Chapter 20
The trailer looks older when Ripley imagines seeing it through James’s eyes.
Her dad made her stain the front deck the summer before she left for college, but now it’s unevenly silvered, the decking screws blooming with deep circles of rust. Although the wooden window boxes burst with this year’s petunias and strawberries, their saggy bottoms aren’t quite hidden by the trailing vines.
Long prairie grass, hardy and unkillable—though it looks like no one’s trying to kill it these days—weaves around the lattice that hides the foundation.
“Hang tight for a minute. Let me make sure my dad’s home.” Ripley’s dad didn’t answer her texts, and she didn’t bring her house keys. She doesn’t want to have to shepherd a large, uncoordinated man back down the rickety steps if no one’s home.
James settles against the window with a low, growly “Mmm.” It’s not the sort of sound that the James Smithson she knows would willingly make outside of a bedroom. Ripley pushes away the desire to find out what sounds would come before that one.
And after.
“Don’t pass out on me now, Professor.” She swings out of the Charger, heads up the steps, and raps a shave-and-a-haircut on the white-painted door.
“Dad? It’s Ripley.” She gives him lots of time to sort out his oxygen tank and shuffle across the trailer. Even so, there’s no answer to her first knock, or her second one.
She’s heading for the rock that hides the spare key when the door bursts open.
“Pip—I wasn’t—expecting you.” Steve Adams is far more breathless than he was on the phone. He leans heavily against the doorjamb, flushed and perspiring in his rumpled T-shirt and boxers.
“Jesus, Dad,” Ripley says, guilt stabbing her in thirty places. She hurries to take his arm. “Why didn’t you ask me to come home if you weren’t doing well? Let me help you inside—”
“Pip, no—”
“Ripley,” trills their across-the-street neighbor from where she’s sitting on the couch, hastily buttoning her blouse. “What a lovely surprise.”
“Mrs. Gunderson?” Ripley exclaims, horrified. “Dad?”
Sweet, motherly Sally Gunderson gives up fumbling with her clothes and rockets off the couch. Ignoring his daughter, Steve Adams snags her on her way out and romantically spins her into his arms. “Take care, Sal. Talk soon.”
Blushing from her ample cleavage to the roots of her hair, Mrs. Gunderson scurries across the road to her tidy single-wide with its overturned half-barrels spilling petunias into the flower beds.
Ripley takes in the scene. Her dad’s pale, skinny legs under his boxers. The throw pillows scattered across the living-room floor. The wingback chair festooned with a scrap of red lace and a pair of haphazardly discarded men’s pants.
Ripley used to like to curl up and read in that chair.
“Were you two…did you and Sally…on the couch? How?”
Steve shrugs. “It’s my lungs that went to hell, Pip. There’s nothing wrong with my heart. Or my other parts.”
“Jesus, Dad,” she repeats. “I didn’t mean how. I meant how. We’ve been neighbors for a million years. You’re like ten years younger than Sally.”
He smirks like a movie star. Ripley suddenly remembers how flustered the widow Gunderson acted around him last December after imbibing a little too much holiday punch.
“Seven years. And you don’t really want me to tell you about sexy older women.”
“No. I mean, the concept in general is fine, but I don’t want specifics that involve my own father, thanks.”
“All right,” Steve says with an air of finality. “I’m still happy to see you, Pip. Feel like a hug?”
“Yeah,” she mutters, stepping into his arms. “Missed you.”
“Missed you too.” He’s thin in her embrace, his bones too near the skin after a year of postsurgical complications. Yet he still feels like love and comfort personified. Her dad—the best man she’s ever known. The man who turned his life plans upside down for her.
It’s almost painful how much she loves him.
Steve’s arms tighten as he looks over Ripley’s shoulder in the direction of the Charger. And the passenger sprawled messily in the front seat.
In the time it took Sally Gunderson to misbutton her shirt, James has most definitely passed out.
“Huh,” Steve says, pulling back. “I see I’m not the only one with an unexpected guest. Well, you’d better bring him in.”