Claws & Crochet

Part 57

ZOEY

"Maybe a sexy demon lady . . ." I murmur to myself, pencil poised over my sketch pad.

Sunlight spills in from the window above the kitchen sink, bathing the cabin in a warm afternoon glow. Good light for my current project.

Different ideas flip through my mind. I'm imagining a pinup girl from hell. Maybe lounging on a bed of fire. Just need to make sure it has a nice curved shape that'll sit evenly on the surface of a motorcycle helmet.

I want my design to be perfect. Badass. Something the wearer will be proud to show off. Because the only way to put this art on display will be if the guy actually wears his helmet.

Some people might think I'm overly cautious, harping on this helmet thing. But I know I'm right.

Mom doesn't talk about her childhood much. She lost her dad at a pretty young age, so I guess there wasn't a lot she could tell me about my grandfather. But there is one thing I know.

How he died.

My grandfather went on a late-night ride on his motorcycle and got into an accident. She never said exactly what part of the crash caused his death, but I know that one of the few rules she insisted my dad follow was to always wear his helmet while riding. The same went for my brothers and me when we took out our bicycles or a set of roller skates.

She wasn't mean about it. Mom would walk up to me, cup my face in her hands, and press a kiss to my forehead. Then she'd whisper, "I love this head more than anything in the world. I don't want to see anything bad happen to it. Please, wear a helmet."

Who can say no to that? None of us ever did.

So here I am, trying to jazz up a boring black helmet, crafting it into something Warner doesn't just feel obligated to put on.

Instead, I want him to be excited about it.

"Who am I kidding? He's not a demon lady kind of guy." I tap my pencil on the paper.

Then it hits me. So obvious, I laugh at myself.

I know what kind of guy Warner is.

He's a wolf.

An hour later, the design is sketched, and the outline painted on a helmet I picked up from the motorcycle shop in town. I wasn't about to ask Warner for his and have him ride unprotected while I worked. Plus, this way I can keep it as a surprise.

Just as I'm mixing paints to get the perfect shade of amber, Cyndi Lauper's voice fades away, and I can hear the click of the cassette tape coming to a stop. The poppy beat of Girls Just Want to Have Fun was apparently the last on this playlist. When a younger version of my mom introduced it, I wasn't surprised. I can only imagine how that song spoke to her; a girl homeschooled in a small Colorado town by a recluse of a mother.

I groan out a stretch before standing up to pick my next round of music. The tapes clack as I finger through them. There doesn't seem to be any particular order. I've listened to maybe a third and have heard everything from an adolescent version of my mother introducing seventies ballads, all the way to late-teens mom jamming out to the eighties glam rock. Her intros get better with time, but they're nowhere near the smooth delivery she has on her current morning show.

Since there's no point in looking, I close my eyes and pick a tape at random from the side of the box I haven't dipped into yet.

With the next round of music cued up, I move back to the kitchen table and my paints.

"Good morning, University of Denver. Well, good morning to those of you who aren't still asleep, hungover from last night's Sigma Tau Delta rager."

Smooth. Practiced. Engaging. This is more like the mom I know today. That, plus the mention of her alma mater, throws me off.

"Rumor has it that a few members of our illustrious football team were spotted streaking across campus around midnight. So this one goes out to them . . ."

Jermaine Stewart's classic We Don't Have To Take Our Clothes Off fills the cabin, but I'm still too befuddled to enjoy the humorous choice.

This is not the recording of a pre-teen girl holed up with her boombox in a tree house, playing at being a radio DJ. This is my mom in an actual studio. The one she had a part-time job at when she was in college.

But I know for a fact that the summer after high school, Selena Gunner packed up her truck, left Pine Falls, and never came back. And if what Mom told me is true, Grandma Minnie only came up to Denver on the days each of her grandchildren were born. She stayed long enough to give Mom a crocheted blanket before she turned right back around.

So how did this recording end up in Minnie's cabin?

Could Mom have mailed it? Maybe as a strange kind of olive branch?

I stand to pace the main room of the cabin as I think.

No. Mom definitely said she didn't contact her mother until she was pregnant with Abram, and that was after she graduated.

An idea occurs, the possibility of it sending an uncomfortable shock of denial through me. But I have to know.

I pause the tape and flick the settings over to FM. Static. I scan through all the channels, and I get nothing. Same with AM.

But that's what I expected. I'd only hoped differently.

After carrying all my music around in a smartphone for so long, the boombox seems awkward and heavy as I lug it out the back door. Bruce lounges on the porch, soaking up the sun, and barely gives a twitch as I hurry past him.

The air smells like damp earth baking in the sun. A chill rides the breeze, raising the hair on my exposed arms.

I ignore the beautiful hints of autumn, focusing on my destination and what it might reveal.

Climbing into the treehouse while clutching the boombox is awkward, but despite swaying a few times, I manage to get both it and myself through the entry in the floor without damage.

Luckily, I had gotten tired of unplugging and plugging it back in and bought some batteries.

I sit cross-legged on the old wooden floor, hesitating with my fingers poised on the buttons. The stereo seems to gaze back at me, its speakers like wide bug eyes.

Tempting me.

Mocking me.

Shaming me.

I flip the on switch.

Static.

There's a tremor in my fingers as I press the button to scan for stations. A second goes by, before suddenly, a voice spills out.

"—the best deal in downtown Denver! Come get your new car—"

The stereo scans again, landing on a station playing Arianna Grande's latest hit. It scans again, finding a classical music station. It scans again. And again. At some point, a set of familiar numbers flash on the little digital screen.

I attended the University of Denver, too. Occasionally, I turned on the school's radio station to see what they were playing.

Today, whoever the jockey is, has chosen some classic rock, but I don't bother to focus on the lyrics.

My heart cracks, little fissures in the organ spiking like splinters in my chest.

Because in this moment, I realize my theory as truth.

In the same way that I've been making this tedious climb to get service, so did my grandmother more than thirty years ago. A woman too proud to mend fences with her daughter, crawled into a treehouse just to hear that daughter's voice.