Free The Return of Jonah Gray by Heather Cochran Page A

you. Believe it or not, that isn’t what went through my mind when the pipe exploded.”
    â€œWhere’s the rest of it?” I asked.
    â€œI’m not going back up there,” Ricardo said.
    The soggy remains on my desk looked like the beginnings of an unpromising papier-mâché effort. And I had a sinking feeling that I was in possession of the healthiest remnant. “That was the original. I’m going to have to request a replacement.”
    â€œSo call Mr. Bean Man. Mr. Funny Dead Chickens.”
    â€œAnd tell him what?”
    Ricardo shrugged. “I don’t know. Mention the tensile strength of newsprint. What man wouldn’t swoon?”

Chapter Six
    WHEN I WAS FIVE AND KURT WAS EIGHT, OUR FAMILY moved from the outskirts of Roanoke, Virginia, to Piedmont, California. That was back before Blake, back when “family” meant just four of us—Mom, Dad, Kurt and me. Leaving Virginia was a huge deal. My father’s family had been there for six generations, and Dad had planned to follow suit and put down roots, his and ours, in the Old Dominion after finishing his accounting degree at the university in Charlottesville.
    My mother, on the other hand, was from California. She’d gone east on scholarship to Sweet Briar, which she left after three years in order to be by my father’s side at the outset of his career. In the earliest years of their marriage, my mother had agreed to adopt Virginia as her own. But during the winter I turned five, the plan changed. I have this vivid memory of Kurt walking me home from kindergarten, the door to our house swinging open, the hallway inside stacked with boxes—giant cardboard containers, some taller than I was, kraft brown and sturdy. They were the sort of boxes you might lose yourself inside, the perfect makings for a clubhouse or tunneled fort. But as soon as my mother came around the corner, I saw something in the crimp of her mouth, and I knew without a word spoken that those boxes weren’t for play. Two weeks later, we lived in California.
    My mother had insisted on the move, explaining to us that kids in California were nicer than kids in Virginia. I was five. How would I know? Soon enough, though, I would realize that our cross-country move had more to do with turbulence in my parents’ marriage. My father had been given a choice: Virginia or his wife and kids.
    Sometimes I wondered what would have happened had he stayed behind, but I guess I’m glad he chose us, packing things up and shuttering his fledgling accountancy. He even found a house in Piedmont, a town my mother had long loved, though it was a stretch for them financially. And instead of growing up in Virginia, I became a girl from California, which brings with it a different set of expectations.
    A part of me had always sensed that I’d missed out on something to have left Virginia so early. My scattered memories of the place were consistently tinged with the green of its thick, hot summers, its dense forests and its slow, fishy river. My recollections of the move itself are hazy, a pastiche of unrelated images, like puzzle pieces from opposite corners. The purple flower and the blue bird may be part of the same puzzle, but they don’t fit easily together. A long plane ride. Kurt crying. Untouched trays of food left outside a hotel-room door. Neighbors that smelled of cigarettes. My old sheets on a new bed.
    Three years older, Kurt probably remembered that stretch of time better than I did, but he didn’t like to talk about it, except to say how scared he’d been to restart third grade in a new school of strangers, even if Mom had promised that they’d be nicer. I didn’t notice that they were any nicer than the kids back in Roanoke.
    My parents lived in that first Piedmont house for a few years, then moved to a bigger one, and eventually landed in the four-bedroom traditional on Banner Hill, where I spent my middle and