Along Came Zoe

Arnie was banging around, opening cabinets, setting out glasses. “Pay a million dollars for a place, and the damn doors don’t shut properly. Say Zoe, d’you check out that entrepreneur site I told you about?”

Zoe ate a cherry tomato from the salad. “No.” Through the tomato, it came out dlo. “Hey, did anyone catch Phillip Barry on TV?”

“Zoe’s content to just muddle along,” Janna told Arnie apologetically. “Courtney’s my ambitious one. She takes after me. She knows that success doesn’t come seeking you out, you have to actively pursue it.”

“They might put me on commission,” Courtney explained as she leaned against the counter. “I saw him, Zoe. Phillip Barry. Actually, I often see him around Seacliff.” She looked at Arnie. “We know the Barrys from way back.”

Janna loudly cleared her throat.

Courtney grinned. “Oops.”

“The Barrys were neighbors of ours,” Janna said. “For a while.”

“We used to play with their kids,” Courtney said. “Phillip was…what, three or four years older than me?” She looked at Zoe. “Remember cannibal?”

“Vaguely.” Zoe turned to look out of the window. Brett and his cousins sat on the edge of a frothing hot tub. Brett was saying something and the other two were laughing. Ellen lifted a leg and splashed hard, showering Brett with a spray of water. The scene, obviously full of good-natured fun, seemed light-years away from her childhood memories.

One year, it seemed the Barry kids and Courtney had spent the entire summer playing cannibal in this great big metal bathtub. She could still see Phillip Barry’s hateful smirk. He’d looked straight at her arms with their big red blotches and said, “You’ll poison the pot.”

And then the other kids had all laughed, even Courtney. “Screw you,” Zoe had said. “I wouldn’t go in there for a million dollars. I don’t like Barry cooties in my food.”

Zoe stayed at the window, watching Brett, who had moved to sit next to Ellen. They were all laughing now. She wondered what they were talking about. Had Brett told them about this girlfriend his father had mentioned? Probably. She suddenly felt shut out, and somehow extraneous.

“The other kids wouldn’t let Zoe play cannibal,” Courtney was telling Arnie. “They thought her rash was contagious. Remember that, Zoe? How you got so mad?”

“Not really,” Zoe lied. Even now, she ached for the fierce little kid she’d been then. Locked in the bathroom, crying and scratching her legs and arms until she drew blood. Maybe Phillip Barry was God’s gift to medicine, but she could only think of him as a grown-up version of a horrible, snobby boy with a knack for cruelty.

“Oh, her skin wasn’t that bad,” Janna said. “It just flared up now and then because she forgot to put stuff on it. Remember all those salves I used to buy? If you’d just used them the way you were supposed to, you wouldn’t have had the flare-ups.”

Zoe turned from the window to stare at Janna. The scaly, oozing outbreaks at the backs of her knees had been so bad that it hurt to walk. Every day had been like that. Sitting on her bike, gears disengaged, a hand against the wall to keep her stationary, frantically pedaling around and around to unstick her legs. Had her mother really forgotten all that?

“Well, let’s talk about something else,” Janna said brightly. “Arnie, hon, what do you think Zoe could get for that house of hers if she put it on the market?”

“PAM SAID you should take Saint-John’s-wort,” Brett told Zoe the next morning as she was sweeping up the shards of a coffee cup she’d accidentally knocked off the counter. “She said it helped her when she was getting mad about everything.”

Zoe practiced deep breathing. Okay, breaking the coffee mug hadn’t been an accident. It was more like leftover anger from the night before. And hearing Pam’s name this morning did nothing to improve her mood. Pam, Denny’s twenty-eight-year-old surfer-chick bride. Pam wore neon-colored bikinis and bodysurfed. Last week in a late-night phone call Denny had asked Zoe if she could get by with half of the monthly child-support check because he wanted to surprise Pam with a trip to Hawaii to celebrate their three-month anniversary. Zoe had sweetly suggested that he do something anatomically impossible with his surfboard.

After Brett went off to school, Zoe slipped on her gardening clogs and went outside to augment the soil in the flower beds. Physical work to shake the surly, disgruntled aftertaste that family matters tended to leave in her mouth. An hour or so later, she looked up to see a guy in bib overalls and a straw hat pulling down the steep driveway towing a horse trailer behind a battered white truck. By the time she reached him, he’d unloaded a tan-and-white Shetland pony from the trailer and was leading it toward her.

“Heard from the feed-store guy that you keep a few animals.” He patted the pony’s neck. “This one here’s looking for a home. Used to give kids rides in a petting zoo, but she’s getting along in years. Ready for retirement,” he said with a laugh. “Know exactly how she feels.”

“Hold on.” Zoe ran into the house, grabbed a carrot from the refrigerator bin and brought it back for the horse who accepted it eagerly. She watched it, chewing contentedly with big square teeth, orange goo oozing from the side of its mouth. Cute, she thought. Blond bangs like a schoolgirl’s hanging over big brown eyes.

“You already have four goats, a sheep, three dogs and a litter of feral cats that you need to get fixed,” the voice of reason pointed out.

Kenna, Brett’s black Lab, was at her side doing some exploratory sniffing around the horse’s hind-quarters. At the bottom of the property, she could hear the two other dogs—Domino, part wolf according to Brett, and Lucy, a big shepherd mix she’d rescued from the animal shelter—barking at the goats. Last weekend, she and Brett had spent three hours stringing up an electric fence around the goats’ pen. The dogs were curious more than anything, but they alarmed the goats, which Zoe didn’t think could be good for their milk or the cheese she eventually wanted to produce. All those stress hormones.

“Gentle, too.” The guy wanted her to make a decision. “Loves kids.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Zoe said. “Warn the neighbors.”

The guy gave her a look—the same look her sister Courtney always gave her when she figured Zoe had to be joking but she didn’t find it especially funny. The horse finished the carrot and Zoe extended her fingers for it to lick.

“Got into some poison ivy?” The guy gestured at tracks that ran down her left arm and bloomed into a red cluster on the back of her hand. A new crop had appeared in the aftermath of Janna’s dinner.

“Yeah.” She shrugged. Easier than explaining what it really was. Without thinking, she began to scratch and then caught herself. She studied the horse. She was bony, her sides caving with each breath, but her perky cream mane was curiously touching. As if the horse was doing her best to be cute. Zoe realized she was hooked.

“Don’t horses need a lot of grooming?” She gestured around at the overgrown lawn, the roses sprouting bright red hips, the vigorous crop of dandelions. Brett was supposed to keep the grass cut, but constantly getting after him to do it was sometimes more trouble than dragging out the mower herself. “I’ve got more than I can do just to keep up with all this.”

He shrugged. “Get someone to help, why don’t you?”

Zoe eyed him briefly. “Money?”

“Oh, that.” His teeth, when he grinned, were roughly the size and color of the pony’s. “Yeah, what’s it they say? A necessary evil.”

She stroked the pony’s nose. “What does she eat?”

“Alfalfa, Bermuda. Some feed. Nothing fancy.”

“Expensive?”

“Nah.”

“What d’you think, Kenna?” She scratched the dog’s neck. “Think your master will groom her? Feed her? Keep her pen clean?”

“She’s yours for fifty bucks,” the guy said. “And I’ll throw in a bale of alfalfa.”

“Thirty,” Zoe said, visualizing her checkbook balance.

“Done.”

Nothing like buying a cheap horse to make you feel better, she decided later as she raked straw across its pen. It was things like this, unexpected gifts almost, that confirmed her belief that even if marrying Denny McCann hadn’t been the smartest move she’d ever made, it was also no cause for regret.

The biggest reason, of course, was Brett, but, shortly after Brett was born, Denny had managed to convince her that buying three acres of undeveloped land in northern San Diego County would be a good business investment.

The plan at the time had been for Denny to build houses on the property, one for them and then three others that he’d sell. “We’ll be set financially, babe,” he’d gloated. “I won’t ever have to work again.”

Omit the words, “have to,” and the second part at least was true.

Back then though, blissed out by the joys of new motherhood, not to mention sleep deprivation, she’d been pretty much indifferent to the idea of buying property. If Denny thought he could make it work, then fine.

While the first house—their house—was being built, she and Denny and Brett had lived in a trailer. Before ground was broken for the second house—actually before Denny had completely finished their own house—he’d succumbed to the charms of a young bank teller.

Zoe had kicked him out. He hadn’t taken a whole lot of convincing and, in a fit of conscience or guilt, had signed over the property to her. “You’re going to have to make the payments though,” he’d told her.

But of course.

The house, a gray two-story wooden structure, vaguely ramshackle New England in style, with a long back deck and steeply sloping roof now seemed so completely hers she could hardly remember her ex-husband’s role in its inception. Kind of like his role in creating their son, really.