California

When Dad left for California the clouds hung low in the sky like a celestial mist foretelling rain, and the sun streamed faintly through the cracks in the rusted door of the tool shed. He and I were housing field mice in there which we had found the week before. There were four of them, three adults and a little baby mouse, all huddled in the corner of the tool shed, quivering and starving. I begged him to let me keep them and take care of them, and I was amazed how easily he agreed.
"This is a big responsibility," he said, his rough hands planted firmly at his side, his knees locked under his weight"You have to promise me you'll feed them everyday, then when they get old enough and it gets warmer outside, you have to promise me we'll let them go into the wild, like mice are supposed to. Okay?" I agreed, and soon found myself spending most of my time with Dad an the mice in the tool shed. We deduced that each old have a name according to its defining characteristic. There was Squeakers, Claws, Nibbler and Tim, who was the smallest and laziest and by far my favorite.
The day Dad left it was my turn to feed the mice when the car pulled out of the driveway and took him away. I was supposed to go with him, not to California, to the airport, but judging by the sullen drag of his lips as he licked the envelope full of cash that my mother had given him, I decided to stay home and pay with the mice.
"One airport looks exactly like the next." That's what my father always said when one of my sisters or I wanted to see him off on one of his midweek business trips to Kentucky or New Jersey. We never liked it much when he left, especially on the weekends. The weekends was our time with Dad; he'd take us to a baseball game or to the zoo while Mom went to the grocery store or to one of her "ladies luncheons" that lasted from 11 a.m. to well past 10 p.m. But I wonder if he always shared our sentiments when he left. He always looked pleasant enough when he left. Not over joyed, but almost relieved.
"He just doesn't want you kids to run into his 'other family'..." she'd say. "I don't think you'd get along with his 'other kids,' they're too rich for your blood... That's where the money goes, you know." She'd joke, her back turned to us, and her unkempt hair hovering over the stoves spitting flames, while her hands were busy turning over the morning bacon and fried eggs. We all knew she was joking about Dad having another family, but sometimes it was hard to be sure.
Sometimes when he'd leave for a few days, my mother would sit in her bathrobe all weekend on the corner cushion of the living room sofa, sipping a seemingly bottomless glass of her cranberry martini. My sister, Olivia, once found her passed out there, on the corner cushion, her head slumped foreword over her shoulder with a faded red rim around her mouth and the stench of cranberries and alcohol slowly infiltrating the sweet smells of the freshly pruned lilacs from the garden outside the living room window. When Olivia tried to wake her up, she just spat out globs of reddish saliva from the corner of her mouth and turned her head violently from one side to the other until she finally nestled into the corner of the sofa where the two parts of the couch met. It wasn't until Olivia gave knocked over my mothers glass, that she woke up. I guess the sound of Mom's glass hitting the hardwood floor woke her up pretty good. After she finally came to, Mom spent the rest of the day in her bathroom, sitting on the tile floor, while Olivia and I cleaned up the shards of broken, cranberry stained glass that scurried along the pale grain of the wooden table and floor.
Dad would usually return before Mom had one of those so-called "episodes" but that time he didn't. He was gone for two weeks in San Francisco before he even called home to tell us whether or not he was okay.
"I've been busy around here, Scout. Really, really busy. Listen, I have to get going or they'll have my ass." His voice sounded quiet and distant like he had in the hospital last year, when he called to tell us that our sister Mattie was born. Only now is voice was tinged with concealment, like he was telling a secret meant only for me.
"Dad, Mom's right here, hang on a second and i'll go tell you're on the phone. She probably wants to talk to you..."
But he interrupted me with a series of 'shhh's,' telling me, "No, no, don't worry about it. Just say "Hi" for me to everyone and tell your mother to stop calling the hotel. Let her know I checked out last Tuesday and that i'm staying at the HoJo Inn in San Diego. She can call there if she needs to, but only if its an emergency. Got it, Scout? An emergency. I'll call back when I can. Be good and remember to feed the 'you know what's'..." When he hung up the phone I swallowed hard, feeling a bulging lump in my throat and a gaping emptiness in my stomach. I never used to miss him before when he'd leave home.
My mom wandered into the kitchen just then and her calloused bare feet rubbed against the faded green tile of the kitchen.
"Who was that, hun?" I felt like the conversation between my father and I was some kind of secret. Something no one should know about except for me and him. I told her it was no one, a wrong number, and she left the kitchen clutching her cranberry martini, after scrutinizing me through her soft, hazel eyes.
Going to bed was hard that night. Squeakers bit my finger while I was trying to feed him, and it wouldn't stop bleeding for a few hours. I remember staring at the ceiling and counting the cracks. There was one that ran from the middle of my ceiling to the corner of my wall. It looked almost like a fault line that runs under California, or at least it looked like what I thought the fault line might look like. Then it occurred to me that I'd never noticed it before, and I lay in my bed, awake, wondering how I could've ever missed it when the phone rang. I thought it unusual to be getting a phone call so late at night, and on a Tuesday, and stayed in bed, partly fascinated at the novelty of its late night ring, until my mother picked it up in her room and answered it.
I could hear her voice from my room, hushed and slurred from her day long happy hour. The "hello" of her greeting fell flat on its face at the threshold of its initiation and sounded almost more like a question than a salutation. She coughed from one minute to the next, punctuating each of her thoughts with the occasional "all right..." or "I see..." I could hear her in her bedroom, scurrying nervously from one side of the room to the next, the receiver in one hand, her martini in the other. When the conversation ended I heard her say 'thank you' and gently let the receiver slide into place. I thought I heard a muffled cry, but I dismissed the thought and buried my body under the weight of my old blanket and bathed my eyes in the cold moonlight and thought about Tim and the other mice, wondering if he was cold outside in the tool shed by themselves.
Dad died that night. Apparently he was involved in some kind of car accident while crossing the Mexican border. He and his passenger were both killed, the passenger instantaneously, and he after a few awkward screams and excruciating jabs from the protruding steel to his abdomen. The police said that the car had been totaled when the other driver lost control of the wheel and skidded into oncoming traffic, hitting my father head on.
He never said anything about going to Mexico, but we were later told the identity of the his passenger was a woman in her mid-twentis from Toledo. Her name escapes me, but was something along the lines of Minnie Grownuss or Greyhauss or something ugly like that. Apparently, Minnie was a secretary at Dad's sister firm, and the two of them were going to Mexico for either a long vacation or a honeymoon. The cops found their bags full of underwear, socks, t-shirts and jeans packed in the trunk of the car, all singed and burnt beyond all salvageable reason, just like the two of them. The authorities had to fly Mom down to identify the body, just to make sure the bag of charred remains and teeth were his. While she was down there, they also gave her some of his personal items that weren't completely ruined, his license, some pictures from his wallet and his toothbrush.
Once Mom got home she headed straight for the refrigerator and drank herself into a cranberry stupor. It was a few days before she actually told us that Dad died, but it took her a few days to become even drunk enough to speak. None of us really cried though. I mean maybe my sisters did, in their rooms late at night, and maybe they couldn't sleep because the thought of never seeing him again scared the hell out of them, but I didn't cry. I thought he was a bastard for doing what he did, but I still couldn't sleep that night.
I decided to spend the night in the tool shed, curled up next to the lawn mower and kiddie picnic table. I could hear the wind outside, blowing past the oak tree above the shed and the sounds of mice skittering and squeaking became a rich rhythm that lulled me to sleep. When I woke up the next morning, there was sun pouring into the shed from the open door. My mother stood in the doorway, her face and features obscured by the light, the barrel of her cranberry shotgun gleaming. I looked up at her, and for a moment I couldn't breathe. She extended her arms out to me and without words I grabbed them and came to my feet. She held me for the next few minutes, crying quietly on my shoulder. Her small, mousy body melted with each sob and she seemed to fall into me as though I were a safety net to catch her. She held onto me like a child and didn't let go for some time. When she was finally finished she only smiled and walked away.
I stood for a moment, frozen while the sunlight washed over my body. I drew in a deep breath and looked at the sun, wondering about the cracks on its surface. Then I turned back towards the shed where the mice lay huddled into a clump. Their small bodies resting one on top of the other, their tiny feet intertwining. I went to the corner shelf to the pile of stale bread dad had left there and sprinkled a few crumbs on the mice. They didn't move, so I nudged them with my finger, but they remained still, their bodies radiating cold.