Off Course (28 page)

“I don't know for how long. Quinn dumped me over the phone. I came up to have it out with him.”

“Donna dumped me, too.”

“No!” Cress hummed and sympathized, and asked Don if she could stay at his place overnight.

“There's only one bed, if you don't mind.”

She took the plaid suitcase inside his converted garage. Then they walked over to the Sawyer Inn and drank bourbon. “After you left,” Don said, “Quinn hit the bars. He felt guilty about his kids. He couldn't see his way clear.”

“Sorry about Donna,” said Cress.

Donna had met someone else, a pretty boy from L.A.: Orton Froelich's nephew, twenty-two years old, who'd come up to his uncle's ranch to kick cocaine. “Four hundred bucks a day, I heard,” said Don. “Up his nose.”

Scott Froelich had come into the Sawyer Inn when Donna was singing and she couldn't stop staring. Don was there and saw it all. True, beauty of that sort was rare in Sawyer, and Donna's capitulation was instant and public. Guys clapped Don on the back, muttered into his neck.
Sorry, man. There's the shits, bud. Too bad for you.

Donna invited the kid over to dinner, Don told Cress. “Like she had me over two years ago. You go thinking it's a barbecue or dinner party, then realize that you're the only guest. She grills steaks, pours good wine, sings to you.” Don smiled faintly. “Poor little cokehead had no choice in the matter.”

The worst thing, Don said, what killed him, was that he and Donna had been house-hunting the very day the Froelich kid showed up. Remember Ondine Streeter? She had a little rental property on the north fork. He and Donna had driven over to see if it was a place where they could live together. The house was far too small, given Donna's accumulations. Still, how could she go from moving in with him to falling in love with Scott Froelich in less than eight hours?

“
Falling in love
may not be the most accurate term,” said Cress.

Don Dare had no way of knowing that, in three months, he'd meet a young pediatrician out climbing the Crags. They'd marry within the year, and she'd put him through law school. In five years, they'd build a Tuscan-style villa on a hill outside of Fresno where they'd raise four boys and Labradoodles.

*   *   *

“I need to talk to you,” she said.

“Where are you?”

“The Food King near your house.”

“Stay right there,” he said.

His truck pulled up alongside the Saab. He motioned her into the cab. He was in that same cotton-poly short-sleeved plaid shirt, but his beard was gone and he'd shaved his head. He looked like a convict or a penitent.

He smoothed his scalp. “My summer cut,” he said. “Like it?”

What did it matter if she liked it? And why were his eyes so merry? From her side of the bench seat, she caught his scent—he must have slapped on his cheap green slosh a minute ago. For her. As the shock of his baldness ebbed, ions fluffed and resettled. There it was, even now: the instant abatement of pain.

His lips seemed thicker, well shaped without his beard, redder, naked. “Very bad form to give someone the heave-ho over the phone,” she said. It came out like a joke.

“I have to try it at home,” he said. “After twenty-one years of marriage, I owe Sylvia a chance to make things right.”

“It's killing me,” she said.

He slid an arm around her shoulder and drew her close. His face pressed against hers, his shaved jaw a novelty. “I thought I would never see you again,” he said into her temple. “I thought you were in England.” He kissed her brow, her cheek, and finally her mouth, right there in the Food King parking lot.

He shouldn't say so, it wouldn't do anybody any good, but he still loved her, he said, as much as he ever had; she was his favorite living thing.

She ran her hand over his shorn scalp, a fine springy velvet.

 

Twenty-One

She found an iron bedstead at the Sparkville swap meet, forty bucks, and an old wooden dining table for a desk, twenty-five. She paid a man to deliver them, fifteen, to Ondine Streeter's rental on Dawkins Lane, eight miles up Noah Mountain Road. At the end of a long driveway, the small yellow house had a green metal roof and a dirt yard fenced in white planks and tunneled throughout with ground squirrel burrows. A path from the back gate led through a thicket of cottonwoods and willows to a swimming hole in the north fork of the Hapsaw. Noah Mountain's massive, slaggy blue face stared in the kitchen window. She was ten miles down the road from Quinn's old mountain home.

She drove to the Meadows and filled the Saab's seats with her boxes of clothes, books, and research notes—no room, still, in the trunk. “Don't spend the money I gave you on furniture,” her mother called from the new house as Cress loaded the Saab. “You'll need it when you get tired of being number two.”

Now that they were renting out the A-frame on weekends, her parents saw the need for furniture more comfortable than the wicker love seat, the unyielding upstairs bed, both of which Don Dare hauled down to Cress in his truck.

At Beech Creek, Dalia said, “I shouldn't take you back, you deserted me in the heat of battle, but I'm helpless in the face of a good waitress.”

*   *   *

“You should have let Quinn fester,” said Tillie. “He knew where to find you. Now he can have his cake and eat it, too.”

“That's a meaningless cliché,” said Cress. “There is no cake. It's not like that at all.”

“What is it like then?”

“Quinn's not greedy. Or getting any pleasure from the situation. We're all just exhausted and need time to recover.”

She was speaking for Sylvia as much as for herself and him.

“And then what?” said Tillie.

Cress closed her eyes. Pain lay in all directions, a black moat. Sooner or later, one (or more) of them would get up the courage and strength to plunge in and get away. “We'll see,” she said.

*   *   *

His truck lumbered down the long dirt driveway; Cress knew by heart the engine's eight-cylinder rumble, and Quinn's schedule, which was the old one, based around Sylvia's work. They swam in the Hapsaw's waning north fork, stretched out in the sun on granite slabs, fingers and shins touching, restored to one another. He tapped her rib so she'd see the bobcat drinking at the river's edge, its tasseled ears flickering, its tongue the pale pink of a powder puff. Another day, as they approached, a pair of red snakes slid off into the water, their movement synchronized, bend-to-bend. Cress was afraid to swim after that, disturbed by what lived underwater, unseen.

They drove to their far-flung taverns, a beer here, a beer there. They ate T-bones at the Murdock Grill and steak and eggs at the Koffee Kup in town. He ordered his meat
charred raw
. Trained by a stingy father, Cress chose the chicken or burger, but Quinn overrode her, insisted she at least have the ladies' cut.

*   *   *

He took her partway up the Wanderwood Road to a berry patch. “My uncle Dalbert lived just down the way there. He raised sheep, and this one old ram would eat his way into these berry brambles and get stuck. Too stupid to back up, he'd bleat and bleat till one of us came to pull him out by his tail.”

With two gallons of blackberries, they decided on the spot to make jam—Quinn ran to the grocery in Sawyer for mason jars while she boiled and stirred. He took a jar of warm jam with him when he left—he'd fib about where it came from. Cress envied the jar, how it could enter his home, sit on a table in the middle of his family life. She wished she'd sunk something into the ink-dark semisolids: an eavesdropping bug, a tiny camera, a bomb to detonate at will.

*   *   *

In the Sawyer post office, she ran into Donna. “Cress! Great to see you. I heard you were back. Sorry I was such a hard-ass, but Norma really put the squeeze on me,” Donna said. “Come, let me buy you a doughnut.”

At the bakery, they sat on cheap metal folding chairs at an old cable-spool table. Above them hung the taxidermied head of a wild boar with a cigarette dangling rakishly between tooth and tusk. Donna swung her head around to see who was behind her: “That's the old Sawyer backward glance—you never know who's listening,” she said, keeping her voice low. “Quinn was out every night after you left. He stayed through all my sets. Drank the whole time. He was a wreck. He adores you. But he felt bad about his boy.”

And rightfully so, Donna added. As an aide at Evan's school, she saw him on the playground. He was shy and quiet and terribly sweet. His classmates' offhand savagery—their loudness, shoving, and teasing—frightened him more of late, and he'd taken to parking himself by any adult who wouldn't shoo him off.

Cress was grateful for the information and wanted to hear more, but Donna's eyes had started to shine. “I have some news, too,” she said.

“I heard a little something,” Cress said.

“It's not little.” Donna was in love. In love and mesmerized by twenty-two-year-old Scott. “Wait till you meet him, Cress. He's the most gorgeous man you've ever seen. I'm
dying
to have his babies.”

*   *   *

In the fall, the Hapsaw's north fork shrank and stilled, and those channels cut off from the main flow stagnated. Cress caught whiffs of it when a breeze came up from the river as she drifted through her sparsely furnished house, drinking coffee, reading books, sometimes sitting at her typewriter. She was on her own here now most of the time. Two afternoons a week, she went down to serve her golf ladies lunch, and there was usually a banquet on weekends.

Reliably, Quinn came to her Tuesdays and Thursdays, and sometimes for a stray few hours when he could. As he walked through her door, a sandbag slid off her chest, her vision brightened, relief rushed in like a fast-acting drug, a shot of liquor knocked back. They cooked together: pork chops, biscuits, green salads. He browsed through her newspapers and magazines and offered up whatever might interest her. The situation in Lebanon was worsening. The actress turned princess was dead in a car wreck. People in Chicago had died from poisoned Tylenol. Oh, and Glenn Gould—wasn't he the pianist she liked so much, the hummer?—he too had died.

For days she listened to the
English Suites
, the
Well-Tempered Clavier
, setting the little record player's arm to automatically repeat.

Because she expressed an interest, Quinn brought over a fly-tying kit, clamped the tiny vise to the table, showed her how to wrap feathers and tufts of fluff onto gold hooks with black thread; a swarm of Royal Coachmen collected by her salt shaker. When he stood to make the pan gravy, Cress sat and tied a fly using her hair, some yellow straw from a place mat, the fuzz from her blue mohair sweater. “See what you catch with that,” she said.

By late October, they were building fires in the ugly but efficient woodstove—it looked like a blackened fifty-five-gallon drum on its side, with a small isinglass window through which they watched the flames curl and lick from their usual creaky perch, the wicker love seat. Without fail, before he left, they went to bed. Their bodies still snapped together like magnets.

She stayed hopeful for a day or so after his visits, then dread and sadness gathered again, like beggars tugging at her hem, stealing into her rooms. Over the long weekend, the need to talk about him grew intense and constant, as if she had to conjure him in words, and discuss all he'd said and done that week in her search for clues to her future. (“I don't know how I thought I could live without you,” he'd said. But then he and Sylvia drove to Sacramento for a weekend to see Annette at Davis—he'd been hundreds of miles away without Cress knowing, and she'd only learned about it afterward from a chance remark.)

She felt like a child, perhaps like Evan himself, in trying to fathom what the adults were up to, a blurred and fragmentary mystery, with rare hints offering only the most oblique, partial insight.

Tillie now greeted any mention of Quinn tersely.
What'd you expect, going back? You've lost any strategic advantage you had.
Don Dare heard her out, so he could have his turn, first to mourn Donna, and then to praise Elise, the long-limbed, gawky pediatrician with small, clear eyes and a managerial briskness, who had big plans for him.

At Beech Creek, over shift drinks, Cress found a confidante in generous, nonjudgmental Lisette, who took it in stride that Cress's boyfriend was married and could not be named.

*   *   *

She met him at the Staghorn on a Thursday afternoon—they needed to get out, drive around—and after a beer each at Murdock and Fountain Springs, they stopped at the Koffee Kup for a quick bite. Once, Quinn said, he'd been eating breakfast here with Caleb—steak and eggs, exactly what he was having now—only that time, when his food came, there were black flecks all over his plate—the eggs, the hash browns, the steak. Caleb's meal was fine. But his was not. He showed the waitress. Had the cook sprinkled on some spice? The waitress took his plate back to the kitchen. The cook was puzzled and prepared a new plate, which looked okay at first, but soon, Quinn saw the black flecks over everything.

He sent the plate back again, and around the time his third batch of eggs was sputtering on the grill, he remembered trimming his beard that morning. “I was too embarrassed to tell the waitress, but I left her a ten-dollar tip.”

His stories, Cress realized, never involved Sylvia, Annette, or Evan. Had he set his family off-limits to her? Was he being polite, pretending that her rivals did not exist? Or had his marriage and family life been so uneventful that nothing amusing, nothing worth relating ever happened? Or was it Quinn's sense of balance and fair play: since they knew nothing of her, she'd know nothing of them?

*   *   *

In the dusty, dim Coach 'n' 4, Dalia waved from the door. The next day at Beech Creek, Cress apologized for not inviting Dalia and the judge to join them.