Tart. Jody Gehrman

shin. “Hello, kitty,” he says doubtfully. “What’s her name?”

      “Medea.”

      “Oh,” he says, stiffly. “Hello, Maria.”

      And then he starts to sneeze. Five times. With increasing volume and violence. Jesus, what is it with men and cats? Clay’s the only guy I ever met who didn’t practically disintegrate in the face of a little cat fur. No. Don’t even think about Clay Parker.

      “Ah-ah-ah-allergic,” my father manages to articulate between sneezes.

      “Okay. I’m sorry. Um, can I put her in the guest room for now? I’d put her out, but she’s so disoriented I’m afraid she might wander off—”

      “Garage,” he says, yanking a handkerchief from his back pocket and sneezing some more. So off she goes, into the garage, mewing in protest until I fetch her a bit of tuna fish and a saucer of milk. I sit there with her for a while, playing absently with her tail and watching her eat, enveloped in the cool, cathedral-like stillness of my father’s garage. As my eyes adjust to the shadows, I gaze around at the meticulously organized shelves and file cabinets, the worktable with tools hanging on hooks, arranged categorically: drills here, saws there. It occurs to me that these may even be alphabetized, which I find more than a little depressing. The air is scented not with the usual grease-and-grime smell of most people’s garages, but with my father’s favorite all-purpose cleaner for twenty years now: Pine-Sol. Parked in its usual place—dead center—is Dad’s 1956 Dodge Plymouth convertible. It gleams with spotless pride in the dark, never having known a dirty day in its life.

      I find Dad in the kitchen, cutting up celery. The house, like everything in my father’s life, is so clean you could eat off any surface, including the tops of high cabinets and the icy-white linoleum floor. He bought a tract home soon after I moved to Austin—one of those creepy, cookie-cutter models that scream “No Imagination.”

      “So,” he says, handing me a glass of milk with ice in it. I don’t usually drink milk, but I sip politely, anyway. “How long are you here for?”

      “You mean, here, at your house? Or…?”

      “When do you go back to Texas?”

      “Pop, listen. I got a job in Santa Cruz.”

      He smiles. He has very white teeth, perfectly straight; my mom says he was still wearing braces when they got married. “You’ve got a Santa Cruz in Texas? Isn’t that funny. I guess all those saints really made the—”

      “Santa Cruz. California, Dad. I got a job at the university.”

      He stops cutting celery and stares at me a moment through his horn-rimmed glasses. He’s got very light blue eyes and a face that is harder to read than any face I’ve ever encountered. He goes back to slicing. “Are you serious?”

      “Yes. Of course I’m serious.” I drink more of my milk and try not to think about the report I read once about cows in America being so mistreated and diseased that they get loads of pus in the product. Eugh. I put the glass down.

      “What about your boyfriend? Is he moving here, too?”

      “What boyfriend?” I’m unable to stop myself from this perverse response. Something about his calm, measured slicing of celery and his luminous white tile countertops are getting on my nerves. I remember now why I’ve only seen my father five or six times in the past ten years.

      “Jason, wasn’t it?”

      I shift my weight and look at the ceiling. “Jonathan. We broke up.”

      “Oh. I see.” He nods at the celery in a cryptic fashion.

      “Anyway,” I say, dumping the rest of my milk in the sink as inconspicuously as I can, “I’m moving to Santa Cruz. I just need to get a car and a place to live.” I stand there, staring at the ice cubes in the sink. I run the water so he won’t see the milk I dumped out, and that makes me remember the bathing fantasy I’ve been fueled by all day. I want to cry with relief when I think of my father’s hotel-sterile bathroom. “Can I take a shower?”

      “Oh, sure, honey. Sure.” He’s more enthusiastic about this possibility than anything I’ve told him so far. “Extra towels in the hall closet.” Oh, God. My father’s white, fluffy, dryer-scented towels. I almost throw my arms around him in ecstasy. Then I remember that I don’t have anything to change into, and the thought of putting this wretched outfit on yet again turns my stomach.

      “You think I could borrow a T-shirt, maybe some shorts?”

      He lets out a snort of awkward laughter. “Honey, where’s your suitcase?”

      “It’s a really long story. Just—anything. Sweats, old jeans, whatever you’ve got.”

      “Well, okay. I’ll see what I can find. They’ll be in the guest room.”

      “Thanks, Pop.” I walk over to him and, before I can get nervous or weird about it, kiss him on the cheek. “I really appreciate being able to come here.”

      “Oh,” he says, smiling nervously, never taking his eyes from the celery. “Well.” And then, when I’m walking down the hall to the bathroom, he calls to my back, “You know you’re welcome, sweetie, anytime.” I think he means it, but something about the effort in his voice makes me want to cry.

      CHAPTER 9

      To do:

      1) Buy fantastic, sexy, dependable, movie-star-quality car for under three hundred dollars.

      2) Do not think about Clay Parker. If absolutely must think of yurt experience, think of WIFE and add SELF at wrong end of .38 special.

      3) Find adorable, sexy, movie-star-quality pad for under five hundred dollars.

      4) When did I become a home-wrecker? Argh.

      5) Join gym. Go to gym. Thighs look like molded Jell-O.

      6) Make friends.

      7) DO NOT THINK ABOUT HIM.

      8) Transform self from hideous, kinky-haired, irresponsible car-thief home-wrecker into elegant, scarf-wearing professor. (Idea: highlights?)

      For several days I use my father’s house as the base of operations while I continuously flip-flop between wild bursts of effort to get my life together and bouts of total despondency, during which I lie flat on my back in the guest room, stuffing my face with Pringles and watching cheesy Hugh Grant videos. This manic-depressive stretch hardly fulfills my hopes of returning triumphantly to California and emerging like a phoenix from my troubled past.

      I grew up here, in Calistoga, and coming home is like facing a firing squad of ghosts. I know loads of people are carrying around childhoods more miserable than mine—hell, most of my friends’ horror stories make my family look like the Cleavers—but all the same, I get restless here, enmeshed in the world that formed me.

      Luckily, my father doesn’t live in the house I spent my first decade in anymore. Most of my worst associations are stuck there, in the idyllic little Victorian on Swan Street where we lived before my parents divorced. That house is where my parents fought their worst battles, almost always silent ones that went on for weeks at a time. They were both very good at refusing to speak to each other. I often felt like a modern-day sitcom character who finds herself in the midst of a silent film. The easiest way to explain their marriage is by cutting to the chase: they didn’t love each other. Not in the days I can remember, anyway. And though my mother was in every cosmetic way the ideal housewife, she maintained an air of aloofness, an icy edge that, paired with my father’s lack of communication skills, made my growing up years chilly and lonely.

      Calistoga isn’t a bad place to grow up, though it’s pretty small and confining when you’re a hormone-crazed teen. It’s wedged between two smallish mountain ranges, one of several little tourist towns in Napa Valley that’s beautiful and pristine and increasingly saddled with this “wine country”