Roman Holiday: The Complete Adventure (2-Book Bundle: The Adventure Begins and The Adventure Continues) (25 page)

“She had the hospice people pack it all up. I don’t think there’s anything personal.”

“Look anyway. And call me later today to tell me, okay? I’m going to work the environmental angle more. I left a message with a lawyer on Friday who’s supposed to be a big expert.”

“Okay.”

“All right. Bye, darling. Love you.”

Ashley hung up and set the phone beside the sink.

She poked a box with her toe and imagined an envelope with her name on it inside. A long, handwritten letter that would provide careful, soothing explanations for all the disappointments suffered by Ashley over the past weeks.

I didn’t tell you I was sick because …

I wanted to call you in Bolivia, see how everything was going, but …

I know you hoped to inherit Sunnyvale. However …

Here’s why I didn’t want a funeral. Here’s why I asked your father to retrieve my ashes instead of you
.

Here’s why I acted like I didn’t care very much, Ashley, even though I loved you more than anybody
.

Here’s why
.

She wrapped her arms around her stomach and kicked the box hard enough to dent the side.

Whatever was in there, it couldn’t hold in this shapeless pain.

No explanation could make it go away.

Stanley cleared his throat.

“Cut,” he said.

“Right.” Ashley reached for the cards and pulled a stack off the top, setting it down to the right of the deck on the concrete picnic table. “Sorry.”

He put the pile back together and dealt. Ashley tried to refocus on the card game. Her mind was a wayward child today, constantly wandering off to find Roman. Dragging her gaze along with it like a bedraggled security blanket.

Stanley hadn’t said anything, but she knew he’d caught her straining for a better angle on the action over at the campsite. For a seventy-something guy, Stanley didn’t miss much.

She needed to stop looking.

A crow landed on top of the next table over. Stanley reached behind him into a bucket and tossed a handful of feed onto the ground. The crow hopped down to peck at it.

“One of your pets?”

“Broken wing,” he said. “Few years ago.”

Stanley was like the Dr. Doolittle of eastern Pennsylvania. Animals came to him, and in some mysterious, nonverbal fashion he figured out what they needed. She’d seen him feed owls, pet deer.

He was animal-like himself, actually—a great big bear of a man in a red flannel shirt, with a few days’ white stubble and the growly manner of someone who’d been disturbed in his hibernation.

Not toward Ashley, of course. He liked Ashley. But with other people, Stanley could be a bit of an ass, if he bothered to talk at all. At the campground, he cleared fallen limbs, cut firewood with a chain saw, fixed problems with the hookups, and performed dozens of other outdoor jobs. He had a bad hip from his stint in North Korea, but he didn’t let it sideline him, although he had been forced to give up his driver’s license several years ago. His brother, Michael, handled the office, the camp store, and any tasks that required the exchange of more than a few terse words with customers.

“You didn’t ante,” Stanley said.

“Oops.” She threw a matchstick into the middle of the table.

As he dealt the first three cards, her eyes drifted back to Roman kneeling beside the fire pit with Michael standing next to him. From twenty feet away, Ashley couldn’t hear what Michael was saying, but Roman had his head bowed, his attention focused on the stick between his palms and the wood board he’d balanced it in.

Michael looked up. Beamed. Waved at Ashley, then jogged over.

He was younger than Stanley, only a few years past retirement and easily the most ebullient person she’d ever met.

“Didja see this setup? I think he’s almost got it now. This is so cool. Never seen anybody do this before. You guys should come over and watch.”

Stanley grunted.

“Maybe in a little while,” Ashley said.

Roman had been working on the fire for five hours. Which was insane, but then, that was Roman. Single-minded to the point of insanity. He’d spent the first two hours whittling sticks. Dozens of sticks. Then another couple hours doing something mysterious with a board and a piece of string. Now he was just using the board and a pointed stick, twirling it between his palms. Michael was right—Roman seemed to have figured out his method.

He gave it his complete attention.

“I’m gonna grab a beer,” Michael said to Ashley. “You want one? Or a soda? I think we’ve got that soda from Catawissa you like. Black Cherry.”

“Sure.”

“Stan?” he asked.

“Beer.”

Michael bounced inside, headed for the refrigerator in the camp store.

Ashley looked toward the fire pit.

When Roman had come back from the shower, he’d been wearing a long-sleeved blue bug-repellent shirt, the sleeves rolled past his elbows to expose the black hair of his forearms. Beneath it, he had on a black lightweight wool T-shirt and stiff canvas pants with a hammer loop on one deep pocket.

All dressed up in his stiff, unfamiliar clothes, he ought to have looked like Camping Ken.

It would be so much easier if she could see him that way. Never mind that it would be one more petty act to objectify him, ridicule him inside her head. Petty was okay sometimes, if the alternative was too frightening to look at straight on.

The alternative, in this case, was to admit that Roman looked like Roman no matter what he wore. Old-man pajama pants, bespoke suits, camping pants, workout clothes. Shirtless in jeans, sockless in his loafers, half-naked and all wet, smiling at her from the mud—Ashley always liked the way he looked. The way he moved, the way he talked, the way he
was
 …

Stanley cleared his throat. Again.

Ashley turned her attention back to the cards and rubbed the embarrassment from her forehead. She was so far from having her mind in the game, she might as well have left it in North Carolina. Rolling around in the mud with Roman.

She managed to win a hand, though. Michael arrived with her soda, then jogged over to the fire pit, shouting something to Roman and carrying an extra can of beer for him.

She tried to focus on the cards. Her pile of matchsticks grew larger, which was good, because she’d nearly lost her whole stake during that spate of Roman-gazing.

She was staring blankly into the woods that surrounded the campground, listening to a truck rumble past in the direction of Centralia, when Stanley asked, “He your boyfriend?”

“Hmm?”

“The guy you’re with.”

“Oh. No. That would be—no.”

Stanley scratched his neck and looked at Roman. “What is he, black?”

“Um, I’m not sure. Maybe? He’s Cuban.”

“Thought Cubans were white.”

“The white ones are.”

Stanley grunted.

Ashley looked toward Roman again. He’d sat back on his heels, the toes of his lightweight hiking shoes bending where they met the ground. He held something cupped in his palm, and with his right hand he ground it into a fine powder between his fingertips.

How many times in his life had Roman had to answer that question—
What are you, black?

She’d asked it, too.
Where are you from?
Just a slightly more genteel version of the same
damn thing. As if the answer would sum him up somehow, make him comprehensible.

The truth was, she’d started getting to know Roman when he sat down in front of her with a bag full of sandwiches he wouldn’t let her eat. When he’d consumed them with deliberate care, wiped his fingers on a napkin, and walked away—and then sat in his car all night, making sure she stayed safe.

Roman had revealed himself when he put on mirrored sunglasses at seven o’clock on an overcast morning and rode through a hundred miles in silence, his posture so stiff that she’d worried about him.

He told her who he was when he did five hundred sit-ups. When he followed her to the pond and groaned at the grip of her mud-smeared fingers on his cock.

He showed his hand in fastidious silence, careful costumes, and the disciplined meanness he turned on himself.

“I guess he’s Afro-Cuban,” she said. “Mestizo, you know?”

“Mixed.”

“Everybody’s mixed, Stanley.”

He grunted again.

“Why does it matter?”

“Doesn’t.”

“Then why’d you ask?”

He looked at his cards. “Your move.”

Ashley had a pair of fours. “I fold.”

She shoved the pile of matches in his direction, and Stanley swept up the cards and began shuffling.

“Usually you’re like Michael,” he said. “Blabbing everything.”

It was true, she’d always blabbed to Stanley. When he’d started coming to Sunnyvale, she was fourteen and newly launched in the world, still adjusting to her grandmother and to the idea of happiness. She’d blabbed at him all winter long, because he said so little. Because he was so different from her father, a politician who talked a lot but never meant any of the nice things—only the criticisms.

Stanley meant what he said. He let her talk. He didn’t judge.

Or if he did judge, he kept it to himself, which amounted to the same thing.

“Maybe I’m maturing,” she said.

He smiled at that and dealt the cards.

“You lose a tooth?” she asked.

“Need a new bridge.”

“Ah. Well, I need answers to a million questions.”

“You and me both, girlie.”

That made her smile, too. She threw four matches into the middle of the table, hoping three tens would beat whatever Stanley had.

He assessed her face and threw in six of his own matches.

She looked at the pile. Looked at her tens. “Fold.”

Stanley shook his head and swept all the cards and matchsticks toward himself.

“You’re running scared.”

He meant the cards, but she couldn’t deny the truth of the observation more generally. Not when she’d spent the past five hours quite deliberately
not
opening the boxes in the trailer.

Those boxes scared the crap out of her.

Even scarier, the way her eyes kept getting pulled back to Roman, as if he were the purpose of all this.

Her turn to shuffle. She eased the cards together, broke their backs, tapped them into a perfect rectangle. Again.

Again.

“Grandma sold Sunnyvale to Roman a few years ago,” she said. “I thought she was leaving it to me, but he’s going to knock it down and build a resort. I’m trying to make sure that doesn’t happen. Mitzi thinks he cheated Grandma. She thinks if I go through the boxes Grandma left me in the trailer, I might be able to find some evidence, a note or tax records or something.”

She was about to deal when Stanley said, “Cut.”

She set the deck in front of him. He cut it, and she took it up again and dealt three cards.

“What for?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you find out he cheated her, then what?”

“I save Sunnyvale.”

“And?”

“And I live there in the winter, like always. And you guys come down. Like always.”

“For how long?”

Forever
.

That was her answer, but it was too childish to speak out loud. Stanley would be eighty years old soon, if he wasn’t already. There was no such thing as forever.

“I’m not sure,” she said lamely. “It’s home.”

“You know the place is a dump, right?”

“It’s not a dump. It just needs updating.”

Stanley chuckled. “You can update it, but it’ll still be a dump.”

“You guys come back every year. Why would you pay to stay at a dump?”

“Mike always complained.”

“He complained? About what? You live at a campground.”

“You don’t have to tell me that.”

“What do you want, a four-star meal?”

“
I
don’t. But Mike’s been getting brochures from those all-inclusive resort places. I think we’re going to try one in the Bahamas.”

“So you’re not coming back even if I save it?”

“Not this year.”

When she didn’t respond, he added, “We’ll be sorry to miss the company, though. You and Esther and them.”

She tossed her cards down, childish in her disappointment. “No matter what I do, it’s pointless.”

“No, it ain’t.”

“I thought I’d fix it up some. Attract new people, too. I mean, I know it won’t always be exactly the same. I know that. But I want to keep it the same for a while. In Grandma’s memory, you know? I think she’d like that.”

“Hmm.” He pointed at the pile of matchsticks. “Your bet.”

Ashley reluctantly picked up her cards and looked them over—red, black, clubs, diamonds. She tried to breathe. The matches were vibrating. Her leg, jiggling under the table.

“I can’t do this,” she said.

She wasn’t even sure what she meant.

At the fire pit, Michael whooped. Smoke swirled around Roman, whose palms rubbed back and forth on the stick, spinning it. Spinning. He bent sideways, low to the ground, and blew, squinting against the sting.

A flame flickered into being.

Without thinking, she was on her feet. She’d spilled her cards on the table, flipping a few of them faceup. Straining to see. Elated that he’d done it.

Stanley glanced at the fire. Then at her face.

“Thought I taught you to bluff better than that,” he said mildly.

The back of her neck went hot. “We’re not …”

He waved his hand at her.
I don’t want to know
.

She sat back down, and they returned to the game.

She lost. Lost again.

She was running out of matchsticks. And excuses.

“Did you know she’d sold?” she blurted.

He shook his head.

“Did you know she was sick again?”

He lifted his seamed face. “We weren’t that close.”

“I don’t understand it.”

“You should talk to Esther.”

Her grandmother’s other best friend, Esther, lived in Wisconsin. She was Mitzi’s opposite—grandmotherly where Mitzi was sleek and sexy, conservative where Mitzi was permissive. “You think she knows something?”

“If anybody does.”

The fire had grown a foot tall now, and Roman had left off feeding it tinder and started putting in chunks of wood as big as his wrist.