Return to Paradise Read online

  The sun was sinking over the heifer pasture when Charlie rattled up the drive in his dear old “Love Machine,” a faded orange pickup he’d had since before I was born. When he saw me out at the corrals, he gimped over to me instead of his trailer. His hips had never worked right after a cow hooked him in the yards. He drew his brows together, never one for many words.

  “Hey Charlie,” I said. Hands tucked into his high vest pockets, he waited for me to continue. “Wanted to let you know I’m heading up to Quincy tomorrow.”

  His gaze left me and traveled over the cattle that were in his charge. Though he didn’t chew tobacco anymore, out of habit, he ran his tongue along the inside of his bottom lip. “You want to see her, do you?”

  “I want to look at that property you always used to talk about when I was a kid,” I said, dodging his question.

  His hooded eyes came back to me. Uniformly dark, they were difficult to read. He took off the small-brimmed gray felt hat he wore until blazing hot days forced him to switch to straw. He slowly turned it in his beat-up hands, a hatband I’d braided him in junior high still circling the crown. I liked him better with the hat on. His cheeks and neck were dark and leathery. I had the same gold undertones and tanned easily, though looking at how constant tanning took a toll on his skin, I was more careful to wear long sleeves and slather on sunscreen. Without the hat, his ghostly white forehead drew my attention away from his eyes. He had hardly any hair left, but he pawed what he had down. “What for?”

  “I won’t be going back to Steve’s. I’d like to run a place, and I don’t have any better ideas of where to start looking.”

  “It didn’t make it before.”

  “I know that.” I could make it work. I knew what it was like to be abandoned and was prepared to give the place my all.

  “You’d run cattle?”

  “I was thinking of outfitting it more like Steve’s.”

  He scratched a hand across his stubbly face. “Old place didn’t have buildings for that.”

  “If the ranch house is big enough, I can start out with lodge rooms.” A big fire didn’t need anything more than a handful of kindling to get started. I knew how to build a fire from a tiny spark. The spark is the key. Once I got the fire going, I knew I could add the bigger logs that made up my dream.

  “You’re talking a lot of cash.”

  “I’ve been saving some.”

  He nodded and squinted as if it would give him a better look at the future.

  “You don’t need my blessing.”

  “No,” I agreed. “The address would be nice though.”

  He turned without a word and walked ahead of me to the trailer, letting the screen go as he passed through it, unconcerned about whether I was following him or not. I caught it and swept it back open to follow him into the dim space. It was tidy, mostly because he had no clutter, no pictures on the dark wood-paneled walls. On one of the kitchen cupboards, he’d pinned a free calendar. The picture displayed was of a Fourth of July parade in town, a handsome pair of Clydesdales pulling an old-fashioned fire truck, American flags everywhere.

  He’d gotten it from a local bank and had forgotten all about it after seven months. It was frozen in a July almost ten years before. Charlie scribbled some notes on a pad of paper. “Don’t know the street number, just how to get there.” He ripped off the sheet and slid it across the counter, replacing the pen to the pad and turning to the kitchen to make his dinner. “You hungry?”

  “Still full from lunch.” It was a half-truth which would do. The day had unsettled me, and I didn’t feel up to sitting across from my father at the tiny kitchen table watching him try to hide his desire to read the newspaper and struggle to find a way to talk to me.

  I couldn’t remember eating with my father. As far back as memory went, I’d eaten up at the house with Bo and Ruth. Ruth picked me up from school. It was less of an interruption to her day. At first, I’d hang my backpack by the door and help in the garden or kitchen until my father came to collect me. If he’d ever tried to pull me out and talk to me about my day, I had no recollection of it. No wonder I preferred to spend my time with Ruth and Bo.

  The trailer always felt dark. I couldn’t understand how the two places could feel so different. Even when I turned on every light, I still couldn’t chase away the darkness. I’d had my own small room in the trailer, with my twin bed, bookshelf and desk. Unlike the room I had up at Bo and Ruth’s, it never felt like it was mine. Now I realized it was warmth I was reacting to because I could crawl into Ruth’s lap and ask her to read a book to me nestled against her chest, something I’d never do with Charlie.

  Bo and Ruth had never had any children and welcomed me as if I was their own. For years, I stayed at the house as long as I could, going back to the trailer to sleep down the hall from Charlie, listening to him turn pages late into the night and waking to the sound of the percolator that popped and gurgled before sunup. When school kids started inviting each other for sleepovers, I wanted to be able to do the same, but I didn’t want them to see where I lived. That’s how I got my room in the main house. Bo sought me out, gently prodding around what was bothering me. I told him about the sleepovers and how I didn’t want to have to show my friends the trailer.

  The main house sat on a hill shaded by poplars on one side with a generous garden on the other. They had rooms to spare in the large two-story place, inviting with its generous porch and gabled windows. They gave me my pick, and Ruth helped me decorate. We chose the paint color together, and Bo took me shopping for all the supplies and taught me how to cut the edges and roll without splatters. Ruth knew things about dust skirts and what looked nice on the wall, and by the time it was finished, and I could invite the other kids to play, it didn’t feel like lying when I said it was my house.

  I never considered how Charlie felt when I started sleeping in my bed with the pretty eyelet comforter. The adults must have talked about it when I started asking for sleepovers. Eventually, they weren’t sleepovers anymore. All my clothes came up to my room, and I always slept there. Some nights, I looked out to the trailer after I’d turned out the light. More often than not, his truck wasn’t parked in front. I’d stand there wondering where he was at my bedtime. If I’d been there, would he have left me by myself?

  Now standing in the living room as an adult, it still felt lonely. I don’t know that I’d have stopped by to tell him about my road trip had I not needed directions. When I arrived home, I always made sure to say hello and catch up with him, and I always said goodbye before I left, but we were stiff around each other, like distant relatives.

  I’d talked about going back to Quincy before. Picking out a dress for a dance, getting my first bra, when I first started my period: there were plenty of times that I thought about my mother. When I tried to talk to Charlie about her, he got even more taciturn. The most he’d ever shared was that she wasn’t fit to be a mother, that Ruth was a better mother to me than I could have ever asked for. I knew he said that out of honesty and not to make me feel guilty, but I quickly learned that I wasn’t going to get anything more specific out of him. He let me keep the pictures he had of her holding me when I was a newborn and some of me as a toddler. There weren’t many. I never found any pictures of a wedding.

  My albums were full of either Ruth or Bo holding birthday cakes out to me, or beaming in the background as I opened Christmas presents. Charlie was in plenty of these pictures, but in the background looking like he’d rather be somewhere else.

  By the time I was old enough to drive the nearly two hours to Quincy to meet my mother, I had no desire to do so. I’d written to her when I was a kid, but I’d never had a reply. What parent can simply let her child slip away?

  I looked at my father. How could they both?

  The directions lay on the counter. I picked them up and nodded my thanks. “G’night then Charlie.” We didn’t hug, and he didn’t see me out. I let the screen slam behind me.

  Chapter Three
r />   Madison

  I’m used to mountain roads, and the stretch up Feather River Canyon is one of the prettiest I know. I left the sweeping pastures of Paradise to follow the curve of the river itself, hairpin turns carved out of rock face on one side and a drop down to the water on the other. As I climbed in elevation over the long drive, I watched for black ice in the shadows that the weak winter sun wouldn’t have a chance to thaw.

  I never had trouble driving in weather. When I first started working for Steve, he’d ask someone else to run errands if it was raining assuming that nobody from California knew how to drive in the rain. Years went by before my record overrode that assumption. I slowed before curves, accelerating out of them, hardly touching my brakes.

  That said, I’d never navigated a narrow mountain road when a tire blew and was completely unprepared for the pull of it. I braked quickly, adrenaline making my skin tingle as I checked the rearview to make sure I wasn’t about to be rear-ended. Luckily, I was alone on the road. As I looked for a decent place to pull over to put on the spare, the truck thumped through the next two turns, the rubber thwapping against the pavement. A turnout wouldn’t do. I’d be inviting a slow traveler pulling over to plow into me. The river to my right, I had no shoulder.

  On the other side of the road, one of the turns had a pocket large enough for my pickup, so I cut across the lane and pulled to a halt facing traffic. I grabbed the tool kit from under the jump seat and retrieved the spare from under the bed of the truck. I assembled the tool to lower the tire, popping out the retaining clip to free it from the cable.

  Bo and Ruth had given me the truck in high school, but Charlie had been the one who insisted that if a person owned a car, she should know how to take care of it. We took off the spare and tucked it back away. He taught me how to jump on the wrench to get the lug nuts loose. He showed me how to check my oil and put in wiper fluid, keeping up a running monologue about how mechanics took advantage of people who knew nothing about engines.

  I stood the whole time, mesmerized by his words. I never heard him put together so many in such a short time span. I didn’t see how learning to change my own oil was going to make me any more knowledgeable and less vulnerable to an unscrupulous mechanic. However, I was happy to spend another afternoon under his tutelage, first at the store learning what supplies I needed, and later under the truck as my hands followed the instructions from the voice I’d so seldom heard.

  Now examining the flat, I couldn’t make sense of how something with so much tread could look so trashed. I tossed it into the back of the pickup wondering if I should add finding a mechanic to my to-do list in Quincy. I didn’t have a choice about finishing the trip up the mountain on the spare but didn’t know if it would do to drive the round trip on it. I was about twenty miles outside of Quincy, so if I didn’t replace the tire, I was looking at putting about a hundred miles on the spare. Bo would say ask Charlie, but Charlie still refused to own a cell phone, so after I checked out the property I resigned myself to finding a mechanic.

  I made the rest of the trip more cautiously, wondering what I was supposed to do if a second tire blew. I took my time, enjoying the whisper quiet of the forest. As I neared town, a small snow berm appeared at the side of the road where the plows had cleared the road, making me grateful I’d had my blowout on more level ground further back down the mountain.

  Much of the way up the canyon, I’d been boxed in by sheer mountains and tall evergreens. When the road started to open up a bit, the straightaways longer, the trees thinning out, sometimes interrupted by small meadows blanketed by snow, I relaxed my grip on the wheel. I began to wonder if someone at home should have talked me out of driving up without phoning any of the realtors in the area. Irrational as it now seemed, I just wanted to see the place. The place of my father’s dreams called me.

  Before I caught sight of the town, I spotted the sign for my turn to Hot Rocks. I found myself alone on the road. Evergreens again towered on both sides. Beyond the dirty snow at the edge of the road, undisturbed white stretched through the forest. Without recent snow, the trees stood in dark contrast, their needles having shed their weight. I passed Charlie’s landmarks—a bridge, water still running below, then a long narrow meadow, and finally a dirt drive leading to the property.

  I swung around, pointing my truck back the way I’d come, and carefully pulled off the road as much as I dared, wishing I’d had the foresight to borrow Charlie’s big old Dodge Power Wagon. I wouldn’t have worried about angling his “Love Machine” back out of the unplowed drive like I did my little pickup. I tucked my jeans into my rubber-soled Sorel work boots and shrugged into my coat before I opened the door.

  My eyes closed as I took a deep breath of crisp mountain air. I breathed in wood smoke and pine but also the richness of the land, wet under the snow that crunched underfoot. When I stopped, there was silence, not even the whisper of wind in the trees. Without a scarf, my cheeks and ears started to tingle. A very loose padlocked chain held the gate across the drive. It had enough play that I could easily squeeze through and continue over a bridge up the undisturbed snow to the ranch house, my legs and lungs burning.

  Charlie had driven these roads for years from the house he and my mother shared in East Quincy. Did the owners have a bunkhouse he could have used had he not been saddled with a family? I’d found a few pictures of him at work, but they never showed the buildings. Black and whites of Charlie driving cattle astride a big bay horse. Charlie kneeling on a calf’s shoulder, immobilizing it while another cowboy applied the brand.

  I never learned these people’s names. Charlie never took me to Hot Rocks with him, and when I’d unearthed the pictures as a teen, he’d quietly tucked them back in the box without a word. In contrast, Bo would have joined me cross-legged on the carpet to reminisce about the horse in the picture or talk about how the sales had been that spring. Maybe it was Charlie’s unwillingness to talk about it that built the mystery for me and fueled my desire to return.

  The master house came into view, and I stopped at the bottom of the large turnaround drive to take in what a guest would see on arrival. I imagined the wraparound porch would beckon travelers year-round, an escape from the snow or the heat of a summer day. Though I was really more interested in the property, I tromped up to the porch and stomped the snow from my boots, peeking in the dark windows at an empty living room and a few dusty bedrooms. The sight cheered me. The place didn’t seem to be waiting for anyone to return after winter.

  The back door angled toward the barn and corrals. I couldn’t fathom where the cattle would have been kept. The holding pen might have held a few dozen head. Bo’s could take a few hundred. I knew from Bo that Charlie had helped him grow his herd, that he’d shipped his heifers up to be bred to the bull at Hot Rocks until he’d become established enough to buy his own. My mind started spinning with the possibilities when something beyond the pens caught my eye.

  A small movement. My body tensed as I felt eyes on me. Again I felt how alone I was. Was there cell phone coverage here? How long it would take for someone to track me down were something to happen to me? I relaxed immediately when my eyes finally sorted out the white body against the background of the snow. The huge white horse held my gaze a few ticks before he moved. I caught myself holding my breath, illogically trying not to spook him. Dumbfounded, I stood rooted as he walked to me, his gait as sound as it was slow.

  “This your place?” I asked conversationally when he reached me, butting my red-cold hands with his muzzle. I ran my hands over his coarse, dense winter coat, and they welcomed the heat caught under his long yellowed mane. He smelled like home to me, all dusty saltiness. Age revealed itself in his pronounced withers and hollowed-out hind end, but he was clearly being fed, no ribs sticking out as I ran a hand over his barrel. “You’re keeping an eye out? I promise I’m legit, on my way to talk to a realtor about the place. You happen to know if it’s for sale?”

  He swung his head around as if surveying t
he place with me. I checked the snow. Aside from our tracks, the place was pristine. I hadn’t seen any other residences that he could have popped over from and found myself worried about the stray. It didn’t feel right to put him in one of the pens if he was due back to his own home, but it didn’t feel right to leave him either.

  I chewed the inside of my cheek as I stroked the broad expanse of his forehead. He was a good-sized animal, easily sixteen hands, and built for work. “What’s your story? I hate to leave you here.”

  It was impossible that he understood me, but suddenly he was walking again, this time back toward the house and the road I’d trudged up. When I didn’t follow, he stopped and looked back at me. Like I said, impossible. “What? You’re going to walk me out?” He waited, so I followed. When I reached him, I put my hand on his withers and steadied myself from slipping.

  When the trees opened up to the small meadow, and I spotted my truck safe by the side of the road, I realized how privately tucked away the main house was. Even when I turned around for one last look, with the slow curve of the road I could barely make it out. At the gate, I slipped through, pausing once more to pat the big horse.

  “You’ll be okay?” I fussed.

  In answer, he turned and walked away. I shrugged and carefully picked my way over the short bridge to the road, afraid of ice. When I climbed into the cab and looked for my friend, he was nowhere in sight.

  I sat in the truck for a moment trying to decide what to prioritize, the tire or the realtor. I mused that what came to mind first probably answered my question. As I rounded the bend to follow the highway through town, I felt like I was driving back in time, grand brick buildings lining both sides of the now one-way street. Following the reduced speed limit, I registered a handful of businesses, an appealing café. A bank and a bookstore. Before I knew it, I was leaving the business area, the buildings more sparse and then suddenly those, too were behind me. I didn’t see a reason to stop at the big shopping center on my right and found myself heading up a hill, the familiar evergreens again lining the two-way highway.