Chapter One

Melba Burns did not mean to buy the boxy old farmhouse on one-quarter acre in the worst neighborhood in Portland. She’d simply driven down Simpson Street ogling its tall trees and seen the For Sale by Owner sign and stopped. Wading through shin-high grass, Melba laughed. The dirty windows. The gabled roof. She felt the tilting rush the ocean gives when tides are going out, taking your footing with them, and life seems stupendously fine. Melba turned, attempting professional distance. She tried the garage door --- unlocked, with pegboard walls painted emerald green --- and everything she saw silenced her: the raspberries pushing up through the cracked foundation, the faltering shed, the soaked firewood, the neglected grace of the two barn-high apple trees in back. Melba breathed awhile surveying the flat weedy parcel. It began to rain. It was lunatic to believe a property actually needed you. But when she hoisted her small body up onto the gas meter and peered into the house ---

Quilt block floors in ruddy fir.

Blown glass windows.

A twelve-pane door.

Knee walls. And nine foot ceilings.

Melba called the owner, who told her to help herself to the key under the mat. “But be quick about it,” he said. “I got two low-ball offers. Gonna sell tonight. You don’t got a real estate agent, do you?”

“Gracious, no,” Melba said. She was a real estate agent, one of Oregon’s best.

The rooms downstairs needed paint--one small bedroom, a bathroom, no closet. The kitchen window had a view of nothing in particular, weeds and grass and chain link fence, the sort of vista only country life could afford. Melba’s heart compressed a little in anticipation as she climbed the steep stairs. Two attic bedrooms, north and south. You could see Mount Saint Helens in the distance, over the top of the giant rhododendron tree in front. Melba tugged the window open and leaned out. She was a girl again. Her bedroom window in Murray, Utah had had a view of the Wasatch Mountains, in an attic with slanted ceilings just like these. Flowered wallpaper. A chamber pot. The Mormon girl in Melba, the calm dependable sunny child she’d been and betrayed and then abandoned thirty years ago, said, “Well, then.”

Melba wrote her offer inside the Volvo, sweaty as a kid bearing her testimony in church. She knew her business partners would be appalled. Her friend Ellie would laugh out loud. The move would uproot her urban life, gut her grueling work schedule. Somehow that was the beauty of it.

So Melba Burns --- a highly realized woman of independent means--stood on the broad front porch with the spider nests and squashed newspapers looking at the neighbor’s tarped RV, feeling both dizzy and drunk. An idiot might have resisted. Melba knew houses. This house chose her. This house and these neglected grounds.

A February rain wetted the gravel drive. The lace cap hydrangeas needed thinning. It would take years to set the garden right. Thank God for time.

****

Matt Garry cut a groove deeper into the arm of the futon couch. He was home. He was alone. His mom’s needy cat rubbed his legs, wanting love, wanting dinner. JoLee had left two microwave dinners on the counter and Coke in the fridge. The note said, “Your dad’s coming. Back late. Eat.”

The holes he’d punched in the pale wood with a ballpoint pen glistened blue. Matt connected the dots, sliding his pen over the long arc, bump, bump, bump. Car wheels over speed bumps, the Indy 500, the number of girls who’d grab and hug him when he won it. Rahhh. A sea of victory fists and shouting before the cold champagne bath. Matt knocked the cat from his lap. He left the race fans roaring at a yellow flag while he smoked a cigarette, licorice red. Beat the bald head of the announcer in the short sleeve shirt a few bold stripes with his Camel Twizzler and laughed into the gold hair of a girl. She was a fan. She had a pen. He signed her shirt right across the front, boobs like watermelons. No, she’d need a hoist. Boobs like stoplights, then. His mom had those compressed kind--maybe that was why the boyfriends all left her, the poor dopes got bored. Matt’s dad said all you needed was a handful, any more went to waste. So Matt rewound on the blond: boobs like glistening white air filters fresh out of the Fram boxes. Now the Fram girl felt like a woman. The crowd roared its approval. Matt handed her pen back, he was generous like that.

The screen door banged. Atten-hut powered down the boy’s slight frame as his father came in. Gene Garry yanked the striped Wonder Bread shirt up over his head and said “Shit!” tearing his hair on a button.

Matt slid an afghan over the arm of the futon.

Gene dropped his work shirt to the floor. “I’m beat, let’s eat.”

Matt led the way to the kitchen.

“No beer,” Gene said, leaning into the fridge, too much butt in his blue pants, too much muscle in his undershirt. The whole apartment shrank whenever Gene Garry inhabited it, which was half of one day per week. “Coke in a can, the story of my life.” He laughed.

Matt laughed, too. Chances looked good for a quiet evening. A meal and five or six hours of TV, his father’s usual quota.

Gene shut the fridge and eyed his son cutting slits in the protective coating of the microwave dinners at four-inch intervals.

“Hey, Lala. It’s not heart surgery.” Gene butted Matt out of the way and scraped back the covers on both dinners, slammed one in the oven. He drank half a Coke. Matt swallowed the bitter nickname as the liquid glugged down his father’s throat. Matthew Anderson Garry had spent ten years observing the habits of parentus nondomesticus, and it seemed he would never be manly enough to make his dad proud.

“Where’s JoLee?”

Matt flinched. His mom never stuck around when his father came. She’d gone out searching for the next boyfriend in her leopard skin stretch pants. The sooner the TV came on the better. “Doing girly stuff in Portland?” Matt said, as if he were guessing, as if it didn’t matter. “You bring dessert, Dad?”

Gene’s eyes narrowed with pleasure.

Matt slapped the offered palm, took the keys to the delivery truck and headed out the front door into the cool March evening. He unlocked his own personal mini-mart: Zingers, Donettes, Fruit Pies, Pecan Rollers. He hated all of them. The Wonder was that anybody bought them. He grabbed a loaf of bread and followed his friend HeShe into the front cab of the truck. HeShe was a fool for Wonder Bread. Matt opened the twist tie and inhaled hard. It smelled just like airplane glue, without the kick. He offered HeShe a sniff and inhaled again. He put his arm around his invisible pal, leaned against the old, torn seat and said, “It’s been a long hard search, my friend, and our work is far from over.”

Matt stared at the mutilated arbor vitae hedge in the parking lot, soaking in the quiet. HeShe said nothing as usual. Invisible sidekicks were great that way. Matt knew what a fall his dad had taken, driving the Wonder van around Portland for a living. Two years of full time humiliation. Humiliation was one of the creepiest requirements of love. Why did they do it, why did they even try? Matt’s parents’ marriage curved like a question, like a hook caught in his throat.

He couldn’t remember a time when they weren’t fighting. Gene drove long haul Matt’s first eight years. He and Matt and JoLee lived in a trailer park beside the paper pulp mill downstream from Portland, where the sickly sweet smell of rotting cardboard boxes filled their days and colored their dreams. Jolee hated it, the place and the isolation. She told anyone who crossed her path --- the checkers at the grocery store, the wiry gas station attendant, Matt’s principal who tried to express concern at her son’s antisocial habits--that she had all the ties of marriage and none of the benefits. JoLee had married a ghost. Matt felt grateful for the image. His kindergarten and first grade years, Gene stayed on the road so long Matt could not remember who his father was. He knew Gene had bought him the puppy, a black Doberman, and had clipped her ears. Without a man’s training, Sadie grew up hard and wild. JoLee wouldn’t have the dog inside, so Matt played with Sadie on the mud-slick banks of the Columbia River, taunting egrets and gulls. That was where Matt had met HeShe--there in the culvert by the broken trees. When it rained, and that was half the year, Matt holed up inside a big tipped culvert some highway crew forgot. Cars roared by and the concrete echoed with the blade cars cut through standing water. HeShe said, “Listen!” but Sadie wriggled so much and never held still until she fell asleep with her head in Matt’s lap, little and smooth, and Matt petted her ears listening to the hollow sounds people made on their way anywhere else.

Gene stuck around more in Matt’s second grade year, and the fights multiplied and exploded. Matt spent hours alone in the cab of the Freightliner, while slammed doors and cries and cursing rocked the mobile home. He huddled up in a sleeping bag with a flashlight and George and Martha, the kindest hippos. It was a baby’s book, for thumb suckers, his mom told him that, but her world was different and inside the musty cab alone Matt loved George and Martha. He hid the book under the first aid kit, the lid so dusty he picked it up gingerly and only on the sides so no one would find the secret treasure below.

George and Martha did not yell.

They were slow and fat with tiny eyes, and George was kind of simple. Heroes could be simple, in picture books. They didn’t need to be cool. They still saved the day and loved you exactly as you were. It was all a matter of patience, getting noticed, getting found. Matt had considered The Badger and Mr. Mole, but both lived underground. And they were single. Matt wanted parents. So he asked George and Martha to adopt him, and George and Martha would have if the snotty old landlady hadn’t broken his parents up.

November fourteenth of his third grade year, Matt came home from school and his key wouldn’t open the door. The landlady crab-walked right over and said, “Your mother shrieked at the wrong individual one time too many, young man, a shriek is not the same thing as rent. I’ve seen and heard the last of JoLee Garry, I chased that nutcase off and changed the locks.”

“Where is she?” Matt asked. He had a sudden need to see the golden city of makeup on his mother’s dresser top.

“Only Satan knows,” the woman hissed. Matt asked if he could make a phone call and the haggard woman stood right there in her kitchen to make sure Matt didn’t steal anything as he dialed the trucking company to tell his dad that he had no home.

“No shit,” Mike the dispatcher said, and told Matt to sit tight. He sent his teenage son to pick Matt up. Matt slept on their sofa. No one searched for JoLee that night, at least not that Matt knew. Searching only passed the time, that empty time until his mother chose to show up. She had a talent for making the best of hard luck. The next morning, they put Matt on an army cot in the basement. He didn’t even have a change of clothes. No school, no one to take him. His friends were all locked up in the trailer. Matt owned twelve books. They were his, no matter what the landlady did. He asked the pages to open. He saw story patterns in the dirty window well. The streaks could tell you things. And HeShe dubbed it a vacation, trying to be brave.

Driving all-nighters, Gene got back to Portland in two days. He said, “Hey, Squirt” and faked a rosy view though the set of his mouth said otherwise. They gave Gene local deliveries so he could take his son along. Fast food, big views and a full time father --- trucking defined the good life. They slept together in the cab of the truck on a gravel turnout near the paper mill while JoLee knocked bees off her blossom. That was what his father said. Gene drank till his breath hardened like his brow and the winter sun rose in the mornings. Then he drove or slept. Matt found George and Martha smashed behind the passenger seat in his dad’s truck cab, the pages glued together with a Frosty Freeze shake. It looked like chocolate chip. HeShe spoke at the little service, to wish the hippos a happy retirement, and Matt placed the book in the culvert. Someday when the Columbia River rose, the current would take it away.

JoLee returned two weeks later with a bikini suntan and a big smile to match. Gene declared they needed a change. The three Garrys tried family life again. They moved into a real apartment in North Portland. Gene gave up trucking and landed the Wonder Bread job, right off. He did it for love. But having her husband home full time made JoLee even crazier than having him gone. The volume knob on her anger turned up as the accusations of neglect shifted along new lines: Gene never made her enough money, she had ugly clothes, they never went anywhere nice. Matt’s dad worked on, believing. Only Matt saw that changing your house didn’t mean you had changed your life.

One night his mom moved herself into Matt’s room, saying they’d have a little sleepover and the sleepover included her son lying against the hollow core door like a short human wedge while his dad threw dishes and girly magazines. Gene had packed up and left them after that. Matt sucked the knuckle on the hand he had punched into the heater grate as Gene drove off. They’d been together in that apartment two whole months. Two years later, the scar still showed.

Matt shoved his foot down on the long gas pedal, then the brake. He yanked the steering wheel back and forth, going nowhere. HeShe sighed, bored silly. He’d heard it all before.

Matt poked his buddy. “Hey. What would happen if Aslan married Bambi? If Momo married Ender? If Dill married Scout?” Matt stuffed the loaf of Wonder bread back on its shelf, took some Twinkies and locked the truck. “Boo Radley could be the godparent if you took away his scissors!”

****

A hot wind from a Metro bus sucked the last burst of smoke from JoLee Garry’s pretty lips. She swallowed fumes and grit. Stamped out her clove cigarette. The vodka and pancakes from breakfast had worn off. Under the shade of a ripped market awning, she squeezed a peach, then a nectarine, settled on a large mango that the Korean shop owner sliced open for her and watched her devour in bald-faced awe. Juice spattered the pavement. He refused payment for the fruit, waggling his hands to say “free.” JoLee smiled at him. “Silly fuck,” she said under her breath as she turned to walk the two blocks back to campus.

JoLee lay back in the grass. She had ten minutes till massage clinic, just enough time to smoke another cigarette. She ran her hands through her blaze-auburn hair. Dozens of men had told JoLee she was beautiful. The compliments glanced off like flies. Like earwigs that burrow into the petals of a dahlia but the flower is so large it’s unaffected. She smoked more when the kid wasn’t around. Not from nerves--who needed the sermons? The little twerp could sling words. Let him sling a few hundred thousand at his dad, it was Gene’s turn tonight.

JoLee stretched, dreaming of the pleasure of a night to herself. She would go to the movies and meet the man of her dreams, no thick-necked contractor or boring civil serpent. He’d be a doctor or a lawyer. Who rarely drank. And owned a yacht. And loved to spend his winters summering on it in the Bahamas. He would have lean biceps and beautiful clothes and he’d never smell of truck grease. A June bug interrupted her reverie. It lit in JoLee’s hair and crawled delicately down her shoulder and into the grass. She sat up and put her cigarette out on it.

She left the butt between its two crisp halves.

JoLee behaved herself with the first client at the clinic--she dropped right down her instructor’s checklist in the given half hour. The old man seemed happy enough with the massage. He pinched JoLee’s ass as she left the cubicle.

“You’d think I was still waiting tables,” she said to her next client, a stubby woman of about fifty. A librarian, JoLee guessed, with sparrow grey hair and thick ankles. Your standard noodle. “You have a heart condition?” she asked, reading Melba Burns’ health history.

“Don’t we all?” Melba said.

And JoLee looked at her.

The woman’s face --- equal parts pixie and Joan Crawford --- made JoLee cancel the librarian diagnosis. What remarkable brown eyes.

Both women laughed.

Melba kicked off her shoes and let the tall, beautiful massage student take her hand and turn it over. “You garden,” JoLee said. “And you eat too much salt.” She left the cubicle to let Melba undress.

JoLee talked about organic gardening as she worked on Melba’s head and neck. She explained the steps for making her father’s manure tea while she found and unlocked the sorrow in Melba’s shoulders. Melba wept. JoLee had heard in class about uncovering emotion and how to let the client’s body tell you what to do. She figured everyone lay down on her table to get rid of pain, they paid for it, so she went deeper. Using her forearms, she bulldozed the knots. She wiped Melba’s board clean with long heavy chalky erasers. It seemed to work. JoLee left Melba snoozing lightly on the table and set up the cubicle beside it for her next client.

Forty minutes later, Melba found JoLee at the reception desk.

“I quit my job,” Melba said to explain the tears.

“Good for you. It beats getting fired,” JoLee said, with a conspiratorial wink. She had been on the receiving end of more job terminations than a union welder. She handed Melba a student evaluation form and a pencil, and greeted her next client.

Melba caught the bus home.

****

Bus routes had become familiar in the two weeks since Melba had sidelined her car, quit her job, comforted her partners at their loss, said good-bye to paychecks, to her social life, night life, travel. One event could knock you off your life path, if you let it. That one event, for Melba, was the cyclist’s death.

The move to Simpson Street hadn’t magically transformed Melba’s life. She’d painted the rooms and arranged her furniture. Her mother’s antique piano looked right at home. She’d meant to take walks and work in the tumbled down garden but months passed and at the end of a work day it was all Melba could do to climb the stairs and tuck into the shortlist of good books beside her bed. The dandelions loved her. The birds sang anyway. The tangled apple trees looked magnificent bare in winter, then covered in blooms, now lowering their shoulders with the weight of new green. In a way, the trees kicked off her transformation. They filled her bedroom window with their easy fruitfulness until she could not stand the mute comparison any longer --- their grace, her scheduled harried mess. Driving home from a long Sunday showing houses in June, Melba decided to start clearing the vegetable garden that evening. She’d bought seeds. She needed bare soil. She rubbed the exhaustion from her eyes and finished her cold coffee, exiting at Columbia Boulevard to start the steep climb home.

A cyclist descended the curve just as a pick-up truck in the Columbia Broil parking lot ripped into reverse. “God, no --- “ shot through Melba’s teeth as the battered tailgate jumped the curb, the fender clipped the cyclist’s wheel and time collapsed. Time and breath and bones. The cyclist became airborne. The truck lurched out of reverse and pulled away, a shout of laughter from inside the cab--the driver clearly oblivious to the damage done.

Melba stopped her car and threw open her door. She tripped on the seat belt, crawled to the crumpled bike, then staggered to the weeds and begged the bloody stranger to speak. She begged the blood to stop gushing from his right temple, begged his flattened eye to open, willed his head back into round. On her hands and knees, Melba looked for signs of life in the strong body, flopped on his stomach like a kid taking a nap. He’d torn his jersey. His neck, smeared yellow with dirt from a boulder, bent to the boulder’s curve. A sob escaped her. She looked up at the dusty leaves devouring sunlight in a tangle over them. Then Melba took the dead man into her lap, into her arms, and leaned against the chain link fence cradling him.

“I love you,” she said, to answer the wild remorse building inside her. He was the first man she’d held in thirty years. She closed her eyes, and felt his heat become hers. His heat but not his stillness. A beautiful young man, stopped in a second. Melba had never let anything stop her. Only Ambrose, and after she divorced him her life had flown open. The speed and power of it continued to amaze her. She’d sold houses to NBA players. She’d managed the refurbishment of the governor’s mansion. She’d bought a beautiful bungalow on the Coast. Melba stared at her car, the shell of so much distance traveled. Culpability surged up, warm as the weight in her arms, for which she had no answer. There were no answers. Guilt came. Love always fled.

A young blond policeman took her name --- Melba Burns, her age --- 54, and her relation to the cyclist --- none, other than his blood. He asked about the hit-and-run driver, and Melba did her best to reconstruct the vehicle. The driver hadn’t known about the collision, she felt sure. But not knowing didn’t put breath back into the lungs of Ken Mitchell whose name and phone number were scotch-taped to the inside of his helmet.

Melba almost growled when the paramedics tried to examine her. Young men, as strong as the cyclist had been, clearly relieved that Melba was all right, that all of the blood was his. Melba wasn’t all right. She left her Volvo in the middle of the road, door open, purse inside, and walked home.

None of the sights on Simpson Street eased the gravel in her gut. The raspberry hedges, the painted cement planters, the lopsided swing under a walnut tree. “Where Portland gets rural,” she’d told everyone who asked about her new place north of town. Friends hadn’t come to visit, and she hadn’t encouraged them. She’d let the nights go slack, to approximate peace. The only peace she’d encountered in the last six months lay dead on Columbia Boulevard. Melba threw up behind a mock orange shrub and scared two children digging in their front garden.

An old Rottweiler barked the fence line as she walked past, its frenzy growing at the scent of human blood.

Melba sat on her front step beneath the rhododendron tree, inhaling blue smoke and killing racket. Her neighbor’s weed whacker chewed the ragged margins of his lawn. The squad car pulled up. Then the Volvo, trailing smoke. The world is on fire --- her heart bore witness. When you add up all the little fires it makes a conflagration. And we’re all too lazy and stupid to stop. The blond cop got out and jangled Melba’s car keys back and forth.

The June sun baked her neck.

“Ma’am?”

Melba couldn’t raise her chin up enough to look at him; her head felt stuck on in a gesture of permanent amazement.

“Your cyclist was not wearing his helmet. He had no bike lane --- “

Melba huffed.

Glen, her neighbor, cut the power on his weed whacker. He eyed the squad car as the second cop stepped out. He walked to the fence. Drama came rarely to Simpson Street.

“Wouldn’t you like to go inside, ma’am, get on some new clothes?” The second officer tried moving her with his impatience.

“And lie down awhile,” the blond said.

Glen slapped a hand to his sallow cheek as he walked up. His eyes bulged. “Jesus, Melba, you look like that Sissy girl went to the prom!” Glen’s ratchety little laugh bought time as his mind searched for more detail. He had a crew cut and a belly to match. Melba wondered wordlessly how she had ended up here, suffering strangers and idiots, baptized in blood.

“Sissy Spacey!” Glen said, laughing. “Booga boo.”

The cops ignored him. The squad car idled, more killing smoke. A call came over the scanner, squawk of birds a world away, as Frank Covey, Melba’s elderly neighbor to the west, tottered home from his afternoon visit to the pub. He didn’t turn in at his driveway but lurched over to the assembled. He looked at the officers and he looked at Glen, then he looked at Melba. “This woman needs a beer.”

Frank swiped her keys from youngster number one, patted youngster number two on the shoulder and herded them both into their squad car. To Glen he said, “What are you doing here? Go get a job!”

And Melba was alone.

Frank came back with a cold can of Budweiser and an umbrella. He worried the ribs open and leaned down to look in her eyes. “It’s hot,” was all he said, giving the umbrella to her. The sad smile in Frank’s bachelor eyes said everything.

He left her to it, the digestion of one of life’s indigestibles. The blood on her shirt crusted over. The beer went flat. Melba cried a little. The warmth of the body she’d held, she had cherished --- was it enough? Ken Mitchell was dead. Nothing was ever enough. The searing pain in her chest embarrassed her, a lightning line to her own self-pity. Seventy hours of real estate work each week, meals everywhere but home, long weekends away to recuperate which only dragged more life out of her. Melba couldn’t hold still. And her dream, the farmhouse behind her with the fruit trees and quarter acre of land --- it remained a ghost dream even with her living in it. What would you say, Daddy? Nothing ever fooled her father. Not time, not trends, not anyone’s opinion. The Almighty could have taken pointers from Lloyd Burns’ consistency. He lived by his principles, as hateful as they were. The Mormon Church did all your thinking for you. Families were eternal. A woman had no value unless she was attached to a man.

Better than stringing your life between two mistakes ---

Melba tried to shrug off the quiet inner voice, but it came with an image, a view, her entire adult life strung between marrying Ambrose Jones and proving it didn’t matter. Thirty years of proving nothing to no one. Melba’s earthly success had made no difference to her parents. It didn’t fill the chasm opened at her marriage to a black man, the chasm widened further by divorce, or silence her own ongoing rejection of the Church.

Melba gripped her car keys. Her head spun with vertigo. The twenty-first century spilled its contents, slick with promises, devouring lives, scouring for ever more pleasure everywhere, as close, as real as the keys on Melba’s ring.

She saw the end. She closed the umbrella.

Late afternoon, sparrows dancing in the old rhododendron tree above her, Melba Burns wound two keys off the ring and wondered how best to get rid of them. It didn’t matter. The keys meant nothing. You didn’t need keys to wade out of the twenty-first century. She would never drive again.