Michael Christie - The Beggar's Garden

“Can I put a question to you?” Isaac said.

“Shoot,” said Sam.

“Why you sleeping out here exactly?”

“Because I can’t stand being in my own house.”

Isaac drew his hands from his pockets and threaded them behind his head. “I heard that,” he said, and re-attained sleep with an instantaneousness astonishing to Sam. Sam flew out the next morning — a parabolic jaunt over jagged spires of grey rock. Dennis, Anna’s father, fetched him from the airport in an immaculate hybrid car. He talked quietly into his phone as they loaded his bags and continued to do so while they whisked over a dead-straight road through an endless procession of camel-tinged foothills. Sam nodded off, and woke to his father-in-law driving with an impenetrable air, two thumbs hooked at the bottom of the wheel. While Sam had slept, a carpet of white cloud had appeared, ridged and crumpled, like the roof of a mouth.

“You’re growing a beard,” Dennis said.

“It’s growing,” Sam said. “How much I have to do with it is debatable.”

Dennis checked each of the car’s three mirrors, even though they were alone on open highway. “Look, Sam, I don’t hold it against you. Hell, I’ve always liked you, and God knows Gretchen and I have had our spats, but I’ve got to tell you that you have my daughter all twisted around.”

“She’s the one who’s still on vacation.”

“Son, I know you haven’t had it easy. I lost my parents early on so I know the feeling, like there is no home left in the world, but you’ve got to give Anna a chance to think things through.”

“Thanks, but I’m not really in the market for fatherly wisdom, Dennis. And I’d appreciate it if you didn’t offer my wife any, either. She’s already got enough wisdom of her own to deal with.”

Dennis shook his head. “I just hope you are happy with yourself,” he said as he clicked a tiny box hung from his sun visor that retracted a wrought-iron gate from the mouth of his two-mile gravel driveway. When they reached the house Sam informed Dennis flatly that he was indeed quite happy with himself and levered open his door.

Anna jogged out to meet him in a jean dress he failed to recognize. She’d cut her hair — how exactly, Sam couldn’t say, but it was angular and ill-suited to her easily flushed, curvy cheeks. These details dispelled any of the confidence he’d been able to scavenge during his flight; they spoke either of a dress rehearsal for a new life or of a regression to an old one.

“I like this,” she said tugging on his beard, enough for him to wince.

“It’s not a joke,” Sam said.

“Didn’t say it was. It’s cute,” she said, nearly giggling. Her apparent glee also unnerved him. She had a way of becoming giddy as she approached the summit of an anxiety. Though he’d visited the house before, she commenced a jolly tour.

At dinner, Cricket viewed him from beneath her party hat with a mixture of pity and skepticism, as if he were a thoroughbred limping to its trailer after a race. Earlier, she’d looked up from a book and called to him but then went rigid when he lifted her warm frame to his chest. While Sam ate, Anna’s mother, Gretchen, moved about the kitchen and scooped various salads of grilled vegetables onto the plates of Anna’s three sisters and their athletic husbands. Dennis leaned back in his chair at the head of the table with a self-satisfied look. Perhaps it was that he’d grown up in a house of silent, brooding suppers eaten with a book, or in one’s own room, but Sam had always felt interrogated and judged by the expectations of festivity.

After dinner, they all sat in Dennis’s basement home theatre for a viewing of Cricket’s favourite animated movie. When it was over, Cricket tore into her presents with a feral tenacity. Dennis had given her a hand-tooled child-sized saddle that was wrapped in pink butcher paper tied with twine, and he insisted on strapping it to his back to go galloping her around the room, whinnying. Sam had been so consumed with getting Isaac settled that he’d neglected to buy his daughter a present, so he’d stopped at a cash machine in the airport and withdrawn one thousand dollars, which he stuffed into a deposit envelope procured from the same machine.

“Good work, Sam,” Anna said, as Cricket fanned the bills with a somewhat horrified expression. “Thoughtful.”

After the gift-giving, he and Anna slipped out for a walk on her father’s ranchland. Sam kicked at dense tufts of bristly grass and nearly began a series of doomed, potentially spiteful sentences that he thought better of. They ascended a long rise of dusty ground that banked east in its climb up the ridge before halting at a post-and-rail cattle fence that ran for miles in each direction. Past the fence was a steep grade that fell into a splayed valley of verdant grass where a few hulks of cattle stood chewing, inert as mailboxes. The spring sun was weak, but Sam was winded and Anna had produced a dark spade shape on the upper back of her T-shirt. When they reached the fence she stepped ahead and put her back to it in the way Sam had seen her lean on numerous bars in college.

“I’ve enrolled Cricket at my old school — she’ll be starting in September.” This she said as if it were something they would both have to endure, like bombings, or a depression. This private school was, from what Sam had heard, a place where uniformed girls learned to beekeep and Nobel-laureate political science professors came to describe to the girls the workings of the Canadian parliament.

“She likes her school,” Sam said.

“A school is a school last I checked.”

“What about her old friends?”

“She’s already made a few new ones at equestrian camp.”

“She’s been taking riding lessons? She’s terrified of animals!”

“Dogs. She’s scared of dogs. And you’d have known about this if you’d returned some of our calls,” she said.

“I’ve been busy with something, I’ve been doing some advising.”

“Well, a guy named Alphonse called from your office. He said you haven’t been there in weeks. They were wondering if you were okay. Christ, Sam, if you are that busy advising someone else, you could just—”

“It’s a business relationship, Anna. Nothing more. It’s about the only thing I can handle right now. And neither of you is exactly eager to talk to me anyway.”

She gasped and appeared to consider saying something biting, then released a long breath and turned to face the valley.

“I’ve made a decision,” she said. “I can’t live in Vancouver, but I might be able to live with you, on my terms.”

Sam could hear her father’s authority behind her words and it riled him. “On whose ‘terms’ do you think I’ve been living for the past five years? Vancouver was your idea. You’re just too selfish to appreciate the sacrifices I have made.”

“Why must the root of every problem exist entirely outside of you?” she said. “It seems a little suspicious, don’t you think? Seeing how you’re here too?”

This was the kind of misdirection from the real topic of discussion that Anna had honed in law school. “You just can’t take criticism,” Sam said.

“What you do is not criticism,” she said. “It’s vivisection.”

Exhaustedly, she turned and started back down the hill. Sam followed some paces behind, his eyes cinching up from the low sun now dipping into the far-off hills.

Back at the house they had more cake and Dennis popped some champagne. Anna spent the rest of the evening in a determined sulk, and Sam suffered the chattering inquiries of her sisters with a brittle smile.

That night, he woke to blue spindles of light twisting on his ceiling, cast by the swimming pool that lay beyond the sliding door of his guest room. He rose and ascended the stairs to his daughter’s room and stood by her canopied bed. He hooked a whip of hair behind her neat ear, recalling that the only effective way to soothe her as a baby was to clamp her to his chest and jiggle her with the vigorous, nearly imperceptible speed of a paint mixer. Forgetting his beard, he kissed her and she batted groggily at her cheek with a wrist.