Byron's Lane (14 page)

As he talked, Adams stared at the cars we passed.

“My father offered no judgment about the fact that I didn’t try to help the farmer. And he didn’t make any suggestions about what lessons I might learn from the experience. Maybe the lesson was to keep my head down and not call attention to myself when I’m in a tough spot. Or maybe it was to stay away from places where I’m not supposed to be. Anyway, I became a lapsed Lutheran that night. I found out that honesty, responsibility, and accountability are abstract concepts—not pillars of conduct. Maybe that’s the lesson I was supposed to learn.”

Adams reached up and pushed the button that closed the Porsche’s sunroof. He watched the process as intently as if he were dismantling a bomb. “The day my father advised me to bury the Pavletich matter, he ceased to be a role model for me. I pulled away from my family and struck out on my own.”

“Struck out on your own? That can be interpreted two very different ways,” I noted. My comment produced the first smiles since Mille Lacs Lake.

“You know something, Tom? That was actually my number one defining Maplewood moment. It had to be. I’ve just buried it so deep it never crossed my mind when we talked about this earlier.”

I had no similar story to tell. No one—friend or family—had ever mentioned the farmer’s passing. I’d occasionally struggled with pangs of guilt about the incident: the consequences of our response, the moral implications of running away instead of trying to help him. The discomfort it caused was intermittent; it came and went quickly.

We had pushed the matter of the farmer’s death into the dim light of a gray autumn day more than forty years after it happened. Maybe we could delete it from our conscience now. Adams was stone quiet the last half hour of our trip. He looked straight ahead. After I turned the Porsche onto his county road, I reached behind my seat, pulled a Handi-Wipe from a plastic covered package, and wiped my hands. I offered Adams the package. He shook his head no.

Adams did not want to go to Christina’s party. After all, it was Christina and Richard’s party—not just Christina’s. Until that Saturday night, Adams had managed to avoid the reality of Christina’s new life. A mile from home, Adams admitted he hadn’t recovered from seeing the picture of Hunter and Christina in the Sunday
Star Tribune
. Having to watch Hunter escort Christina around her house that evening would be difficult.

Adams was the instigator of this series of rotating neighborhood parties. For the last five years, they had become a tradition as celebrated as Thanksgiving dinner by its twenty or so regular participants. When he was home, he never missed one; when he was on the road, the person whose turn it was to host the party postponed it until he was back.

As I turned into his driveway Adams announced that he’d go to the party and he’d put on a good show. He had home-field advantage, he told me. Hunter had never been to a neighborhood party. Given what Adams referred as his overbearing personality, Hunter would probably try to change its chemistry—no doubt with disastrous results. Adams was clinging to a feeble hope that maybe, if Christina had the opportunity to see them side by side, he might be able to plant the seed of a notion somewhere inside her that he was a better fit than Hunter.

Once inside Adams’s house, I headed upstairs for my bedroom. I wanted to unpack and change clothes. Adams went off in the direction of his office to check telephone messages and e-mails. He dropped his overnight bag in the foyer.

Within a few minutes I heard him yelling to me from the bottom of the stairs, “Put your pants on, Tom. We’re going to take a drive over to the Budget Inn. There’s a coffee shop next door. You can pick up something for us to drink while I check for signs of Linda McArthur.” Adams had had six more payphone calls from the motel on Sibley Avenue.

Five minutes later we were back in the car, headed down the driveway, on our way to Brookfield. “She must be in a really bad way if she called that often and didn’t leave a message,” he said.

I hoped he’d find her there. Adams needed a diversion from his Christina Peterson crisis.

It was barely a fifteen-minute drive to the motel from Adams’s house. The Budget Inn was on Brookfield’s main east-west street, just inside the city limits. We cruised through the parking lot. Adams didn’t see a car or a vanity license plate he recognized, but wasn’t surprised. Linda’s husband would buy her a new car as frequently as the rest of us replace bottles of shampoo. The gold Lexus that she drove when she had last visited Adams was surely long gone from their four-car garage.

We parked next to the motel’s office. Adams reached across me into the glove compartment and pulled out a brown leather two-fold wallet. He opened it up and flashed a silver badge at me. “The Minnesota Highway Patrol gives these to state legislators. It’s saved me a few speeding tickets,” he said. “Maybe the badge will allow me a peek at the guest register. I’ll meet you in the coffee shop in ten minutes.”

Adams was out of the car before I could unlatch my seatbelt. He disappeared into an A-framed building next to a two-story row of motel rooms. The place was at least fifty years old; its style was vintage 1960s, the colors of its peeling paint pink and teal. I got out of the car and walked across the parking lot, toward the Emporium Coffee House.

The Emporium had an authentic coffee house feel to it. Based on its appearance and its unfamiliar name, I assumed it was a locally owned and operated business. Tastefully laid out, the establishment was a cut above the others in the neighborhood. And so were its patrons. The pleasant smell of fresh ground coffee greeted me as I approached the front door.

Waiting in a short line of people wanting to be seated, I looked out over a roomful of tables, chairs, and customers. They were cluttered in no special way around a brightly appointed open area that spread out two steps below the coffee bar where I was standing. My casual survey of the room abruptly stopped when I discovered Christina Peterson sitting off in one of its corners. She was not alone. The man opposite her, his knees touching hers, was Richard Hunter. I recognized him from the newspaper picture Adams had shown me.

Between them were a partially eaten muffin and two coffee cups. The food and the crockery filled most of their table’s surface. He was talking intently to her. In the process of making his point, his right hand found a way through the plates and cups that littered the table and rested on hers. She looked down at her coffee cup and up at his face and nodded in agreement to whatever he was saying.

Christina Peterson did not look happy. But she didn’t seem unhappy, either. There was an unmistakable air of intimacy about the picture they made.

A clerk informed me that I was next in line. I ordered two regular black coffees to go—they could be made the fastest. As soon as the drinks were put in front of me and I’d paid for them, I rushed outside, meeting Adams in the middle of the parking lot.

“I don’t think Linda’s here,” he announced. “I looked at a week’s worth of registration slips. I described her to the desk clerk. I’m sure he would have remembered her if he had seen her. The phone calls are a mystery. I guess I’ll just have to be sure I’m around the next time I get one.”

He put his Styrofoam coffee cup up to his lips and frowned as he finished his first taste. “All those blends of coffee, and you got plain black?”

I kept my mouth shut.

Near the end of our short drive back to Adams’s house, I dutifully reminded him that he wanted to do something about his will. He thanked me for the reminder and told me that he could accomplish what he needed to do in what remained of Saturday afternoon. He asked if I’d graciously give him a couple of hours alone in his office. “I need to follow up on a couple of things and have some checks to write and bills to pay. If I put it off, I’m afraid I’ll forget about it.”

As Adams opened his front door and led me back into his house, he mumbled something about my Lawrence of Arabia quote. He reached into his carry-on bag, still lying in the middle of the foyer, and gave me his black book.

“I liked that Lawrence of Arabia quote last night. Write it on one of the blank pages in the back, okay?” He turned down the hallway and disappeared into his office.

I carried the Day Runner up the stairs and laid it on the bed in my room. After I finished unpacking, I sat down on the carpeted floor, my back up against the foot of the bed, facing the room’s wall of windows. A pen in hand, I slid the black book off the bed’s comforter and onto my lap. Trying not to intrude on Adams’s business or private thoughts, I turned the pages to the first blank sheet. I couldn’t help but see Adams’s last entry on the opposite page: “Monday meeting, 10:30 @ sheriff’s office—Brookfield. Should I bring UM threat letter received Friday 9/23?”

I wrote the quote about success wrested from sure defeat on the next page and shut the book. I couldn’t ask Adams about the threat letter without betraying the trust he demonstrated when he gave me his black book. I wouldn’t have been surprised if this was the first time he’d ever allowed it to be put in someone else’s hands. I decided that I would wait to ask Adams about the letter until after his Monday morning meeting at the sheriff’s office. I’d call him from California and make him talk about it.

Downstairs, the door to his office was opened. I stepped just inside the doorway and put his black book down on the edge of his desk. He looked up at me from his computer monitor.

“Hey, Tom, I’ve got an e-mail here from Gabe Chance. He’s offered me those Cleveland Indians shares again. If I bought them from him, maybe I’d be involved in discussions about how to make the Indians pennant contenders. Technically, I’d be a part owner, right? But, then again, Chance owns less than three percent of the team. I guess I’d be lucky if they sent me the minutes of their meetings.”

Adams had met Gabe Chance in graduate school, after Chance had had his
Field of Dreams
Moonlight Graham moment as a brief member of the 1971 team.

Called up from the minor leagues at the end of the season, when teams could expand their rosters, he tore the tendon in his pitching arm warming up in the bullpen during a meaningless late September game against the Baltimore Orioles. Almost thirty years later, when the team’s owner took the baseball club public in a stock offering in 1999, Chance used what was left of a signing bonus he had prudently invested to buy a few hundred shares. He refused to sell them and make the same tidy profit all the other shareholders did when the current owner bought the team.

I offered my business advice from the doorway: “Owning part of the Indians is appealing, but it doesn’t make any business sense. The stock has got be way overvalued. You won’t live long enough to recover your outlay,” I counseled.

Adams got up from his chair, laughed, and closed the door in my face.

I instinctively headed for the television in the living room. During the time it took me to walk down the hallway, through a corner of the kitchen, around the L-shaped couch, and past the fireplace, I was oddly reminded that, in my family’s house on Byron’s Lane, we were forbidden to watch television on Saturday afternoons. It was a strange rule, and the only one my mother ever held fast. It imposed no great hardship on me, especially in late September. I wasn’t much of a college football fan, and the Indians had vanished from baseball’s American League pennant race by then. I spent most Saturdays up the street with Adams at El Capitan, vagabonding around the neighborhood, or doing the two-mile trek, on foot or by bicycle, to the shopping center to hang out with friends at the lunch counter at Woolworth’s. We’d nurse ten-cent Cherry Cokes for an hour so that we wouldn’t be told to get up and leave.

When I was a reach away from the remote, I decided that instead of aimlessly flipping through a hundred and fifty channels, I’d spend my time alone with an interesting book that I expected was lurking somewhere on the shelves in front of me. Books were my business, so I wasn’t keen on spending leisure time immersed in something dense or significant. I decided I’d look for books full of pictures.

Three hundred books had found a home on the shelves on either side of the television. Arranged by genre, a fourth of them were novels. Almost all the novels were nineteenth- and twentieth-century American classics in hardcover and paperback. Sprinkled among them were books of poetry and Shakespeare. Public administration textbooks and books about government that had escaped from Adams’s offices at the State Capitol and the university filled the top shelf to the left of the television. A majority were history books, an impressive collection of mostly American history, including a shelf full of biographies.

My hand followed my eyes, causing me to occasionally pull a book from a shelf and thumb through its pages. My attention eventually settled upon a stack of oversized books pushed into a corner of the lowest shelf. I pulled the pile from the bookcase and restacked it on the carpet. I recognized the exposed binding of the second one from the bottom: our high school yearbook. I eagerly yanked it from the pile. My copy was long lost, probably during a move from someplace to somewhere early in my marriage. Maybe it was thrown away by my mother when she moved to Florida, along with my baseball card collection.

I’d been looking for a picture book. This one was filled with hundreds of pictures of people I knew once—faces I hadn’t gazed upon in two-thirds of a lifetime.

Stretched out on Adams’s living room carpet, yearbook in front of me, I opened it up to its first page. I closely studied each picture and the captions below them. When I finished the section set aside for our senior class—about half the yearbook—I skipped to the index of names at the back.

My name had more page numbers next to it than I thought it would. I felt good about that, particularly when I compared the number of entries written after my name to most of the rest of the names on the page. When I think about high school, I remember it being about endurance rather than enjoyment. The shorthand résumé next to my name suggested something else. I turned the pages back and forth, from the index to pictures of favorite teachers whose faces I had long forgotten; to sophomore girls I’d dated; to senior girls I had hoped to date, but never had the nerve to ask.