Along Came Zoe

Three acres of land and she knew every inch of it, from the gully at the bottom of the property that sometimes flooded after a heavy winter rain, to the faint pale green sheen on the distant brown hills that appeared after the first rains of the year. By early spring her land turned as lush and verdant as Ireland, lasting until about June, when the green faded to gold.

She loved it in every season. Like right now, walking through the beds of tomato plants, the pungent smell of ripening fruit, the sun warm on her back, Kenna trailing at her heels on the off chance that some food might be involved.

“You are getting way too smart for your own good,” she said.

“Woof.”

“Sit.” The dog sat, almost quivering with anticipation, her eyes on Zoe’s hand as Zoe reached into a huge old mailbox on the potting table in the middle of the garden. Dog biscuits. Kenna’s tail was going crazy now, her front feet dancing a little jig. “We’re happy, huh Boofuls?” Zoe threw the biscuit and watched the dog carry it off. She always got a kick out of how furtive Kenna looked as she trotted off with the prize. Gotta hide this real good, she could imagine the dog thinking. Never know when someone might get a taste for Old Roy peanut-flavored dog biscuit.

Some of the branches of the plants were so heavy with tomatoes that they were touching the ground, and she decided now was as good a time as any to do a little cleanup. As she went into the garage for twine and nippers, the phone rang from inside the house.

“Hello,” she said, breathless from running to catch it.

The line went dead.

Zoe stared at the phone and felt her newly improved mood begin to slump. This had been happening a lot lately. Nothing there when she picked up the phone. Once a girl had asked for Brett.

“May I tell him who’s calling?”

“Oh, he’ll know.”

“Maybe I’d also like to know.”

Click.

Brett tell you about his girlfriend?

She and Brett seemed to be fighting over everything lately.

You want to end up like your father, Brett? Is that what you want?

If she had a dollar for every time she’d stopped herself from blurting that question, she’d be a wealthy woman. And as much as she’d like to credit her restraint with something high-minded, like fairness at all costs, the main reason she never asked her son if he wanted to end up like his dad was a suspicion that Brett might say that turning out like his dad would be pretty cool. A garage full of toys—surfboards, water skis, a cluster of dirt bikes; summer weekends vrooming across the water in a sleek white powerboat, winter weekends snowboarding in the local mountains. A hot-looking babe for a wife. How bad could that be?

A more pertinent question might be Do you want to end up like me?

Last month she’d attended her twentieth high-school reunion. Reluctantly. Her friend had practically had to drag her there. “Come on. It’ll be fun.”

Right. Wearing heels was never fun and neither was anything else about the evening. Like the emerald-green silk dress she’d bought from Second Time Around that clung like a fretting child to her legs, or the large, laminated and hideously embarrassing picture of herself at eighteen, or Evelyn Something-or-other, Ph.D., former class valedictorian, who had droned on about how reunions were a chance to catch up on one another’s lives.

“A reunion is an opportunity to examine our own life narrative,” Earnest Evelyn had told the assembled crowd in the San Diego Hilton ballroom. “A chance to consider the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and how we became that person. Always remember though,” she’d cautioned, “reunions can also threaten the integrity of those stories by subjecting them to the scrutiny of others, to friends and acquaintances whose memories of the past and of us may be altogether different from our own.”

That bit at least had gotten Zoe’s attention. In fact she’d fallen asleep thinking about it. Less about how she got to be the person she was—she could pretty much work that out—than why her version of who she was, which she was quite satisfied with, thank you very much—seemed so out of whack with the way everyone else saw her. Who exactly was fooling whom?

CHAPTER FOUR

AFTER HE’D TRIED TWICE to reach the boy’s mother and got Zany Zoe’s recorded message, Phillip decided he’d talk to Molly before he tried the number again. He reached her from his office, between surgeries.

“Hello?” a young, female voice responded.

“Hi.” Was this Molly? Embarrassing, but he couldn’t be sure. “Moll?”

“Dad?” It was Molly. “Something wrong?”

“No,” he said. “Why would you think that?”

“Uh, duh, Dad. Why do you usually call me?”

Phillip exhaled through this mouth, slumped in his chair. In his peripheral vision, he saw Eileen motioning to him. He covered the receiver. “Eileen?”

“Hospital administration on line two.”

“I’ll call right back.” He spoke into the receiver. “What’s up?”

“You called me, Dad.”

“I know I called you, Molly, I—”

“Well, you’re making it sound like I called you.”

“I’m not making it sound like anything.” He forced himself to relax. Exactly when they’d gone from being friends to adversaries, he couldn’t say, but lately every conversation with Molly seemed to go this way. “I just called—”

“What time is it?” Molly demanded. “I was still asleep.”

“It’s after noon, Molly.”

“So?”

“You were sleeping when I came to take you out to lunch last week.”

“So what?” Her voice had escalated a notch. “I was tired.”

“You don’t have school?” he asked, looking up as Eileen tapped on his door. “Hold on a minute, Moll. Yes?”

“That reporter from the Tribune. He has a follow-up question.”

“Tell him I’ll call him back.”

“He asked me to interrupt you. He said he’s on a deadline.”

“Hold on again, Moll.” He clicked the hold button and pressed the other line. “I have a question for you,” he said to the reporter. “What if you’d caught me in the middle of surgery?”

The reporter laughed. “I’m tenacious.”

“Okay,” Phillip said. “So what’s the question?”

“Confirmation really. You said on a typical day, you usually do four surgeries.

“Scheduled surgeries. There could be one or two emergency surgeries.”