Wild Roses (6 page)

That's why I was trying to get thoughts of Ian
Waters out of my mind that day I went to my dad's for the weekend. Real simply I
didn't want to get hurt by the power of my own emotions. I wasn't doing a very
good job of erasing him from my head. I'd stooped to the lowest depths of
thoughts, pictured him kissing me deeply before leaving on a plane for Curtis,
me sobbing miserably in an airport chair as his plane pulled away from the
doorway. I mean, I knew how this story would have to end, if there was even to
be a story at all. It was not an end I wanted to willingly walk
toward.

Dad wasn't home when I got there, so I went out
to the porch and sat in the swing and looked out toward the sound. At that time
of year you had your occasional humpback, otters, and sea lions, and I watched
for the odd shape in the waves, a break in the pattern that meant some creature
was there. It was colder than hell outside, and everything was painted in the
Northwest's favorite color, gray. The water was steely, and the sky a soft fuzz,
but it was still beautiful out there. A kayaker with a death wish was bobbing
around on the water, his boat a vivid red spot in a silver sea. For the
millionth, compelling time, I saw those fingers stroke that violin
case.

"Look who's here!" my father called
out.

I went inside. My father had one arm around
Nannie and the other around a fat bag of groceries.

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"He thinks he's made of money," Nannie
said.

"I bought her a People magazine," Dad
said.

"That's hard-earned dollars you spent on that
trash," Nannie said. I kissed her cheek, helped her off with her coat, which
wasn't too necessary. She was flinging it off like an alligator wrestler in her
eagerness to get to the bag Dad had set on the counter. She fished around inside
with one thin arm, plucked out the magazine, squashing a loaf of bread with her
elbow in the process.

"I don't even know who these trollops are," she
said as she eased into a corner of the couch and stuck her nose in the
pages.

"Hey, Cass. How about sweet-and-sour chicken?"
"Yum."

Cooking was one of Dad's post-divorce hobbies.
Before that, his specialty was cornflakes with bananas on them. Now he was
really into it. He cooked better than Mom ever had, which was probably the
point. He has all of these fancy knives and pots, and various, curious utensils
good for only one weird purpose--skinning a grape, say. I could have written a
confessional My Father Had a Spring-farm Pan. He built a shelf in the kitchen
for all of his cookbooks, and Nannie kept bumping her head on it. Who put this
thing here? she'd grouse, knowing full well who did it.

We had dinner and watched a movie, some PG
thing about misfit boys who go to camp, which ended with the two parents who'd
both lost their spouses deciding to marry. Of course there were two white kids
(one good,

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one evil), a black kid, an Asian kid, one fat
kid, and one girl with glasses. It was worse than those movies where a dog wins
a sports championship.

"Sex, sex, sex," Nannie said when the happy
couple kissed at the end. "That's all you see in movies anymore."

1 guess that's why we weren't watching The
Rocky Horror Picture Show. "I'm going to bed."

"Dishes await," Dad said after Nannie's
flowered housecoat disappeared slowly up the stairs. "Would you go and check on
her? I'm worried that by the time you get there Grandpa's photo will be up on my
nightstand and her Poligrip will be in my medicine cabinet."

"No problem," I said.

I trotted upstairs, checked the guest room, but
didn't find Nannie. I went to Dad's room to see if he was right. I was expecting
to catch her red-handed, an unrepentant criminal of living in the
past.

That's when I saw it--part of the cover of
Dino's biography sticking out from under Dad's bed. It was splayed open to keep
his place. I was sure he'd read it before, when all of the awful stuff was
happening, but why was he reading it now, three years later? I walked over to
his bed, looked underneath. There was a nest of papers, notes in Dad's
handwriting, other books. Composers Speak--Part

2 in the Young Musicians Series, with that
famous picture of Dino on the cover, looking sultry and young, during his days
in Paris. And there was Culinary History--Authentic Tuscan Recipes. What was he
doing, writing the Dino Cookbook? I wrestled with my conscience about
sitting

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down right then and reading those notes. Guilt
convinced me that Nannie would fall and break a hip or something if I did, so I
left to find her. I saw the light on under the bathroom door.

"Are you okay in there?" I called through the
door.

"Yes, thank you," Nannie said
primly.

I waited until she came out and got settled
into the guest room bed. She was propped on the pillows as if waiting for
visitors when I kissed her cheek and turned off her light.

"What a day," she said.

"Good night, Nannie," I said.

"Good night, my special dear," she said. She
was always a little sweeter at night. Maybe it was the nightgown with the
bow.

I wanted to go right downstairs and confront
Dad about his under-the-bed project, but when I got there he was drying a pan
with a kitchen towel and whistling, having such a cheerful father moment, I
couldn't stand the thought of breaking it. His T-shirt was loose over his jeans,
and his hair had gone from polite to playful. He looked so happy I decided I
didn't have the heart for a confrontation just yet. It would have to
wait.

The next day I went to the movies with a couple
of my friends, Sophie Birnbaum and Nat Frasier, Zebe and Brian Malo. Zebe's real
name is Meggie Rawlinson, which sounds like some fifties cheerleader and doesn't
fit her at all. We call her Zebe after her favorite zebra-stripe boots. We try
to get together most weekends when there isn't a

49

play, as everyone but me is in drama. Sophie
and Brian usually are the leads and we give them crap because sometimes they
have to kiss. They love each other like brother and sister, which apparently
means they sometimes want to tear out each other's throats. Zebe does stage
managing, and Nat is happy when he gets more than a couple of lines. Last year,
every time we saw him, we'd say "This way, sir," after his Oscar-winning role as
a waiter in The Matchmaker.

It was turning out to be Crappy Movie Weekend,
as what we saw was basically one long boob joke. It was all girls in tight
shirts with enormous buttlike cleavage and boys falling over their own tongues
hanging out their mouths, the kind of thing that makes you wonder if there's any
truth to evolution after all. Sophie got in a fight with Brian when he said that
a little lighthearted movie with lots of tits was occasionally
refreshing.

"We can help you hold him down," Zebe
said.

"Hey, I don't want to touch him," I said.
"Stupidity is a disease."

"I'll wash my hands afterward," Zebe
said.

When I went back to Dad's, the house was quiet.
It was so quiet that the refrigerator humming was the only noise, and I got that
has-a-mass-murderer-been-here-
and-now-he's-in-the-closet-
just-waiting-to-jump-out-at-me
feeling. Instead, I found that Nannie's coat was gone, taken back with her to
Providence Point, I guessed, and I noticed that a couple of pieces of toast had
popped up from the toaster and had long ago grown cold. The coffeepot
was

50

on, with no coffee left in the pot, just a
burning smear of brown. I always worried that this was how Dad really lived when
I wasn't around, that the good cooking and orderly house were a show put on just
for me and dropped the moment I left. I've come by unannounced before and saw
unopened mail stacked six inches high, and egg yolk permanently wedded to the
dishes it was on. That's the other prominent thing about divorce--you worry
about your parents when they are supposed to be worrying about you.

I turned off the coffeepot and went upstairs. I
found Dad on his bed, propped up not too differently than his mother the night
before, with his glasses on and one toe trying to get a glimpse of the outside
world from a hole in his sock. Those notes I had seen the night before were
scattered all around him. Maybe it wasn't disinterest that had let the toast
grow cold--maybe he was just excited to get back to his project.

"Knock, knock," I said.

"Oh, jeez." Dad startled, gathered up his
papers. I'm surprised he didn't shove them under the pillow, stuff them in his
mouth, and swallow them like they do in the spy movies.

"What time is it? You're early."

"Nope, right on time," I said.

"Wow," he said.

"So what're you doing?"

"Work."

"One, you look too guilty for work. Two,
there's one of

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Dino's books open in front of you. Unless you
got a new job I don't know about, that's not work. What's going on?"

My father sighed. He looked out the window, as
if hoping the answer to my question would form in the clouds. I see a giraffe! I
see a pirate ship! I see that I'm nosing around on my ex-wife's new husband to
try to catch him doing something horrible!

1 moved closer to the bed to see.

"No!" he said. He actually put one arm over his
notes, same as those kids who make sure you don't cheat off them.

"Dad, God."

"All right," he said. "Okay! I just had a
little feeling about something and I wanted to check it out." "What kind of
little feeling?" "About Dino Cavalli." "No shit," I said.

"Cassie, watch your mouth. Is that necessary? I
was just thumbing through this book recently and something caught my eye that
didn't add up."

"You mean you were hunting through it line by
line for something that didn't add up," I said.

He ignored me, which meant I was right. "I
found something. I mean, I think I found something, and I was just checking it
out."

"What did you find?"

"I don't know if I want to say."

"What? He's actually a woman," I guessed. "A
killer. A killer woman."

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"A liar," my father said.

I sighed. "You should get a girlfriend, Dad. I
mean it. It's been three years, and you haven't had a date."

"I've had dates. This isn't about dates. This
is important. Your mother's life. Your life. If he's lied about one thing, he's
lied about others, mark my words."

"Marissa what's her name. She seemed nice. A
little Career Barbie but ..."

"All right, listen to this," Dad said. He
adjusted his glasses and began to read. "'My mother would make a simple lunch,
gougere, some bread, and then I would practice.'"7

"Goo-zhair. Is that edible? I think our
neighbor's cat had one of those caught in his throat once," I said. "It's a
lie."

"There's no such food?"

"No, it's a real food, but it's a recipe from
1969. He's claiming he ate it when he was eight or nine, and the man is older
than I am. The recipe first appeared in a Moldavi wine recipe book, and the wine
itself used in the recipe wasn't even made until 1968."

"God, Dad."

"I know," he said.

"No! I'm talking about you! What are you doing?
So maybe the food wasn't around. Maybe he made a mistake. Maybe they got his age
wrong. Maybe a thousand things. What does this prove? You've already got plenty
of reason

7 Dino Cavalli--The Early Years: An Oral
History. From Edward Reynolds, New York, N.Y. Aldine Press, 1999.

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not to like him. Shit, in my opinion, Mom has
plenty of reasons not to like him, and she still does."

Dad got up, gathered his papers. He looked
pissed at me. "It just may prove what I've always known. He's a fraud. You just
wait."

It's tough to lip-synch violin playing, but I
didn't say this. I turned and left the room, as I didn't want to fight with Dad.
Anything I said would sound like a defense of Dino, and the Civil War began on
less.

"That snake was fucking strong, man," Zach
Rogers said. "A reptile's muscles you can't exactly see, you know, through that
skin and everything, but I had two encyclopedias on the lid. Two, and he still
pushed open the lid and got out. Here's the psychic-phenomenon-ESPN-shit part.
One encyclopedia? It fell open to a page on dinosaurs. Tyrannosaurus rex.
Biggest badass dude of reptiles in history Now, that's almost creepy. What are
the odds?"

I was walking home from school with Courtney
Powelson, my neighbor, and Zach, though I don't even think he lived near us. He
was just sort of migrating along with us, and I had the feeling he was soon
going to look up and wonder where the hell he was. He either had a thing for
Courtney or he was so used to seeing me that he forgot we were separate
individuals. I had every class period with him, even lunch. It was one of those
annoying twists of fate in a supposedly random universe. I've noticed that this
kind of scheduling cruelty never happens