Prologue - April
Happy Birthday to me. I’m twenty-three. Who would have thought I would have ever made it this far?
The first two months after we got to the River House, after that mad drive leaving California, were bad. The rest of January was spent just making the place habitable. Disgusting doesn’t even approach the description of what it was. My OCD had every hair on my body doing the Gangnam Style dance. Mr. Jensen had just locked things down, hadn’t really done any clean up. It took a week just to clean out the trash and other crap (literally in terms of one of the bathrooms) just so I could get an idea of any repairs that would need to be made. But once the house was cleaned out it made the mildew, delayed maintenance, poor housekeeping, and roach infestation that much more obvious.
So long as I was moving, and exhausted at the end of the night, the hamster didn’t get me. Not even finding out how famous Lev really was, and that his “flush” and my “flush” were different by a few zeros … okay, yes that bothered me. A lot. But we worked through it. Barely, but we both survived. It wasn’t all his fault. I wasn’t all my fault. We were just new and still fragile in places neither one of us had considered. But we both came out stronger as a team. Individually we needed some work, but we always had. However, when I found the termite damage in the deck and that it was heading for the house, yeah I came close to losing it. Then I found all the chemicals buried in Grandfather Barry’s shop closet and got to work.
Then came the news that Groucho had had a stroke, more debilitating than the original head wound. On top of that was the news that Stella had been diagnosed with Stage 3 breast cancer. With Lev’s agreement I offered whatever help they needed. I got shocked by being shut out. Stella said they had family that had stepped up. That was a heck of an ouch to absorb. It definitely put me in my place. Kirkland must have overheard the phone call because he called the next day and begged me not to be mad or hurt.
“Gus … we’re all just messed up and I don’t think that Stella is coping. The chemo they put her on is just not doing her too well and … and Dad … and … and … it’s just really hard.”
He was trying so hard. Who was I to not give them grace when I’d already walked the Grief Road and not always behaved very well.
“Don’t you dare worry about any of that Kirkland. I’m … really sorry about your dad. He helped me out when no one else stepped up.”
“Thanks. I … I’m just not ready for any of this.”
“No one ever is. No matter what you think while you are preparing it is still a boot kick to the back of the head when it happens. Is there anything I can do that isn’t intrusive?”
We talked for a while longer and truthfully there really wasn’t. Stella’s kids had all stepped up. He’d let me know if it changed.
And then two weeks later Groucho had another stroke, and everyone said it was a mercy that he left on his own terms. His awareness of his situation was tenuous, but it was there, and he was really depressed at the end and very ready to “kick off” as he wrote in an addendum to his will. He said Kirkland got everything only so long as he took care of Stella for the rest of her life. Only it looked like Stella was following Groucho sooner than anyone had been prepared for.
I went to Groucho’s funeral. The family had asked that no children come because it was likely to get rowdy with all of Groucho’s biker buddies. Benny stayed with Lev after we explained what had happened but that I promised to take a picture of him and Groucho and Penny together and “give it to him.” That was difficult to explain to Stella, or I thought it was going to be. She looked really bad. I hadn’t known it, but she had her own injuries from the incident that no one is allowed to speak about. She’d had a quick double mastectomy and was still recovering from that as well. Then the chemo. All the coloring had been washed out of her hair and she looked like someone’s frail granny rather than the vibrant, busty, lusty, and loud woman she’d been the last time I’d seen her riding off on the motorcycle with Groucho.
Of all the things to happen at a funeral, some old girlfriend of Groucho’s tried to get in Stella’s face and dared to comment on Stella’s diminished bust line. I nearly lost it. I simply picked the old ‘ho up and carried her out to her new old man’s bike.
“Your old lady is disrespecting what everyone here is trying to do for Groucho’s memory.” I didn’t have to say anything else. CPO Barrymore still crawls out and over my skin on occasion and that was one of them. Dude got the message and he made sure the ‘ho got it. I left it to someone else to uninvite them if that is what was going to happen. I went back to Stella to check on her.
“Honey, you can still bust a move when you need to.”
“Yes ma’am. You need me to do anything else?”
“Yeah. Show me what you brung.” I carefully handed her the letter and explained that it was from Benny specifically for his Uncle Groucho.
She took it and after touching Groucho’s likeness, she slowly walked over to a box and slid the picture inside it. Groucho hadn’t wanted a burial plot as cemeteries had always creeped him out. Instead, he wanted to be cremated and then taken on a “last ride” where his ashes were allowed to fly out over one of his favorite scenic highway routes. What was in the box would be cremated with Groucho’s physical remains.
That was the last time I ever saw Stella. She never recovered and the cancer won. I did find out from Rain that both she and Groucho had found peace after leaving Key West and she is sure that they are in Heaven and waiting on the rest of us. That was a real life-turning time, but it wasn’t to be the last one I had to face.
Not long after Stella, the Judge passed away. I knew he’d been getting bad. I also found out that the Judge had been covering up that Meemo had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Between all the other chaos, I’d tried to do what I could for them the way my grandparents would have expected and wanted me to. Their nephews knew – Donner was the one that explained it to me – but it was still a shock how quickly she slipped after he passed away. It was like she was there one day, and was just gone the next. Am I supposed to say it was a blessing she didn’t really understand what was happening, or remember it? Donner and Clifton moved her closer to them in Tallahassee in some swank residential facility where she was attended to and cared for 24/7. Clifton had patient privileges there and knew the place had earned its sterling reputation. They let her keep Bartholomew and she mistook him for the Judge pretty regularly … or did for a while. She started having trouble swallowing and then developed pneumonia and … she just slipped away.
I found out when Donner himself came to tell me. And then he just broke down. Meemo had all but raised him and Clifton. For him it was like losing his parents all over again. For me? It was like closing a circle. Grandfather Barry, Grandma Barry, the Judge, and Meemo. I gotta trust my worldview is true. All four of them are together and cutting up with Grandfather taking them all on the adventures they all had wanted to go on together if age and time and fate hadn’t caught up with them in this life.
Now, in addition to trying to clean up the River House I was helping Donner and Clifton and their family clean up the Phelps House. Geez there was a lot more junk left in both places than first glance would have let you think. Decades of old case files and stuff had to be gone through. Donner kept breaking down every time he tried to get through it so at Clifton’s request, I went through it and used my best judgement on what to keep and what to cremate. I pulled a few files concerning properties (and families) along the river and locked them up for future reference. Found both men’s DD214’s and some other associated papers like that and got them preserved and locked up as well. I had to go through a lot of files boxes of all the papers that I’d found out in Grandfather’s “man cave”. Had to do it at the Phelps’ place as well. I do not want to tell you how gross it was to pick through that stuff. Roaches and silver fish and how it was obvious that Meemo and the Judge hadn’t been up to keeping up with their stuff but had been too proud – or perhaps too blind – to see they were getting buried in ballast and bilge.
A lot of stuff went into a fire pit we dug with a practically brand-new Kubota tractor that had a front end loader and a couple of other implements in the barn. When Lev had said he knew how to drive a tractor and other farm-ish stuff he wasn’t just whistling Dixie, though he could do that too along with a few other tunes when he was trying to cheer me up or make Benny laugh.
It took me a while to figure out where the tractor itself had come from. Apparently my uncle had purchased it not long after my grandparents had passed but hadn’t ever really gotten around to using it because of some “back problems” he had. It hadn’t been maintained which left Lev fixing that part with the help of the neighbor on the other side of us … Donner and Clifton Phelps were only at what was now their property part time and would have been useless anyway, neither brother being particularly mechanically inclined. The neighbor on the other side of us was named Drew … as in the people that had founded Ellaville. Ellaville is a local ghost town these days but the guy who founded it was Florida’s first governor. And our neighbor, Mr. George Drew, was named after his ancestor.
He is about the age Dad would have been and even says he knew Dad when they were growing up. Remembers my mom as well and Lawrence too who his son is the same age as. But he moved away for a while and had only recently come back to the area when he couldn’t pass up the chance of buying the property he now has when it went on the auction block. Long story short, they were very happy to find out I wasn’t like my uncle and his kids. George – he wouldn’t let me call him Mr. Drew no matter how many times I tried – didn’t complain but he did let me know more of what had been going on between the time of my grandparents’ death and last year.
It was George and Sonja (Mrs. Drew) that started me wondering about Lev in the beginning. They knew his work. They even had one of his books. Books?! One of them?! Lev blew it off and said it really wasn’t his book, but one of the ones that he’d put together of his grandfather’s uncle’s really early photo projects from the early Panama Canal era.
Okay, so I kinda ignored the obvious because Lev keeps making it out to be no big deal … it was someone else’s work, not his. And there were other things for the hamster to spend its energy on. If it wasn’t trying to make the River House livable and helping the Phelps brothers deal with the other house, it was keeping food on the table. It wasn’t a money issue, it was an availability issue. If Lev hadn’t insisted on doing some of the stocking we did as we made our way cross country things would have been a lot worse off. We ate out of the river most days. I managed to resurrect some of Grandma Barry’s and Meemo’s hedges and fruiting trees but not much, just enough to supplement our supplies.
And if it wasn’t our immediate geographic reality, it was that the world looked like it wanted to blow up in record time. I mean it looked like every head of state in the world was living in Crazyland. And then there were all the ist’s out there … socialist, communist, anarchist, caliphate-ist, etc., ad nauseum … trying to act out their slice of insanity as well. Lev and I stayed up late in the night trying to figure out what we would do when – not if – the bubble popped. Only it didn’t, which was the one thing we hadn’t expected to happen, or not happen depending on how you looked at it.
It was like the Creator had injected everyone with their fingers near a button of some type with a big ol’ dose of Clonazepam or Xanax or something. And the world got a big ol’ shot of antibiotics in the backside and the latest clade of frankenvirus just went away. I’m not kidding. Look at the CDC. It’s like the scientists are still weeping because there wasn’t another pandemic, not even one they could gin up. I swear we’re living in the bizarro universe.
April comes in like a lamb. Should have been grateful. Should have also been watching for the basket of shoes that was about to drop. After trying really hard to get Benny acclimated to public school it was just a no-go. And home schooling was proving to be not only good for him but good for us as a family. I got a job with the River HOA patrolling “my” section. It was only part time, but it was a job, doing something I loved (I patrolled via kayak). My “paycheck” was a Florida fishing license, a Florida hunting license, and no HOA fees, plus whatever was leftover from the weekly produce stand everyone along River Road contributed to. I set my own hours and never went far from home, and I made connections. And I found the name Barrymore still carried weight.
I only got into a few scrapes and one of them was with my own kin. One of Sharon’s kids had come up thinking he and some of his craphead friends could just “camp out.” They hadn’t known I was back. They didn’t know me very well any way you looked at it. And Sharon really hadn’t taken my words of being my enemy seriously.
Frankly I wouldn’t have known who he was if he hadn’t looked just like pictures I’d seen of his uncle, my dead, reprobate cousin. One of the too many Barrymore males that didn’t outlive their genetic weaknesses. Apparently he also had the same proclivities, as when I was done kicking his and his friends’ butts and calling Fish and Wildlife down on them, a stash of recreational chemicals were found in their illegally tagged car they were driving … which just so happened to be a car their newest stepdad had claimed was stolen though they later claimed he’d paid them to get it out of town and disappeared for a while. That was a 9-day wonder that I could have done without but according to George it just proved I was a Barrymore.
“I’m a Hargis now. I’m trying to act like one.”
Lev who was still not happy that one of the creeps had tried to sucker punch him in the kidney growled, “You’re a Barrymore and don’t you forget it.”
“What … what’s that supposed to mean? You don’t want me to be a Hargis?”
“I want you to be you. Being a Hargis isn’t anything special. I’m thinking of joining you. I’m only a Hargis by accident. Ask my sister.”
There was a reason why his mouth was running more like mine than his. He’d just gotten a letter from his sister, and it had left him feeling a little sensitive. She’d thanked him something to the effect that at least he sold the farm to someone in the family. She’s been worried that he’d just sell it to support his travel plans since he was only a Hargis by the skin of his teeth. That their mother had almost changed all their surnames to her maiden name but hadn’t in fear that his paternal grandfather would stop allowing him to come visit.
Er … yeah. Bull in a china shop where Lev’s feelings are concerned. And people call me “hyper honest” in my opinions and conversation. Needless to say I avoided her when I could to keep Tennessee and Florida from having their own versions of Hiroshima.
It was also about that time that Lev started to get stressed out about not being able to sell any of his latest private work. My “helping” actually only made things worse. And that’s when we came close to an argument on finances and I found out his definition of “flush” was basically an understatement that had a lot to do with his occasional problems with self-esteem. He claimed it was only there due to inheritance.
“And exactly what do you make of what Benny and I have and where it came from?” I asked trying to keep the hamster from turning into Snark-Sharko.
“Uh … fine. I might not have stated things … er … look, I don’t want to fight about it.”
“I don’t either.”
“Good.”
“Good.”
“Are we fighting?” he asked, obviously in need of some reassurance.
“Not because I want to. Benny and I are not going to be an anchor around …”
“Not that shit again,” he snapped, something he rarely did. “Babe, I’m not leaving.”
I sighed and tried real hard not to let the hamster free. I was also struggling not to throw something at him or play at the immaturity I knew was still lurking inside me and stomp off like a two-year-old in a snit. “Lev, I’m trying really hard here. You know finances is a serious thing for me, and I thought you understood why. I’ve shared everything I’ve had to share as far as information goes. This … your definition of “flush” … caught me sideways. ‘K? I don’t resent you, want you for your money, or any of the other stupid crap that has come up …”
“It isn’t stupid.”
“I didn’t say you are stupid … I’m saying …” I was giving serious consideration to going with a pixie cut again. My brain was starting to short circuit and go “Squirrel!” right when I needed to stay focused. “I don’t know what I’m saying! I lost my train of thought! I think I’m going to just go cut my hair!”
Lev gave me a strange look and then tried to not laugh but he did slowly grin before hugging me and saying, “Thank you.”
“For what?” I asked in irritation.
“For being you.” He kissed me and said, “Okay, we’ve got some hang ups and right now they are getting tangled up. Not good for either one of us. Let’s table this discussion for a bit and go get Benny and go swimming.”
# # # # #
We did get back to talking about finances and we smoothed things out. It turns out it really isn’t about money for either one of us but about the responsibility and all the other stuff that goes along with finances. And while I thought everything was all ironed out, it turns out it was far from it. By June of this year, time enough that we should have had more straightened out than we did, despite everything seeming bright and sunny in the world, Lev and I were in quicksand and going under.
.