Читать книгу Follow the Sun - Edward J. Delaney - Страница 12

5.

SHE’D SAID HELLO AS HE SAT UPON HIS STOOL, MINDLESSLY watching a women’s college basketball game on the big TV over the bar. She was sidling up for drinks for herself and her girlfriends, over in the corner. And in the way it happens when there’s some attraction, she’s now sitting here while her girlfriends keep a wary eye from their table. Jean seems okay, as far as he can tell. She’s tall, with blond hair that may be holding off the gray with some chemical intervention. Fortyish, he guesses. The talk has been tame enough, and he’s made that mistake that happens when you’re starting to like someone, which is to foolishly confide one’s most assailable opinions.

“When I was young, girls playing sports seemed stupid to me,” Robbie says, to her narrowing gaze.

“Is that so?”

“But let me continue.”

“Go on.”

“So now I have a daughter. Seven years old. And what I’d love is for her to play every sport she can. Hockey, even. I see the utility now of any of that. It would be the only thing I’d ever imagine we’d have in common. Except she’s shown no interest at all.”

“No boys?” Jean says.

“No. Just the one girl. My brother has two girls, too. Our older sister—she lives down South now—has a girl. The name seems to end there.”

“What’s the name?”

“Boyle.”

“Don’t worry, I think there are plenty of those left. How old is the niece?”

“Senior in high school. I just saw her today.”

“That’s nice, for a family to be close enough to see each other so much,” Jean says. He lets it lie there.

“You?” he says. “Kids?”

“A daughter, too. She’s thirteen.”

“And where is she?”

“Home, I hope!” Jean says. “It’s been a little bit of an adjustment. But this is where the company sent me and that’s why I’m here.”

“And the father?”

“He didn’t leave me in the classic sense, just an hour at a time. We almost never saw him. When we packed the rental truck, he showed up to talk me out of it, but seemed half-hearted. He also had a girl in the car. He said she worked for him and he was driving her home. He owns a restaurant. That’s a tough business, where monogamy is concerned.”

He supposes it is; he’s listening but also confounded about why she apparently likes him. He’d abandoned all hope after the divorce from M.; she’d weakened him, and his faith in himself. In the office he’d often tell the younger guys, “Marriage—a contract for idiots!” That played as a punch line, but he was dead serious.

“Do you know her?” Jean is saying.

“Huh?” Robbie realizes how far adrift his unmoored mind has gone. “Who?”

“The woman shouting at you from over there.”

“I didn’t hear her.”

“So you didn’t hear her screaming ‘Hey, asshole’? Everybody else did . . .”

He turns, and looks. Oh. It’s Botelho’s widow, clearly drunk, her eyes ablaze.

“Yeah, that’s right,” the woman is yelling, “the brother who helped cover up the murder, right over there!”

“Well, I really should run,” Jean says.

“And who could blame you?” Robbie says.

“Nice meeting you,” Jean says, standing. “And good luck with all that about a murder . . .”

Nothing like the mention of murder to scare a woman off! Probably better off; for a man without a woman, Robbie seems well-weighted with woman problems. Walking home, he ponders not just the specter of M., but also the prodigal return of a girlfriend he’d thought he’d not see again.

Dawn is back up from Florida, to Robbie’s mixed regret. She’d been in Orlando trying to do the real-estate turn, but the recession has apparently driven her back. She’s had scant success in a place where half the houses are in foreclosure. Dawn, forever the victim of bad timing, such as when connecting with a man who has just come out of a marriage vowing never to marry again. She was the rebound relationship, unfortunately for her.

He’s followed her fortunes indirectly, via that ethereal network of small-town talk and well-meant reports. He’d hoped, badly, she’d succeed. He regrets she hasn’t, both because he actually likes Dawn, a lot, but as well because her departure from town seemed like a healthy denouement for both of them. It seemed, in fact, like pure relief. There were too many cold nights with them ending up in bed, even when they long knew it couldn’t possibly work out. Yet his memories of being in bed with her are happy. It was by daylight that it all got too complicated.

The thing that most appealed to him about Dawn was that she was the antithesis of his ex-wife. A high compliment, to be sure. He’d gotten married on what felt like the too-younger side, although much older than Quinn had. M. never stopped treating him as a boy—the way he watched M.’s mother treat her father, until that old boy’s heart gave out with a massive infarction. M. had quickly taken the air out of their marriage with what might have been called, in another era, henpecking. As the years went on, her disappointment in his failure to move beyond his local sportswriting job, and the pay that came with it, was palpable. Used cars and forestalled luxuries. She ran up the credit cards as if he had already succeeded, to punish him that he had not. He punished her in turn by letting go of any ambition at all. Coming out of that mess, he met Dawn, which felt like oxygen again. She laughed hard, they had real fun, and he came to have deep affection for her. He just couldn’t marry her.

Then he heard she was back, from one of the secretaries at the paper who knew them both. A kind of “brace yourself” sideways warning, because coming home disappointed was never easy. A few weeks after that, he heard Dawn was back at the bar at The Wharf, a place he then frequented much less frequently. But then there he was, at the bar of The Wharf.

Why was he here? He knew why: the whole thing always had the opposing forces. It needed to be done. He’d watched the door even as he’d fought the urge to flee. He leaned back over his beer, trying ineffectively to convince himself once more he didn’t come to see Dawn. The Celtics were on the big screen above the bar, playing the Nets, and he focused in on that, just as ineffectively.

“Well, let’s get this done with,” she said from behind him.

“Hey, look at you!” he said.

He’d not have recognized her. The hair was cut so severely short it almost seemed applied. It seemed lacquered down with some kind of hair product and the smallness of her head was the shock. Her mane, shorn. She was deeply tanned, baked in a way he suspected came from extending it in the local tanning parlor. But he had to admit it was good to see her. She pushed her cold cheek at him, the awkward kiss, and he could feel the shaky vibe.

“Your hair looks great,” he said.

“Yeah, well, things happen,” she said. “I assume you heard I was back.”

“I think I had.”

“Come on, you knew,” she said. “I made sure you would, so this wouldn’t be an ambush.”

“Thanks. Are you back for good?”

“Oh, God, I hope not! I was trying to sell real estate in a place where every other house seemed to be abandoned. That doesn’t mean I’m giving up.”

“Good for you.”

She was dressed smartly, if not warmly. In their times together, she tended toward jeans and sweaters, but tonight she was bedecked as the tropical real-estate woman she had tried to be. Silk blouse, pencil skirt, jangling jewelry up and down. And that perfume he always liked, but the name of which he could never remember at Christmas.

“And you’re still at the paper.”

“Of course. Where else would I be?”

She was smiling in a way, with the tan, that spoke of some gained perspective. She’d been places, as he had never, something he wouldn’t have expected.

“Don’t you ever want to even try to do something different?” she said.

“Such as?”

“Such as moving to Florida, even if it doesn’t work out. To have an experience!”

“But there’s Sarah.”

Dawn, childless, backed off a little at the mention of the daughter. “And how is she?”

“Great. As always.”

“You know, she could come visit you somewhere else.”

“Dawn, I can’t move to Florida.”

“I’m not talking about Florida. I’m not even talking about me. I’m talking about you.”

“Florida is too far away.”

“Try Connecticut. Try New Hampshire. You can’t aspire for something better? You can’t try to move up a little before it’s too late?”

Her phone was going in her bag, and she looked at it and looked over to her sister, sitting in a booth with her phone to her ear.

“I’ll be right over,” she said in that direction, then turned back to Robbie. The exasperation was now patently noticeable.

“I’m not talking about you and me,” she said. “For good or for bad I just had an experience where everything was exciting. I want that for you, because I know it’s what you really want.”

“I do?”

“Robbie, you’re stuck and you don’t even know it,” she said, turning away, her scent still enveloping him.