Six Feet Over It (14 page)

“Why do you know that?”

I put my hands up. Why did I
say
it?

“Huh.”

“But you’re still too young to run for state senate.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Yeah. Well. Happy late birthday.”

“Thank you.”

He gets up to riffle around in his pack.

“I brought you something.”

My toes clench inside my shoes.

I twist my ponytail around my fingers and press my shiny lips together. Sit on the top step.

He tosses me a brown-paper-wrapped bundle of tissue bound with red thread, protecting—

One more sparkly dead person, tiny shovel in one hand, bouquet of glittery flowers in the other. I blink. Dario smiles.

“He’s a grave digger. See?”

Oh, I see.

“Your birthday one, the lady, she’s a Catrina.
Catrin,
it means sort of … elegant? Because everyone dies, right? Not just poor people,
everyone,
fancy,
elegant
people, wealthy with big hats and flowers; all of us. José Posada was this artist a hundred years ago; he made a block print of her, carved into wood with ink,
Calavera Catrina.
For political … like a joke?”

“Satire?”

“Right. But now people make these from clay, every kind of dead person you can think of. Grave diggers!”

“I get it.”

“Your birthday Catrina, she is special. She is Mictecacihuatl, the patron saint. She’s the queen. Queen of the Underworld. She watches over the bones. Because she was born, and then sacrificed as a baby.”

Nice.
Stupid birth/death just like me.

Patron saint of
creepiness.

The grave digger grins from his tissue bundle in my open hands.

“But that’s more Aztec, the sacrifice part.”

“Great.”

“My friend Ana—friend of my family, in Pátzcuaro, she makes them. She’s a real artist. I asked her to send him for you and there he was, waiting at the post office. Isn’t he beautiful?”

His smooth bare skull, silver shovel shining, flowers resplendent in his bony fingers, dark pants painted over bone legs.

“Yes,” I sigh, holding him to the sunlight, reflected glitter light spinning, shiny stars skimming my skin. “He is.”

Dario pulls his Sierrawood Hills baseball hat over his black hair. Sits beside me.

“Elanor come around?”

I shake my head.

“You go see her?”

I stare into the mud.

He shakes his head. “How can you not like her?”

“I do,” I admit.

“Really?”

I nod.

“You do?”

“Yes.”

“Want to go to Rivendell? I need potting soil anyway. I can drop you off. …”

I shake my head miserably.

“Or I could teach you to drive and you could get your license and take yourself there, or anywhere you wanted. …”

“No.”

“Leigh. I don’t understand.”

“Me either,” I sigh.

“Your mom back yet?”

I nod.

“How’d that go?”

I shake my head.

The leaves of the tree saplings lining his walk shiver in a slow draft, rain-soaked and lawn-scented.

“Hungry?”

We walk past the Manderleys and fifteen minutes later we are sipping lemon water downtown in a booth at Denny’s and studying tall, glossy plastic menus. When the waitress comes, I announce, “I would like the hot fudge ice cream cake, please.”

Dario shoots me a stern
It isn’t even eleven a.m.; you are not eating cake and ice cream for breakfast
look, hands his menu over, and says, “Me too.”

I am accumulating a debt of gratitude to him I fear I may never be able to repay.

The waitress nods. “Good choice.”

MAYBE “FISHING IN LAKE TAHOE”
is code for something sketchy or life-changing, because ever since he’s been back, Dario is not only especially, relentlessly cheerful, but he also has a seemingly random and definitely super annoying new obsession.

He is going—
driving
—to the post office every five minutes, which makes me so anxious I can hardly stand it. Because aside from the law he’s breaking every single day just by being here at all, he is otherwise a stickler for rules, and when he drives it is understood that he’s breaking two pretty major ones simultaneously, but clearly the risk is worth it to him. He does not talk about it. None of us do.

All I know about it is what I’ve gotten from Wade, which isn’t much, because I don’t think I
want
to know, and Dario does little more than confirm facts. Plus with Wade, anything I think I know is probably wrong anyway. I know the Coyote and the money and hiding and the guns, and this is where my information ends. I could get the actual lowdown in five minutes at the library, but I don’t feel like it. Visas. Green cards. Wade remains unconcerned, putting all his eggs in the “Dario knows what he’s doing” basket.

“When he drives,” I asked Wade once, “like, to town—what would happen if he got pulled over?”

“Nothing good” was all he said. “But it’s not like he’s driving all over the back forty, just to the store, the nursery … the post office so he can send half his damn salary to his mother every week.” (Enormous eye roll.) “He’s a good driver. He’s not going to get pulled over.”

“But what would happen if he did?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.

Okay, and then there’s a second annoying thing, which may be semirelated and is possibly even worse: he’s straight up harassing me night and day to join him on the autobahn, insisting I enroll in driver’s ed.

“Yeah …” I call down into the grave we’re digging, my Spanish faster and more sarcasm-laced every day, “that’s a super idea. Let me get right on that so I can kill someone,
quick.
”

“Why are you going to kill someone? That’s ridiculous!”

“Fifteen is way too young to be driving, permit or not. That’s why we have so many kids in here with stupid poems on their headstones.”

“But those guys are always drunk!” he insists. “You’re not going to be drunk or half-asleep or on drugs; you’re going to be an excellent driver, I’ll show you!”

“No thanks.”

“Elanor says she wants to. She can’t wait,” he says.

“Good for her.”

He frowns up at me.

“Why doesn’t Kai drive?”

“Scared.” Sixteen but not one to tempt fate, Kai figures cheating death once was the only lottery she will ever win. Driving is pushing her luck.

“So
you
can! Show her it’s okay, help her!”

“Don’t need to.”

“You could go visit your friends.”

Is he
trying
to be mean?

“Don’t feel sorry for yourself. Elanor’s your friend.”

I pretend I didn’t hear him.

“Listen. That whole situation is just—You’re being stupid. But besides that, I find it very hard to believe there isn’t
one
girl in your entire school you could be friends with.”

“Believe it.”

“Whatever. You need to make that a goal. You need friends, ASAP.”

Next to
whatever, ASAP
is Dario’s new favorite word. English acronyms make him laugh. Wade and I are taking the linguistic bloom off the NPR rose in no time.

“Fine,” I sigh. “That’s really great advice. I’ll get right on it.”

“Don’t you
want
friends?”

On the hill above us, I see he has graced Emily’s grave with tulips, all pink.

“Do you miss your family?” I ask.

He nods.

“A lot?”

Nods again. All I ever get. Never details. It’s like he was born on the moon.

“Sure,” he says. “I do. But you’re supposed to, right? Grow up, have a life, visit. Write.”

Now I nod.

Ravens caw.

“Leigh. Don’t you want to go anywhere?”

I drum my heels against the soil wall.

He stops digging. Looks up at me.

“I want … I would like to go home,” I say. “To the ocean.”

Down in the dark, his face lights up. He grabs my foot. Shakes my leg.

“When can you take the class? Too late for spring, is there a summer one?”

Gramma’s voice howls her freaked-out panic,,
Don’t touch that, we’ll die, Wallace, turn here or we’ll die, the motor will catch fire, we’ll all die!
Patron saint of vehicular manslaughter.

“There are buses. And taxis,” I say.

“Leigh.”

“Forget it.”

“Okay. We’ll see.”

He pulls his sleeve back from his watch. “Oh, shoot—be back in a minute.”

“Where’re you going?

“Post office closes in half an hour,” he says.

“Again?”

“Be right back!”

How much money does his mother need?

He’s up and out of the grave, starting the backhoe, moves it awkwardly around the trees and off to the shed.

“Don’t be scared!” he yells over his shoulder.
“No te asustas! Te encantará!”

No, I will not
love it.

Stupid post office.

Kai’s seventeenth birthday is nearly here, and for her sake, I am willing to submit to the ickiness of parting with some icing-on-the-cake Grave Money.

Every one of her birthdays is cause for relief and celebration, but also I want to help make up for Meredith using the hot weather as an excuse give the Sea/graveyard split an 80/20 advantage to The Sea, which is seriously troubling Kai. I am troubled as well, though it is less Meredith’s absence and more my lack of caring about her absence that gives me pause. Her presence is so rare, it is a novelty, departures and arrivals unceremonious for Wade and me. But poor Kai, even basking in the glow of Balin and the paradise of Rivendell, still refuses to warm to the familiarity of Meredith never being around. The seascapes she produces in Mendocino grow bigger and admittedly more beautiful with each trip, the walls of even the kitchen now crowded with them, and when she
is
here, it’s nothing more than business as usual with the recorded waves, acetone forever wafting down the hall, the painting, painting, painting. If Wade is disturbed by his mostly bachelor life, he isn’t letting on.

The Saturday before her birthday, Kai conveniently dashes off to a matinee with Balin and I beg Dario to take a long lunch and drive me to town to find her a present.

“See?” he crows. “You could be driving yourself! You could go wherever, whenever you want! Just take the class!”

“Please?” I sigh. “Just downtown. For Kai.”

“You can’t walk a few blocks?”

“It’s hot,” I say, my hatred of the inland heat enough to temporarily supersede my fear of his getting pulled over. “I’ll just run into the pharmacy and get her some hair clips or lip gloss, I’ll be fast, I swear—
please.
”

He pulls his gloves off. “I’m going to the post office anyway.”

What is
up
with the post office?

He drives slowly, carefully. If he ever does get pulled over, it’ll be for drawing attention to himself going way under the speed limit. Or for being a USPS stalker. The wind barely moves through the windows, but at least we’re out from beneath the pulsing sun. I lean my head against the door and close my eyes, think hard about the Mendocino bluffs, sea spray, fog, willing myself cool in the comfortable radio drone of Carl Kasell’s NPR voice. I feel Dario park in shade.

“Quick stop first.”

“Seriously, haven’t you been twice today already?”

I open my eyes—

Rivendell.

“I need to get her a present, too,” he says. “Just come with. Come in and look.”

“No thanks.”

“Don’t be a baby. Get out here.”

“I’ll wait.”

He climbs out, stands there in the heat rising even within Rivendell’s redwoods, guilts me through the open window. “Let’s find her something better than pharmacy lip gloss.”

“What am I getting her here, daffodil bulbs? Forget it.”

“They’ve got stuff.”

“Why don’t
you
be friends with Elanor and leave me out of it. God!”

He frowns.

“I mean
gosh.
”

I prop my feet petulantly on the dash.

“Leigh.”

Always sounds different when he says it. Makes me like it more.

Kai does deserve better than pharmacy lip gloss.

The brass bells ring. The mill house is blessedly cool.

“Dario!”

Of course she’s working.

Slate gray skirt, sleeveless lavender blouse, rhinestone earrings beneath each knotted braid. Clean apron. Boots. Blue striped socks, no tights. Too warm.

“Leigh!” She dives to hug Dario, then goes for me.

He hugs her back. “We need a present for Kai.”

She nods. “Balin’s been spazzing out trying to think of something good.” She kneels at the register, digs around the shelves beneath it. “He says something from here is lame, which is stupid because wait till I show you, oh my gosh … But so I say, ‘What about running stuff?’ and he gets all huffy. I guess shoes and sweatpants aren’t too romantic. I don’t know. I told him to wait till the day before and the right thing will just … announce itself.”

“Good plan,” Dario says.

She ignores him and his recently developed sense of sarcasm, tosses a pile of fabric onto her sewing machine, finally fishes a key ring from the register mess, and hurries to a glass case tucked into a corner. “Okay, now look, my mom’s friend asked if we’d sell these for her. Delicious.”

Jewelry case. Beneath a tall window, sunlight spills rainbows through the crystal suspended above it and into a shallow bowl filled with rice and laden with slender silver chains, some strung with iridescent opals, seed pearls, and—

“Oh, that one,” I breathe.

Sea glass, a necklace strung in all shades of blue and green sea glass, the colors we collected at home when Meredith would take us to Fort Bragg to visit Glass Beach, a former dump site, the shore there curving sharply in toward the dunes. We walked carefully on broken shells and filled our sand pails with blue and green and aqua and clear glass worn smooth by years of ocean waves rolling them against the sand, more precious, more beautiful than jewels.

Elanor turns the jumble of keys to open the case, scoops the necklace from the rice, and holds it to the light.

I think of the still-life painting (bowl of fruit, random scruffy dog with one ear cocked, vase of flowers dropping petals on shiny tabletop) that Meredith routinely paints and wraps for our birthday gifts. Wade signs the card. Not that presents are all-important, and a painting your own mom did is obviously a thing to be treasured or whatever and a decent child would be grateful for it, but—this birthday will not be spent on the sofa near the bucket. The first, after three years, that she won’t fear is her last. And this sea glass is just
so
 … Kai.

It will remind her of the ocean. It is the color of her eyes.

It is ridiculously expensive.

“Want to go halfsies?” I ask Dario low, wanting so badly for Kai to have it.

“What?”

“Buy it together, from both of us,” I say.

“Dario, you know what halfsies means, don’t be dumb,” Elanor says. She cradles the glass in her hands, carries it to the register, lays it in a nest of lamb’s wool in a slender brown box, attacks the price tag with a Sharpie. “Oh, look, I guess I’m the manager on duty to approve employee discounts.”

“Can you do that?” I ask.

“Apparently.” She smiles.

Dario and I pool our cash and watch her wrap the box in layers of crispy blue and white and violet tissue. She tosses fairy glitter between each sheet and ties it all in festoons of satin ribbon. She holds it up. “Delightful. She’ll love it.”

She wipes her sparkling glitter hands on her white apron. Enya warbles. The crystals spin their rainbows.

“Thank you,” I say. “She’ll be so happy.”

Dario kisses her hand soundly. “You are a jewel,” he says.

The brass bells ring. A familiar voice.

“Dario!”

Oh for God’s sake.

“Helen!”

Dario goes to hug-fest party with Real Nice Clambake near the split-leaf philodendrons, and Elanor takes my arm.

“Don’t make eye contact,” she whispers, steering me out the back door waving as we go. “Hey, Mrs. Irvin!” Clambake waves back.

Out in the shady heat of the tree-filled nursery, she leads the way to a hammock anchored between two impossibly tall redwoods.

“She is so hot and cold,” Elanor whispers, flopping into the swinging ropes. “Do you talk with her a lot?”

“Clambake? No.”

“Is that what you
call
her?”

“Not to her face.”

“That song gives me an aneurysm. She’s insane! I mean, she’s nice, but it’s like one day nothing, not a word, and I think,
Great, did I insult her by accident?
and then the next day she’ll yammer about nothing for hours. She loves Dario, though, huh? Sit!” She moves far to one end, closes her eyes, pushes the hammock, swings back beneath the trees with her boots.