The Elephant in the Room Read online

  3.

  Alp pushed a button on a call box next to the wooden gates. Right away they heard sharp chirping sounds coming from the trees. Out the windshield Sila could see a small flock of red finches against the gray Oregon sky. The sight of the little birds felt hopeful.

  Her father’s focus was on the intercom. He pressed the button on the box again, and a voice finally said: “Hello . . .”

  “It’s Alp Tekin. I’ve come about your truck.”

  A buzzer sounded and then the wooden gates started to roll open. Sila noticed that they had sturdy metal wheels on the bottom and big, dark metal hinges. Alp drove forward, and up ahead they could see a large, old pink farmhouse, a weathered barn, and an ancient-looking windmill that probably pumped water at one time but was now a lasting monument to a different era. Sila noticed that the front porch was surrounded by interesting overgrown plants. A lot of them were exotic, not like stuff that she’d seen wild in Oregon. “I didn’t know you could grow palm trees here . . .”

  Alp stared at the sago palms. They were tucked around one side of the farmhouse as if drawing warmth from the building. “Me neither.”

  “How come the plants don’t die when it snows?”

  He must not have known the answer, because he said, “Where your mom and I grew up in Turkey, there were places with palm trees.”

  “Yeah, but you guys love pine trees. I think palms are better.”

  “Is something better because you don’t see it all the time?”

  When her dad offered up his ideas they usually came out as questions.

  Maybe her mother right now was sitting in a grove of palm trees. Sila saw that image in her mind’s eye. It was strangely comforting.

  The door to the pink farmhouse opened and an old man came out. He had mostly gray hair, a full white beard, and he was wearing a lemon-yellow jacket. Sila tried to remember if she’d ever seen her father in a yellow jacket. It was possible that he had a raincoat that color. The boys at her school must have thought that bright colors were only for highway workers, because almost everything they wore was blue, gray, brown, or black. Sila looked over at her dad. He had on jeans and a gray shirt. It was as if there were some kind of secret dress code they were all following, she thought. But not this old guy.

  Sila’s dad leaned out the open window on his side of the car. “I brought my daughter. This is Sila. I hope that’s okay.”

  Sila had been taught that it was important to make a good first impression. It was also (according to her mom, who had made a lot of the rules) necessary to make a good second, third, and fourth impression, which was another way to say that her daughter needed to have good manners all the time. Sila tried to smile, but the corners of her mouth had lost whatever natural will they once possessed to turn upward. At least her teeth didn’t stick to her lips. She’d been eating pretzels and her mouth felt salty and dry.

  The older man spoke in a voice that Sila thought sounded like gravel. It was rocky like the road to his farmhouse and there was crunch in his words.

  “I’m Gio. Nice to meet you two. My truck’s in the barn. Drove it in there to give it a break from the rain. The thing’s got enough rust spots. Now I can’t get it started. Should we go take a look?”

  Many times when Alp went to fix a car or truck, it was on the side of the road, or stuck somewhere, like in the mud. He didn’t mind working in the wet weather, but Sila thought the look on his face said he was glad that Gio’s broken vehicle was under cover. It was late spring and in Oregon that meant that the sky could open up in a downpour at any moment that would last for hours.

  Sila swallowed a few times to get rid of the pretzel pieces that were lodged around her mouth between her teeth. Her plan had been to stay in her father’s car while he worked, but then she heard the old man’s voice: “Are you coming with us?”

  Sila looked up at him. She thought of all the excuses for why she was going to stay in the car and was surprised to hear herself say, “Okay. Sure.”

  Alp lifted his toolbox and they both followed Gio. Sila thought the old man moved pretty fast considering his right knee didn’t bend in the same way as his left knee did. One of the rules when she went with her dad on work trips was to approach everyone she met not just with respect but also with caution. You shouldn’t trust someone, she had been taught, until you really knew the person.

  Gio pushed opened the barn’s large double doors and Sila and Alp followed him inside. An old blue pickup was parked in the middle of the cavernous space. Sila wondered if at one time the barn had housed pigs and cows and chickens. She also imagined ponies and geese and sheep. Instead there were just a lot of spiderwebs.

  Alp went to work looking under the hood of the truck, and Sila was unsure if she should wait at his side or whether the old man expected her to talk to him. Then she heard, “I went to the bakery on Route 99 this morning. I have donuts. Would you like one?”

  Sila sat on the front porch of the farmhouse and Gio brought out a plate with a jelly-filled cruller, a chocolate-glazed thug, and a large cinnamon twist. Sila took her time making her choice, but in the end she went for the cinnamon twist because it was the biggest thing on the plate and if her mouth was full she wouldn’t be expected to talk.

  Gio went back inside and returned minutes later with a cup of coffee for himself and a glass of milk for Sila. They ate donuts in silence until all three were gone. Sila was surprised she didn’t feel uncomfortable. The man in the yellow jacket didn’t seem to care about talking. It was a huge relief.

  Sila’s mother had said it wasn’t good manners to stare at your phone if you were with someone else, so Sila resisted the temptation. She drank what was left of the milk and watched the birds in the trees. Gio sipped his coffee. Finally Sila said, “So, did you build that stone wall?”

  “I did not.”

  “The barn is so big. But you don’t have any animals.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Are you a farmer?”

  “I was thinking of farming when I bought this place. But I haven’t done that. I’ve only been out here for a few months.”

  Gio took another sip of his coffee and then he sat back and told her about the last eight months of his life.

  4.

  “For almost thirty years I worked as a carpenter, but then a place called Chinook Modular Housing opened up off River Road. You’re too young to remember when all that land was a blueberry farm.”

  Sila nodded.

  “Well, they plowed under the bushes and built an assembly plant. I took a job out there. We made housing units—Chinook mobile homes.”

  “How do you build a mobile home?”

  “The things start as big metal skeletons that are shipped from China. Those pieces get welded together. After that, a wooden frame goes on, which was my part. Then plumbers and electricians come on board. Once that happened my crew would start all over again on another unit. For sixteen years I built the same thing, the same way, with the same materials, five days a week.”

  Sila took a moment to imagine what his job was like. “Was it boring?”

  Gio laughed. “I could put the thing together with my eyes closed. Well, almost. It wasn’t exciting. But I worked out of the rain. And it took some skill.”

  “Were you allowed to listen to music?”

  “We did do that.”

  “Did you like the other people you worked with?”

  “We were a good group. We had a bowling league and a book club. We needed things to talk about besides each other. We didn’t want to spend too much time gossiping.”

  “My teacher last year said that gossip is telling stories that you don’t know are true. But most of the stuff kids repeated was true. So does that make it gossip?”

  “Hard to say. I think of gossip as being mean.”

  Sila managed a half smile. “I agree.”

 
“Anyway, at one point a bunch of us at work decided to play the lottery.”

  Sila repeated the slogan she’d heard on local television commercials: “Powerball and Mega Millions. Hey! Somebody’s gotta win.”

  “That’s right. Our friend Corey was in charge. Twenty-four of us put in money and Corey bought tickets every week. It was too much trouble after a while picking all the numbers, so we used an online program that chose random ones, but we always used the number twenty-four. Because that was us. Twenty-four Chinook workers. Well, we played the lottery for six years, four months, and three days . . .”

  Gio stopped to take a sip of his coffee. His eyes had lit up, and Sila realized she was holding her breath as she waited. He swallowed his coffee and continued, “When one wet, foggy Saturday—it was October twenty-fourth of this past year—we had the winning ticket.”

  Sila couldn’t help but be excited. “You won!”

  “We did.”

  “Was it a ton of money?”

  “It was. Even split twenty-four ways. It was the largest jackpot in the state’s history. No one had won for eighteen weeks. The prize kept rolling over, getting bigger and bigger.”

  “Did you freak out when you heard the news?”

  “I didn’t believe it at first. It felt like a dream. Or a crazy hoax or scam someone was playing on us. My friend Rosa called me crying. She worked in accounting. I thought her cat had died. She’d been really worried about that cat. But she was happy-crying.”

  “I guess it sounds the same.”

  “Especially when all you hear is someone having trouble breathing. It was a weekend and no one was at work, but we all jumped into cars and met in the Chinook parking lot. We were screaming and shaking and falling all over each other. Dee Dee Pratt even fainted. There are more than a hundred and fifty people who are employed out there, but we were the lucky ones. I can tell you for a fact that come Monday the other workers really weren’t that happy for us.”

  “Maybe they felt left out.”

  “It was like someone died. They walked around with their heads down, trying to smile but really filled with grief. Even the president of the company, a guy named Ronnie Roberts, didn’t come in for three days. That’s how much it shook people up. And yes, of course they were mad that they weren’t part of our lottery group.”

  Sila nodded. “I guess for once everyone at work was talking about the same thing.”

  It looked to Sila as if Gio was enjoying telling his story. She wondered if he’d spent the last eight months keeping what had happened private from anyone not directly involved. She felt no envy as she listened, and was happy when he continued, “Three weeks after the Big Saturday, all of us, except a welder named Duncan Maynard, had quit our jobs. Duncan said he really liked installing windows and he didn’t care that he had a ton of money heading his way.”

  “I wonder if he got treated differently at work after that.”

  “I’m sure he did. The day we got the check we took a group photo in front of the Chinook Modular Housing sign. I’ve got it right here.”

  Gio pulled his phone from his coat pocket and scrolled to a picture. He held it up for Sila. She squinted at the screen.

  “Which one is Duncan Maynard?”

  Gio pointed to a man in the front. Sila looked carefully. “He’s got the biggest smile.”

  Gio turned the phone back around. “You’re right. I never noticed that. Most of us weren’t getting a lot of sleep back then. We were still in shock.”

  “Well, he looks happy.”

  “He does. And he was the only one not going anywhere.”

  Gio put the phone back in his coat pocket and continued, “All I wanted that day was for my wife, Lillian, to be alive. She believed in playing the lottery more than I did. I’ve never been much of a gambler. But Lillian thought it was a fun thing to do. So she’s the reason I was even part of it.”

  Sila’s voice was small: “And she’s not around now?”

  “She passed away over four years ago.”

  Sila knew it wasn’t polite to ask too many personal questions, but she wanted to know more. “What happened to her?”

  “She was healthy until just after her sixty-first birthday when she got a sore shoulder. Then the pain moved to her back. We thought she’d pulled a muscle, or slept on her side funny. But it didn’t go away. She wasn’t someone who complained about stuff, so I forgot she even had a problem. After that, maybe a month later, she started to cough. It was winter and everyone was hacking away all the time. We just thought she had a bad cold.”

  Gio stopped abruptly and put down his coffee cup. When he started to speak again Sila heard the words spill out fast and dull. “She had lung cancer. She fought. It won.”

  “I’m sorry. . . .”

  “Me too.”

  After a while Gio went back to talking. “So Lillian never knew I won the money. She worked hard her whole life, and she never got to see any of this. She always wanted to live on a farm. She liked to garden. She wanted a house with a second floor. She said she’d like a barn. That’s why I’m here. It’s for her.”

  Gio looked out onto the tall pines trees.

  “Did you and your wife—”

  “Lillian.”

  “Did you and Lillian have kids?”

  “No. But she was always around young people. She taught second grade at Harriet Beecher Stowe Elementary School.”

  Sila’s mouth opened and she looked wide-eyed at Gio. “Wait. What’s your last name?”

  “Gardino.”

  “So you were married to Mrs. Gardino?”

  “I was.”

  “She was my second-grade teacher!”

  “No kidding!”

  “She was my favorite!”

  Sila impulsively reached over and touched his hand. “I think about her all the time.”

  When she looked at Gio she realized his eyes were turning liquid.

  5.

  They heard the sound of an engine starting. Gio seemed to collect himself as the pickup truck emerged from the barn. “Your dad’s got the old engine running again.” Only moments later Alp cut the motor and got out of the vehicle.

  “Your truck’s working, but it won’t stay that way. There’s a problem with the alternator. It needs to be replaced, and then the fuel line should come out. I could have the parts shipped to me. That would take about ten days. If you’re interested I can get you a price.”

  “You call and let me know what it will cost, but plan on doing it.”

  Sila looked at the old man in the lemon-yellow jacket and brightened. “So we’ll have to come back.”

  She could see that Gio Gardino seemed to also feel as if not being able to fix the truck was some kind of good news. Gio took his checkbook out of his pocket and paid Alp, saying, “Sila, I enjoyed our chat. But I feel bad that I spent the whole time talking about myself.”

  “That’s okay,” Sila said.

  “But I didn’t learn enough about you. Except of course that you are a good listener.”

  Alp answered for her, “Sila likes books and animals.”

  Sila grumbled, “We’re not allowed to have pets at our apartment, which is why we don’t have a dog.”

  “What’s your favorite animal?” Gio asked.

  She answered immediately. “An elephant.”

  Gio laughed. “Well, I can see how you wouldn’t be able to keep one of those in an apartment.”

  Sila smiled politely. Alp looked over at his daughter. Oya had made a stuffed elephant for Sila when she was very young, and more than eleven years later it was a lumpy gray mass with the button eyes long gone.

  It still spent every night on Sila’s bed.

  Once they were in the car Sila told her father about Gio’s lottery win.

  “I remember that now. A big group of people.
I heard one of them went into the Mercedes dealership on Franklin and bought four cars.”

  “Really?”

  “I think it was the biggest lottery payout they’ve had.”

  “That’s what he said. And guess what? His wife was my second-grade teacher. Mrs. Gardino. She was so nice.”

  “We’ll have to tell your mother tonight. She’ll remember her.”

  “She was my favorite teacher ever.”

  “And she’s gone?”

  Sila nodded. “She died four years ago. I guess I was in her last class. They didn’t tell us much about what happened.”

  Alp glanced at his daughter. He tried to change the subject. “If I won the lottery I’d hire a great immigration lawyer. Maybe from someplace like New York City. Somebody who knew all the right people.”

  Sila’s face scrunched up. “Is that the problem? We can’t get Mom the visa because we know the wrong people?”

  “The rules changed. That’s a bigger problem. But still, it would help if we had a real advocate on our side.”

  “Dad, if we won the lottery, after we hired the right lawyer, I’d fix the sidewalk in front of our apartment. People trip out there all the time.”

  “I like that idea, Sila. It’s very thoughtful.”

  “Thank you.”

  “What else would you do, little one?”

  “I’d rent the apartment next door to us and make a door connecting the two units. Then I’d have a big bedroom and also my own kitchen.”

  This made her father laugh. “So we’d have two kitchens to make eggs and toast.”

  “Exactly. But Mom would be back, so things would be normal and she’d like the extra oven for baking.”

  “Well, if I had some of that Powerball money I’d start my own auto mechanic business. I wouldn’t work at the repair shop anymore or take weekend jobs.”

  They drove in silence for the next ten minutes, both thinking about the fantasy Powerball money they had. Sila finally spoke again as they pulled into their parking space at the apartment building. “I bet everyone who meets Gio starts thinking about all that money and what they’d do with it.”