Read Apricot brandy for Free Online Page B

straight to the living room, put her boombox on the mantel and cranked up Bonnie Raitt, then set to building a fire in the huge fieldstone fireplace.
    She’d meant to roust some kind of meal from the kitchen, but the feelings in there were too complex. She wasn’t hungry anyway, the brandy tasting rich as food. This, right here by the fire, was base-camp. She’d return to exploring the house tomorrow.
    With the fire roaring, she lay on the couch with her paperback thriller, the Stones now thumping away, her toes sketching the beat as she sipped and turned pages. The phone rang. She’d forgotten all about Susan!
    But it was some man, deep-voiced, asking for Mr. Fox.
    “He died three days ago.”
    “Oh. I’m very sorry. I’m Kyle. We’d arranged last week to cut some of his trees into cords for him.”
    “Which trees?”
    “This is… ?”
    “This is his daughter.”
    “Oh. Well, I’m sorry. Very sorry. It was a grove of oaks in your northwest corner, near the highway?”
    Karen had played there. It was her special “forest” at seven and eight, wild and druidical, not like all the tame plum trees in their rows. It was where she and a girlfriend might “hike” to on a Saturday afternoon, with doll-dishes and real lunch in their backpacks. Dear Dad had done it to her out in the trees now and then, but never in her play-forest. Too close to the road, no doubt.
    “You said your name was Kyle?”
    “That’s right.”
    “Hi, I’m Karen. Listen, I guess he didn’t want those oaks, but I do. But there are some trees you could cut, some fruit trees in the yard. They’d make lower-grade firewood, but there must be seven or eight cords in them.”
    “Well, they’d still go for ninety a cord and if I could get that many, I could leave you three cords and still do fine.”
    “So when can you come? I basically just want them gone.”
    “Not for two or three days, Ms. Fox. Could we say Sunday around eight, just to be safe?”
    “That would be great.”
    “Okay, then. Thank you. And please accept my… sympathy.”
    “Thanks, but none needed.” She hung up wondering why she’d said that. It was saying a great deal, really, to a stranger. Remembered Mom telling her when she was small, “When someone calls, you say, ‘Who’s calling?’ and after they tell you, say, ‘How may I help you?’ You don’t start telling them your business.” The recollection was piercing, a sweet touch of Mom’s voice. Why was Mom so little in her memory?
    Dad tyrannized Karen’s memory, as his spirit tyrannized this house. Where in it now could she still feel Mom’s sweet and concerned presence, the way she could feel Dad’s lurking everywhere? Her eyes went to the breakfront in the dining room where, above heirloom dishes, a photo of Mom as a young woman looked out the glass door, but faint moonlight from the dining room window hid her image behind its reflection.
    Well, if Karen started uprooting Dad, maybe Mom would… start coming back out. A nice first step this, converting Dad’s precious brandy trees to firewood. His pet orchard in the back yard, whose fruit went down to his still. Start with those. Bit by bit she might do it, dig him up and throw him out for good.
    She jumped up and began to dance. Dancing, she heaped split after split of cured oak on the fire. She danced over for a hit of brandy and her Ry Cooder disc, danced the disc back to the machine and popped it in, and set to boogying all over the room.
    Karen could rock. She strutted, bucked, and swooped. She raised up and testified. She danced through the kitchen, out the back door, and raised her jar in salute to the brandy trees standing in darkness. “Say goodbye to your parents, Baby Brandy!” She drank a prodigious toast and danced back to the fire.
    Disc after disc she danced in front of the roaring fire, till her body’s movement seemed far, far away, amid the thud of the music more and more remote. And there was her friendly old sleeping bag