True Colors

  Noah’s light was on.

  To the girls, she said, “Excuse me for a minute,” and walked into the new wing of the house. To the left lay her bedroom and bathroom. She turned right and went down to the end of the hall. She hadn’t found the time yet to pick out carpeting for this area, so her cowboy boots creaked on the springy plywood flooring.

  She knocked on Noah’s door, got no answer, and went inside.

  He was on his bed, knees drawn up, eyes closed, rocking out to music on his iPod. White wires snaked down from the buds in his ears and plugged into the thin silver player.

  At her touch he flinched and sat upright. “Who said you could come in my room?”

  Vivi Ann sighed. Did they really have to have the your-room-my-house conversation every day? “I knocked. You didn’t answer.”

  “I didn’t hear you.”

  “That’s because you listen to music that’s too loud.”

  “Whatever.”

  She refused to take the bait. Instead, she reached out to tuck the hair behind his ear the way she used to, but he shrank back from her touch. “What happened to us, Noah? We used to be best friends.”

  “Best friends don’t jack your Xbox and TV out of your room.”

  “You got suspended from school. Was I supposed to send you flowers? Sometimes parents have to make hard decisions to do what’s best for their kids.”

  “I don’t have parents. I have you. Unless you think Dad is making hard choices about me in his cell.”

  “I don’t know why you’re so angry these days.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Please stop saying that. Come on, Noah, how can I help you?”

  “Give me back my TV.”

  “That’s it, that’s your answer. You get in a fight at school and—”

  “I told you it wasn’t my fault.”

  “Nothing ever is, is it? You’re like a fight magnet, I guess.”

  “Whatever.” He glared at her. “You know everything.”

  “I know this: you’re a member of the Bits and Spurs 4-H Club, and as such, you’re supposed to be making a poster for your stall.”

  “You’re crazy if you think I’m showing at the fair this year.”

  “Then I’m crazy.”

  He jumped off the bed. His iPod swung from his earbuds and then fell, clattering to the plywood floor. “I won’t do it.”

  “What’s the alternative? You going to sit in this room all summer, staring at where your TV used to be? You don’t do sports, you won’t do chores around here, and you don’t have friends. You can damn sure go to the fair.”

  He looked so hurt that Vivi Ann wanted to apologize. She shouldn’t have said that about his lack of friends.

  “I can’t believe you said that. It’s not my fault I don’t have any friends. It’s yours.”

  “Mine?”

  “You’re the one who married a killer and an Indian.”

  “I’m tired of this same argument, Noah, and I’m tired of you sitting around doing nothing and feeling sorry for yourself.”

  “I’m not showing at the fair. Only girls show horses. I take enough crap already. All I need is Erik, Jr., to see my pink and blue glitter why-I-love-my-horse poster.”

  “That was a great poster. Everyone loved it.”

  “I was nine. I didn’t know any better. I am not showing at the fair this year.”

  “Well, you’re not sitting home all summer.”

  “Good luck with making me move,” he said, putting his earbuds back in.

  Vivi Ann stood there, staring at him. She could actually feel her blood pressure elevating. It was amazing how quickly he could get to her. Finally, remaining silent by force of will, she left his bedroom, slamming the door behind her. A juvenile show of irritation that nonetheless felt good.

  In the living room, she paused. “I’ll be right back, girls. Keep working.”

  Grabbing a sweatshirt off the sofa, she left the cabin and walked down to the barn. It was full of trucks and trailers.

  Inside the arena was carefully controlled pandemonium. Kids and dogs ran wild through the bleachers, chasing the barn cats around. Several women and girls were riding in the center of the arena, practicing flying changes. Janie, back from college, was working her mare along the rail, and Pam Espinson was leading her grandson on his new pony.

  Vivi Ann scanned the crowd, finding Aurora in the stands watching her daughter. She put her hands in her pockets and walked over to her sister. All around her was the blurring movement of people on horseback, the vibrating thunder of hooves on dirt. She moved easily through the crowd and took a seat by Aurora. “It’s nice to see Janie riding again.”

  Aurora smiled. “It’s nice to see her again, period. The house is awful quiet these days.”

  “I wish,” Vivi Ann said.

  “Noah?”

  Vivi Ann leaned against her sister. “Isn’t there a rule book for raising teenagers?”

  Aurora laughed and put an arm around her. “No, but . . .”

  “But what?” Vivi Ann knew what was coming and tensed up.

  “You’d best do something before he hurts someone.”

  “He wouldn’t do that.”

  Aurora looked at her. She didn’t say anything, but they both knew she was thinking about Dallas.

  “He wouldn’t do that,” Vivi Ann said again, although her voice wasn’t as strong this time. “I just need to find him something worthwhile to do.”

  Traffic on First Street was stop-and-go on this last day of school. No doubt all the graduating seniors in town were in their cars right now, honking to one another and high-fiving out their car windows as they passed. She saw a few yellow high school buses caught in the snarl, too, and could imagine their tired drivers’ reaction to all this.

  If she’d left ten minutes earlier or later, she wouldn’t be stuck here. It wasn’t as if she were on a tight schedule—or like she didn’t have access to a calendar.

  It was summer on the Canal now, on the very June day that most of the county’s schools ended for the year, and those two details combined to make a perfect storm of traffic. One blocky motor home after another inched down the winding road. Most of them were hauling other vehicles—boats, smaller cars, bicycles, Jet Skis. Nobody came to the Canal in these golden months to sit inside, after all; they came to play in the warm blue water.

  Out on the highway, she drove past Bill Gates’s gated compound and the gorgeous lodge and spa called Alderbrook, where yuppies congregated for wine tastings, weddings, and hot stone massages.

  As she drove, the Canal bent and curved beside her; sometimes the road was inches from the water and sometimes there were acres in between them. Finally, as she neared Sunset Beach, she slowed and turned onto the sloped gravel driveway that led to the house she’d purchased only last week.

  Her newest project was a sprawling 1970s rambler, originally built as a summer home for a large Seattle family. There were six bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen the size of a toolbox, and a dining room that could comfortably fit a motorboat. A huge covered deck jutted out over the Canal, and to its right, stairs led down to the two-hundred-foot-long dock that was white with bird droppings. Every square inch of this place was dilapidated or rotting or just plain ugly, but the property made it all worth it. Along the road, huge cedars shielded the property and ringed the flat grass patch like a protective circle of friends. In front of the trees, in full bloom now, were giant rhododendron bushes and mounds of white Shasta daisies. The two-acre parcel sloped gently down to a sand beach. White pieces of opalescent oyster shells decorated the shoreline, interspersed with beautiful bits of gem-colored glass. A hundred years ago this stretch of sand had been a dumping ground for broken bottles. Time had taken that trash and turned it into treasure. Every time Winona looked at that impossibly colored beach, she thought of her mother and smiled.

  She parked in the grass, grabbed a Diet Coke out of the cooler in the backseat, and considered how best to redesign the
house. Obviously she was going to use the building’s footprint and remodel extensively. It was the only way she’d be able to have a house so close to the water these days. She could, however, go up a floor. That meant opening up the downstairs, making sure every room had a view, and creating a master suite, master bath, and office upstairs.

  Perfect.

  She retrieved her meatball submarine sandwich and her notepad from the car. Sitting on the front lawn, she ate her lunch and began drawing out interior plans. She was so enmeshed in the scale of rooms and the positioning of doors that she didn’t even notice that she wasn’t alone until Vivi Ann said her name.

  Winona turned. “Hey. I didn’t even hear you drive up.”

  “I didn’t mean to startle you.” Vivi Ann crossed the lawn toward her as Noah exited the passenger side of the truck. Making no move to join them, he stood there, hands in his baggy chewed-up jeans, shoulders slouched, hair in his face, looking put-upon and pissed off.

  “You came out to see the new house, huh?” Winona said. As a rule, she ignored Noah’s presence whenever possible. It made life easier. “Can I show you around?”

  Vivi Ann’s gaze swept the place. “What do you have to do before you begin tearing down walls?”

  “Oh, lots. There’s always prep work. You should see the dock. Forty years’ worth of seagull crap takes a while to wash off.”

  “That’s perfect!”

  “I know. A dock adds over one hundred thousand dollars’ worth of value to this place.” Winona frowned. “Is that what you meant?”

  Vivi Ann glanced over at Noah, who was studying his dirty fingernails as if he might find gold in there. “Noah doesn’t want to be in 4-H anymore and he’s refusing to show at the fair.”

  “Uh. Duh. He’s a boy. Maybe you want him to take ballet, too.”

  “I’m glad to see you understand the problem. It wasn’t quite so clear to me.”

  “Of course it wasn’t. You were beautiful and popular. If you wanted to play football, the guys would have said it was cute. Hell, if you threw up at homecoming, the boys would’ve lined up to hold your hair and still thought you were adorable. A kid like Noah has to be careful: no math or computer clubs, no chess, and certainly no 4-H. He’s trying to make friends, not lose them.”

  “And you said he shouldn’t be sitting around all day.”

  “Did I? I think I said he needed counseling, too. He seems . . . angrier than normal.”

  “What he needs is a summer job. And not at the ranch. We don’t need something else to fight about.”

  “That’s a great idea. It would use up his time and give him self-esteem and . . .” Winona stopped. “No,” she said to Vivi Ann, shaking her head. “You aren’t thinking—”

  “It would be perfect. He could clean up the dock. Eight hours a day, five days a week. You can pay him by the foot. If you pay him by the hour I think you’ll go broke and your dock won’t ever get cleaned up.”

  “I’m supposed to pay him, too?”

  “Well, he’ll hardly do it for free. And you’re rich.”

  “Look, Vivi Ann,” Winona said, lowering her voice. “I don’t know about this.”

  “Tell her you’re scared of me, Aunt Winona,” Noah yelled. “Tell her you think I’m dangerous.”

  “Shut up, Noah,” Vivi Ann snapped. “She certainly isn’t afraid of you.” She looked back at Winona. “I really need your help here. You’re so good at solving problems. Aurora thinks it’s a great idea.”

  “You ran it past her?”

  “Actually, it was her idea.”

  Winona was screwed. Any idea that had been vetted and approved of by half the family was a done deal. “He has to pull his pants up—I don’t want to look at his underwear all day—and he washes his hair on the days he works for me.”

  Noah grunted. She didn’t know if he’d agreed or not.

  Winona walked over to him, hearing Vivi Ann following her. “How does eight bucks a foot sound?”

  “Like slave’s wages.”

  Vivi Ann cuffed the back of his head. “Try again.”

  “It sounds fine,” he grumbled, shoving his hands deeper in his pockets.

  Winona was actually afraid his jeans would fall down in a heap around his ankles.

  This was a bad idea. The kid was just like his dad: trouble. But she had no way out. “Fine. He’s hired. But if he screws up once—once—you get him back, Vivi. I’m no babysitter.”

  Vivi Ann looked directly at Noah. “If you fire him, he’s competing at the fair. Is that understood?”

  Noah didn’t answer, but the look in his eyes was pure teenage rage.

  He understood.

  Chapter Twenty

  WHAT DO I CARE ABOUT?

  Another totally useless question, Mrs. I. What do you do, sit around reading some old teacher’s handbook on how to get bad kids to talk? I can tell you what I don’t care about. How’s that? I don’t care about Oyster Shores or the kids in my class or high school. It’s all just a big waste of time.

  And I don’t care about family suppers. We had another rocking good time at the Grey house last night, btw. It’s always the same. Aunt Aurora bragging about how perfect her kids are. Ricky the perfect college student and Janie the girl wonder. And Grandpa sits there like a rock while Aunt Winona tells us all how perfect her friggin life is. No wonder my mom used to take a bunch of pills to get through the day. I’m not supposed to know about that. They think I’m an idiot. Like because I was a kid I didn’t notice that she used to cry all the time. I tried to help her—That’s what I remember most about being little. But she used to either push me away or hold me so tight I couldn’t breathe. I got so I knew what her eyes looked like when she was drugged up and I just stayed away. Now she pretends everything is okay because the medicine cabinet is empty and she never cries.

  I found something else I don’t care about. Aunt Winona’s dumb old dock. It’s covered with bird shit, so naturally I’m the one that gets to scrape it all off. You should see the way she watches me. Like I’m going to blow any second or come at her with a knife. She used to like me, too. That’s another thing I remember from when I was little. She’d read me bedtime stories when Mom was gone and watch Disney movies with me. But now she stays away, staring at me when she thinks I don’t notice.

  I think she’s scared of me. Maybe it’s because of that time I got pissed off at a family supper and threw my glass at the wall. That was the day Erik Jr. told me my dad was a half breed murderer. I didn’t believe him and when I got home, I asked my mom and she talked and talked and talked and never said anything.

  And everybody wonders why I get pissed off. What am I supposed to do when Brian calls me injun boy and says they shoulda fried my dad for what he did?

  The next Friday teased them with the promise of summer. A pale, pretty sun played hide-and-seek with the clouds; light came and went across the yard like a capricious child, until finally sometime just past noon it came out and stayed.

  Winona was busy scrubbing the kitchen floor when she noticed the change in the weather. At first she thought nothing of it, figured, in fact, that it was just as likely to begin raining as not, and kept working. But when she started to feel heat prickle on her forehead and form tiny moist beads in the curl of her back, she climbed to her feet and pulled off her rubber gloves. If it was actually going to stay nice out, she knew she should power-wash the deck. You didn’t squander sunlit days in June around here.

  She changed into shorts and a baggy, thigh-length T-shirt. As she pulled her hair back into a ponytail, she peered through the cloudy glass of her bedroom window and saw Noah down on the dock, supposedly scraping bird poop off the splintery wooden rails.

  Honest to God, the dead moved faster.

  And his pants were so low she could see the waistband of his blue boxer shorts.

  He’d been working for her for five days and she could barely identify his progress. He got here promptly at nine o’clock every morning and went down to
the dock without saying a word to her. On the days she went into the office, leaving him here alone, she had no doubt whatsoever that he was sitting on his ass.

  “This is so not working out,” she muttered, grabbing a roll of duct tape.

  She marched out onto the deck, letting the door bang shut behind her. Enough was enough. She might have to employ him, might have to ignore his surly attitude and his dirty hair, might have to pretend he was working, but by God, she didn’t have to look at his damn underwear.

  She walked down the dock. The tide was low, so the ramp down to the dock was steep and springy beneath her. She held tightly to the bird-ruined handrails, looking carefully for bare wood places to touch, as she made her way cautiously down to him. “Noah.”

  He’d been so busy doing nothing that he was startled by her voice. He flinched, dropped the metal scraper. “Jeez. Yell, why don’t yah?”

  “Duct tape is a remarkable invention. It can be anything. Did you know that?” She unwound a length about as long as her arm, tore it off, and then carefully folded it in half lengthwise.

  “I don’t think about tape much, but I’ll believe you.” He reached down for the fallen scraper. “Unless you want to tell me something about . . . I don’t know, maybe yarn? I think I’ll get back to work.”

  “We both know what a joke that is. Here.” She handed him the strip of silver tape.

  “What is it?”

  “Your new belt. Put it through the loops—you do know how to do that, don’t you?—and tie it in a knot. I do not want to see even a strip of your boxers.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “Do I look like I’m kidding?”

  “This is the style,” he said stubbornly.

  “Oh, yes, you’re a real Giorgio Armani. Put on the belt. If you’ll remember, it was a condition of this ridiculous enterprise you and I pretend is employment.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  She smiled. “You know what I loved about the fair? The way my chaps and hat and gloves all matched. They were all the same blue. Your mom called it dressing to win. And everyone I knew was there, seeing me dressed like a fat blueberry.”