Orphan Pirates of the Spanish Main Read Free Page A

most dogs better than we like most people—but something’s weighing on him. This cooking business is just the tip of the iceberg. I’m thinking the worst, some horrible wasting disease. Guilt geysers up inside of me. I haven’t been the best brother in the world, and now he has weeks to live. I feel awful.
    He doesn’t care. It’s not about me. When I get him alone, he confesses that he and Camille are separated, that she said she couldn’t stand to live with a seventy-one-year-old man who still has serious issues with his parents when they’ve been dead for more than forty years. She said some things that weren’t very nice, made all the worse because they were true. Ollie’s a mess.
    â€œIssues? She says ‘issues’?” She’s a semi-retired counselor, though I’m not sure who or what she counsels about.
    He nods, snuffles. “She’s right,” he says.
    Maybe she is, but she doesn’t have to say issues. Makes him sound like a client. He just needs to open his eyes and see. Ollie seems to have no idea what a gift it is to have had exceptional parents. Mom was an artist, though she never tried to sell anything, painting hollowed-out eggs, neckties, paint-by number landscapes with the palette changed so as to depict a scene from her home planet—never anything ordinary and mundane, no big-eyed girls or forlorn clowns. She made sculptures out of trash before everybody was doing that. The house always smelled like one glue or another. She threw herself into mosaics for a while. You never saw her without this tool, like pliers with jaws, that she used to snip the tiles. The sound drove the dog crazy—I guess it reminded her of having her nails cut—so when Mom had completely covered the kitchen counter, she abandoned mosaics so Natasha would come out from under my bed.
    The mosaic was a city with domes and minarets and obelisks and ziggurats. Mom told me what they were when I asked. There was a lot going on. When you looked real close, some little chip of tile up along the roofline looked like a cat, or there were shadowy faces looking out the windows. She made it without a picture or plan or anything. Just snip, snip, snip, gluing down these pieces until she was done. I asked her if it was a real place, and she said, “Not anymore. It’s how I remember it.” The next thing she said was something like “Don’t you have homework?”
    â€œI have to go,” Ollie says to me now. “We both have to go. To the abyss.” The abyss is where Mom and Dad’s earthly lives ended.
    No, we don’t, but I have to say I’m intrigued. This isn’t like him. I figured Ollie gave up on bold symbolic journeys a long time ago. I tried going to the abyss and didn’t make it, thank goodness. Once is enough for me. “All this because of a few allspice berries, an overly cautious soup? What’s going on, Ollie? Oliver. I don’t see the connection.”
    â€œI received a message.”
    â€œA message?”
    â€œFrom Mom.”
    Before I can tell him he’s nuts, he hands me a postcard. On one side is a photo of a sand painting I’ve seen before. On the other is a map of a portion of New Mexico with the abyss marked with a red X. “Your Father Needs You!” is written in Mom’s loopy cursive. It’s postmarked Tucumcari, ten days ago.
    Mom’s last artistic obsession, in the months before she and Dad took off for a vacation in the southwest, was a sand painting. Like the Navajo, she explained. She spent weeks just assembling the jars of different color sand. Dad would bring jars home from his travels. It took her a day and a night to sift the thing onto the garage floor, grain by grain, until it took up the whole garage. I was home for the summer, just out of college. Ollie had his own place, just out of the military. He’d come over for dinner to celebrate our birthdays, a