The Honey Bus - Meredith May Page 0,46
top. She pulled it out with her lips and tossed the pack back into her purse. When the lighter popped out, she held the red coil to the tip and lit it.
“Grandpa isn’t your real grandpa,” she said, lowering the window and exhaling smoke out the crack. “My dad is. We’re going to see your real grandpa. Granny’s first husband.”
A gong went off. The news that Grandpa wasn’t my grandpa was preposterous. I’d never seen this other man, nor heard of anyone else claiming to be my grandfather. I dug my fingernail into the white seat, trying to poke a hole. She was trying to tell me that Grandpa wasn’t good enough somehow, but I refused to believe it. I fumed in the back seat, at Mom for so casually dismissing Grandpa, and at this stranger for taking Grandpa’s place without my approval. Mom held her cigarette out the window to let the wind suck off the ash, then brought it back to her lips.
“Grandpa is my grandpa,” I insisted.
“No, he’s your step-grandfather.”
My mood was good and foul when she eventually turned off Highway 1 onto Ocean Avenue, and we descended a steep hill that bottomed out before Carmel’s downtown shops. She steered the growling Gremlin away from the main street and up through a wooded neighborhood of cheery cottages that looked like gingerbread houses with icing. The roofs were thatched and wavy, some decorated with flags or weather vanes. Windows had flower boxes, doors were flanked by lanterns. Everywhere I looked I saw cobblestone walkways, and the homes had names instead of numbers: Country Comfort, A Whistle Away, Sea Shadows.
These were the homes that originally belonged to painters and poets and actors when Carmel began as a seaside artists’ colony at the start of the twentieth century, but were now heavily renovated and occupied by descendants or wealthy outsiders. Each was unique, yet all were the same in that they were the kind of homes I’d never been in before. I felt suddenly self-conscious, and worried about just what, exactly, Mom was getting us into.
My foul mood got a little fouler. Mom took the car slow around an oak tree that was growing right in the middle of the narrow road. In the twisting backstreets of Carmel, trees sprouted here and there from the asphalt with reflective tape around them, directing drivers to respect the landscape and please go around. Whoever had built the roads hadn’t had the heart to chop them down, and locals were accustomed to driving slowly to go around them.
Mom pulled into a parking space above a house that clung to a hillside overlooking a canyon of Monterey pines. We walked on a narrow balcony that wrapped around the house, until we were facing a big red door flanked by two Chinese lion sculptures, one with a paw resting on a ball and the other with its paw on a cub.
Mom smoothed her skirt and stood up taller, then knocked. As if someone was standing on the other side peering through the peephole, the door whipped open immediately, and a short, thin man in pressed khakis, tasseled loafers and an oxford shirt stared at us. His white hair was precision-combed as if he were still in the military. He had a pink, expressionless face, dark eyes and a mouth that relaxed into a natural frown. I had never met him, yet I felt he was already disappointed with me. He and Mom looked at each other in silence. I had a sudden urge to bolt for the car.
“Sally.”
“Dad.”
He opened the door wider and motioned us in. I reached for Matthew’s hand.
Our steps echoed as we entered what appeared to be a modern art gallery instead of a home. The two-story architectural home was cold and impersonal, empty in the center with a top floor that formed a ring around the one below. From anywhere on the upper balcony, you could peer over the ledge down to the first story, which had a decorative concrete floor with slices from a massive redwood tree trunk embedded in it. The wall facing the canyon was all glass. A floating staircase connected the two levels. The walls were decorated with Chinese paintings of fog-filled mountaintops and fighting warriors. A towering silvertip Christmas tree as giant as the one at Macy’s rose from the bottom floor. There wasn’t a speck of dust anywhere in this showpiece of a house.
Mom instructed us to say hello to our grandfather. I gave a