Retreat to Love Read online

  Water lilies flanked both banks, in places so dense the ropy, gnarled roots of the cypress trees weren’t visible as they hooked themselves into the water. The management had scattered some benches and picnic tables across the live oak-shaded lawn, and a few other groups were lounging and drinking in the late afternoon sun. One couple was sharing bruschetta topped with something red; as they fed it to each other, they splatted blobs of crimson on their cheeks and chins. If it weren’t for that visual, it would have been downright romantic.

  We walked a ways up the path. There were some kids fishing off the main road’s bridge, skinny little guys. The ducks back-peddling around the edge of the water right near them probably had a lot to do with why they weren’t catching anything. Just to confuse them, Wren tore up bits of her napkin and tossed them at the ducks, which figured out quickly she was toying with them, but stuck around just in case she was hiding something.

  “That table’s free now,” Zach told us, tipping his chin at the picnic table on the far end of the lawn. Caleb spied some fresh patrons edging out onto the patio, handed me his beer, and sprinted to claim the table before them.

  “Mine, all mine,” he cackled when we caught up to him. I sat opposite him and handed over his Shiner Bock.

  “Those people think you’re an idiot,” I said. They were leaning up against the railing of the covered porch, pretending to laugh at a joke instead of us.

  “So?”

  Zach slid in next to me, telling Wren, “You should keep an eye on those ducks.” She moved around to sit opposite me, facing the water. Already the alcohol had flushed her cheeks; when she’d told me she was a lightweight drinker, I’d figured she could take two or three units before she turned tipsy. But if she was right about her inhibitions, too, maybe the beer’d help her out. Already a couple of times she had flipped her hair in that annoyingly attractive way longhaired blondes have when their pheromones were firing. Having rather flat brown hair myself, the most I could ever manage was letting wisps of it escape from a braid or scrunchie, so unless it was humid I ended up looking unkempt rather than fetching.

  Zeke and Ned started in talking about other Zekes and Neds out there, and what had happened to them in the prior years. Like I cared. But Caleb started it, and we were all there on the premise of the two of them catching up. So I heard all about Neil, who’d invented an ergonomic keyboard, and Emily, whose group had just been awarded a patent for their Gamma project, and Warren, who had worked on the Atlas URL. And neither Zach nor Caleb brought up Eva, so I was glad I’d given Caleb enough info for him to flag her as a hot topic.

  It took me sighing and leaning against Zach’s shoulder to get him to shut up about him and focus on us gals. Or more specifically, on Wren, whose eyes were beginning to rim with red. Boredom or frustration about hearing yet another geek success story, I couldn’t tell. Either way, she blinked it out of her when Caleb started acting interested in her stories about the agent she’d hooked up with out of college and just recently dropped. His monstrosities ranged from a commission for Wren to make crucifixes for a priest who wanted gifts for his mistresses to selling her bowls to a traveling exhibition of the art of the impaired.

  “He told them I was mute, so I couldn’t interview, then pointed out how wonderfully I’d learned to express myself through my work! He says to me, ‘Lauren, baby, this one is perfect—it’s no problem for you to fake it, and if you make it big and they come back asking questions, you can attribute it to a miracle! Think of all the poor desperate souls who’ll buy up your stuff to try to ride the coattails of your encounter with the Lord!’ Well, I called the Enabled Artists and told them my ‘miracle’ had happened a little sooner than Marty had planned.”

  As we laughed, Caleb caught my eye. He let his eyes shift towards Wren, smiled, and subtly toasted me with his longneck before taking a swig. He obviously didn’t think she noticed, but from the way her cheeks went red right back to her ears, I knew she had.

  Dinner itself was a little less flirty and more friendly. There was a give-and-take to the conversation, and I was happy to feel a part of it instead of like an inexperienced puppeteer watching to see if my marionettes would go where I was hoping they would. Zach ordered a half-pound of fajitas with his salad, making me promise not to tell Bernadette, which brought on the inevitable story of why we were veggies in the first place. How Bernadette said Gran and Pappa couldn’t be our caretakers while they ran their co-op store unless Pappa traded in his chicken ranching for organic farming.

  “What would they have done if he’d refused?” Wren asked, pecking away at her burger.

  “Handed us over anyway, I suppose.”

  “It’s not like they were so successful they could afford to put us anywhere else,” I added. “And having Zach at the store for a couple of years before I was born was enough for them. They didn’t want to try to keep us both under control while they spread the natural word through the Gulf States.”

  Zach disagreed. “They’d have kept us there if they’d had to. But Gran and Uncle Matt were pretty set on us coming out every day. When I was ten Frank told me I could come home after school and hang out in front or up in my room if I wanted, but Pappa said I shouldn’t.”

  “Matt was already gone by then.” He was a guitarist, and had lived at home throughout early adulthood, until he had the money and reputation to move to LA and make it as a session musician. Our Uncle Dermot, who was stationed in San Diego, was supposed to help ground him, but Matt had spent years wandering up and down the Pacific Coast. The rest of us never heard much from him, but he and Zach had been close since Zach’s earliest days, infant ears turning whenever Matthew crooned songs his way.

  “Yeah, and Pappa was lonely. You and Gran were so cliquish, us guys had to bond with each other to stop ourselves from pure-dried boredom.” He’d unleashed the brogue-y drawl.

  I smiled. “I’d never-a guessed.”

  “It’s the God’s honest.”

  “Well, shit fire and save the matches!”

  Zach nearly choked on his jalapeños. Most of Pappa’s trademark phrases we kept to ourselves, but once we started exchanging them it took no time before one of us was doubled over.

  “Careful, there, lady boy, you cut yourself a fat hog this time,” I said, thumbing at his over-loaded plate. He coughed again and called for another beer.

  “Want one?” he asked Wren and Caleb.

  “No, you two go ahead,” Caleb said. “Whatever you’re having is obviously doing a lot for you.”

  Wren grinned at him. “I knew there was some sort of back-woods fool in that girl there. All it took was one beer to bring it out.”

  “I hope it goes back before breakfast tomorrow. I don’t want to find myself bellying up to a mess of grits anytime soon.”

  “You have both been watching too much Beverly Hillbillies,” I said, primly dabbing at my mouth and folding my napkin back into my lap. “Y’all hush now, y’hear?”

  Stuffed, we all collapsed on my sofa and floor for coffee and lingering chat. I was getting to know them both pretty well now; it was one of those revelatory nights that made you feel even closer. Caleb’s nuevo-environmentalism sprang from spending two weeks hiking Oregon after graduation; he’d been on mini-pilgrimages to a lot of the sites Ansel Adams had immortalized ever since, and was gradually compiling enough for a photo essay.

  And Wren told us about the night when she was seventeen and had run away in order to find a home where no one would force her to pack up every few months. Her college fund paid for the bus to Norwich, Connecticut, a deposit on the two-bedroom duplex, and a print run of thirty resumes. She’d been in the same place for the intervening years and had never since traveled further than Cape Cod. GED obtained, she commuted to New London three times a week for five years to get a studio arts degree at Connecticut College. Flying to Austin for FireWind was her first plane ride since her childhood trips to summer with her grandmother in Alaska.

  Zach hung around until almost two
, long after Caleb and Wren headed out of my den. “You think they’re going off together?” he asked when the sound of her flats on the short concrete path had faded off.

  “Dunno. They weren’t being obvious enough for me.”

  “Well, I think we done good. Did you notice the way I kept bringing the conversation back to her?”

  “Yeah, you’re a master of subtlety, but I picked up on it.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. ‘No, I can’t stand watching baseball on TV. Wren, what will you do when FireWind is over?’”

  He threw a vegan marshmallow at me from the bag he’d imported for my hot chocolate. “You told me to set them up.”

  “And you did. Thank you.” I ate the mallow. “Don’t forget to load me up with dirt on college days.”

  He groaned. “I don’t know anything. We weren’t exactly bosom buddies, you know, we just saw each other at the lab.”

  “Which you were at for hours every day. You know stuff, so spill it.”

  “I honestly don’t remember much. He had some girlfriends, off-and-on kind of things. One of them, this brunette with a ponytail, she and Eva hit it off. We doubled a couple of times.” He did the usual brow-crinkling thing, which meant he was pretending to think hard but was just looking for a way to end the stream of the conversation. “Her name was Ellen or Lucy, something like that. Ellen, I think. Helen. Pre-med. They lasted a few months, a year, I don’t know. Then she moved. Or got a new boyfriend, or something.”

  “Was her name Ann and she dropped him after sleeping with some guy she met because y’all were meeting at Eva’s place for a movie and this guy lived next door?” I asked.

  He sat up and thunked his mug on the table. “Oh God.”

  “That was him?”

  “Oh Mother God. I’d forgotten.”

  “Zach? It was Caleb, wasn’t it?”

  He nodded. “Do you think he hates me?”

  “Where would you get that?”

  “Cause Ann and Shawn ...”

  “Cause nothing, Zach, Ann was a bitch. She’d have done it with someone else if it wasn’t with Eva’s neighbor. You just wouldn’t have known so much about it, is all.”

  “Well, I’d hate me.”

  “Maybe you’re more into displacing your emotions than he is. He hasn’t acted at all like he’s got a problem with you.”

  “Has he mentioned Ann at all?”

  “Why would he? It was like a decade ago. Do you still mention Eva all the time?” Stupid me. Because of course he doesn’t. He hasn’t dealt with it, which I, the trusted and knowing little sister, am perfectly aware of. “Sorry,” I added.

  He sat back down. “No, it’s okay. Like you said, it was years ago.”

  “Zach. Come on, it can’t still hurt that bad?”

  He wouldn’t focus on me. He just shook his head.

  “You wanna talk about it?”

  He shook his head again. “It’s not her, Ashlyn. It’s me. I mean, I’m worldly enough to know things just don’t work out sometimes, and at least she didn’t do anything cruel, like Ann. So it ended. Life goes on.”

  “Well, then?”

  “Well, then, she lives in Marin with her law degree and architect husband and baby girl. She’s happy, I’ve moved on.”

  “So you keep saying.” It wasn’t the first time we’ve talked about love and the way it ends and what happens afterwards. But I’ve always let him bring it up before, or else I’ve talked to him about my own situations. And he’s never brought up the break-up with Eva, not since he told me what had happened.

  “I know all the things to say, Ash. I’ll meet someone else. It’ll be magic. I’ll forget anyone like Eva ever existed. We’ll be so good together it’ll make my life whole in a way she never could have.” He looked at me then, and smiled a little. “And when all that happens, I’ll be happy.”

  “You don’t think it will?”

  “No, I do. Some day. Hell, tomorrow would be good. I’m open for it.”

  “Well, I love you.”

  He let me hug on him a while. “I love you, too, sis.” Pulling back, he added, “And if it were Game of Thrones we could go with that and live happily ever after. Well, not happily ever after. Those guys are fucked up. So it’s a bad idea.”

  “Good thing. Cause I hate to burst your bubble and all, but you’re so not my type.”

  He laughed, finally. “What? You crazy? Look at me, I’m downright perfect.”

  “You’re a little skinny.”

  “I’m just healthy. Check out these muscles.”

  “And you’re definitely a nerd.”

  “But a well-off one.”

  “And above all, that mom of yours near bout scares me to death. That is one lady I do not want as a mother-in-law.”

  “Now, that I can agree with.” Yawning, he stood. “I should hit the road, gotta actually go in for a lunch meeting tomorrow.”

  “Poor guy. I gotta get up in about five hours to cook muffins for eight grumpy artists.”

  “When I get home, before I go to sleep, I’ll cry a river of tears for you.”

  “Thanks.” We hugged at the door. “And thanks for coming down and all. Now get the hell out of here.”

  He headed out into the blackness, his headlights bobbing across the crushed white of the dozed-out road. I sighed. My brother, whisking through the darkness to his hip little stone house in Austin; he’d bought a three-bedroom in anticipation of needing both a study and a nursery some day. I had a key so I could crash in the guest room at a moment’s notice, and only four or five times had he asked me to stay away because there’d be someone else there in the morning eating his signature huevos rancheros. I was all about the free accommodations, but for his sake, hoped he would find the woman to make him forget the Evas out there can take all your love and trust and turn it around until you are afraid to give it to anyone else again.

  Maybe someday.

  Maybe tomorrow.

  I closed the door and closed my eyes, sending happy ever after thoughts into the ether for my too-alone brother.

  Chapter 5

  The alarm clock dragged me up through a confusing swathe of fuzzy dream-chatting with a 21st Century Martha Washington. It was 6:30; Caleb insisted I be by his side in the kitchen by seven. He pffted at my pointing out it takes only minutes to prepare cereal in a bowl of soy milk.

  In deference to my headache, I kept my grumblings quiet as I drenched myself in the shower. I had to wash my face three times to get the sleep rocks out of my eyes and the smell of my asparagus-soup tainted pee out of my nose. It was the kind of morning I most cherished my collection of oversized sweatshirts. I felt almost like myself when I stepped onto the porch of the Main House.

  “Hey, sleepyhead,” Caleb said over his shoulder as he rinsed potatoes in the sink.

  “How long have you been up?”

  “An hour, I guess. Zach got home okay?”

  “I suppose. He’d sobered up before he left, and he’s used to being up until the early hours, so there’s no reason why not.”

  “Here, grate these,” he said, passing me a chopping board loaded with peeled spuds. “We’re making latkes this morning.”

  I looked around. “Isn’t there a food processor or something?”

  “It makes it too fine. Latkes need texture. Use the coarse end.” He gathered up all the scraps of peel. “Have you seen a compost?”

  I shook my head no. “Haven’t looked. She shoulda mentioned it on the tour, though. Just feed them to the electric pig.”

  “The what now?”

  I stifled a yawn in my collarbone before looking up at him. “The disposal.”

  “God, you’ve gone all Texan on us again. Zach never did that.”

  “He says the only thing anyone ever asked him in California was why he didn’t have a Texas accent. So he dropped it all, just told people he was from a little town called Spring and they assumed it was off I-5 somewhere. But ever since h
e moved to Austin, he grew more of a drawl than ever.”

  “Doesn’t explain yours.”

  “The beer explains mine. Pure and simple.”

  Caleb smiled those crinkles again. “Well, it’s cute, you should drink more often.”

  “I’m glad you enjoy it. Damnation!” I shoved him away to wash the blood from my knuckles where I’d grated them. “You’re sure I can’t use a food processor?”

  “I’ll do it. You oil the skillet and put the sour cream and preserves into serving bowls.”

  “Yes, sir.” I didn’t mind his being in charge so much, but surely he considered me capable of doing more than menial kitchen jobs. My silence was resentful enough to stop him issuing more orders until he had the first batch frying.

  “Ashlyn, would you mind watching these so I can finish up the fruit salad? Just flip them when the edges brown up a little.”

  “I’ve made potato pancakes before, Caleb.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “I also mix up a damn good black bean burrito, a zesty western omelet, and my home-toasted granola will knock your socks off.”

  He stopped chopping to look at me. “Well, all your talk of sleeping in had me fooled. I had you pegged as a toasted bagel and out the door type.”

  “Breakfast is my main meal when I’m working. I don’t feel like going through a lot of trouble for lunch and big dinners for one are depressing, so I sleep late, make myself something yummy, and get to it. But the key is sleeping late.”

  “Well, remind me to give you a choice in what we make this week. Sorry if I’ve been a little pushy.”

  A little pushy? He’d been the most militant cook I’d ever met. I hoped Wren didn’t mind being submissive once in a while.

  As if summoned by my brain, she walked in, apparently scrubbed to freshness and vitality by her own morning shower. I would have snoop in her bathroom to see what product she used. “Morning, all!”