Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

“But there are women in your life, I hope?”

Turtle says nothing.

“And Martin? I bet he’s a wonder, helping you.”

“Yeah. He is.”

“He could explain anything, if he wanted.”

“Yeah.”

“He has a way with words, doesn’t he?”

“Yes, he does.”

“He was the most imaginative person I ever met. Goddess, he could read! And talk! Can’t he?”

“Yes.” Turtle smiles.

“He’s a good guy,” Caroline says, “but when he’s angry, he sure can hit hard, can’t he?”

Turtle runs her tongue along her teeth. She says, “What?” She thinks, you bitch, you whore. It is the kind of trick people play with kids, they try and get you to answer a lot of questions and then they ask you a question about your family. Turtle’s seen it before. Women are always cunts in the end. No matter how they start up. Always some axe to grind.

Caroline sits cross-legged on her stool and watches Turtle with serene attentiveness, and Turtle thinks, you bitch. You fucking whore. I knew it would come and it came.

“Well,” Caroline says, seeing her error, backpedaling, “he used to have a temper on him.”

Turtle stands there.

“I remember, when we were just kids—just—well, goddess, he had a temper. That’s all I’m saying, just that sometimes he had a temper on him. So, how is he these days?” Caroline asks.

“I’ve got to go.” Turtle turns.

“Wait,” Caroline says.

Turtle strips all emotion out of her face but not quite out of her posture, and she thinks, look at me. She thinks, look at me. You know that I take this seriously. Look at me. If you ever try and take him away, you will see.

“Did I say something wrong?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Julia, sweetheart, I’m just wondering how things are at home. I can’t tell you how often I’ve thought of you over these years. How many times I thought I saw you at Corners of the Mouth, or waiting in front of the post office, or walking through Heider Field. And could never be sure, because, of course, I didn’t know you. And now that you’re here—well, of course it’s you. You look just like your mom.”

Turtle says, “My daddy would never.”

“I know, sweetheart, I’m just curious,” Caroline says. “You know, I was so close to your mother, I’m allowed to worry a little bit. You and I, we’d know each other if she was still alive, and you and Brett would’ve grown up like brother and sister, but instead, I don’t know you at all. I can’t help thinking that it’s a weird turn of fate, you know, that she left us and you grew up not even knowing me. And good goddess, girl, you need some women in your life!”

Turtle stares at Caroline, thinking, I have never known a woman I liked, and I will grow up to be nothing like you or like Anna; I will grow up to be forthright and hard and dangerous, not a subtle, smiling, trick-playing cunt like you.

“Oh,” Caroline says, “sweetheart. Let me drive you home. I’d like to talk to Marty. It’s been ages.”

“I don’t know,” Turtle says.

“Oh, honey, I can’t let you walk all those miles back home. I just can’t. If you’d rather, I’ll call your father and he can come pick you up, but it’s an hour out of his way, and I’d much rather just take you home myself.”

Turtle thinks, I will be in the car with this woman, and her thinking her things about Martin. But she wants to see how Caroline talks to him. She wants to be there, she half wants to know what Caroline thinks, and half she doesn’t.

It is near sundown when they reach the turnoff for Turtle’s house. Caroline drives hard up the washboard gravel, just about six hundred yards, the Explorer lurching in and out of ruts. She keeps saying, “Look at this, Julia, goddess, if you knew how this place used to look.” The boys have their hands and faces pressed to the glass and look out at the fields with fascination. The driveway runs up the northern edge of the hill, and on their left it’s all shore pines standing above Slaughterhouse Gulch, which cuts west below them. Above them, they can just see the house at the crest of the hill, all of the windows dark. On their right the fields run until they meet the orchard, beyond which, and hidden from them, are the raspberry fields and Grandpa’s trailer. A stream cuts its way through the grass, visible only as a seam of thimbleberry and hazelnut. Turtle thinks, we will see how this goes, but he will not be hard on me until they are gone.

Caroline slows down, looking at pampas grass beside the road, and says, “Daniel used to be more proud of that meadow than anything, I think. I don’t know how many hours he spent tending this meadow, and you know, it used to be just all timothy—as far as you could see, just timothy. But he’s let it get away from him, hasn’t he?”

Deer lying on the warm gravel lurch to their feet and bolt into the grass. She looks at Turtle and says, “It’s a jungle you’re growing up in, isn’t it?”

“Look!” Brett says. “Look!” They can see a flat shoulder of the hillside, not far from the orchard, thickly overgrown in wild oats, where seven doors stand in a circle, without any walls or framing. Ravens stand on the lintels, cocking their heads to watch the Explorer come up the drive.

Caroline looks over at Turtle, and then up to the house, where the white roses have climbed up among the windows and up onto the second story, braided with poison oak, which throws long, crinkly green-and-red shoots high into the air. “Look at that,” Caroline says, “look at that. Look at all those roses. When I was last here, what—over ten years ago—this was all different, Julia. All of those roses were pruned and tied up on lattices, and the house was newly painted, that field had not a weed in it, and that driveway was beautiful new gravel. I can’t believe how it’s all changed. Those roses, no one even knows the cultivar. There was some kind of rose specialist out here to examine them once and take cuttings. Your great-great-grandma was a rose enthusiast and had all kinds of rose varieties, including some that were found only here in Mendocino that are now thought to be gone except, maybe, here they are. And there were pots on the porch, big glazed pots, just full of lettuce and kale and onions and garlic, squash and artichokes, and there were”—she points out by the deck off the master bedroom—“there were beehives.”

“Oh,” Turtle says, “Grandpa still has the hives. They are out in the orchard.”

“And the orchard, it wasn’t overgrown at all like that. Do those trees still fruit?”

“Not really,” Turtle says. She looks at the orchard, the trees gone to shoots spring after spring without pruning, wickerwork hulks in a sea of blackberries.

“That orchard was in a lawn, I mean a lawn, that your grandfather used to mow. And look at it now. Just look at that. Those trees look awful. I mean, they look miserable. Oh, honey.”

Turtle puts her fingers in her mouth. She doesn’t like how Caroline is talking, like it’s her daddy’s fault that the trees stopped bearing fruit, her daddy’s fault that the field is going to weeds, and what she’s not saying is how Grandpa used up all the money, and her mother died, and how Martin is raising Turtle on his own, picking up jobs where he can, and isn’t in the same position that maybe Grandpa was when Grandma was alive and he was retired and had money.

Martin is sitting in an Adirondack chair holding a Red Seal Ale in one hand, watching them. He’s got his Colt 1911 .45 sitting on the arm of the chair, and laid up against the back of the chair, a Saiga shotgun. Evening light slants across the hill from the lambent blue ocean.