Gemini

by Carol Cassella

  And then Raney became aware of David. He was standing at the counter waiting to pay for something, apparently not impatient with Lena’s distraction. He nodded at Raney, and Jake looked straight at him. David smiled at them both. Such a comfortable smile. Lena took his credit card and put his things in a brown paper bag. Raney noticed, she remembered later, that he’d bought a half gallon of milk. Why would that stick in her mind? Because milk is not what a single man would likely drink? Or that a single man might only eat cold cereal for supper? Did she think about him that way, even that first time?

  He asked Lena for an extra paper bag, dropped something into it, and walked over to Jake and Raney, leaning forward slightly so that it was clear he was focused on Jake. It would have made Raney nervous if he hadn’t looked somewhat embarrassed about it himself. He rolled the top of the bag down and creased it to make a tidy package, then held it out to Jake. “I have something for you. Looked like you could use it—if it’s okay with your mom.” Jake looked at Raney and she gave him an equivocal nod, which, to a child offered a gift, could only mean yes. David left with a quick good-bye as soon as Jake took the bag. Raney unrolled the top, opening it just enough to glimpse inside. It was a toy truck. Not yellow. And not a dump truck. One couldn’t be too picky in a town with no toy store—he’d had only the six aisles of Peninsula Foods to choose from. A red plastic pickup truck.

  She fell a little bit in love with David that day. Before she knew his name, before she knew his work or habits or history. She was old enough to know that once you let the possibility of love slip past the radar of mature reason, it can be hard to go back. On the other hand, what love didn’t begin as an illusion, the outcome hinged on lucky or unlucky guesses? Maybe we are all best loved depending on how well we keep our secrets.

  A few weeks later, Raney drove to Port Townsend to pick up some things at the hardware store and buy Jake a new pair of sneakers. They were done by eleven so she bought him an ice cream, then they walked out to the rocky tide flats at the foot of the pier and threw Saltines up to the seagulls, following them high above and over and behind their heads until they were both dizzy and laughing and the ice cream teetered precariously on its waffle cone. On the drive home she kept glancing at Jake in the rearview mirror. He looked like such a normal kid, chasing every bubble-gum-blue drip along the side of the cone with his tongue. Appropriately dirty and windblown. Why was it so hard for him at school? Who wouldn’t want to be his friend?

  “Hey, I know a great beach near here. A sand castle beach. Want to go?” She turned the car around and in ten minutes they were parked and shoeless and using coffee cups scrounged from a garbage can to build a castle with a moat and a canal leading all the way to the water’s edge. Jake was so focused he didn’t mind when his mother brushed the sand from her knees and sat on the log railing along the parking lot, watching waves and sandpipers and lovers. She saw Jake surveying his fortress, narrow-eyed and calculating, his near-black hair cutting at all angles across his face, and suddenly she thought of Bo. For the first time in so long. This was the beach she and Bo had been to the last day of the last summer he’d spent in Quentin, when they were teenagers. It hit her so unexpectedly she thought she might look up and see him. Right there, just near Jake. Piling sand onto the same castle they’d made over twenty years ago. Her first kiss was just across that hill, inside the black caves of the gun batteries.

  A shadow fell in front of her eyes, someone standing with the sun behind him. She raised her hand in a shield and squinted, half expecting it to be Bo, knowing it would be Jake. But it was David. In a moment of “right face, wrong place” she couldn’t connect who he was or where she’d met him, only that she knew him. And in that awkwardness she was too friendly, too familiar—scrambling through principals’ names and teachers’ names and gallery customers’ names and then, finally, remembering she’d never heard his name. She didn’t really know him at all.

  “He looks happier today,” David said.

  Raney looked past him at Jake, who was watching them now. “He is. He got an ice cream—that always helps.”

  After a long wait he asked if he could sit down. She scooted over, though there was ten feet of log on either side. “You live in Quentin, don’t you?” he asked.

  Raney nodded. “You too? You new there?”

  He shrugged and glanced out at the water, which put her more at ease. “I’m working for the seafood company, down near the bay.”

  She looked straight at him then, this news putting him on the map of her world. “Really? You fish?”

  “Oh! No. Accounting. I do the bookkeeping—temporary work for now.” He laughed when he said it, and Raney wondered if her question had insulted him for some reason. He introduced himself then. “David Boughton.” She tried to spell it in her mind: b-o-w-t-e-n, b-a-u-t-o-n. She noticed he wasn’t wearing a ring. “Did you raise your son there? In Quentin?” He nodded toward Jake.

  “All his life. Me too. Not many of us—most people leave as soon as they can drive. I like it, though. I like the bay. The mountains.”

  “You work in the art gallery.” It struck Raney that he didn’t ask this as a question. He already knew; he must have been in before.

  “You like art?” she asked him.

  He waggled his head from side to side, take it or leave it. But then he smiled, that smile, and any answer would have been acceptable. “I like what I like.” She heard a flattening of the “I,” a southern accent corrupted with travel.

  A wave washed over the sand castle’s critical bulwarks and Jake stomped through the rest of it, though he looked satisfied with his work and the day. He came over ready to go. “Hey, Buddy. This is Mr. Boughton. Your truck friend.”

  David held out his hand. “Nice to meet you, Buddy.”

  “It’s Jake,” Jake answered without taking his hand in return.

  Raney answered, “I call him Buddy sometimes. A nickname.” She stood up and took her keys out of her purse. He walked with them to the car and she held out her own hand then. “Well, it’s nice to meet you, Mr. Boughton. I’m Renee, by the way. Renee Flores.”

  He opened her door for her and stepped back, tucking his hands into his pockets. “And nice to officially meet you, Raney.”

  They were halfway home before it occurred to her that she had not given him the name Raney.

  —

  Sometimes running into the same person for a few minutes here and there, over and over, can make you feel like you really know him. You see him going off to work at the same time every day, a short wave from the car, a rolled-down window to say, “The Seahawks sure blew it, huh?” “Weird weather—maybe it’s this global warming business.” “Your boy must be looking forward to summertime.” Bits of disconnected conversation that add up to nothing more than an assumption that someone is considerate, or reliable, or has a good sense of humor. Like a Seurat painting—dabs of paint that only suggest a scene and your imagination fills in the gaps.

  David was a good listener. He could ask Raney a question and sit back with his arms crossed over his chest, nodding, smiling, rarely cutting in to say he’d been through something even worse. It was the listening more than the talking that won her—once she joked to Sandy that she might be falling for herself instead of for him. Or maybe, Sandy countered, it had just been a very long time since Raney had someone to talk to.

  The facts of David’s own life came out almost incidentally. He had a steady job doing bookkeeping and some tax filing for Tom Fielding, the owner of Oceanic Seafoods. David was renting the one-bedroom mobile at the back of Fielding’s property. He kept it tidy and beside the front step he had planted a clay pot with some marigolds and begonias. Pretty things you couldn’t kill. He drove a six-year-old black Tahoe that he changed the oil in every three thousand miles, religiously, and he had an associate’s degree from Oklahoma City Community College. He’d lived in Tulsa for a while, but his boss there had refused to promote him. As David explained, he was the one keeping the
business afloat behind the scenes, which eventually got embarrassing for the boss and was at the root of their separation. After that he’d preferred smaller towns—Marshall, Texas; Slater, Missouri; Medford, Oregon. Quentin. That was where you found the heart of this country, he said to Raney. In the small towns.

  His family was scattered and not on good terms—he hadn’t spoken to his brothers or his dad in five or six years, not since they’d accused him of manipulating the books at his father’s appliance repair shop. They were talking outside Loggers Restaurant, where David had bought Raney a cup of coffee. “My dad probably meant well,” he said. “Well enough anyway. But he needed cash and borrowed against assets he didn’t actually own—if I hadn’t cleaned up the accounts he would have been jailed for fraud. Tax evasion anyway.” Sadly, rather than being grateful, his brothers had used the mess as an excuse to take David’s share of the business. “It’s a shame when a family falls apart over money, but some things you can’t change.” He pressed his lips into some conscious resolve, then lightened up, asking Raney how old she was when she got her first set of paints. A few minutes later she said she was late to pick up Jake, so David walked her to her car. “I always wanted kids. Didn’t work out for us.”

  “You were married?” Raney asked.

  “High school sweetheart. Crazy—got married at eighteen. She had cancer. Surgery, chemo—the whole works. Finally beat it and then she ran off with my best friend, five years ago.” He looked straight into the deepest part of Raney’s eyes. “I’ve been wanting to tell you that.”

  He came to Raney’s house for dinner a few times, and he would always bring something small for Jake—a package of Pop Rocks, Life Savers, a deck of trick cards. He even brought a gift for Grandpa once, a bottle of cognac (which put him so soundly to sleep Raney turned his nighttime oxygen up and sat in his room counting his breaths). While she set the table and finished cooking, David played catch with Jake in the backyard, a carefree smile on Jake’s face that she’d missed. She could tell David didn’t get much pleasure from the sport itself—he was so careful to keep his shirt clean and tucked in. Watching them, she realized it had been two years since she’d seen Jake catch a ball.

  David loved classic movies and had amassed a good collection through garage sales and bankrupt video stores. He feigned horror when Raney confessed that she and Jake had never seen Metropolis, and made a special evening of the screening. It was Jake’s first silent movie, and when he grew restless, David jumped in with narration so animated Jake enjoyed the story despite losing the plot. Even Grandpa seemed to have a good time that night, though he remained uncharacteristically tight-lipped about David’s more frequent presence in their house. Grandpa made just one pointed comment regarding this new friendship, in fact—reminding Raney about the campfire he’d taught her to light using only one match and her own wits.

  One morning Raney came into the gallery and found a note from David: he would be in Port Townsend that afternoon and hoped to take her out for dinner after work. Sandy watched her read it but didn’t say a word until after lunch when, seemingly out of the blue, she asked, “So why are you seeing this guy?”

  “What’s wrong with David?”

  “Nothing. As far as I can see. But it’s hard to see much past that salesman’s smile.”

  “Well, partly because he’s the only one asking me out.” Sandy gave her a dubious frown. “It’s not serious,” Raney said. “What? Are you afraid I’ll get married and quit before you have to admit you can’t afford me? Every time he takes me to dinner I save twenty bucks in groceries, if I bring the leftovers home.”

  Finally Sandy laughed. “I guess he is the only single man between eighteen and eighty in Quentin. I hope the sex is good.”

  “Jesus, Sandy! I’m not sleeping with him. I have enough problems in my life.” They both laughed then, but something about the whole conversation bothered Raney for the rest of the day. It bothered her even more when she pinned it down—maybe she did want to sleep with David.

  —

  It was David’s idea to go into the park for Labor Day weekend—all three of them. They could take Jake on a hike and cook hot dogs over an open fire, maybe take Jake’s fishing pole. Raney spent Friday making slaw and fried chicken and cramming so much stuff into their packs they could have camped for three days. Jake had been quarrelsome all week, but on Saturday he woke up at six and started asking when they could leave, going through his tackle box to check lines and lures and weights.

  David said he’d pick them up at nine. They waited on the front steps with their water bottles and a grocery bag of too much food, the pack between Raney’s legs, ready to go. At nine forty-five she called David’s cell phone and left a message. At eleven she called again. At one o’clock she fed Jake the chicken and slaw and made him a batch of brownies, then spent the rest of the day playing any video game he wanted. When Jake finally fell asleep after eleven thirty she drove past David’s mobile at the back of Tom Fielding’s house. The lights were out and his car was gone.

  On Tuesday, Raney took the afternoon off from work and drove back to Quentin, down the marina road to Oceanic Seafoods. If she’d been hurt yesterday and annoyed today, she was furious by the time she parked and went into the building. Fielding was in his office. He’d been a snob to Raney in high school and she still saw the length of his nose when he talked to her, even though Jake had played with both of his boys off and on until a few years ago, when Jerrod Fielding had hit puberty with a mean streak.

  “Hey. Is David in the back? Or out for lunch?”

  Tom stood up from the corner of his desk with a half-eaten tuna sandwich in his hand. He wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist and shook his head, still chewing. “Boughton’s not here.”

  Raney looked around the small office as if a grown man could possibly be hidden there. “Can I leave a note for him?”

  “Sorry. I mean, he doesn’t work here anymore. Quit on Friday. Some family emergency came up.”

  She could almost see a glimmer of pity in Tom’s face, and suddenly she wanted to hit him for sneering at her clothes in seventh grade. “Right. I totally forgot he was leaving Saturday. Thanks—sorry to bother you.”

  —

  David disappeared as thoroughly as if a tornado had blown his house into Oz. A month later Raney took Jake to a movie in Silverdale, leaving Grandpa with Jenny. When they got home, Raney found the Cenex propane bill hanging on the doorknob. She folded it three times over and wedged it deep in her pocket, one step away from throwing it directly into the trash. In two years Jenny’s salary had used up what cash her grandfather’s farm had cleared, and his medical bills had soared above his benefits. As if he guessed the numbers he wasn’t told, Grandpa grew both more belligerent and more dependent, his anger leeching his waning strength.

  After Jake and Grandpa were asleep, Raney made a hot chocolate and poured in a big dash of the cognac David had given to Grandpa. She unfolded the bill onto the table in front of her so the corners fit perfectly inside the red-and-white checks of the vinyl tablecloth, as if making that new paper match up with the squares on that old stained cloth might align her prior married life and her current widowed one. She finished the chocolate and got out an envelope, a stamp, and her checkbook. She sealed the check inside the return envelope and walked all the way down the drive in the middle of the night to put it into their mailbox and raise the red flag. She knew it would bounce, but she didn’t think they could suck the gas back out of the tank once it had been pumped in.

  She talked to the same Realtor who’d sold her grandfather’s farm. He spent a long time walking her property and pulling up comps, and then he spent more time showing Raney graphs and tables and explaining the market meltdown that made her mortgage debt higher than any remotely possible sale price. In the end he was blessedly realistic with her. As she was driving away, he stepped out of the office and flagged her, maybe, she hoped, with some ingenious, viable plan. She stopped and rolled down her window. He
looked once over his shoulder before he asked if she’d seen any of the recent articles about how long the banks were taking to act on foreclosures these days. On the way home she went to the library to do a Google search; the next month she stopped paying the mortgage and waited.

  —

  Raney did not need a medical degree to know what had happened when she went to help Grandpa dress for breakfast. He was still in bed, leaning against the wall. He looked at her speechless and gape-mouthed, as if she had appeared out of a dream. His right eye was half-closed and his right arm flopped like a rag doll’s when he reached for her. He seemed oblivious until the medics came, and then he flailed and fought their help with the half of his body that could still move. They got a shot in his arm, and in the space of three or four minutes he changed from an angry man to an overgrown infant that two strong EMTs could fold onto a stretcher and cart away. The thing he feared most had just happened to him.

  The next day another new doctor, a neurologist, showed Raney a CT scan of her grandfather’s brain—two wrinkled fetuses curled face to face in the womb of his skull. The neurologist pointed to a walnut-sized black pool along the ruffled left edge of one fetal spine. Too much black. Too little gray. Raney didn’t need a doctor to tell her that either.

  The doctor gave her some percentage odds on Grandpa’s functional recovery, quick to point out that they were guesses at best. She explained how much care he would need after he was discharged, that it might be impossible for Raney to keep him at home anymore. Raney could tell she’d had this conversation before. The doctor put the names and phone numbers of the few skilled nursing facilities available to Grandpa into a folder with some preprinted pamphlets about stroke patients and passed it across the desk to Raney.