I must be burning it up this morning, because Ditto has given up running with me. He knows the path—when I get to the top of the foothill, I’ll turn around and come blazing back down, ultimately ending back in the yard—but in the last year or so he’s gotten lazy. If I’m going too fast, he sits his furry white butt down and waits for me about midway up the hill, then gallops down ahead of me to the house, ready for a morning scoop of kibble.
I can’t help it. Last night has left me in a state of frenzied euphoria. Life is good. Hell, life is freaking awesome.
I make the top of the hill and stop for a moment. The sky is bluing up, going from a faint robin’s egg to strong, crisp poplin blue. No inversion today. The sun will shine down, and I will take my new friend out for a very good day in a very good place.
I tear down the hill as best I can. My knees aren’t quite as strong as they once were, so the bounding is limited a bit by the wish to not blow any anterior cruciate ligaments in the near future.
Peter always said the difference between men and women when they skied was only noticeable at the top of a run. “A man drops down into the chute without question. A woman wonders which turn might turn into a fall. That possibility never occurs to a man until it literally occurs.” We would debate the merits of each tendency.
Right now I wish for a little of the downhill plunge. I want to jump in and stop the constantly worrying nag in my head. Fear is always right there for me. Anxiety? It’s the what-if. When the boys were little, they often climbed up on the countertops. My first thought was always what it would look like when I found them with cracked-open skulls. The what-if still gets me constantly. I hate it. A lot.
Just this once I want to assume that things are going to be awesome. Or assume nothing, but also think about nothing but the present. Worry about the future when the future comes, and right now breathe in deep and love life and the possibility of great things.
I give my best war whoop as I run down the hill into the backyard. And you know what? I don’t fall. I don’t gouge my eye out on a low-hanging branch. Nothing bad happens to me. The drop into the chute doesn’t bring any fall, not this time.
The house is still quiet when I return. The boys need to be up. They’ll need to get to school soon. Neither of them showers in the morning, although Hunter is going to have to get into the habit soon, I suspect. Soon he’ll be a teenager, and teen means stinky boy odor. His childhood habit of a nightly bath or shower isn’t going to cut it anymore.
I go upstairs to rouse them. They sleep in one room. They have since they were little, in bunk beds now. Hunter has grumbled about moving into the game room. It’s the bedroom next to theirs, which has been their playroom forever. Of course, both of them are too old for that now, so it has to be a game room.
I’m living in a foreign country. It strikes me hard for a minute. Peter was supposed to help navigate this territory. Puberty looms on the horizon, and this was not supposed to be my job. This was his job. He was the one who would have the “talks” and help the boys through all of this.
“Boys!” I begin the wake-up routine. “Time to report for duty.”
There are groans from each level of the bunks. Some days they roll out of their own accord. Other days it takes tickling, full lights on, and all manner of wake-up maneuvers to raise these two.
Beau is up. His is the bottom bunk. He rubs his eyes and orients himself. “Hey, is Andrew still here?”
It’s a good point. The whole thing felt very possibly like a dream. “I’m pretty sure. Yes, hon.”
He’s on his feet. “Good. I’m going to go get him up.”
He’s out the door and dashes toward the catwalk—I’m not fast enough to stop him. Oh, Lord, he’s going to go wake Andrew up. Beau doesn’t know any better; the people who usually stay with us are family or friends who held him when he was born. They’re willing to tolerate very early wake up calls because they know him and love him.
I brace for the awkwardness, prepare an apology as I go after Beau. Hunter gets out of bed behind me and goes to the scary boy-bathroom to get ready. He distracts me for a moment, and when I look back, Beau’s already made it across the catwalk.
“Beau, it’s not a good idea—” I get to the guest room door, which is ajar. I push it open a bit more.
Beau sits on the bed, spreading Pokémon cards across the comforter and explaining them in detail. Andrew is awake, reclined against the headboard, his hands clasped behind his head.
“So if this one evolves, which one does it turn into?”
Andy Pettigrew is in my guest bed, discussing Japanese trading cards with my youngest son. I have to back out of the room. I almost feel faint. If I don’t go make breakfast now, I will dissolve into a ball of noodle-y tears. Too many emotions and associations and possibilities for things to come swirl in my head, my blood pounding loudly in my ears. I have to get over it. I believe this man is a good man, and for some reason he’s here. I’m not going to fuck this up by overreacting.
I go make breakfast and keep the façade of sane-girl behavior intact.
After breakfast I run the boys down to school. When I open the door to the house upon my return, I’m somehow surprised to hear Andrew in the bathroom. He’s still here, and thankfully he’s bypassed the boys’ bathroom for the larger one downstairs. He is really here. Unbelievable.
The bathroom door swings open, and he sticks his head out. A waft of shampoo and shaving cream comes to my nose. Another detail I hadn’t realized I’ve missed: shaving cream. I take a deep breath.
He speaks. “The boys make it okay?”
“Yep. Miraculously, no one forgot a lunch or homework or anything. And they didn’t fight this morning.”
He’s brushing his teeth now, still standing partly out of the bathroom to talk to me. He’s so relaxed. He wears a T-shirt and jeans. He turns back to the sink to spit, and then I hear him again.
“I had two older sisters. They didn’t fight with me; they just never acknowledged my existence. I would’ve liked to have a brother.”
“I had a brother, but I was a bossy old nag of an older sister, so I can’t tell you. I pounded on my brother, and then when he was big enough he pounded on me in retaliation. We didn’t get along until I moved out for college.”
Andrew comes out of the bathroom, tucking his T-shirt into his jeans, now with a flannel long-sleeve shirt over it. The span of his chest is smooth and wide. He’s a good-looking man, no doubt about it. I, as usual for this relationship (if that’s what it is), am in running clothes and have questionable hair.
“What are we doing today?” he asks.
This is really happening. A day with Andrew.
Suddenly, my phone hops all over the kitchen table. Someone is texting me. My stomach lurches. I can bet who it is.
“Aw, crap.” I grab the phone.
“What?” Andrew comes to my side.
“It’s Tessa. My friend you met in the parking lot.”
“Oh yeah, the one who IDed me. Good thing it’s not witness protection, or I’d be whacked next.” He chuckles.
“Yeah, that one.” I look at her text.
Spill, girl. What’s he like in bed?
Jeee-zus. I snap the phone shut. “I hope you didn’t read that.”
“She wants to know how I am in bed.” He smiles slyly. “I don’t have to see to know that.”
My face feels hot. Ugh. “I apologize in advance for anything she ever does to you. I better text her.” I reply:
Shut. Up. HE’S HERE!
“I’d turn the phone off, but I always have it in case the boys need me.”
“Did you tell her I was amazing?” He smirks.
“Are you amazing?” I smirk back.
“Getting sassy now, are we? Go get ready. You’ve got a tour to give.”
9: Tour Guide Extraordinaire
I TAKE A SHOWER. I even shave my legs. I try to think when I last shaved my legs in the wintertime. It could have possibly been in the ti
me of dinosaurs.
Even when Peter was alive, I could never claim to be a girly girl. He loved me, and he didn’t seem to notice whether I was dolled up or in one of his crew T-shirts from college that had a hole in the armpit. We always had a good relationship—you know, relations relationship—whether my legs were shaved or not.
I don’t think we ever took each other for granted, but we had very few secrets, to be sure. That many years together is too long to pretend. We learned that lesson.
But today I make an effort. I put on a clean pair of jeans, and I actually apply some lip gloss. My hair is pointless. No one ever showed me how to do anything with it when I was younger, so I keep it cut in a long bob and call it good. I think watching my cousin’s curling iron fall apart and down the back of her prom dress when I was six probably scarred me for life. No big beauty routine for me.
My teeth are brushed, and I look casually decent. We get in the car.
“Where are we going?” He’s curious. He smells a little of smoke. He must have had a cigarette while I was getting ready. I appreciate that he hasn’t smoked in front of the kids. I understand addiction, so I know he’s making an effort there.
“I’m showing you Boise, the West. And distracting you. I’m totally doing that.”
I shift into fifth and hit the highway on-ramp. We’re headed east, out into the middle of nowhere.
He looks out the window, watching the sagebrush and the wide sky. We see an antelope when we’re about fifteen minutes out of town. He looks through my iPod, picks out a few songs. One is Coldplay.
“I like this.” He sits back. He seems at peace, content. I wonder if he means the song or being here. I don’t ask.
“I love Coldplay,” I tell him. “I really love eighties music, though. It’s the onset of middle age. I can’t help but like cheesy music.”
“Middle age?”
Uh-oh. We haven’t done the full disclosure thing on age. Now the cougar will be out of the bag. He’s hanging out with a fossil.
“Um, I’m thirty-six.”
He scoffs. “That’s being cynical, isn’t it? You’re planning to die before you turn eighty?”
I roll my eyes. “Come on, you know what I mean. I’m not young. Not like you, for instance. How old are you?”
“I’m twenty-nine.”
“For the love of Mike. You’re a babe in the woods.” I’m a little nauseated.
“It’s not young.”
“I was a total dumbass until my thirties. Twenty-nine is young.”
He narrows his eyes. “Are you calling me a dumbass?” I’m about to protest/apologize when he laughs, hard. “Listen, it all depends on the amount of living you’ve done with your years. Now, you might have been a choir girl, but I got an early start on everything, trust me.”
“You weren’t a choir girl?”
“Not even close. Don’t dig too deep on the interwebz. I’ve done some dumb, dumb stuff.”
“So you were a dumbass, then.”
“Touché. I like to think I’m a work in progress. I’ve learned a tremendous amount from my mistakes. I’d venture to say I’m quite wise, even.”
I like the verbal repartee. “Am I blessed by the presence of an old soul, then?”
“Ancient. Like Yoda, I am.”
“Were you alive when they made that movie?”
He punches me in the shoulder.
And no, he wasn’t alive when they made that movie.
We’re way out of town now. It doesn’t take long. I pull off the highway and drive toward the fringe of hills in the distance. There’s nothing but sagebrush. I know what I’m looking for…When I see the turnout, I guide the car off the road and stop. Dust swirls up around us. Andrew swings his door open, gets out.
“It’s so quiet.” He stands still, breathes in. “I’d give my firstborn for this kind of peace on a regular basis. In LA, sometimes I can’t even think straight.”
But he doesn’t fully get it yet.
“Walk with me a little. I’ll show you why we’re out here.” I find the narrow path between the sagebrush.
He comes up behind me. We walk silently for a bit. The highway whispers in the distance. The wind blows over the desert scrub, and we are utterly alone.
“Out here reminds me of the earth and how big it is and how tiny I am. Everyday life is too noisy for me to remember that.” I wonder if he understands me. He nods.
I go on. “But here’s the really awesome part.” The path has just widened. We stand in front of two ruts in the desert floor. Running parallel with the highway, they stretch in both directions as far as I can see. To the east, the land slopes up gently and the ruts meet with the horizon. To the west, the trail seems to curve to the left and thins into a point in the distance.
He’s perplexed. “What’s this? A jeep trail?”
Here’s the part where I feel cool. “These aren’t tire tracks. They’re ruts from wagon wheels. It’s the Oregon Trail.”
“Really?” He looks at me.
“Really.”
He stands for a minute, then walks forward, faces west, and puts one foot in each wheel rut. He is still for a minute. Then he steps forward a few feet, bends down, and picks up a little of the dust, smoothing it between his fingers.
He stays crouched. He’s looking for something. Then he stands up.
“What’d you find?” I come over to look.
He opens his palm—it’s a smooth black rock. “I want to take this back.”
I smile. I think I did good.
After a bit more exploring, we head back into town. I’m still nervous about public outings with him, but I’ve figured out lunch. We hit the Basque Block, walk around and look at the old sheepherder’s boarding house, the wagon parked out front, the handball court.
We sit on the patio at a Basque grill for lunch. His sunglasses never even have to come off. The waitress is so distracted, she never looks either of us in the eye, anyway. No one else is outside, even though the day is what I expected it to be: unseasonably warm and bright.
I’m almost through my lamb sandwich when he pushes back from his burger and sighs, contented. “That was good.”
“I still say you should’ve had the beef tongue. If you were a risk taker, you would have.” I smile at him and take another bite.
He steals a French fry out of my basket. “I’m not good at risk taking.”
“Really? I would’ve taken you for a daredevil.”
He exhales loudly, takes another drink of his Coke. “I’m not afraid of risk. It’s just better for me to be conservative. There’s some switch missing in me. I tend to have a hard time finding a balance.”
“I don’t understand.”
“All things in moderation, right?”
I’m not following. “Yeah. So?”
“So, very often I can’t do that. I don’t know how to do that. Some things I can’t do at all. Some risks I can’t back away from once I jump in. It’s complicated.”
“What kind of risks?”
“Let’s just say I’m at my best when I’m working. If I’m not busy I tend to brood.”
“Really?”
“I’ve been known to blow off steam in not-so-healthy ways.” He eats another fry off my plate.
My stomach knots up. This new information doesn’t feel good. I fight off the urge to worry by looking for something to distract me, a way to escape this conversation.
A large group of women are coming down the sidewalk in our direction. They’re loud, laughing. “We should go before those girls walk by. If anyone’s going to spot you, a herd of single women will.”
He smiles, scoops up his Coke, and waits for me to walk with him down the street. “Lead on, tour director.”
“Our next stop took me a while to choose. If it were summer, we’d go fly-fishing. But the river’s frigid now. They release trout this time of year, but I don’t like suffering. Plus I never catch anything, anyway. We could go up to Sun Valley like you were supposed
to and see Hemingway’s grave, fly fish in Silver Creek. But it’s too snowy up there now. In Boise, if it were full-on winter, we’d go skiing. Do you ski?”
He shakes his head. “This weekend was supposed to have been my first time—though I was going to snowboard.”
“Well, skiing takes a while to get into, from my experience. I did not have fun the first couple times.” We’re at the car. “Plus, I would hate it if you got hurt or anything. Someone would probably sue me. And skiing’s hard to love after you get hurt, take my word for it. It took me more than a few seasons after I broke my leg to get back into it. And it’s never been quite the same, to be honest.”
We’re in the car now. He raises his eyebrows at me. “You still ski?”
“Well, the boys like it. It’s a good family thing to do. And Peter was amazing, so it was fun to ski with him.”
He looks at me closely. It feels like he’s trying to put something together. “Do you sometimes feel like you do a lot of stuff you don’t really want to do?”
I don’t know where he’s going with this. “Sure. Having a family is about that sometimes.”
He sits back. “Huh.”
I start the car. “Huh, what?”
“Well, I just wonder if I’d be good at that.” He smiles at me.
I shake my head. “You don’t have to be good at it. It just happens. It’s called compromise.”
His phone vibrates, and he jumps a little. He pulls it out of his coat pocket in surprise. He stares at the screen for a second before silencing it.
My heart sinks. “Was that important?” I can’t help but think it’s the real world calling—they want their movie star back.
He sighs. “Naw. It’s my agent. He’s probably put two and two together about me not being in Sun Valley. He worries a lot.”
“Do you need to call him? Should you call him?”
He stares down at the phone. I can’t read the expression on his face. I have this weird feeling he’s in trouble, that we’re in trouble—like ditching-class trouble or something. “Did you have to do something this weekend?”
“No. I don’t need to call. I’ll text and tell him I’m visiting a friend. That’s all he needs to know. And no, I wasn’t contractually obligated to appear in Sun Valley.” There’s a bitterness to his voice in that last sentence.
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