The Golden State

He walks past our table and stops to cluck at Honey with big-man friendliness and I smile at him and say hello and he stares at me for a beat until I prompt him with my mother’s name. “Jeannie’s daughter. Frank and Cora Burdock’s granddaughter.” “That’s right!” he beams at me and his large presence his belt buckle are enough to subdue the bleating Honey. “You know Rosemary’s sure been workin’ on gettin’ that place sold.” “Well, no rush,” I tell him. “Rod up with you?” he asks. I feel suddenly threatened by being narced on but I don’t know why my taciturn uncle Rodney, patron of the mobile home, shouldn’t know I’m here, in fact I don’t know why I didn’t just call him to tell him myself. “Not this time,” I tell him, “but I thought it might be nice to get the, um, cobwebs out,” and he nods. The proper maintenance of immovable property or cars or livestock is a central concern to citizens of the high country. The great sorrow of my aging grandparents was seeing the disorder that crept into the town, shaggy lawns strewn with toy limbs and decaying copies of the Paiute Recorder. Rusted lawn mowers, sweatpants in the market, cars with rusted tailpipes—their lawn stayed pristine, their Buick polished, their small finances in impeccable order. I am looking a little down-at-the-heels myself, I realize. I am wearing a maternity shirt and Honey has smeared a substantial portion of the stew all over. But I am keeping cobwebs out of the house and the water moving in the pipes.

I shouldn’t be snide. The reason Honey and I are sitting pretty all things considered up in Deakins Park is that good old Uncle Rodney cares enough to keep the place maintained, to keep the water in the pipes, while my helpless disdain at the bourgeois mysteries of property maintenance would probably leave the town with another rusted-out mobile home. Uncle Rodney, never married, lives in a nice cabin outside Quincy, many basins south and west of here. He has worked for the Forest Service his entire life and has a very long-term off-and-on relationship with a surprisingly bubbly woman named Helen who works at a quilt shop of the sort that Quincy is cute enough to sustain. He and my mom had not a lot in common except their happy memories of summers at the lake and winters in the snow, girl scouts and boy scouts and high school hijinks and bridge nights with drunk parents letting the kids run free. In the end what she wanted was to get out, to get Elsewhere, and Rodney won’t even come to San Francisco except for when Honey was born. (“Not a city person,” he told Engin when we met him.) But he never made a peep when my mom got the house, and now he keeps the water in the pipes for me.

John Urberoaga doesn’t ask me where Honey’s dad is which seems curious and I wonder whether it is some sense of social nicety and not asking what don’t concern you or whether it just had not occurred to him to have any curiosity about my life which I suppose would justly match the general lack of curiosity I have about his and he ambles off to a table with his wife and Honey is now struggling so much to get down onto the floor that I know we’ve got to go and I crane around for the jokey server to bring us the check and she laughs at Honey and says “She’s feisty” and it soothes me. I hate being an archetype—woman struggling alone with fractious baby—but it really does feel horrible and a little humor delivered with a deft hand can go a long way. Too much sympathy and help is bad though, it’s very obligating.