Valley Fever (21 page)

The cold air came forced in from beneath the cabinets.

“I'll get them,” Mother said, making a move to rise.

“I'll get them,” I said.

“Don't forget the front door,” she said. Every window in the house had to be closed: the bedrooms, four bathrooms, the three sets of sliding doors in the living and dining rooms, the small casement window in the bar off the kitchen, the small pass-through at the top of the front door that Mother had built in so she didn't have to open the door entirely to small deliveries or to men she didn't know.

“We can now be completely refrigerated,” I said, returning.

“And pickled,” said Mother.

“Don't look sad,” I said to Dad.

“I'm not sad,” he said.

The cool air at my feet eased the itching in my ankles. None of us drank the drinks in front of us. I had my hair up, and Mother ran her finger along the base of my neck. “You have a line of dirt here,” she said.

“I have what?”

“You need to wash your neck.”

“That is so rude,” I said. “I do not have dirt.” I shifted my chair out of her reach.

“I never say the right thing,” she said, sending her eyes toward the ceiling. “Everything I say is a mistake.”

“That's not true,” Dad said, his hand on her hand. She squeezed, and he squeezed her back.

“My daughters hate me,” she said.

I said, “Mother, you say these things so I have to declare how false they are, and then I'm just telling you how wrong you are once again, and then you're upset about that, too.”

“Stop,” said Dad. “Let's stop.”

There was more to say, but Dad never gave orders, so when he did we listened. I could see Mother pulsing with accusations. “Did you speak to Anne?” she asked me.

“Earlier.” I touched my neck to feel for dirt.

“What did Anne say?” she asked. There was no correct answer to this question. Any answer could be interpreted by Mother as a slight against her.

“Anne says I ought to come be an assistant on the show,” I said.

There was a quiet wait.

“At voice-over?” Dad said.

“You should write a play, Ingrid,” Mother said, “and the title should be
What to Wear to the Oncologist.
”

“It doesn't matter what you wear,” I said.

“That's the point. That's why it's funny.”

“An oncologist joke,” said Dad, flat.

An angry bee knocked itself against the kitchen window. There were bugs everywhere, it seemed. “A job at the show,” my mother said.

“Aren't you happy here?” Dad said.

The urge to cry came on like a smack. “I never know when I'm happy until I look back later,” I said. It was the truest thing I could say.

“I don't understand what you mean,” Dad said.

“I understand,” said Mother.

Movement solves every small crisis, even tiny movements, like getting up from your chair and putting your glass in the sink. I put my unfinished gimlet in the sink and poured myself a tumbler of wine, not because I wanted it but because there was nothing to do but to do something.

“Would you like to manage things here,” Dad said, without a question mark. “Just through the harvest. If you can do that for me.”

“Are you too tired?” I said. The saucepan we used to soft boil eggs sat on the counter, so I began to scrub the water line from the top.

He said, “I've just got a little pain in my gut.”

“But what do I do? I don't know what to do.” Baking soda works very well for cleaning old stains off pans.

Mother said, “Of course you know what to do. We all know what to do.”

“Most everything is done,” Dad said. “You check the water, you watch the vines, measure the sugar.”

Mother said, “It doesn't matter if you measure the sugar. Felix will pick when he wants to pick.”

“Daddy.” I feared if I stayed here much longer, I could do more harm than good, as they say. I would have to wait until Dad felt better to tell him how I'd failed at the rentals.

“You keep the records. It's just a few weeks,” he said. “You might be here a few more weeks anyway.”

“You think I'm going to stay permanently.”

“No,” he said, laughing the laugh that turned into a cough. “Get in the truck tomorrow and drive around and talk to people, that's all I need you to do. I can handle the office work.”

“People just need to see the truck out there,” Mother said. It was true; one of the old rules of farming is that half the work is simply being around, and Dad's truck hadn't been around for days now, not since Phillip quit.

“What would you have done if I weren't here?”

“I'd have asked you to come back.”

“But you might have asked Anne,” I said. “Anne is so intimidating. She would be better at all of this.”

“Oh,” Mother said, “Annie doesn't even know which vineyards are ours.” There were close to twenty thousand acres of vines, and I knew them all.

“That pan is clean enough,” Dad said. “Sit with us.”

I stood at the sink with a dish towel, drying the pot. “I'm here,” I said. I'd had to leave when I was thirteen because I hated the “here” of being here so much. But then I had to leave school, too, because I hated the “there.” And then I kept leaving places, and now I was back home. I tried to catch myself every time I called Fresno “home.”

“Annie didn't say anything else?” Mother asked. Mother had this sense of things. If there was something you didn't want her to know, you would have to deliberately force it out of your head, or else she'd detect it from three thousand miles away and start asking questions.

“Evelyn. You've driven her away from the table already.”

“I just think it's funny Annie hasn't called us since she was last here,” Mother said. “She calls Inky.”

“What are you going to do?” I asked Dad. “How are you going to feel better?”

“I'm going to work softer,” he said.

Mother said, “Daddy has spiders in his lungs.”

 

16.

“If the guy in the tractor were any smarter than you, you'd be on the tractor and he'd be in the truck.” Wilson was full of encouragement. There are wives and children all over the valley who pretend to know nothing about their family's ranch, but if something were to happen to the person in charge, anyone else in the family could take over without having to learn an awful lot. Miguel organized the labor and weighed the grapes and kept Dad apprised of the vines. Then I would show up to look. All farmers really do is look around. “The most valuable thing you can put on your land is your shadow,” Wilson said, which I'd heard before, and, “Grapes don't stop growing on Saturday.”

I told Wilson, “Thanks for the tips.”

“Don't take advice from Wilson,” Mother warned me. “If there's something in the field you need advice on, call Mr. Matheus or Mr. Ellison or, if you want to,” and she paused here, almost with a wince, “call George Sweet.”

“And why not Uncle Felix?”

“Felix has got his own agenda,” Mother said.

“Bootsie says George has got bees or something.”

“Bees? He might have bees.” The Sweets had four hundred acres just north of town. “But he's still got the vines and the pistachios. I think they've got pistachios.”

“If you don't trust Wilson to give me the right advice, why have you got him handling your money?”

“You ask too many questions, Ingrid.”

“Simple questions.”

“Call George,” she said. “Wilson's only expertise is telling people he's an expert.”

Anne called my mobile. “Have you checked the Brix?”

“What do you think I'm doing?”

“I used to love to check the Brix.”

“The grapes to the south are getting high. Way too high.”

“Where are you?”

“I'm driving Dad's truck.”

“I mean where.”

“In Berenda.” Berenda was some of Dad's early acreage. Anne knew this landscape well. “This all feels so masculine.”

“Masculine,” Anne said. “It doesn't have to be masculine. Why is driving the truck masculine?”

“I mean my associations are masculine.”

“It doesn't sound at all masculine. Think of Marianela, with all those vines.”

“This is not exactly Marianela's operation.”

“Maybe you'd be better off thinking of it in terms of how Marianela runs her operation. Just think of twenty acres at a time.”

“That's not possible. You have no idea what's going on here.”

“You never listen to what I say, and you know, you
know
I'm always right. You're thinking about masculinity, you're already making yourself separate from all those guys, putting yourself in a secondary position. Can you remember the last time I was not right?”

“All right, Annie, then you come home and look after the farm.” I unwrapped a stick of hard, waferlike Juicy Fruit I'd found in the glove compartment. Poor Dad had probably bought it expired at the dollar store. Dad loved the dollar store. The gum was crunchy. I put the wrapper in my pocket. Dad's truck was pristine, the worn beige leather of the interior oiled to a shine; never had he left a receipt or pennies or a packet of salt in the console.

“I'm coming home while the show's on hiatus.”

“When is that?”

“Tonight, I'm coming home tonight. I'm packing. Do you think I need to pack dresses and things? Are there weddings or anything?”

“I think that's wonderful,” I said. “That's the best news ever.”

“It's actually very bad news, obviously.”

“Come home,” I said. “I'll make soft-shell crabs.”

“You have to order them from Virginia,” she said.

“And I'll find nice wine somewhere.”

“Get it from Felix. Just take it from his house.”

“How's Charlie?”

“For half our marriage, he's been trying to figure a way to get out of it.”

“That's not Charlie.”

“I know. He's impossibly charming.”

“What's happening at work?”

“I don't think we're getting picked up again. Which is all right. Which means I can go to New York if I want.”

“Do you want?”

“It would be nice to actually act for a while. I've been a squeaky-voiced cow for five years.”

“Five years,” I said.

“Should I not even suggest we go together?”

“What's that mean?”

“I mean we had kind of talked about going together.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“But you seem very happy doing what you're doing.”

“I'm not doing anything.”

“Helping out Dad, I mean.”

“We would have so much fun,” I said.

“So many times things that should have been fun have turned out to be pure dread and terror. I could make you a list.”

“Make a list,” I said. “I love lists.”

*   *   *

All existential problems are solved when you're driving somewhere. Being in the truck, passing the vines and trees and row crops from one end of the valley to the other and back, gave me that feeling of accomplishment movement gives you.

Dad had had the same white pickup for twenty-four years. It's a point of pride among the farmers to drive the oldest truck. The older the truck, the less likely you're in debt.

When I was little, on weekends and in summers, I used to love driving around with Dad in the truck. He'd come home for lunch—he was always home for lunch—and afterward I'd ride next to him while he drove from Fresno to Firebaugh and out to Berenda, checking vines and trees and rows, answering workers' complaints, looking for leaks in the water lines. Coyotes would get to the drip hoses and chew holes through the plastic. When we were teenagers, Wilson and his friends used to shoot the coyotes for sport. One summer they dragged in the carcasses of ninety dogs. The police and wildlife rangers never bothered to stop all that. The farmers and workers and everyone else were grateful, and Uncle Felix paid Wilson and his friends fifty dollars for every dead coyote they brought back with them. That was a lot of money then. Those boys didn't need another summer job, and during college they'd come home on the weekends just to shoot dogs.

I had always been best at spotting leaks in the water lines. I could see a tiny spark of water shooting out from fifty feet away. Dad had one of those old, thick phones wired into the car, and the first leak I spotted I called Miguel. We had always called Miguel for everything.

“Ingrid,” he said (he pronounced it
Ehn-greed
), “you're calling me for a leaky pipe? Ingrid! You call José. He's in charge over there.”

“I thought you were in charge everywhere,” I said.

“Yes, in charge. Call me if you have a dead worker, don't call me for a leaky pipe.”

*   *   *

Mom called the phone in the truck. That phone rang like a fire alarm. It startled me every time. “Anne's coming home.”

“She told me. I think you should order some soft-shell crabs. You know how to do that, don't you?” I drove slowly past the vines, scanning for leaks but careful not to drive so fast that dust would spray the fruit.

“Do you think something's wrong?” she said.

“Of course nothing's wrong.”

“I mean between her and Charlie.”

“The thing you have to do is order crabs. Can you order crabs?”

“Of course I can order crabs, Ingrid, what do you think I am?”

“Just get the crabs here, get Dad to pull out some nice wine, everything's going to be fine.”

“Your father doesn't have any nice wine.”

“All of Dad's wine is nice.”

“Maybe we should have that harvest party.”