by Liz Adair
Cassie frowned and looked away.
“No, no. I didn’t mean that.” Chan touched her arm lightly. “I remember my task. Let’s go in and play, by all means.”
Cassie sent him a grateful look. “Yes. Let’s.” She led the way into the foyer and down the darkened hall to the brightly lit gym.
Ben was under the basket, practicing bank shots. Cassie and Chan stood and watched for a moment as time after time the ball went into the hoop. “He’s a player,” Chan said under his breath.
“Yes,” Cassie quietly agreed. Then in a louder voice, she called, “Well, here we are, Ben. It’s you and me against Chan and Punky, only Punky’s not here, so Chan is on his own.”
Ben turned and faced them, holding the basketball between his forearm and hip. “Okay. We’ll play half court. Call your own fouls. We’ll play to twenty-two, losers’ outs. Cassie, you take it out.” He fired a pass to Cassie with such force that it stung her hands when she caught it. With a questioning glance at him, she took the ball out of bounds and passed it to Ben, who was at mid-court. Then she cut across to stand under the basket and wait for Ben to feed it to her for the score. But Ben was dribbling, leaning his shoulder in to fend off the tight defense of the taller man, intent on making his way to the basket. Suddenly he feinted, spun, and broke away, moving past Chan and making a lay-up with Chan two steps behind.
Chan caught the ball as it dropped through the net, took it out of bounds, and brought it in. As Ben harassed him, Chan kept control, dribbling away from the basket. He stopped just beyond the three-point line, turned, and effortlessly hoisted up a jump shot. His delivery was smooth and graceful, and the ball dropped cleanly through the net.
As Ben retrieved the ball and passed it in to Cassie, it became obvious to her that this wasn’t a benign game of family home evening basketball. Ben called for the ball and then went to work against Chan. His jaw was set, and even when he duplicated Chan’s long shot, he showed no sign of satisfaction, taking up instead a determined defensive stance as Chan brought the ball in.
Cassie drifted off the court and sat on a folding chair, watching the men as the play became more and more physical. The squeak of their shoes on the floor sounded again and again as they jockeyed for position, ran and stopped, shuffled and jumped. Soon, they were both perspiring heavily. On one play, Ben broke to the basket, colliding with Chan and sending him sprawling backwards as Ben made a lay-up.
“That’s a foul!” called Chan.
“The heck it was! You didn’t have position.”
“I was planted. That’s a foul.”
“If it was a foul, I’d call it. It’s not a foul. Your ball.”
Glowering, Chan brought in the ball. His hook shot bounced off the rim and they contested the rebound. Being taller, Chan got it, and coming down he cleared a space with his elbows, jamming one into Ben’s neck.
“Hey! Watch it!” Ben’s voice was sharp.
Chan paid no attention, dribbling away from him and circling around toward the basket. Ben made an aggressive swipe at the ball, knocked it away, then quickly retrieved it. Chan was immediately on him, guarding him closely, trying to shut him down. Again Ben’s quickness left Chan in the lurch as he did a nifty cross-over dribble and drove by him for an easy basket.
Chan got the ball and immediately brought it in, wildly charging through where Ben was planted. Ben said something that Cassie couldn’t quite catch, but Chan heard and understood. He dropped the ball and threw a punch at Ben, connecting with his jaw and snapping Ben’s head around. Ben let out a bellow and charged, plowing in with his head down, catching Chan in the midsection, and driving him into the wall behind the basket.
Cassie didn’t wait to see any more. She got up and left, walking down the dark hall and out into the warm twilight. Wrenching open her car door, she got in and started the car with a trembling hand. She backed out of the parking spot, then yanked the gearshift lever down and made the tires squeal as she drove off.
Both Ben and Chan called later that evening. She let the machine answer, and she listened to both apologies. Neither sounded repentant, and as each said, “If you’re there, please pick up,” she did nothing. Chan added that he could be reached on his cell phone for one day and then he’d be out of range. Would she please call him? Ben said he would call back.
Cassie’s anger waned, leaving her feeling bleak and unsettled. She didn’t call Chan back, and she didn’t take Ben’s call when he called the next day. Or the next. Or the next. He called her at home and at her office downtown, but she wouldn’t answer at home and she instructed the receptionist that she was not in for Mr. Torres.
It wasn’t until Thursday evening that she finally spoke to Ben. He was driving everyone to the Jones’s cabin in the San Francisco Mountains. Punky sat in the front with Ben, and Cassie shared the backseat with Ricky, two duffel bags, and three pillows.
There wasn’t a great deal of conversation among them, since Punky felt the constraint and made sure that the first four hours of travel were full of games, recitation, and singing. But several times Cassie caught Ben looking at her in the rearview mirror, and she could see that he had a bruise under his right eye.
Punky finally ran down. At around eleven o’clock she commandeered a pillow from the backseat and snoozed with her head leaning against the doorpost. Ricky slept in his car seat with his head flopped forward, and the silence stretched out like the empty desert before them.
In the darkness Cassie couldn’t see Ben’s eyes in the mirror, but she knew he was watching her. Finally he said quietly, “Cassie?”
Pause. “Yes, Ben?”
“You and I’ve been assigned to get wood tomorrow morning. You all right with that?”
“Yes, Ben. I’m all right with that.”
“All right, then.”
The rest of the trip was made in silence. Cassie leaned her head against the window and contemplated the moon dogging their tracks. She wondered where Chan was that took him out of cell phone range. She wondered if she would ever hear from him again, wondered if she wanted to hear from him again. Knew that she would die if she didn’t hear from him again.
When they reached the cabin, the Joneses were waiting up, generator still running and lights ablaze. Sister Jones, sitting on the deck, was down the stairs before Ben had even turned off the headlights. She had the door opened and Ricky scooped out of his chair before she greeted anyone. “Come on in,” she said. “I’ll put Ricky to bed in the upper west bedroom, Ben. That’s where you will be. Hi, Cassie. You and Punky are in the upper east. Punky! Punky! Wake up. You’re here.”
Grateful for the warm, chaotic welcome from Punky’s large family, Cassie felt a sense of homecoming. She was tired after the emotional drain of the week, and she shook her head when a much-revived Punky invited her to sit up and visit. Instead, she climbed the stairs to claim the lower bunk.
Cassie awoke early the next morning to find the room painted rosy by sunrise. Listening to Punky’s regular breathing above, she snuggled with the covers up around her ears and watched the walls turn from pink to yellow as the sun climbed up and sat on the horizon. Loath to waste her mountain-time in bed, Cassie threw off the covers, dressed quietly, and made her way downstairs. When she stepped out on the deck, she found Ben sitting in a wicker rocker sipping a cup of hot chocolate and offered him a tentative, “Good morning.”
“Good morning.” His reply was warm. An olive branch.
“I was going to take a walk,” she explained.
Ben didn’t say anything. He just looked at her with those expressive brown eyes.
Cassie stood on the deck and looked around. The sky was the color of her lapis earrings. The sun, just topping the trees, began to warm her back and shoulders. She knew that a mile down the trail was a place where a vista opened up looking north to Humphrey’s Peak. It was a view that needed to be shared. “Do you want to come on a walk?”
Ben smiled and set his cup down. At the sight of that smile, a tight
ness around Cassie’s heart relaxed. She nodded in the direction of the trail. “Let’s go.”
She led the way, swinging along at a brisk pace through the tall Lodgepole pines. They made no sound, for the needles on the forest floor muffled their footsteps, and they didn’t speak. After about twenty minutes, Cassie stepped into a rocky clearing. The far edge was a sheer cliff, a breath-catching drop of a couple of hundred feet. But the real heart-stopper was the panorama spread before them: spiky foothills with patchy stands of pine and quaking aspen leading up to the rocky face of Humphrey’s Peak rising majestically above.
Cassie heard Ben whistle under his breath.
“You can’t describe this,” Cassie said. “You have to see it.” Sitting on a rock and leaning against an adjacent boulder, she felt the coolness of a breeze evaporating the perspiration from her forehead and neck.
“Cassie?” Ben had found a perch on a large rock right at the edge of the cliff, and his legs were dangling over the precipice.
Cassie’s eyes widened as she transferred her gaze from the vista to her companion. “That’s not safe, Ben!”
“It’s not going anywhere. It’s solid rock.” He shifted so he was facing her. “I need to talk to you about Monday night.”
“All right.” Cassie’s voice was wary. “Talk.”
“Well . . .” Ben ran a hand through his hair. “Well, I need to tell you that what happened there on the court wasn’t all Chan’s fault.”
“Oh?”
“No. Um . . .” The hand went through the hair again. “I, um, I was angry. Even before we started to play, I was angry. I said something to him—something pretty crude.” A rueful smile flitted across Ben’s face. “I didn’t know he understood Spanish. Did you know, Cassie, we both served in the same mission? At different times, you know. But who would have guessed?”
“And what you said . . .”
“Oh, no!” Ben laughed. “That wasn’t part of mission vocabulary. But, you pick up things. I made reference to his parentage, and he resented it. Quite rightly. We had it out right then and there.”
“I saw,” she said dryly.
“He’s pretty good,” Ben said, rubbing his jaw. “He’s taller, has a longer reach, but I learned a few things at the academy, and I’d say we each gave as good as we got.”
“Ben, I’m not much interested in a blow-by-blow. I think the least said about it, the better.”
“Well, what I’m trying to say, Cassie, is that I know you’ve fallen for him. I wanted you to love me. I prayed that you would love me. But you don’t and you won’t.”
“Ben—”
“No. I’m trying to tell you that it’s all right. He’s a good guy. It’s . . .” Ben paused and looked toward the mountain, as if trying to read his next line in the granite slabs. “It’s just that, when you love someone, sometimes you have to show that love by stepping aside. I want you to know, I’m stepping.”
“Oh, Ben!” Cassie’s eyes were shiny and her chin quivered.
“No, don’t cry, Cassie.” Ben was off his rock and kneeling beside her, taking her hands in his. “Don’t cry. I just want you to be happy.”
She stroked his hair, smoothing an unruly patch left from his nervousness of a few minutes before. “I’ll try to be. But how can I be happy if I cause you pain?”
“Don’t worry about me.” He sat back on his heels. “I’ll find someone who is right for me—for us. For Ricky and me. I’ve been thinking about it. Someone who’s crazy about both of us. There’s someone out there. I just have to be patient and believe.”
“And look under your nose,” Cassie said, searching in her pocket for a tissue.
“Beg pardon?”
“Look under your nose,” Cassie repeated, smoothing out a crumpled Kleenex. “You want to find someone who’s in love with you? You don’t have to look any farther than Punky. Ricky, too. She’s mad about you both.”
Ben blinked. “Punky? You’re kidding!” He frowned, considering. “Punky? You sure?”
“She’d kill me if she knew I told you. I think she thinks if you knew you might do something out of pity. She doesn’t have a very good self-image that way. Credit her ex-husband for that.”
“Pity? Punky? No, she’s swell! Not pity, ever.” Shaking his head he picked up a rock and hefted it. Then he stood and hurled it out into the void beyond the cliff. They watched it fall and listened to the faint chink as it landed far below them. “We’d better go back,” he said, looking at his watch. “Ricky will be waking up soon.”
Reaching down, he helped Cassie to her feet. “I’ll accept the position of brother-that-you-never-had.”
“Thank you, Brother Torres.” Smiling, Cassie kissed him lightly on the cheek and then headed back to the cabin, walking briskly to keep time with the lilting song in her heart.
7
Tuesday morning Cassie slept in until eight o’clock. They had returned late from their trip to the mountains, wanting to wring the last drop of coolness and green from their long weekend, and waiting until evening to start back.
Cassie stretched and lay with her hands behind her head, smiling at the good time they had had. After her walk with Ben, there had been no uneasiness between them.
As she lay in bed she became aware of a throbbing, pulsing sound coming in from outside. It was a Latin rhythm. Mariachi music, she judged by the sound of trumpets and fiddles. Thinking that Luis, the pool tender, had brought a boom box, and wondering whether the residents would take exception to that, she partially opened the plantation shutters and peeked out the window.
It wasn’t Luis’s boom box; it was a real mariachi band. Smiling at the sight of eight black-clad musicians in huge black sombreros, she wondered aloud who was being serenaded. When she caught sight of Chan, just getting ready to sing, she stopped wondering.
After quickly putting on a pair of sweat pants and a T-shirt, she opened the sliding glass door and stepped out onto the balcony overlooking the pool. Chan was singing a lilting song, and the members of the band were all beaming as she stood on the balcony and listened.
When the song was over, Chan walked nearer and looked up. “I thought you’d never appear,” he said.
“Have you been here long?”
“About ten minutes. We’ve had five other people come out. I was beginning to think we’d missed you.”
“I must have been asleep. We got in late last night. But what is this all about?”
“You wouldn’t return my calls. I’m trying to get your attention.”
“You’ve got it.”
“Okay. Then listen.”
Chan cued the band and began singing another song. This one still had the same throbbing rhythm, but it was slower and more emotionally charged. Cassie sat on a wicker chair, leaned her arms on the railing, and rested her chin on her wrists. Trying to understand what the song was saying, she caught a word here and there: heart . . . night . . . sad . . . love . . . tomorrow. When the last strain had died away, she asked, “What does it say?”
“I’ll tell you tonight, if you’ll let me.”
Cassie smiled down at him. “Come at seven,” she said. “I’ve got leftover lasagna in the freezer. You can help me finish it off.”
“It’s a deal,” he promised.
“I’ve got to go,” she said, reluctantly. “I may have a new client locally. I have an appointment to talk to them this morning, and I can’t be late. See you tonight?”
“Yes, tonight.”
Cassie looked at the musicians behind him. “Thank you very much,” she said to them. “Muchas gracias.”
The musicians bowed and replied, and as she turned to go back inside, the guitarron player slapped Chan on the back and said he was a lucky man, that the girl on the balcony was very beautiful.
Cassie hummed as she showered and dressed. After catching herself daydreaming with her pantyhose in her hand, she glanced at the clock and realized she didn’t have time to woolgather. Taking herself to task, she determined th
at she wouldn’t think about Chan until dinnertime.
It was a resolve that was broken several times during the day, though she did pretty well at staying on task. She was working on a presentation for St. Alphonse Cancer Center, an account she really wanted to secure, so she focused on a flawless presentation.
The presentation was very nearly flawless and generated so much enthusiasm that people stayed afterward to ask questions and share hopes and dreams. Cassie was two hours later than she had thought to be going home. Then there was an accident that backed traffic up, delaying her an extra half hour. As she pulled into the parking lot, her pulse quickened when she caught sight of the white convertible parked in the shade at the back of the lot.
Chan Jordain was out of the car as soon as he saw her, striding over to open her car door and help her carry her things.
“Were you afraid I had stood you up?” she asked.
“No. I figured you got hung up somewhere. I was a little early.”
Opening the door to her condo, Cassie directed him where to put the computer. “Upstairs,” she said. “Middle bedroom. I’ve turned it into an office.”
As he did that, she went to the kitchen and peeked in the oven to make sure that the time bake had turned on as it was supposed to and that the frozen casserole she had put in that morning was bubbling. Then she popped the bread in the oven and got the salad out of the fridge. When Chan came downstairs, she was taking placemats and dishes out of the cupboard.
“Shall we eat out on the patio?” she asked. “I think it’s probably cool enough. It’s shady on this side of the building. If you’ll open the door, we can get the table set.”
Chan did as he was told, revealing a small paved area furnished with a table and two chairs and a glider swing. Surrounded with oleanders, the patio was private and secluded. They set the table, and Cassie brought out a tall pitcher of lemonade. Then she gave Chan a pair of mitts and asked him to carry the hot dish out while she followed with the salad and bread.
When they were seated and the blessing had been said, she offered him some salad. “So, where were you over the weekend? You missed a good time.”