The Lies They Tell(5)
Most of the course had been freshly mowed lengthwise, green to the tee and back again, but here, the lines ended. She spotted the zero-turn abandoned near a sand trap, Dad nowhere in sight. She hit the horn lightly and parked. “You here?”
No answer. Pearl climbed out and walked the ragged edge of the bluff, running her hand along the wire fence. She finally spotted him, out there on the embankment, standing on the ledge, facing seaward.
She gripped the fence posts, afraid to speak and startle him. After a moment, he sensed her and turned, a man torn from a dream. “Hey, Pearlie.” He sounded fine, same old Dad, but the late haunted nights had seamed his face, already full of sharp angles, like her own. He was responsible for all of it: her small build, the slight wave in her hair, her habit of biting her lips whenever she was nervous or upset.
“It’s five o’clock.” She still couldn’t move. He seemed to understand, then, how much he was scaring her, and walked over, squeezing through a rolled-back panel in the fencing, where she immediately hugged him hard around the waist. “What were you doing out there?”
“Looking around.” He kissed the top of her head. She caught a hearty whiff of him: spearmint gum, fresh sweat, and booze, but not recent—hopefully none since this morning, Irish in his coffee while she was out of the room. “Hey, I got something for you.”
“It’s not a golf ball, is it?”
“Hey. You used to love that when you were little.” He took something from his pocket and pressed it into her palm.
She opened her fingers and saw a tiger-striped sea scallop shell, perfectly intact. “You found this out there?”
“Thought you’d want it for your collection.” The gesture almost made her forget that he hadn’t answered her question. “How was work?”
Memories of Tristan flickered by. “Typical. Doing stuff for rich people.”
“Sounds like we had the same day. How about I grill tonight? Got some burger half off at Godfrey’s.”
“Sure. But the grill needs gas.” He swore. “I can fry it up on the stovetop instead. Make pasta salad?” She was rewarded with a nod, half a smile. “Race you back.”
Dad made for the zero-turn. She ran to the Gator, already rolling before he even had the mower started. She kept him in her side-view mirror the whole way. Better to focus on that than on how her stomach had plummeted at the sight of him on that ledge, how everything she’d become so afraid of seemed encapsulated in that moment. Better than asking him the hard questions, the ones that really needed answering: When are you going to be okay? Were you thinking about them?
Dad’s Beetle Cat sailboat sat on the boat trailer in the front yard with a spray-painted For Sale sign leaning against it: $3,500 OBO. The original prices of $4,500, then $4,000, were blacked out. Dad stood with his back to it, hosing road dust off his battered pickup, the first Bud Light of the evening in his free hand.
It was the final ass-kicker in the whole ordeal, selling the boat. Dad had owned it since before she was born. When Pearl was a kid, sometimes they’d drop a line in the harbor on a Sunday—never with Mom, that wasn’t her thing. Her parents had so little in common it was amazing that she’d ever been conceived. So, it was Pearl and Dad, fishing buddies; poker buddies; throwing the ball around on warm evenings and tinkering with projects in the shed. Mom used to complain about feeling left out of their little club of two, but whenever she and Pearl tried mother-daughter stuff, it always ended in a fight; they just didn’t seem to speak the same language. When the divorce finally happened, Pearl was thirteen, and the judge had let her decide for herself who she wanted to live with. She was surprised he’d even had to ask. And Mom never forgave her. Why else would she have taken that job down in Kittery, almost a four-hour drive away?
Now a sedan drove down Abbott Street and slowed, checking out the Cat. Pearl sat up in her lawn chair. After a second, the driver accelerated again. Relaxing, Pearl pulled her feet back up to sit cross-legged and continued reading Sense and Sensibility on her tablet.
“Maybe I should knock the price back.” Dad popped the tab on Bud Light #2.
“It’s too low already.”
“Not if we want to unload the damn thing.” Dad’s profile was stony as he sprayed the mud flaps.
They didn’t want to, but they were drowning. The mailbox was crammed with notices from collection agencies; snail mail was the only way they could reach the Haskins household now that Dad had canceled his phone service, both to save money and escape the reporters begging for comment, to find out what he’d seen that night. Dad’s caretaking business, which kept them afloat during the off-season at the club, was bust. All because of the Garrisons, and what everyone in town was saying: it was Win Haskins’s fault. A few tips of the flask, and he’d let the wolf in the door.
The image brought back the memory of Tristan today, sitting close enough for her to add his brand of aftershave to her cache of Garrison knowledge. Pearl slouched down, closed out of her social media accounts—Mom was always trolling, hoping to catch her online; after their latest fight, it probably seemed the safest way to communicate—pulled up Google, and entered the familiar search criteria David Garrison family deaths with the sound of Mom’s old wind chimes pinging off each other in the background, miniature anchors.
Pearl had reread those first Mount Desert Islander and Ellsworth American articles countless times. She knew the photographs they’d run to the smallest detail, starting with the full-color spread of the Garrison house with a scorched hole in the roof, the blackened clapboards, the second-story east window a gaping hole into what had been the master bedroom. Firefighters were roaming around the front yard, their gear smudged with soot. The American headline read “Multimillionaire David Garrison, Three Family Members Killed in Tenney’s Harbor Blaze.”