Storm Tide (28 page)

“What do you think you’re doing?” Holly said.

“I can’t let them get away with this.”

“People already know you’re running, David. They’re not more likely to vote for you because you fill the roadsides with cardboard.”

“Is there a problem, Holly? Let’s have it.”

“No, there’s no problem. You know I want you to win this thing.”

“Do you?”

“If that’s what you want, but …” Here it was. The reason she was not at candidates’ night, and why I saw her scowling while I was cutting scrap wood for sign posts. “It can’t be good for this business, David.
We’ve worked so hard to build it up. You know how crazy people in this town are about politics.” Our own father, after seeing a Nixon’s the One sign on the lawn of a local farm stand, never bought apples there again. “People hold grudges. If you win, they’re going to hate you for some stupid decision you’ll have to make. Even if you lose, you ran against someone’s candidate.”

“But you’re not talking about people in this town, are you? You’re talking about Johnny Lynch.”

“He’s an old friend of the family, David.”

“You think Dad thought so?”

“I think Dad would have been happy to know his wife was taken care of.”

“For fuck sake, Holly, that’s how half the town thinks. He gives everyone a little piece of something and keeps the rest for himself. Everyone’s so damned afraid of losing their little piece.”

“Johnny owns the house Mother lives in.”

“Our old house?”

“You were away, David. You were having your own problems in Florida. Daddy couldn’t pay the mortgage. Johnny bought it, the way he likes to pick up property. He’s let mother live there for years for a nominal rent.” Holly looked at me with something like pity.

“She never told me.”

“Did you ever ask?”

Late one afternoon I met Judith in her office for a quick update on the campaign that turned into drinks as the sun went down and an invitation to the island for dinner. The kitchen smelled of chicken and garlic. Gordon was sitting near the fireplace with a red wool blanket wrapped around him and a glass of scotch in his big hand. “She’ll have it all together in half an hour. Now tell me how the campaign is going.”

“Well, as I was putting gas in my truck today, who should pull up?”

Judith ran in from the kitchen. “Blossom End-Rot?”

“Go on,” Gordon said.

“Did you see the picture in her ad?” Judith perched on the arm of Gordon’s couch. “The meanest teacher you ever had.”

“Judith, let him tell the story.” Gordon settled back.

“She didn’t say hello,” I said. “She could barely return my smile. She stuck a newspaper article in my face about some proposed antiprofanity bylaw.”

“I never heard of it.” Gordon asked Judith, “Have you?”

“Neither had I,” the chair screeched as I leapt to my feet. “But once
I knew she was for it, I felt the need to oppose it, to draw crowds, to orate, to reorient people’s hearts and minds so that we will always and forever have the right to call each other assholes in public.”

“He’s got the fever,” Gordon said. “Blossom’s your only real competitor. The professional widow.”

“He was a war hero, right?” Blossom invoked his name regularly, and right in the middle of town, on High Street by the Town Hall, was Lieutenant Phillip Endicott Square. Every Memorial Day a wreath was laid against the street sign.

“He was a local boy who went off to Korea. He came home on furlough looking for a good time, and he got hitched to Blossom instead.” Gordon shook his head. “In Korea, he lasted two months.”

“It’s always been my opinion,” Judith said, “that she’s far happier as a widow than she ever would have been married to Phil Endicott, who liked his bottle and his feet up, or so Mattie tells me. It was a mismatch. She’s the matriarch of her clan in spite of not having children. She gives money, advice, whatever, to her eleven nephews and nieces, and she plays them off against each other. The heroic status of her dead husband—and remember, they were only together for two weeks—has grown with every passing year.”

“Her signs are everywhere,” I said. “They’re green and red to my plain little black and white ones. They’re wider than mine. I measured. And longer by six inches. I’m developing a case of sign envy.”

Gordon liked my joke. But his laughter caused him to cough hard. Throughout dinner he seemed distracted by pain. He would suddenly drop his hands to the table, eyes alert but otherwise motionless, as if listening to something inside himself. Three or four times Judith suggested he lie down, but despite his obvious fatigue, he refused.

I told them what I’d learned from Holly.

Gordon sat back in his chair, his eyes half closed. “He plays fast and loose and he plays hard. If he can’t get what he wants one way, he tries another. Remember the Town Hall fire?”

“Sort of. I was in high school. Wasn’t it some kind of accident?”

“That’s what the fire chief said. But you always have to ask yourself, who won, who lost, who benefited most? All the records were burned. All the titles, all the deeds. All the town correspondence.”

“Are you saying he did it?”

“Funny thing. Johnny was under investigation at the time. All the records the state probers wanted were lost.”

“What was he being investigated for?”

“Conflict of interest. Obtaining state grants for the town to build roads through land he owned, to dredge the harbor for a fancy new
marina built by his friends. The very site selected belonged to his wife. Sweet woman. Spent the better part of every year in a mental hospital.” Gordon seemed to drift off into the past. He was silent for several minutes. “Saltash might have had thousands more acres of protected land if it wasn’t for old Johnny. Powerful man. His connections ran high up. You didn’t fuck with him. He could be very good to you or come down hard. Two sides of the same coin …” His voice trailed off.

“How is he?” I asked Judith when Gordon finally went to bed.

“I’m worried,” she said.

“For a while he seemed so lively.”

“He’s getting a lot of pleasure out of your campaign. He’s having fun.”

“Isn’t that odd? Why does this backward little place mean anything to a man as successful as Gordon?”

“Gordon knows that small places are just as real as large ones. Since he’s ‘succeeded,’ as you call it, on a grand scale, he knows what’s at stake here: the well-being of the land, the local economy. He has high hopes for you, David. He thinks you’re bright. He told me you have a sharp instinctive intelligence.”

“That’s a very kind thing to say.”

She smiled. “Kind? It’s something that his graduate students would have killed to hear.”

We finished the dishes together quietly. Before things had changed, I would have taken my sweater off, made myself comfortable. Now I felt like a guest. “I forgot to ask about the tide,” I said when we finished.

Judith cocked her head, as if to consider an interesting ploy. “Are you asking if you have to stay or if you can?”

“I’d like to.”

“Good.” She kissed my nose. “What’s wrong?”

“Why do you put up with me and her?” I asked.

“You and Crystal? Is she very much on your mind?”

“No,” I said quickly. Unless I was in bed with her, no. Even when sex was over, when she’d offered me something I’d never dared ask a woman to do, we lay side by side without a thing to connect us except what we’d just done. So we did it again.

“How well do you really know her, David?”

“Why? Do you think she’s hiding something?”

“Most people are, David. Some more than others.”

One afternoon, when business was slow and the back lot was alive with insects and wildflowers, I asked Laramie if he wanted to play catch. He
was sweeping up the stock room in his quiet, meticulous way, seeming content, but I felt like a sweatshop foreman keeping children from the light. “I thought you liked baseball?”

As if annoyed with the interruption, he continued sweeping. “I don’t have a baseball glove.”

“Use mine.”

“Too big,” he said.

“Well, you’re going to get one soon, right? For your birthday. Your dad’s sending it.”

“No, he’s not. He never sends me anything.”

“He sent you a tape deck last year. I saw it.”

“My mom got it.”

“That’s not what she told me.”

“Yeah, she did. Her handwriting was on the box.”

“Maybe he sent it to her and she rewrapped it.”

Laramie swept the dirt into a perfect conical pile. “She says my dad sends presents, but she does it. ’Cause she wants me to think he loves me.”

Most nights, after Crystal left work, she had both kids to care for. She did the shopping and all her other errands, the laundry, gave the kids supper, cleaned up afterwards, supervised their homework and put them to bed. Two nights a week she came straight from work to my house with clothes for the next day. She loved those nights, she told me. She loved having supper on the table in my house with its shabby furniture and cold drafts, because, she said, “I feel like somebody wants us.”

That night, as she usually did, she threw the door back and spread her arms wide. “Where’s my guys?” I had brought Laramie home with me from the nursery.

She gathered Laramie up in the folds of her coat and kissed his sallow face until he squirmed and turned pink. Me she dragged behind the closet door and shot her tongue into my mouth murmuring, “Thank you, thank you, thank you, for saving my life.” Then the kid and I settled down with her at the kitchen table.

“This is great,” she said. “What is it?”

“Obviously not too good if you can’t tell.”

“Beef stew! We made it,” Laramie said.

“You two made this? No sir. I don’t believe it. It’s takeout from a fancy restaurant.”

Laramie’s laughter was as pure as water splashing on a ledge of slate.

“I really do not believe you made this,” she said to me with a wink. “Is there something you want?” Then, sotto voce, “Because I think you’re going to get it.”

Laramie studied his mother, not quite understanding the sudden huskiness in her voice, the tip of tongue brushing her upper lip, but trying to.

“So what’d you do in school today?” she asked him.

“I don’t know. Nothin’.”

“And you, Daddy? Nothin’? You guys.” She shook her head. “Well, I have good news.”

Because she said it quickly, because it blew across the table and was gone, we continued our conversation. Although I played at being Daddy two nights a week; although I was often mistaken for Laramie’s father by shopkeepers and placed in that role by school officials beside themselves in the presence of a man of appropriate age, a working man, taking an interest in a child, I was not Laramie’s father. In his presence I watched the years I’d lost with my own boy and imagined taking Laramie down to Florida with me the next time I went to see Terry. I cared a lot for Laramie. In my way, I loved him. But every time Crystal cast me as Daddy—and I believe she did it when I wasn’t around—she created expectations that could only break his heart.

“There’s a party after work on Friday. For Mr. Lynch’s birthday. I know. I know.” Crystal deepened her voice. “He’s the evil Darth Vader. But he asked you especially to come.”

“Well, send my regrets.”

“Can’t you put politics aside? He’s been very nice to me, David. He may give me a recommendation to law school.”

“Johnny Lynch can be very nice when he wants something.”

“Maybe you’ll meet some new people. Isn’t that what politicians are supposed to do? Show up and mingle?”

“I doubt anyone in his own office would vote against his candidate.”

Her voice became liquid sugar. “That’s not what the girls say. They’ve seen you in the parking lot, David. They think you’re adorable.”

“I’m sorry. I can’t make it on Friday.”

“No, of course not, that’s not my day, is it? It’s Judith’s.”

I looked at the clock, the wall, anything but the little family I could only seem to disappoint. Crystal took a second helping of stew and wiped the gravy up with stale bread. Laramie’s eyes moved from one of us to the other. He barely seemed to breathe.

I was in bed pretending sleep when Crystal crept under the covers and kissed my nose. “I want you to know you’re the sweetest, most wonderful boyfriend I’ve ever had.”

“Except that I see another woman.”

“That does hurt me. But I know you care about me. We have plans together. For me to go to law school. That’s what you, and only you, convinced me I could do. And I believed you. I believe in myself because of you.” Crystal turned on the beside lamp. She was wearing a black nylon nightgown. Crystal complained about putting on weight since she’d moved East, but if she had, it only made her breasts bigger and more attractive to me. I had no particular reaction to the small roll of flesh that swelled over her skirt waistband. Her face was round and luscious. “Look, David, you don’t know where I came from. My ex didn’t want Laramie. When I told him I was pregnant, he—” She stopped abruptly.

“He what?”

“He got very angry. I thought I would lose the baby.”

“You never told me.”

“It’s behind me now, and you’re the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“You can’t mean that.”

“At least I have you three nights a week. I know where I can call you if I need you. Liam used to go off for weeks at a time. If the baby got sick, I was on my own. Sometimes he’d have wads of money, stacks of bills. But not for me.”

“From what?” Dealing drugs? Gambling? Where did a guy get stacks of bills?

“I didn’t ask questions. But then it would be gone as fast as it came.” She yawned heavily. “You’re great, David, for me and for Laramie.”

“Compared to Liam.”

“Compared to anyone.” She yawned again. “We better do it before I fall asleep.”

“We don’t have to
do it
. Not if you’re tired.”

“But you want to, don’t you?”

“You were up at five this morning. You got two kids off to school, worked a full day and then did the laundry. We can skip a night.”

“You really are the best man in the world.” She set the alarm and kissed me. “I’ll make it up to you.”

“You don’t have to.”