The Girl Who Ran Off With Daddy (4 page)

I’d sit there sipping single malt and staring at the fire and brooding a lot about life, death and fatherhood—three things I knew nothing about. I knew I’d never had it so good. Christ, I knew that. But I also knew I’d never felt so frustrated and unfulfilled and lost. Part of it was the novel, no question. But not all of it. I didn’t know what it was, the rest. I only knew there seemed to be an absence of joy in my life.

That’s what I was thinking about the night Thor Gibbs showed up, begging me to help Clethra pen her Tale of Whoa. Like I said, I didn’t want to. And not just because I’d had it with ghosting. As far as I was concerned, Thor had behaved like a swine. A seventy-one-year-old man doesn’t run off with his eighteen-year-old stepdaughter. Not if he’s thinking straight. But therein lay my dilemma—the man
wasn’t
thinking straight. Couldn’t be. Something had to be wrong. Terribly wrong. And part of me felt that Thor knew it. That’s why he’d shown up. Not because
she
needed a ghost but because
he
needed
me.
My old friend was crying out for help. So was poor Arvin, an innocent boy who was being ripped apart by his parents’ battle—not to mention his half-sister’s rather queer taste in boyfriends.

Face it, this was a family in desperate need of a healer. John Lee Hooker calls the blues our great healer. I don’t disagree with the old master. It’s just that most of the people who come to me for help are tone-deaf. And they don’t see things too clearly either. They need someone to set them straight. Someone who’ll tell them what they don’t want to hear. Someone who’ll whomp them upside the head if need be.

They need me.

And sometimes, if I get real lucky, I need them, too.

I
PICKED SOME WHITE MUMS
from the garden to put on Merilee’s breakfast tray. Breakfast in bed may be Merilee’s favorite thing in life, other than watching
Regis & Kathie Lee,
and she won’t watch them anymore. Doesn’t want to expose Tracy to crap. She’d heard that just as you are what you eat you are what you absorb—in other words, if you watch crap, if you listen to crap, if you read crap, you
become
crap. I don’t know who told her that. It may have been me.

I’d been up for hours. Never went back to bed, actually. After I’d gotten Thor and Clethra settled in I’d stropped Grandfather’s straight-edge razor and shaved. I dressed in an old, soft Italian wool shirt, thorn-proof moleskin trousers, ankle boots of kid leather and the eight-ply oyster gray cashmere cardigan I got at the Burlington Arcade in London. At dawn I’d grabbed my old hickory walking stick and went hiking off through the woods with Lulu to Reynolds’ general store for the
Times,
the maple leaves turning a million different glorious shades of orange and red, the geese flying over in formation, heading south. It was a bright, clear morning, the air crisp and cold. Lulu had on her hand-knitted Fair Isle vest to ward off the chill. She picks up sinus infections easily, and she snores when she has them. I know this because she likes to sleep on my head. After her most recent bout, her vet had raised the idea of having her deviated septum repaired. I’d never heard of a basset hound getting a nose job. The vet assured me it was quite common and would not alter her appearance in the least. Right away this cooled me on the whole idea.

She came scrambling up the stairs with me when I took Merilee’s tray up, nails clacketing on the wood floor, desperate to jump up on her mommy’s bed for a snuggle. But this was a no-no. Not with Tracy there. She was on her belly next to Merilee in her Babar the Elephant footed rompers, arms waving, legs kicking. Looked like she was break-dancing, actually. Merilee cooing at her with delight. Lulu had to settle for the rocker in front of the fireplace, grunting peevishly while I threw open the curtains and let in the morning sun.

One entire wall of the master bedroom was a row of tall mahogany casement windows that afforded a not terrible view of the cove. The bedroom was not large. We kept it rather sparely furnished. The rocker, washstand and lamp tables were Shaker. The bed, of gently battered brass, was not. Shaker beds, as you may know, tend to be, well, really narrow.

“They’re still here, aren’t they?” Merilee demanded when I presented her with her tray.

I stood there gazing at her. She looked weary. She always did now. But she also looked extremely delectable. It was hard to believe she was past forty. Even harder to believe she was mine. Not that Merilee Nash is a conventional beauty. Her nose and chin are too patrician, her forehead too high. Plus she is no delicate flower. She is just a hair under six feet tall, with broad sloping shoulders and huge hands and feet. What used to be called a big-boned gal, and is now called a Merilee Nash type.

“Can’t I do something nice without you immediately being suspicious?” I said lightly.

“Hmphht.” She reached for the paper and glanced at the headlines. Or I should say squinted. She won’t read with her glasses on in front of the baby for fear Tracy will grow up wanting to wear glasses whether she needs them or not. This particular belief she cooked up all on her own. She took a sip of her hot milk. The milk was from a dairy in nearby Salem and came in glass bottles with the cream floating on top. She took another sip. She said it again. “They’re still here, aren’t they?”

“As a matter of fact, they’re asleep in the chapel.”

Without warning, Tracy tried sitting up. I gave her an 8.5 on form and a 9 on degree of difficulty—before she abruptly plopped over onto her side with a quizzical yelp.

Delighted, Merilee reached over and tickled her foot, producing a gale of giggles. I watched the two of them, wondering just how much longer Merilee would be content here on the farm with her, especially now that the summer gardening season was ending and the fall theater season beginning. How much longer before she’d need to hear that applause again?

She furrowed her brow at me. “Darling?”

“Yes, Merilee?”

“There’s no bed in the chapel.”

“He prefers the floor. Some back injury from his rodeo days.”

“And she?”

“Not to worry. She’s generously padded on both sides.”

“Why, Mr. Hoagy, are you being meowish?”

“Who, me? Never.”

“So what’s she like?” Merilee inquired, trying to sound casual about it. And failing.

“I gave them the down comforter from the guest room.”

“Is she awful?”

“And Sadie to fend off the mice.”

“You don’t like her, do you?” She seemed mildly amused by this.

“Thor asked me to give her a chance.”

“You
detest
her.” She seemed greatly amused by this.

“Possibly,” I offered, “she’s just in need of a positive female role model. After all, she and Ruth aren’t exactly on good terms anymore.”

“And I wonder why.” Merilee took a bite of her toast, which was topped with her very own apple butter. She shook her head. “He’s a dirty old man, Hoagy. And she’s cruel and stupid.”

“I guess that means you don’t want them staying here for the winter.”

Her eyes widened. “Staying here? Explain yourself this instant, sir.”

I did. And to her credit, Merilee listened patiently and calmly before she responded, “I want peace and quiet right now, not
Hard Copy
camped out at the foot of our drive. That’s exactly what I don’t want.”

“I don’t want that either, Merilee. Nor do they.”

She studied me over her mug. “You want to do this book with her, Hoagy? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Not even maybe.” I sat down at the foot of the bed. “But I do owe the man. And he is in trouble.”

She sipped her milk, considering it long and hard. “Okay,” she concluded, much to my surprise. “But only because of a certain person who I happen to care deeply for.”

“Ruth?”

She shook her head.

“Arvin?”

“You.”

“Me?”

“You haven’t been very good company lately, darling. You’ve been pointy and distant and about as much fun as a dose of poison ivy in one’s pink places.”

“I know that, Merilee. Just one of those phases a guy goes through. Shouldn’t last for more than another decade.”

“Is this you being new-fatherish?”

“This is me being I-don’t-knowish.”

Tracy watched me intently from the bed. I watched her back.

Merilee watched us watching each other. “I wish you two would make up your minds about one another.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean you keep measuring each other like potential enemies.”

“We’re just getting ready for when she’s a teenager.”

Merilee hesitated, biting her lower lip. “Know what I keep thinking you ought to do, darling?”

“Oh, God, Merilee. You’re not going to send me off in search of my smile, are you?”

“Hoagy, you never had a smile.”

“Did so. It so happens I was a buoyant, fun-loving child.”

Lulu started coughing. It’s what she does instead of laughing.

Merilee’s eyes were on the windows. “I keep thinking … What I mean is, if only you’d sit down with your father and—”

“I don’t want to talk about him, Merilee,” I said gruffly. “You know I don’t want to talk about him.”

“I know, I know,” she conceded, coloring. “It’s just that your mother and I were—”

“My mother and you were what?” I snapped.

“Don’t yell at me!”

I stood and went over to the windows, gazing out at the cove. A hawk was circling over the marsh, slowly, in search of breakfast. “Merilee, I don’t know what it is.”

“Then maybe Thor can help you find out. He’s always had some mysterious power over you, God knows why. And God knows why I’m agreeing to this. The two of you will probably end up facedown together in a brothel somewhere in Mexicali.” She sighed grandly, tragically. “All right, they may stay—for your sake. And because I care about Ruth. Although if she ever finds out I’m harboring those two moral fugitives—”

“Let’s try not to judge them, okay?”

“I’m trying,” she insisted. “I’m just not having much success.”

“Neither am I.” I took her gloved hand, getting lost in her green eyes. “That’s a rather agreeable mouth you have on, Miss Nash.”

“Why, thank you, sir.”

“Any reason I shouldn’t kiss it?”

“None that I can think of.”

So I did. She kissed me back, gently. And then not so gently. I reached inside her nightshirt for whatever I might find in there.

“Careful,” she whispered. “They’re sensitive.”

“Nice and warm, too.” I know I was certainly overheating. It had been quite a while since we’d been joined together in atomic passion. Longer than I cared to admit. “I could get back in there with you, you know.”

Her eyes widened in mock horror. “Merciful heavens, Hoagy. Tracy could be permanently scarred.”

“Or permanently impressed.”

“I should have had her when I was twenty-two,” she said ruefully. She said this a lot. Practically every day. “I would have had energy for the both of you then. I just don’t now.” She tugged primly at her nightshirt, buttoning it. “And I certainly don’t feel sexy. More like some form of large, slow farm animal.”

“You don’t look like one, Merilee.”

Her eyes softened. “Really?”

“Really,” I said, reaching for her.

Only now we could hear Dwayne’s truck turning in at the foot of the drive, stereo thumping, engine rack-racketing—the kid had little or nothing in the way of a muffler. He pulled up outside the carriage barn in a splattering of gravel and hopped out. I heard voices. Thor was up. The two of them were getting acquainted.

Merilee pushed me away, reluctantly but firmly. “I’ll be down to say hello as soon as I do my post-natal exercises.”

“I can suggest some terribly interesting new exercises.”

“Those, mister, are very old ones. Now off with you. Go on. Scoot.”

It was my turn to sigh grandly and tragically. I climbed to my feet and started for the door.

“The thing of it is,” she pointed out, “I wasn’t ready to be a mother when I was that age. I wasn’t a grown-up, not like I am …” She stopped short, her brow creasing with concern. “Are you all right, darling? You look terribly pale all of a sudden.”

“I’m fine. Still can’t get used to the idea that I’m living with a grown-up, that’s all.”

“Hoagy?”

“Yes, Merilee?”

“Hello.”

“Hello, yourself.”

Dwayne was busy showing Thor the sill work he was doing. Thor was busy making all sorts of enthusiastic noises. The man always did have a gift for drawing people out. Making them see themselves and their work, whatever it was, as something to be proud of.

Proud made for a nice break in the day for Dwayne Gobble. He was a tall, grungy beanpole of a kid with veiny red hands and a scraggly goatee and dirty blond hair he wore in that style favored by heavy metal musicians and minor league hockey players—short on top, long and stringy in back. A strikingly ugly purple scar slanted across his forehead and halfway down his nose—this from when he’d gone headfirst through his windshield a while back. They hadn’t done a very good job of sewing him back together. One eyebrow was higher than the other, one eye slightly atilt. It was as if two different people’s faces had been stitched together. Dwayne had worn the same flannel shirt and torn jeans every day since he started working for us, his jeans stained and filthy and so loose they practically fell from his bony hips. He favored tattoos. Had any number of them on his arms. None said loser. He didn’t need that one. Already had it written all over him. Chiefly it was his eyes, which never looked directly at you. Down at your feet or over your shoulder or up in the air—anywhere but at you. Dwayne was a troubled kid. The village outcast, actually. But nice enough, once you got to know him. And it really wasn’t his fault no one in town besides us would hire him.

Thor knelt in the damp earth beside the twin hydraulic jacks that presently held up that corner of the barn, scrutinizing one of the pressure-treated two-by-fours Dwayne had sistered in. “Lay a transit on her, boy?”

“You bet I did, sir.” Dwayne shook a Camel out of the crumpled pack in his shirt and lit it, using his calloused palm as an ashtray. “She’s dead nuts, all right.”