She knew what he meant, and she knew why he was explaining it again. She understood his deliberate tone. Don’t. Tell. Anyone. That’s what he was saying. He remembered their conversation on the rock, so many years ago. He knew why she traveled, why she had no real home, why there was no warmth in her life or her face or her heart. He knew, and he had no pity.
“I was here with my lover!” Laura said.
For a moment, the sunlight coming through the window froze to amber and everyone sat motionless. Laura had the uncanny feeling that if she stood up and walked out, the family would remain petrified, like an installation at a wax museum. First Family on the Eve of Ruin, the artist would title it.
Unfortunately, they had not been reduced to figurines. Natalie broke the silence.
“You can’t do this to us.” It wasn’t a plea. It was a statement.
Then everyone was talking at once, everyone except Laura. She sat rigid on the couch, her hands clutching her empty glass. It was ten minutes before they quieted down. Then John stood, the alpha male presiding over his women.
“I’m going to sit here.” He motioned to Laura’s sofa.
“Fine.”
He sat and waited a beat.
“Do you love America?” John asked finally.
A month ago, she would have given a knee-jerk yes. Of course, she loved America. Now, she thought of Maggie standing behind the counter of Out Coffee. She thought of Krystal with her pink ponytails, sheltered by the only people who would take her in, dreaming of a father in prison. She thought of Tate, with her stern face and endless loyalty. She thought of this network of work and love and sacrifice, where the small pleasures had to be enough because often that was all there was. America. She did love it, and it had nothing to do with the Stan Enfield campaign.
“You value AMERICA,” John continued, pronouncing America in all caps. “You have a responsibility to bring your gifts to the service of AMERICA.”
“Don’t talk to me,” Laura said. She knew the buzzwords: value, future, accountability. “I don’t give a shit about your America.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Laura saw her mother open her mouth to protest, but John stopped her with a glance. He was planning a new approach. He leaned back, throwing an arm across the sofa behind her.
“Ah, Laura!” he said cheerfully. “We should come out here more often, spend more time together. We used to do that. Remember?”
“We miss you,” Natalie said with so much venom, Laura was certain rattlesnakes dropped dead in the rocks around the house just at the sound of it.
“Everyone makes mistakes,” John added. “We’re all human. And we can be that here, with family, but outside of this house we have a duty, a responsibility just as much as any soldier. We have an obligation to be role models to AMERICA.”
“And I can’t be a role model if I sleep with women?” Laura asked bitterly.
“It’s confusing.” John shrugged. “People don’t know what to think.”
“And Dad needs the conservative Baptist vote, which means no gays.” Laura knew the statistics.
“You were happy when you were married.”
John squeezed her shoulders, and Laura flinched.
“I’ve never been happy.” She did not know how true it was until she heard the razor edge in her own voice. “Not until I met her.”
“Maybe you could help us find a way to reach the moderate liberal,” John continued. “Maybe you could campaign around some social issues. Maybe there will even be a time when you could ‘come out’ if that is something you really decide you want to do. But not now. We are standing on the edge of a cliff, and we can either soar with the eagles or fall.”
Laura thought of Tate, standing beneath the hawk and the sky. Laura had never seen anyone be so cool in her entire life, and there was nothing she could say to her family that would make them understand the pathos of a gay Portland barista walking through the desert. Going home.
“We are going back to Alabama tomorrow,” John added.
In her family’s mind it was already settled. Laura would fly back to Alabama on a private jet. She would hardly need to call Brenda to give her notice. The Clark-Vester Group and the Enfields had a long-standing relationship, which was, Laura knew when she was being honest, the only reason she had ever been hired.
“No,” Laura said and hurried out of the room before her family could see her cry. “I’m going back to Portland.”
Chapter 24
Tate watched Palm Springs shrink beneath the wing of her plane and felt nothing. She knew on some level that her heart was breaking. She could barely remember the steep descent from the bluff to the highway below. It was just a blur of heat and dust and shifting gravel. She patted the pocket of her jacket. At least she had her keys, her wallet, and her own jacket, even if the rest of her clothes belonged to brother Enfield.
“Hard day?” the man in the seat beside her asked, looking askance at her dusty clothes.
“Yep.”
The pilot announced cruising altitude and Tate fell into a deep, suffocating sleep. When she woke, they had landed. On the TriMet home she watched her own reflection in the window. She could see why the man on the plane had looked at her uncomfortably. It wasn’t the dirt on her jeans. It was the look in her eyes. I’m too old for this, Tate thought.
Tate returned home and threw herself on the futon. She considered calling Laura. Then she replayed the conversation she had heard through the door of Laura’s closet. A presidential nomination. An accountant. Laura’s voice taking on the same tone it had had at their meeting in Beaverton. Let’s go downstairs and you can brief me. Who’s at the press conference? Anyway, she had left her cell phone in Palm Springs. It was probably for the best.
She did not want to stare at the four walls of her studio apartment and think about Laura. She went downstairs. After several failed attempts, she got the engine of her ancient Harley to turn over and headed to Vita’s.
At least she could tell Vita the story. Perhaps in the retelling, some part of it would become comic or at least remarkable. Perhaps, true to form, Vita would retell the story to each of her roommates, and by the end of the night Tate would have been locked in a basement, rescued by FBI agents, then chased through the desert amid a rain of bullets.
True to its original calling the door to the Church was never locked, and Tate let herself in when she arrived.
“Hello?” she called as she climbed the stairs.
The living room/sanctuary was dark, the air was heavy with incense. Melissa Etheridge blared from a crackling speaker. For a moment, she thought she had stumbled on a performance-art installation by one of the roommates.
“I’m sorry,” she called out. “Is Vita here?”
It was only then that she noticed the figure slumped across the kitchen counter, her head near the speaker, a bottle in one hand.
“Vita?”
On the speaker, Melissa Etheridge wailed.
Vita straightened, slightly, and took a swig off the bottle. Southern Comfort, Tate noted. Vita’s mascara had run. Her hair had deflated while still maintaining a certain rat’s nest quality.
“What does it all mean? Life!” Vita pounded the bottle on the counter. “Nothing. That’s what it means.”
It actually would have made a fairly good performance piece if it had been staged. It was a modern rendition of No Exit.
“What’s wrong?” Tate asked, hovering in the doorway because a quick exit felt like the most attractive course of action at that moment.
“She left me.” Vita’s words slurred, and she swayed on her stool. “Cairo left me.”
There was no exit this time. Melissa soared to a crescendo. Vita turned up the volume until the music was so loud Tate thought it would recalibrate her heartbeat. The song ended and began again. Tate crossed the room and turned off the music. Melissa Etheridge playing on repeat was never a good sign.
“I’m sorry, Vita.”
Vita turned, bottle i
n hand.
“Where the fuck have you been? I called you and you didn’t call me back.” She was drunk. “How could you, Tate. You’re supposed to be my best friend.” Vita took another gulp of Southern Comfort and looked at the bottle. “You’re my only real friend.”
“How can you drink that stuff?” Tate said wearily.
“I don’t see why you care, since you never call me.” Vita rested her head on her arms, staring across the countertop at a bowl of shriveled oranges. “Where were you?”
Tate had half a mind to pull up a stool, take a swig of the Southern Comfort, turn Melissa Etheridge back on, and tell Vita exactly where she had been and why she was back. But that wouldn’t help either of them.
“I lost my phone.”
She pulled the bottle from Vita’s rubbery grasp and poured the rest of the brown liquor into the sink, filling the air with its cough syrup smell.
“That’s mine,” Vita whined.
“You’ve had enough.”
“You don’t get to lose your phone,” Vita said, draping even more of her body across the counter. Tate put her hand on Vita’s back.
“What happened?”
“Life is shit. That’s what happened. She said she wasn’t ready to make a commitment. She said she didn’t want to limit herself to the experiences she could have with one person.”
Tate looked down at Vita. Only the look of abject misery on Vita’s face kept Tate from reminding Vita that she had used the same line on every woman she had ever dated. How many brokenhearted girls had cornered Tate outside the Mirage, begging her to intervene on their behalf? She did a quick tally: at least seven.
“Say something,” Vita said, looking up.
And there was the rugby player. She made eight. The white girl with dreadlocks, the drag king, the stripper, the woman from Austria.
“What do I do?” Vita said.
Tate stopped counting.
“I don’t understand. How she could just leave? What do I do? You’ve been dumped a hundred times. You must know.”
“Thanks.”
“But you have to know! Why am I so unhappy? What do I do?”
Why are we so unhappy? Tate thought. She patted the Aqua-Net disaster that was Vita’s hair.
“You never do anything.” Vita answered her own question. “You just go quiet and sit around looking stoic with those goddamn cheekbones. Why did we break up, Tate? You and me, why?”
“Because we were sixteen, and you set my porch on fire.”
“I did it for you.” Vita reached for Tate’s face. “You’re so pretty. You know I love you.”
Tate took a step back.
“I love you too, Vita. And you’re drunk.”
“How do I get her back?”
“You don’t. You cry. You watch L Word reruns. You say you’re going to go vegan and stop drinking, but you don’t actually do it. That’s what you do when you get dumped. Because people don’t come back.”
In the back of her mind, Tate thought she must still be in shock. It was the only way she could deliver the words without weeping.
“Of course they do,” Vita said.
“In movies.” Tate sighed. She didn’t know what else to say or how much. There had to be some sort of inverse relationship between alcohol and talk therapy. The more one drank, the less point there was in processing details. “Do you remember the rugby player you dated?”
“Yeah.”
“And the biology major from PSU, and the woman with multiple personalities? Did you ever think about going back to them?”
“No.” Vita’s eyes were wide.
Tate heard her own voice as if from a great distance, a gentle friend delivering the news directly because delay would only cause more pain.
“Did you know that they all asked me what they could do to win you back? Do you know what I told them?”
Vita waited.
“I told them there was nothing they could do.”
There is nothing I can do.
“But I love her.”
But I love her.
“I know you do,” Tate said quietly. But it doesn’t matter.
Chapter 25
There had been a moment when Laura thought she could make the afternoon flight from Palm Springs to Portland. She had swept her clothing off a chair, tossed her laptop—still on—into her luggage, and rushed past her family to her rental car waiting outside. She had sped to the airport, nearly running several red lights, but the flight had already left.
“Can you tell me if there was a passenger named Tate Grafton on the airplane?” she had asked the clerk, knowing the airline would not reveal the identity of passengers, even if she had paid for Tate’s expensive, last-minute, flexible-departure ticket.
The next flight to Portland was at eight the following morning. Laura booked her seat and retreated from the counter, her haste turning into lethargy. She booked a room in a nearby hotel. Then she sat in the air-conditioned chill, staring out the window. Her view offered only the backside of another hotel and a slice of the pool. She tried to call Tate a dozen times, but Tate did not answer.
Time passed like a geological age. Nothing moved, not the stiff laminate curtains, not the palm trees by the pool. Laura moved from chair to bed to chair and felt like she sat in each position for hours, but when she checked the clock only minutes had gone by.
Around five she called the hotel’s front desk and asked if they offered room service.
“I’m sorry, no,” the friendly woman’s voice said. “But various restaurants deliver.”
Laura offered a hundred-dollar tip if the receptionist would send someone to fetch a bottle of gin and a bucket of ice.
She had drunk a considerable amount when her phone rang with an unlisted number. She leapt to answer it, then dropped the phone on the bed when she heard her brother’s voice.
“Hello? Laura?” she heard him call from the tiny smartphone. “Laura, don’t be childish. Talk to me.”
She poured another ounce of gin into her glass, picked up the phone and her room key, and walked barefoot into the hall, not caring who saw her.
“What?” she asked.
“Have you been drinking?” her brother asked.
“Yes.”
She moved toward the end of the hall and the door that led onto the pool. Apparently this was not a popular hotel with parents and children. She would have expected to find the pool full of kids, but it was empty, the water as smooth as a mirror. Beyond the pool, she could see a mini-mart, a dusty highway, and the arid desert Palm Springs pretended not to be.
“Laura.” John’s voice was urgent. “I’m glad I caught you. Look, I’m sorry about everything. Okay. Can we just skip that part for now?”
“What part?”
She wasn’t in the mood for cajoling. No threats of expulsion from the family circle, no doomsday forecast for the world without Stan Enfield, no promise could drag her back to Alabama. She felt very calm. The air outside was still, the noises muffled, and yet her vision felt clearer. She could see the horizon in one direction and the mountains in another. The day was hot, but the sun was dimming. A few house lights in the distant mountains were just flickering on in the early twilight. Standing at the edge of the fence that surrounded the pool, she could be anywhere, any desert.
I’m drunk, she thought, but she didn’t care. Let the family sit around sipping their mint juleps and judging her. A gust of wind blew into the pool area, carrying a wave of dust that blew around her bare feet.
“I know you don’t want to come home,” John said.
“I’m not coming home.”
“It’s just that…”
“Home is hardly the right word for it, John.”
“It’s Dad.” John drew in a deep breath. “I told him what you said…what you are…and that you plan on living that life in public, no matter what it does to our family.”
Laura moved the phone away from her ear and put John on speaker.
“I’
m not doing anything to our family,” she said. “I am living my life. You never asked about me? Have you ever thought about what life on the Stan Enfield campaign trail has done to me? You like this. You’re perfect for it, but I don’t want my whole life to be a lie because you think I’m inconvenient.”
She was drawing a breath, ready to keep going, when John interrupted.
“Dad’s had a heart attack, Laura.”
Laura froze, the phone in one hand, her drink in the other.
“What?”
“I told him about you, and he had a heart attack. Mom and Natalie have already flown out on a charter flight to be with him.”
“But he’s in great shape.” Laura saw her father’s broad shoulders, his campaign smile, his wide wave to the crowd.
“Laura, listen to me. They don’t think he’s going to make it.”
Chapter 26
There was only one option for a woman heartbroken at the height of summer in a city of bridges with a Harley as old and familiar as a twin brother. Tate stood on the sidewalk outside the Church, breathing in the smells of the city. Then she mounted the bike and pulled on the helmet, comforted by its familiar warmth. It had been too long since she rode alone just for the sake of the ride.
It was hard to feel sad as she urged the bike past seventy, up onto the Broadway Bridge, so wide and high it felt like someone had paved the sky. She thought of the time she had taken Laura on this ride. Over the years, Tate had taken a dozen different friends and a handful of lovers on her bike. Usually it was no more intimate than riding in a crowded TriMet bus. The movement of the vehicle jostled them together, but it wasn’t sensual. With Laura it had been. The ride had been awkward at first. Then Laura had wrapped her arms around Tate’s waist and pressed her chest to Tate’s back, and they were one body. Tate remembered that as she crested the Broadway Bridge and soared back down into northwest Portland. She remembered how Laura had leaned into her as they rode, using every turn as a chance to draw nearer. She remembered leaning into a curve, feeling Laura’s arms tighten around her, Laura’s hands caressing her sides. At that moment, she had been suddenly and completely certain that Laura was as hungry to touch her as she was to touch Laura.
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