“Clear to South Dakota, judging by what time it is,” his mother replied.
“You mad, Mom?”
“Actually, Christopher and I were talking so hard I hadn’t even noticed it’s nearly dark.”
“Jeez, am I relieved. Guess what? I ran into this girl I know . . . Sandy Parker? And she’s having an end-of-the-summer party at her house the last week of vacation and I’m invited.”
“A party? With girls? And you want to go?”
“Well, Sandy’s not like the other girls. She likes to Rollerblade and fish and stuff like that.” He swung his hat bill around to the front and used it as a handle to scratch his head. “I can go, can’t I, Ma?”
Lee and Chris pushed up off the table. “You can go.” The three of them headed back toward the blacktop trail where Joey immediately pulled ahead. “Wait by the truck for us, okay?” she called after him.
For the short remainder of their walk, and all the way back to Anoka, Lee and Christopher found little to say. He was going out on a date next Saturday and they both knew it was an antidote for the him-and-her situation they’d been nurturing since June: the two of them with their mismatched ages, beginning to enjoy each other’s company a little bit too much.
Joey jabbered all the way back to the house, unaware of the deflated moods of the two with him. Back at home, Christopher walked them to the door then waited while Lee unlocked it and Joey passed them in his stocking feet, carrying both his shoes and his skates, his stockings filthy.
She watched the screen door slam behind him and muttered, “I give up.”
Neither she nor Christopher laughed as they would have earlier in the evening. Somehow their mood had dulled.
“Joey, come back here and thank Chris!” she called.
He reappeared in the entry hall and said through the screen door, “Oh yeah . . . hey, thanks, Chris. It was fun.”
“Sure thing. ’Night, Joey.”
He disappeared and a moment later the bathroom door slammed. Lee stood on the step above Chris, telling herself she had no right to react this way to his dating a young woman his own age.
“Yes, it was fun. Thank you. You rescued me again and I needed it.”
“So did I.”
Joey came banging out of the bathroom and flashed past on his way into the kitchen where the cupboard and refrigerator doors started opening and closing. Lord, it was hard to sort out these feelings with a teenager banging around.
“Well, listen . . .” Lee said. “Have a good time Saturday night. Give the woman a chance. Who knows . . . she might turn out to be somebody you like a lot.”
He dropped his foot off the step and stood in what she’d come to think of as his cop pose, weight distributed evenly on widespread feet, shoulders back, chest erect, chin level with the earth. His key ring was looped over his index finger and he gave it a jingle, then snuffed it in a tight fist.
“Yeah, right,” he said, deep in his throat. “Who knows.”
He’d already turned away before saying, “Goodnight, Mrs. Reston.”
8
ON Saturday night Christopher, Pete Ostrinski, his wife, Marge, and sister-in-law, Cathy Switzer, had a date to go bowling. Summer leagues were done, winter leagues hadn’t started: the lanes would be half empty. Pete and Marge lived in a nice new house over in the Mineral Pond addition on the east side of town: split entry with two bedrooms up, finished, two down, unfinished. The seams still showed between the rolls of sod in the front yard, and inside, the place smelled like new carpet and paint.
Pete answered Christopher’s knock and walked him up into the living room, where toys shared equal space with furniture and the two women were waiting. He kissed Marge on the cheek. When introductions were performed, Cathy Switzer rose from her chair and shook Christopher’s hand; her palm was damp. She was blonde, sharp-featured, relatively attractive in a bony way, but when she smiled her gums showed.
“Hi, Chris,” she said. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
He smiled. “That makes two of us.”
Pete said, “Marge has got some drinks out on the patio,” and they trailed after him, attempting to make conversation. Outside, drinking a Sprite while the others drank margaritas, Christopher covertly assessed Cathy Switzer.
Her hair was fluffed up into a huge arrangement of disheveled corkscrews that must have taken her some time to accomplish. He quite hated it. She had tiny breasts, skinny hips and an unearthly thinness that gave her the frail look of a matchstick. Plainly thought: She didn’t look healthy.
He remembered Lee’s admonition to give the woman a chance, and remarked, “Pete tells me you work for a plumbing supply.”
“Yes, in the office. I’m going to school two nights a week though, to get my realtor’s license.”
So she had goals and ambition.
“And you bowl on a league, I hear.”
The conversation bumped along like all conversation on all blind dates has bumped along for aeons. The baby-sitter came home from the park with the kids, providing a welcome diversion just before the foursome left for the bowling alley in Pete’s car .
Cathy Switzer—it turned out—brought her own ball.
The first time she delivered it down alley number five, Christopher expected to see her skinny little arm snap off at the elbow. Instead, she went into a downswing in perfect form, right leg crossed behind left, shoulders canted in a perfect follow-through, and put enough backspin on the ball to throw pins halfway to the scoring table, had the setter not descended to scrape them away, still whirring.
Naturally, she got a strike.
Everybody clapped, and Cathy blushed as she returned to her seat next to Chris.
“Nice,” he said, grinning at her askance.
“Thanks,” she said with a pleasing balance of pride and humility.
They had a lot of fun, playing three games, all won by Cathy in her size seven blue jeans with her top-heavy hair, matchstick arms and her gums that showed when she smiled. Afterward they drove down to Fridley to T . R. McCoy’s for some burgers, fries and malts, and sat in a rainbow of neon with Fats Domino’s “Walkin’ ” on the jukebox and James Dean smiling down off the walls beside a ’59 Merc.
“I like this place,” Cathy said. “Mark and I used to—oops!” She covered her lips with four fingers. “Sorry,” she whispered, dropping her eyes to the black Formica tabletop.
“That’s okay,” Christopher said. “Mark’s your ex?”
She looked up at him like Betty Boop and nodded.
“The divorce has been final for nine months, but I still slip and mention him sometimes when I’m not supposed to.”
Across the table Marge said, “The ass.”
Pete nudged her arm. “Marge, come on now, not tonight.”
“All right, sorry I called the ass an ass.”
Things got tense after that and they decided to call it a night. When they got back to Pete and Marge’s house it turned out Cathy had no car, so Christopher offered to drive her home. In his truck he turned on the radio and Cathy stayed buckled onto her half of the seat.
“You like country?” he asked when the music came on.
She said, “Sure.”
While Willie Nelson tried his darnedest to sound less than pitiable, she said, “Sorry I mentioned my ex.”
“Hey, listen . . . it’s okay. I imagine you were with him for a few years. You’ve got two kids, I hear.”
“Yeah, Grady and Robin. They’re five and three. He never comes to see them. He married my best friend and he’s busy with her kids now.”
He wondered what to say . “That’s tough.”
“You’re only the second guy I’ve been out with since my divorce. The first one never called back.”
“Probably because you took him on the pro bowling tour.”
She laughed and said, “Mark hated it when I bowled. It was okay for him to go running all over the country taking my best friend to bed, but he didn’t like it when I went out with
the girls from work to our bowling league.”
He began to regret telling her it was okay to talk about this guy.
“What hurts worst,” she went on, “is that a lot of the stuff he’d never do with me and the kids, he does with her and her kids. I know because I talk to his mother, and sometimes she slips and mentions things.” She talked nonstop about her ex-husband, barely pausing to give directions to her townhouse. When they got there, she said, “Oh, are we here already?”
“Wait there,” he said, got out, pocketed his keys and went around to open her door.
“It’s been a long time since a guy has done that for me,” she said. “That kind of stuff stopped long before Mark divorced me. That’s sort of how I knew something was going on.”
He trailed along after her to a concrete walk that took two turns between buildings and led them to a ground-floor door without an outside light. There she took one step up and turned to him.
“Well, I’ve enjoyed it,” she said. “Thanks a lot for the bowling and the burgers and everything.”
“I enjoyed it, too,” he said. “Especially the bowling, even though you beat everything in sight. It’s fun to watch somebody do something that well.”
“You’re sweet,” she said.
“Sweet?” he repeated with a chuckle. “I’m a lot of things, but sweet I don’t think is one of them.”
“Well, you put up with me crying on your shoulder all night about Mark. That’s sweet, isn’ t it?”
“Hey, listen,” he said, taking a step backward. “Good luck. I know it’s hard losing someone that way, but I hope everything works out for you and your kids.”
She stood in shadow so deep he couldn’t make out her face. He had the impression her hands were stuck into the tight front pockets of her jeans, and her puffy hair created a faint nimbus in the dark around her head.
Suddenly he took pity on her. “You know, Cathy, you ought to get over him. Somebody who treats his wife and family like that doesn’t deserve any tears.”
“Who says I cry about him?”
He saw himself getting in deeper than he wanted with this deluded woman and backed away another step. “Listen . . . I’ ve got to go. Good luck, Cathy.”
When he got a yard down the sidewalk she stopped him. “Hey, Chris?”
He turned.
“Would you . . .” She paused uncertainly. “Come here?”
He knew what was coming and experienced little joy in the presumption. Nevertheless he again took pity on her and moved to the base of the stoop, which put their heads on the same level.
“Listen,” she whispered, and he heard her swallow as she put her hands on his collar. “I know you’re not coming back again either, and that’s all right . . . I mean, really it is!” She spoke anxiously. “I mean, I talk too much about Mark and I know that. But before you go, would you mind very much if I kissed you? I mean, it’s been a long, long time since he left, and I know you don’t like me or anything, and I don’t want you to go away thinking I ask strange guys to kiss me all the time. You’re a cop, like Pete, and I trust you . . . I mean, I know you think this is a pretty dumb thing to ask, but it’s been . . . I’ ve been . . . I’ ve been so lonely . . . and . . . and it would be the sweetest thing you could do for me if you’d just stand there and . . . well, I don’t care . . . pretend I’m somebody else if you want . . . and let me kiss you.”
Something in his heart twisted. Lonely he understood. Lonely was Judd Quincy waiting with his foot against the wall of the 7-Eleven store. Lonely was little Chris Lallek waiting for his mom and dad to come home so he could ask them for money for a band uniform. Lonely was this skinny, divorced woman laboring under the delusion that she didn’t love her philandering husband anymore.
He didn’t wait for her to kiss him. He kissed her—an honest, full-mouthed French kiss, holding nothing back. She felt like a bundle of kindling wood in his arms, and he put from his mind the way her gums showed when she smiled, and how unnatural her hair looked, all tortured up three times bigger than her narrow little face.
He’d kissed enough women that he felt the universal pull of all that went along with it; he gave himself over to that universality, to the pre-mating ritual of running hands over backs, and tongues over tongues, and fitting two bodies together so that the line of one obscures the other.
It stopped when Cathy ran her hands down the rear pockets of his jeans and made a place for him between her thighs. His sympathy didn’t extend quite that far .
He pulled her arms from behind his neck, stepped back and gripped both her hands hard.
“Listen,” he said throatily. “I gotta go. You take care of yourself now.”
“Yeah. You, too.”
When their hands parted and she stayed on her stoop, he couldn’t help but breathe a sigh of relief.
ODD,for a woman he hadn’t particularly liked, she stayed on his mind a lot the next couple of days. Then he realized why: he was comparing her to Lee Reston. She had a Dolly Parton hairdo, not Lee’s short, unaffected cap, which took wind and weather as it would. She had a profile like an eleven-year-old girl, not the rounded curves of maturity. She had a bony, emaciated face instead of a full, healthy one. And those gums—ye gods. Had he really French-kissed her? Well, hell, the kiss hadn’t been so bad if he really stopped to think about it. Cathy Switzer’s greatest shortcoming was simple enough for Christopher to understand: she wasn’t Lee Reston. Damn, but that woman stayed on his mind a lot. Not a day went by that he didn’t think of her and manufacture excuses to see her, which he most often decided not to act on.
Several days passed after his date without either seeing or speaking to Lee. Then one day he was standing in his kitchen scooping ice cream into a bowl when someone slipped a piece of paper under his door. He reacted like a policeman: leaped and yanked the door open suddenly, to confront whoever was on the other side.
And there was Lee, leaping back in fright.
“Christopher!” She pressed her heart. “Lord, you scared me! I didn’t think you were home. I thought you were working days.”
“It’s my day off.” He looked down the hall both ways, then at the envelope on the floor . “What’s this?”
“Something of yours I found stuck between Greg’s papers. I think it’s an insurance card. I must have picked it up when I was taking some things out of your kitchen drawer.”
He opened the envelope and perused the item. “Oh yeah . . . I was looking for this.”
“Sorry.” She shrugged.
“You could have mailed it.”
“I know. I was passing by.”
He studied her in her green canvas skirt, white blouse and slip-on shoes, her healthy middle-age robustness so different from Cathy Switzer. He had done the right thing; he’d tried a date, tried meeting someone new, but it had only served to point out how much he enjoyed the woman standing before him in the hall.
“Wanna come in?” He stepped back and motioned toward the kitchen.
“No. I’ve got to go home and fix supper for Joey.”
“Oh. Well, okay then.” They stood awhile coming to terms with her correct decision before he dropped one shoulder and said, appealingly, “Well, hell, you can come in for a minute, can’t you?”
“What were you doing?” She bent forward from the waist, going up on tiptoe to peek around the open door.
“Having a bowl of ice cream.”
“At suppertime?”
“Yeah. You want one?”
She settled back down on her heels. “No, I really have to go.”
“All right then,” he said, accepting her decision, but wishing if she was going to go, she’d go, because they both knew it wasn’t what she wanted to do. “Say hi to Joey. I gotta go,” he added with a hint of irritation, “my ice cream is melting.”
“Well, you don’t have to get mad at me.” If someone were to point out how childish they sounded they both would have made loud protestations of denial.
“I’m no
t mad at you.”
“All right then, could I change my mind about the ice cream?”
He waved her in, shut the door and followed her into the kitchen, where he took out a glass dish and scooped out ice cream. “You want topping?” He opened a cupboard door and hung a hand from it while taking a tally of its contents. “There’s chocolate, caramel and . . .” He picked up a moldy bottle of something, turned and made a perfect shot into a garbage can next to the stove. “I guess there’s just chocolate and caramel.”
“Caramel,” she said.
He drizzled some straight from the jar, caught the stalactite with a finger and sucked it off. Recapping the bottle, he put it away, found spoons, then brought the two sundaes to the kitchen table.
“Sit down,” he ordered.
“Thanks.”
They ate in silence until half their ice cream was gone. Then Lee asked, “So how was your blind date on Saturday?”
“Great,” he answered. “She owned her own bowling ball.”
A stretch of silence passed before Lee asked, “So, are you going to see her again?”
“Why do you ask?” He watched her carefully, but she refused to meet his eyes.
“I was just wondering, that’s all.”
He got up and took their bowls to the sink, rinsed them both and put them in the dishwasher. When he finished, he stayed clear across the room from her, catching his hips and both palms against the edge of the countertop, studying her back while she remained at the table waiting for his answer. After an uncomfortable stretch of silence he sighed—an enormous effort to relieve the tension in his shoulders—and spoke resignedly.
“No,” he told her.
She twisted around in her chair and stared at him but said nothing.
“She was pathetic,” he added, pushing off the cabinet and returning to the table, where he took the chair at a right angle to her. A fingernail clipper lay on the table. He picked it up and let it slide between the pads of his thumb and index finger time and time again, turning it end for end each time his fingers touched the table.