Seasons of the Fool (8 page)

“Really?” His face lit up.

“Really.”

“I told you you’d surprise us both, one of these days. Mexican all right?”

“I love Mexican food.”

“Good. I’ll pick you up at seven.” He bounced out to his truck and waved as he drove away.

As she closed the door, her gaze fell on the coffee table, and the letter from her lawyer that she’d received the day before. Trembling, she tore open the envelope. It contained a summons, telling her to be at Cook County Circuit Court at 9:00 a.m. in three weeks for the final dissolution of her marriage.

She sank onto the sofa and began to cry. Too much had happened within the past twenty-four hours, and who knew what she was letting herself in for tonight? But at least one thing was finally going to go right. She was going to get to go back to being Julia Morton, as if all the craziness with Lance and Jesse had never happened.

~

Dave wasn’t surprised when he awoke to find Julia gone. He went to the window and looked up the street; he had a passable view of her cottage through the leafless trees, and he noted the Ames Construction truck was now parked in the street in front of her place.

He nodded, telling himself he approved.
Best to get the heat back on as soon as possible.

He thought he understood her reluctance to get involved with him again. She was fresh out of her own horrible marriage, after all, and probably didn’t want to get too close to his. And there was the obvious parallel between the affairs that had undermined her marriage, and what outsiders might think of his relationship with Julia.

Relationship
was exactly the right word for what he proposed to pursue with her. As loveless and difficult as his marriage had become, he couldn’t conceive of anyone in their right minds criticizing him for finding love elsewhere. And he had always, in his heart of hearts, considered Julia to be his true love – even after she’d married that asshole Lance.

He didn’t consider the thing with Jesse to be an affair, either. Oh, maybe in the technical sense, since she’d slept with him. But the asshole had used her.

He wondered whether her therapist had pointed out that she had been victimized – by Jesse, certainly, but to a degree by Lance, too. She was absolutely right that Lance had wanted her as arm candy. It was one of the things he had disliked about the guy from the very first time he’d met him.

Lance had come out to the cottage with Julia once, a couple of years after their marriage. Dave and Nina had come out for the weekend with Randi, who was still sleeping in a bassinet. At the time, Nina’s diagnosis was post-partum depression; he thought that if he could get her out to Michiana, the lake air might make her feel better.

It hadn’t. But he’d invited Lance and Julia over for a barbecue anyway.

The four of them had sat on the deck in the twilight, the citronella torches doing very little to keep the mosquitoes at bay. Nina had had a couple of glasses of wine and was alternately catty and withdrawn. She had never had a nice word for Julia anyway. Dave had made the mistake of telling her once that he and Julia had dated, and Nina had never been able to get past it.

Lance, on the other hand, felt the need to be the life of the party that night. The more he drank, the louder and more vulgar he got. Every time Julia tried to get him to tone it down, he called her a bitch and told her to shut the hell up. And when she got up to go inside for something, Lance leaned over to Dave and said, in a voice loud enough to wake the dead, “She’s a nice piece of ass, huh? Brainless, but a looker. Wish you had a piece of that, don’t you?”

“Get the hell out of my house,” Nina had screamed at him, waking the baby.

He hadn’t seen Julia again until her grandmother’s funeral. Nina had been too ill to go, and Lance had been out of town – or anyway, that was Julia’s official story. Dave remembered sitting in the pew with his arm around her shoulders, thinking that Mrs. Morton was his last link to her, and wondering, now that she was gone, whether he would ever see Julia again.

And he hadn’t. Not until she had moved out here last fall.

He dismissed the possibility that Lance’s troubles could affect him. That was her fear and anxiety talking – nothing more. And if she was this upset now, she was going to need support to get through the trial. He intended to be there for her.

He put on his coat and went outside to shovel out his car. When he saw Ron drive away, he planted his shovel in a snowbank and walked down the street to see her.

~

Julia stiffened at the knock on her door. She was pretty sure she knew who it was, and she didn’t want to see him right now. But she didn’t have much choice. It wasn’t as if she could pretend to be out.

Wiping her eyes on her shirt sleeve, she went to let him in.

“What happened?” he said at once, and slipped his arms around her.

She hugged him back and stepped away, gesturing toward the letter on the sofa. He picked it up and read it. “This is good news. Isn’t it?” he asked.

She nodded. “Yeah. The hearing is basically a formality. There’s no reason for the judge not to grant the divorce.” She took in a breath. “And then I’ll be Julia Morton again.”

“But you’re upset,” he said, not quite understanding.

“Relieved,” she explained. “Not upset, exactly. Relieved.”

He nodded. “I can come with you to the hearing,” he offered.

She waved him off with a shaky chuckle. “No! That would be…weird. No. Thanks for the offer, but I need to go by myself.”
Go and face Lance one last time, and hope I never have to see him again.

Dave nodded again, and then stepped toward her. It was all she could do not to fall into his arms. “Look, Dave,” she said, holding up her hands. “I meant what I said last night. We can’t do this. Maybe someday,” she said, softening a little at the stricken look on his face, “but not now.”

“When?” he said.

When your kids are grown. When Lance is safely in jail.
“I don’t know,” she said.

He closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, he said, “All right. I guess I’ve waited this long.”

She couldn’t look at him. “Um. Do you want something to eat? I’m sure everything in the fridge survived – the house was like a meat locker when I got here.”

“No,” he said. “That’s okay. I should go home.” He paused. “Can I take you to dinner tonight? To celebrate your good news.”

“Oh,” she said, looking at him sidelong. “I can’t. I made plans with Ron.”

“Ron,” he said. “Ron Gorski. You spent last night with me, and tonight you’re having dinner with Ron Gorski.”

“I’m sorry,” she said softly. “It’s not what you think.”

“I don’t know what to think.” And he let himself out.

She covered her eyes with one hand and wondered how much worse this day could get.

~

At 6:55 p.m., Ron Gorski parked his truck in the driveway of the Morton cottage, hemming in Julia’s car, and strode up the walk to her front door.

Elsie
tsk
ed, shaking her head. “What is wrong with that child?”

“What’s happening now?” Thea asked, coming to stand beside her at the window.

“That workman is back,” Elsie said. “And he doesn’t look like he’s here to fix anything.”

The two women watched as Julia got into Ron’s truck. He backed out almost recklessly and revved the truck’s motor a little too loudly as they pulled away.

“I thought we were on track,” Thea said. “Didn’t she stay with David last night? Why is she going out with this person tonight?”

“I don’t know,” Elsie said, crossing her arms. She walked to her loom and picked up the shuttle. Almost violently, she shoved it through the warp strands and pulled the beater toward her.

“That won’t help, dear,” Thea said, seizing the shuttle and taking it gently from Elsie’s hand. “Delicate movements, or you could ruin the design. And you don’t want that. Not when we’re so close.” She glanced over her shoulder toward the window.

Elsie lowered her chin to her chest, nodding. “Of course. You’re right, dearest. I wasn’t thinking.”

“You were upset,” Thea said, slipping an arm around Elsie and pulling her head to her breast.

“He’s no good for her,” Elsie said with a sigh as Thea stroked her hair.

“I know.”

“It’s going to end badly. I just know it.” She pulled away from Thea. “What are we going to do?”

Thea drew in a breath. “Well, we can’t do anything tonight. But if we can get her into the labyrinth again, this may all sort itself out.”

“Now?” Elsie said. “You want to send her into the labyrinth in February? She’ll freeze in there!”

“I know there’s a risk. But what choice do we have?”

Elsie looked at her weaving and shuddered. “What choice does
she
have?” she said bitterly. “All right. But let’s try to wait ‘til it’s at least a little warmer.”

Thea glanced toward the window again. “Let’s hope for an early spring.”

~

But spring was slow in coming.

With less editing work coming in, Julia found she had more time to work on her own writing. This was both a blessing and a curse. The whole point of moving into the cottage, after all, was to have the time and the solitude to write. But the going was slow and painful. Her characters seemed to insist that she plumb the depths of her own emotions – all the anger, bitterness, betrayal and hurt lurking in the dark corners of her own soul. Her work demanded that she deal with all of the stuff she would rather gloss over.

Her therapist would probably have said her characters were a reflection of her psychological state, and that deep inside, she was crying out for healing. The woman would probably also say that working through her troubled feelings by writing could be a major step toward her recovery.

Yeah, well, she can go take a hike. I’m not paying her for her advice any more, and I wish she’d get out of my head.

Julia sighed and stared out the window, trying to figure out a way to justify her characters’ actions without making them all about her.

The other problem with the lack of a steady income was that she was finding herself increasingly beholden to Ron to take her out to dinner. He wasn’t the most congenial of dinner companions, but she couldn’t afford to pass up free food.

Oh, he was nice enough. Polite. Always held doors open for her, always pushed in her chair and helped her on with her coat. He actually brought her flowers on Valentine’s Day, even though they had only been seeing each other for a week or so. But a sparkling conversationalist he was not. He had no interest in the arts; he knew nothing about what she did for a living, and didn’t appear to have any interest in learning about it. Any jokes she made, particularly if they involved wordplay, went straight over his head.

And there was something a little off about the guy. He sometimes looked almost predatory when he regarded her across the restaurant table. And she was a little troubled by his interest in guns. He collected them – for their firepower, not for any aesthetic reasons – and he spent a lot of time at the shooting range when he wasn’t either working or with her.

So far, she had managed to avoid sleeping with him. But tonight marked almost three weeks since their first date, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to hold him off much longer.

Tonight, she could plead her need for an early bedtime, for she needed to be in Chicago the next day for the divorce hearing. But past that – especially once he realized she was legally available – she didn’t think she would be able to keep him out of her bedroom.

He picked her up at seven. “I thought we’d go to our place,” he said as he walked her out to the truck. His breath made little puffs of frost in the air.

Our place
was the mediocre Mexican restaurant in Long Beach. Julia, who had frequented Rick Bayless’s restaurants in Chicago, considered
our place
to be not much better than Taco Bell. But the margaritas were decent, and he was paying, so she nodded.

He had a plateful of something smothered in cheese. She opted for her usual, the chicken and shrimp fajitas, and immediately asked for a box so she could take half of it home for lunch the next day. As they ate, he talked about the gun show that was coming up in South Bend the following weekend; he’d been after her for a week or so to come with him, but she kept putting him off, saying she had to work.

Now, he said, “I’m going to have to insist that you come with me on Saturday.”

She shot him a look. “Oh? Why’s that?”

“Because you need to have a gun.”

She blinked. “I do? What makes you say that?”

“Well,” he said, sitting back in his chair with his knees splayed, “you’re all alone in that cottage. There’s no telling when some crazy person might get a wild hair up his ass and decide to break in and rape you.”

She couldn’t help but laugh. “I wasn’t aware that was a problem in my neighborhood,” she said lightly. “In fact, I’ve always thought it was really safe.”

“Looks can be deceiving,” he said, with an odd, almost avid, expression.