9.
I drove away from Danny’s trailer and turned right on the gravel road toward the RV park. Okay, I thought, the way to deal with Danny is to focus on the here and now. I felt some joy, as though I’d found a path into his troubled mind. I wouldn’t bring up our family with him again. Though I bet he talked about the past with his online ex-military buddies. Wasn’t that what those guys did? Relive everything that happened to them over there? Whatever. I’d leave the past in the past. I’d try to find a movie playing nearby that he might be interested in. I’d take him to dinner. We could talk about books. Some nice, safe topic. Maybe I could get him to move up to Durham, closer to me. There were more services for veterans up there.
But I was getting ahead of myself.
My father’s small RV stood where it always had, in the first of the park’s twelve sites. The old trailer had once been white with a green stripe down the side, but although the green was still in pretty good shape, the white had aged to a dingy yellow. I pulled up next to it on the concrete pad and was about to get out of my car when my phone rang again. Pulling the phone from my tote bag, I saw Jean Lyons on the caller ID. With a sigh, I lifted the phone to my ear. Might as well get it over with.
“Hi, Jeannie,” I said, opening my car door wide to let the air in.
“Listen, honey, I’m swamped the rest of today and tomorrow morning,” she said, “but I could come over tomorrow afternoon. Christine’s dying to meet you, but she’s tied up till next week, so I can get started on making an inventory of everything in the house. Then we can get cooking on—”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I interrupted. “I have plans for tomorrow.” I was lying, but I needed one more day to myself without Jeannie in it. “The next day, maybe?”
“I have two showings that day.” She sounded frustrated. “And you need to get going on this or we’ll be putting the house on the market too close to the schools opening. We’re way too late as it is.”
“Tuesday?” I suggested.
“You know,” she said, “you don’t really need to be there tomorrow. You can go on about your business and I’ll come over in the afternoon and get to work. I have a key so I can let myself in.”
She had a key to the house? Well, of course she did, but for some reason, that creeped me out.
“I’d rather be there, Jeannie,” I said. “I want to go through everything, too. We’ll just have to wait a few days.”
I heard her sigh. “All right,” she said. “If you change your mind, let me know.”
I hung up the phone and shoved it in the pocket of my shorts. Could she be any pushier? Picking up the ring of keys from the passenger seat, I got out of my car.
It took a few tries to get the key to turn in the rusty RV lock and the door creaked open on its hinges. I was nearly blown back by the heat and the scent of mold and mildew. I turned on the air-conditioning, relieved to find it still worked. In spite of the mustiness, the small space looked fairly neat. A threadbare navy blue spread was pulled over the narrow bed and the only thing on the built-in table was a small CD player, tucked close to the wall.
I went through the dresser and kitchen drawers and the one closet, but found little besides a few towels and some well-used rags. A couple of fishing poles stood upright against the wall next to the lavatory. The mini-refrigerator was empty except for three of cans of Pepsi and a nearly empty bottle of Chardonnay, and there was no food in any of the kitchen cabinets, although I did find evidence that mice had made the space their home sometime in the not-too-distant past.
A small TV sat at the far end of the kitchen counter, and a row of CDs, bookended by fist-sized rocks on the left and right, was lined up next to the small sink. No vinyl here, I thought. Taped to the wall above the CDs was a newspaper ad for a concert, and I recognized the picture of the four musicians from that postcard in the purple envelope, the one from the post office box in Pollocksville. What a weird coincidence, I thought. A child’s stick-figure drawing of two smiling adults and two smiling children was taped next to the ad. Then there was a photograph of a couple of kids on a merry-go-round. I pulled it from the wall for a closer look. The girl was two at the most, the boy a few years older. Both redheads. They had to be brother and sister, but who were they? If Daddy had truly been close to Jeannie, maybe these were her grandkids?
As I retaped the picture to the wall, I saw the cover of the first CD in the row. Alison Krauss. My father listening to bluegrass? I pulled out a couple of the other CDs. Ricky Skaggs? Béla Fleck?
I was starting to feel like a trespasser. This couldn’t be my father’s trailer. I kept glancing out the dirty windows, expecting the real owner—or renter—of the RV to show up any minute, angry over my intrusion into his space. I replaced the CDs and had turned off the air-conditioning when I noticed the VHS player beneath the television. I stared at it for a moment in disbelief, then detached it from the TV, tucked it under my arm, and left the RV, locking the door behind me.
* * *
I put the VHS player in my car, then decided to walk rather than drive down to the Kyles’ RV at the other end of the park. My feet crunched on the gravel as I headed east and it was a pretty walk along the winding lane through the trees. Though the park was short on amenities, it had a natural beauty that I guessed had drawn my father to it to begin with. Through the trees, I could see more RVs than the last time I’d stopped by. The park was filling up for the weekend. I heard voices as I passed a couple of the RV sites, and at one point I smelled bacon frying, the scent heady and delicious.
As near as I could figure, my father had been in his midforties when we moved to New Bern, too early for him to have retired from the U.S. Marshals Service. Maybe he’d burned out or just needed to get away from the pressure and rat race of Washington. Both he and my mother had inherited some family money. Not a lot, but it had probably been enough to allow him to get out early if he wanted to after Lisa died. They could get a fresh start somewhere else. I would never know. It was too late to ask him all the questions I had now.
I reached the Kyles’ dented old motor home. Their car was gone and I was afraid they weren’t home, but as I neared the RV, the door opened and Verniece Kyle stood beneath the striped awning.
“Hello, Riley!” she called. “How are you, love?”
“I’m good.” I smiled. I loved her sweetness. “Do you have a minute?”
“Of course. Tom’s fishing and I’d enjoy the company. Don’t you have the prettiest hair, the way the sun’s shining on it.”
“Thanks,” I said, climbing into the RV.
“How about some coffee and we’ll sit out on the patio?”
I’d already had two cups that morning, but I liked the idea of sitting with her, sipping coffee and chatting. Verniece wasn’t much older than Jeannie, but I had a completely different response to her. Frankly, I liked having someone call me love, even if she probably used that endearment for everyone from her husband to the checkout clerks at the grocery store.
We carried our mugs out to the patio and sat down on a couple of blue-webbed lawn chairs.
“Do you get lonely out here?” I asked, nestling the mug in my lap.
“Oh, no,” she said. “No more than any other housewife gets lonely. I like meeting all the newcomers to the park and of course there are those folks who come back year after year. It’s a lot of fun. Plus, I’m really involved with the church. That’s not Tom’s thing. I need to be around people more than he does.”
We sipped our weak coffee and talked about a few of the people who had checked in the night before. Then I put my cup on the plastic table next to me and reached into my purse for my key ring.
“I stopped by my father’s RV on my way here, and I wondered if you and Tom would like to have it,” I said. I worked the RV’s key free of the ring and set it on the table. “I know it’s not in the best shape, but I figured you could sell it or rent or…” I shrugged.
“You don’t want it?” she asked. “What about your brother?”
“He doesn’t want it,” I said. “I looked through it to be sure there wasn’t anything I should keep, and it seemed like my father hadn’t been inside it much in a while. Has someone else been using it, do you know?”
She shook her head. “Not that I know of. Your father was there a couple of times a month, I’d say. He liked to be close to the water, like Tom.”
“Speaking of Mr. Kyle,” I said, glad for the opening, “when I was going through my father’s checkbook, I realized he’s been paying Tom five hundred dollars a month and I don’t know what that’s for. I don’t know if my father owed him money or what.”
She stared at me blankly. I’d flummoxed her. “I have no idea,” she said. “Are you sure about that? Maybe it was for…” Her voice faded away as she shook her head. “Well, I have no earthly idea what it was for, actually. Every single month?”
I nodded, but wished I’d kept my mouth shut and waited to talk to her husband about it. I had a terrible feeling I’d told her something no one had wanted her to know.
“Maybe Tom would want my father’s fishing gear that’s in the RV,” I said, to change the subject.
“Sure.” She let me change it, but her eyes were still cloudy with confusion. “I’ll tell him to look it over and see what he wants,” she said.