Jill Barnett - New Beginnings

For her, there was something incredibly grounding about a place where she’d taught her children to ride a bike to the ringing of a cable car bell and the applause of tourists, and where the call of gulls was as much a part of the air she breathed as oxygen.

The noise of the city was most noticeable in the old brick courtyard at the center of their home. Mike called it March Country—an oasis where on temperate mornings she drank her coffee surrounded by raised planters and huge stone pots spilling over with flowers the color of a fall sunset. Some of the wind chimes from their wedding hung from courtyard posts, ringing out occasionally in the October wind.

March looked up from the kitchen sink when she heard her grandson cry. Sixteen-month-old Tyler was out in the courtyard trying to scale the seven-foot brick wall and not one bit happy that he was failing. She dropped the pasta strainer and, wiping her hands on her shirttail, she was through the French doors in a heartbeat. “Hey there, sweetie. What are you doing out here alone? Escaping?” She scooped him up and headed inside. A minute later she stood in the door of the media room, Tyler hooked on her hip while a good minute and a half of Sunday afternoon, Forty-Niner’s football passed without a single male in the room noticing them. “I think you lost something, Scott.”

Her oldest son looked her, then quickly glanced at the corner where a five-foot square rainbow of bright Fisher Price toys lay abandoned.

“Daddy!” Tyler shouted. Her grandson had great timing.

Scott was up and made a beeline for her. “Damn, Mom. Sorry.” He took his son. “You okay, buddy?”

“Daddy!” Tyler rubbed his hands on Scott’s cheeks.

Scott groaned. “What’s all over his mouth and hands?”

“Dirt. He was trying to climb the courtyard wall.” She held out an open container of baby wipes.

“One play,” Scott muttered. “I only looked away to watch one play.” He cleaned up his son and wiped his own face. “He fell off the back of the toilet last week when I was watching him. Renee will kill me.”

“Then you’re lucky she’s out with Molly and Keely,” she told him.

Her eldest son looked at her over his son’s head, thickly-covered in his same black curly hair, and Scott grinned at her, knowing she wouldn’t say anything to his wife.

For just one second, one small heartbeat of memory, there stood Mike in another time and place holding Scott and giving her that same grin. Those moments were why she wouldn’t want to be twenty-five again. The future was always a blank, out of control; it lay out there as unclear as morning fog on the horizon. But the past was familiar and kept coming around and around in tender, special moments that gave her some measure of contentment about her choices in life.

Looking back was the best way to understand destiny—something she’d always believed in because how could life and all its complications be completely accidental? There had to be a master plan, a book somewhere, like something out of an episode of the Twilight Zone , that foretold who, why and where everyone existed.

“Tyler’s part monkey. Takes after you, big brother.” Phillip set down his beer and grabbed a handful of chips. “You’ve always been the live and hairy proof that Darwin was right.”

“You’re just pissed because I actually have hair.”

“I have hair. See?” Phillip bent over and rubbed his dark-stubbled scalp. “Keely loves this. Women go for men with the confidence to shave their heads. Think Willis…Think Agassi…”

“Think MiniMe,” Scott finished.

Mike set a box of Wheat Thins on the table and stood, stretching. “Remember the time Scott disappeared, sunshine? You were a climber, too, son,” he said to Scott. “We looked for you for almost an hour. Your mother was frantic, crying like crazy, certain you had somehow gotten out in the street and been kidnapped. Eventually we found you sitting on a ceiling beam watching us.”

“I was just glad you were safe,” March told him.

“So I guess that means I’m not going to get much sympathy from either of you.”

“Payback is hell,” she and Mike said at the same time.

“See?” Phil said laughing. “I keep telling you. I’m the perfect son. That’s why they like me best.”

Scott looked at Tyler. “Do you want to go to Uncle Phil?”

“Yes!” (Tyler’s favorite word.)

Scott set his son in Phillip’s lap, sat down in a club chair and picked up his beer. “Daddy is smarter than Uncle Phil, isn’t he?”

“Yes!”

He took a swig of beer. “And Daddy is more handsome than Uncle Phil, isn’t he?

“Yes!”

Phil just shook his head and turned to Scott, who said, “Uncle Phil has big, ugly, jug-handle ears, right?”

“Yes!”

Phillip smiled, familiar, a little wicked, the same way he had as a kid when he just passed Go , collected two hundred dollars and owned Broadway with a hotel. He glanced at Scott, then held up Tyler in front of him and said, “Your daddy likes to dress up in your mommy’s clothes, doesn’t he?”

“Yes!” Tyler said in perfect toddler Pavlovian.

“I’ll get the kid gate,” Mike said, laughing.

“It’s in the laundry room,” March told him.

Mike swatted her on the butt as he walked by. “I know.”

On the third Sunday of every month, like today, March cooked for the entire Cantrell clan, kids, wives, grandkids. Most of the year they met in the house in the city, except during the winter season, when they spent most weekends at their place in Tahoe. Years back, Cantrell Sports Inc. created the roving three-day week during the months of snowboarding season, so everyone from the top down could take advantage of the Sierra snow. They worked longer hours, a little harder in late summer and early fall to get ready for the new season, but when the lifts were running, at least one week a month the whole company worked three days and took off four.

Already into late fall, the past week had been crazy with Mike working fourteen-hour days, Mickey in the beginning of his senior year with college selection on the horizon, and an auction and benefit March was chairing coming in mid-October, all pre-snow season.

While she was still intimately involved in the family company, she didn’t spend the time there she used to. Other than the board meetings, and there was one this coming week, she had hired good managers for the graphics side of the business. The graphic designs for the new season had been selected months ago, so she had home time now, time for some charity work, her grandkids, and a gourmet cooking class she took from one of the top chefs in the city.

Tonight the menu wasn’t gourmet, just the kind of food her family liked on these evenings: salad, hot bread, lasagna and anything chocolate and gooey for dessert.

March was spinning lettuce dry when she heard her granddaughter, Miranda, chattering even before she heard the sound of the electric garage door closing.

“G-Mo! G-Mo! Look what I made for you!” Miranda came running across the courtyard from the open door to the garage, followed by her daughters-in-law, Renee and Keely, then her own Molly.

The kitchen was suddenly chaos, all of them talking at once, shopping bags on the counters, a long loaf of fresh Boudin’s bread and two bottles of Chianti suddenly in her arms, her granddaughter jumping up and down and tugging on her shirt, trying to tell her everything they had done in the last three hours.

“I think we got everything from the list,” Renee said. “Let’s see…You have the wine. I gave you the bread.” She looked up. “Did we forget the garlic?”

“No. I put it in the cart. It’s there somewhere. Here it is.” Keely handed it to her.