The Tree in the Front Yard: An Epic

The Tree in the Front Yard: An Epic

1.        

“The Tree in the Front Yard” was how the Lawrences talked about it, if they did talk about it, which they didn’t, much. Officially (to the best of eldest brother John’s knowledge) there were three conversations in all: the time they got the beastly thing (believed, for some reason, to be a distant relative of the Banzai), the time Wayne kicked it so hard he broke his foot, and today, Christmas 2008, when John finally put his foot down, raised himself at the breakfast table and stammered, not ineloquently: “Wuh…Whu… Ell…Well… Let’s bring the fucker down.” 

None of the other Lawrences made eye contact, no one even looked up from his plate: John’s wife, Linda, rolled and unrolled a corner of the beige cat themed table cloth; the Deans, senior and junior, said “ho, hummm” while Dean senior’s wife, Krystal, patted her husband’s muscular back with one bone-thin hand; Wayne shoved a mouthful of egg into his left cheek and muttered some inaudible expostulation; Wayne’s daughter, Julie, excused herself from the table to prepare her camera.

Now it is 9 o’clock. John has decided the festivities will start at noon.

2.

            The tree/dilemma was a present from Wayne to his parents, to commemorate the first Christmas the Lawrence family had spent together in nearly fifteen years. It was a Chinese Pistach—a gorgeous, slender tree that gained leaves in the summer, to “shade the front yard,” and lost leaves in the winter, to “allow the sun through.” The manager of Orchard Supply—a former botany major—had explained this to Wayne in detail, however Wayne, who was a sucker

for big words, forgot most of the explanation and remembered only the word “Deciduous.” He repeated it often, like a mantra or a prayer or a magical spell. This was the Christmas of 1993.

Earlier that year, on the morning of August 5^th, Wayne’s youngest brother, Ricky, ran his 1978 Firebird off the side of the Pacific Coast Highway, killing himself and his lover “Floyd,” a young dental hygienist/gym rat from Whittier. It was too bad: the over-caffinated personality on KROQ claimed it was going to be a “nice day,” and Ricky had stashed a quarter ounce of some primo indoor with a half-full bottle of Jack Daniels in the glove box; the recently yoga-enthused buttocks of Floyd frisked happily in the passenger seat.

According to the police report, the skid marks began on the road, two hundred meters or so before they entered the sunbaked dirt. This led investigators to conclude that the car “ran over a nail or something” on the highway and had a blow-out. The various morning commuters who claimed to have witnessed the event said they heard the Motley Crue ballad “Home Sweet Home,” accompanied by “loud whooping,” all the way until the car wrapped its front end around the freshly treated Western Red Cedar utility pole, at which point the power lines came crashing down and the explosions and the sparks were, by all accounts, too loud and too blinding to hear or see much of anything else.

Ricky was the last of four children, all named after actors in the film Rio Bravo. John, the oldest, was followed by Wayne (John Wayne being the favorite actor of their father Uly); then came Dean, after Dean Martin, and Ricky, after Ricky Nelson. Ricky had been a bassist in a mildly successful hair metal band called Taint—a fact the family found out when they stopped getting calls from him asking for money, and started to hear his voice in the background of songs on the radio. The band broke up in 1990 when half the members left the group to start a “garage” band; Ricky had inhaled the royalty checks waiting for their only album, Almost There, to go out of print. Then he’d taught guitar at a music shop in Costa Mesa, living, “temporarily,” in the garage of an old widow. Until the day he died.

The funeral and reception were held on August 9^th at the Pacific View Memorial Park and Mortuary in Costa Mesa. Three of the remaining four members of Taint attended the funeral. They agreed to play an acoustic set of Ricky’s songs, and organized some chairs by the buffet. A few aging long hairs gathered around and sang along:

I left the dark place
going into the light place
 I’m climbing the tower
 I’m almost there.

Floyd’s parents came to the funeral too. They were nice, college professors, intellectuals; there were no hard feelings. The Lawrences didn’t have much to say: Uly bought drinks, John gave them big “we accept you anyway” hugs, Wayne muttered something mostly inaudible, Dean Sr. slapped them all on the back, nodding: “hmm, hum.” The Lawrences had heard a little about a friend of Ricky’s named Floyd, but the lover part was new to them. They said so. They made “we understand this is a big deal” faces. Then they returned to the open bar.

It was over the many free drinks from that open bar that the Lawrences decided to gather for Christmas. It had been too long; no one knew why they stopped getting together in the first place.

 They would meet at their parents’ house in Santa Cruz. That seemed then to be the most effective middle ground: John and Linda lived in Bend, Oregon, Wayne and Marianne in Pasadena, and Dean and Krystal in Union City. The brothers had no trouble convincing their father, Uly, who, very drunk at that point, became so excited that he vowed, then and there, to quit drinking completely.

“Fwrum this day forth!” Uly exclaimed, screeching his plastic chair away from the table and lifting his right hand, “I will remain, Stop,” he swatted at his wife Lorena who was pulling at his coat sleeve; “I will get— no you stop it Lorena this is important —and remain, completely, one hundred and fifteen percent sober, so that I will remember the beautiful and wonderful childhood of my sweet, sweet grand-children.” The three remaining sons applauded while Lorena rearranged the silverware.

They all arrived Christmas eve: The Deans junior and senior, along with Krystal, arrived first, then John and Linda with their three girls, Vera, Dianna and Luz. Wayne, Marianne and Julie arrived later in the night: Marianne had pulled over at a Vista point and refused to budge until Wayne agreed never to say the word “deciduous” again. Wayne, who was sitting in the back seat strapped in with the same seatbelt as the plastic-potted pistacia chinensis, was watering it with a large Evian bottle and administering baby talk. He protested the sanctions nobly at first, but gave in after the second hour’s stalemate, secretly resolving to whisper the word to the plant’s roots.

            In the morning, after they ate the largest pancake breakfast ever served west of the Rio Grande, they opened presents. They played Ricky’s album Almost There. His voice serenaded the family pictures along the living room walls: “I was stuck in the middle/ But I’m almost there.”

 When Wayne brought the tree in from the car and presented it to his father, everyone smiled and nodded thoughtfully. Everyone except John. When they all went outside to plant the tree, John stayed inside, under the pretense of feeling sick. He stood at the window, clutching his own symbolic gift—a family portrait in a family-made macaroni frame. He was not feeling inferior or muttering stupid to himself.

The earth was cold and hard, but Uly had a small bag of potting soil and some compost so they, each Lawrence except John, took turns digging, breaking up the stubborn clay, and mixing the potting soil with compost in a white painter’s bucket.

            “Yer yard was so bare, Pop.” Wayne put his hand on his father’s shoulder, triumphantly.

            “Well” Lorena interjected, sailing in between them with a blue coffee pot “you kids never come around here anymore.”  She peered into the mugs to make sure none were empty; “We’re too old to be working in the yard every day, Wayne.”

            “That’s what this tree means, Mom,” Wayne blurted out, blushing, feeling that he’d said too much: “It means we’re going to be here now, more often...” He stopped and scratched his expanding bald spot. Nobody said anything, some smiled at the ground. Dean lumbered over to administer a good ol’ back slap: “heeyaah big fella.”

“Aan and, this is good, for us, aand the kids.” He lingers on the word kids, mouthing it unconsciously. Then he sniffled: “He’s left the dark place, I guess, Dean. Right?”

“Mmm, fella.”

After a light lunch, the whole Lawrence family bundled up and walked the train tracks to the tide pools. Julie ran ahead of the group and, after some brief argument with his mother, Dean Jr., “Junior” for short, chased her. Vera and Diana joked at the clumsy novelty of only children playing together, but Junior and Julie were too far gone to care.

“Can’t catch me!” She turned and yelled when she noticed he was following her. She had on black leggings and her pink jacket matched her leg warmers. She was right, Junior’s jet-puffed jacket and oversized boots wouldn’t allow him the necessary free movement to run fast; his clumbsy knees clapped together on every stride, no matter how hard he tried to keep them apart.

They got to the tide pools far ahead of the rest of the group. It was around one o’clock and it was gray and foggy. They climbed out on the mossy rocks. Furious waves sent silver mists swirling all around them. The water made the moss slick so they crab walked to keep their balance until they got to the very tip of where the rocks thrust out into the water. Then they sat there, looking into the largest tide pool they’d ever seen: large flexing blue-green anemones, pink crusty starfish. Julie looked back to where the path down to the tide pools broke off from the road. Their parents were still specks in the distance. She pushed up her sleeve and reached deep into the pool.

“What are you doing?” Junior asked as he watched Julie using her little fingernails to pry a starfish from the rocks. She didn’t answer. When the starfish came loose, it left some small sticky white feet where it used to be.

“Dare you to bite into it.” She held it to him, sticker side pointing at his face. The corner of his mouth twitched involuntarily. The starfish slowly bent toward him. Some slime oozed from the stickers it had lost. Junior lost then regained some peanut butter and banana sandwich.

“I will if you will” he told her. She shrugged and sunk her two front teeth into a small part of one of the corners. She chewed.

“How is it?”

Like the toughest piece of beef-jerky ever, she thought, or a leather boot.

“Good,” she’d said, “Like chicken.” Then she handed the starfish to Junior who used his  K9s to bite into it, then set it back, maimed, into the pool; it oozed some and drifted to the bottom like a leaf. “Blehk,” he said.

“I think I have some of it still in my braces,” Julie said. Looking back she saw her parents coming across the beach, nearly to the rock cliffs. Behind them both the gold sun urged through a soft gray layer of cloud. Like piss in snow.

3.

9:02 am, by her watch.

Julie toe-heel creeps down the upstairs hallway and through the second plywood door on the left. She locks the door behind her, crosses the soft blue room to a double bed near the window, and opens a green corduroy daypack.  She takes out a Canon digital SLR, a Pentax K1000 and a large sack with many rolls of undeveloped film and a few new rolls, still in boxes. Below her, on the ground floor, the rest of her family clear the dishes from the table and waddle, stuffed, to the nearest comfy chair. Someone’s labored footsteps lumber up the stairs and stop at her door. Dean, she thinks, though of course it’s not.

            “Julia.” A low cigarette stained voice accompanies a soft knock at the door. Her father. Julie opens the door so Wayne, holding his stomach, can shuffle into the room and collapse, face down, on the cluttered blue comforter. Many groans follow.

            “Dad?”

            “Hrmpf?”

            “Sorry about the tree.”

“Hrmpf.”

 Julie sits down beside her father and takes his left hand in her own. “How can something I thought was so good” Wayne says into the pillow, “have turned out so bad?” She rubs his back and decided to let him rest. She places her lips on the golden wedding band for a second, then picks up the Pentax with a black and white roll of film and leaves the room.

She will use film. The light today will be good for film.

4.

The Lawrences have two more wonderful Christmases before they begin to gather for Easter and Thanksgiving too. By 1996, when Wayne broke his foot, they had all had become the best of friends; they’d developed inside jokes, and even called each other throughout the year: just to say hey, how are ya, how’ve you been.

Julie and Junior kept in especially close contact. Since both were only children, they cherished their newfound companionship and, though long distance prevented physical contact and long distance charges often prevented even the meager comfort of grainy voices, they devised a system whereby they could nearly always feel the other’s presence: this system was “the dare.”

After that first dare with the starfish, they began to raise the stakes. Secretly, over the phone in the middle of the night, they began to give each other directions about some task or other that was sure to cause general mayhem. They could get confirmation that the task was completed when parents would call one another, lamenting the “awful” deed the other child had done, how severely they had been grounded, yadda yadda yadda. In this way, both were nearly always grounded and, thus, united by their mutual imprisonment.

The “Tree in the Front Yard,” meanwhile, was watered every day by Uly. This was in spite of protest from Lorena, who had always been afraid of dying alone and could not help thinking that some misfortune might befall Uly while navigating the treacherous crabgrass in the front yard.

Her mother had sighed alone in her house for decades after her husband passed. Her grandmother had done the same. The women came to feel that their good health was their cross to bear.  Yes, as Catholics, they came to accept their misfortune, knowing that few things are better for the soul than suffering. Yet neither could imagine a “suffering” greater than “good health” and were overjoyed at the onset of illness. “Child,” they had confided in Lorena from the same position on different unadjustable deathbeds, “it is always better to die sooner, rather than later.” It was for this reason that she had married Uly; a hard drinking Russian with an Ellis Islanded name, Uly was a man seemingly preserved by liquor: at 30 he had looked 20 and yet drank as much as 2 or 3 men his size.  He often took a drink instead of laughing, that is, on days when he was untroubled enough by the non-existence of god to want to laugh. The universe was truly bleak.

Still, taking nothing for granted, Lorena remained vigilant: throughout her married life she maintained a level of stress that was sure kill her promptly, or at least before her godless husband. She attended church multiple times a week (not because she was devout, but because it was a great source of guilt) and accepted all the sins of those around her as her own as her own, making them up as necessary (“forgive me father for I have sinned, I have eaten my mother’s cookies. I am sorry”). She nearly had a heart attack (and immediately regretted that she didn’t) when Uly announced he was going to stop drinking. When they received the plant, anticipating Uly’s dogged watering, Lorena began sneaking out of bed in the middle of the night to pour Vinegar around base of the trunk—anything to keep Uly inside, safe and alive. Life continued this way until the Christmas of 1996.

That year, because their grandparents had a large house and because Julie and Junior were nearly the same age and so much younger than everyone else, they had been able to successfully petition the adults for their own room. Of course they barely slept, or fell asleep on the floor next to dog-eared books, flimsy paper fortune-tellers or large sheets brought down from their closet: Julie had received a small camera for her birthday and enjoyed posing Junior dressed up like a sultan. And so it happened, on that Christmas morning, while they supposed the rest of the family was sleeping, that they woke-up on the floor of that room, lying on their stomachs, facing each other.

They immediately picked up where they left off last night. They had been discussing a new development: Junior was twelve, beginning to “notice” the girls at school and, well, child-jeans in the mid-90s were not particularly accommodating when it came to that area. They both puzzled over this misfortune for some time until Julie came up with a proposition.

“Hey,” she said, swinging her legs under her so that she was sitting, now, hugging her knees.

“Yeah,” Junior said, copying her.

“I think you need some practice with this whole lady problem of yours,” She glanced around the room, then got up and grabbed a pillow from her bed, “here,” she said.

 “What am I supposed to do with that?”

“Am I gonna have to explain everything to you?” she sighed, “Jeeze. Take this pillow and show me what you’d do to one of these girls, if you got the chance. If you know what to do, maybe you won’t get so… excited…” Junior raised an eyebrow at her. “Listen, do you want my help, or not?” Junior nodded. She bit her bottom lip, “I am a girl after all, I can give you pointers.”

“Right here?”

“Where else?”

“I dunno, I’d be nervous, plus I… I wouldn’t know where to start…”

“Jeeze you’re such a kid,” Julie sighed, “I guess, if you’re gonna be such a kid about it, you can go in there” she pointed at the mirrored door to the closet.

“What’s that gonna prove? You won’t even be able to see me.”

“Uhg!” She socked him in the arm, “Since you’re too much of a baby to start doing anything to the pillow in front of me, you just go in the closet and start up and I’ll open the door, when you’re already in the middle of it. That way you don’t have to worry about performing and I can just uh… catch you in the act. It’s so obvious.”

Dean Jr. looked at Julie for a few more seconds, expecting her to crack up laughing, but she didn’t. She looked bothered, she was blushing in a certain way that he’d never seen before. Not wanting to upset her any further, he agreed and climbed into the closet with the pillow.

He put the pillow down and sat at the opposite end of the closet. He stared at it for some time. It was a white pillow with lase at one end and some of Julie’s light drool stains on the other. Then he heard Julie press herself against the door.

“I don’t hear you in there!” she said. He figured he had to make some noise at least. For inspiration, he grabbed the pillow.

At first, the noises he made sounded obviously faked, and Julie groaned on the other side of the door. Soon, however, he was fully involved with the pillow. He was so involved, in fact, that he didn’t notice if Julie said anything or not; he wasn’t aware of anything besides himself and the pillow, onto which he projected an amalgam girls from his class. He took the pillow, put it on the floor, and mounted it, romantically, imitating Connery from the Bond films. He squeezed his eyes shut and his tongue was making a wet spot in the fabric. Finally, he let out a groan, loud, natural; surely one that wouldn’t make Julie think faking anymore, he thought. Then he opened his eyes, just a little, to see if she had opened the door and observed his success, deep in the act of making it with a pillow. Indeed, the lights were on—in his passion, he had not realized that the whole room was lit up. He turned to look at Julie’s reaction.

What he found instead was his whole family—Grandma, Grandpa, John, Wayne, Dad, Mom, Marianne, Linda, Vera, Diana, Luz—all gaping mouthed, stunned, motionless. He stood up, too startled to think that standing up so soon would be the last thing he should do; Lorena turned to her husband and crumpled into his arms, howling in an anguished gasp: “My God! Jesus in heaven! Someone fix that boy’s pants!” Then he saw Julie, between Luz’s skort and Diana’s Hip-hugging Levis, raising a small silver-bodied, black-nosed creature to her right eyeball. There was a golden flash.

Krystal quickly shut the door to the closet, and Dean Jr. was left in the dark while the rest of his family shuffled his grandmother out of the room. After a few minutes he could hear Wayne’s voice from the front yard: “Aaah, fuck!... I’m okay… No No, I’m okay I just needa walk it off… Fuck, man.”

5.

Julie creeps back down the stairs and bounds—quickly, so as to remain unnoticed—past the kitchen and through the dining room. In the kitchen, at the sink, both Deans are scrubbing egg scum from the flower-laden dishes. A small brown radio on the counter plays “Pictures of Home” by Deep Purple. The two grown men avoid making eye contact. Feeling their movements coincide too naturally with the rhythm of the song, they deliberately make awkward jerky motions, grit their teeth, clench their buttocks: anything to prevent an outward display of “liking” the music, or of enjoying the “bonding” time washing dishes afforded them.

Krystal updates her Facebook status to something “Christmassy” and surfs around the pages of her old friends: some from High School, others from her twenties, etc. She gaffaws at a post from an old roommate: a picture of her dancing with “Jeffery” the Cat, under it the quote “we’re the party people night and day.”  No one around her seems to have noticed her gaffaw, so she does it again. When, still, no one notices, she clicks on the response box and tries to think of something from the old days to post—a memory from all those high heeled nights, light headed from all that hairspray, jamming to the dance club after work. But she can’t think of anything to say except “I don’t think Mikey really touched all those kids, did he?” She gives up and closes her laptop. She calls her mother and leaves a message: “Hey mom, Merry Christmas. Call me back soon. If it’s after 12 I might not answer cause I’ll be helping take a tree out of our front yard. I’ll explain later. Love you.”

6.

In 1997, nobody thought about the Tree in the Front Yard. That was also the year that Grandmother Lorena died.

“The Closet Perversion” as the pillow incident was known in the Lawrence family thereafter, though rarely spoken of, was generally accepted to have been, if not the direct cause, then at least related to her declining health. She died on October 3^rd, in her bed. The funeral was on October 8th, a Friday. They gathered the Sunday after at San Gregorio State Beach to spread her ashes.

            They decided on San Gregorio instead of a beach in Santa Cruz because they thought it’d be sunnier and less crowded. They were right about the crowds, but not about the sun. It was overcast and cold.

Dean (he was now “Just Dean”) was wearing shorts and a t-shirt and the first thing Julie said to him, when she saw him, shivering, after a half a year of silence, was “you’re underdressed.” She was wearing a jean jacket over a black hoodie. She had a camera around her neck. Just Dean said nothing.

            “Alright,” Julie said, “Do we need to talk about this?”

            “No.” Dean was nearly fifteen, had grown his hair out long and was wearing a shirt with the cover of Nirvana’s Bleach on it. “You got your braces off,” he told her.

            “Yup!” she leaned into Dean’s face, stuck her index fingers at the sides of her mouth and stretched her lips apart, “see!” Her breath smelled like the burger she had for lunch. There could have been bacon on it. She plopped herself down next to Dean, and they watched the waves while their parents made awkward small talk and set up the barbeque.

Uly sat alone, shivering, with one blue blanket covering his whole body. He hadn’t wanted to talk that day, he hadn’t said much since his wife died. The remaining sons tried to console him: “she’s in a better place,” John had said, “be happy for her”; “She’s with Ricky now,” Wayne had said, “climbing that tower to the light place, to god”; “hmm, humm” Dean had affirmed, handing his father a drink (Uly had started drinking again). When it came time to heave Lorena, his wife, the mother of his children, his friend, his companion, out into the ocean, Uly stood-up silently; he rolled-up his pant legs, retrieved the ashes from John’s car, and walked, businesslike, into the ocean. No one followed him; they were all moved.

            Uly walked deep into the ocean. The waves soaked his Dockers, made his knees buckle; at one point it looked as if he were certainly going down. But he kept trudging forward. When the water got to his hips, he stuck the urn under his arm like a football and charged into the waves, ducking his head into the strong wind. Julie squeezed Dean’s elbow: “Should he be going in that deep?”

            When the water got up to his waist, he lifted the urn over his head. The waves were hitting him in the chest now and he was forced a few steps back with every impact. Still he continued. Linda grabbed hold of John, and Krystal began to ask Dean Sr., again, if it was a good idea, should they let Uly just do that.

He’d gotten in up to his ribcage, waves socking him in the face, when he stopped. He drew a breath and ducked his head into wave after wave. Then he turned around to face his family. Still holding the urn above his head, he shook it in their direction. He drew a deep breath and for a moment it looked like he was about to say something, finally, after the last five days. The beach was silent, riveted, hanging on Uly’s every move. And as they watched his lips they were not looking out, to see if there were swells on their way, rising, say, almost breaking, but not yes, behind Uly. Uly opened his mouth finally, and triumphantly said: “FffuMah!”

Before he could get out whatever it was he was saying, the wave had pounced on him. The urn went flying, lid off, mother of his children swarming up in a big greasy cloud, choking him as he batted at the water for air: “LlllOoreenaaa!” Immediately John and Dean Sr.raced to his aid. Wayne was initially too stunned to move, but when he saw that his brothers were being pulled underwater by their flailing father he set down his beer, flung off his 1800PETFOOD t-shirt, and raced into the ocean crying “hold on Pop!”

            First it looked like John had Uly on his feet, but then a wave came and toppled them both until the burly Dean Sr. picked them up, “hang on little fellas, woap,” and lost his footing. After Wayne ran into the water his wife joined him, followed by Vera and then Linda. One after one they piled on top of each other, pummeled each other, gasped for air covered in the thick fatty ashes of their august matriarch.

 Krystal ran into the parking lot for her cell phone and help. Dean stayed with Julie on the beach. Julie put the Pentax camera to her right eyeball and snapped four or five golden shots. It had started to clear up--the clouds were being swept east. The way the moon could be seen chasing the sun over these sheer northern Californian beach cliffs…

“They say” Julie said, “whenever you can see the sun and the moon at the same time it means there’s extra magic in the air.”

“Who says that?” But Julie didn’t bother answering. Then Dean started to shiver so she gave him her jean jacket. It took a good ten minutes for the seven exhausted, humiliated people, thrashing about in the remains of their dearly departed, to get back on the beach safely.

“Can I see those pictures when you’re done?” Dean said to Julie as they all packed their things. “They’ve got to be hilarious.”

“They’re not hilarious, they’re in earnest,” Julie replied, “Everything I do is in earnest. You’ll see them. Maybe. Someday.” They all went home after that. 

7.

            Wayne lies motionless, face down on the blue comforter until he hears Julie talking to Linda in the livingroom. Then he leaps to his feet. He flicks the lock on the door, sprawls onto his belly and shimmies under the bed until his gut stops him from getting any further. He strains with his right hand, searching the fabric on the bottom of the box spring for something that’s got to beee there. He flips himself onto his back and searches with his left hand. Goddamn, he thinks, goddamn, but then he finds it—yes, the fist-sized hole. He shoves his hand up through it and gropes some more until his pudgy fingers close around the smooth, cool neck of a bottle. He clenches his jaw to keep from letting out a joy-squeal.

            He takes the bottle from the box-spring and sits cross-legged on the carpet, like a kindergartener during “silent sustained reading time.” He flicks the cap off with his thumb, and it spins off, goes flying across the room. He swigs from the bottle, gasps, and jerks his neck to the left: yyeeah. The ritual: the shiver, to be countered by the general plague on all Lawyers’ houses; the brief gag, the stagnant days old water on the nightstand. Rinse, repeat.

            He stands up and goes to the dresser. He opens the top drawer, slides undies and socks to the left, and takes out a small manila envelope. He sifts through its contents. He spits. Motherfuckers, he smiles. He moves to sliding glass door to the balcony and looks out onto the Tree in the Front Yard. He takes a long swig and doesn’t chase it. He steps onto the balcony.

8.   

In the Spring of 1997, before his mother died, Wayne began a business selling pet supplies over the phone. Somehow he had got a “connection”: a guy in Lomita who was supposedly able to get “all kinds of pet supplies for cheaper than retail, bro.” All he needed was a cash backer, maybe a guy to do the selling. So Wayne got a loan, his credit was still good then, quit his job at the Griffith Park Observatory, and went into business.

The idea was that you’d call Wayne and have him send you a catalogue. Then you’d find whatever it was you wanted in the catalogue, call Wayne back, and he’d bring it on over to your house—provided you were located relatively near Pasadena. Unbelievably, Wayne did very, very well. So well in fact they’d been able to hire more and more Waynes to do the driving. Eventually the Company moved into a Warehouse just little north of Long Beach. A compound. Wayne then had a business and a compound.

 When Uly heard that one of his sons had finally gone into business for himself, he slapped phone on the counter, yipeed (nearly laughed), and had Dean Jr. pour him a drink. By 1998 Wayne and his family moved into a big new house in the hills of Glendale and the Lawrence family was beckoned to gather for Christmas once again. Dean’s family had moved into Grandpa’s house, so they all piled into Krystal’s Dodge Caravan and made the trip down Highway 5. John and Linda flew from Oregon.

Everyone was awestruck with Wayne’s new house—the gorgeous terracotta facade, the intricate Japanese style front yard: they had two Chinese Pistachs. Marianne greeted them at the door in; she was in her bathing suit and told them “everyone” was in the jacuzzi out back. Krystal borrowed a swimsuit from Marianne and Dean Sr. borrowed one from Wayne. Dean Jr. did not feel like swimming. Neither did Uly.

There’s a well-tanned buff stranger in a lawn chair by the pool. Julie butterflies under the water and surfaces at Dean’s feet. She’s wearing a white bikini. She spits a mouthful of water onto his jeans.

“Hey,” she said, folding her arms on the ledge and resting her chin on her wrist.

“Hey,” Dean told her, “who’s that?” He nodded in the direction of the tanning buff dude.

“Mario.”

“Mario Mario or Luigi Mario?”

“Come on,” she smirked, “I’ll introduce you.”

She kicked off the side of the wall and back-stroked across the pool. Dean walked around the pool, Grandpa following behind. Julie lifted herself from the pool, strutted to one of the lounge chairs next to Mario and picked up a towel to wipe the water from her face.

“Grandpa, Dean,” she gestured with a loose hand, “this is Mario. Mario, this is my grandfather and Little Dean Lawrence.” Mario and Dean shook hands and grunted. Mario offered his hand to Uly, but Uly just sat down on one of the chairs, and dropped his head in his hands.

“Goddamn southern California,” Uly muttered, “no weather for Christmas.” His nose hairs twitched in his furious breath. He turns to Mario, gritting his teeth; “you put on a shirt, young man,” Uly’s eyes widen, “You cover you’re damn pectorals, they are offending Jesus on the god-blessed day of his virgin birth.”

“Grandpa..” Julie started to say, appalled, but Grandpa cut her off, slamming one varicose-vained fist on his knee: “You, young lady, you’ve got no business being all hot and bothered on the day of sweet Jesus’s blessed virgin birth. Now put more clothes on. Put much more clothes on. Put as many goddamned clothes on as possible.” Then Uly stood and stormed inside muttering something about stiff ones, bastards and metrosexuals (a term he had heard on the news and was confused by). “I’m happy for you, Wayne” Uly had said later, “but these Southern Californians…”

They had brunch that day, instead of a dinner. Wayne cooked tri-tip and Marianne had made a large salad and some potatoes.

“How do you like the hot tub?” Marianne asked, over and over again at dinner, “I simply had to get a house with a hot tub, didn’t I Wayne?” Wayne nods between bites of steak. “I had one in the house I grew up in,” Marianne continued, “but well, let’s face it, Wayne hadn’t been the most successful man in the world, now was he?” She laughed and glanced around at us for encouragement. She apparently found it because she continued, “He was always so bright, so bright, but the fates just didn’t want us to have it easy now did they? But now! Well, things certainly are looking up.”

After dinner, the rest of the family got back in the Hot Tub while Uly and Dean sat in their rooms reading. Christmas was on a Friday that year. They stayed another day and drove home Sunday.

In the summer of 1999 Wayne found Marianne blue, pruned and stark naked in the hot tub. That Spring, Wayne had been served a cease and desist letter from Sterner & Sterner Law Firm, followed shortly by a court hearing in which it was determined that, one thing leading to another in the usual, unpredictable way, Wayne was not to step foot within a half a mile of Executive Julie Wainwright, or the Pets.com compound.

Wayne’s speech at the hearing did not help things along:

“Assault! PFFAH, I wasn’t even, but hey that car had a lot more than a golf club comin’ to it and… Drunk? You’re calling me drunk? Well I highly doubt you can tell that at this moment in time, as I stand here before you and it is my contention that 1800PETFOOD was a completely original company, but Drunk? Under the circumstances, no you cant tell that, I’m stressed, who wouldn’t be after that *****…”

At Linda’s funeral, nobody talked about Wayne losing his business or how his partner made a deal and merged with Pets.com to avoid the lawsuit, or the restraining order he’d received for beating up Ms. Wainwright’s Miata with a 5 iron. No one talked about Wayne’s new habit of smoking menthols or his new earring or his sudden fondness for the music of the Birthday Party. Shortly after Wayne was forced to file for bankruptcy and move in with Uly, Krystal, and the Deans. He drank heavily. “Not like I didn’t try!” he often ranted to the family, “Motherfuckers just have the money. It was My idea, Mydea!”

Initially it was hard for him to talk to Julie—that his daughter shared a name with the woman who put him out of business… well, rage, it caused him fits of rage. She had moved out of his house some time ago and was living in Silverlake with a number of UCLA grads who fancied themselves bohemians. 

“A cruel joke,” Wayne had told his therapist, “the woman who screwed me over has the same damn name as my only damn daughter. Who’d a figured on that?”

This coincidence eventually drove him to develop a belief in God. When he was not drinking, he was reading the Book of Job. Sometimes he even combined the two. On these nights he would call the Pets.com hotline and read passages into the automated voice machine—one of the main reasons they developed a special “what to do if you feel your life is in danger” section of the Pets.com employee handbook. “To know God is to suffer!” he would shout until he was told to “please hang up and call again. He began going to church multiple times a week, often confessing to sins that were not his own.

A year later, when he found the news article about the demise of Pets.com, he became so elated he quit drinking. He joined an AA group and was “an asset” to the organization, helping many alcoholics, little lost lambs that they were, find their way again. He got a job selling sporting goods at Play It Again Sports. This was in May, and the tree had been full of leaves.

When Wayne told Uly about his new job, Uly was overjoyed. Finally his boy was recovering from what those shitty southern Californian people did to him. He instantly demanded that Dean Jr. make him another drink. As Dean was presently at school—it was 11:30 am—Wayne offered to make one for him instead.

“Don’t skimp on the sauce there Wayne,” Uly warned him, “that’s the special sauce. Red Label.”

As they sat in the living room, Wayne meditating on the tree in the front yard and Uly looking like he had water in his ear, a feeling descended upon Wayne. Maybe it wasn’t a holy feeling, because it was very similar to the feeling he got when he found his other sock, but it was a strong feeling nonetheless. A compulsion to say something. He turned to his father:

“Hey, Pop, did I ever tell you why I liked that tree?” he said, “About the deciduous thing?” Uly’s head twitched and Wayne took that as a No, do tell. “Well, its silly really, but, you know, when a tree starts to get its leaves you know its spring and it’ll be summer soon. That’s when life is supposed to be good—birds are chirping, kids are out of school. All kinds of life, everywhere, and its hot. To be comfortable you need shade. Some peace and quiet.

“But when a tree loses its leaves, you know it’s getting to be winter. That’s, like, the worst time of year. When it’s cold and everyone stays inside so the streets are lonely, people get sick. To be comfortable you need warmth. The one good thing about that time though is that that’s when the holidays are. So you get it?” he put his hand on his father’s knee, “I know it’s kinda stupid, but it’s like we’re the leaves—except we’re people of course—but we’re the leaves that come and bring you comfort in the winter. So when the leaves start to fall, you don’t have to be sad or anything, that just means your family is gonna be here soon… like that tower in Ricky’s band’s song, taking you away from the dark place.. You listening Pop?...”

Uly’s head twitched again.

“Pop?”

No, Uly had not been listening; he was mouth breathing. He had fallen asleep with his eyes open. 

It wasn’t too long after that speech that Wayne found Uly on the ground, beneath the Tree in the Front Yard: cold, stiff, wafting odor of feces and urin, sprawled among the rotten wood splinters of the step-ladder. His sheers were still hanging from a branch on the tree. That was the most recent event requiring family contact. He had immediately gone to the liquor store.

9.

On the pleather couch in the living room, John and his wife, Linda, are awkwardly exchanging large sheets of Newspaper. Julie plops herself in a rocking chair by the window and begins to load the camera. Linda’s cellphone barks: text from youngest daughter Lily. Linda shows the text to John, who smiles, kisses Linda on the forehead, and continues reading about the assorted heroics of Tom Brady. Linda replies to the text and sets her phone back on the arm rest. Linda watches Julie’s cautious, deliberate movements. All those pictures, Linda thinks, and we’ve yet to see one developed. She shrugs.

The Deans finish the dishes and go into their separate rooms. Krystal, having thought up something to say to her old friend, returns to Facebook. Linda cozies herself under John’s arm, and falls asleep staring out the window, awaiting the fate of the deciduous abomination in the front yard.

The sun is not shining, it seems trapped behind clouds. A Blue Jay lands on the Tree in the Front Yard. It lingers for a moment then fucks off into the sunless horizon. It is 9:30 am. A faded blue Datsun truck farts past the driveway. A slender yellow stream falls on leafless branches. Soon.