The First Time I Fell

by Joanne Macgregor

  “Nice vase,” I said.

  He shrugged. “Hey, I’m a bachelor, what do you expect?”

  “These from your garden?”

  “It’s slim pickings this time of year. What can I get you to drink?”

  My inner Colby was rooting for beer, but seeing the thick steaks laid out on a plate in the kitchen, I asked, “Do you have red wine?”

  “Sure. pinot noir or merlot?”

  “Honestly, I couldn’t tell the difference.”

  “Coming up.”

  He poured me a glass and then set to work making a salad.

  “Can I help?” I asked.

  “Can you cook?” he replied, looking doubtful.

  “I can slice a freaking cucumber.”

  He handed me a sharp chef’s knife and stepped away from the chopping board, hands raised in surrender.

  “How do you like your steak?” he asked.

  “Medium rare.”

  He nodded his approval, fired up the burner under a heavy grill pan on the stove and spiced the meat.

  “Damn!” I said.

  Ryan looked up, concerned. “Amputate a finger?”

  “No, worse! I forgot the hot sauce.”

  “At least you’ll be able to taste the meat,” he said, searing the steaks on the grill.

  I sliced a tomato and chopped the cucumber into blocks, remembering too late that my mother always halved cucumbers and scraped the seeds out first. Was there a reason why she did that? Ryan finished the steaks and removed baked potatoes from the oven. Ten minutes later we were at the table, digging in.

  “Great steaks,” I told him. “And delicious vino.”

  I’d been tempted to ask for ice for my wine — I liked hot things very hot and cold things very cold — but was glad I’d resisted.

  “Can you taste the undertone of black currant and hints of cinnamon?” he asked, grinning.

  “No, but I’m catching a strong whiff of BS. How’s your salad?”

  He gave me an enthusiastic thumbs-up, even though I could now see I’d put in way too much cucumber, and that the tomato and onion slices were somehow way too big for the torn bits of lettuce. The whole thing looked unbalanced. A little like me.

  “Eh,” I said. “Cooking’s not one of my gifts.”

  “You have many of those?”

  “So many. Too many to count, really.” I added extra butter to my baked potato. “I even have the lobster of intuition.”

  “You lost me at ‘lobster of intuition.’”

  “My mother,” I said. He’d met her, so that ought to be explanation enough.

  “Ah, say no more.”

  He finished his wine, and while he went to the kitchen to fetch the bottle, I glanced around, taking in his home. Leather, a few interesting paintings on the walls, a big-screen TV, and a real fire crackling in the living room. It had that slightly random, uncoordinated look of a bachelor pad — nothing matched, but everything looked lived-in and comfortable. I liked it.

  He returned and topped up our glasses. Before we could return to lobsters or any other subject, I cut to the chase.

  “Heard anything from the G-Man?”

  Ryan shook his head.

  “Me either,” I said. “What do you think he’ll do with what I told him?”

  “You want the truth?”

  “No, Ryan, I want you to tell me sweet, sweet lies to make me feel good.”

  He grinned. That grin did things to my insides. Melted some hard places.

  “Then, yes, Garnet, I expect him to call you soon with an update that he’s told his colleagues and boss all about you and is getting stuck into chasing up new leads based on your invaluable assistance. And you should expect delivery of a big bunch of thank-you flowers any day now.”

  I gave a huff of disgust and swallowed a slug of wine. “How’s the Laini Carter investigation going? Any new leads?”

  “We’re not talking about the case tonight,” he said.

  “We’re not? I thought that’s why you invited me.”

  “Then you thought wrong.”

  I eyed him suspiciously, confused about what was happening between us and frustrated that I couldn’t crack open a door to his skull and excavate what he knew about the case. Perhaps I could tempt it out of him.

  “I learned a couple of interesting things today,” I said, with what I hoped was a mysterious smile.

  “Great! I want to hear all about them.” I opened my mouth to speak, but he added, “Just not tonight.”

  “What are we going to talk about then?”

  “Ourselves.”

  “Oh.” I ate a forkful of salad. It was weirdly watery. Really, it was beyond time I learned how to cook. Looking up, I saw Ryan was staring at me expectantly. Deciding attack was the best form of defense, I said in the dulcet tones of an empathic therapist, “So, Ryan, tell me about your childhood.”

  “Oh no, you don’t.” He said it lightly enough, but there was an underlying tension in the speed with which he closed off that avenue of discussion, and a sudden tightness in his face which piqued my interest.

  “Sure?”

  “Yes.” There was no accompanying smile this time. That subject was out of bounds.

  “Fine.” Since he wouldn’t talk about two of the subjects I wanted to know about, I picked another. “Tell me about your marriage.”

  He ate a slice of steak before responding. “Her name was Desirae, and she was a lovely lady.” He returned his attention to his meal.

  “That’s it?” I challenged. “You were the one who wanted to get personal, Bud-dy.”

  He opened his hands as though to indicate he was an open book, ready for the reading. “What do you want to know?”

  “How long were you married?”

  “Four years before we separated. The divorce was settled about a year later.”

  “Which was … when?”

  “Four years ago.” Before I could ask, he added, “When I was thirty. How old are you now?”

  “Twenty-eight, but we’re still talking about you.” I did some rapid mental calculations. “So, if you were twenty-five when you got married, then it must have been pretty soon after your relationship with Vanessa Beaumont came to an end.”

  He’d been dating Colby’s sister back when we’d been seniors, but they’d called it quits sometime after Colby died.

  “It was an entirely decent eighteen months later.”

  “But how soon after the breakup did you start dating Desirae?”

  “You know,” he said, putting down his knife and fork, “if this psychologist thing doesn’t work out, you should consider law. I think you’d be a natural at grilling a witness in the stand.”

  “The witness will answer the question,” I said.

  “Around six months.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Was it a rebound relationship?”

  “No.”

  “Was your heart still broken, maybe?”

  He pinned me with a look. “Broken hearts can mend, Garnet. We don’t have to give up on love when the first time around doesn’t work out.”

  I knew he was taking a dig at the way my life, especially my love life, had gone on hold after I lost Colby. I finished my steak and gave up on the salad.

  Leaning back in my chair, I asked him, “So, what went wrong if your wife was such a ‘lovely lady?’”

  “Nothing dramatic or tragic, we just drifted apart. I think — I know — that we were way too young when we got married. I was only twenty-five, and she was just twenty-two. At that age, you aren’t the person you’re going to be. You’re too young to commit to forever.” He shot me another meaningful glance. “You haven’t finished developing.”

  “You never finish developing,” I replied.

  “Sure, but there’s a big change in your personality and maturity between when you leave school and about twenty-five, don’t you think?”

  Don’t ask me, friend, I hardly changed between eighteen and twenty-eight. I took a gulp of wine.<
br />
  “Well, it was too young for us in any event,” Ryan continued. “She clearly wanted more than I could give her, and it just kind of … fizzled out?”

  “What did she want? Big city, big life?”

  “No,” he said, gathering the plates and heading to the kitchen.

  I followed, eager to hear his reply.

  “What Desirae wanted more than anything was attention. Loads of it, all the time. I couldn’t pay her enough compliments, or spend enough time with her, or reassure her enough to fill the hole of insecurity that ran through the core of her.”

  He scraped the plates and put them into the dishwasher.

  “In the end,” he continued, “I got tired of being a perpetual cheerleader. And she got tired of me withdrawing into myself and my career. Well, that’s my side of the story, anyway. If you spoke to her, she’d probably tell you I was a boring fart who prioritized his work over his wife, dragged my heels on starting a family, and never put the toilet seat down after I peed.”

  Ryan extracted a tub of ice cream from the freezer, handed it to me, and got us a couple of bowls and spoons.

  Back at the table, I asked, “So, you don’t have kids?”

  “Not a one.”

  “Are you still in contact with your ex?”

  “We send each other texts on our birthdays.” He placed two large scoops of ice-cream into a bowl and handed it to me. “They didn’t have a jalapeno-flavored one. Hope Rocky Road’s okay.”

  “Sure,” I said, although I despised Rocky Road. All those bits of nut and marshmallow spoiling the creamy smoothness. “Hugo from the hardware store told me your wife left you because she was from the South and her blood was too thin to stand the northern winters.”

  Ryan laughed. “She sure did hate the winters!”

  “He also said that she ran away with a Texan.”

  “That part he got wrong. She ran away to Texas. Got an impressive position as a sous chef at a fancy restaurant in Austin.”

  “Your wife’s a chef?”

  “Ex-wife. And yes.”

  “That’s how you learned to cook?”

  “She taught me a thing or two. Now,” he said, pointing a spoon loaded with ice cream at me, “it’s your turn to spill the beans.”

  – 29 –

  Knowing that Ryan was asking for details on my love life, I instead gave him a long, detailed answer about my thesis, telling him more than he surely ever wanted to know about theories of grief, while I smashed my ice cream into a paste with the back of my spoon.

  “It’s almost finished,” I concluded.

  “What’s next?” he asked. “Are you going to do your doctorate?”

  Steering my spoon between the offensive bits pocking my ice cream, I spooned up a mouthful of frozen chocolatey goodness. “Nope. I don’t know much about my future, but I’m fairly sure that being a shrink isn’t in it.”

  Ryan pointed at my bowl. “What do you have against nuts and marshmallows?”

  “Nothing. I like them, just separately.”

  “Okayyy. So, what will you do then?”

  Too embarrassed to admit that I’d been contemplating my mother’s suggestion of becoming a private investigator, I fobbed him off with a joke about becoming a barista at Starbucks.

  He laughed, but asked, “Seriously, though?”

  “Seriously, though, I don’t know. Look for a job, I guess.”

  “Here or in Boston?”

  “Are there many jobs going here?” I asked.

  “Fair point.”

  “How about you? What’s it like being Police Chief of Pitchford?”

  “Mostly good. Not very eventful, usually. Though things do seem to get more interesting every time you breeze into town.”

  I made an indeterminate noise and held up my empty glass. “Can I have a refill?”

  “I’ll open another bottle. Unless you’d prefer something else? A brandy?”

  “Do you have whiskey?”

  He nodded.

  “Lots of ice.”

  We took our drinks into the living room, where I sat at one end of a long couch, with my feet curled under me, nibbling on a nail. He added a log to the fire in the grate before sitting down at the other end, facing me.

  “Why did you become a cop?” I asked.

  Ryan leaned across to brush my fingers away from my mouth, saying, “If you’re still hungry, I can make you something more to eat.”

  He said it gently, but it still got my back up. Why did my condition bother people so much? It wasn’t like I was chewing on them.

  “I have a condition, okay?”

  He cocked his head in interest.

  “An anxiety disorder. The nail-biting is part of it. And I know I have it — I don’t need reminding.”

  “Noted” he said, in the tone of someone closing a subject, but then he asked, “So, are you seeing anyone back in Boston?”

  “I’m not in therapy.”

  “I meant in the romantic sense.”

  “No.” I took a swig of whiskey, enjoying the burn as it went down. “I don’t really date.”

  Ryan drew back his chin in surprise. “Come again?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “I’ll try to keep up.”

  “I mean, I do go on dates. I just don’t, you know, do relationships.”

  “Why not?”

  In reply, I downed the rest of my whiskey. He topped me up, even though I was fairly certain I’d already had too much to drink. My cheeks were getting numb, and my eyes felt like they wanted to focus in different directions. As heavy as I’d seemed to be hitting the bottle lately, you’d think I’d have built up more of a tolerance by now.

  Ryan was still watching me, waiting for an answer. It seemed like cops also knew about the holding-a-silence trick.

  “What were we talking about?” I asked.

  “Romantic relationships. Why you don’t have them.”

  “Oh, right.” I took another sip. “Well, I don’t have relationships for good reasons. For fine reasons. Several of ‘em.”

  “Such as?”

  “First of all, all the best men are gone. They’re dead. Or gay. Or” — I gestured at him with my glass, sloshing a little of the amber liquid over the side — “married!”

  “I’m divorced. Though I’m glad you rank me with the best men.”

  Wait, what?

  “What’s another reason?” he asked.

  “For what?”

  “Not having romantic relationships.”

  “Oh. Are we still talking about that?”

  “We are,” he said.

  “Fine, I’ll tell you! And don’t blame me if I overshare because I’m jingled. You’re the one that keeps filling up my glass.”

  “I take full responsibility,” he replied.

  “I don’t do relationships because my heart won’t survive another break. There! Happy now?”

  “How can you know for sure it will end in heartbreak?”

  “Because it does.”

  “Garnet, you can’t make a decision that rules the rest of your life based on one experience you had years and years ago.”

  “Oh, can’t I?” I replied and was surprised to hear how belligerent I sounded. I took a breath and said in what I hoped was a more reasonable tone, “It wasn’t just ‘an experience.’ Colby and I were totally in love. It was perfect.”

  “No relationship is perfect.”

  “That may be true, over time. But we didn’t get time. We weren’t together long enough for things to cool down, to get pissed off at each other’s quarks.” That didn’t sound right. “Quarks?”

  “Quirks,” Ryan said.

  “Yes, them. It just ended abruptly, right in the middle of wunnerful. We never said goodbye, so it kinda felt like we were still together. Or that he was still in Pitchford, waiting for me. And then, in December, it felt like he was back, and we were together again. Can you understand that?” I sent him a pleading glance.

  H
e was sitting very still, his full attention on me. “Does it still feel that way?” he asked.

  I set my empty glass on the table and hugged my legs to my chest, bouncing my chin on my knees while I considered.

  “I don’t think so. I think finding his killer and being there when his ashes were scattered helped settle something. Like maybe I finished some unfinished business.”

  Ryan moved closer, took one of my hands and began playing with my fingers. I smiled at him. What I’d told him had been true. I did feel like I’d reached some kind of conclusion with Colby. But I wasn’t sure he’d reached the same kind of closure with me, because it was also true that sometimes I sensed him. I imagined I could feel him nearby, at times. Like right now.

  “Cola,” I murmured.

  “You want a soda?” he asked, surprised.

  “No. No, thanks.”

  I wondered what he would say if I told him that I thought Colby was right beside me at that very moment, jealously guarding my left side and probably unhappy about the fact that Ryan was holding my hand. And that far from wanting him finally gone, I liked the occasional sense of his presence.

  “So, you said you were going to speak to Carl wassisname tomorrow?”

  “Did I?”

  “I have a clear recollection of it,” I said, nodding firmly and enunciating each word so I didn’t slur. “I think your special consultant should tag along to see if she picks up anything. Tha’s what I think.”

  “You do, do you?”

  “Uh-huh. And also, I found out some verrry interesting stuff about him, but I’m not telling you now because you said we couldn’t talk about the case tonight.” And then, in case he hadn’t gotten it, I spelled it out. “But I could tell you about it tomorrow. I could meet you there, at his place. Nine o’clock.” I contemplated this plan for a moment. “If you tell me where it is.”

  “I’ll collect you from your place tomorrow morning,” he said, sounding resigned. “And I’ll come in your car because we’ve both been drinking, and I reckon I should call you a taxi.”

  “A taxi?”

  “Would you rather sleep over?”

  I narrowed my eyes at him.