After breakfast, I spent an unproductive day at work before saying my good-byes just after lunch. The best thing about my part-time hours was their flexibility as long as I was efficient, but today I was in for the longest two hours of my life as I headed to Templeton.
I thought about what I would say to my son and worried about how he would react. I had lied to him, trying to reassure him. Now, I was going to drop the truth on him with all of its inherent baggage, including an innocent man locked up in the Santa Barbara county jail. I wanted to know the truth about his involvement, and I needed to know it now.
Would this send him straight to the arms of drugs for relief? Is that what he’d been doing with the money he’d been borrowing from both Rick and me anyway? Were there signs of the glossy cover-up of semi-permanent change, or had he really had the true, cell-level life change that I had believed? Yes, his change was real, I knew it was. Jodi’s intuitive nature would have sensed if it were otherwise, and I couldn’t imagine that Monte wouldn’t notice anything as they worked side by side every day.
Today when I drove up the driveway, I bypassed the house altogether. If I stopped and talked to Jodi for too long, I might lose my resolve. I needed to go through with this before I changed my mind.
I was certain Kurt and Monte would be out in the orchards somewhere, so I drove as far as my car would take me in that direction. I took a deep breath and walked toward the orchards, while everything inside me screamed to get back in my car and go home before I wrecked Kurt’s life. And Caroline’s. And mine.
I heard the sound of their voices coming from the middle of the trees. Kurt said something I couldn’t quite make out, followed by Monte’s rumbling laugh. The sound of scraping and cracking led me in the general direction. I finally saw them between a couple of trees, covered with dirt from head to toe, dragging loose branches into a pile. They looked up as I approached and smiled in greeting. I didn’t return it. I nodded at Monte. “I need to talk to Kurt for a minute.”
He nodded. “ ’Course you do. I was just about to take the quad up the hill anyway. I’ll leave you guys to your privacy.” Without another word, or even a readable expression, he walked over to the ATV that was parked a few feet away and climbed aboard. The motor roared to life and he disappeared behind a trail of dust.
“What’s wrong?” Kurt’s voice seemed deeper than usual.
I knew that things would only get worse from here. The weight of this visit would drag everything down, until his voice would be the least of my worries. I reached out and touched his cheek, so warm and soft, with the grainy texture of dirt and bits of wood chips clinging to the mix. I looked into his eyes, searching for any sign that drugs had been part of the reason he was borrowing money. They looked clear. My hand fell away and I turned my back on him, wrapping my arms around myself. “I’m not sure where to start.”
“Why don’t you start with what’s bothering you?”
“Kurt, did you play any part in what happened to Rudy Prince?”
The question hung in the air between us, taking all the oxygen with it. Somewhere in the distance, I heard birds chirping a happy song, completely out of tune with the deepening tension so nearby.
“I don’t know, Mom. I don’t think so.”
This was not the answer I wanted. I wanted to hear “No, nothing at all.” Or just the truth, straight and plain. I was tired of wondering, exhausted with vague.
“You don’t think so? I wouldn’t think that would be the kind of thing you would forget.”
“Well, if I did something, I don’t remember it. But I keep having these dreams.”
“What kind of dreams?”
“When I was in rehab, I kept dreaming about waking up back at my cabin with a baseball bat in the bed beside me.” His voice trailed off, leaving no sound but the horses neighing from the next property over. Or maybe it was the blood rushing through my ears.
His “dream” was bringing me face-to-face with a truth I did not want to know. “A baseball bat?” Still, to this day, I have no idea how I managed to squeak that question out of me.
“Yeah. A Louisville Slugger, and a bloody one at that.” He turned to face me, but he kept his eyes focused on the ground. “Rudy Prince always carried a Louisville Slugger with him—he used it to hurt anyone who crossed him, and intimidate everyone else. Anyway, the night before I left, I either dreamed he came to me—or maybe he did, I’m still not sure which—wanting some of the money I owed him. Of course I didn’t have any.”
“Did you dream that, or did it really happen?” Hysteria was descending on me.
“When I first started having the dream, I thought it was just that because it always morphed into Rudy beating some homeless guy, and me getting so angry I was somehow beating Rudy instead. But when it kept coming back, I started to wonder if maybe there was something to it. I … uh … well, I’d been really wasted the night before, and sometimes after a night of partying I used to have memory blackouts, so I wasn’t sure what to believe. The day I got out of rehab, I stopped by my old place before I even came to your house. I wanted to see if the bat was there, so I would know for sure.” He shrugged. “They had already bulldozed the thing and there was nothing left. I had assumed all my stuff had gone with it, and in a way I was relieved. I figured that if I had done something stupid, but the evidence was gone, I could leave it buried in my past.”
This was the part where I was supposed to tell him about the bat, about Gary Singer’s arrest, but there was more of a reason I’d come here. Something else I needed to ask, and I wanted the answer now. “Kurt, there’s one more thing I need to ask you, and I want an honest answer.”
“Okay.” He sounded unsure.
“Why have you been borrowing money? From your father and me?”
He linked his hands and cracked his knuckles. The same boyish grin I’d always loved crept across his face. “I wondered when you two would bust me for that one.”
“Well, you’re busted. Now, what are you doing?”
“I didn’t want to tell you about it yet, but there’s this girl. We were together for a while, and I found out that she’s pregnant.”
“Pregnant?” That knocked the wind right from my lungs. “Is it …” I stopped myself at the use of the word it and corrected, “Are you the father?”
He shrugged. “According to her I am.”
“But you don’t know for sure?”
“I know a few things for sure, like that we were together for a couple of months last fall. She’s now six months pregnant, so the timing is right.”
“And the money is for?” A picture flashed across my mind of a white coat in a dark room, latex gloves, and a disembodied voice, “This will all be over in just a minute.” I tried to shake free from the nausea of the images that followed.
“To help her out, of course.”
“Help her out with what?”
“Taking care of herself. You know, medical checkups, food, some medicine they’ve got her taking. I guess she’s had a few problems.”
“So, she’s not … I mean, she plans to keep the baby?”
“She’s planning to put it up for adoption.” He rubbed at a particularly dirty spot on his hand. “She went to this place called Life Network a couple of weeks ago. They said they can help her, put her up with a clean place to live, help her find a nice family to adopt the baby—if that’s what she decides to do.”
A grandchild. This certainly was not the way I’d dreamed of someday hearing such news. In fact, at this point, the thought had never even occurred to me. An unmarried son, a woman I’d never met, who probably was using drugs just like my son was at the time of conception. How was I supposed to feel? I’m not sure, but something about the thought of putting him up for adoption, of never seeing him, it just hurt.
Then all sorts of ugly possibilities began to fill my mind. This woman had likely had several sexual partners in the last six months. Had she found Kurt an easy target for money since he was the only clean one of the bunch? Considering the large amounts of money he’d already given her, doubt shook flags on every pole in my brain. “What if the baby’s not yours?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “It’s not like I’m paying child support or anything. But the fact is, we were together and now she’s in trouble. I don’t want to leave her to face that alone. The least I can do is help her out.”
I put my arms around him. He’d grown up so much. His willingness to take responsibility for this woman’s child that he didn’t even know was his, it made me want to cry. This was a person who deserved the chance at a new life. I pulled back so I could look him in the eye, although his face blurred beneath my tears. “You know those dreams, the ones about the bat?”
“What about them?”
I squeezed him until I thought he must surely be suffocating. “You’ve started a new life now. You need to quit thinking about your past life and leave yesterday and its nightmares behind. Become the man you were intended to be.”
“That’s what I want to do. More than anything.”
“Then do it.”
At that moment, with the promise of a grandchild—even if I would never know her—and the potential for the man my son had become, I realized I had made my decision. There would be no turning back
Jodi was waiting for me when I left the orchard. She stood in the middle of the driveway and didn’t budge until I came to a stop. She walked around to the driver’s side and motioned for me to roll down the window. “You are not leaving here until I take you to coffee. You may have driven all this way to talk to your son, but your sister demands her share of time before you go.”
She didn’t ask a single question, and she didn’t do her usual, “Come inside and I’ll fix us something to eat.” No, she must have known that I needed to get away from the house. I swear, my sister would have been burned at the stake a couple of centuries ago for reading minds, or whatever it was they called it back in those days.
I put the car in park and got out. “Sounds good.” And it did. I wanted to talk to her, but I couldn’t tell her the things I so badly needed to say.
Could I?
“I’m so glad you’re here.” She put her arms around me and hugged. It was the hug of love and support no matter what. I recognized it well. “So, I was just sketching out some designs for the interior of the shop. Do you want to come take a looksee, or are you ready to go?”
“I’d love to see them.” I wasn’t sure what I was or wasn’t going to tell her, and it was best to start with just some friendly conversation as a warm-up.
“I did have a row of shelves right here.” She pointed at the drawing of what was now an oversized bay window. “But I just couldn’t stand the thought of hiding the beautiful hillside views from that side of the building. It would completely wreck the innate rhythm I want to create. I decided to make the window extra wide, so it’s actually a little bench seat, for anyone who might want to rest awhile, enjoy the views, and take another sample.”
“I think it’s perfect.”
“Well, probably not perfect, but it’s as close as I can get to it.”
If ever there was a human, aside from a God-incarnate human, who could put the word perfect beside her name, it was my sister. It amazed me that she didn’t see it like that. I thought of my own mistakes, always plenty, but lately who could even begin to count them? What would she think of me if she knew the whole truth? Somehow, I didn’t want to know. “You ready to go? I’ll take us to that new place in Paso Robles that has everyone talking. I’ve heard the chef is down from San Francisco.”
We climbed into my car and started down the rural street that led away from Jodi’s house. Oak trees towered above the road, with moss hanging from the branches like garland from a Christmas tree. Vineyards filled a good portion of the hillsides, most of them neat and tidy rows of vines, each trunk supported by a pole, each branch held in place by two rows of wire that ran the length of the row. We drove past one large vineyard that looked different from the rest. It looked more like shrubs than vines, and there were no wires, no support poles. “What’s the difference between this vineyard and the others? A different kind of grape?” I asked the question mostly to make small talk.
“These grapes are dry farmed. They’re not on an irrigation system like the other kind.”
I knew that summers here were very hot and dry. I couldn’t imagine anything besides tumbleweeds growing without irrigation. “Does that work?”
“Quite well, apparently. The yield per vine is much smaller due to the lack of water and less pruning, but supposedly when you take into account the extra cost for the water and labor, the cost per ton of grapes is about the same. So you can spend more time and money and produce more, or spend less time and money and produce less.”
“Interesting.”
“It always reminds me about the first verses of John 15, ‘I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.’ You know, it’s not enough for Him to put minimal effort into us. He gives us all that He has so that we can be all that we’re supposed to be. Sometimes the pruning is painful, but it’s ultimately because that’s what needs to happen.”
I thought of myself as a grapevine and didn’t like the image. I could almost picture the hand of God coming after me, and I suspected he might be holding a machete instead of shears at this point. I wondered what I needed to do to get moved to God’s dry farming list.