Remarkably Bright Creatures(9)

The landlord opens his mouth, then snaps it shut.

“Case closed. No snakes.” Cameron folds his arms, which are at least twice the diameter of Delmonico’s. Bicep day’s been lit at the gym lately.

Delmonico does actually look like he’d prefer to leave. Studying his shoes, he grumbles, “If that’s even true, the snake-eyelid thing . . . there are ordinances. Blame the county for that, if you want, but when someone reports that one of my properties has a pest infestation—”

“I told you, no snakes!” Aunt Jeanne throws her hands up. Her cane lands on the grass. “You heard my nephew. No eyelids! You know what it is? Sissy Baker’s jealous of my garden.”

“Now, Jeanne.” Delmonico holds up a hand. “Everyone knows you have a lovely garden.”

“Sissy Baker’s a liar, and blind to boot!”

“Be that as it may, there are safety codes. If something creates a hazardous situation—”

Cameron takes a step toward him. “I don’t think anyone wants a hazardous situation.” It’s a bluff, mostly. Cameron hates fighting. But shrimp-on-a-stick here doesn’t need to know that.

Looking almost comically startled, Delmonico pats his pocket, then makes a show of pulling out his phone. “Hey, sorry. Need to take this.”

Cameron snickers. The old fake phone call. This guy sucks.

“Just trim it back a little, okay, Jeanne?” he yells over his shoulder as he crunches down the gravel walkway toward the road.

IT TAKES CAMERON the better part of an hour to prune the clematis, fielding Aunt Jeanne’s picky instructions while balanced on a stepladder. A little more there. No, not so much! Trim down the left. I meant right. No, I meant left. Down below, Aunt Jeanne collects the snipped-off stems and purple flowers in a yard waste bag.

“Is that thing about the snakes true, Cammy?”

“Sure it is.” He climbs down the ladder.

Aunt Jeanne frowns. “So, for real, no snakes in my clematis, right?”

Cameron glances at her sidelong as he strips off his gloves. “Have you seen a snake in your clematis?”

“Uh . . . no?”

“Well, there’s your answer.”

Aunt Jeanne grins, opening her back door, shoving aside a stack of newspapers with the tip of her cane. “Stay and visit, hon. D’you want coffee? Tea? Whiskey?”

“Whiskey? Seriously?” It’s not even ten in the morning. Cameron’s stomach lurches at the thought of booze. He ducks under the door frame and blinks, adjusting to the low light inside, letting out a breath of relief at the state of the place. It’s bad, of course. But no worse than last time. For a while, the junk seemed to be breeding with itself like a bunch of horny rabbits.

“Plain coffee, then,” she says with a wink. “You’re getting old, Cammy. No fun these days!”

He grumbles something about having too much fun last night, and Aunt Jeanne nods in her slightly amused way. Clearly, she can tell he’s riding the struggle bus this morning. Maybe he really is getting old. Thirty is a bitch so far.

She shuffles the mess of boxes and papers on her tiny kitchen counter in search of her coffee maker. Cameron picks up the paperback sitting on top of a pile of junk that has nearly buried her rickety little desk, an ancient desktop computer humming somewhere beneath the heap. The book is a romance, one of those ones with a shirtless muscled guy on the front. He tosses it back down, causing a stack of piled-up crap to cascade to the carpet.

When did she get like this? The collecting, as she calls it. She was never like this when he was growing up. Sometimes Cameron passes through their old neighborhood back in Modesto, the two-bedroom house where she raised him. That house was always clean. A few years back, she sold it to help pay off the medical bills from the summer before. Turns out, getting knocked out in the parking lot of Dell’s Saloon costs a fortune, and it wasn’t even Aunt Jeanne’s fault. Some asshole guys from out of town were making trouble, and she was just trying to get everyone to simmer down. Somehow, she took a punch to the side of her head and ended up flat on the pavement. A bad concussion, a shattered hip, months of physical and occupational therapy. Cameron had ditched a decent job with a restoration company, one that could’ve led to an apprenticeship, to care for her, sleeping on her couch so she’d remember her meds and driving her to and from the brain-injury specialist in Stockton. Every afternoon, he met the mailman on the porch, opening the door quietly so she wouldn’t notice. His pathetic savings account held off the collectors for a little while.

When Aunt Jeanne finally sold the house, she had just turned fifty-two, the age requirement for Welina residents. For reasons that still baffle Cameron, instead of getting a regular apartment or something, she decided to use the small amount of cash left over to buy this trailer and move out here. Was that when the collecting started? Is this dump of a trailer park causing it?

Still railing about how Sissy Baker has had it out for her since the misunderstanding at the Welina potluck last summer (Cameron doesn’t ask for details), she sets down two steaming mugs on the coffee table and motions for him to sit next to her on the sofa.

“So how’s work been?”

Cameron shrugs.

“You got canned again, didn’t you?”

He doesn’t answer.

Aunt Jeanne’s eyes narrow. “Cammy! You know I pulled strings down at the county office to get you on that project.” Aunt Jeanne still works part-time at the reception desk at the county office. She’s been there for years. Of course, she knows everyone. And yeah, the project was a big one. An office park on the outskirts of town. Still didn’t matter: ten measly minutes late on his second day, and the asshole foreman told him to pack it. Was it Cameron’s fault the foreman had zero capacity for empathy?