“Your dad,” Theo says, “talks about you all the time. He was so excited that you were coming home for Christmas.” I have to look away, embarrassed.
At home I save Theo’s number into my cell phone and give him a code name: PHILLIP. I throw away the receipt that I’ve written Theo’s number on. It was from years ago—for a meatball sub and a Coke I shared with Joel in the cafeteria. I remember Joel had been in a good mood, and it had helped to buoy mine. That morning I’d had a woman scream at me. In her ultrasound photo, it looked as though her baby didn’t have a foot.
“YOU SAID SHE WAS NORMAL,” the woman shrieked.
I tried to point the foot out to her, but it was too little too late. The woman was already inconsolable.
“She should be fired!” she’d screamed to everyone, storming out of the exam room while pointing damningly at me.
And even though my coworkers laughed sympathetically about it afterward, and even though this patient was known to be a drama queen, and even though Joel said, “You can’t let that get to you,” I couldn’t help it—I let it, anyway.
January 26
When I call Dr. Nazaryan to tell him the idea, he seems unperturbed—even excited. He says it so happens he’s actually rescheduled his Monday seminar, so we can use his classroom for our first meeting.
“Have you seen Bonnie?”
“I have.”
“I’m glad to hear you’re in touch again,” he says, gently.
“I’m glad, too,” I say.
January 30
“They changed their minds?” is Mom’s reaction to Dad’s news about the semester of class he’s going to be teaching after all.
She is pushing an iron down the sleeve of one of Dad’s dress shirts. The smell of ironing is a smell I love. The iron travels down the sleeve, like a ship on a shining river.
She says nothing for a moment. She glances at me—my face is doing I don’t know what. Suddenly, she gets it. I see her decide not to object.
“Take Ruth with you,” Mom says.
“It’s work, Annie,” Dad replies, avoiding my gaze.
Mom’s looking at him in a funny way. It’s pity, I think—possibly even disdain. It’s two seconds, maybe, then passes.
“Please, Howard.” Mom touches his upper arm. “Maybe she’ll learn something.”
“Can you assist?” Dad says, skeptically.
“I’m a professional assister,” I say. “I’m at your service.” I salute him.
Reluctantly, he tells me my duties: I am to make sure that the library has the textbooks the students need. I am to photocopy the materials that aren’t available in book format, and get them bound.
“Can you handle that?” Dad asks. I tell him I can.
February 2
We drive to campus, Dad in his ironed shirt and a shiny tie. He always used to point out the types of trees to me. He points to one now and looks at me expectantly.
“Holly oak,” I ID.
He points at another, a crape myrtle. There’s a southern magnolia, and a California pepper, which is my favorite—knobby with drooping leaves like a willow’s.
Barring two exceptions, there is no such thing as a native California tree, he says to me, in his teacher’s voice. It’s because of him I already know this. All the trees in California at some point were carefully selected, then planted, coaxed into growing here.
Except for redwoods. The other exception: ancient bristlecone pines, the oldest trees in the world, which somehow live in California—in Bishop. The oldest one is five thousand years old, and its location is a Forest Service secret. It’s in Bishop, and that’s all the public can know. We can’t be trusted.
Dad’s parking permit has expired, so we park in the visitors lot.
“Make yourself useful,” he says, peeling the permit sticker off and tossing it at me. “Renew this thing.”
“I’ll look into it,” I lie.
We meet in Dr. Nazaryan’s classroom where, sitting around a conference table, are eight students. The room is small with a powdery chalkboard in front and fluorescent lighting overhead. He greets each by name, then introduces me and says I’ll be helping this semester. They all call him Howard.
Dad says: This course is California History, Pre-European Contact to the Present.
We’ll cover the Spanish arrival in California, the hide-and-tallow trade, the Mexican-American War, the gold rush, the building of the railroads, the San Francisco earthquake, the importance of water: the rise of Hollywood and the failing of the St. Francis Dam.
We’ll touch on California’s environmental diversity and abundant—seemingly inexhaustible—natural resources. Immigration, agriculture, and so on. I hand out photocopies of the syllabus.
Actually, I never finished college. Joel was two years ahead and had been accepted to med school in Connecticut. I miss you too much, he said, on one of our phone calls, during the long-distance year—a thing I took, and ran with.
I’m flattered too easily, is my problem. One of them, anyway.
This is why a person would, seven months shy of finishing college, decide to drop out. I’d had pretty good grades.
In Connecticut, I got a job cutting fabric at the Discount Fabric Outlet, where mothers would come to buy the fabric to sew their kids’ Halloween costumes. I could still tell you what fabric to buy to outfit a reptile, or a Power Ranger. Six months of that, and then I enrolled in my associate’s program. Then Joel’s residency took us to San Francisco, where we both got jobs at the medical center.
And I liked it. It seemed like fate: a roundabout route to your happy career, and I did, I did like it. It seemed romantic.
After class, outside the seminar room, students linger. Someone says she read it was safe to eat cows with eye cancer. Someone else says that in Chicago, where it is twelve degrees below zero, a peacock was found frozen to a pine tree. A biplane is flying overhead: toward sunset, west.
“Theo, my daughter,” is how Dad introduces me.
Theo, who’s wearing the same crumpled shirt he wore to the doughnut shop, sticks out his hand and says, “Pleasure to meet you,” very coolly. We shake hands like perfect strangers.
Across the courtyard, Dr. Nazaryan is hurrying somewhere and carrying a briefcase that appears to weigh him down on one side. He waves hello.
They’re serious about their fountains on this campus, and as kids, so were Bonnie and I—tossing in dimes and quarters whenever we had them. We’d pull connected pine needles apart like wishbones. I don’t know how we came up with so many wishes; I can’t remember a single one. But what could we have wanted back then?