Missed Connections (8 page)

"Valentines?"

Emily slapped his shifting hand lightly.

"Hey, don't hit the driver, I'm the one keeping us alive," Rob said. "What valentines?"

"You have to have the worst memory of anybody I ever met if you don't remember those. They're so cute! Handmade hearts of construction paper
and
glitter and stickers, and even a bit of doily on one, and they have
Rab plus Rob numeral 4 E,V,A
on them in glitter glue. There's like three or four of them!"

"Doesn't ring a bell. Mom's been telling me about this guy, but I can't picture him."

"Oh, cold," Stanny said. "Better hope he feels the same way, or you're dead."

"That kind of stuff only happens in operas and
telenovelas
," Maria said. "Speaking of, my mom is completely addicted to this one that is so stupid it's worth watching for its absurdity. For one thing, get this, a man and a woman meet after thirty years and they get close and it turns out he's the father of her child. Don't you think they'd have recognized each other after they did something like that?"

"Not if it was a one-night stand," Emily said. "Isn't that what happened to the people at this wedding anyway?"

"Yeah, but real life doesn't have to make sense," Maria said.

They had to wait twenty minutes for George and Sera and Letty and Jaime to show up at Casa de Fruta. Stanny said, "I don't see why we can't just go into the restaurant or something. It's boring and you won't let me go into the souvenir shop."

Emily said, "No breaking things. You could go look at the miniature train. But just
look,
okay?"

"You know he's going to find something to get into trouble with," Maria said as Stanny walked away. "Rob, go watch him."

Rob grimaced and followed Stanny across the substantial lawn. Sure enough, Stanny had already gotten into an altercation with a white peacock.

Rob rescued Stanny from the viciously attacking bird, saying "How did you get in trouble so fast?"

"You shouldn't molest the animals," a censorious-looking man in a flat cap said. "It's cruel."

"I was just trying to give it a piece of bread," Stanny said.

When they got back on the road after breakfast, Emily drove, and Rob got in the backseat with Stanny, who was in a bleak mood.

"Don't pout," Rob said. "You're lucky I was able to talk your dad out of making you ride with him the rest of the way. Man, you're lucky he didn't hog-tie you and throw you in the trunk."

"He wouldn't have done that," Maria said. "He would have kept him in the passenger seat so he could watch him and keep him from dismantling the windows."

"I wouldn't do that," Stanny said.

"After what you did in the restaurant, nobody would dare take bets on what you would or wouldn't do anywhere else," Emily said.

"It wasn't that bad, it just got out of control," Stanny said. "The sign says 'Home of the Cup Flipper and nobody was doing it. I thought there should be a cup flipper at the home of the cup flipper!"

Maria turned around in her seat and pointed her finger at Stanny. "One, there's no cup flipper anymore. Two, the cup flipper used to flip one cup at a time because that's what the trick is. One cup, one flip. Nobody ever tried to take a stack of cups and saucers and tried to flip them all at once. That's dumb."

"Plate spinners spin a whole stack," Stanny said.

"Plates are not cups. Anyway, please, next time you get a flashy idea, tell somebody about it before you try it, okay?"

Delays

The last leg of the trip went slowly. Maria insisted on driving because she hadn't done any mountain driving before, but because she hadn't done any mountain driving before she took every hairpin curve at a walking pace and pulled into every turnout, getting stuck while chains of hot-dogging locals zoomed past But they couldn't get the wheel away from her, so they had to endure two-and-a-half hours of past-the-tree line creeping.

"The view is great, though," Rob said.

"So optimistic," said Emily. But she couldn't deny it: the vast stretches of bare rock, twisted and scarred by millions of years of dramatic geographic action, were something to behold. It was grand and somber to eyes trained on the gentle curves of the coastal hills and the lush growth of the marine terrace and redwood forest.

Stanny was asleep.

"Here we are!" sang out Maria as they took a tight curve around a crumbling pile of boulders and there, below them, a more gently winding road descended to a little river valley decked out with a quaint sprinkling of cabins and tents and other rustic amenities. Rob elbowed Stanny, who came to with a blink.

"We're here," Rob explained to Stanny's scowl. "Didn't want you to miss the approach."

"What for?" Stanny said, but in a moment he was gaping at the view himself. "It's a long way down," he said.

"It's not steep here, though," Rob said.

"It doesn't matter what it is, it's what it looks like that makes my stomach hurt," Stanny said.

"Wait, has this been bothering you all along?" Rob asked.

"Yeah, that's why I went to sleep."

"Sorry," Rob said, "I didn't know. I guess I'm bad at noticing things."

"You are," Emily agreed happily. "You need people to hold your hand and tell you things."

"Alas, most people don't operate that way," Rob said, thinking of his kinda-sorta college boyfriend, who'd left him a letter that started out with 'You're a sweet guy, and I still like you a lot'
,
and ended up a list of twenty things Rob 'should have known' and done something about and the conclusion that someday he'd be a good boyfriend to somebody, if he ever got a clue and grew the eyes to see what was in front of his face.

Stanny was right—the resort was a long way down. And Rob was right—the mountainside was not steep. And Maria was still driving, so the descent was slower even than the ascent into the mountains. "This downhill stuff is creepy!" she said but she wouldn't relinquish the wheel. Altogether it was another forty-five minutes of braking and coasting till they finally leveled out on the gravel drive of the resort.

And yet, they beat their parents, who called and said they were having dinner in Mariposa for some reason. "Isn't it early?" Rob asked.

"We needed a pit stop anyway," Sera said.

They were met by a man Rob recognized. It was Jack's burly possible boyfriend, only now he was wearing a T-shirt with a logo Rob didn't recognize, and long walking shorts.

"You must be on Constance's side," the man said. "I'm Charles, the guy who's finally earned the privilege to marry the lady. And you all are?"

"Sera's kids and stepkids," Maria said. "I'm Maria, this is Emily, Stanny's the shrimp, and the old man is Rob."

"Oh, the famous Rob," Charles said in a knowing way. He didn't seem to recognize Rob from all their near-encounters back home. "Good to meet you all. So pull up your car over there, and see that building? It's the office and they'll tell you where you're sleeping. And Stanny and Rob, fair warning: the bachelor party tomorrow night is mandatory."

After gesturing all of them over, he stepped back and let Maria park. They trooped over to the office while Stanny muttered about the arrogant assholism of calling a mandatory bachelor party and making innocent kids witness old farts get shitfaced.

"It might not be like that," Rob said mildly, though he also cringed at the thought of having to share a maudlin prenuptial evening with his stepfather's generation. Worse, he thought, was the knowledge that the groom for this wedding was a man he had seen acting very close with Jack several times in the last month and a half.

Well, maybe it wasn't what it had looked like. Maybe. He hoped so.

More arrivals

They had just gotten their luggage moved to their various tents—no cabins for the young folk of Sera's contingent—when George and Sera crunched to a halt in the gravel drive. Chuck materialized from nowhere again and to guide them, but unlike earlier Chuck stayed with George and Sera and kept on talking. Rob shrugged and followed Maria and Emily on their self-guided tour of the campground. Stanny wanted to hang out in the tent and play video games on his phone, but Rob grabbed him by the elbow and made him walk around with the rest of them. He didn't say "so as to keep you out of trouble," but he might as well have, because Stanny said "Geez, Rob, I can be on my own for
twenty minutes
, okay?"

"You could, except this is your chance to figure out what's here and I'm not going to let you miss out on it," Rob said blandly. "Ten years from now we'd be reminiscing about this place and what happened here, and you'd be feeling like an idiot because you'd have nothing to add since you'd spent three days holed up in your tent doing what you could do anywhere. And I'd feel like an asshole because I
Iet you miss out."

"You're not my dad," Stanny said.

"No, I'm your brother and I owe this to you," Rob said.

Emily and Maria were bonding again over the hints of wildlife in the little river and the sulphur smell coming from the hot springs on the farther bank. Stanny was glowering but not whining for now. Rob enjoyed the feel of the high mountain sun on his skin. Up here the sun seemed so much closer than it did down at sea level. "Yikes," he said after a while, when he noticed that the warmth was turning to heat. "We all need to go get sunblock if we're going to stay outside."

"I'm probably already burned," Stanny said mournfully. "All because you dragged me out here."

They turned back and soon connected with Sera and George, who were fully protected with large hats, sunglasses, long sleeves, and visible
and
smelleable streaks of opaque sunblock. Sera greeted them as if it had been weeks rather than hours since she'd talked to them. "And did you see Rab yet?" she asked Rob. "Charles says he's here somewhere."

"I wouldn't know," Rob said. "I don't know what he looks like these days."

"Oh, right," Sera said. "I'll point him out to you, then."

But Rab wasn't to be seen. Rob didn't mind. He was certainly curious about this mythical best friend from childhood, but his curiosity wasn't the burning type. His sisters' insinuations about puppy love did not make him more curious.

Dinner was interesting enough without meeting Rab. Apparently a small catering crew had been hired for the entire trip, but they were not there to do all the work. Everybody had jobs to do. Rob became a busboy: he ran dishes and utensils to the long folding tables before the meal and picked them up into tubs after he had eaten. Stanny was assigned to work along with him, a gift Rob supposed he owed to the mothers' backchannel communications. But he gave up being Stanny's watchdog when he realized these were camp dishes and could not be broken easily. Stanny got the job done. He dropped a few more things than average, but he didn't get any crazy ideas about it, so it was all good.

During dinner Rob got introduced to a variety of people he was supposed to have known in early childhood. They all clucked and cooed over him the way his uncles and aunts did, which was mildly embarrassing, but tolerable. Some people were surprisingly excited when he told them he had just graduated with an environmental sciences degree. Apparently it was a popular field among the people at the campground. "Charles has a company that does environmental impact reports," Constance told Rob. "He might be able to fit you in somewhere. I'm not promising anything," she added hastily.

Rob liked Constance. He had been prepared not to, when his mother said that she was a girl who had liked to sleep around freely when she was in high school and had never married since. She said she had only embraced a monogamous life in her early thirties because she didn't have time for an active and complex social life any more. But he couldn't see anything really objectionable about her besides her somewhat ridiculous earrings, which featured cartoon owls and snakes painted in livid colors on plastic shields half as big as his palm. Her conversation was bright and friendly and she had a surprisingly ladylike laugh. She observed that her son was not there, but didn't offer an explanation, and Rob didn't ask for one.

The big reveal?

The next day was all organized hikes and games. The morning hike was organized by Charles, and included a great deal of mountain natural history and a little social history as well. Stanny refused outright to go. Any argument on Rob's part was forestalled when George showed up with a posse of younger teens and older children bound for a swimming expedition. Suddenly Stanny didn't have a heartfelt objection to going out in the potent Sierra sunlight anymore. That there was a girl carrying a backpack full of different strengths of sunblock and George was handing him two huge parasols to carry may have been part of the explanation. Especially, Rob thought, since the girl also had a couple of handheld games and encouraged Stanny to bring his phone with him with too.

It was apparently because of Charles that the wedding was being held up here. It wasn't only the place of his life's work, it was also his childhood home. The high school era visit to the coast when he had inadvertently fathered Rab had been a rare occasion. "I can't say I regret every moment when I am not in the mountains," Charles said, "But I will say that I usually prefer the moments up here to the other ones. Usually, not always."

It felt to Rob that they were stalling for time. Charles made them stand around for well over fifteen minutes, telling them pleasant but pointless anecdotes and fussing about their sunblock and water supplies. Finally he said, "Oh, here he is, we can go now."

Rob looked around and saw Jack approaching. Rob scowled. He had successfully forgotten that the husband-to-be of his mother's best friend had been seen all over town with a fellow Rob's age, a fellow Rob harbored a bit of attraction to himself. Remembering it all again was not pleasant. Especially since the guy in question was looking at him like he was the one doing something underhanded.

"For the new arrivals, this guy here's my son Jack," Charles said. "Lucky me, he's following in the old man's footsteps. We'll be seeing his name on our reports starting—when's that first one coming out?"