What You Have Left (9 page)

“If you're so concerned,” she says, “you deal with it.”

I keep driving. I know she's not a child, but I do believe that what Holly needs, now and then, is someone to take charge, someone to guide her down the path she's too scared to go down herself. “Not going there isn't going to make Cal not be dead,” I say.

She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath. “First of all,” she says, “this has nothing to do with Cal. This is about me and you. You think we're going to get out there, just the two of us, and it's going to be like old times, and suddenly I'll decide I'm ready to get married.”

I keep my eyes on the road, trying not to let on that she's nailed me. “And second of all?”

“Second of all, fuck you. I don't want to go.” Saying the words seems to cement her anger, and when we get to the farm, she lets herself into the house and locks me out. I
stand there knocking for a few minutes. Through the door, she informs me that I'm trespassing and that if I don't leave, she'll call the police. I knock some more. When she finally opens up, she's holding Cal's Daisy rifle, the one he kept around to scare off the neighbor's hogs when they got loose in his garden.

“Get off my property,” she says.

“Whoa. That's a pretty mean-looking BB gun.”

She raises her eyebrows, clicks off the safety, and shoots me in the thigh. It stings—more than I would've expected— and when I reach for the gun, she shoots me in the hand. She's back inside with the door locked before I can stop her. Next thing I know, she's opening an upstairs window, taking aim at me again. I can tell she's enjoying this.

“Suit yourself,” I say. “Good luck.” As I'm walking away, she shoots my windshield, leaving a neat, milky divot in the glass. I lean against the car, trying to rub the sting out of my hand as I scope out the house. The downstairs windows are low enough to break into, plus I'm pretty sure Cal kept a key under the doormat. It would be easy to get inside, but after lying to Holly and dragging her out here, I figure she deserves to win this round. If she wants to shoot me and lock me out, fine, whatever, I'll come back later. My only concern is that she'll take off while I'm gone. There's not much I can do if she decides to call a taxi or walk back to town, but I don't want her getting behind the wheel, so, before I leave, I slip into the barn and disconnect the battery on Cal's old Plymouth.

It's dark by the time I get back with the pizza. Through the window, I see Holly sitting in the dining room, going
through a box of old photographs and arranging them in stacks across the table. She lets me in when she sees I have food. Her eyes are red from crying. Taking my hand, she traces the welt on my palm with the tip of her finger. “I'm sorry I shot you,” she says. “Do you want to shoot me?”

“Maybe later.” I give her a kiss and open the cupboard for a couple of plates, but she asks me not to.

“I want to leave things the way they are,” she says. “Let's just eat outside.”

I follow her out front, where she sets the pizza and her pint bottle on the wrought-iron table beneath one of the live oaks beside the driveway. This is where we used to sit with Cal for cocktails every Friday afternoon, the very spot where Holly and I first met. I pull a chair up next to her and reach for the Lord Calvert. She does, too, probably afraid I'll pour it out, but instead I take a long swallow and pass it back to her. We haven't been drunk together since the day of the funeral.

“What say we get loaded?”

She gives a halfhearted laugh. “Already there.”

That's the last thing she says until the pizza's gone. By then it's almost nine o'clock. She's a wreck, just sitting there staring at the house, dabbing her eyes with a tissue, and it makes me queasy to think what she'd do if she knew her father was just forty miles away, downing his own nightly ration. When I offer to take her back to my apartment, she shakes her head. She has decided, after all, that this is where she belongs, here on the farm where her mother and Cal lived, the only place where she still feels connected to them. At least, that's how I imagine she feels. She stands up and announces she's going back inside to finish sorting the photographs. I offer to help, but she says she'd rather do it
alone. By midnight, she still hasn't come to bed. I find her at the dining room table, asleep, with a stack of photos next to her. The one on top is a snapshot of Holly, her mother, and Cal posed on the front steps, three generations in their Sunday best. It's a photo I've seen before, taken on Easter Day, 1976, a few months before Maddy died. Wylie was there, too—he's the one behind the camera. If you look closely, you can see the faint shadow he casts.

The next morning, I wake to the sound of Holly playing back messages that have accumulated on Cal's answering machine. I sit up, ready for disaster. What if one of the messages is from Wylie? What if he called to say meeting me made him want to see her? I dress quickly and head downstairs, listening, but the calls are from friends of hers, people wanting to offer condolences. Even so, bringing her to the farm now seems like a mistake, because of course if Wylie has a change of heart, it's the first place he'll look.

“Why don't we go out for brunch?” I say. “Maybe see a movie.”

Holly's sitting on Cal's bed, jotting notes. She tells me she's already eaten and doesn't have time for a movie. “I've got a lot of stuff to take care of here,” she says, “but you could give me a ride into town to get my clothes.”

It takes a moment for what she's saying to sink in. “You're moving out?”

She pats my hand, which still smarts from the BB. “I never moved in,” she says. “I was just staying at your place. And now you can stay here for a while, if you want.”

This is what I've been hoping for all along—the two of us together on the farm—but Holly refuses to make a big
deal of it. She just turns back to the answering machine. “I want to get my truck, too.”

“I meant to tell you. It's got a flat.”

“So we'll get it fixed.”

“Maybe we should wait,” I say. “The police are looking for it, remember?”

That's when Holly informs me she's going back to Camden, with or without my help. It's no use trying to talk her out of it. I take a seat beside her, sinking into the old mattress. “What do you want me to do?”

“Take me there tomorrow,” she says, which must have been her plan all along, the threat of her driving just a threat to get a ride. As she's erasing the messages, she tells me she had a dream last night. She was back at the garage in her pickup, just like Saturday morning, only this time, the man she almost hit was her father. “I think he's still there,” she says. “I can feel it.”

“That's not what old Gene said.”

“But here's what I don't get,” she says. “If he called the cops, and if he knew you knew where to find me, why didn't he call them again so they could question you?”

“Maybe he'd cooled off by then.”

“Or maybe he just made up that stuff about the police. To scare you off.”

“It's possible.”

“Well,” she says, “only one way to find out.”

It takes Holly less than fifteen minutes to pack up the two suitcases of clothes she's been keeping at my apartment, and then we head back to the farm in my car. She's okay with leaving the truck now that I've agreed to drive her to
Camden. As we're passing the VA hospital, she asks me to stop at the cemetery up ahead. She hasn't been there since the funeral. We don't stay long—just long enough for her to smoke a cigarette and get rid of the dead flowers on Cal's grave—and she doesn't pray or cry, just stands there scowling at the headstone.

As soon as we're at the house, she puts on a pot of coffee and gets to work. She starts by opening all the windows, then she strips Cal's bed and gathers up his towels. When I ask if there's anything I shouldn't touch, she just shoves another blanket into the washer. “He didn't want this place to be a museum,” she says. “He wanted us to
live
here.” I'm happy to hear her say “us,” but that's the only bone she throws me. The rest of the day she's moody, preoccupied with the task at hand. Once we've emptied the closets, we pack up Cal's clothes and store them in the attic alongside boxes of her mother's belongings. Next we start going through dressers and cabinets, sorting his personal effects. Most of his stuff gets packed away, but some of it Holly keeps out—his tackle box, his Carhartt coat with the wool lining, a silver flask we find in the nightstand. It's a slow process, trying to decide how much of her grandfather she still wants around, and Holly doesn't take it well. By lunchtime, she's on her third glass of wine. All the while, I'm resigned to the fact that we're going back to Camden, and every time I pass through Cal's room and see her notebook next to the phone, I could kick myself. Because now that we're here together, just the two of us, I don't see how Wylie was even worth lying about.

In the morning, Holly's sitting up in bed, watching me. My first thought is, I've been talking in my sleep, spilling the
beans about Wylie, but when I ask her what's wrong, she tells me she couldn't sleep. “Let's go,” she says. “I want to be there when they open.” Again, I try to talk her into waiting— “just to let things cool off,” I say—and when that doesn't work, I tell her it's risky to show up first thing in the morning. “We don't want him to see us staking out the place,” I say. “He might turn around and go home.” I finally convince her to wait until after lunch. Even so, she's antsy. As soon as she finishes breakfast, she mixes a bloody mary and picks up where she left off the day before, sorting through Cal's desk. Passing the doorway, I notice she's wearing the engagement ring. She glances up from a stack of old bank statements, gives me a look that says,
Now don't get all excited.

“I'm just trying it on for size,” she says. “The whole idea.”

As much as I like the look of that ring on her finger, I'm too nervous to sit still, so when she asks if I want to help clean out the desk, I tell her no thanks, I'll be mowing the grass. I start with the front yard, which has come to look more like a wild meadow than the neat lawn Cal once kept. The grass is still wet with dew, and I'm so busy thinking about Wylie that I keep stalling the mower. My only hope is that he won't be at work, or that he'll pretend we never met, seeing as how that was his idea in the first place. More likely, though, he'll assume I told Holly where he was, in which case he'll have little incentive to cover for me, the temporary boyfriend of his permanent daughter.

Around lunchtime, on my way back to the shed for the gas can, I notice the barn door is open. My mouth goes dry. Inside, Holly is under the hood of Cal's Plymouth. She
sees me coming and bangs the hood shut. Then she gets in and locks the doors. I realize she's on to me somehow, though it won't be until later, when she visits me in the Kershaw County Jail, that I'll learn the whole story, how she got impatient after her third bloody mary and dialed up the garage. A man answered the phone, and even though Holly hung up without a word, not wanting to spook him, she was certain the voice on the other end was her father's. She wondered how he'd managed to duck me when I was in Camden. She thought about all the times I'd tried to talk her out of looking for him. She put two and two together. It was only a hunch, but with a few drinks in her, that was enough.

Now she's trying to start the car, which has been in the barn gathering dust since springtime, when Cal stopped driving. His silver flask is on the seat next to her. I figure my best bet is to play dumb, so I stand there tapping on the window, asking her what's going on, asking her to open up. She tries the ignition again. When the engine finally turns over, blue smoke billows from the tailpipe and a clutch of swallows burst from the rafters. Holly throws the car into reverse, backs out of the barn, and stops long enough to pull the diamond ring off her finger. For a moment she just sits there, holding it in her fist, and then she rolls down the window and drops it in the dirt.

By the time I get on I-20, Holly's nowhere to be seen. I figure she's only a half mile ahead of me, tops, but I hang back, fighting the urge to catch up. I don't want her to spot my car; I don't want her trying to outrun me. As it is, I'm sure she's hauling ass, drunk enough to pretend she's invisible, and every time I come around a bend in the road, I expect to
see her being handcuffed at the back of a cruiser. It's no surprise, then, just a mile or so before Camden, when I crest a hill in time to spot a state trooper pulling onto the highway, lights twirling. I speed up, trying to see who he's after, but it's not until the exit is in sight that I make out the Plymouth. Holly isn't slowing down a bit. She flies up the ramp, brakes hard, and hangs a sharp left at the light. The trooper gets stuck behind a big RV at the exit, and then he has to wait while an eighteen-wheeler makes a wide, slow turn onto the overpass. By now Holly has disappeared. The trooper turns off his siren and slows down, probably calling for backup. I'm only a few blocks behind him, heading past the academy, when he makes a wrong turn down a side street.

I let out my breath for what seems like the first time in hours. It's too late for wishing Holly had pulled over, so now I'm just hoping she makes it to the garage without wrapping the car around a telephone pole. That, and I'm hoping she has the sense to park behind the building, out of sight. But two minutes later, when I pull into the lot, the Plymouth is sitting right out front, blocking the service bay. The door is wide open, and the flask is lying on the front seat for all the world to see. Holly's already inside. She shoots me a fierce look through the plate-glass window, then turns back to Gene, who's cornered behind the register. Her voice carries through the garage. “Don't give me that,” she's saying. “He was here half an hour ago. He answered the phone.”