Belonging Read Free Page A

“Hell, I have no
idea. Let’s just say it’s a big, fat tangerine.”
    “That wasn’t on my shopping
list.”
    “I know. I think it’d do you good to
expand your diet a bit, so every week, I’m going to bring you one
new item. I’m starting easy.”
    “I don’t want it. Take it
away.”
    “Don’t fear the fruit,
Zan.”
    “I don’t fear the damn thing, I just
don’t want it in my kitchen!”
    “Tough. I’m not taking it
away.”
    He knit his thick brows at me as he
crossed the room and plucked the orange sphere off the counter. He
then strode to the back door, flung it open, and chucked the
tangelo outside. Zan looked pleased with himself when he turned
back to me, until he realized the tangelo had been immediately
replaced with another. That fruit met the same airborne
fate.
    “You’re totally acting like a child
right now,” I pointed out as he turned toward me again and found
yet another tangelo in the spot previously occupied by the other
two.
    “Bloody hell. Are you shitting those
things out?”
    “Now there’s an attractive visual.” He
grabbed the latest fruit and I did, too, leaning over the kitchen
island to get in his face. We were the same height, about six-two,
and I held his gaze as I said, “Stop throwing these! You’re not
six. Actually, that’s beneath even my six-year-old
nephew.”
    “I’ll stop throwing them if you
promise to stop improvising! There’s a list. Just stick with
it!”
    “It’s not good to be so rigid. You
need to open yourself up to new experiences, or else what are you
going to be like five or ten years down the road?”
    He let go of the fruit and
straightened up, his green eyes flashing. “I don’t recall asking
your opinion.”
    “I don’t recall needing to wait until
I’m asked.” He’d had enough of me by that point and started to
return to the den. I called after him, “I’m going to be doing yard
work for a couple hours, just so you know. If you decide you
actually want to have a conversation with someone, you know where
to find me.” The door clicked shut behind him and I frowned at
it.
    I gathered up the grocery sacks and
went back down the long hallway leading to the side door. The walls
were lined with a couple dozen gold and platinum records. Zan
Tillane had been a famous pop star, one of the biggest in the
world. But that was a long time ago.
    He hadn’t left his house in more than
a decade. His son and I’d had long conversations about how much of
this isolation was voluntary, and how much might stem from some
kind of mental illness. Zan was definitely bipolar, there was no
doubt about that. But was he also agoraphobic, paranoid, or any of
the other diagnoses that doctors had tried to assign to him over
the years? I really didn’t know.
    When Zan first disappeared from the
public eye, it had set off a firestorm of publicity, far more than
he’d probably ever anticipated. All kinds of stories sprang up, in
the form of urban legends, movies, documentaries and countless
rumors. Whatever his goal had been when he tried to walk away from
it all, the end result was this. He lived his life totally cut off
from the world and if he ever tried to go back, the paparazzi would
pretty much swallow him whole. Given that, it might be a good thing
that he seemed to have no interest in ever leaving his
home.
    But how could he stand so much
isolation? The only person he spoke to regularly was his son, and
he kept a lawyer on retainer to deal with anything that cropped up.
That was the sum total of his social interaction, not counting me.
And I really didn’t count, since he had very little interest in
speaking to me.
    After stopping off in the tool shed, I
started working around the perimeter of the house. The sprawling
ranch-style behemoth was partially built into the side of a hill.
It appeared to be one story when you drove up to it, but around
back, two lower stories were revealed. The house sat by itself amid
rolling, tree-dotted grassy hills,