Adventures with Max and Louise (32 page)

“I’m leaving tomorrow,” he says.

“Wolf, I . . .” What? I have a pat speech ready to roll about being friends and this is not a date, and he’s leaving?

He smiles as if he’s just given me a handful of wildflowers and not, what I realize the instant he says it, a slap in the face.

“For the weekend?” I reply breezily. Two can play this game. I could care less.

He looks away from me, gazing at his first true love: the mountains. “No. I’m going to Alaska first. I’m going to climb Denali.”

“Oh.” My mother told me about men like this. She dated a guy once who thought it was an honor for her to sit there and hold the water bottle while he trained for the Honolulu marathon. And he didn’t even invite her to join him in Hawaii. “How long will it take?”

“Once I buy the equipment I need in Anchorage and get transportation, not long. If the weather holds, the entire summit should take three days. It’s kind of late in the season, but one of the other guys couldn’t get off work. We’re a whole team, the four of us. Been training for years. This is our seventh summit. It’s really pretty fun.”

I’ll bet it is. And I’m sure all their girlfriends have been catching up on all the
Sex and the City
DVDs too. Only it’s poor old Mom who’s being left to hang on this one. I’ll bet she watches the Food Network and bites her nails.

“So that’s what’s been bothering Sasha. I could tell it was more than Food Fest. She’s really been on edge.”

“Well, actually it’s the rest of the trip she’s more worried about.” He rubs his shoulders as a chilly wind sweeps up the rock’s surface. “I’m going to South America to climb. I’ll be gone a year. You know, one last hurrah.”

I hug my knees. “Wow,” I say numbly. “A year . . .” The news hits me like a bucket of cold water. I barely know the guy. And I’m dating Chas. Sweet, funny, tender Chas who loves that I’m an independent spirit.

“Don’t forget rich, luvey. Don’t ’old that against the lad,” Max whispers.

“Shut up and let the girl listen,” Louise barks.

Wolf leans back on his hands. The wind ruffles his hair. “I’ve been thinking about this since I was in junior high. This guy Stan and I used to plan imaginary climbing trips. We’d figure out a budget and actually go around to stores pretending to buy the gear we needed. Of course, we’d be doing all this by the time we were twenty-one.”

“Yeah, I was going to be fluent in six languages by twenty,” I add. I thought I’d have a great guy trailing me around and my own cool apartment by then too; funny how life happens.

“Well, you know two languages anyway,” he reassures me.

“The last time I checked, English wasn’t two languages.”

He holds up two fingers. “English and cooking. You’re fluent.”

I cock my head, interested. “I never thought about it like that.”

“Sure, food is its own language. You either understand it, or you don’t. People who don’t can’t improvise. They have to follow a recipe exactly, word for word. It’s really interesting to see which side of the river people land on. There’s really no gray area.”

“I’ve never thought about it that way. You don’t think like most people, do you?”

A beatific grin spreads across his face. Apparently this is a compliment. “No.”

“And you’re very proud of that.”

The grin turns bashful. “Very.”

“And you don’t care that the whole world sees you driving around in a van that says Shaggin’ Wagon and Big Daddy. Doesn’t tarnish your professional image a bit, does it?”

He is in heaven, and his grin reflects it. “I couldn’t care less.” He waves his hands around. “You know where we are?”

I-90 unfolds in the distance like a gray ribbon among the evergreen-covered foothills. “Little Mount Si or Big Mount Si. I always get them mixed up. I know I made it halfway up one of them when I was twelve, but I don’t remember which.”

He shakes his head. “No, no, no. You don’t get it.”

“All right, we’re somewhere off I-90. That I know.”

He’s still shaking his head. “This isn’t a geography question. We’re in church, my church.”

I look around for a moment. No candles. No incense. “I go to St. Patrick’s Church myself.”

“I go to Our Lady of the Woods,” he says slowly, with the satisfied aura of someone telling me about yoga.

I gulp in the fresh piney air. “What do you take for communion, pine needles? I guess some of them are edible, but I wouldn’t bank on it.”

“Water, that’s my blood of Christ, if you want to get all Catholic about it, which I really don’t.”

I give him a sharp look. “I’m Catholic.”

“I know.”

“No, you don’t. I never told you that.”

He shakes his head, chuckling. “It’s in your cookbook, Molly. In the breakfast section you talked about donuts in the basement of St. Patrick’s church and eating fish on Fridays.”

He’s read my cookbook? People don’t sit down and read cookbooks. “I’m impressed you read it. Sorry I interrupted. So, the woods are your church?”

“Yes. Because it’s the one place where you can be completely still and hear yourself think. Come on, have you ever been closer to your own truth than in the woods?”

“I think my truth is probably in a dense dark chocolate cake, at least the first piece. The second piece is more about guilt.”

I glance over, but he’s not amused. Maybe I’ll just be still for a while. Let him commune with his nature boy self. I hunker down and listen to the birds, the wind whistling through the trees. I make myself so still I can hear my breath. What I realize is that I don’t like my quiet place. I fill it up with recipes and reviews and restaurant gossip. I hide from quiet like it’s chasing me. So I try harder, allowing myself to feel the breeze, which is now more like a wind, brushing my skin. I close my eyes and listen to the rustle of the leaves, the call of a hawk.

“So when you say truth, are you talking about God?” I ask respectfully. No more tromping on this man’s deeply felt beliefs. His God didn’t take away his mother.

He turns to me, his eyes full of earnest truth. “I guess so. I don’t really think about it in those terms.”

“I don’t go to church much anymore myself.”

We’re both quiet, watching the sun dip down, almost touching the foothills. “I’m a better person when I come back down a mountain. Better than the man that went up. Does that make sense?”

I sigh. “Yes, perfect sense. I wish I had something like that.”

He leans his shoulder against me. If I tipped my head it would be against his. I could feel the heat of all those thoughts against my scalp. Feel his curly chestnut hair against my . . .

“Run your fingers through his hair!” Louise screams.

“Think about Chas!” Max howls. “ ’e loves you. Okay, maybe not yet, but ’e likes you very much. And it could be love. You never know. This bloke’ll never go anywhere. What irritated you in the beginning will drive you bloody bonkers in five years’ time.”

I resist the urge to tangle my fingers into his scalp. I hold very, very still. Each breath lifts his fleece-covered shoulders against mine.

“He lifts weights. He could bench press a gal like you with those biceps,” Louise says and sighs.

“You use your lats to bench press, you ignorant flit,” Max rumbles.

“What would a limey boob know about weight lifting?” Louise snaps back.

I ignore them, which I am doing more and more lately. “I used to pray, and that felt really peaceful. But I don’t anymore.”

He plucks a blade of grass, chews on the end. “Why don’t you go to church anymore?”

I decide to tell him about Mom. He’s the wrong person, but if there ever was a right place, this is it. I’ve never talked to anyone about how she died, and I’m going to now. I take a deep breath and let go. “I guess because I feel like God stopped listening when my mom died.” I have to choke back my tears a little, which makes me cough. Wolf offers me his water bottle, and I take a drink. “We were on our way to the Spring Tolo. I had a crush on this boy. He was dating this girl named Caroline; a really popular girl on the tennis team but my friend, Martin had talked me into meeting him at the dance. He was going to cut in on Caroline and I was going to get one dance with my crush. That was our plan.”

I can still see Martin outlining his strategy like a military commando, his heavy black German glasses, which he didn’t need but wore to look cool, falling down his thin nose. “It was raining really, really hard and mom didn’t want me to drive but I wouldn’t leave her alone about it. I begged and begged, saying I needed all the experience I could get and finally she gave up and handed me the keys. We’d been fighting about my dress too. Mom said that it was too low-cut for me. I’d borrowed it, well, really I’d stolen it out of my sister Trina’s closet because my other best friend, Angeli, convinced me to. We were arguing about a stupid dress the whole way.”

Wolf nods encouragingly, takes the water from me, and takes a long drink.

“The rain was streaming down the window, like we were underwater. The windshield wipers couldn’t keep up. And then I heard the sirens.” My throat is dry. The tears I’ve been holding back burn and it’s hard to hold them back. Wolf squeezes my hand with his, warm and slick with climbing chalk. “Mom was looking around to see where the sirens were coming from, telling me to pull over to the side of the road. I froze. Instead of pulling over, I stopped the car in the middle of the road. I couldn’t see well enough and with the sirens . . . it was just so confusing.”

“I would have done the same thing,” Wolf says.

I look him in the eyes, my face streaming with tears. “The van hit us going 60 miles an hour. The windshield came down on my chest. The dress was low cut and . . .” I run my hands across my now smooth skin. “I was cut.”

I stop short, inhaling a deep, jagged breath. “Mom was on the side where the car hit. Her whole body jerked forward really fast and slammed back so quickly, her neck broke. I’ll never forget her leaning back in her seat with a broken neck. We were facing each other, and it was really, really quiet, just the rain on the roof of the car. Her head was at this weird angle, but her eyes were very bright, very focused. She asked me if I was okay. She told me to take her hand, she couldn’t move it. So I did. I moved her hand for her even though it scared me to move it. It was very cold. We waited for the cops to get to us. My dad was on duty and he came and he went in the ambulance to the hospital with her, which really ripped me apart. I thought it was because he was mad at me because I was driving the car. But my aunt told me it’s because they knew she was going to die. He wanted to spend the last time he had with her. She died two hours later on the operating table. The guy who hit us had robbed a gas station.”

Wolf is quiet. His curls shift in the wind. We’re in your church now, I feel like saying. What does Our Lord of the Woods have to say about this?

“I’m sorry,” he says, wrapping his arm around me. “I’m really sorry.”

“You can kiss him now,” Louise says.

“A pity kiss, we don’t need a ruddy pity kiss,” Max adds.

“I’m really sorry,” Wolf says, turning to me. It is the perfect moment for a kiss and every fiber in my body wants to lean into him and lift my face. I shove Chas to the furthest corner of my brain. One kiss, what harm can that do?

“You know what they call a girl who plays two men at the same time?” Max asks.

Single?

Max answers, “A tart.”

“Oh, piddle,” adds Louise. “A man gets a high five and free beer. Why should there be a double standard for sister girl here?”

“It’s called life, Louise,” Max offers. “That Y chromosome is loik a free pass.”

“Thanks,” I respond, thinking that I deserve a treat for finally telling someone the real story of my life, the not so pretty part before Diner X, before my cookbook contract, before surgery. “I had the surgery to remove the scars right before I met you. They were pretty bad.”

“I didn’t notice.”

“You would have before.”

Wolf nods, lifting his finger to his chin. “You know, there’s just one thing here that doesn’t fit.”

“What?”

“Well, why do you still live with your dad?”

There’s his flaw. He’s nosy. “You know, this is the thing. Martin used to bug me all the time about it. Men never understand how much my dad needed my help after mom died. I mean, we had a lot of help at first but then everyone went away and it was just me and him. He was barely eating, watching TV all night, sleepwalking out the front door. He got over the worst of it after a couple of years. And now I keep house, I make sure he doesn’t live on beer and pork rinds; that he goes to the doctor once in a while . . . you know.”

He chin tightens as he pushes his point. “But all men are like that, and their daughters manage to leave, make lives for themselves.”

“Not all men lose their wives in such a horrible manner.” It reminds me of how much he irritated me when we first met.

“Nosy Parker,” snaps Max. Finally, we agree on something.

“Neither one of your sisters felt the need to stay, did they?” Wolf asks.

“No.” But neither one of them could take care of a squirrel, let alone a grieving father and a big house.

“And they didn’t stay at home.”

“No.” I explain in my best preschool teacher voice. “Trina got married pretty young to this rich guy. And Denise lives in an artists’ colony and dates inappropriate men.”

“So
they
left?”

“Trina did, she got this amazing house on the lake with her husband. Denise always comes back because she dates projects. Some fix up houses, Denise remodels boyfriends. And when they get their degree or finish therapy or lose the weight or sell a painting, they dump her. And then she comes home for a couple of days but she always keeps her apartment.”

“And you? You didn’t want to do any of these things?”

“Date projects? No thank you. Marry a rich guy? That sounds a little bit better.” I think about Chas. “What are you . . . what are you getting at?”

“Why do you live with your dad?”

I take another deep breath, try to clear my head. I don’t have to take this. I share the most painful experience of my life, and he gives me the third degree? Max and Louise are strangely silent. Where is Louise when I need a tailor-made cutting comment? Why isn’t she calling him a dumb ass? Instead of waiting for them to speak, I push myself up, wiping the grass from my jeans. “I’ve answered the question. This is starting to feel like an inquisition. I have to get back to Seattle.”