Falling for June: A Novel Read online

  I had wandered back into the living room and was looking out the window at the creek and the trail beyond when Mr. Hadley finally came looking for me.

  “There’s nothing like sitting on the toilet for ten minutes because you’re too old to stand,” he said. “I should have taken them up on the catheter.”

  “Okay, a little too much information,” I said. “But thanks for the mental image.”

  “Oh, you’ll find out eventually, young man. If you live long enough, two things are guaranteed to happen: you lose people you love, and going to the bathroom slowly takes over the hours left in your dwindling days. Haven’t you ever seen the line for the bathroom at a funeral?”

  “No, I guess I never gave going to the bathroom much thought.”

  “You will. You have a lot of time to think about these things sitting on the toilet, I’ll tell you. About the only thing that has me questioning the existence of God is the fact that He or She decided to thread the urethra through the male prostate gland. That and cable news. Who would design such stupid things? Should we sit in here and get back to the story? That chair there is the most comfortable.”

  I don’t know why he thought that old chair was so comfortable. If he ever sat in it himself he’d die there, it was so hard to get out of. “I think I’ll sit on the couch,” I said.

  “Suit yourself. Can I get you tea, or maybe another RC Cola, before we start?”

  “No thanks,” I said. “After our little chat about prostates I’d like to hold off on using the bathroom for as long as I can.”

  “Sorry about that. Those MoonPies get me on a sugar high and I start blabbering. I’ll probably be snoring in another ten minutes or so. So where was I? Oh yes, seducing June. Well, after hang gliding I found the courage to knock on her door the next morning. I even made her laugh with a very clever accountant joke. Would you like to hear it?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’d love to hear an accountant’s take on humor. Unless it’s something silly like why is number six afraid of number seven.”

  “I don’t think I’ve heard that one,” he said.

  “Six is afraid of seven because seven eight nine.”

  It took him a second to get it, then he laughed. “That’s pretty good.”

  “What do you mean? It’s terrible.”

  “Well, if you think that’s terrible,” he said, “I’m definitely not starting the story with mine. How about we begin instead with the hippies waking up Echo Glen by blasting that ungodly bus horn and rounding up their missing fellows by screaming out a roadkill announcement . . .”

  14

  DAVID STAGGERED OUT from the bunkhouse, thinking it was some new playlist on Sebastian’s wakeup speakers he was hearing. But it was altogether too early to be getting up for stunt lessons, and not even Sebastian could have dreamed up an alarm like this.

  The bus horn was blasting and Clarence, the hippie who had offered David the joint the night before, was hanging from its open door and repeatedly shouting, “Hidy-ho! We gotta go. Roadkill on the radio. Hidy-ho! Hidy-ho! We’ve got roadkill on the radio.”

  The door to Sebastian’s hayloft apartment burst open and he stepped out onto its balcony wearing a robe. He yelled something but it was impossible to hear over the honking. He reached inside his apartment and grabbed his bullhorn and used it to shout down to Clarence over the noise.

  “What’s all this racket down there, comrade? Some of us are trying to sleep.”

  Clarence said something to someone inside the bus and the honking stopped. Then he looked up at Sebastian. “Roadkill, captain,” he said. “You wanna come along?”

  “Come along where? What’s this talk about roadkill?”

  “We got a dead deer on the police scanner, man. Someone hit one out on Dansville Road. We gotta get out there before animal control. We gotta get it while it’s fresh. Living off the land, man. Gettin’ while the gettin’s good.”

  While he was talking, Sebastian stood gazing down on him, mumbling something privately and shaking his head. He appeared to David almost like a disappointed father looking down on a child.

  “You live off the land all you want, comrade, but don’t you dare come back here with some dead deer to skin. Me comprendes? June will not have you scaring the other animals.”

  The kid shrugged. “Whatever you say, captain. We would have shared the meat, though. If it’s a good-sized deer it’ll last us a week.”

  By this time other hippies had begun appearing from the bushes and the trees, heading for the bus—some of them in various states of undress that led David to believe they had been sharing more than just joints the night before—and they all looked bedraggled and cold, shivering in their rags. When the last of them had boarded the bus, Clarence leaned out again.

  “Hey,” he called up to Sebastian. “Is there any chance we could get our bird back, man? We don’t kill nothing ourselves or anything like that, but I’ll bet my head that thing lays some serious eggs.”

  Sebastian turned without answering and disappeared into his apartment.

  Clarence glanced at David, who was standing nearby, watching. “Guess that’s a no,” he said. “Sure you don’t wanna join us, man? Living the dream.”

  David shook his head. Clarence shrugged and withdrew into the bus. The door closed, the engine started, and the bus pulled away. But for all their rush to leave, it hardly moved above an idle as it rolled down the drive. And it was rocking something awful too, as if maybe those on board were fighting, or possibly dancing. Who knew?

  It honked one last time and David watched its taillights disappear into the gloom. He would see that bus some ten years later parked on four flat tires alongside the river several miles up the road. He stopped to say hello then, and to let them know that the ostrich was healthy and doing fine. But he found that only one aged and tired hippie remained, and although he resembled Clarence, if it was in fact him he’d long since boiled his brains, and he remembered nothing about an ostrich or even Echo Glen.

  With the bus gone and the ranch quiet again, a few students wandered off to the showers while the others drifted back to the bunkhouse to catch whatever little bit of sleep was available to them before Sebastian’s speakers blasted them officially into the third and final week of stunt camp. But having no desire to be violently woken twice in the same day, David stood outside the bunkhouse in the dim light of dawn, just breathing the clean country air and listening to the quiet whisper of the creek. He had been away from work for the longest stretch in probably twenty years, and it felt really good. Maybe his crazy ex-wife had been right about his needing to take a vacation after all. David smiled. He had not thought of his ex-wife without resentment since their divorce, but when he’d thought of her just now he’d felt nothing but peace.

  David noticed the lights were on in the house and something gave him the courage to go up. June answered the door with wild hair and an afghan blanket wrapped around her shoulders. She had reading glasses on and a pencil stuck behind her ear.

  “You look more like a hippie than the ones who just left,” David said.

  “Oh, is that what all that racket was?” she said. “They’re not really hippies, though. That bus has been trolling around these parts for years, picking up the county’s disgruntled youth. Most of them grow out of it eventually. Would you like to come in?”

  “If you don’t mind. I thought maybe I could use your phone to call my office. They’ll be expecting me if I don’t.”

  “Sure,” she said, stepping aside to let him enter. “I’ve got coffee on.”

  She brought him in and showed him to the phone. It was on a desk that sat in front of a bay window in the living room. The window offered a view of the creek. A desk lamp was turned on as if June had been working there recently, and the desktop was strewn with paperwork and mail. A ten-key calculator had a tape two feet long hanging from the roll.


  June went to retrieve coffee and David dialed his office. He was hoping to get voice mail for his boss’s secretary since it was so early, but she answered. David instinctively began coughing and speaking in a low, raspy voice.

  “Hi, Lindsay, I’m afraid I’m not going to make it in again.” Cough cough. “Yes, yes, it’s very bad. Contagious.” Cough cough. “Wouldn’t want to infect anyone. Yes, maybe out all week. No. No need to call and check on me. Okay. Charlie can handle my quarterlies that are due.” Cough. “Thanks.”

  When he hung up and turned around, June was standing behind him with two mugs of coffee. She handed him one.

  “Maybe instead of stunt school you should enroll in real acting lessons,” she said, grinning. “That was really good. I thought for sure you might die before you had a chance to get off the phone.”

  David blushed. “I know it’s silly, isn’t it? But I really do have weeks of vacation time saved up, so I don’t feel too bad.”

  “Well, you should use it,” she said, raising her eyebrows as if lecturing him. “Working to make a living is noble. Working to avoid living is tragic.” Then, after taking a sip of her coffee, she said, “Hey, you said you were an accountant, right? Do you have any professional advice on how I can turn around a struggling stunt camp located eight hundred miles from Hollywood and make a small fortune? Me and the animals would thank you.”

  “Well, in my professional opinion, as an accountant, to make a small fortune in your line of business is easy. All you need to do is start with a large fortune.”

  He laughed at his own joke, but June didn’t appear to think it was very funny.

  “Come on,” he said. “That was a pretty good joke.”

  “Maybe for an accountant,” she said, shaking her head. Then she giggled. “Okay, it was pretty good. And true too. If you only knew. Money. Ha! What’s it good for?”

  She was standing close to him and she smelled like lavender. He noticed she wasn’t wearing any shoes again and he wondered if he should have offered to take his off at the door. For some reason David felt suddenly nervous. He sipped his coffee, nodding to the cluttered desk. “Looks like maybe I caught you working.”

  June sighed, waving her hand at the desk as if wishing it away. “I’d rather be out in the barn with the animals. And you can tell by my growing pile that that’s where I’ve been too.”

  “What’s in the sack?” David asked. “Fan mail?”

  He was referring to a large black-plastic garbage sack sitting on the edge of the desk and stuffed with what looked like letters and other mail.

  “Yeah, right,” June said. “Fan mail. That’s a laugh. That’s how I pay my bills.”

  “Those are all bills?” He almost choked on his coffee.

  “Yes. Some of them are several months of the same bill, of course. I feel so bad about having to decide which ones to pay that I just put them all in the bag. Then I blindly draw them out and pay them one at a time until I’m out of money.”

  “You pick which bills to pay out of a hat?”

  “Out of a bag, but yes. That way it’s random chance, you see. And when the bill collectors call, I just explain it to them, and I tell them that they’re in the same bag with everyone else. Sometimes they get nasty, but then I threaten to not put them in the bag at all. Susan down at the feed store got pretty smart and started sending duplicate bills to increase her odds. But they’re pretty good about floating us down there. They love animals as much as we do.”

  “You do realize that I’m an accountant and this is driving me crazy, don’t you? How do you balance your books? How do you keep track of your debits and credits? Pay taxes? Plan?”

  “I keep a checkbook, silly. I’m not completely helpless.”

  “Do you want a hand?” he asked. “I could organize all of this for you in no time. Put it on a ledger spreadsheet that you could easily look at and understand. See everything. Maybe things aren’t as bad as you think.”

  “Maybe they’re worse,” she said.

  “Not knowing is worse.”

  She looked to be considering his offer, so he pressed her.

  “Come on, I do this for a living. I could even call some of the bill collectors and get them to freeze interest. Saying you’re an accountant goes a long way sometimes, you know. Although I’d be doing this strictly as a personal favor, since I don’t keep up on my CPA license.”

  June looked at the cluttered desk. “When would you have time even? You’re already calling in to work sick.”

  “I’ll start today. Right now.”

  “What about stunt class? I think Sebastian’s doing fire again today.”

  “My eyebrows are just growing back. Plus, we both know I enrolled in stunt camp pretending to be a reporter just so I could talk to you, as embarrassing as that sounds to say out loud.”

  There was a pause while June considered, looking at the piles of paperwork on the desk. They heard the music come on the speakers outside as Sebastian woke up his students.

  “I hate that he does that,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s not good for the animals. Especially not for the horses. But he means well. He has a good heart.”

  “What do you say about me helping?” David asked, not letting her change the subject. “I’d really rather not have to set myself on fire today.”

  She sighed. “Sebastian will be disappointed.”

  “Sebastian will understand. He has a good heart, you just said so yourself.”

  “Okay, but only if you let me pay you.”

  David laughed. “Pay me how? Are you going to put me in the bag?”

  “No,” she said, sticking out her tongue. “I’ll pay you in glider lessons, and I’ll pay you in food.”

  David toasted her coffee mug with his.

  “You’ve hired yourself an accountant.” Then he rubbed his belly and added, “But I’ll warn you, you rarely see skinny accountants for a reason.”

  June smiled. “Good. I’ve got cinnamon apples baking in the oven right now, and I make great lemon garlic ice cream, as you know.”

  15

  YOU SLY OLD dog, you. Pretty darn smart working your way into the house with the old ‘I’m an accountant and can help you with your bills’ routine.”

  “Hey,” he said, grinning, “you have to shake the milkshake God gave you.”

  “Shake the milkshake. Is that an old accountant expression or something?”

  “No, it’s from the song. You know: My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard.”

  He sang the line, holding his fists up and shaking them from side to side, as if he were doing the milkshake booty dance, even though he was sitting. I almost fell off the couch laughing again. “Where did you learn that?”

  “Mean Girls,” he said.

  “Mean Girls the movie?”

  “Cable news isn’t the only thing I watch, although Lindsay Lohan’s on there a lot too these days. It really is a shame. I hope she keeps it together this time.”

  “You know what, Mr. Hadley,” I said, sitting back and shaking my head, “you really are an onion, you know that? Each time I think I’ve got you pegged you peel off another layer.”

  “Well, you know what happens when you keep peeling an onion,” he said. “Eventually you don’t have any onion left.”

  He laughed, but then his laugh worked into a nasty cough again. He bent over in his chair and appeared to be struggling to breathe. This time I did get up, and I rushed over to see if I could help somehow. But I had no idea what to do so I stupidly patted him on the back, as if he were a choking child.

  “What can I do?” I asked. “Can I help somehow?”

  His breath was labored and wheezy, rattling in his lungs, but he finally sat up enough to look up at me, signaling by waving his hand that there was nothing to be done. I stood there over him while he c
aught his breath.

  “Can I get you something?” I asked.

  “Maybe another RC Cola,” he said, straining to speak.

  “How about some water?”

  When I came back from the kitchen, his breathing had improved. He fished a pill container from his big sweater pocket and picked out a couple of tablets and swallowed them.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I’m sorry you had to see that.”

  “Are you okay?” I asked, hesitating before taking my seat again on the couch.

  He sighed. “Yes and no. But I will be. We all will be.” Then he looked up at the cat clock on the wall and squinted. “Would you mind telling me the time, Elliot?”

  “Three twenty-two.”

  “Oh, boy,” he said, “I had better get moving with the rest of this story then.”

  “You had just started organizing June’s books.”

  “Oh, yes.” He sipped his water and nodded. “Although she didn’t really have any books to organize. Just piles of papers. And she was right, it was worse than she even thought. You have to understand June had a lot of animals here at that time. She had maybe seventeen horses then. Almost all of them saved from racetracks. Plus Rosie, who had just arrived, and who you met. But she also had goats. Sheep. A mule even, if I recall. Now she had that silly ostrich, of course. And there were so many dogs and cats you couldn’t count them.

  “She was the catchall, you see. The last resort. Every other rescue within a hundred-mile radius knew June couldn’t turn an animal away, no matter how low on money she was. It’s the only reason she had started the stunt school. It had been Sebastian’s idea. He had left Los Angeles, where they had worked together on films years before, and he needed a place to stay, so she took him. She was struggling for money and he suggested using the property to run a stunt school, trading on their reputations to get students. It was their third or fourth session that summer when I arrived.”