Adam March turned up just as I was checking in an older couple reliving their youth by visiting the places they’d been on their honeymoon fifty years before. Mr. and Mrs. Abbott had bickered their way into the office and, key in hand, were bickering their way back out. I catch the glint of amusement in Adam’s eye as he stands aside to let them by. “You let me know if there’s anything else I can do for you,” I call to them. “Like get you dueling pistols.” This last remark under my breath.
“Nothing says second honeymoon like a good squabble,” Adam says as he walks up to the desk. “Ms. Mitchell, I’m here to throw myself on your continued mercy. Can we have our room back?”
I don’t see the dog, so I have to ask, “You and the dog?”
“Yes.” Adam glances toward the open door. “He’s checking things out.”
“How many nights?”
“Just tonight. I think.”
I try to make a good show of studying my computer screen, scrolling down and across, as if seeing if there is anywhere I can possible squeeze him in. I even pull a frown of concern.
“And I’m happy to pay the same surcharge as I did for last night.” He’s beaten me to the punch. I calculate the revenue in my head and have no choice but to smile and ask for his credit card.
“Cody should have room nine all set, so I’ll put you back in there.”
“I look forward to another stunning sunrise.”
“You should pay attention to the sunset, too. The view isn’t quite as dramatic, but the sky gets very pretty. You can get a nice view from the upper porch.”
“I will, thank you.” He takes the key out of my hand, pauses. “This is a nice place, Ms. Mitchell, perfect for a guy like me.”
“How so?”
He just shakes his head, as if he doesn’t really have an answer. Smiles that nice smile. “It just is.”
There isn’t anyone else expected to check in on this Tuesday afternoon, so I put up my sign and lock the office door. Cody has left the housekeeping cart on the porch instead of putting it in the laundry room. She knows better. It looks terrible, this cart full of helter-skelter bottles and brooms, dirty sheets billowing out, parked bluntly in front of the stairwell door. No pride. No sense of ownership, that girl. In the next thought, I pardon Cody. She’s only fourteen, after all. How responsible was I at that age?
With everything else going on in my life, I have given up meal planning in favor of something closer to “If it’s Tuesday, it must be meat loaf.” Tonight, it’s accompanied by baked potatoes, and in deference to the idea of a well-balanced meal, I’ve opened up a can of corn.
Cody sits down with a thud. Contemplates the slice of meat loaf on her plate, the same meat loaf that she’s eaten for years, but this time she’s looking at it as if I have finally lost my mind, or that I’m trying to poison her. “I can’t eat this. It’s disgusting.”
“You ate it last week. And the week before…”
“And, yeah, the week slash month slash years and years before that. But. Not. Anymore.”
“And when did you decide this?”
“I’ve been working up to it. I’m considering becoming a vegetarian.”
“Okay. So, no meat?”
“Duh. That’s what a vegetarian is.”
“Fish?”
“I hate fish.”
“Chicken?”
Cody shrugs. “Maybe. But not every day.”
“I come from a meat-and-potatoes background. We didn’t do vegetarian in the Lenihan household. I don’t think I know how.” I say this hoping to get a smile, but, as usual, she doesn’t give me an inch. I wonder for a second whether maybe the preponderance of red meat on the menu contributed in some way to my father’s early death. Then I remember that he died of a brain aneurysm, faulty wiring.
“I bet there’re recipes online.” Cody splits her baked potato and lathers it in butter, adds a handful of shredded cheddar cheese, smooshes it all together.
“And I bet you can make them.” I am not going to add specialty cooking to my task list. Uh, no. “You find them, give me the ingredients, and I’ll get you the stuff, but I’m not going to cook two different meals.”
“You could do it. Convert.”
It’s the first time in a very long time that Cody has suggested something we could do together. I should be glad. “I’ll think about it. I’m guessing you aren’t expecting canned corn and frozen peas as part of your diet. Vegetarians have to eat stuff like hummus and kale. Tofu.”
Cody shoves her bangs out of her face, gives me the death look. “You think that I’m some baby who doesn’t know what it takes to avoid meat without sacrificing nourishment?”
“Yeah.” Why are we fighting about this? We should be laughing. It should be a fun thing to do, plan meals, learn how to cook with fresh food. “Are you hanging around with vegetarians?” I jokingly make the word sound like it’s a cult. I want a smile. Give me something.
“No. Not exactly.”
“Who are you hanging out with?” I know that this is a good parenting question, know who your kid’s friends are. It gives me a little boost to think Cody really does have a peer group, even if it’s vegans or vegetarians.
“Nobody you’d know.”
“I’m sure I don’t, but I’d still like to know their names.”
“Hers. Molly.”
“Why don’t you have her come by some afternoon after school? I’d love to get to know your friend.”
“I really don’t think you would.”
“Why?”
Cody doesn’t answer, just shoves the untouched plate aside and goes to her room. Conversation over.
I poke at my own meat loaf. Maybe it is time to try a little harder with meals. I push the contents of my dinner plate into a plastic container, do the same for Cody’s untouched dinner, search for the covers, and can come up with only one that fits. It is one of life’s bigger mysteries, along with missing socks, where the tops to GladWare containers go to when they disappear.
* * *
Cody kind of regrets walking away from the dinner table. Not rejecting the meat loaf, but forgoing the baked potato, which is her favorite with cheddar cheese mashed into it. She’s hungry and too stubborn to go back out and grab the potato off her plate and bring it back into this closet that her mother thinks is an adequate space. At least the dump in Holyoke had a real closet; she didn’t have to hang her stuff on pegs against the wall. Well, they’ve got a couple of rooms occupied—that guy with the dog is back—so Skye will go hang out in the office most of the evening and Cody can get herself something to eat when her mother leaves the cottage. She pulls the remnants of Mosley’s joint out of the tampon box. Lights up.
It’s weird, having given up Molly to her mother, like they had more in common than the fact that Black Molly is in the in-school suspension room, too. They don’t talk. No one talks in ISS; the monitor makes sure of that. But on the way to pick up lunch this afternoon, Black Molly slipped a scrap of paper into Cody’s pocket, leaned close, and whispered, “Case you want some fun.” Cody takes it out now. The handwriting is abysmal, like the numbers have been written by a six-year-old. She doesn’t know if she should be pleased to have the attention of the only other student more despised than she is, or despondent. What the hell. She inhales a mouthful of dope, thumbs the number into her phone directory. Saves it. Exhales. She doesn’t think that the fun Black Molly has in mind is going shopping together, and that thought makes her smile. Skye think she’s trouble now, well, there’s a whole world of exciting trouble out there.
Cody pulls out her sketch pad and finds a pencil that’s got enough point on it to be useful. Mosley always sketches out his work on paper first, before committing the idea to whatever surface he’s working on. Except about making art, he’s so laid-back. Sometimes it feels like he doesn’t even know she’s there, but then sometimes she looks up from her sweeping and sees him watching her. He’ll ask her to stop, hold the pose. He’s in the “zone” and she’s helping him to work through something. That’s what he calls it. The zone. That’s when she most likes to be there, when Mosley is in the creative zone. Cody flips to a clean page in her sketchbook. Not another horse, no. She should try to expand on her subject matter. Mosley said that. “You have to draw everything, not just what you know you can draw well.” Words of wisdom, certainly.
Cody looks around the room, doesn’t see anything particularly sketchworthy. She looks out the single bedroom window at the trees that form a backdrop to the property, reds and yellows and permanent piney green. Brown oak leaves stubbornly cling to twigs, and faded yellow beech leaves flutter, raining down, defeated. She’s been to the top of Mount Greylock, been driven up the switchback road with its view-offering turnouts, and each wave of mountain and its trough of valley made her feel like she was at sea. Lost.
She feels claustrophobic, crowded by the relentless magnitude of the mountains, crowded by her mother. Aching with the weight of the Secret. It’s not so hard to keep silent when there is no one around who knows about Randy’s death, his murder. Maybe she should be grateful that they did move to this hellhole of a place; if they had remained in Holyoke, remained in the same neighborhood where everyone read the local paper and knew what had happened, where her friends were attracted by her unique status as child of the deceased, it would have been a lot harder to maintain a grip on the Secret.
Every few days, Cody checks the online version of the Springfield papers, looking for references to her father’s unsolved death. Making sure that the shooter knows that she’s keeping her promised silence.
Framed by the small window with the froufrou curtains wafting gently in the evening breeze is a big blazing red maple tree, its obscene color muted in the fading sunlight. She begins to work, shoves a hank of hair behind an ear. Her tree won’t be pretty; she’ll take liberties with its shape, and the benign maple will show its true intentions. A hanging tree. Mosley says you sometimes have to get down to ugly to make something beautiful.
The joint is reduced to an ember. She touches it to the edge of the curtain. It crumbles.
* * *
Adam thumbs off his phone after a nice, albeit brief, chat with Ariel—she’s fine; he’s fine—and swaps it for the remote, swings his feet up onto the bed, loosens his tie, and points the remote at the television. Chance pokes his nose over the edge of the bed, makes his little Me, too noise. “Come on.” He pats the bed, but he really doesn’t have to make a formal invitation for the dog to leap up, circle once, and snuggle his back against Adam’s side. Adam finds the news. “We should go for a walk before dinner.” Chance doesn’t seem to care either way, although his stubby ears perk at the word dinner. Adam drops his arm across the dog’s back, scratches gently along his ribs. In a moment, Adam gets up, opens his briefcase, and extracts a pint of Jack Daniel’s. The bathroom has only plastic cups, but they’ll do.
Adam takes his drink outside to the porch. Leans his elbows on the rail, studies the landscape. This time of year, the light becomes butter yellow before tarnishing into sunset. In a few minutes, he’ll take Skye’s advice and go upstairs to the west end of the gallery. The light here is different from that of the Cape, where he and Gina had spent a lot of time. Sunset was their favorite time to walk the beach. He wonders why they never made it up to the Berkshires, two hours and a whole landscape away. Standing, leaning, sipping, Adam is quietly glad that they didn’t. Maybe that’s why he is pleased to stay here again tonight. There is nothing of Gina here.
Adam finishes the drink, tosses the plastic cup into the wastebasket. There was a time in his life when he felt the world was closing in on him in an unfair and brutal way, and Mr. Daniel’s twelve-year-old product was his best friend. Now he enjoys a pre-dinner drink; later just a nightcap, a liquid reminder that, as bad as he feels now, he has regained control of himself. It was one of Chance’s first influences on him, when the unwanted dog had inserted himself into Adam’s life, requiring an attention that brought Adam out of his self-inflicted funk. A dog needs food and walking and a kind touch. What he gave in return was everything.