Pinch of Love (9781101558638) (27 page)

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Authors: Alicia Bessette

BOOK: Pinch of Love (9781101558638)
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IT'S NOT FAR, but Garrett drives Ingrid and me to the Midmass Footpath trailhead behind the Wippamunker Building. Ingrid seems older, and taller, even though she was gone only a week. I try to remember if I felt different when
I
got back from Nature's Classroom—more curious about my surroundings, maybe? Braver? More mature?—but I can't really recall.
Garrett tells Ingrid about Ahab—that he ran away, and even though we searched long and hard, we didn't find him. She doesn't say anything, just weeps quietly in the backseat and looks out the window. After a minute she wipes the tears from her face. As we pull into the lot she asks, “When's he coming back?”
“He might not, boo-boo,” says Garrett. He reaches into the backseat and strokes her chin.
She pushes his hand away. “Maybe we'll see him today, on the trail.”
“We might,” he says. “We certainly might.”
“This one girl in my class?” says Ingrid, absently kicking the back of my seat. “Her uncle's dog went missing one day? And three months later, they found him in Kentucky. The dog walked all the way from Wippamunk to
Kentucky.
”
“So maybe Ahab just felt like a road trip,” I say—even though Ahab was the laziest dog in the world, and the chances of him embarking on an extended cross-country jaunt are as slim as he is.
“Exactly,” she says.
We put on our snowshoes in the parking lot. It's been a while since I stood this close to the big old converted factory. Nick's darkroom was in a corner of the basement, where the walls were half dirt, half brick. But in the darkroom the walls were plastered over, of course.
Memory Smack: The day I sold my first freelance illustration I walked to the Wippamunker Building from the apartment Nick and I shared, which was right down the street. With a five-dollar bottle of champagne zipped under my fleece, I snuck unnoticed past the reception desk and descended the steep stairs. I ducked away from the cobwebs and rapped on the darkroom door.
Nick turned down Guns N' Roses and opened the door a crack. “Pay the toll,” he said.
I slipped him the bottle.
“You sold something?” he asked.
“The inner ear.”
“Good money?”
“Great money.”
“You think you can do this? I mean, you think this is gonna work? Freelance?”
“Totally.”
He opened the door. I entered and closed it behind me, savoring the darkroom's chemical smell.
We whispered. We always whispered in the darkroom. Something about it was intimate.
“That's awesome, Zell.” Nick pinched the bottle between his knees and popped the cork. “Congratulations.”
We passed the champagne back and forth. We laughed and kissed. He showed me, through the enlarger, some photographs he was developing for that week's sports section: the Wippamunk High School girls' soccer semifinal.
He told me how earlier that day, his dad met him for lunch and they drove to Bedard's Orchard to pick apples. And on the way there, they drove past an old house, white with orange-red shutters. Half a house, really—a twin—but a big old Victorian with new siding and a wide front porch, nonetheless.
“So?” I said. I swallowed some champagne and passed the bottle.
“So, it's for sale,” said Nick. “And it's affordable.”
“I'll have to make a few more sales first.”
“Maybe we could get a dog.”
“Maybe we could convert one of the rooms into a darkroom.”
“Maybe we could have a bunch of babies.”
“One thing at a time.” I sidled up to him, between him and the enlarger, and wrapped my arms around his neck.
He pushed my hair back from my face. “Hello, Pants.”
“Pants?”
“That's your new nickname. Cuz you wear the pants.”
We laughed and made out in the red shadows. The cold tip of his nose mashed into my cheek. Behind Nick, the photograph of the ponytailed center forward heading the ball into the goal floated too long in the developer bath—so long it turned completely black.
REAL TIME, REAL PLACE. Ingrid, Garrett, and I hike past the Wippamunker Building, alongside the brook. Eventually the trail peels away from the water and heads north, toward the turbines of the defunct wind farm—the towers' giant white blades glint above our heads. Every now and then Ingrid calls for Ahab. But other than that, there's no sound besides the swish and crunch of aluminum in snow, and our panting breath.
After a while, Ingrid stops for a water break. “That's the rule,” she says, passing me a bottle. “Hike for twenty-five minutes, break for five. I learned that in Nature's Classroom.” She fishes around in her coat and holds up an empty, clear plastic baggie. “Ta-da.”
“What's that for?” I ask.
“In case I see any animal scat, I can collect it.”
“Always be prepared,” I say.
Garrett smirks. “She never struck me as a girl who would be into that sort of thing, but hey.” He crosses all his fingers on both hands, and I know he hopes Nature's Classroom somehow cured Ingrid's Polly Pinch obsession.
But his face falls when Ingrid says, “Hey, Zell, remember when we went snowshoeing and I lost my red hat? The hat that belonged to my mother? Well, my dad and I went back there the other day, and it was still there, high up in the tree.”
I don't comment, just half smile.
Ingrid stuffs the little baggie into her pocket. “Are you still baking?”
“Yeah. But it's not the same without you.”
“Dad says the Polly Pinch ban is still in effect. Right, Dad?”
“You have to prove yourself, Ing. You have to do your homework. All of it. For a long time. Then you can bake with Zell again.”
“I know, I know.” She consults her pink Hannah Montana watch. “We've got two more minutes of break time. So tell us about this trail, Zell.”
I tell them about the Midmass. It's a footpath, built and maintained by volunteers, scenic despite being so close to cities and suburbs. I show Ingrid the patches EJ gave me. “Nick's dad got these for him and Nick,” I say. “They were gonna hike the Midmass together, but they never got around to it.”
“Can I have one?” she asks.
“Ingrid,” Garrett scolds.
“It's okay.” I hand her one. “Here.”
“Cool, Zell. Thanks. Break time's up,” she says. “Let's go. Another twenty-five.” She snowshoes ahead, studying her patch and shouting for Ahab every few paces.
Garrett and I trudge behind her. “Nick's dad live around here?” he asks.
What I tell him:
1. His name is Arthur Roy, and he lives right across town in a little house on Malden Pond.
2. I haven't seen Arthur in more than a year. The memorial service he planned for Nick—because I was too distraught to plan it myself—was held a week before Christmas, at the Collins-Parks Funeral Home in town. Father Chet recited a few generic words about death and heaven and Jesus before a small gathering of Nick's mostly dark-haired, gray-eyed family, and me and my parents (Gail and Terry were in England, visiting Terry's family). Afterward, as I was getting into the back of my parents' car, Arthur approached me and thrust a heavy box into my arms. “Here,” he said. In the box were ashes.
3. Arthur called me that first Christmas Eve, but I didn't pick up. He left a slurred, rambling message, something about sending me a fruit basket. I never got one.
What I don't tell Garrett:
1. I put the ashes in the attic and felt so walloped by Nick's absence that I haven't been up there since.
2. One time in high school, Nick told me his only memory of his mother, Ilene. He was on his back on a brown-and-yellow carpet and looked up through a glass table. It was someone else's house, he said, because they never had a glass table, or a two-tone carpet. His mother smiled down at him through the glass. She pressed her nose against it, and her breath fogged it up and obscured her face. That was the only time he ever talked about her.
3. Arthur left our wedding early, right after he finished his dinner.
4. He came to Okemo with Nick and me for a weekend, when Gail and Terry first moved. Nick was irritated because his dad read a book the whole time. He sat at the kitchen table in his holey socks and didn't join conversations or the Saturday night game of Trivial Pursuit. The book he read was about gardening; I remember because of the irony: Arthur doesn't garden—he didn't then, either—and his yard's always looked unruly and overgrown, like his beard.
Garrett and I snowshoe next to each other, not really talking much, for a good while. Ingrid's fifty feet ahead. Whenever the trail curves, we lose sight of her, but we hear her call, “Ahab!”
“So the contest deadline's coming up, right?” asks Garrett. He's obviously changing the subject, and I wonder if I went on too long about Nick's dad.
“In a couple days,” I say. “Yeah.”
“Have you got anything?”
I explain my recipe involving strawberry yogurt and Nutella. It's totally not what EJ recommended, but I just can't come up with anything fresh and
foodie,
as he says. I guess I'm in a rut.
“I know I won't win,” I say. “But I have to finish what I started, right?”
“Right.”
I ask him about the babysitting situation, and he says Ingrid's going to spend a lot more time with Trudy. It's hard for him to ask for help, but she seems to love having Ingrid around, he says, and he's glad for her involvement, because a girl should know her family, and Trudy's the only family around, really.
“She cried her heart out when I told her she couldn't bake with you,” he says. “Cried her heart out.”
I look up the trail. A man stands a few feet from Ingrid, a fellow hiker. I hear her ask him if he's seen a dog.
“Ingrid!” shouts Garrett, hands cupped around his mouth.
The man has a roundish head of black-and-white hair. A beard grows close to his eyes and almost completely covers his cheeks. He doesn't wear snowshoes. Red gaiters cinch just below his knees and cover all but the toes of his boots.
For a second—even less than a second—I don't recognize him. Then I think, it's what Nick would look like in thirty years, if he stopped shaving.
Arthur. I run to him, a bouncy, slow-motion run, because of my snowshoes, which slap my heels with each stride.
I stop when I'm a foot from him, and then I don't know what to do. Arthur doesn't say anything, just squeezes his eyes shut and hugs me tight. I can't remember the last time he hugged me. My wedding, maybe?
I let myself be hugged. Finally I stand back as Garrett catches up to us.
“This is Arthur Roy,” I say. “Nick's dad. These are my neighbors, Ingrid and Garrett.”
“We're gonna turn around now and head back,” says Garrett. He squeezes Ingrid's hand. “We'll wait for you in the parking lot.”
After they turn, she says, “Daddy, is Zell okay with that man?”
“She's fine,” Garrett says. “She's going to be fine.”
Arthur hears the exchange and smiles sadly after them. He clears snow from a nearby fallen log and gestures for me to sit with him.
“I haven't been hiking in so long,” he says.
I look at the ground. I realize he's probably had those gaiters since the 1970s.
“It feels good to be out here,” he goes on. “Isn't it a shame that all these years this old trail's been here, so close by, and Nick and I never took advantage of it?”
“It isn't so surprising to me,” I say. “I bet there are a lot of people around here who intend to take advantage of it but never do.”
“Maybe I
will
hike the Midmass after all. Maybe you and I can do it together.” Without looking at me, he grips my knee.
“I'd like that,” I say, even though I know we'll never hike it together. We just won't.
“I lost Ilene. Nick was so small when that happened. He couldn't even talk yet.” He sighs. “And then I lost Nick. Our boy.”
He holds his hand over his eyes, like he's shading them. He sits like this for a while, and soon his pinkie trembles. “I'm sorry I haven't been around at all, Zell,” he says.
“Me, too.”
“I just can't.”
“I understand.”
“I know you do,” says Arthur.
A twitchy squirrel crosses the path a few feet away. It hops over the upturned snow, then skitters up a tree, and soon after, we hear hikers approach, and our heads turn in the direction of crunching snow. An older couple tramps past, the man huffing heavily, the wife searching the bare branches for songbirds. She smiles and says, “Beautiful day.” Arthur nods and waves in response.

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