Maisie toyed with one of the giant pine cones between her feet. “Not really.”
“No?” Patrick opened one eye and looked skeptically in her direction.
“As air rises, the pressure decreases. Lower air pressure means lower temperatures.”
Patrick looked at Grant.
“You know this, too?”
“Yeah,” he said, but it was clear that he didn’t.
“How’d you kids get so smart?”
“School,” Maisie said. She gave the pine cone a swift kick and it went sailing over the ledge. “I heard you two fighting.”
“Who?” Patrick feigned innocence.
“You and Aunt Clara.”
Patrick looked at his fingernails. They were getting long. He remembered accusing Sara once of neglecting her appearance after she had kids, but now he understood—there simply wasn’t time. “Families fight sometimes. There’s a lot of history.”
“Mom and Dad used to fight,” Grant offered.
“Oh, yeah?” Patrick’s curiosity was piqued, but it wasn’t the right time to pry. “Your mother was a fighter.”
“Why?”
“Oh, I don’t mean it in a bad way. She was spirited. You know. Passionate. That’s a good thing. The reason you had her as long as you did. When she was first diagnosed they gave her a year, and she held on for three.”
“I didn’t like it,” Grant said. “When they would fight.”
The sky seemed bluer up here, the air cleaner, sharper, as if there was more oxygen in it, not less.
“People who love each other fight. The opposite of love isn’t anger. It’s indifference. When people stop fighting, that’s when you should be worried.”
Patrick wasn’t sure how much he believed that, at least as it applied to Clara. He felt for her, but he wasn’t sure how much of a relationship they had to save—and if it was even worth saving. It was truer, he supposed, with Sara. They’d had epic fights. One of their biggest was at the Grand Canyon.
* * *
Patrick’s decision to move from New York to Los Angeles came quickly; Joe had accepted a job at UCLA and Patrick didn’t see the point of waiting a respectable amount of time to follow, especially with pilot season on the horizon. To make this relationship work, he would need a job, too, so he might as well go all in on getting a job on TV. Despite his deep love for Joe, his feelings for Los Angeles were less clear, and moving coasts just to wait tables seemed at best like a lateral move. Joe had gone ahead to scout for apartments while Sara had agreed to accompany Patrick on the cross-country drive.
The trip started well enough. They stopped at Graceland and braved inconceivable crowds; Sara asked a woman in line for a tour if it was always like this. “It’s Elvis’s birthday today,” she had said with a Midwestern twang, kind on the surface but with just enough judgment underneath to express she thought they might be mentally impaired. They took New Orleans by storm and drank Hurricanes at Pat O’Brien’s, suffering a hangover for the record books, then went to the School Book Depository in Dallas and eyed the grassy knoll. For six hours they made it their life’s work to solve the Kennedy assassination beyond any reasonable doubt, but lost interest as hunger set in and wound up at a BBQ place and then later that night at Billy Bob’s, a honky-tonk in Fort Worth. They learned to two-step and line dance and swayed to the music until they were bathed in sweat. They went to Carlsbad and hiked deep underground into a cavern large enough to hold a commercial airplane, and to Roswell to eat Alien Jerky. And then to the Grand Canyon, where they walked to the South Rim only to find the canyon socked in with fog. So they fought. About nothing, about everything.
“Shall we go to Las Vegas?” Patrick asked. He had a vision of himself in LA, a cliché of West Coast living, of going to the gym and drinking green tea and perhaps being a vegetarian. He thought a martini and a bloody prime rib dinner for $4.99 would be the perfect way to bid adieu to his old New York self—even if a classic Vegas martini was half vermouth. Sara, however, was not game for such nonsense and in fact had her eye on Sedona and a massage, perhaps, with hot stones.
“You’re already changing.”
“What? No I’m not.”
“Yes, you are. You’re leaving me alone and I already don’t know who you’ve become.”
“I’m not leaving you, I’m leaving New York. And we both know you won’t be alone.” Sara by then was dating Greg, which left Patrick feeling unnerved.