Apricot brandy

Copyright © 2008 by Lynn Cesar

First published in 2008, 2008

ISBN

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At long last, on a cold golden October afternoon, Karen Fox came home. The tires of her pickup crackled down the long gravel drive, around the bend, and there it stood: the big old two-story house, her childhood world.

A broody brutish old house, Karen thought, with its thick-pillared porch, deep eaves, and gabled windows that resembled hooded eyes. Crouched like a gate-keeping troll, it dared her to enter the orchard beyond it, dared her to open its door and step into the first sixteen years of her life.

Karen killed the engine and propelled herself out of the cab. She faced the house which she could enter for the first time in nineteen years, but it was no use. After all her furious rush to get here, on freeways, highways, county roads, speeding from sun-up to high noon, it all came to this. She could not climb those porch steps, could not open and walk through that heavy black door.

It stunned her, the power this house still had over her. She felt like her face had been slapped and the breath punched out of her, to stand so helpless against her fear and grief. Dazed, she looked around her and saw the plum trees in their ranks.

She would look at the orchard. It was hers now and she could at least do that. Turning away from the house, Karen walked past the packing sheds and up along the first of the picking lanes. She went up to where a rank of oaks screened the orchard from the county highway.

Here it was, the vantage she had liked as a kid. You could see acres of plum trees descending in gentle undulations. When she was ten or so she would perch here and gloat over the green wealth of her universe, the braided leaves, all gemmed with purple fruit.

She drew a half pint from the back pocket of her jeans and took a pull. As she drank, her forearm showed the etched muscle fifteen years of swinging a framing hammer had put there; her posture showed strong shoulders in her loose Pendleton and breasts large for her leanness. The sun, just declining, picked out the first wisps of gray in her loosely ponytailed blond hair.

She licked whiskey from her lips and addressed the trees. “This is a goddamned shabby turn-out, men! Look at you! Like a bunch of savages! Degenerates!”

After Mom’s death, three years ago, Dad had not pruned nor picked them. The trees were spiderish in the gold light, crooked and hairy with untrimmed shoots and suckers, the lanes between them full of weeds and fruit-rot and clouds of flies. The scent of the decay touched her nostrils and, somehow, it filled her with memories of fear. Would she never understand Dad’s crime against her? Would she never be free?

Groping for a gesture of defiance, she thought of a game she and Susan liked to play. They would sit around drinking wine and talking to one another like characters in a romance novel. Draining her half-pint with a flourish, she flung it out into the orchard.

“Now, at long last,” she declaimed to the trees, “the comely Karinna Foxxe was the mistress of all she surveyed! She stood alone on the crag, a bit long in the tooth, perhaps, but with her willowy limbs and her swelling bodice, still a striking figure of Womanhood. But as Karinna gazed upon her new domain, ample though it was, she felt there was something lacking, something hauntingly absent from her grand estate! For where, oh where, was
He
? He who had so benevolently ruled this Fairy Kingdom of delight? Where, oh where, was Dear Dead Dad?”

Shouting this, her voice broke and she wiped away unexpected tears. “How she and Dad had haunted these verdant acres together, these nooks and bowers! But now, though she harkens, Karinna hears no sound of Him!” More tears came, so hot and sudden. “Oh, my plummy troops! Oh, my poor bedraggled army! Dear Dead Dad, your general, is no more! It seems he blew his fucking head off!”

It hit Karen then for the first time: though she had shunned Dad for twenty years, she had all along hoped to hear his voice just one more time. To hear him grieve for what he had done.

The breeze shifted, wrapping her Pendleton around her like a shroud. She looked skywards and saw a magnificent red-tail hawk— a female by her great size— crucified against the flawless blue. Karen’s mind was lifted to the raptor’s viewpoint and she remembered what a wide green world surrounded her, all the hills and groves and silver streams of Gravenstein County. Outside this place, outside these acres which still held her heart staked to the earth, there was a another world. One filled with peace and joy. There was a whole life to be lived, if she could just be free.

Back along the oaks she walked. There was the house and Karen tried to imagine she
had
been able to go inside it after all, imagine she was in there right now, in Mom’s kitchen, maybe, where all the warmth her childhood held could still be found. Looking out the windows into the back yard, where Dad’s private fruit trees stood, the ones for his brandy. But no, not till she knew through her own eyes that Dad was truly and unarguably dead.

So back she drove through hours of sun-washed terrain, seeing again the bright red barns and white-railed fences she’d passed coming out. Bales of hay studded just-mown fields, each bale casting the same parallelogram of shadow. Green slopes were dappled with harlequin herds of black and white cows.

But when night came and the towns became sparse islands of light in the long darkness, she stopped for another bottle of bourbon and drove drinking it. Pretty soon she felt simplified enough by the booze that she could pull off to a thinly-neoned country motel, crawl into a bed, set the TV screen flickering with murky shapes to keep her company in the dark, and deeply, simply sleep.

Karen woke late, got a six-pack for the road and fired up the truck with a brew between her thighs. She came into the metropolis’ web of freeways just when they were starting to clog with afternoon traffic. The mortuary lay deep in the old downtown. She had picked Chapel Grove from the Yellow Pages three years ago, when Mom died. Had told Dad’s old army buddy, Dr. Harst, who’d called with the news, that Dad could send Mom’s body here, that she did not choose to come any closer than here to Gravenstein County, or to Dad himself.

Three nights ago, when Dr. Harst, weeping this time, called and told her of Jack Fox’s suicide, she’d given him the same directions.

The mortuary was an extensive one-story structure, in dirty pink stucco with a pseudo-Spanish façade. The last direct sun had slipped off the building and was retreating across the parking lot. Freeways on their colossal pillars surrounded it on all sides, their rivers of traffic snoring and rattling through orange smog that was just beginning to be tinted with violet. Karen thought of Dad’s so-different world, the one he’d never seemed to want to leave, save for a tour in Viet Nam, and later, in Central America— thought of the orchard with its cool, creaky country silence, its long corridors of shadow… .

Old Dad was a plucked root now for sure, warehoused amid monoxide and endless traffic. He was stacked like cargo in this downtown depot, “You’re boxed and docked, old man. We say this one goodbye and I ship you to the flames.”

But, at first, it was like yesterday all over again. She couldn’t step forward, couldn’t approach the mortuary’s pompous façade, her legs cold and sluggish. And, Karen didn’t really have to go through with any of this. She could tell that bitch on the phone just to burn him and send her the paperwork. Then head back to Frisco. From there, she’d sell Dad’s house and all the ground it stood on.

Yeah. Back to San Francisco. Back there, things were really swell.
Tongue ‘n’ Groove Carpentry
limped along on what sub-work Karen could scrape from a few old friends. More often than not, Karen’s partner Susan was paying all the rent. And meanwhile Susan had to go on living with Karen Fox as she was, right here and now, and as she had been all her adult life: a drinking, brooding grief-maker.

There was no other way, she had to face Dad, to tear her heart free of him.

Walking towards the entry, Karen tensed in anticipation of the opposition awaiting her. This business of viewing Dad, dead by his own shotgun, had been hard-won and had taken a good deal of almost-shouting on the phone two nights ago.

False columns ennobled the walls of the wide reception chamber, where a thick carpet of doeskin hue obsequiously received her feet. A beautiful black woman sat at the gleaming barge of the reception desk. It had been an older white lady three years ago when Karen had come here to see Mom. This woman was helmeted with lacquered hair and had sloping, bird-bright eyes.

“How may I help you?” That lilt, the
help
almost
‘elp
. This was the musical voice, Haitian or something, Karen had encountered when she called.

“I’m Karen Fox.” With a lift of her eyebrows, she referenced that telephone chat. There was a pause between them, the woman’s slightly dreamy smile seeming to recall that conversation fondly.

Karen had said, “I’ll have to see the body, of course, and then I want it cremated right away.”

“Miss Fox,” this woman had said solemnly. “It’s not a good idea to view the deceased. His condition is very severe.”

“Miss. You think I’m just gonna take the word of
strangers
that he’s really dead?”

“Miss Fox, we can assure you. You can be absolutely sure.
Absolutely.
”

“Miss, you’re not listening. The body is released to
me
. And what I’m telling you to
do
, is to arrange for me to have a last look at him and then burn him, in that order.”

“Of course we wish to follow your instructions, Miss Fox, but this is a very unhappy thing you are choosing… .”

It had gone on from there, back and forth. All of that echoed for the two of them now as they took each other in. The woman’s hands lay gracefully crossed on the desk blotter. Such polished, pointed fingers she had. Something in the way those hands lay crossed told Karen that the woman was still not willing to concede. “Ms. Fox, will you please permit me to say something to you? Your father’s death is absolutely real. Again,
absolutely
. But when you do this, regarding his terribly damaged body, you make it more real than it ought to be. You are endangering… your peace of mind.”

Karen had to laugh at that.
Her peace of mind
… “I’m very sorry. I know you’re trying to be kind. Please, just tell me the room.”

Though smiling again, the woman did not look like a particularly kind person when she answered. “You go left down that farthest corridor and turn right where it ends. It’s room 311.” Her eyes had an ironic glint: a fool had been warned and had chosen as expected. “And if you would just sign this release for the cremation, please?”

“Gladly. As soon as I’ve seen him, you can burn him. I don’t want the ashes.”

Karen passed the entryways of tasteful parlors and viewing rooms, but at the far hallway, all glamour sharply ceased. A many-doored white corridor stretched to either hand, its garish floral carpet short-napped and much-trudged. She turned left. This was a sizeable building. Someone whispered behind her. She turned. The hall was empty. She walked on. In the land of the dead, of course things whispered. A dark man in a long white lab-coat emerged from around the corner ahead and walked serenely towards her, the open coat delicately flaring as he came. He was Latino, his sculpted Mexican hair veined with grey. Had an elegant black suit under the lab-coat. He paused by a flight of stairs that led down to a lower floor and let her come up to him.