Scott Cheshire - High as the Horses' Bridles

The clock now read 9:04.

Amad was opening up the store, I was sure, and I expected him to call any minute now, wondering where I was. I put the mug on the windowsill and decided I would take the long way to work along the water, maybe give Dad a call. Have a chat. It would be three hours later in New York, about noon. A light spark of hungry angst fizzed in my belly.

I opened the window and looked out over the courtyard to the palm trees and the open back windows of all four buildings, curtain-sails ballooning with the morning breeze. I saw my neighbors’ pull-blinds all gone wonky. The barbecue grills, and the folding chairs, the tikis propped in buckets of sand. I looked up over the roofs to where the birds were squawking. I was expecting seagulls, and a breeze carried over the salt-rot stink of the bait-and-tackle shop around the corner. Morning clouds were laundry white, slack, and sprawling over blue. What a day. I was very proud of this view. It wasn’t cheap. And I remember there was a flood of blue sky that morning. I saw a shark’s eye in water, a pale moon east of the morning sun because nighttime hadn’t gone home just yet. I liked to think I wasn’t one for omens. But Dad was maybe not entirely fine, and there I was way up with the clouds, fastening clothespins, and still needing a cigarette. I heard the water, the soft crash of ocean waves just across the street. I’d taken up smoking again, not sure why. This world works in circles, or maybe more like squashed, elongated ovals. I went downstairs and got a new pack from the freezer.

Keys, wallet, phone.

I took the path through the courtyard and around the garden I shared with my neighbors, where I never did much more than put out the occasional butt in the flowerpot soil. Bev, on the other hand, in the condo diagonally opposite, took great care with our little garden. She watered almost every morning. And Charlie, who lived right next door, often tended to a scaly potted tree, his favorite. The condo walls were so thin I sometimes heard Charlie talking to his parrots. He was a volatile man of sixty, fond of bicycles — the kind of guy who’d lived alone for a long time by the water.

Unkosher? I was already late for work. But I was heartened that Sarah and I would share an evening meal.

Sarah liked to think she was responsible for bringing Dad and me back together — and she was. But she also liked to think that, if not for her continual upkeep, he and I would forever lose touch. She was my wife (ex-wife), his daughter-in-law, yes. But she was also a stereotypical Jewish mother to us both. Make sure he’s eating enough. Make sure you’re eating enough. Would it kill you to pick up the phone? Whether she believed it or not, Dad was forever on the borders of my brain, practically stalking every thought since Mom died. He and I talked on the phone, but also he was right there on the perimeter of my thinking, all ghostlike and circling like a buzzard. Don’t get me wrong. This is my father we’re talking about. I felt nothing but love for the man but, like I said, it was complicated.

The palm trees out front by the street were spread up high like God’s grabbing fingers. The fiery orange and midnight-blue birds-of-paradise bursting from the ground like frozen firework moments. And that fading neon pink bumper sticker on Bev’s yellow Gremlin: “Live Each Day Like It’s Your Last.” That always seemed to me to be a terrible idea.

I walked toward the water and called Amad. I told him not to worry, said I was on my way.

He said, “You’re late.”

“I know. That’s why I’m calling. To tell you I’m on my way, but I’m late.”

He hung up on me. Very Amad.

I walked on and waved to Mrs. Dunbar, down the street, as she swept her driveway with a push broom. She waved back. I walked by, admiring the trees on her corner lot, the tall crepe myrtle with its brown-butter leaves, and her American persimmon in bloom with orange fruit hanging in orbit like succulent planets. We said a quick hello. Persimmon trees, at least the American ones, she’d told me once before, are naturally self-fertile. Feel free to draw your own conclusions from this, as I certainly had to on many a lonely night.… And the magnolias, Mrs. Dunbar loved her magnolias; she’d gone to great pains in the past pointing out to me the overt and subtle differences between the many types. The lily magnolia, the saucer, star, and pink star magnolias, all very beautiful and hung with those enormous and puffed-out flowers, a black eye staring from the center of each. A cork tree stood on the corner by the road. A wide monster of a thing, knotted, and tall as any tree I’ve ever seen. She’d also told me the cork was not native to California, and yet this one had to be a hundred years old at least. If that’s not native, I don’t know what is. I liked pressing my fingers inside its soft and fleshy give-way bark.

I headed for work along the beach, wondering if my father would answer his phone. Sometimes he flat-out refused even though I paid his cellular bill.

I called, and it rang and rang and rang …

Of all things Californian, probably my least favorite thing was the water. I liked the beach, yes, but you’d never catch me swimming. Water has no shape, and I like shape. I’ve had more than one nightmare of me going over some mammoth and rushing Niagara, on a spindly wooden raft, screaming my head off all the way down, only to wake like a petrified dead man born to his bed in the afterlife. I have to say I especially liked watching the sunset from where my street dead-ended. All clichés are true, so I say it’s our job to refresh them. I liked looking out past the grassy rise where the kids played Frisbee, and way out there beyond the boardwalk. Past the deep stretch of sand and the lifeguard’s tower of rough, white wood, and beyond the tower, where the ocean stretched out to the hazy silhouette of Catalina Island, where the sun goes down to sleep. I stood at the waterline sometimes, at the end of America, one of the ends anyway, and I imagined there was nothing else at all.

Only days before, Amad and I made a wager that I wouldn’t actually show up this particular Sunday. He told me Teri, his wife, had been asking questions lately: Seriously, how bad a shape was the store in? Was business so bad? Should he start looking for a new job? And what about the baby? (Teri was pregnant!) I mean, if Josie can successfully close down three stores, why not a fourth? Actually, Amad told me the bet was her idea. And I couldn’t blame her. The stakes were small — the loser bought breakfast burritos and coffee — but I got the message. Otter Computer, right there on Main Street, was my first and eventually my only location. At one time there were four. Then three. Number two closed during the divorce. And finally just one left. I worked there a few days a week, but never ever on a weekend. Business wasn’t great. Like I said, I was a bit unmotivated. But not the lovely Mister Amad Singh, my only remaining employee, and closest friend (also thirty-seven, such a complicated age). Amad was all things Otter Computer. He had been with me since the beginning. And I spent a good part of my days off avoiding his phone calls. The economy was tanking and he was worried about the business, with good reason. I always told him to calm down. I said I had a plan, and I knew what I was doing. Don’t forget I built this place from nothing. Then again, I’d been saying that for a long while, and not very convincingly.

Nevertheless, I promised him that we would turn things around pretty soon now. Do your best and stay focused. I told him once how crazy he was for having kids and, I swear, he stopped just short of slapping me across the face. I agreed to start working on Sundays because the weekend business had been getting better. Sarah would have laughed out loud at the idea of me working on a weekend.