by Daniel Pyne
“I’m around a lot of people,” Rayna said.
Grant’s unusually muddled thoughts resulted in another awkward pause in the proceedings, with the locals still nailed to the floor where they’d been standing, Greek Chorus, way too scared to move, as if waiting for the barroom brawl and beating they were sure an ex-con would deal them, and that they were starting to believe they deserved.
“Anything else?” Rayna asked again.
She wasn’t as pretty as Grant had expected, from the photograph, but far, far lovelier; this new word that had come into his head out of nowhere to describe her, and now he thought he might not ever use it to describe anyone else.
She was lovely, and she liked his brother, Lee, indisputably. If Grant knew nothing else about her, he knew that. He was sure of it. And he was determined not to mess this up.
Which, of course, spelled disaster for everyone.
“There is,” Grant said.
“Is what?”
“Something else.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“Would you go out to dinner sometime with me and my brother?” Grant asked.
THIRTEEN
The date itself took place four days later, on a Thursday, which is a school night, but Grant successfully argued that 1) Lee wasn’t in school, 2) Lee wasn’t in school, and 3) Lee wasn’t in fucking school, for crying out loud, and didn’t have homework and taught fucking wood shop, thank you very much, and, okay, yes, physics, but for Pete’s sake, to little ignorant trilobites who could give a rat’s ass about Bohr’s Law. Grant arranged for them to meet Rayna more or less halfway between Evergreen and Basso Profundo, in Georgetown, a hardscrabble, Victorian mining town lovingly restored by people who loved to restore quaint old houses, an activity Grant regarded as pointless, but he didn’t lose sleep over it. At twilight, Lee’s Jeep rolled down Main Street and found a parking place just up the block from a supposedly refurbished nineteenth-century saloon Grant was pretty sure was never any kind of saloon until the owners, more Denver expats, refurbished the place.
“It was probably a T-shirt shop. You know. Spelled with two p’s and an e. Remember back in the day, when Georgetown was just a lot of tacky little joints selling hats and shirts and rock candy and ski posters and those postcards with jackalopes and fur-bearing fish, and the Georgetown state legislator tried to get gambling legalized, like in Central City?”
“No,” Lee said. “That never happened. It went from a sad and dying Front Range mining town to a kind of low-rent Aspen, when baby-boom skiers decided to buy and build there to avoid the weekend gridlock on I-70 between Denver and Loveland Basin or Winter Park.”
“Nobody in Georgetown goes to Winter Park.”
“It’s only half an hour.”
“Over Monarch? Bullshit. That pass snows shut more than not.”
“Not really, but, okay. Loveland and Arapahoe,” Lee offered as a compromise.
“Or Keystone, if they’re particularly impressed by size.”
“Fine.”
“Not to mention all those sketchy shale oil profiteers who wanted to retire somewhere they hadn’t torn up and ruined.”
“Whatever. You see my point.”
“I see a T-shirt shoppe right there,” Grant pointed out, pronouncing the e.
“Now,” Lee said. “You see it now. It’s new.”
They were nicely dressed. Anyone looking at them could tell that they were brothers because Lee had to loan Grant some clothes, which meant they were both wearing jeans, shirts, and casual cotton sport jackets. “Brothers, or gay,” Grant said. Lee told him that joke wasn’t funny anymore, if it ever was. “Or high school teachers, same diff,” Grant added, unrepentant. Grant said it looked as if Lee had gone to the Gap one day and just bought one of everything, and Lee didn’t say anything for a while, which meant Grant wasn’t too far off from the truth.
“Maybe it wasn’t Georgetown that wanted a casino.”
Lee held the door open for Grant, so that Grant would have to go in first.
“Grant?”
“What?”
“If this is some kind of setup—”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
Dark wood and red vinyl. A quaint little saloon née après-ski restaurant. Eighteen-nineties music squeezed from a lively, motorized player piano. Rayna was at the bar, waiting, in a spaghetti-strap top and a little leather skirt. Extremely wary, Grant thought, but dressed to exterminate. She stood up and both men felt their hearts skip. This was not the General Store Rayna. This was the makings of a skirmish.
“Hey,” Grant said, and wondered if he could have greeted her with anything more banal.
“Hi. Hi.”
“Are we late?” Lee was strangely comfortable.
“I was early. I got a ride from a rig headed into Denver from Kremmling, so . . . ”
“Something smells great.”
“Probably the duck. I heard this place got in trouble for shooting some ducks in Dillon Reservoir.”
“Car trouble?” Lee, the auto shop instructor.
“No. I don’t own a car. Grant said you could take me back over the pass after dinner.”
They both looked at Grant. He just smiled and pointed toward the window. “Hey. There’s a table. Let’s grab it. Farthest distance from the piano, and so forth.” He led them to it and pulled out a chair for Rayna.
“There’s only two chairs,” she said.
“You know what,” gently pushing her down into the one he’d prepared, “I’m thinking I’m gonna take my supper at the bar. Do you guys mind? I’ve got this . . . lower back problem, from sleeping on crappy institutional bunks, you know, and, well, to be really honest with you, it’s better for me if I sit on a stool.”
Rayna and Lee looked at each other.
“You and I can talk on the ride back to your house,” Grant added. “Lee doesn’t talk when he drives; he says it’s too dangerous.”
“Grant.”
“Lee. Sit. Sit.”
Grant was already moving away, smiling, telling them he’d send the waiter right over. Again, Lee and Rayna looked at each other. They smiled slightly, almost in unison.
“Setup,” they both said.
They got through small talk and ordering drinks and food without incident or embarrassment, except when Grant ordered them an expensive bottle of wine that neither of them wanted. They tried to send it back, but the waiter got bent out of shape because he’d already opened it, so Grant wound up nursing it at the end of the bar, for a while looking genuinely hurt. There was the usual where-are-you-from and my-parents-are-both-dead and oh-I’m-so-sorry that had to be done, and some biographical stories on each side that raised more questions than they answered. Then there was the ongoing mine talk, inevitably including Lee’s it’snot-about-finding-gold assertion, which Rayna gamely tolerated longer than Lee thought she should have, and there were awkward pauses, but not too many.
They found a rhythm and a comfort in each other that surprised them, and was easy, and was promising.
“What did he do?” Rayna asked finally, after all the safe subjects had been exhausted. Lee had expected her to ask and had spent a good part of the evening wondering when she’d ask, which accounted for many of the awkward pauses; it was just habit. And history.
“Who?”
“Your brother. He said he was in prison.”
“Yeah.”
Neither one of them had eaten much. They both got more anxious, and cautious, as the evening unfolded, as if something was changing during their conversation, dynamic, an ineluctable settling seriousness. But now there was another shift, a different shift, a more familiar shift, and Lee, resigned to it, glanced over at Grant, across the room, finishing dinner, chatting with the lanky bartender, and making him laugh, and then Lee held out his hands for Rayna, palms up.
“You’re probably aware that if you’re a trained boxer, under the law, your hands are considered lethal weapons?”
“I thought that was just
a TV crime show plot thing.”
“No.”
“Oh.”
Lee took a sip of water and shrugged.
“He hit someone?” Rayna asked.
“He went a couple of rounds on him.”
“Was he drunk?”
“Grant? I don’t think so, no. Not until afterward.”
“He beat up somebody and then got drunk because . . . he regretted it? Or to celebrate?” Rayna studied Lee. He didn’t answer right away. “Look, if you don’t want to talk about it, I understand.”
“It was a one-off. Special circumstances, if that’s what you’re worried about; he’s not a violent guy in any sense of the word, believe me.” Lee got it all out in a blurt, sounding more sulky than he intended.
“Why would I be worried about it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s just . . . you’re asking all these questions about Grant, clearly it’s a topic that interests you, and I . . . ”
Rayna said nothing for a moment. Her eyes sparkled, watching him, and a smile traced her lips, but Lee was too preoccupied with his own turbulent thoughts to notice.
“If you want to go over and sit with him,” Lee said, “it’s all right. I won’t mind. Really. He’s much better at this than I am. I mean, it’s been this way our whole lives. He’s good-looking and interesting. I know he is, and more; that’s why I like him so much, don’t get me wrong. We’re brothers. I get it; I have to get it, right? And since I can’t compete with it . . . no, no, wait, let me finish. Since I can’t compete with it, I don’t. I won’t. This is important. I’ve never said this to anybody, particularly not any woman I’ve known, and I want to tell you so you understand that I’m not, I don’t know, giving up. It’s just. Well. Conservation of energy. Thermodynamics, in a sense.”
Rayna reminded him to breathe, and he did before continuing: “Back when Grant was a sophomore in high school, not even seventeen, when my parents were still around and I was just his older brother going to college, I had this girl friend—woman, actually—from grad school, early childhood education—Marion Gilroy was her name. I was hopelessly gone-over-the-moon in love with her, even though I hadn’t quite worked up the courage to ask her out on what could objectively be considered a date. Girl friend, not girlfriend. You know. But I was about to. I was. And I had her come over with a couple of other friends for dinner. Grant was there. And . . . yeah, Grant sleeps with her the next night. Wild monkey sex in the back of her Plymouth, for chrissakes. She couldn’t stop talking about it. You know, confiding in me, because I’m her friend, and I’m his brother, and she wants some insight into him. Or something. ‘He’s so chill and mysterious,’ she told me. I don’t know. But sweet Jesus. He was sixteen; she was, like, twenty-four.” “I’m sorry,” Rayna said.
Lee lowered his head, shoulders round, and took a long drink of ice water.
“And it’s not like he’s always on the make or anything. He’s not. He’s just . . . a really nice, fun guy. Clueless, rat bastard. My little brother. So.”
Rayna considered Lee, then asked if Grant knew.
“Knew what?”
“That you were interested in Marion.”
Lee frowned. “I don’t know. Yeah. Maybe. I might have mentioned it after the dinner thing.”
“Might of?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t see ‘might have’ making much of an impression on your brother.”
Lee nodded. “It wouldn’t,” he conceded. “But, hey, don’t get me wrong, I was not upset. At all. Seriously. I mean, how could I be upset? It wasn’t like I was dating her or anything. I love Grant. I do. I couldn’t ask for a better brother.”
Rayna pointed out that he could, but he wasn’t going to get one. Lee’s thoughts and emotions were so knotted he didn’t have a response. Rayna asked if she ever went out with him again.
“Marion? With Grant? God no. The next week he was already onto working his way through the girls’ volleyball team. It was a whole tall-chick phase he went through,” Lee said. “Marion, on the other hand, turned out she was sleeping with our Whole Learning professor, who was about sixty, and they eventually shacked up in married student housing . . . I think they’ve got, oh, three or four kids now.”
Rayna considered him with an expression Lee couldn’t, or didn’t want to, decode.
“I’m sorry.”
“So I’m just letting you know,” he concluded, “that I’m not ever surprised or disappointed when a girl, or woman, I’m sorry, tells me she’s got a crush on my brother.”
“I don’t like this story,” Rayna said.
Lee was of the opinion that it wasn’t really a story she had to like or not. Rayna assured him that Lee was anticipating a problem that didn’t exist. She wasn’t at all interested in Lee’s little brother, and, cards on the table, wasn’t under the impression that this was the kind of dinner date in which she needed to make those kinds of far-reaching declarations to begin with.
“It must have ripped your heart out,” she added.
“Grant?”
“No. Your ex-wife. Getting divorced.”
Lee blinked. Then he looked away, as if for help, and saw that Grant was no longer sitting at the bar.
As Rayna followed Lee’s look, the bartender came out and across to their table, carrying a slip of paper that Lee and Rayna both thought was a note.
“You’re Lee?”
“That’s right.”
“Dude, your buddy had to leave? But he said you were paying his bill.”
The bartender put down the check. Rayna laughed. Lee reached for his wallet.
“Yeah, I’m paying.”
“Be sure to thank him for sending over the wine,” Rayna teased. Lee pointed out, probably unnecessarily, that Grant didn’t have any money anyway.
Troutdale Estates held the heavy canyon midnight air and a deep darkness cut only by lights that glimmered softly through the trees from the windows of the occupied houses. The sound of crickets was thick, like a sheet of brittle, one-note music, continuous; you wouldn’t notice it unless you’d spent the last couple of years in a prison cellblock where night was filled only with percussion and loss.
A pickup truck rumbled up the street, and Grant rose from in the bed and pounded on the rear window of the cab, and the truck slowed long enough for him to hop down and wave his thanks to another driver; this one just flicked his lights and disappeared around the next corner. Grant stared across the street at a familiar split-level house.
A slender shadow passed across an upstairs curtain.
He stood there for a long time, until the lights in the house went dark, until nearly all the lights in all the houses were extinguished and the neighborhood slept. He stood watching, hands in his pockets, in no hurry to go anywhere.
And Lee’s Jeep cornered nimbly through the curves coming up from Dillon. He and Rayna had hardly spoken on the trip through the Eisenhower Tunnel. A restful silence had settled and neither seemed anxious to break it. Tires hummed on the machine-creased asphalt of I-70. At the turnoff for Keystone they stopped for gas. Rayna got out and stood near Lee as he worked the pump. There was no moon. The canopy of stars was spectacular, and the air redolent with the bite of pine.
“Lee?”
“Yes?”
Rayna took a moment, her eyes narrowed; she was thinking, organizing her thoughts before she spoke.
“Nothing,” she said.
Half an hour later the silver Jeep glided up to the door of the General Store. Rayna climbed out, came around to the driver’s side, and looked in at Lee.
“A gentleman would have opened the door for me,” she baited him.
“You were out so fast. I would have only been halfway there and felt pretty foolish.” Rayna was smiling; Lee realized she was yanking his chain. “Oh.”
“Don’t worry. That whole chivalry vibe died for me when Clinton did the thing with the cigar,” she told him. “I mean. President of the United States. He probably went to
cotillion and everything. I mean, come on. He was a Rhodes Scholar.”
“I know.”
“Isn’t there like a rule Rhodes Scholars have to be gentlemen?”
She looked up the street. There was nothing to see. A pool of light beneath the single street lamp. The outline of Mayor Barb’s Caddy.
“I don’t smoke,” she said.
“Okay.”
“Or if I do, it’s just, like, one. Or a half. I’ve quit,” she told him.
“That’s good,” he said, and let too much quiet settle.
“You going to kiss me good night?”
“I will if you want me to.”
“You’ll have to get out of the car.”
“Spontaneity is my middle name.”
She leaned her elbows on the door. “Or you can come in for a beer, but I’m not going to sleep with you,” Rayna said.
Lee must have inadvertently thrown an odd, worried look at her because she added quickly, nicely, “I like to get that out of the way. It relieves a lot of tension.”
“Oh.” It did, somehow. And created another kind.
“I’m serious. See? We’re already past it. It’s all good now.”
“Will you be insulted if I say I’d better get going?” Lee asked her. “I’ve got fifty-nine papers to grade for tomorrow.” Now all he could think about was sleeping with her.
She leaned in and kissed him, lightly. Her lips were soft, dry. “No,” she said, “I had a great time.”
“Really?”
She kissed him again.
“Yeah.”
Rayna backed away, turned, and walked happily through the headlights and up to the front steps of her store. Lee dropped the electric window on the passenger side and called out to her, “Are you saying you’re not going to sleep with me now, or you’re not going to sleep with me ever?”
Rayna just smiled, unlocked the door, and went inside. The door closed softly. Lee stayed there for a moment, looking at it. Then he turned his Jeep around and headed back down Main Street toward the highway and the long drive home.