“Why?” To Grant it all seemed equally horrible.
“Because of the views! You know what Maryland has? Crabs. You know what Pennsylvania has? The Dutch.”
Maisie and Grant shook their heads at one another and they rode the rest of the way to Mountain Station in silence.
“It’s cold up here.” Maisie kept her arms crossed, partially in protest, partially to keep her body heat contained.
“It’s seventy-five degrees!”
“It is?”
“Yes, this is what summer feels like in Connecticut. You’ve just gotten used to it being a hundred and five.” They forged ahead on the easiest trail Patrick had scouted; it was a loop with five scenic overlooks that ran just over a mile. The forest floor was littered with enormous pine cones, the size, almost, of Grant’s head. Birds were chirping, chatty but unseen, and the ground was soft with pine needles. It took less than ten minutes in the cable car to get from the Valley Station to their destination, but they were a world apart.
“Look, a lizard!” Grant was beside himself with joy.
“Where, bud?”
“Thunning himthelf on that rock.” He pointed to a sunny patch that formed between two trees.
“Good eye.”
“Ith it dead?”
“No, just sleeping.”
“Are you sure?”
Patrick took Grant’s hand. “I’m positive.”
Grant ran toward a cluster of trees to study the pine cones that lay beneath them until he was far enough ahead to make Patrick uncomfortable. “Slow down, Grantelope!”
Grant picked up a pine cone and studied it. “Can I keep this?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Bears eat them.”
Grant looked skeptical. “Bearth eat pine cones?”
“You know what else they eat?” Patrick picked Grant up in one sweeping motion and threw him over his shoulder. “Grantelopes.”
Grant laughed and squirmed. “What’s a Grantelope?”
“You are. Like an antelope, but a Grantelope.”
“Or a cantaloupe,” Maisie observed.
“I’M NOT A CANTALOUPE!” Grant protested more and Patrick set him down on the ground.
A term of endearment, Patrick thought. That was new.
They stopped at the third outlook and sat on a rock that mimicked a bench to sun themselves like lizards. Patrick closed his eyes. It was nice to feel sunshine as comforting warmth and not scorching heat. Although they were ten thousand feet closer to the sun. Shouldn’t it be hotter? Science, he thought. Not to be understood. “Isn’t it strange how the higher we get the cooler it is? It’s the opposite of what you might think.”
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
