Golden State by Stephanie Kegan

Author:Stephanie Kegan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

chapter twenty-six

MY MOTHER’S VOICE on the phone had a rare tentativeness. She hated asking anyone for anything. “I have to sell the cabin in Gold Run,” she said.

I took a painful breath, but I understood. I didn’t like thinking about how much Bobby’s defense was costing her, where she was getting the money, that Eric and I hadn’t contributed a dime.

“The cabin belongs to you children,” she said. “It would’ve been a place Bobby could go, after.” She stopped herself.

“That’s fine,” I said. The land would be worth something. With the money she got for it, I’d be contributing in some small way to Bobby’s defense.

“I need you to clean it out,” she said. “Soon. Not the furniture. Just the personal stuff. Toss it in the trash.”

My great-grandfather had bought the land along the Bear River after the gold was gone. He’d built the cabin with my grandfather. My dad had spent his summers there as a boy. As kids, we had, too. Now I came there with my own family.

I packed clean sheets, a cooler and Julia’s CD player, two sets of rubber gloves, rags, and a box of forty-gallon trash bags. This was going to be dirty work. Still, I felt recklessly on vacation as I drove into the Sierras, away from Eric’s quiet withdrawal, a faultless sky overhead, the scent of evergreens in dry mountain air.

I drove across the railroad tracks where Bobby and I had once laid pennies. We used to follow the railway to the next town. We were in scenic country but the terrain along the tracks was ugly, crumbling rocks scattered across barren red earth. The scarred landscape sickened Bobby. It was an atrocity, he told me. Hydraulic mining during the Gold Rush had ruined one of the loveliest places on earth.

I parked in front of our cabin, acorns and pine needles cracking under my tires. The place looked the same, a timber rectangle with a screened-in front porch, among the pines above the Bear River. It was a beautiful spot with enough land around it to make a difference in Bobby’s defense.

I switched on the power and the water, opened the windows in the big central room to let out the stale air, and went to work in the kitchen. The spices in the cupboard could have been in a museum. No one, including me, had ever thrown anything out. I examined the old pots and pans that I still used. This wasn’t what my mother meant by personal stuff.

In the bedroom off the kitchen, the small double bed was made. My daughters slept here now, just as Sara and I had years ago. Once, I wet the bed. “At least we’ll be warm for a while,” Sara said.

A plaid shirt of my father’s hung in the closet. I put the sleeve to my nose, longing for the familiar scent of Parliament cigarettes and newspaper ink, but all I could detect was old wool. Within a week of my father’s death, my mother had cleared his closet and sent his clothes to Goodwill.

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