Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

“Stay in the car, boys,” Caroline says to Jacob and Brett, who peer through the tinted windows at the big man on the porch. He raises himself slowly, puts the Colt in the waist of his jeans, and walks carefully down the steps. Caroline winds down her window, and Martin comes abreast of the SUV, and then leans through the window, more than spanning it with his shoulders, propping his elbows on the door so that the car sinks to the side. Turtle’s vision flexes with anxiety, and her hair prickles up across her arms and legs, on her scalp, on the back of her neck, and a feeling of cold follows after, running down her body. He looks into the interior, right at Caroline, and she doesn’t talk for a moment, and he seems to chew on what he’s seeing before he breaks into a crooked grin.

“Well, Caroline,” he says. “God, but it’s terrific to see you.”

“Martin, I’ve found your daughter.”

“If only you’d found her mother,” he says. At this, Caroline opens and closes her mouth, at a loss, but Martin goes on, almost kindly, almost as if to put her at ease, nodding to indicate Julia and saying, “That girl,” sharing a roguish look with Caroline, a look so conspiring and full of good humor that she smiles despite herself.

“Marty,” she says, trying to sound stern, “she was way out in Little River, almost in Comptche.”

“Well,” Martin says, “that’s just a hop, a skip, and a jump for her. Between you and me, there’s no holding that girl back, Caroline. I’ve known her to go thirty miles across country in a single day. The girl’s part Helena Macfarlane, part wildcat, you can’t wear her out. Between you and me, Caroline, it is a thing out of myth, almost. You could hamstring her and drive her way out into the bush and leave her there, and you would come back to find she had taken up with wolves and founded a kingdom. When she was just a little thing, she’d walk all the way to the Little River Market. I am talking about a child in diapers, barefoot, and the girls at the register would give her a stick of butter to eat and give me a call. Once, a little older, she walked all the way to the Ten Mile River before I found her. But if you’re too hard on her about it, you just drive her away, isn’t that right, kiddo?” Turtle, named this way, smiles and then looks quickly away. Martin is taking pleasure in talking. He goes on. “God, Caroline”—raking his fingers through his hair—“you look just like you did a decade ago, you know that?”

“Oh stop,” Caroline says, smiling despite herself.

“Just the exact same way,” Martin says.

“Little more gray in my hair,” Caroline says.

“But it suits you,” Martin says, turning his attention to her mop of wiry salt-and-pepper hair. “It’s the only thing that keeps you from looking like a twenty-something. It’s this sea air and that olive complexion of yours.”

“How are things?”

“Are you sure there isn’t a picture of you somewhere,” Martin inquires, “getting more aged and wicked with every passing day?”

“No such thing,” Caroline says.

“Just good living, then. As for me,” Martin says, looking away from the car and out at the setting sun above the ocean, “things have never been better.”

“Well,” Caroline says.

“Well,” Martin says, catching some meaning she conveys, “I have my daughter. And god , but that’s more than enough for anybody. As you can see, she keeps my hands full. If you can’t find happiness there, in a girl like that, Christ, I don’t think it’d be worth living. She’s everything to me, Caroline. Look at her, and a great beauty, too, isn’t she?”

“Yes she is,” Caroline says, sounding a little doubtful on the subject of Turtle’s beauty.

“You know, you can’t be too hard on the girl, she’s just like you were, except so far, no boys and no psilocybin.”

“I told her the same thing,” she says, laughing. “That’s exactly what I said!”

“Because it’s true, look at her, I hope you weren’t too hard on her,” Martin says, and both adults look appraisingly at Turtle.

“I could use your advice, though,” Martin says.

“You’ll have it,” Caroline says.

Martin looks out at the ocean and, narrowing his eyes as if describing something in the far-off distance, he says, “Kibble,” and then pauses for a long moment to compose his description, “she struggles in school. Not with everything, but with English. With her vocabulary lists.”

There is silence from the backseat, a creak of springs as Jacob leans forward to catch this. Turtle chews her fingers, angry that he would bring this up in front of her friends.

“Oh well,” Caroline says with a sympathetic glance at Turtle, “don’t we all struggle with that.”

Martin nods in acknowledgment, slowly and humorlessly.

“There’s nothing, I’ve found, but just to help them through it, though goddess knows that’s not easy. Martin, this is my boy, Brett.”

Brett leans forward, and they shake hands, Martin reaching in through the window and smiling at Brett with his jaw standing out and his flannel hanging open.

“Well, now,” Martin says, “what a big handsome boy.” He looks back at Caroline. She seems to be searching his face for something that isn’t there. She is turned away from Turtle and Turtle cannot tell what she is thinking, but Turtle knows that Caroline must be putting on an act, that she must be worried and trying to suss something out. Turtle looks at Martin and wonders if he knows that, and looking at him, she thinks he does. Caroline says, “You should have me over more often, Martin. I’d like to be a part of the girl’s life.”

“Of course,” Martin says.

“It’s the same phone number,” Caroline says.

“Truly?” Martin says. “The same number? Well, I have it then.”

“The same house, even.”

“Out on Flynn Creek Road? I remember that house very well. Still infested with brown recluses?”

“You have to knock every stick of kindling against a post before you can bring it inside.”

“Well,” Martin says in wonder. “Anyway, I have your number, and I will give you a call.”

“I’d like that,” Caroline says.

“Come on, kibble,” Martin says, and Turtle opens the door and hooks something in the footwell with her toe and pitches it out into the grass unnoticed and then climbs out. She looks once at the boys and closes the door, and steps back from the car. Caroline waves a final good-bye to Martin, pulls the SUV around, and goes down the driveway, leaving Turtle and Martin standing side by side, watching them go.

Martin, silent, walks back to the Adirondack chair and sits down in it. He picks his cigar up from the arm and tosses open the Zippo’s lid and lights it, puffing and squinting into the smoke. He draws on the cigar and then fits it between two fingers and she climbs up the porch steps and sits down on his knee and he pulls her back into the depths of the chair and puts one big, tobacco-smelling arm around her, cupping her hair to her neck, and they are silent for a long time. He puts his face into the nape of her neck and inhales. With the hand slung over her shoulder, he gestures down to the hill, to the fields.

“When you were just a little thing,” he says, “you couldn’t’ve weighed more than fifty pounds. Your mother, she’d let you out to play. You were way out in the field, at the edge of the orchard, and the grass was high that year, as high as you were. And I come out onto the porch to have a smoke and I’m looking, and I can just barely make you out. Down there, with this little toy monster you had, a toy Godzilla. You were making it walk through the grass and I could just barely see you. And not thirty feet from you, half hidden in the grass, was the biggest mountain lion I’ve ever seen. Sitting there, watching you. The biggest son of a bitch I’ve ever seen, kibble.”