Once Ellie left, I went inside and flopped myself on the big green chair across from the couch and watched Dad working. He muttered to himself about dumb callers and celebrated when he got a client off a call. He winked at me a few times. The air-conditioning was cranked to arctic.
“You need me, Cupcake?”
“Only when you have a second,” I said.
He typed in some stuff and said, “Once I get this woman her link, we’ll be good to go.”
“Cool.”
I had my History of the Future book with me and reread my chapter about the Sniper that I’d written that morning. I was still intrigued. Something about her made me think she would be the one in the tunnel with the USS Pledge guy’s descendant. Maybe she’d be my daughter or my granddaughter or something.
“Everything all right?” he asked, still waiting for a beep from his computer to say that the client was gone.
“Yeah. Just a few more questions,” I said.
He didn’t look scared this time. The last two times, he was scared.
Maybe the talking was helping him, too. We had waited thirteen years.
When he was done sending the link and the beep sounded, he put his computer down, got up and grabbed himself a microwaved burrito and a small bowl of tortilla chips and sour cream. He also grabbed a beer.
He didn’t ever drink beer.
I was so shocked I said, “Beer?”
He chewed on his sour cream–dipped burrito and said, “You told me I should try new things.”
“Did I?” I remembered telling him I wanted him to paint again. I didn’t remember anything about beer.
“You don’t want one, do you?”
Beer reminded me of last Saturday night and the bat. I would probably never drink it again. “No thanks.”
“So what’s up?” he said. “UPS man brought your darkroom stuff today.” He pointed to the once–dining room table. “I got you three sizes of paper. I wasn’t sure if you wanted to go to sixteen by twenty or not, but what the hell, right?”
“Thanks,” I said. And then I went into my pocket and got the letter. “I did some research today. I think you need to know about this.” I handed him the letter and he started reading it. “If we don’t send her a letter now, she could take the land from us. I don’t think we should let her have it. I don’t care if it breaks me and Ellie up.”
He finished reading it and then he read it again. I could see his reading eyes start back at the top left of the paper.
“Obviously, you’d have to sign it,” I said. “It’s not my land.”
“Shit, kid. I can’t do this.”
I gave him the WTF? face.
“I hate confrontation. I hate Jasmine. Mixing the two is just too much. I mean, for me, you know?”
“They can take the whole place from you. The house, the land, the barn. All of it. Like—not too long from now, either. Maybe a year? Whatever is twenty-one years from when you gave it to them.”
He turned this over in his head and made a few grunty noises in his throat. “I’ll think about it,” he said, and he dropped the letter onto his lap.
I just looked at him. He was sloppy. Clearly two beers was his limit.
“I don’t get why you’re afraid of her,” I said.
He shook his head. “I’m not afraid of her,” he said. “It’s her home. It’s where she raised her kid. I mean, how would I feel if someone took this place away from me? I couldn’t do that to another person.”
“You paid for this place,” I said.
“Your mother paid for it. I didn’t have a pot to piss in.”
“So then sign the deeds over to me and I’ll kick her ass off,” I said.
He eyed me suspiciously.
“Is something going on between you and Ellie? Is she getting on your nerves or something? You can just ignore her, like I ignore them all. You don’t have to hurt anybody,” he said.
“I don’t want to hurt anybody. I just want what’s ours. It’s important.”
Dad frowned. “I didn’t raise you to think like that.”
“California, remember? The Virgin Islands?” I said. “You can’t sell this place without taking the land back.” I looked around the room. I saw the art. The TV. The couch. His tie-dyed T-shirt. I saw the new darkroom supplies on the table, waiting to be exposed and developed. “I want us to get on with our lives, Dad. I want us to be what Mom would have wanted us to be. You painting, me growing up and having a life. Not stuck in neutral. Not just sitting around eating microwave dinners,” I said. “I want to go to college. I want to be somebody. I want to do cool shit.”
He stared at me and looked a bit shocked. Or happy. Or thoughtful.
“So think about it, okay?” I pointed to the letter on his lap. “I know it seems wrong. I know it seems…”
“Vindictive?”
“Yeah. But it’s not. It’s not even mean. Do you know what’s mean? Squatting on someone else’s land for nineteen years and never even thanking them for it. What’s mean is knowing you can steal it if you wait them out. That’s mean. This is hard and seems mean, but it’s not mean.”
“Just think about it,” I said.
“Okay.”
I took my new boxes of paper to the darkroom and I didn’t print anything. I just sat there on a stool and looked around. I looked at the tooth and I wanted to touch it, for some reason. It was part of Darla. I could tell it things. It could keep me strong as I wrote another entry in The History of the Future.
I stood on the stool and untacked it from the ceiling and when I sat back down, I took off the message—Not living your life is just like killing yourself, only it takes longer—and I tacked that to the door. I cupped the tooth in my hands. Someone had drilled a tiny hole through the tooth and strung the red thread through it. The roots were long and chunky and ugly.
All the rest of her had been cremated and saved for Dad’s ashes so they could be scattered together in the Caribbean Sea, where they’d honeymooned. I didn’t have anywhere to visit when I felt like crying about it. I didn’t have a gravestone to hug or a place to leave flowers. So I held the tooth and had an imaginary conversation with Darla.
ME: Why shouldn’t I kick them off the land?
DARLA: Because then Jasmine would win.
ME: What would Jasmine win?
DARLA: She’d be the ultimate nonconsumerist. She’d be the ultimate hippie.
ME: Are you fucking kidding me?
ME: She’s a parasite, Mom.
DARLA: She’s a very smart parasite, then.
I went back upstairs and flopped on the green chair again. Dad looked up from his laptop.
“Is this some endurance test of hippieness? Like, if you ask for your own land back, that will be you being a consumerist and she will win or some shit?”
He cocked his head. “A little bit, yeah.”
I looked at him. First, I wondered if the imaginary conversation I’d just had with Darla was really Darla. I was pretty sure it wasn’t. I just think like Darla.
Oh well.
Then I got a transmission from Dad.
He will be a very old man when he dies. I will be with him. I will be pretty old too. He will hug me and tell me he’s proud of what I’ve done. I will be wearing a headband.
This was huge. It nearly made me cry on the spot. I was going to grow old? Like old-old?
The headband thing bothered me. It looked like I was wearing it as a bandage, not as a fashion accessory.
“You’re looking at me like I’m crazy,” Dad said.
“You are crazy.”
He shook his head.
“I read all about that law this morning,” I said. “She’s going to win everything. The land, the house, the barn. After all that, she’ll finally have you, like she always wanted you. I don’t think Mom would be happy about that at all. Consumerist or nonconsumerist.”
“I gotta get back to work,” he said.
I went back to my room and I opened my sketchbook.
I paged to Empty Jar.
I asked myself, “What will you put in your jar, Glory?”