The Last Thing He Told Me: A Novel
part 1
CHAPTER 1
The last thing he told me, part one, chapter one if you answer the door for strangers, you see it all the time on television, there's a knock at the front door. And on the other side, someone iswaiting to tell you the news that changes everything. On television. It's usually a policechaplain or a firefighter, maybe a uniformed officer from the armed forces. But when I opened the door when I learned that everything is about to change for me, the messenger isn't a cop or a federal investigator in starched pants. It's a 12-year-old girl in the seeker, uniform, shin guards and all. Mrs. Michaels, she says, I hesitate before answering the way I often do when someone asks me if that is who I am. I am and I'm not. I haven't changed my name. I was Hana Hall for the 38 years before I met Oh, and I didn't see a reason to become someone else after. But oh and I have been married for a little over a year. And in that time, I've learned not to correct people either way. Because what they really want to know is whether I'm Owens's wife, it's certainlywhat the 12-year-old wants to know, which leads me to explain how I can be so certain that she is 12. Having spent most of my life seeing people into broad categories, child and adult. This change is a result of the last year and a half a result of my husband's daughter Vallely being the stunningly disinviting age of 16. It's a result of my mistake. Upon first meeting the guarded Bailey of telling her that she looked younger than she was. It was the worst thing I could have done. Maybe it was the second-worst. The worst thing was probably my attempt to make it better by cracking a joke about how I wish someone would age me down. Baileyhas barely stomached me since despite the fact that I now know better than to try to crack a joke of any kind with a 16-year-old or really, to try and talk too much at all. But back to my 12-year-old friend standing in the doorway, shifting from dirty clean to dirty clean. MR. Michaels wanted me to give you this, she says. Then she thrusts out her hand, a folded piece of yellow legal paper inside her poem. Hannah is written on the front in Owens's writing.Itakethefoldednote. Hold her eyes. I'm sorry. I say I'm missing something. Are you a friend of Bailey's? Whose Bailey I didn't expect the answer to be yes. There is an ocean between 12 and 16. But I can't piece this together. Why hasn't Oh, andjust called me? Why is the involving this girl? My first guess would be that something has happened to Bailey. And oh and couldn't breakaway. But Bailey is at home, avoiding me as she usually does. Her blasting music. Today's selection, beautiful. The CaroleKing musical. Pulsing all the way downthe stairs. It's my own looping reminder that I'm not welcome in her room. I'm sorry. I'm a little confused. Where did you see him? He ran past me in the hall. She says for a minute. I think she means our hall, the space right behind us. But that doesn't make sense. We live in a floating home on the bay, a houseboat as they are commonly called, except here in Sausalito, where there's a community of them. 400 of them. Here they are floating homes, all glass and views. Our sidewalk is a dock. Our hallway is a living room. So you saw mr. Michaels at school. That's whatI just said. She gives me a look like where else. Me and my friend Claire, we're on our way to practice. And he asked us to drop this off. I said I couldn't come until after practice and hesaid, Fine. He gave us your address. She holds up a second piece of paper like proof. He also gave us 20 bucks. She adds the money she doesn't hold up. Maybe she thinks I'll take it back. His phone was broken or something and he couldn't reach you. I don't know. He barely slowed down. So he said his phone was broken. How else would I know? She says that her phone rings or I think it's a phone until she picksit off her waist and it looks more like a high-tech beeper are beepers back. Carole King showtunes high tech beepers. Another reason Bailey probablydoesn't have patience for me. There's a world of teen things Iknow absolutely nothing about the girl taps away on her device. already putting oh and her $20 mission behind her. I'm reluctant to let her go. Still unsure about what is going on. Maybe this is some kind of weird joke. Maybe oh and thinks this is funny. I don't think it's funny. Not yet. Anyway. See you. She says she starts walking away. Heading down the docks. I watched her get smaller and smaller. The sun down over the bay. A handful ofearly evening stars lighting her way. Then I stepped outside myself. I have expect oh and my lovely and silly Oh, and to jump out from the side of the dock. The rest of the soccer team giggling behind him. The lot of them letting me in on the prank I'm apparently not getting. But he isn't there. No one is. So I close our front door. And I look down at the piece of yellow legal paper still folded in my hand. I haven't opened it yet. It occurs to me in the quiet, how much I don't want to open it. I don'twant to know what the note says. Part of me still wants to hold on to this one last moment, the moment where you still get to believe this is a joke and error. A big nothing. The moment before you know for sure that something has started that youcan no longer stop. I unfold the paper. Owens note is short. One line, its own puzzle. Protect her. Chapter 2 Green Street before it was green street. I met oh and a little over two years ago. I was still living in New York City. Then. I was living 3000 miles from Sausalito, the small northern California town that Inow call home. Sausalito is on the other side of the Golden Gate from San Francisco. But a world away from city life. quiet, charming, sleeping. It's the place that oh and Bailey have called home for more than a decade. It is also the polar opposite of my previous life, which kept me squarely in Manhattan, in a lofted storefront on Green Streetin Soho, a small space withan astronomical rent I never quite believed I could afford. I used itas both my workshop and my showroom. I turned wood. That's what I do for work. People usually make a face when I tell them this is my job. However, I tried to describe it, images of their high school woodshop class coming to mind. Being a woodturner is a little like that, andnothing like that. I like to describe it as sculpting. But instead of sculpting clay, I sculpt wood. I come by the profession naturally. My grandfather was a woodturner an excellent one at that. And his work was at the center of my life for as far back as I can remember. He was at the center of my life for as far back as I can remember, having raised me mostly on his own. My father Jack and my mother,Carol, who preferred that I refer to her as Carol were largely uninterested in doing any child rearing. They were largely uninterested in anythingexcept my father's photography career. Mygrandfather encouraged my mother to make an effort with me when I was young. But I barely knew my father, who traveled for work 280 days a year. When he did have time off, he hunkered down at his family's ranch in Suwanee, Tennessee, as opposed to driving the two hours to my grandfather's house in Franklin to spend time with me. And shortly after my sixth birthday, when my father left my mother for his assistant, a woman named Gwendolyn, who was newly 21 My mother stopped coming home as well. She chasedmy father down until he took her back. Then she left me with my grandfather full time. If it sounds like a sob story, it isn't. Of course, it isn't ideal to have your mother all but disappear. It certainly didn't feel good to be on the receiving end of that choice. But when I look back now, I think my mother did me a favor exiting the way she did without apology, without vacillation. At least she made it clear. There was nothing I could have done to make her want to stay. And on the other side of herexit, I was happier. My grandfather was stable and kind and he made me dinner every night and waited for me to finish dinner before he announced it was time to get up and read me stories before we went to sleep. And he always let me watch him work. I loved watching him work. He'd start with an impossibly enormous piece of wood, moving it over a lathe, turning it into something magical. Or if it was less than magical, he would figure out how to startover again. That was probably my favorite part of watching him work, when he would throw up his hands and say, well, we've got to do this different, don't we? Then he'd go about findinga new way into what he wantedto create. I'm guessing any psychologist worth her salt would say that it must have given me hope that I must havethought my grandfather would help me do the same thing for myself to start again. But if anything, I think I took comfortin the opposite. Watching my grandfather work taught me that not everything was fluid. There were certain things that you hit from different angles, but you never gave up on you did the work that was needed, wherever that work took you. I never expected to be successful at woodturning or at my foray from there into making furniture I have expected Iwouldn't be able to make a living out of it. My grandfather regularly supplemented his income by picking upconstruction work. But early on, when one of my more impressive dining roomtables was featured in Architectural Digest, I developed a niche among a subset of downtown New York City residents. As one of my favorite interior designers explained it. My clients wanted to spend a lot of moneydecorating their homes in a way that made it look like they weren't spending any money at all. My rustic wood pieces helped with their mission. Over time, this devoted clientele turned into a somewhat larger clientele in other coastal cities and resort towns, Los Angeles, Aspen, East Hampton, Park City, San Francisco. This was how and I met. Eva Thompson, the CEO of the tech firm where oh and worked was a client. David and his wife, the ridiculously gorgeous bill were amongmy most loyal clients. They'll like to joke that she was able to trophy wife, which may have been funnier if it also wasn't so onpoint. She was a former model 10 yearsyounger than his grown children. Born andraised in Australia.
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