Lone Star (60 page)

“Oh, now you're all about what friends do. And who's brooding?”

“You.”

“Stop splashing, I can't see where I'm rowing.”

“Stop brooding and I'll stop splashing.”

“Okay.”

“Blake!”

“What?”

“Do you accept my apology?”

“No.”

“What do you mean no?” She splashed him again. He put down the oars and stood up. Without saying another word, he took one wobbly step over to her, picked her up, and before she had a chance to protest, threw her in the lake. Then he sat back down and picked up the oars. She thought he would jump in after her, like he used to when they were kids, but he didn't.

“What are you doing?” she called, blowing water out of her mouth and nose.

“Stop splashing me, or you can swim back home.”

“You're going to leave me in the middle of the lake?”

“It's forty yards to shore, Miss Melodrama.”

“Help me get into the boat right now.”

“Are you going to stop splashing?”

“Are you going to accept my apology and stop brooding?”

“No.”

“Then I'm not going to stop splashing.”

Calmly he moved the boat away from her, and resumed rowing.

“Blake!”

He's impossible, she thought, and didn't call out his name again. She simply turned over onto her back in the lake and drifted toward her dock, her arms every once in a while fanning through the water to propel her body forward.

Bartering

A few days before Chloe left for California, Blake drove her to Jackson to say goodbye to Hannah.

“Are you going to stay in the truck again?”

“I'm going to visit my girl by the covered bridge,” he said.

“What girl?”

“Jealous, are we?”

Chloe rolled her eyes.

“Lupe in the yellow shack.”

“You still see her? 'Splain.”

“Nothing to 'splain. I started bringing her Meals on Wheels after you left, and then she wanted me to come read to her every other Tuesday, and then she wanted me to take her to the doctor every Friday, and then do her shopping, and fix her roof and her windows and install her new oven. Then she made me pie in that oven. On and on. She pays me almost a full-time nut. I'm with her four days a week. She needs my help. She has no one.”

“She has three sons!”

“They're in California, like you. What if
your
mother needs help? You're going to help her lying in your little bikini on Mission Bay beach?”

Chloe scoffed. “Like I would ever wear a bikini.”

“I don't know
what
you do over there,” he said, leaning over and reaching across her to open the door and let her out, his entire large Blake arm nearly sweeping against both her breasts. He didn't touch her at all.

“Chloe, I beg you, if you're still my friend, talk to him for me. Please.” Forgetting about her other tables, Hannah parked across from Chloe, grasping her hands. Her face plain, beautiful, her eyes moist, pleading, her hair all slicked back, oh God, what boy could resist that face and those eyes, childbirth be damned.

“What could I possibly say to him?”

“You're a college student. Figure something out.”

“Having book smarts doesn't make me smart.” Chloe nearly went moist eyed herself.

“Yes, but he still listens to you.”

“No, he doesn't. Where do you get that? He's not too thrilled with me either.”

“Oh, please. You know you can do no wrong. But I really screwed up. Tell him I'm sorry.”

“He knows.”

“Tell him again. Tell him I miss him. I'm going to be good to him. We had it so good once.”

Chloe's head went from side to side, in a swing not a shake. “What if he thinks you just want to get out of your mom's house?”

“Well, I do.”

“Right. But maybe that's not enough to build a whole relationship on?”

“Who says? And we don't have to build. We already built. We need to rebuild.”

“It's been leveled,” Blake said on the way home when Chloe tried to persuade him of Hannah's sincerity. “Can't build on scorched earth, baby. Gotta get what's left of your shit and get the fuck out. It can never, and I mean
never,
happen.”

Chloe shook her head. “Blake, you don't think people deserve a second chance? Everybody makes mistakes. Come on. Don't be such a hard-ass.”

“I see where you're coming from. Second chances. Mistakes. She's ready to turn over a new leaf, maybe?”

“Absolutely!”

“Ready to give me what I need?”

“Goes without saying.”

“Willing to commit to a real relationship?”

“That's the point.”

“So let me ask you, this new Hannah who wants to try again, with a baby by another daddy and a waif she's dragged here all the way from Latvia, do you think that turning over a new leaf includes her giving my friend Orville head a few weeks ago when he gave her a ride home from Yesterday's?”

“What?”

“Oh yeah.”

“It's a lie. Who told you?”

“Orville.”

“What—why would he tell you that?”

“Because I told him she wanted to get back together with me.”

“No!”

“Oh yeah.”

“I don't understand.”

“What's not clear? He gave her a ride home, and she wanted to say thank you.”

Chloe, completely flustered, turned toward the side window. “Why did your dumb friend say yes?” she muttered.

Blake was silent a moment. “Are you really asking why a twenty-something dude with a 24/7 hard-on would say yes to a blow job from a pretty girl? Have you ever met a dude, Chloe? Any dude?”

“Wait, hang on . . .” She tried to compose her words. “I'm saying, I didn't know this was a thing.”

“Me neither! Would that I did. I'd have had a completely different high school experience. Because I was always driving chicks around. Back and forth. Blake, take me here, Blake, take me there. Come pick me up. If only I'd known this secret barter system for rides. I would've slept with a smile on my face every night.”

They arrived at her house. He pulled into the clearing, stopped the car, idled it. “Well, here we are,” he said.

“Yes.” She unlatched her seat belt, took her purse from the well. “Thanks for the ride.”

“That's it? Thanks for the ride? I thought I explained to you how these things work.”

Chloe fixed him with an appropriate blinkless stare. “I'm leaving the truck right now.”

Laughing he circled her wrist. “I'm kidding.”

She unfurled herself from his fingers. “Yeah, sure.”

“What, you don't think I'm kidding?” He was so twinkly cute.

“You said it yourself. Are you a dude or aren't you?”

“Well, I'm not a dude with you,” he said, getting out of the car to walk her to her front door because her father was a cop and cops didn't like their daughters dropped off at the curb like UPS packages. “I'm Blake.”

Back at her other life, Chloe scrutinized the audition message boards on her laptop. Her mother was in the kitchen. A thousand meaningless posts. Come see this band, come buy my Les Paul, my steel drums, audition for my band, piano for sale, cat for sale, cat lost, looking for a lead singer, looking for a new lead singer . . .

Looking over Chloe's shoulder, Lang said she'd look into that one, auditions at the Blue Moon in Santa Fe, because it was posted three weeks in a row. A cover band called Lone Star looking for a singer, a small but intensely loyal following. Auditions this Friday at the university practice rooms down in the basement.

“Mom,
how
is this helpful? We don't even know if Lone Star was the name of his band.” He lifts up his shirt on the train and, beaming, shows her the tattoo and says how do you know I don't already have a band? She has just told him he is going to own the world with his voice. Johnny Rainbow and the Hail of Bullets. He is going to live forever.

“Maybe it's his old band,” her mother said. “Maybe they're auditioning for a new singer.”

“What, they're looking for a singer five years later?”

“Why not?” Lang said to Chloe. “You are.”

San Diego University Junior Year Course Load

F
ALL
S
EMESTER:

Tai Chi Multilevel

Advanced Voice

Plant Pathology

Plant Propagation

Topics in Modern Europe

Modern U.S. Fiction

S
PRING
S
EMESTER:

Kung Fu

Advanced Hiking

Applied Entomology

Herbaceous Landscape Plants

Studies in Continued Continental Philosophy

Law and Society

Holocaust: Death of God or Death of Humanity

Introduction to the Brain

She has forgotten an introductory science class to satisfy her graduation requirement and apparently plant biology doesn't satisfy.

So half-asleep she soldiers on through an 8:30
A.M
. class on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, learning about the amygdala and the hippocampus.

Of some interest is the transfer of information between neurons. The end with the dendrites receives the information. The other, with an electrical charge, sends it. The neurons don't touch; it's all about the strength of the electrical impulse in the synapse and the sensitivity of the branchy receptors.

Eureka! Now she understands why she can never remember anything. The distance between her neurons is a micrometer too long.

She has been combing through twenty days of her life, trying to find a star, a proton, a quantum particle that might point her in the direction of the boy who had promised her himself in the palm of her hand. In the Introduction to the Brain, she learns why she can't find him. And maybe why he can't find her. The neuron that holds the data she needs is spaced too far apart from the neuron that throbs to receive it. In the end, Chloe and Johnny, the forever lovers, are felled by nothing more than biology.

All the philosophy courses Chloe doggedly takes—because that's what prelaw undergrads do, that's what abandoned lovers do—can't answer the unsolvable riddle.

Here's one he and his mother would like. Chloe knows how much those two enjoy unsolvable riddles.

What if she doesn't wait and he comes for her?

What if she waits and he never comes?

The riddle, not for Ingrid or Johnny but for Chloe, is: Which is worse?

Johnny!

Promise me you'll never forget me,
you whispered to me the night before the day you left me.

I promised you I never would.

How I wish to God I had.

How I wish to God I could.

Why did you make me a promise you couldn't keep?

Despite her neurological limitations, Chloe tries hard to remember something, anything. She keeps returning to the traveling butterflies who accompanied them to the mass graveyard at Treblinka. She doesn't know why her mind keeps sifting through that barren ground.

The bus, the walk, the woods, something about those people and their incessant chatter keeps ringing a dim bell inside the belfry of her head. Look there, the bell thuds. There is something there.

Chloe fears it's something irretrievable. On the bus, while their mouths had been going like go-cart wheels, Chloe was either staring out the window or gaping at Johnny as he talked about Majdanek and cyanide. Yet through it, Yvette's voice, or Denise's, keeps poking in with something revealing. But try as Chloe might, she can't catch the end of the string of their words. Yet the bell keeps chiming. There is something there.

Lupe

The Haul Spring Fair conceived by Blake and sponsored by Chevy grew a tad in its second year. Attendance jumped from ten to thirty thousand people. Old vendors returned, new vendors called him directly, wanting to participate, to license a booth, to sell their products. His mother remained the treasurer and publicist, and his father, with his brand-new titanium back and a new sponsored-by-Chevy Chevy, gifted to him as a promotional gimmick, drove around town, shaking hands and lugging lumber. Burt described it all to Chloe in rich detail when she came to call on Blake after she returned home for the summer. The Hauls built a new deck and two new carports. The wheelchair ramp to the lake had been dismantled. “Her next car, she tells me, is going to be a Cadillac,” a beaming Burt told Chloe. “My wife, in a Cadillac!”

“Sit down.” Janice pulled on Burt's sleeve. “Why stand at the door like a horse?”

“I've been sitting for ten years,” the man said. “From now on, I'm doing
everything
standing up.” He grabbed Janice around the waist.

“Burt, the children!” Janice squealed. “You'll have to excuse him, he—”

Blake strode out, in new jeans and a white button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He was even wider in the shoulders than he had been last summer. Through their emails she knew that he was roofing and hauling granite blocks for outdoor fireplaces. “I leave you with her for two minutes, and what happens?” he said. He smiled. His face was clean shaven. “Hey, Chloe.”

“Hey, Blake. Is it true you now have even your dad running errands for you? I'm so sorry, Mr. Haul.”

“Oh, I don't mind,” said Burt, gazing adoringly at his son. “I'd carry his water for him, if he'd let me.”

Blake gave Chloe a nudge. “Did you hear that?” He grabbed his wallet and keys.

“So where are you two headed? Why don't you eat first? Blake, you can show her the pictures from the fair. Janice, fetch the album.”

“We can't eat
here,
Dad, because we're going to eat elsewhere.”

“Is that why you told me to get dressed up?” she asked, in a miniskirt and a sleeveless blouse.

“And I'm so glad you didn't listen.” He winked. “Let's go.”

“Chloe,” said Janice, “come for dinner on Sunday. Mason will be here with Mackenzie and their new baby boy.”

“No, Ma, Chloe won't be able to make it,” said Blake, thank God.

“Blakie, wait, don't rush the girl out, I want to show her a picture of the baby—”

“Gotta go. Bye, Mom, bye, Dad.”

“Wait! Do you have your phone? He always forgets his phone . . .”

“Lost it last week, don't worry.” He waved, prodding Chloe to his truck.

“Are you going to tell me where you're taking me?”

“Nope.”

“I swear, it better not be to your brother's house to see his new baby.”

“There's an idea.”

“How's Hannah?”

“What, Taylor doesn't give you a full report on us?”

“She's lost touch with Hannah.” Taylor was otherwise quite good at keeping Chloe updated. “She told me she's going to start a clipping service for every time she sees your mug in the local paper. Why are you working so hard?”

“I don't work that hard,” Blake said. “I fix some roofs and fire pits, read to some blind old ladies, swim, fish.”

“Renovate houses, write books, run fairs that make tens of thousands of dollars for local businesses and charities.”

“My mother does all the work. I just make the money. She gives it away. To St. Elizabeth's, Meals on Wheels, MADD, Planned Parenthood.”

She did a double take. “What?”

He chuckled. “Just making sure you're paying attention. My mother loves playing the queen. Yea here, nay there. The other day she got a request from the South Maine Bowling Association asking for new shirts for their bowling league. She's like, how is that charity? And they were like, because we can't afford them.”

Chloe laughed. “Where are you taking me?” They were heading into the White Mountains, past Jackson, past Bartlett.

“You'll see. I have a big day planned.”

Chloe was happy to be back home. She told Blake she was thinking of not working at all this summer. Just sleeping and repairing her ruined rosebushes. Watching the road. Watching the Internet. “Um, maybe reading
The Blue Suitcase
?”

He shook his head. “First, I don't have physical books yet. In August, if we're lucky. But second, what if, after you read it, you won't want to hang out?”

“Perhaps that's a worthy sacrifice to make for art. Blake, what the heck did you put in that story? Now I'm
dying
to read it.”

They turned into the mile-long winding drive of the Mount Washington Hotel, an enormous white, red-roofed resort spread over a hundred acres at the foot of the White Mountains.

“You're taking me to a hotel?” She was being silly.

“To a restaurant in a hotel to be more precise.”

They valeted his truck! That must be a first, not to self-park. “Aren't you fancy?” she whispered to him, as her door was opened.

“Good afternoon, sir, good afternoon, madam,” the valet said to Blake and Chloe. “Are you checking in? Will you be needing a luggage rack?”

Chloe giggled. They called him sir! They asked if they were checking in! “Um, sir, will you be needing a luggage rack?” she teased, as Blake pressed his palm into her back, guiding her inside the long gilded lobby. He was treating her to a nice lunch.

“I thought it'd be a welcome change from the dorm fare you've been noshing on. I've acquired quite a sophisticated palate while you've been away. I eat lamb sliders now.”

They sat outside on the veranda with a view of the rolling golf course and the full sweep of the mountains. White cloth napkins grazed their laps. It was funny to be so elegant. “You clean up nice, Blake Haul,” she said.

“You too, Chloe Divine.”

“So are you going to tell me what you and Hannah are up to, or am I going to have to guess?” she asked after he ordered for both of them (!).

“Me and Hannah? I'm good, and she's . . . well, you'll see for yourself. She's the last part of our afternoon today. But what's going on with you? I saw on your schedule you're taking Advanced Hiking. Among other things.”

She was baffled. “Since when do you look at my schedule?”

“Since your mother showed it to me last time I was over.”

“Since when do you go to my mother's house when I'm not there?”

“Since every week when I ask her if she needs anything from the store, and she invites me for dinner.”

Chloe stopped sipping her ice tea.

“She does? And do you?”

“Once a week.”

“Wait. You eat dinner with my parents once a week?”

“Your parents and Ray. He's a great kid. Makes your mom and dad happy. You did well there, finding him.”

“Blake, you're bullshitting me.”

“You're changing the subject.”

“You mean there's another subject other than you having dinner at my house every week?”

“Absolutely. There's the much more important matter of your schedule.” He pulled out a crumpled piece of paper from the pocket of his jeans. It had her course list on it.

“So you don't have your cell phone, but my class schedule is in your pocket?”

“Correct. Advanced Voice? Holocaust studies? Tai Chi?”

The lamb sliders came and distracted Chloe from having to answer Blake's unanswerable question. She knew why she was taking these courses. Affixed to the past, she was polishing away at the edges of an empty cup. Did Blake and her mother discuss this? She almost lost her appetite. Almost, because the sliders with the mint yogurt sauce were delectable. She didn't respond to his teasing or judging or whatever it was he was doing. They talked about other things.

Over the toffee-chocolate bread pudding, Blake said, “You won't believe who died.”

“This is how you tell me? Over bread pudding? Who?”

“Lupe.”

“Oh no! I'm so sorry. Poor thing. What happened?”

“She was nearly a hundred; maybe that? I loved that old broad. Remember she told me not to go to Europe? Boy, should I have listened to her. It's as if she knew. She said all the drama I could want was right here.”

Chloe didn't say there was drama everywhere.

“You want to hear drama?” He leaned toward her over the amazing pudding they were sharing.