The Return of Jonah Gray Read online

  I doubted this, but the fact was it wasn’t my evening to whine.

  “I’m sure it’ll be fine,” I said.

  “That’s exactly what I thought!” My mother smiled brightly before turning back to the caterer. “What about grapes? People like grapes.”

  “We could do grapes if you want,” he said. He looked tired.

  “Here, Mom,” I said, taking her by the elbow. “Why don’t you let the professionals do that.”

  “I’m just trying to help. Scott,” she said, turning to the caterer. “I’m not bothering you, am I?”

  “I’m sure Scott agrees that you should be out enjoying your party,” I said. “Did you see that the Maselins were here?”

  My mother must have already been on her way to another thought. When she answered, her voice sounded far off. “Oh, really,” she said. “I should say hello.”

  “Thanks for that,” Scott said after she left. He gave me a smile that I liked to think looked less forced.

  “She means well.” I picked a grape off the platter and popped it into my mouth. “At least, that’s what I keep telling myself.”

  I returned to the patio and found Gene by the pool.

  “Hey there, stranger,” I said. I’d avoided saying hi to him ever since he’d told me that had been a joke in intermediate school. All the kids coming up, saying “Hi Gene,” thinking they were so clever.

  “Why, hello Sasha.” He was always so polite, an otherwise inoffensive trait that had grown to annoy me. It was as if I’d become allergic to everything about him. You break up with someone, and then, maybe to prove to yourself that it was the right thing to do, you find all the ways that the person was wrong for you, wrong for your life or just plain wrong.

  “You look as lovely as ever,” Gene said.

  “My mother just used the word androgynous.”

  “She must have been making a joke.”

  “She says sometimes she forgets that she doesn’t have three sons,” I added.

  “That Lola is a funny one,” Gene said. He gazed at me with that way of his, the one that made me want to run screaming. He was so gentle. So sweet. So nothing.

  “So how’ve you been?” I asked. I hadn’t seen Gene since we’d called it quits. To be precise, I’d called it quits. To be totally precise—Jeff-Hill precise—I had seen him a couple times as he’d delivered my mail, but I’d stayed hidden behind a window shade.

  It’s not as if he would have ripped up my catalogs had he seen me, but it seemed easier to avoid eye contact. Maybe I hadn’t quite filed away my feelings for him, even though I didn’t have any use for them anymore.

  “I’ve been just fine,” he said. “Work always slows a little in August.”

  I nodded. Most things slowed in August. Only the IRS revved up.

  “Are you here with anybody?” I asked him.

  “No!” he croaked, clearly appalled.

  It was a silly question. Bringing a date to my parents’ party was the sort of provocation Gene would never have undertaken.

  “You seeing anyone?” I asked. I didn’t want him back, but I still wanted to know.

  “No,” he said, with a sad sort of half smile. “One of the other carriers has been trying to set me up with his sister.”

  “Are you going to do it?”

  “I don’t know. It seems like so much trouble to go to.”

  “Have you met her?”

  He shook his head, then he shrugged. “I’m not comfortable having this conversation with you,” he said.

  I nodded. Why did I still need to know every little detail? I had been the breaker-upper—I didn’t get to know everything anymore. But even now, he made it easy for me.

  “So how’s your father?” he asked.

  “Fine, I think. His doctor said it looks like a full remission.”

  “I saw him when I came in. He’s gained some weight back,” Gene said. “He looks good.”

  In my job, I heard a lot of people lie. There’s a tone to it, an airiness, a carefully constructed casualness. I heard the same in Gene’s voice. “But?” “What?” Gene asked.

  “It sounded like you were going to say something else.”

  He paused. “No,” he finally said. “You know, I never got to know him very well.”

  “You got off easy,” I said. “But speaking of the guest of honor, I see him over there. I haven’t said hello yet.”

  “You should go,” Gene said, nodding.

  I was suddenly grateful that he’d made it so easy, as if he really did want the best for me. I felt my stomach sour a little. Why couldn’t I just be nice to the guy?

  “Hey, Dad,” I said.

  My father looked up and lumbered a step closer. “So you made it,” he said.

  “Are you kidding? I wouldn’t have missed this.” I was surprised that he thought I might not have come.

  He leaned in for a quick hug and then pushed away, throwing me off balance. My father had always hugged abruptly, as if physical proximity were a reflex which, on second thought, he wasn’t comfortable with. I don’t know why I still wasn’t ready for it.

  Though I lived only five miles away, it had been about a month since I’d seen him last. That wasn’t an accident. My father and I had hit a rough patch right around the time I took the IRS job, and we’d been skidding for about six years. Back when I was twenty-five and had passed my CPA exam, he’d wanted me to join his accountancy. At least, that’s what my mother had said. He’d never actually offered me a job, except to mention that if I ever worked with him, I couldn’t expect a handout, and I would need to generate my own clientele and find office space. It hadn’t been a terribly compelling pitch, and instead, I’d accepted the IRS’s offer.

  Ever since, he’d seemed a little angry with me. I could tell by the way he asked about my work, on those very rare times he deigned to broach the subject, that he didn’t respect it, and so I’d stopped offering. I figured that he didn’t talk to me about his clientele because he thought I might audit them, and frankly, I couldn’t have promised not to. You get a lead and you’re obligated to follow it. Either way, as the years passed, we seemed to have less and less to talk about. He found the energy to talk to Kurt about geology and to Blake about various school subjects—things he knew precious little about. But with me, the child who worked in the same field as him, my father drew a blank.

  Maybe I wasn’t the daughter he’d wanted. Or maybe that’s just the natural order of things. It’s an old song: children grow up, become adults, develop their own friends, buy their own houses, and in so doing, spend less time with their parents. It’s not as if my parents were suffering. My mother kept my father busy with shopping trips and golf outings and visits to the wine country and to the condo in Tahoe. It just meant that I didn’t see him very often. At least, I told myself that’s all it was.

  “You’re looking well,” I told my father.

  “Your mother and I were golfing. I got a little sunburned.” It was true—he glowed pink under the tiki lights. “You look tired. Audits getting to you?”

  “They’re fine,” I said.

  “Don’t let the bear get you yet,” he said. It was the same admonishment he pulled out whenever he thought I was getting lazy. My father’s solution to most any problem was overtime.

  “What about you? Everything okay?” I asked.

  “Did I say it wasn’t?”

  “No, I just thought I’d—”

  “You always think I’m hiding something.”

  “I’m not accusing you of hiding anything.” I turned to the table of food we stood beside. “So Mom made deviled eggs,” I said, hoping that my father’s favorite snack might settle his mood.

  “Don’t you think they look a little weird?” he asked.

  The sunny centers of yolk and mayonnaise and mustard looked as golden as I remembered from my childhood. “Do they taste weird?” I asked.

  “They taste fine,” my father said. “They don’t look different? Maybe she use
d a new mustard. Go get yourself a beer. You want a beer?”

  “I already had one. I’m okay.”

  “There’s wine, if you prefer wine.”

  “I’m going to stick with beer.”

  “Go get yourself another,” he said.

  “In a minute.”

  Ever since my dad’s illness, I’d tried to visit more regularly. But once his lymphoma went into remission, back in May, the backsliding began. Sure, I’d tell myself to spend more time with him. Time was precious, we’d been spared, seize the day, etc. The fact is, sometimes those lessons stick and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes you realize new truths and sometimes you fall back into the same habits, the same annoyances, the same shilly-shally as before.

  My father had nearly died, that much we all knew. But the experience hadn’t magically fixed everything. He was the same person as before, if a few pounds lighter, and even that difference was fading fast. We were the same family as before, if a few months older, and my attempts to reach out felt as listless as ever. Not that he ever made it easy. Whenever I called home, he’d talk to me for thirty seconds, maybe a minute, before passing me off to my mother. It didn’t matter if I said, “Dad, I want to know what Dr. Fisher said.” It didn’t matter if I tried to tell him about an audit I was working on. It seemed that he found talking to me as awkward as I found talking to him, as though he was always searching for a reason to end the conversation.

  “Oh great, Ed just got here,” my father said, and before I could say anything else, he was gone.

  Soon enough, Kurt arrived. I had expected him to bring Lori and the boys, but two out of the three of them were suffering from pink eye, and Kurt had insisted they all stay behind. He would have berated himself for years had his kids spread conjunctivitis around the party.

  My older brother looked almost relaxed, far from his usual state. I watched him as he said his hellos and made his way through the buffet line. Eventually, with a plate of food and a drink in his hands, Kurt settled beside me into one of the poolside lounge chairs.

  “Get enough to eat?” I asked.

  “What are you saying? I mean, I know I’ve put on a few pounds.” From childhood through college, Kurt had been your classic mesomorph—average height with an average build. In his twenties though, he’d begun to round out, and now at thirty-four, his silhouette revealed the growing potbelly of a life distinctly sedentary.

  “It was just a comment. Jesus, you’re as paranoid as Dad.”

  “Sorry. I’m stressed out. You don’t know what a relief it is to get out of that house and away from everything,” he said. “It’s chaos out there.”

  “Actually, I was hoping to see Lori and the boys tonight,” I said.

  “Well, sure. Of course.” He sighed and ran his hand through his thinning hair. He’d been born with my father’s fine, dishwater-blond hair, but had lost most of it in the preceding few years. “You seen Blake?” he asked.

  “He’s spending the night at Barney’s.”

  “He got to skip this? I guess it’s good he’s not sick. I thought maybe he was sick since I hadn’t seen him all night.”

  Kurt had always been fretful. In elementary school, he worried about me. He worried about missing the school bus, getting lost in the woods and that the apple in his lunch bag would mash his peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. When he was a Boy Scout, he worried about squirrels skittering out of trash cans when he went to throw something out. When he was in middle school, he worried that someone would hit him as he drank from a water fountain, mashing his teeth into the metal spigot.

  In his teens, Kurt’s worry centered on Blake, our “whoops” brother, who was born when I was fifteen and Kurt was eighteen. What if Blake stopped breathing? What if he choked on mashed banana? What if his bathwater ran too hot? What if it ran too cold? In hindsight, I could view it as caring, but at the time, it was really annoying, like having an extra parent watching your every move.

  But now, with two boys and a wife at home, plus a new job in Stockton, my older brother was saddled with a new set of anxieties. Still, leave it to Kurt to come up with something no one else would have worried about.

  “I hope no one gets too drunk tonight,” Kurt said. “Those tiki torches are a lawsuit waiting to happen.” I watched his eyes move from the torches to the legs of a waitress who was passing out mini-quiches. They stayed there for some time.

  “Been a while since you’ve been out on your own?” I asked.

  He snapped out of his stare and looked embarrassed. “I guess.”

  “How are things in Stockton?”

  “The same. The whole city smells like fertilizer.”

  “Are you all settled in? Got your cable hooked up? Electricity?”

  “Oh, we got it all,” Kurt said.

  “How about a newspaper subscription?”

  “Even that,” he said. “We’re officially plugged into the local scene.”

  “What’s the newspaper up there called?”

  “I think the biggest local one is the Star,” he said.

  “So that’s the Stockton Star?” I asked. For some reason, I felt that I had to be covert.

  “Yep,” Kurt said. He took a sip of his beer.

  “Is it any good?”

  My brother looked over at me and frowned. “I don’t know,” he said. “We just started getting it. It’s a local newspaper.”

  I rocked a little in my seat before I spoke again. For some reason I was nervous. “You remember reading anything by a guy named Gray?”

  “Gray? Gray what?” Kurt asked.

  “Jonah Gray.”

  He shook his head. “No. Why? Do you know him?”

  “Just that he works at the Star.”

  “If you already knew the paper, why did you ask me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What, do you have a crush on him or something?”

  “No.”

  “You do, don’t you?”

  “Maybe.” Only when I said it did I realize that it was true. Much as I hated to agree with my angry callers, there was something about Jonah Gray. Maybe it was the fact that he’d accomplished what I’d only planned to do—live in Tiburon and sail his Catalina 22. Or because he had come from the same corner of the world as I had. But those weren’t the sorts of things I would have been able to explain to Kurt.

  He turned toward me, interested now. “Really? Some guy in Stockton? What did you say his name was?”

  “Never mind. Forget I said anything.”

  “How’d you meet him?”

  “I haven’t yet. Not, you know, actually.”

  “Is this an online thing? One of those dating sites?”

  “No. It doesn’t matter.” I had realized how weird the conversation was going to make me sound, even to my brother, who’d long ago labeled me an oddball.

  “Seriously, who is this guy?”

  “I’m auditing him,” I finally admitted, just to get it over with.

  Kurt started to laugh.

  “It’s not funny,” I said.

  “Yes it is,” he said. “This Gray guy is one of your audits? Jesus, Sasha! First, your mailman and now an audit? You really can’t do anything like a normal person, can you?”

  “Like study gravel?”

  “Geology isn’t gravel,” he said.

  “He seems interesting, is all,” I explained. “He’s from Roanoke, for one. And he used to sail. And he’s a journalist.”

  “And a total fucking stranger.”

  “Only sort of.”

  “That doesn’t worry you? I’d think that you, of all people, would want to find out more about him before turning all googly.”

  “I’m not all googly. I’m not even half-googly. I just think he’s interesting. Besides, nothing’s going to happen. I don’t get involved with people I audit. And even if I did, he thinks I’m some scary bean counter.”

  “You are,” Kurt said.

  “I’m sorry I ever brought it up.”


  “I kind of am, too,” Kurt said. He sipped his drink and watched the waitress again. Then he turned back to me. “How does Dad seem to you?”

  “Back to his same prickly self as far as I can tell.”

  “I thought I saw him walking funny.”

  “Funny how?” I hadn’t noticed anything.

  “I don’t know. Off balance.”

  “He’s probably been drinking since five,” I pointed out. Our father often started early.

  Kurt nodded, but he looked dissatisfied. Then again, it was his default expression.

  At that moment, there was a clinking of glasses, and I could see my mother and father standing together at the top of the small set of stairs that led from the house down to the patio. They were smiling, my father’s arm around my mother’s waist.

  “To my lovely bride,” my father said. My mother beamed.

  “Should we be up there?” Kurt asked me.

  I shrugged. “I think they’re fine.”

  “By now, we’ve covered most all our vows. She’s been with me in sickness and in health. Richer and poorer, and with some of these trips she’s got planned for us, poorer still!”

  My parents’ friends laughed. My mother laughed.

  My father was finishing. “To my lovely wife of thirty-five years. Here’s to another thirty-five.” He gave her a kiss, and their friends cooed and applauded. It was sweet. It really was.

  At any gathering, you couldn’t miss my uncle Ed. All you had to do was find the center of the largest and loudest group of people. As an oncologist (though not my father’s), Ed had traveled around the world, setting up clinics and medical trials where there had been none before. He had a wallet full of stories about being chased by bulls in Argentina, sailing through the mouth of Gibraltar, trying to outrun a mob in New Delhi.

  He loved good stories, too, and as I glanced over at him—later, after the glasses had all been lowered again and the guests had retreated to smaller circles of conversation—he seemed to be taking great pleasure listening to someone’s anecdote. I heard him snort and saw his eyes light up. He put down his drink and wiped his broad brow with a cocktail napkin.