Page 69 of Just Like Starting Over
“You could call him and find out.”
“I called him Tuesday, after I went to see the trailers. He never called me back.”
“Ha!” Sierra is triumphant. “Thereissomething wrong!”
“The man works every day,” I say. “He’s busy. With tomatoes.”
“What did you say to him, Mom?”
I blush as Merrie whistles louder and I turn away from both of them. The thing is that Sierra’s got me wondering. Oddly enough, while I can believe that Mike will ignore me – he has justification for that – I don’t think he would deliberately disappoint Sierra. If he said he was going to talk to her this weekend, he would have come into the café already.
I check but he doesn’t have a dinner reservation. Sierra is watching me, proof that she already checked.
I call him when she can’t see what I’m doing, but it goes straight to his voice mail.
I assume he’s on another call, but leave another message.
He doesn’t call back.
I call again after the dinner rush dies down. Same thing. Maybe he’s away. Maybe he has a date. Maybe he’s working some crazy overtime. Maybe he took a vacation. I try to stifle my rising concern.
I call again before I go to bed and again the next morning. Voice mail both times.
Sierra catches me when I call Mike at lunch time Sunday. “Voice mail, again,” I tell her. “This has to be the fourth time since last night.” It’s more like the tenth. “Maybe he doesn’t want to be disturbed.”
Maybe he reallyreallydoesn’t want to talk to me.
“Maybe he’s been robbed, stabbed, and left to die, but no one is coming to help him,” she replies.
“You watch too many movies.”
“You don’t watch enough of them.”
“Okay. I’ll stop at his place after I take you to the bus in Havelock.”
“We could go on the way.”
“He might be…entertaining.”
She is visibly shocked. “Mike can’t have a girlfriend.”
“Why not?”
“Because he can’t, that’s why. Promise me that you’ll go and that you’ll tell me he’s okay.”
She’s really agitated, although I can’t completely explain it. Okay, he is her father and she knows it, but he doesn’t believe it, and they haven’t exactly spent a lot of time together. She’s more upset than I would have expected. “All right. I’ll do it.”
“Promise!”
“I promise!”
And so,I find myself at Mike’s family home in the early evening Sunday. I’ve already had two texts from Sierra reminding me of my promise.
I haven’t been to the Cavendish place since high school, but it’s exactly where it used to be. It’s a two-storey house built in the seventies, a classic family home like you’d find in a million other places. It’s changed, though, and doesn’t look much like a family home anymore. The fence around the backyard is gone and the pool has been filled in. The gardens around the house are untended. It looks solid but abandoned.
There’s also an enormous greenhouse right behind it, a sheer wall of glass that extends far to both the left and right and stretches up to the sky. There’s a big parking lot beside the house, although it’s empty now, and a warehouse and office building to the right.
All of that used to be tilled fields.
