Kalani stood in the doorway, clutching her plate in two hands, still ogling me with mingled covetousness and fear, like she was Indiana Jones and I was a legendary, potentially cursed artifact. Joey patted the cushion next to him. “Kalani, come sit here by granddad. Hadley doesn’t bite.” To me, he said, “Not a lot of movie stars drop by.”
I gave Kalani a little finger wave, and she bolted back into the house, a rain of baby carrots falling behind her. Joey nearly collapsed with mirth. “Oh man,” he said eventually. “You know, that’s probably the right response to meeting your heroes. Just run away.”
“She lives with you?”
“For now.” His expression turned somber. “Her parents have been having some issues.”
“Sorry.”
“That’s life. But, so, you’re in a movie about Marian Graves?”
* * *
—
“Nah, Caleb never got married,” Joey said. “He wasn’t really the type. He had some nice girlfriends, though. He was dating this hippie girl Cheryl for a while who was friends with my mom, and so when I was a sophomore in high school and my mom ran off with a guy to Arizona and I started getting in trouble—this was in like ’70, ’71—Caleb and Cheryl took me in and straightened me out. They broke up after a couple years, and Cheryl left but I stayed. I’d never really had a dad, so Caleb and I had our rocky patches, but we were always like this little team, you know? I didn’t leave until I got married. Then when Caleb got sick, my wife and I and our kids moved back in with him to help out. Not like I could ever repay him.” He pointed at the ocean. “I scattered his ashes just right there.”
“You must miss him,” I said.
“Yeah, sometimes, even though it’s been twenty-one years. You don’t really get it before it happens—how you always miss some people, you know?”
I thought of Mitch. “I do know.”
He looked at me curiously. “So Adelaide Scott told you about her, um, connection to Jamie Graves.”
I nodded. “She said she came here once.”
“Yeah, a long time ago. She was on a big family-discovery kick. She was trying to figure some stuff out for sure.”
“Like what?”
“What you’d expect, I guess. Who am I? What should I do with my life? I was pretty young and not great at asking people, like, probing questions, so I didn’t really interrogate her. Plus I had a huge crush because she was really hot and scary. She seemed like such a grown-up, but she would only have been in her twenties, I think. She’s made a big success of herself, right? She’s some big artist? It was Caleb she kept in touch with more, not me. What did we really have in common, you know?”
I couldn’t think what to ask. I sipped from my beer to cover my awkwardness. Reading those letters at Adelaide’s had felt good—exciting and revelatory, almost like desire. I guess it was desire. I wanted to know more. But now the truth about Marian seemed too big, too amorphous for me to gather. She had spread out like debris from a wreck, drifting bits and pieces that didn’t connect.
Joey didn’t seem to notice how lost for words I was. He said, “Caleb was the best, though. Like he could be strict, and he wasn’t the kind of guy to pretend he was in a good mood when he wasn’t, but he was, you know, honorable. You could trust him. He partied a little too much sometimes, maybe, but I think he was like, I survived the war, so fuck it. He worked on a ranch until he got too old, and then he worked in the little library down the road. He liked to read. He didn’t talk much about the war, but he said it had gotten him into books. When he got sick, he’d sit out here all day, reading. Then he got too sick to read, so he’d just hold a book in his lap and look at the ocean. He wasn’t a spring chicken even back when he took me in. He must have been about the same age then that I am now.” He looked into the house, in the direction Kalani had gone. “Life’s full of surprises, though.”
“Did he talk much about Marian Graves?”
“You know, honestly, he wasn’t, like, chatty. He didn’t really share. But she came up sometimes, yeah. He said she was really brave and a really good pilot. I watched a TV show about her once, and I tried to read her book, but I couldn’t get into it. I’m not really a reader. Caleb was always trying to get me to read. So Marian left her personal stuff to Adelaide Scott, but she left her money—there wasn’t much—to Caleb, and then he got royalties from her book after they found it at the South Pole or whatever. That money added up. I didn’t even know how much until after he died. There was all this money in his will, and I was like, where did this come from? The lawyers told me it was the book, which I guess really had a moment back in the day. It came in handy because my son wanted to go to college on the mainland, and now we have Kalani.”