is a good thing or not, but I want to see him squirm. “She's been after you like a bloodhound.”

“Why?”

I shrug. “Her grandfather—Cal—died.”

“And what does that have to do with me?”

“You'd have to ask her,” I say.

If I come off as rude, Wylie doesn't seem to hold it against me. In fact, when the food arrives, he asks me to tell him all about Holly, which is how we pass the next half hour, me trying to fill him in on the last fifteen years of her life. The fact that she's at Carolina, that she drives a pickup, that she wants to be a veterinarian—all of this pleases him. He's so engrossed, he barely touches his lunch, and sitting there across from him, seeing how he hangs on every detail, it's hard not to like the guy. I imagine most people who meet him must feel the same way—the housewives whose cars he fixes, the bartenders who pour him free shots, people who haven't yet known him long enough or well enough to be disappointed. When I tell him how torn up she is over Cal, he gazes out across the parking lot and lights a smoke. There was a time, he says, years ago, when he wanted Holly to come live with him in Myrtle Beach, but by then, Cal wouldn't let him near her, wouldn't even let him talk to her on the phone. “For a while, I hated that old bastard.”

“Come see her,” I say, wanting to know if he's sincere. “You're all the family she has left.”

He glances down at the ashtray, rolls the tip of his cigarette
around until it's a point. Outside, a line of cadets jog past, kicking up dust along the edge of the road. “You know, not a day passes that I don't think about her,” he says. “I want to be part of her life. I really do. Just not quite yet.” It's a matter of pride, he tells me. He doesn't want her to see him while he's broke and underemployed, living in a motel. He says that as soon as he gets his act together—“and it will be soon”—he's going to give her a call. He sits up straight as he says this, looking me dead in the eye like a politician, and for all I know, he actually believes what he's saying. But then he tips his hand.

“At any rate,” he says, stubbing out his cigarette, “what say we keep this under our hats for now?”

He means the fact that he's still in Camden. That's when I know I was right about him all along. If Holly had come with me, he'd still be hiding in the garage. I sneak a glance at the clock over the lunch counter. If I leave soon, I could pick her up and be back in Camden before he gets off work. I'm thinking once she meets him and realizes he'll never give her what she wants, she'll be able to get on with her life—
our
life. “Sure,” I say. “Just between us.”

“I appreciate that.”

I don't let him pay for my lunch, but when we get back to the garage, Gene is working on my car. “Oil change and a tune-up,” Wylie says. “On the house.” Gene isn't quite finished, so Wylie takes me out back to show off a couple of race cars he's been working on, a midget and a late model that belong to a local banker. By and by, he asks about my family. I tell him my father's in the video poker business and leave it at that. Then he wants to know how I met Holly, what line of work I'm in, whether I went to college. I'm relieved when Gene honks the horn to let us know he's done. As we
turn to go back inside, Wylie clears his throat, then claps a hand on my shoulder. “So am I to understand,” he says, “that you're serious about my daughter?”

The question catches me off guard. “I want to marry her.”

“And vice versa?”

“Vice versa,” I say, but there must be a hitch in my voice, a flicker of hesitation that lets Wylie know there's more to the story. And in that moment, as his hand drops from my shoulder, I get the feeling he sizes me up, decides then and there that though I may be important in his daughter's life, I'm not necessarily permanent. Not like blood relations. Not like him.

That look of his gnaws at me all the way home. When I walk in the door, Holly's still asleep. I pause at the foot of the bed, studying the freckles on her shoulders, the long eyelashes she inherited from her father. Maybe I'm just being paranoid, but I can't help wondering—what if Holly
is
her father's daughter? What if
I'm
the one who's never going to get what he wants? Suddenly she opens her eyes, smiles a wise-guy smile.

“May I help you?” she says.

I climb in bed and comb her hair with my fingers. I tell her I went to Camden. “Good news is, you didn't hit the guy.” She looks at me like I've just lifted a car off her chest, then puts her head on my shoulder. For a few seconds, things feel like they used to back when Cal was still alive, a time when our future together seemed as inevitable as the sunrise. Then the spell's broken. She can't help herself.

“Did you ask about Wylie?”

I nod. “Same story. I guess he's gone.” As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I feel like I've stepped through a rotted floorboard, but Holly doesn't doubt me. She's still focused on Gene.

“Maybe he's just covering,” she says.

“Maybe,” I say, and then, as long as I'm at it, I tell a second lie I hope will keep her from going back. “But the bad news is, you clipped a gas pump, and he filed a report. The cops are looking for your truck.”

Holly paces around the apartment for a while, trying to puzzle out a way to get back to Camden without getting arrested, then gives up and takes a bath, which is what she always does when she's hung over. While she's in the tub, I sit at the kitchen table, smoking bent cigarettes from the crumpled pack in her purse. Her father is out there. I saw him, I ate a meal with him, I shook his hand, and now I've taken it upon myself to see that she doesn't get to do the same.
Who the hell do you think you are?
I can hear the fury in her voice. Because sooner or later, she'll learn the truth. And what will my excuse be? That I was only doing what I thought was best? That I was honoring Wylie's wishes? I'm tempted to walk into the bathroom and just come clean, but not tempted enough. So I sit there, knowing that in a few minutes, she'll emerge from the steam scrubbed and sweet-smelling, and we'll carry on in our limbo until she either runs off again, or figures out I lied to her, or both. It occurs to me I have a finite amount of time before the shit hits the fan, time I can't afford to waste. What we need, I decide, is a change of scenery.

As soon as Holly turns on the hair dryer, I call the lady in
Shandon whose kitchen I've been redoing to tell her I won't be at work for a few days, then I quickly pack a duffel bag and sneak it into the trunk of my car. I'm back at the table smoking another cigarette when Holly sulks into the kitchen in jeans and a black T-shirt. She pours a glass of water and pops some aspirin.

“I'm starved,” she says. “Let's order a pizza.”

“Let's go out for one.”

We're halfway to the farm before Holly realizes where we're headed. She doesn't want to go. She tells me she's not ready. “Turn around,” she says, “or let me out right here.” I have to hold her wrist at the next stoplight to keep her in the car. I try reasoning with her, reminding her that the mail is piling up, food's rotting in the fridge, the lawn is going to seed.