He points to the couple. “Isn’t it romaine-tic?”
He takes my empty energy bottle in his hand, which is holding his own empty bottle. It reminds me of church with Joel and his family at Christmas; how, after communion, Joel would take the little plastic cup that had contained the blood of Christ, and stack my cup with his. His hand would brush mine when he did, and I would feel like I was in on something.
When the trucker gets up to throw our small bottles away, I notice, for the first time, the back of his shirt, which says, “If you can read this, the bitch fell off.”
“I like to ride a bike,” he says, when he turns around and sees that I’ve glimpsed the print on his shirt. “What do you do?”
“Sonography,” I say. “Ultrasounds.”
“How is it, working with the whales?” people tend to ask.
“Sonography,” I usually have to repeat. “Not sonar.”
“Are they really as friendly as everybody says?” they’ll continue.
I started reading about echolocation so I could field the questions. The answer to “Are whales friendly?” is “Most are.” The “melon,” which is what you call the fatty organ in the whale head, serves an important function in echolocation.
But the trucker only says, “Good.”
He reminds me of my father. They could be the same age. He sticks his cigarette in his mouth and puffs while he engages both hands to rummage in the inner pockets of his jacket. He hands me a small paper booklet. On the cover of the booklet is a photograph of him, looking somber, and beneath it: COOKERY BY CARL. I open the book. It’s recipes. The first is for endive boats.
“Someone told me it’s a tradition they have in Thailand,” he says. “Over there the thing to do before you die is compose a cookbook. That way, all the guests at your funeral get to depart with a party favor. Somewhere along the line you can crack this open, see”—he opens the book, at random.
“Say you want to cook trout en papillote for dinner. Well, you’re in luck, because there’s a recipe right here. So you get your trout en papillote and as a bonus you remember your old friend Carl, too.”
“That’s a nice tradition,” I say.
I make a motion to hand the book back to Carl and he pushes it away.
“That one is yours.”
“But here you are, alive,” I say.
“No sense denying that you and I will one day both be dead.”
He stands up.
“Hopefully me before you,” he says.
He shakes my hand.
“A real pleasure,” he says.
I drive past billboards advertising pistachios, the lowest-fat nut, and Merry Cherry stands, with their painted grinning cherries, until the furrows give way to desert, and the desert gives way to the roller coasters in Valencia, and the mountains before Los Angeles.
Upland is shaded and quiet and, by California standards, old. On a clear day, which is most days of the year, there’s this very blue sky and the San Gabriel Mountains, which includes Mount Baldy, the highest point in Los Angeles County. It’s a picture-perfect postcard picture; it looked, I thought, growing up, exactly like one of those posters you affix to the back of fish tanks.
That’s not exactly the truth. I used to think that every fish tank’s backdrop actually was a photograph of these specific mountains. That other mountains existed didn’t dawn on me until embarrassingly late in the game.
My street smells cold and familiar. All the grapefruits are hanging from trees like ornaments. It feels like there’s a sun going down in my head, and outside it is rising as I pull into town, my five hours of energy coming to a not-unpleasant close. On our street there is a squirrel that’s been hit, not freshly, and now looks like smashed cookies.
“Ruth,” says my mother, there to greet me, in the lit driveway of our pink house. I’d forgotten the exact color. It’s the color of a cut, ripe guava.
“Hi, Mom,” I say.
“My toes are frozen,” she says. “Hard freeze. They won’t be producing any oranges this year.”
January 8
Before she leaves for work in the morning, Mom gives me a lesson in the washer and dryer.
“What you do,” she says, “is kick it like this.” She gives the washer—which she’s loaded—a single firm kick, prompting it to start.
“Some other time,” she says, “I’ll show you the thing about this dryer.”
Apparently, the dryer’s deal is that it tumbles, but never with any heat.
Mom retired last year from the high school; now she substitute-teaches. She’s been filling in for Mr. Byers, a third-grade teacher at my old elementary school. He broke his leg in a skiing accident. He’d taken hallucinogens. When the snow patrol finally found Mr. Byers, it was inside the deep snow angel he’d dug himself into. He was singing “On Top of Old Smokey.”
All day, Dad won’t leave his office. I watch educational TV: about how to make Greek salad and chicken potpie, and how to increase the value of your home by painting an ugly brown table black, because as it turns out, an ugly black table is preferable to an ugly brown one. I read ancient newspapers no one has bothered to recycle about improvements in replacement heart valves, prisoners exonerated by DNA evidence, obituaries of notable people I’ve heard of and others I haven’t. I wonder what Bonnie is up to, so I text her. She texts back a photo of a clump of hair she’s swept into a pile that sort of resembles a turtle.
There is, in the backyard, a pile of lumber, for the patio cover my father has forever intended to build. The bird feeder, hanging from the cherry tree, is empty, to my surprise. When we were little, my mother always kept it filled. It always attracted regulars, like a good pub.
Every so often, I check the backyard, to see if any birds are dining at the feeder.
Every so often, I take bathroom breaks: I remove my top and examine myself shirtless in the mirror. My nipples really do look like his.
I wait and wait for his mood to change, but the birds never come, and the mood never changes.
January 9
He shows me another page from the notebook:
Last week I played you the Beach Boys and today you sang the wrong lyrics. You were singing, “I guess I just wasn’t made for these tides” and when I tried to correct you, you said, “Well, they were the Beach Boys, weren’t they?” You made a very good point.
Today you asked about storms, and their eyes. You asked what it was like, to “see like a storm.” You asked, with great concern, “What do birds do in the rain?”
Actually, I remember that.
“They huddle beneath the leaves,” I remember my father saying. “Their feathers shed the rain. You ever heard of a birdbath?” he’d said, when I seemed unconvinced. “Don’t worry. They don’t mind it.”
What else I remember is that despite my dad’s answer, I didn’t feel very placated. I was worried for them, still. When I questioned him further, he seemed irritated.