You Only Get So Much (5 page)

Chapter 7

Two weeks later, my cabin in Montana

"I fucking hate
you!"

This was not the first
time I'd heard this statement, but it was the first time in the past two days
that Kendall said it without storming out of the cabin. Progress, as it were. I
take no offense. If her boyfriend, Ethan, had tagged along on our little jaunt
to Montana, I suspect that she wouldn't have been so openly hostile toward me;
but then again she was a teenage girl and what the hell did I know about what
would make her happy? Clearly being in Montana wasn't doing it for her.

The judge awarded me
temporary custody of the girls over April, who wasn't in attendance to object.
The decision was basically made for him, considering that April had been
arrested the night before the hearing and at the time was sleeping off a bender
in the Spokane County Jail. Mom had prepared a speech to give the judge about
why I should be given custody of the girls. She was visibly upset that she
couldn't give her sermon. She mumbled something as we left the courtroom about
mailing the judge a copy.

My original idea of this
custody thing being temporary was thrown out the window when April skipped town
after her release, unwilling or unable to get into a rehab program that suited
her specific needs. The kids, for all intents and purposes were now my
responsibility alone. My burden? I guess that's the right term, but man, that
makes me sound like a dick.
 
This
was not my plan, but it's my path.

Since I needed to stay
at the Cedar House to sort through Trevor's affairs and figure out what I was
going to do with the girls, once school started again, I had to close up the
cabin and get some personal belongings. The one change of clothes I had brought
with me after the funeral was getting rather ripe. I wasn't about to leave
Kendall alone in the house—I didn't know her that well, but I was a kid
once too. You didn't unlearn how to be a deviant. Not that she was a deviant,
but I suspected her boyfriend was or at least that's what I keep telling myself
as to why I forced her to come with Gracie and me to stay at the cabin for a
while.

"When are we going
to town?" Kendall asked. "I need . . . girl stuff."

"Define girl
stuff," I say, as I seal up a cardboard box of books on the little kitchen
table.

"Stuff for my
vagina. God!" She shouts this at me from across the room. It came out more
like
Gaawd!
with an extra eye roll and a hair flip.

"We'll leave when
Gracie wakes up from her nap. So it'll be at least 20 more minutes. Can your
vagina wait that long?"

No reply. She just walks
out to the deck and plopped into my favorite chair by the fireplace.

The cabin is a
traditional A-frame, custom designed by a local company. It has two bedrooms
and a combined kitchen and living room space. It's not much, but it is still
probably more than I need anyway.

A massive deck adorns
the south side of the cabin, giving breathtaking views of White Fish Lake and
the surrounding mountains. I've never shared the place with anyone else. I've
always been here alone, until now.

Kendall has taken up
residence on the deck for the past two days, leaving me inside the cabin with
Gracie. Apparently the axiom of kids being resilient is truer for little kids.
Gracie warmed up to me pretty quickly after the court hearing. It helped that
Grandma Redmond told Gracie that I was "pretty OK" and would be
around more.

"You look like
Daddy," Gracie said. At which point I lost any sense of being a man, who
was stoic and reserved, and proceeded to cry like a little boy right in front
of her. I did in fact look like Trevor. He was only one year my junior. The
recognition from Gracie was a little more than I could handle.

"Thank you," I
choked out. Not exactly sure what I meant by that. Thank you for recognizing
your dead father in his loser brother's face. Yes, thanks for that.

"Oh, man up,
daisy," Mom said. "These kids need someone to lean on, not some
wilting flower."

Mom, always the source
of joy and light.

Flower or not, Gracie
and I got along famously. She was particularly fond of puzzles, although she
needed assistance to get the pieces where she wanted them. I found myself
setting her up to place the pieces in the puzzle. Nonchalantly sliding the
pieces near where they went and waiting for her to recognize where it should be
secured. This puzzle work started back in Spokane, but continued at the cabin.

She was a remarkable
6-year-old kid. She dressed herself each morning. No fuss. She ate what was
provided to her—bland mac and cheese, oatmeal or cereal. It didn't
matter, she was content. Happy. I can't recall how exactly this compares to
Aspen at this age. I can only imagine she was more difficult, but I wasn't the
one dealing with or parenting her. That was my fault, not hers.

Gracie told me she
needed a nap after lunch. She seemed to be keenly aware of her childhood needs.
The shared loft that Kendall and Gracie were using was too noisy for her, so
she was currently napping in my bedroom.

We didn't actually need
much from town to warrant a trip, but I thought the distraction of going into
town would be a positive one for Kendall who was growing increasingly
stir-crazy with each passing day. And obviously I we couldn't keep her lady
parts waiting. So, when Gracie wakes up, we are headed to town for a few hours.

* * *

I lied. OK, it wasn't a big lie, but when I said I was an
isolationist, I'm sure it conjured up the image of a guy who never once talked
to another person. That's not entirely true. While, yes I've shied away from
public interaction, I'm only human. One of the most basic human needs is to
eat. Considering I can't cook anything that doesn't boil in a pot or sizzle on
a grill, I'm lucky to be alive. My lifesavers—cooks and
waitresses—work at Lucky's Showtime Bar in downtown White Fish. They feed
me.

So when I decided to take the girls to town to shop for
Kendall's . . . things, a stop into Lucky's was practically a requirement. When
we arrived, Kendall nearly ran back to the car.

"That's where we're eating?" she asks.

"Yes. It's actually quite good," I say, while
admiring the dusty swinging doors out front that would better be found in an
old western movie. The decor is cattle-raising, prairie western. The
floorboards are worn. The vinyl covered chairs are cracked with age and stained
with the spills of thousands of careless patrons.
  

"I want mac and cheese," Gracie says.

"You always want mac and cheese," Kendall
replies as we sit down.

"You never eat anything," Gracie contends.
"We can share."

Gracie's youthful observation was spot on. Kendall rarely
ate anything. She did a good job of pushing her food around her plate, but
little of it actually made it past her black lipstick and into her mouth. I'd
yet to bring this up to Kendall because I didn't view it as any of my business
. . . yet. If she was hungry, she'd eat. Who was I to question that?

We find a table in the back and, true to form, we were
provided menus within seconds of sitting down by Patricia, the head waitress
and general town know-it-all.

"Your girlfriends are a bit young, Mr.
Redmond," she observes with a smile.

I introduce the girls as my nieces and explain we're only
in town for a few more days.

"That's too bad," she said. "It'd be nice
to have a few new faces around here. Especially ones who eat in my
restaurant."
 

She takes our orders and disappears from sight. I then
get Gracie started on a maze on the back of the kids menu and Kendall wanders
off to look at all the old farming implements and skiing relics hung around the
place. It's clear she has no interest in sitting at the table with us.

I am so focused on Gracie's maze that I don't notice when
Patricia first appears next to Kendall on the far side of the restaurant. I
don't know how long they've been chatting, but I see Kendall actually smile.
Only when I see the direction of the smile do I realize the reason. She is
eyeing the teenage dishwasher in the back. I guess she isn't so upset about
missing old what's-his-name—oh yeah, Ethan—in Spokane.

After just a few short minutes, the kitchen's short order
cook dings a bell signaling our food was ready. Patricia retrieves it while
Kendall returns to the table. She turns to look at the boy again, but he's
already moved out of sight. Seeing the look on her face, that first glimpse of
someone new, was nice. Even if I was secretly plotting against the
dishwasher-kid; because no kid who does that job should go anywhere near my
niece.
 
Young love. Or lust, as it
were.

I start in on my cheeseburger and Gracie practically
inhales her mac and cheese. Kendall slowly and deliberately munches on a basket
of French fries.

"Where's all your writing?" Kendall asks.

"What do you mean?" I say.

"That lady told me you usually come in here and
write. So, where's all the writing?"

"It's not that simple."

"Amuse me." She actually said that.

"Sometimes when a writer needs to write something
that's difficult or different from what they usually write, they change the
scenery around them. I like to come here because it's noisier than the cabin.
The more things happening the better. It helps me concentrate."

"Great story, but you didn't answer the
question," she reiterates. "Where's all the writing? She said you
were in here all the time writing in notebooks."

"You mean, where is the stuff I wrote?"

She nods.

"It's here and there," I evade. "Not ready
for public consumption."

"You're afraid to show me?" she asks.

"It's not done."

"I'm 17 years old. You're afraid of my
opinion?"

I'm afraid of anyone's opinion. But I couldn't let her
know that.

"Of course not," I deny, hoping to successfully
put an end to the inquisition.

No less than a dozen novels are currently sitting in
various stages of completion in boxes in my bedroom closet.
 
I wrote in those little blue notebooks
and pulled out pages that were complete, thereby creating a mess of loose
notebook pages to serve as the complete original draft of each potential novel.
I have no intention whatsoever of showing her, or anyone else, anything I wrote.
It wasn't good enough and showing it off wouldn't make me happy anyway. I'd
seen enough rejection that my writing felt like a big vat of doubt. Every
insecurity I had in myself was shown for all to see on the pages of my work. My
singular success meant that everything I would ever do would be judged against
it. My follow-ups weren't enough. They were embarrassing. I was embarrassed.

Maybe someday the spark would ignite again and I'll find
some story burning to get out of me. But that hadn't happened in quite some
time and I wasn't sure if it ever would again. The novels that I thought were
good, were practically laughed out of my agent's office. There's more to that
story—to Monique, my agent—but I'd rather not think about her. Not
ever again.

Chapter 8

The next morning the smell of coffee wakes me up. This is
a particularly strange feeling because I didn't set the coffee pot timer to go
off. Over the years I had forgotten how the strong, surprise aroma would bring
me out of my slumber. Kendall must have made it. As I roll over and swing my
legs to the floor I notice the steaming cup on the night stand. Maybe I was
still dreaming. Kendall actually brought me coffee? What parallel universe have
I awakened in?
 

I sniff it, thinking that I would recognize the smell of
poison, but knowing that I was just being overly dramatic. She and I weren't
off to a great start—which was exemplified by the fact that I immediately
thought she might be trying to kill me with morning coffee. Yes, overdramatic.
I'm not used to being around people this much.

I put on a tee-shirt to go with the shorts I usually
sleep in and shuffle out into the living room with my coffee. Gracie is still
asleep in the loft. Kendall is nowhere to be found. I look out the window to
her spot—my spot actually—on the deck overlooking the lake.

Her knees are curled up to her chest and she's covered
with a blanket. She's holding her own cup of coffee and glancing down at her
lap. I quietly walk out to the deck, careful not to make too much noise and
wake Gracie. That's when I see what Kendall is doing—reading. Reading one
of my unpublished manuscripts in a blue notebook.

"What the hell?" I blurt out. A bit louder than
I intended.

I startle her and she drops the notebook. Loose pages
scatter and slide to the deck like floating feathers. I drop to my knees and
attempt to scoop them up before the wind can catch them and send them careening
off the deck and into the forest below.

"Wow, be a dick, why don't you," Kendall says.

"I told you those were not ready to be read."

"Yeah, and that was enough to get me to want to read
them even more. Have you never met a teenager before?"

"Those are private," I tell her, embarrassed.

"Your novel sold millions of copies—what's so
private about that?"

"This isn't a finished book. It's just notebook
pages."

"Looks pretty finished to me," she retorts.
"And it was just getting good."

I stack up the last of the pages that fell to the deck
and finally catch a look at the working title in the header of the notebook. It
was called
Your
Loss
, about a medical salesman who traveled 20 days out of the month. He
never saw his kids and his wife leaves him. I wrote it a few years ago and
hadn't thought about it even once since.

"It's not finished," I repeat. "Otherwise
it would have been . . . wait, did you take this out of my closet?"

"Oh, come on? You know I did. That's where you left
it and you told me where they were. It didn't come out here by itself."

Smartass.

"No, I didn't
tell you where they were," I correct her. "Those are private."

"You keep saying
that."

I attempt to stack the
pages in order, but they are completely disorganized. I give up and simply
straighten them before setting them on the bench next to where I sat down, my
coffee long forgotten.

"You can ask
me," she invites.

"Ask you
what?"

"Ask me what I
thought of it."

"I wasn't going
to ask you that," I lie. "I was going to ask you why you brought me
coffee."

"Because I read
your book, you jerk, and I liked it."

I can't help but
smile, yet I turn away so she can't see it. Validation in the most unlikely
form. She smiled too. Had she said she liked
Isolated Highway
, I would have
acknowledged the words and moved on. I'd heard that a thousand times. But not
about this never-before-seen work. It felt good. I handed her back the
disheveled, unedited manuscript and walked back inside wondering if she'd
finish reading it and what she might think about it when she finished.