Falling for June: A Novel by Ryan Winfield Page A

If you had to wash dishes it was a nice view. I was looking at the tree, focusing on being quiet, when the phone rang. I nearly dropped a plate. I turned around, but Mr. Hadley had not woken so I stepped over and caught the phone off the wall midway through the second ring.
    “Hello.” I cupped my hand over the mouthpiece to muffle the sound.
    “Yes, hello, Mr. Hadley,” the voice on the other end of the phone said. “I’m calling from the department of planning about your cemetery inquiry.”
    “Oh, no. I’m not . . .”
    Just then the old man opened his eyes and looked at me. I felt more than a little awkward standing in his kitchen on his phone speaking to someone who thought I was him. He looked down at the table, as if searching for the missing dishes. Then he looked back at me.
    “Hello . . . ,” the phone said in my ear. “Mr. Hadley?”
    I hung it up. I’m not sure why, but I just did. I guess I panicked.
    “Who was that?” Mr. Hadley asked, fully awake now.
    I didn’t want to lie so I answered as honestly as I could. “I don’t know, he didn’t say his name. I didn’t want to wake you. I’m sorry I answered your—”
    “It’s fine,” he said. “I get wrong numbers calling almost every day. And people selling siding or awnings or Lord-knows-what. They really are pushy. Sometimes I talk to them if I’m bored. You might be surprised to know that you can keep one of those time-share salespeople on the line for a good four hours before they’ll give up and call someone else.She never did send me my prize, now that I’m thinking about it. Say, where’d my sandwich run off to?” he asked. “I hadn’t touched it yet.”
    After we had finished cleaning up the kitchen together, despite his trying to shoo me off again, he softened an apple in the microwave and chopped it into slices. I was worried that they were for us—I’d had quite enough fiber already—until he squeezed on a little lemon juice and said, “She’s blind as a beetle and can’t really tell if they’re brown, but I prefer them to look nice when I feed them to her.”
    Then I thought maybe they were for June—since her whereabouts were still a mystery to me. But he dried the apple slices in a paper towel and handed them to me to carry, then grabbed his cane and walked me out to the barn.
    The barn was across the drive and down a bit, at the edge of a field. It was even more weathered than the house, with only a few remaining flakes of red paint clinging to its exterior walls. The big door was already slid half open on its tracks and I followed him inside. It was dim and smelled of hay and moist dirt. Shafts of sunlight filtered in through old skylights that had been mended and covered over with green tarps.
    “I don’t bother to turn the lights on anymore, since Rosie’s the only one left and can’t see a thing anyway,” he said. “I came out here once in the middle of the night to check on her in a storm, and every bulb was burned out, it had been so long since I’d turned on the switch. Have you ever heard a thunderstorm from inside an old, empty barn? You don’t know whether to feel awestruck or forsaken. It’s quite a sound. June and I spent the night in a barn once, waiting out a rainstorm. But I’ll get to that later.”
    By the time he finished talking we had arrived at the last stall. He hung his cane on a hook and slid the stall door open, almost without thought, as if he had done it a hundred timesbefore, even though the effort appeared to take a lot out of him. An old black mare was lying on her side in the back of the stall. Her head was lifted, as if she’d heard us coming. Her eyes were milky white. David entered the stall and signaled for me to follow. I held the apple slices out on the towel and he took one and fed it to the old horse.
    “Not exactly the crunch of a fresh-picked apple, is it?” he said, feeding her another. “But then she hasn’t got many teeth left, have you, you old