The Spite House(6)
“I think I can.”
“Can you make one for me? I have a little girl at home who loves bows. She’d get a kick out of it.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Stacy said, and set aside the stem she had been working on to fulfill this new request.
Dess’s phone buzzed with a text from her father. On my way, it read. She had hoped he wouldn’t join them. He had to be wondering how she got the money to dine out, and that would lead to a conversation she would rather avoid. At least she doubted he would bring it up in front of Stacy. Still, if he was coming, there had to be something he wanted to talk about that couldn’t wait.
She took a deep breath and tried to relax, tried to enjoy as much of the moment as she could, to feel normal for a while before Dad arrived. She was in a restaurant with her baby sister. The place smelled like fried food that probably had way more salt and butter than her old track coach would have approved of, and she loved it. Not half as much as the smell of the kitchen back home when Mom and Dad were cooking dinner two or three nights a week. Not a tenth as much as that, but that was long gone, so she had to do like that old song said and love what she was with, as much as she could.
Across the highway there were trees that hadn’t changed color or lost any leaves yet. Dad had told her when they passed through Austin that the fall barely touched most of Texas, and the parts that did get some color and coolness didn’t get it the same way Maryland did. That made sense, of course, but it was one thing to know it, another to see it and feel it and miss home that much more because of it. When they had left, she’d thought of other, more immediate things she would miss. Mom most of all, even though she had already had time to miss her before they moved. Then there were her cousins, aunties, and uncles. School, too. Not friends, so much. Most of them had peeled away in the months before they’d had to leave. Not the old house all that much either, or so she’d thought at the time. In hindsight, she’d been fooling herself, but in the moment the house had been attached to so much sadness, and then strangeness, that she thought it would be good to get away. What she hadn’t considered was how much she would miss the first September chill. Red, orange, and yellow leaves. Pinecones on the ground. Across the street she saw greens and browns that lasted into the winter. This made her sadder than it should have, and she shook her head to snap out of it.
Dess didn’t know exactly how long she had spaced out, but when she looked at her sister she saw that Stacy had already made the bow Tanya had requested. Dess remembered when she had shown Stacy the video of someone making the napkin flowers and other simple decorations. It had been a quick tutorial, and the woman in the video had also used proper supplies, including tape, twine, and scissors. Stacy didn’t need any of that. She tore one napkin to strips and used them to tie tight, unobtrusive knots. It only took her a minute or two longer than the woman from the video to make her bow.
Stacy held it up. “You think she’ll like it?”
“Bet. I think she’ll love it.”
Out of the corner of her eye, through the window, Dess saw someone approaching the restaurant. She turned, saw that it was her father. When he waved at her, she looked away as though she could undo being seen. She chuckled at this, recalling one of her last happy memories among friends before her world changed. During a lock-in with the track team she and a few others snuck out after lights out, just to hang out and talk. After a while one of the coaches heard them and when she approached, Dess and her teammates fell silent as if Coach wouldn’t be able see them if she couldn’t hear them. Coach walked up and stared at them, and Dess knew she had to speak up first before someone else tried to come up with a bullshit explanation that would get them in more trouble. So she said, “We were all just out here praying for you, Coach. No lie.”
That got a laugh out of everyone, Coach included, and Dess was sure that her desperate little joke had shaved a few laps off their punishment.
She was still smiling when her dad joined them. He sat next to Stacy in the booth, and she beamed at him. He put the jobs page of the local newspaper on the table. The photograph of a house on the page that was faceup drew her attention. For a second she thought it was just part of a house, the improbably freestanding ruin left over after a storm or fire took the rest away. Then she saw where it was built, at the edge of a hill, and realized it must have been built as thin as it was on purpose to fit on the strip of land between the slope in front of the house and the trees behind it.
It looked like something left behind after a disaster. She’d seen a video online a couple of years ago that told the story of an old dam that collapsed in California. An enormous wave had rushed through a valley and killed hundreds. The biggest remnant of the dam was a slab that locals called “the tombstone.” It hadn’t been nearly as tall as the dam had been but was still tall enough that a fall from it would kill you. That was exactly what happened to some unfortunate sightseer who climbed it years later. That last death had been enough to make city officials blow up the tombstone and keep that old, failed dam from killing anyone else. Dess had a feeling that someone should have done the same thing to this strange old house. They should have blown it up years ago.
God, why did she think that? Yeah, it looked weird, but it was still just a house, wasn’t it? She blinked and brought the paper up for a closer look, but leaned back away from the picture as she did so. It was the sort of thing she used to tease her mom for doing when she didn’t have her glasses on, except Dess wasn’t tilting back because the image suddenly went blurry. She did so reflexively, like she was scared of seeing something she didn’t want to. A face in a window maybe. Or something worse.