Tales of the City 08 - Mary Ann in Autumn

news.
    She turned and looked at her old friend.
    “Mouse, if you can’t do this, just say so.”

Chapter 6
Not to Be Alone
    N ormally, with groceries in the car, Ben would have headed straight home, but he wasn’t sure how much time Michael needed with Mary Ann, and he didn’t relish the thought of walking in on whatever drama was unfolding. So he headed over to his workshop on Norfolk Street and finished staining a stair-step tansu that was slated for delivery on Monday. Roman, as usual, was thrilled to be there, feverishly prowling the shop for the mice that were known to live behind the walls. The place had once been an appliance repair shop, so even with the addition of whitewash and fiberglass skylights, it hovered on the funky side of dilapidated. Ben loved it, though, loved its rich aromas of cedar dust and linseed oil and the quiet afternoons he spent here, alone with his craft.
    As he brushed the stain onto the tansu , he gazed wistfully across the room at a rustic fireplace surround he’d started on nine months earlier. He and Michael had settled on the pinecone motif, since the piece had been intended—was still intended—for their fireplace in Pinyon City. Except that there was no fireplace, much less a cabin; just three acres of rocky, sloping ground with an unbelievable view of a Sierra range. He had bought the land before the economy began to tank, when there were still people in the market for museum-grade furniture. He’d envisioned their own secret Eden, where Michael could grow old in the bosom of nature and he, Ben, could have ready access to snowboarding. He’d pictured rocking chairs on the deck and hikes up the canyon with Roman and occasional trips into Pinyon City for drinks at the corner saloon.
    For the moment, of course, building anything was out of the question, since Ben could barely manage the mortgage on the land. Michael was in similar straits—still paying the mortgage on the city house—and his shoulder was threatening to put him out of commission for a while. There were hopes that this new administration might be able to fix the economy, but even the most optimistic observers believed that it would take a while—years, even. All things considered, not a time to go further into debt.
    Still, there was no reason they couldn’t enjoy the place now, cabin or no cabin. They could pitch a tent there (at least in the summertime) and wake up beneath the pines with the scent of sage in their nostrils. Michael, of course, could get grumpy as hell on camping trips, but that was mostly at public campgrounds where the crowds made him noticeably misanthropic. “I didn’t come to the wilderness,” he had once announced a little loudly at a campground in New Mexico, “for the chance to shower with America.”
    But this would be different. This would be their own turf, where they could stake a sort of spiritual claim just by spending some time there. As for showering, they could do that down the road at the state park, preferably at a time when America wasn’t around. The important thing was to be on that land , leave their mark. Burn a little sage, maybe, make a little love. The property wasn’t visible from the access road, so maybe they could find a talisman here in the city—a big stone raven or a rusty iron Quan Yen—that they could plant there on the mountainside as proof of their intentions, even when they weren’t around. He loved the idea of finding it there every time they came back.
    Pinyon City had become their version of the future. “We’ll get that for Pinyon City,” they would say when they spotted a woolen blanket in a garage sale or a set of rugged dinnerware, and they would buy that thing, whatever it was, and stuff it into the coat closet to await its eventual alpine destiny. Some of these items had been absorbed by the city house, like the rare Indian basket that Michael surprised Ben with on his birthday. Michael had tracked it down on the Internet, ordering it from a private collector in Reno. Roughly the size of a grapefruit, it was woven from pine needles and red gum—a reliable indicator that its maker had lived not far from their homestead-to-be. They had already picked the very spot it would occupy on the mantelpiece that Ben was building. It would have made it there, too—a perfect symbol of their reverence for the land and its culture—had they not displayed it on the coffee table in full view of a teething Labradoodle.
    Ben stayed at the