Chapter 2
After his rendezvous with Red, Sam dropped her off in the alley behind her office and waited to make sure she got safely inside.
He should run over to the consortium before it closed. When you had your own business, Saturdays were no different than any other day. There were always a million and one things that needed doing. But ever since Red had opened up that can of worms about the saltbox, he couldn’t push it out of his mind.
Instead of going to work, he steered the bike back out of town in the opposite direction from where he had taken Red. Out onto Meadowlake Road.
When he was growing up, Sam thought the only good thing about his house was that it was the last stop on the school bus route. None of the other kids saw him get on or off. That meant he didn’t have to worry about any of them coming over unexpectedly, witnessing what passed for normal in his family.
Not that his formative years were all bad. In the summer, he and the O’Brien brothers down the road had the freedom to do anything they wanted. Looking back on those times, he, Jeff, and Derek lived their lives the way boys should live everywhere, in every age. Hunting small game, fishing Walker Creek for cutthroats, camping out in the woods for days. Happily subsisting on a diet of cereal and candy bars and the occasional coho salmon roasted over a campfire.
And there was Sam’s dog, Riggley, never far from his side.
All of that was before Mom left and Dad hooked up with that woman from Tualatin. Penny was her name. But Sam and his brother and sister refused to honor her with it. Any woman dumb enough to hook up with Psychodad didn’t deserve their respect.
Although Sam could see the O’Brien house from his bedroom window in the winter when the leaves were off the trees, it sat across some invisible line in the McMinnville School District. Instead of Clarkston Elementary, Jeff and Derek went to Memorial.
It was the first of many divisions in Sam’s life.
Past the reservoir, Sam hung a left on the lake access road. His body leaned easily into the curves, at one with his bike. He knew where the hairpin turns hid at the bottom of hills, where the stretches of road were that remained in shadow on the brightest July day, marking the distance to his destination.
Twenty minutes later he came to the remnants of the lean-to he’d jerry-rigged out of a couple sheets of corrugated tin scrounged from Dad’s junkyard, the summer between fifth and sixth grades. The previous winter they’d gotten slammed with rain. Day after day, Sam had shown up at school soaked. The bus stopped a quarter mile away. But standing in the freezing rain waiting was better than missing it, then having to stay home all day. Dad worked the opposite way from school, in McMinnville. He would never have gone out of his way to drive Sam in.
He hung a right and then a left, expertly centering the bike in the ridge between the ruts, and finally pulled up to the front door of the mud brown house and climbed off his bike.
As always, his eye went first to the little white cross planted in the earth beneath his bedroom window.
He went over and squatted next to it before yanking out the relentless dandelions and snakeweed that would have obscured it by now, if not for his regular attention.
Sam’s face softened, remembering the day one of Mom’s strawberry customers carried a cardboard box from her car into the yard. She sat it down, tipped it on its side, and onto the grass spilled a white puppy with splotches of black, ears flopping forward in little triangles.
The puppy immediately went exploring, tail wagging double time, making his mother’s chickens cluck and dart out of her way.
“She’s the runt of the litter. I thought Sam might like to have a dog. Give him some company out here,” said the customer, with a glance at Sam’s house—the only house for miles.
Sam squatted and the dog trotted straight into his arms. She was stronger than she looked. Sam fell backward and the puppy climbed onto his chest, tickling his stomach.
“She likes you,” said the lady with a smile, pleased with herself.
“She’s all wriggly.” Sam laughed, squinting against the dog’s pink tongue licking his face.
From that day on, Sam and Riggley were a pair.
Sam rose from where he knelt and went to the door. He inserted his key in the padlock, released the shank, and let himself in, looking around the kitchen, trying to see it through the eyes of Red McDonald.
The house had to be a hundred years old. The smell of smoke from the recent chimney fire still hung in the air. He looked up at the water-stained ceiling. If he ever wanted to try to sell it, the least it would need was a new roof.
But Sam had no plans to sell.
Dad wasn’t quite as ancient, but he was getting up there. There’d been some worrisome incidents. Last spring, a bar owner had repaid a favor and called Sam instead of the cops when Dad had had one too many Hood River Vodkas. Sam walked into the bar to catch Dad moving in on the young wife of a grizzled motorcycle enthusiast flying the colors of a well-known outlaw gang. Sam had had to do some fancy footwork to get them out of that one unscathed.
And in May, a mysteriously torn tire wall on Dad’s truck had left him stranded. When Sam arrived less than an hour later, Dad was still shaken up. He didn’t even object when Sam took charge of calling AAA to arrange for the tow.
Just last week, Sam left work mid-day on a hunch to check on things. He walked in just as Dad tossed a match to a fresh stack of split wood on top of the gas fireplace “logs.”
Sam could still hear Dad giving him hell for saving his hide.
Maybe he was right. Maybe he should’ve let him be. Everyone would be happier right now. Instead, Dad was cussing and screaming at the nurses over at the assisted living place. Making them miserable the same way he made every person he ever came in contact with miserable, his whole life long.
Sam’s thoughts went back to Red and her obsession with old houses. He wandered through the first floor, trying to understand the attraction. But all he saw was conflict in every corner.
All of his problems originated here, in this house.
He trudged upstairs, accurately predicting which steps would creak beneath his feet, and peered into what had been his bedroom.
He looked at the empty space where his narrow brass bed used to be. He’d spent many a winter night shivering in that bed when that corner took the brunt of the northwest winds. Dad had permanently banned Riggley to the back porch. But sometimes, on the very coldest nights, he managed to sneak him onto the bed with him.
There had never been any question of Sam moving back into this place two years ago when he’d come back to Oregon to stay. Instead, he’d hauled the few childhood possessions he still wanted over to his room in the old consortium in Clarkston.
In his whole life, Sam rarely spent time in this house without his dad lurking nearby. Now that Dad was stuck in Woodcrest without the keys to his truck, Sam should feel better about it. More at peace. Yet all he felt was the same old sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach.
He couldn’t stop wondering if maybe, when he had saved his dad at the last second, he had interrupted a brilliant plan. Suicide by fireplace. Had to give Psychodad credit—it wasn’t a bad one. Given his recent spates of bad judgment plus the deteriorating condition of the house, it might easily have been dismissed as an accident.
Sam could never wish his own father dead. But to watch this house and all its painful childhood memories go up in flames? The idea was dangerously tempting.