by Carolyn Nash
Andrew pulled out a wrought iron chair. I quickly pulled out the other chair and dropped down into it.
“Hey,” Andrew said. He raised an eyebrow and nodded at the chair he held.
“Oh, I’m sorry.” I jumped up and moved over. “I’m not used to these first class, four-star dining establishments.”
He eased the chair in under me, then leaned down across my shoulder and shot glances to the left and right. “I can see that,” he whispered in my ear. “But don’t let Francois, the maitre’d see you or we’ll be tossed out of here on our ears.” If he hadn’t moved away that instant to go sit down, I think I would have put an elbow into his side. If he couldn’t tell how hard all of this was on me, then he wasn’t the man I thought he was. Or maybe he could, and he was doing it deliberately. But if he was, then he was a jerk, so what was I worried about?
Andrew reached for the bottle of Pepsi, twisted the metal cap off and held it out to me. “Madam would like to sniff the cork?”
“But of course.” I took it and sniffed gently. “Ah yes. Aluminum. Colorado. Mined in I’d say ’09, perhaps 2010.”
He laughed. “You have a problem with your silliness factor.”
No, I have a problem letting things get too serious.
I grinned back. “You started it.”
He gave me a look. “The last desperate cry of the terminally silly.”
We each took some bread and some of the deli meat and helped ourselves to the fruit. Unfortunately, we both reached for the last slice of apple at the same time and the ends of our fingers touched. I snatched back my hand. The wedge of apple rocked back and forth then lay quietly next to the grapes.
“Uh, you go ahead,” Andrew said.
“No, no,” I said, gesturing toward the apple. “You.”
He smiled and shook his head. “Really, I have plenty.”
I looked over at him. “Then why’d you go for it?”
“Because you got most of the pear, that’s why.”
“I never did. And if I did, it’s because you took most of the turkey. But then, that’s appropriate. After all, you are what you eat.” I smiled.
He glared at me. “Ms. Brenner, are you aware of why donkeys are not sent for a formal education?” he asked.
“No,” I said warily.
He smiled as maliciously as I. “Because nobody likes a smart ass.”
I clenched my teeth and turned away, but when I looked back I caught Andrew’s eye and we both burst out laughing. He threw back his head when he laughed and the sunlight shone down on his face. He’d shaved and washed his hair while I’d been gone; it was still damp and combed straight back from his face so that I could see that the color was back in his cheeks. The combination of the sunlight, the clean-up and two days’ rest made him look as if he’d never been hurt.
As if reading my thoughts, he grinned, rubbed his scalp briskly, and raked back his hair. “God I feel better.”
“I’m glad.” Our eyes met again. The silence swelled, and I could feel my heart knock-knock-knock-knocking in my throat and the color rising in my cheeks.
“Melanie…” Andrew lifted his hand, started to stretch it across toward me.
A rustle of movement under the table made me jump and I nearly screamed when the white Persian cat from next door suddenly leapt onto my lap.
“Jesus!” Andrew cried, and then he began to laugh.
I wrapped my hands gently around the cat’s throat. “You nitwit!” The cat butted his head against my chest and began to purr. What could I do but laugh? Besides, he had saved me. “Scaring me like that,” I said to the cat. “You ought to be ashamed.”
The cat rubbed his head up under my chin, then changed his focus to my plate of food.
“Oh no you don’t! Get on down, now. Go on.” I pushed him gently and he thumped down on the patio and stropped himself against my legs.
“Oh, all right. But this is it.” I tore off a bit of turkey and passed it down to him. He took it quite daintily, and then, taking me at my word, he stropped himself against me once as if to say thank you, lovely having lunch with you, then he walked grandly over to the fence, swarmed up the thick trunk of an ancient grapevine, and leapt up and over to his own yard.
Andrew watched him go. “It’s always nice dining with royalty.”
“Too true.”
Our eyes met again.
“Gee, this sandwich stuff looks great. I am absolutely starving,” Andrew said.
“Me too,” I said. I really was hungry, and as long as I didn’t look over at Andrew, I kept my appetite.
“Listen, are you going to explain the Uncle Marley and Tiny Tim business now?”
“Nope.”
He’d brought the partially-opened package with him and I snagged it. “Gee, that’s too bad.” I tossed it in my hand. “You know, this looks flammable. I bet it wouldn’t take more than a match or two to get it started.”
“All right! Just put the package down. I’ll probably be sorry, but… John Chambers was my father’s partner when I was a kid.”
I dropped the package back on the table and picked up my sandwich and took a bite.
He picked it up and finished opening it while he talked. “The summer I was thirteen I spent about every waking moment ragging on my Dad to buy me a dirt bike. I had to have one, would die without it. One afternoon it came to a head. All my friends were going up in the foothills to ride and I couldn’t go because I didn’t have a bike and I certainly could not ride on the back of some other guys’ bike hanging on like some girl!”
“A girl? Horrors!”
“Exactly! Well, John was at the house working with Dad on some paperwork and I stormed into the study and threw an absolute fit. I’ve got to have a dirt bike, and I have got to have it right now! Dad looked me straight in the eye and told me for the umpteenth time that they were dangerous and that he wasn’t letting me near one. So I yelled back that the truth was that he couldn’t care less about me. The truth was he wouldn’t buy one because he was tighter than Ebenezer Scrooge. Well John started laughing and he looked at my Dad and said, I guess that makes me Jacob Marley. Then they both started laughing and I got so mad I didn’t speak to either one of them the rest of the day. I never lived that down. To this day if I start getting mad because I don’t get my way, whichever of them is around will look at me, shake his head and say, Poor Tiny Tim. Poor, poor Tiny Tim. Believe me, it’s a very humbling experience.”
I laughed. “I’ll bet.”
“Let’s see what old Ebenezer has to say.” He opened the box. Inside were a leather wallet and a thick envelope. He flipped open the wallet. It held the usual assortment of credit cards, a driver’s license, and in a clear photo holder, a picture of Caren Granzella. “Ah, yes. My plastic.” Andrew nodded at the credit cards; I looked at the photo. “I’m a real person again.”
He dropped the wallet on the table and picked up the envelope. Fifty and one hundred dollar bills filled it, topped by a small note. He tossed the money after the wallet and opened the note. “Thank god,” he said.
“What?” I asked.
“Lance. He’s out of danger.”
“Oh good!”
“The police have questioned him, but he doesn’t remember anything about the explosion. He didn’t mention you.” Andrew looked up from the note. “It was just luck that you got away without being questioned. I was afraid that whoever destroyed the lab might have found out you were there, and that you saw something.”
Saw something. Saw something.
A chill swept over the skin of my arms. “Good lord, I did!”
“What?”
“I did see something!” I said. “That’s why the short blond man looked familiar! When I went to the lab Friday morning, he was coming out the back door as I went in. He was there. It was him. He set the bomb!”
“Do you think he recognized you?”
I shook my head slowly. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. But wouldn’t this clear everything
up? I mean, I can place him at the lab. And the hotel people saw him at the Pacific Crest.”
“Sorry, but I don’t think at this point they’re going to believe anything you say.”
“Oh, right. But maybe Lance saw him.”
“If he did, he doesn’t remember it. Maybe he will in time.”
He kept reading. “He’s put private guards on Lance, Chuck, and your friend Cheryl and he’s got private investigators looking into J.P.’s finances and business dealings. He’s spoken to the police and repeated what I told them, but they are having trouble believing that J.P. Harrison had anything to do with a lab explosion 400 miles away plus he’s got alibis coming out his… ear.”
“Ear,” I said.
“Well, add an ‘r’ to that and you’d be a little closer to what he actually said.”
He read further and then sighed. “Oh good. He acknowledges that I’m probably the only one who can find the evidence to clear myself. We had a hell of an argument about that before I left.”
He scanned down the page then grimaced. “Rips me a new one for involving you.”
“I’ll explain how it happened,” I said.
“Good, then explain it to me. I know, I know, it’s just that I wish you’d never gotten involved. I wish… Well, as my great-aunt used to say, If wishes were horses, we’d all be hip deep in manure.”
“And aren’t we just.”
He laughed. “He’s sent someone up through Oregon to lay a false trail to get the pressure off us here.”
“That’s good to know.”
He put down the letter and grinned. “He just finishes with a lot of Dad stuff.”
I looked up at Andrew. “Nice letter.”
“Yeah. He didn’t get me a dirt bike, but in almost every other way, he’s a hell of a father.”
“It must be great to have a dad like that,” I said. Andrew’s head came up and he looked over at me.
“Why, wasn’t yours?”
I laughed. “No, not quite.”
“What do you mean?”
I shook my head, wiped my mouth, and started to push back from the table. “It’s a long boring story.”
“I’ve got time,” he said.
“No, you don’t. We don’t. After all, we’ve only finished phase one of the great Brenner-Richards plan.”
He reached across to lift my hand, but I reached for another grape. He dropped his hand back in his lap. “Melanie, I want to hear.”
“It’s not the time or the place.”
“If not, when is?”
I shook my head again and my hair slid down around my shoulders. I raked it back. “Really,” I said. “It’s the same old boring story: alcoholic abusive father and warped mother dump family, run away, are never seen again.”
“It wasn’t boring to you. It must have hurt like hell.”
I nodded slowly, and then the words formed, rising in my throat, seeming to come of their own accord. Something about Andrew made me say things I’d never say to another living soul. “Yes it did,” I said. “The stupidest thing is—they were awful, I know I would have been worse off if they’d stayed, but even now, even this morning while I was walking through the crowds to get to John Chambers office. There was this intersection near the office, very busy, lots of traffic and people. As the light changed I stepped off the curb and I looked up. A couple of people ahead of me I saw the back of this man’s head and his hair was the right shade of brown, he was the right height, the right build, and suddenly, there I am, walking on tip toe, elbowing past people, trying to see him, because maybe, just maybe it’s my father.”
I shook my head. “A split second later he turned and I saw it wasn’t him, but then the whole train of thought started: I wonder if he’s nearby; I wonder where she is, what they’re doing, if they are even alive. I wonder if I had just said the right thing and behaved the right way, if they would have been like the parents in the books I read as a child. It’s stupid, I know. I’ll never know what happened to them and mostly I don’t care, but still when I’m in a crowd, on a street, part of me still is looking.”
“That isn’t stupid.”
I looked up.
Andrew shrugged. “I do it too. I lost somebody, once.”
I almost didn’t say it, but part of me had to know. “Beth?”
His hand stopped in the act of eating a wedge of apple. “How? Where did you hear about Beth?”
“The other night. You said her name.”
He dropped the apple on his plate. “No, I didn’t.”
“When… when you were feverish. I think you were sort of dreaming.”
“Oh.”
“If you want to talk about it…”
“No.”
“Really, I can be a good listener.”
“Beth is none of your business.”
I pushed back from the table, stood, and picked up my plate.
“Look, I’m sorry,” he said, “but she is not someone… I just don’t want to talk about her.”
“That’s fine.” I crumpled up my napkin and picked up the empty cups and plastic utensils.
“She’s from a long time ago.” Andrew picked up the fruit plate which still had a few grapes left
“Look, Andrew, if you don’t want to talk about her, it’s okay. I’m not asking you to.” I stood, hooked the bucket with the Diet Pepsi bottle and headed inside.
Andrew followed with the rest of the leftovers.
In the kitchen, I dropped everything on the counter, pulled the soda from the melted ice, wiped it down and stuck it in the fridge.
Andrew held out the fruit plate. “You want the rest of the grapes?”
“No,” I said. “You have them.”
“Nah, I’m not hungry.” He dropped the plate into the paper bag I’d been using as a trashcan.
“Well you didn’t have to waste them,” I said.
“Sorry. I’ll put them in the fridge.”
“Not now! They’ve been in the trash!”
“Fine. Whatever.”
I dropped the plastic utensils and cups in the sink.
Andrew stood in the center of the room watching me, and then he started looking around the kitchen. “You know?” he said, looking around. “They should have put an entrance from the kitchen to the patio. It’s not a very good design to have to walk through the living room or the bedroom to get to the kitchen.”
“I think it’s fine.”
“But it’d be better with a direct door to the kitchen.”
“Maybe you can buy the place,” I said. “Then you can cut a door anywhere you want.”
He gave me a look. “I was just making a comment.”
“Well, I was just kidding,” I said, and smiled. “You don’t really have to buy the place.”
“All I’m saying is that it would make sense to have a door from the kitchen to the outside,” he said.
“Maybe, but I think this place is pretty nice the way it is.”
“Well, sure, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be improved. Look.” He walked over to the sink under the window. “Move the sink over here, and you could cut a door in where the window is now.”
“I like the window and the sink where they are,” I said.
“But wouldn’t you rather have a door in here?”
“Look, Andrew. This isn’t my apartment. It isn’t your apartment. We’re only going to be here, hopefully, just the rest of today. So, I don’t think it really matters whether a door would be better there or not. Okay?”
He emptied the bucket into the sink. Water splashed out on the counter. “Neither one of us has to spend the rest of our lives here to agree on the fact that a door would be better in here than a window.”
I grabbed a sponge and started wiping up the water he’d sloshed. “Andrew, I really couldn’t care less about the goddamn door, but if it will end this stupid conversation, yes, I think a door in here would be infinitely better. You’re a genius to have thought of it. Architectural Digest
will want to do a cover article on this place once you’ve remodeled. Okay? Can we drop it now?”
He dropped the bucket by the fridge. It hit the refrigerator door and clattered on the floor. “Damn it, don’t patronize me.”
I turned and pointed the sponge at him. “And don’t insist that I stand here and agree with every little pearl that happens to fall from your lips.”
“I wasn’t asking you to.”
“Okay, you weren’t. You’re right. Besides, I’m just one of your lowly students who couldn’t possibly understand the wonderful things you have to impart, anyway. If I were on your higher plane I would have instantly recognized the fundamental rightness of having a door in here and we wouldn’t be having this discussion.”
“The reason I don’t want to talk about Beth,” he said slowly, “is not because I don’t think you’d understand.”
I laughed and threw the sponge in the sink. “You think I care to hear you discuss your ancient girlfriends? Like I have the time or the inclination to hear who did what to whom, and who dumped who? Don’t be ridiculous.”
He stood for a long time, staring at me. “She wasn’t my girlfriend. She was my wife,” he said, “and she didn’t dump me. She died.” Then he turned and walked from the room.
After a few minutes, I followed him to the bedroom. He was buttoning up the light brown flannel shirt I’d bought for him. I stood in the doorway and watched him.
“Does it fit okay?”
“It’s fine.”
“Look, Andrew, I’m sorry.”
“Forget it.” He pulled on his socks and then reached for his shoes.
“I guess I’d better get ready, too,” I said.
He pulled his left shoe on and started tying it. “I decided it’s better if I go alone.”
“What?” I watched him loop the strings, tie them into a firm bow, reach for the other shoe. “I said I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“What you said’s got nothing to do with this. I’m going alone.”
“But you can’t. You need me.”
He laughed. “Need you? No. Look, now don’t get all misty-eyed. I appreciate everything you’ve done, but it’ll go more smoothly if I’m alone.”
“I’m not getting ‘misty-eyed’! I told you, I’m part of this.”