Bad Things

‘Ah, it's easy,’ he said, sounding much happier. ‘She print it off, leave it here, after the burglary. Everybody's is here. Is okay.’

‘Great,’ I said, relieved at not having to lean any more heavily on him. ‘Give me hers, and while you're at it, Ted's home phone too.’

He recited them, slowly and painstakingly. I thanked him, and was halfway to putting the phone down before he asked something.

‘You okay?’

‘I'm fine,’ I said.

I called Becki first. I wasn't banking on her to be up, certainly not to sound so businesslike at that time of the morning. She listened without interruption, and immediately agreed to the two things I asked of her. So finally I called Ted.

‘Don't tell me it's happened again,’ he said, straight away.

‘Nothing's wrong with the restaurant. I'm at home.’

‘So …’

I told him that I would be gone a day, maybe two. That Becki had agreed to cover for me on the floor, if reservations merited it. The truth was they probably wouldn't.

Ted listened as I laid it out for him. ‘What's this about?’ he asked, finally.

‘Family business,’ I said.

‘Didn't realize you even had one. A family, I mean.’

‘Well, I did,’ I said. ‘I do.’

‘Anything I can help with?’

‘I appreciate it, but no.’

‘You let me know if that changes.’

He was being kind but I wanted this over with. ‘I will, Ted. It's no big deal. Just, it has to be now.’

‘I hear what you're saying,’ he said.

I'd packed a small bag and locked the place down half an hour later, and ten minutes after that Becki arrived to drive me over to Portland.

* * *

I was on a plane at 12.40, business class, which is all I'd been able to get at short notice. I spent the bulk of the flight staring at the back of the seat in front, trying to concentrate on how strange it felt to be in the air again. I'd flown a lot in the past. For work, and longer ago for other reasons and under different circumstances and in planes that did not offer hot beverages. Sitting on the flight to Yakima, I realized it must be the first time I'd been on an aircraft in over three years.

Yet my hands strapped me in without conscious thought. I passed my eyes dutifully over the laminated ‘Let's pretend a crash isn't going to finish us all in a shrieking fireball of death’ sheet, and accepted a coffee from the stewardess with the frequent flier's casual indifference.

The distance between then and now is always far shorter than you think. By the time the plane had reached its cruising height, I was cradled in the past's unyielding embrace, and listening as it told me the same old story again.

That I'd once had a son, and he died.

Chapter 8 (#ulink_b2168b68-ffa9-504f-a0de-49f4740da717)

Kristina watched through the coffee store window as her mother started walking up Kelly Street back toward her lair. She took a deep breath, and let it out very slowly.

Children, huh. Again. For God's sake.

It was actually kind of amazing how her mom kept going on about it – ‘amazing’ in the limited sense of ‘unbelievably annoying’. It was her sole subject matter, apparently. She never pitched in about her daughter not having a husband, or a boyfriend … but a child – that was the only story in town. As if she'd been this perfect Earth Mother figure, a Good Housekeeping bake-and-nurture paragon, and was just dying to see the maternal genius bearing fruit in the next generation. As if the whole of male-kind was a sideshow or distraction, the unending line of women the only thing that ever mattered (because a granddaughter was what her mom wanted, let's face it, not just any flavour of grandchild) – and her own not-much-lamented husband had not been father to someone who'd loved him.

As if she honestly didn't realize there had been occasions when her own daughter had fervently – though unsuccessfully – wished her dead.

She ordered more coffee. Might as well. Her shift didn't start until five, so why not while away another Fairtrade, kind-to-all-God's-creatures hot beverage, savouring the rich pageant of a Black Ridge afternoon?

After a few minutes a car trundled past, its tyres making sticky sounds on the wet surface. A little later, a different car went by in the other direction. Hold the front fucking page.

Five minutes after that a girl whom she'd known back in school waddled diagonally across the street, toward the hair salon. By the look of it this girl had successfully made it to motherhood, at least six or seven times. Either that or she needed to seriously rein back on the snacks.

The sight of the salon triggered the thought that Kristina should/could/might as well get her own hair attended to, and so she called and made an appointment for a couple of days' time. Then she put the phone back in her bag, and returned to staring out of the window. A few more minutes passed, as though on their way to somewhere they'd already been told wasn't worth the visit.

What bugged her most was she didn't even know why she'd come back, and in truth this was probably part of why conversations with her mother tended to start scrappy and go downhill from there. She knew that her mother regarded her return as a moral victory, and Kristina wanted to be able to explain and defend it in some way other than pure laziness or worse. She didn't want to believe it had been inevitable.

That her mom had won, basically.

But why do you go back to where you and your parents and their parents and grandparents were born, after a decade away? Friends? Nope – all moved away, either geographically or into the snug dens of parenthood. Father? Dead. Dear mother herself? God, no. There's plenty room in a Christmas card to be reminded of your alleged responsibilities, and/or be given a hard time about the only important thing in life, spawning a child.

She'd left town less than a week after her eighteenth birthday. Goodbye, thanks for not much, I'm done here. Worked, paid taxes and leased apartments in five different states and three foreign countries, including a whacky six months in Thailand as the weird tall chick tending bar: by all means buy her a drink but please understand it isn't getting you anywhere. Some of it had been interesting, some of it fun, a lot of it day-to-day and hard to remember in detail – even the high times and hair-raising scrapes. She could have kept doing it, though, or things like it. Could have stuck it out in Vermont or Chicago or Barcelona, dug herself a life or just committed properly to the ones she'd tried, rather than leaving a series of men staring bemusedly at brief notes left on kitchen counters.

Yet here she was, back where she came from, under her own steam and with no one else to blame. And she had been here – she was horrified to realize – almost nine months now. She didn't want to be here.

And yet (and the words were beginning to feel like a spike in her brain, banged deeper and deeper by a hammer she held in her own hand), here she was.

She accepted a refill from the server, a girl who – despite nose ring and turquoise hair – was so bovine it made you want to set fire to her (and not just because she so obviously resented her sole customer for being thin: well, sweetie, newsflash – your hips are what happens if you won't eat anything except nut loaf and cheese). She wondered briefly where the girl had caught her counter-culture vibe from. Some two-years-ago crush who'd entranced a teen, flipped her world, and moved on? The uncle who always seemed cooler than Mom and Dad, while quietly tapping them for money on the side? Or the girl's own parents, dragging her hither and yon as a baby, borne on Mom's fleshy hip from festival to protest and back. Not that Kristina was so different, she supposed. You think you're being yourself and then one day you realize you're in beta testing for turning into Mom 2.0, the worst of it being that the observation is so fucking trite you get no points for having hacked your way to it the long way around.

And had she finally got down to the point? Was she back in town because part of her knew being elsewhere would never make a difference, that these mountains and trees and the scratchy pattern of these streets were where she came from?

She didn't think so. And yet…

Oh, fuck it.

She stood before she could complete the sentence yet again, left a large tip just to fuck with the hippy's head, and went out onto the street.

It was cold outside. Winter was knocking on the windows, and she knew she basically wouldn't get her shit together now to ship out before Christmas. She'd always liked fall and winter here anyway – the land was made for it, so long as you didn't mind snow and the somewhat oppressive company of trees – so maybe that could serve as an excuse. Perhaps she was proving you could come home again, and then leave for good. She hoped so.

People came and went up and down the sidewalk, some nodding at her, most not. She walked slowly up the street, in search of something to do until it was time to go to work. It was as if she'd been awake for ten years and then allowed herself to fall asleep again. Or maybe the other way around, she wasn't sure.

There was nothing for her here. Nothing she wanted, at least.

And yet here she was.

Chapter 9 (#ulink_ec9576c1-17d5-58f8-a7a0-2bbb3a0bbbe4)