29. Zach
As little as I relished the idea of driving two hours to pick up my grandmother from the airport in Spokane, I knew the alternative—disobeying her—would be worse. Which was why I was so startled when I settled behind the wheel of my Jeep to find the passenger door swinging open and a woman sliding into the seat beside me.
“Uhh…hello?” I said, my hand paused on the key.
“Hey, Zach,” the woman said in a laughing voice. I recognized her from the library—she was Pepper, Chloe’s best friend. From the way she was looking at me, I guessed she already knew most of our situation. “It’s nice to finally meet you—formally, I mean. I hear you’re making a trip to the airport.”
Since the evidence of this trip would soon be joining us in Colville, I nodded. I also felt a wave of relief. Gossip in small towns tends to flow pretty fast, but this seemed more like the result of a personal conversation. If Pepper knew about my plans, then Chloe was the one who told her.
And if Chloe told her, that meant she hadn’t totally written me off. Yet.
“My grandmother’s flight gets in at ten,” I said with a glance at the clock. My boss, a terrifyingly capable retired Air Force pilot who only answered to his call sign of Bones, wasn’t happy to give me the day off, but I promised to make it up to him by giving him my dad’s secret cricket-and-dandelion soup recipe. “So if you’re here to yell at me for lying to Chloe, you’re going to have to do it quick.”
Instead of being put off by my words, Pepper reached across her shoulder and started buckling her seat belt. “If I come with you, then I’ll have all the time in the world to yell,” she said, still too cheerful for my peace of mind. “And if you step on it, we can stop at Starbucks on the way. I haven’t had a pumpkin spice latte in ages.”
I cast her a sideways look, but she was already settled in as if she intended to stay.
“Didn’t your mother ever teach you how dangerous it is to get into a strange man’s car?” I asked.
She beamed across the console at me, and I could immediately tell why she was such good friends with Chloe. Pepper seemed like the sort of woman who didn’t take the word no very easily—and Chloe was very much the sort of woman who was used to saying it.
Pepper patted the bag she had tucked at her feet. “My mother didn’t, but you can bet your ass my grandma gave me firsthand lessons. Try anything funny, and you’re getting a face full of bear spray.”
I started the car with a laugh. I might have been caught in the middle of a mess that was only about to get messier, but at least the trip would be a lively one.
“Bear spray doesn’t work on me,” I said. “The first step in any wilderness training class is learning how to take what you dish out. At this point in my life, I’m practically immune to the stuff.”
If I was afraid that two hours of driving next to Chloe’s best friend would be an agony of interrogation techniques and awkward questions, it was nothing compared to the agony of watching Pepper and my grandmother fall into each other’s arms outside the airport.
“My God,” my grandmother said as she stepped out of the sliding doors with a train of oversized baggage behind her. From the look of it, she was planning on taking up residence in Washington for the rest of her life. “It’s like looking straight through the portals of time. Don’t tell me—you must be a Pakootas.”
“Is it that obvious?” Pepper asked, laughing. She accepted the embrace my grandmother held out to her as though hugging complete strangers was a thing she did every day. “I’d be insulted, but I’ve seen pictures of Grandma when she was young. She was a serious smokeshow.”
“That she was,” my grandmother agreed. She turned to me next, only I wasn’t offered a hug. If anything, she looked annoyed to see me standing there. “Hello, Grandson. You have some nerve, dragging me back here when I swore I’d never set foot in this state again.”
“I’m pretty sure I didn’t drag you,” I said with a pointed glance at her baggage. “In fact, I didn’t even invite you.”
“When has that ever stopped me before?” she countered.
That was when I finally got my hug. My grandmother is considerably smaller than me, but she has an energy that makes her feel ten times her size. She smelled, as she always did, like warm vanilla and the musk perfume I’d never known her to be without. That was one of the things that made this whole situation so surreal—my whole life so surreal, when I thought about it. For as long as I could remember, Grandma Cathy had been a figure of glamour and sophistication. Dressed in the latest fashions and with chic scarves always swathed about her person, a cocktail in one hand and her cell phone in the other, she was the poster child for a generation that refused to accept old age as anything but a chance to celebrate life. She’d been an unwed single mother at a time when that sort of thing equaled social ostracism. She’d become a book editor in a field that was so male-dominated at the time that she would sometimes find herself not just in a room full of men, but a whole building of them.
To see her in a place like this, where the closest thing to pass for fashion was the newest line of North Face fleece wear and the nearest Michelin Star restaurant was four hundred miles away, felt wrong.
“Well,” she said as she eyed my Jeep. It was dirty and battered and ideal for making it over unpaved roads—in other words, a lot like me. “I guess we’d better get this over with.”
Abandoning her pile of luggage for me to load, she swung herself into the back seat. Instead of claiming the front for herself, Pepper climbed in next to her.
“I want to hear all about your time in Colville with my grandmother and Jasper,” Pepper said as she once again buckled herself in place. “And don’t leave anything out.”
“People always think it’s the vain city-dwelling men who are the most arrogant and self-involved, but they’re wrong,” my grandmother said as I zipped the Jeep down the well-trod highway back home. She spoke in a voice that was meant for me to overhear.
“Do you know a lot about arrogant men, Auntie?” Pepper asked in a voice that was equally obvious. It had taken her all of five minutes to start calling my grandma by the familiar nickname, even less for her to decide that the two of them were destined to be best friends. “I bet you’ve known your share.”
“You could say something like that,” my grandmother said primly. Then she laughed and reached forward to pat my shoulder. “But I won’t go into details. Poor Zach would run us off the road if he knew about the men I’ve known in my lifetime—biblically speaking, that is.”
I groaned. “This can’t be happening.”
“See what I mean?” My grandmother tsked. “The real problem with society is men like Zach here—he and his father both, not to mention Jasper, the one who started it all. They act as though they’re rough and tough and self-sufficient, but the truth is, they’re odiously selfish.”
“I’m turning on the radio,” I warned, but we all knew it to be an empty threat. Despite my discomfort with the conversation, I found myself interested in what my grandmother had to say for herself. She seemed to have no idea of the devastation she’d wrought when she left this place the way she did, the hearts she broke and the lives she’d left behind.
“They use the manufactured hardship of the wilderness as an excuse for avoiding reality,” she continued. “Think about it—we live in a glorious time of human existence. If I pull out my phone, I can instantly access every piece of documented history. We’ve passed no fewer than fifteen different restaurants since we got on this road, and we can pay for anything we want to eat with a small piece of plastic we carry in our pockets. And that’s not even counting the fact that we’re sitting comfortably inside a hunk of metal designed to fly over roads using the decayed remains of marine plants and animals that lived millions of years ago. Yet these men pretend that the only thing keeping us alive as a species is their ability to sleep in a tent and skin a squirrel in under a minute.”
“You tell him, Auntie,” Pepper cheered.
I could hear the amusement in my grandmother’s voice over the roar of the engine. She leaned forward and tapped my shoulder. “Back me up, Zach. How often does Bates leave your poor mother all alone in that big house so he can go out and ‘commune with nature’?”
“Three or four times a year,” I said, understanding my role. Still, I felt compelled to defend my dad. My parents’ marriage might have been odd, but it had always been a happy one. “You know she doesn’t mind, though. She always ends up painting like six or seven new pieces while he’s gone.”
My grandmother waved me off. “That’s not the point. The point is—”
“Wait,” Pepper interrupted. “Your son’s name is Bates? Like the butler from Downton Abbey?”
I shook my head. Explaining my father’s love of the wilderness was nothing compared to explaining the origin of his name.
“Not that Bates,” my grandmother said. “The one from Psycho. Norman.”
“You named your son after the psychotic killer in a horror movie?” Pepper demanded, incredulous.
My grandmother was quick to correct her, which she did with a gentle cough. “No, I named him after the psychotic killer in one of the greatest novels of all time.”
I couldn’t help but add my own mite. “Yeah. The one who lives in an unhealthily codependent relationship with his mother after his biological father leaves them.” I laughed at the sudden silence in the back seat. “Grandma has always had a dark sense of humor.”
“Bates is a good strong name, and I’ve never once regretted choosing it,” my grandmother said sternly, but then she ruined it by dissolving into giggles. “You should have seen my poor parents when I told them. I think they took the news of my pregnancy better. My mother actually cried.”
Pepper breathed out long and slow. “Damn, Auntie. You’re next-level badass. Chloe is going to love you.”
At the sound of that name, my own breath came in a sharp inhalation. When we’d first spoken on the phone, I hadn’t said anything to my grandmother about my feelings for Chloe, but her name had naturally arisen—and Grandma had always had an uncanny ability to see beyond the surface of things. I imagine that was what drew her to a man like Jasper Holmes all those years ago. The rest of the world looked at him and saw a confirmed grouch with the social skills of a bear awakening from hibernation; she looked at him and thought, Huh. He seems sweet.
“Ah, yes,” my grandmother said, careful to keep her tone neutral. “The girl who found the book. The one Jasper has been antagonizing for the past few years.”
“I never said he was antagonizing her,” I protested. “He’s been stealing her family’s Frisbees, that’s all.”
I might as well have not been in the car for all the attention the other two paid me.
“Which just goes to prove what I was saying before,” she said. “I gave that man the gift of a lifetime. Walking away from him was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but I knew it was the only way he’d have a chance at a life of his own. And what did he do with it?”
I had my own answer to this question, but it wasn’t the one my grandmother wanted to hear. I’d seen too much of Jasper Holmes and read too many of the lines in those books to believe that his life after her had been anything but a long, lonely slog.
“He wasted it, that’s what,” she said as if clinching an argument. “He sat in that town and let decades pass without making the least push to improve himself. It’s exactly as I said—he’s selfish.”
I was about to protest again, but Pepper beat me to it. “But Auntie, what if he didn’t see your death as a gift? What if his heart was broken and he couldn’t find a way to fix it?”
My grandmother grew unnaturally silent. For the longest time, I thought she was going to finally admit that she may have been wrong—that she was, in large part, responsible for the man Jasper turned out to be—but she didn’t. At this point, I wasn’t sure that she could.
“Everyone’s heart breaks at least once in a lifetime,” she said, determined, as ever, to go her own way. “It’s as inevitable as falling in love. The real challenge is deciding what you plan to do about it.”