Tribute

Numbers Four and Two, and considerably smarter than Number Three. And he’s the reason I’m sitting here sharing a sub with the never-to-be-matched Number One.”
    “How’s that?”
    “Putting the song and dance together requires money. I had some money.”
    “Cilla.”
    “Wait, wait. I had some money, and she had something I wanted. I wanted this place, Dad. I’ve wanted it for a while now.”
    “You—”
    “Yeah, I bought the farm.” Cilla tossed back her head and laughed.
    “And she’s so pissed at me. She didn’t want it, God knows. I mean, look at it. She hasn’t been out here in years, in decades , and she fired every manager, every overseer, every custodian. She wouldn’t give it to me, and it was my mistake to ask her for it a couple years ago. She wouldn’t sell it to me then, either.”
    She took another bite of the sub, enjoying it now. “I got the tragedy face, the spiel about Janet. But now she needed seed money and wanted me to invest. Big no on that followed by big fight, much drama. I told her, and Number Five, I’d buy this place, named an amount and made it clear that was firm.”
    “She sold it to you. She sold you the Little Farm.”
    “After much gnashing of teeth, much weeping, various sorrowful opinions on my daughterly behavior since the day I was born. And so on. It doesn’t matter.” Or hardly mattered, Cilla thought. “She didn’t want it; I did. She’d have sold it long before this if it hadn’t been tied up in trusts. It could only be sold and transferred to family until, what, 2012? Anyway, Number Five calmed her down, and everyone got what they wanted.”
    “What are you going to do with it, Cilla?”
    Live, she thought. Breathe. “Do you remember it, Dad? I’ve only seen the pictures and old home movies, but you were here when it was in its prime. When the grounds were gorgeous and the porches gleaming. When it had character and grace. That’s what I’m going to do with it. I’m going to bring it back.”
    “Why?”
    She heard the unspoken How? and told herself it didn’t matter that he didn’t know what she could do. Or hardly mattered.
    “Because it deserves better than this. Because I think Janet Hardy deserves better than this. And because I can. I’ve been flipping houses for almost five years now. Two years pretty much on my own. I know none of them was on the scale of this, but I have a knack for it. I’ve made a solid profit on my projects.”
    “Are you doing this for profit?”
    “I may change my mind in the next four years, but for now? No. I never knew Janet, but she’s influenced almost every area of my life. Something about this place pulled her here, even at the end. Something about it pulls me.”
    “It’s a long way from what you’ve known,” Gavin said. “Not just the miles, but the atmosphere. The culture. The Shenandoah Valley, this part of it, is still fairly rural. Skyline Village boasts a few thousand people, and even in the larger cities like Front Royal and Culpepper, it’s far and away from L.A.”
    “I guess I want to explore that, and I want to spend more time with my East Coast roots.” She wished he’d be pleased instead of concerned that she’d fail or give up. Again.
    “I’m tired of California, I’m tired of all of it, Dad. I never wanted what Mom wanted, for me or for herself.”
    “I know, sweetie.”
    “So I’ll live here for a while.”
    “Here?” Shock covered his face. “Live here? At the Little Farm?”
    “I know, crazy. But I’ve done plenty of camping, which is what this’ll be for a few days anyway. Then I can rough it inside for a while longer. It’ll take about nine, ten months, maybe a year to do the rehab, to do it right. At the end of that, I’ll know if I want to stay or move on. If it’s moving on, I’ll figure out what to do about it then. But right now, Dad, I’m tired of moving on.”
    Gavin said nothing for a moment, then draped his arm around Cilla’s shoulders. Did he have any idea, she wondered, what that casual show of support meant to her? How could he?
    "It was beautiful here, beautiful and hopeful and happy,” he told her. “Horses grazing, her dog napping in the sun. The flowers were lovely. Janet did some of the gardening herself when she was here, I think. She came here to relax, she said. And she would, for short stretches. But then she needed people—that’s my take on it. She needed the noise and the laughter, the light. But now and again, she