by Sue Henry
“Maybe,” he confessed. “I’ve been happy with things the way they are—or were. You know?”
“Stop for a minute and turn it around,” I suggested. “If it was a job you wanted to take in Portland, how would that seem to you—and to Sharon? Would it be any different if you were the one who wanted to make a change?”
He frowned again, thinking about it. “I hadn’t looked at it like that.”
“I thought not. Might there be just a bit of chauvinism mixed into your thinking?”
“I guess it’s possible.”
We sat quietly for a few minutes, Joe clearly turning the idea over in his mind.
I thought back to Becky’s reaction on hearing about the situation the evening before. Oh, for Pete’s sake! she had said. Why doesn’t he just marry the woman? She’s a honey!
“Joe?” I asked him, finally, cautiously. “Don’t take this as a suggestion from an interfering mother. You know that’s not my style. But would it make a difference if you and Sharon were married? Part of a really good marriage is the freedom for both parties involved to be honestly themselves. It’s recognition of the trust you share, that you know is basic and depend on. I think you’re feeling threatened—that things are changing and out of your control. There! That’s the word—control.
“And, by the way, you don’t have to answer that question—just consider it, okay?”
He turned to give me a grin of approval.
“I will—am—have been,” he told me. “But I appreciate the suggestion. Thanks, Mom.”
“You’re welcome. Now it’s bedtime for me and the bonzer here.” I stood and picked up Stretch, who had been dozing next to me, his chin on my knee. “Your room is ready for you.”
“I’ll be up in a few minutes,” he told me and turned back toward the dying fire, a contemplative expression on his face.
“Good night, then, son. See you in the morning.”
I didn’t hear him come to his room upstairs, but went to sleep that night turning Joe’s problem over in my mind. I had been lucky that both my marriages had been good ones, easygoing and well balanced in terms of decision making. Maybe it would have helped if his father had lived to be a sounding board for him. But, whatever resolution resulted from the current situation, I could only hope for the best for them both, and leave it to Joe and Sharon to solve, one way or another. He was not a child anymore and some things you have to work out and learn for yourself.
The smell of coffee drifting up the stairs—along with the scent and sizzle of bacon frying—brought me back to life the next morning. Stretch’s bed on the flo or next to mine was empty, so I knew he had joined Joe in pursuit of breakfast. Donning my robe and slippers, splashing some water on my face and running a comb through my hair, I went downstairs to find them both in the kitchen.
“Morning, Mom,” Joe said with a grin. “I thought cooking bacon would probably bring you down.”
“It did indeed, especially with someone else cooking. You’ve even set the table.”
“That’s because my mother taught me right. How do you want your eggs?”
“Over easy, as usual.”
“You’ve got it. I’ve already let Stretch out and fed him.”
I filled a mug with coffee and sat at the table, pleased to watch him moving around familiarly in my kitchen, thinking how nice it was to have him home, even briefly.
Saturday’s storm was long gone, and glancing out the glass doors that led to my deck and yard I could see that the sky was blue and the waters of the bay sparkling in the morning sunshine. The mountains beyond looked sugar-frosted with snow halfway down—termination dust, as the miners called it in the gold rush days, as it signaled the end of the year’s mining season. I knew it would soon make an appearance in Homer, but the day promised to be a pleasant one, if cool.
“What have you in mind for today?” I asked as Joe set a plate in front of me containing my eggs and bacon and an English muffin slathered with butter and Becky’s peach jam.
Sitting down across the table with his own plate and coffee, he picked up his fork and told me between bites that Marty Berman had offered him some frozen halibut and salmon to take back to Seattle.
“I’ll need a small cooler and ice to carry it in, so before I go to Marty’s for the fish, I’d like to stop at Ulmer’s and pick one up. Do you have duct tape I can use to tape it shut?”
“Does anyone in Alaska not have duct tape?” I asked him. “In this state, along with blue plastic tarps, it’s practically building material, as well as being used for a hundred other things folks outside never even heard of. What color do you want? I have several.”
We had a good day, enjoying each other’s company with no further mention of Joe’s relationship with Sharon and the possibility of her moving to Portland. He was cheerfully upbeat, joking with the clerk at Ulmer’s Drug and Hardware who sold him a cooler for the fish, tooting the car horn and waving to another friend from high school that we passed on our way to Andy’s bookstore, where he found a book he’d been wanting to read again and couldn’t locate in Seattle. We had lunch at Café Cups, where we chanced upon Lew and joined him for an hour of great food and conversation, stopped at Joyce and Marty’s, then took Stretch for a walk on a beach close to town. In a quick stop at the grocery, we picked up another loaf of French bread to accompany the last of the stew left over from the night before.
I drove Joe to the airport in the early evening dark so he could take the seven o’clock hop to Anchorage in order to catch his flight to Seattle. It would put him into Seattle late that evening, but he was used to that, as he did it a couple of times a year.
“Thanks, Mom—for everything,” he said in my ear as he gave me a huge hug. “I’ll let you know how it goes.”
“Give Sharon my love.”
“I most assuredly will.”
I returned his wave as he carried his bag and the cooler out the door and onto the plane that was waiting on the tarmac for the first leg of his return to the big city.
Driving back alone through the Homer streets seemed oddly quiet and the house, when I reached it, extraordinarily empty.
I always miss my children after a visit, so it was not unexpected, but this time the feeling was stronger than usual. So, after a second cup of coffee and some consideration, I set myself a task I had been putting off for weeks—the thorough reorganization of a storage closet by the door that I had lost control of completely.
An hour later I had located several things I had thought were gone for good—a wrench and a screwdriver that both belonged in my toolbox in the garage, a package of paper Christmas napkins from the year before, and a chew toy I had meant to give to Stretch and forgotten. I also found a few grocery items I had replaced, then lost to the closet—several cans of cream of mushroom soup, for instance, a caramel crumb cake mix I had thought to try, and a brand-new package of hairpins that I remembered stashing there on my way out the door sometime the preceding summer, meaning to move them upstairs later. Having bought more, I now probably had enough to last me the rest of my life.
Satisfied with the effort that had allowed me to work off the disquiet I had been feeling, I emptied out the cold remains in my coffee cup and made myself a cup of tea. Then I shoveled out the ashes in the fireplace, built a cheerful new fire, tuned the radio softly to a favorite classical station as background company, and settled in my overstuffed chair to begin one of the books Lew had brought me Saturday evening.
Stretch, who had been getting acquainted with the newly discovered toy, came and went to sleep at my feet—welcome company.
Aside from letting him out for a quick few minutes and making myself a sandwich later, I read the late evening away and went to bed yawning, intending to continue my cleaning spree by attacking an upstairs closet the next morning.
Some old habits remain the best and most reliable remedies for escaping the odd worrisome mood.
FIVE
SOMETIME IN THE DARK MIDDLE OF THAT NIGHT
I woke to the sound of Stretch growling quietly deep in his throat, intent on something I couldn’t hear, though I listened closely.
Leaning over the edge of the bed, I laid a hand on his head.
“What is it, lovie? You hear something I should know about?”
He seldom growls without reason, so I got up and, without turning on the lights, carried him to the bottom of the stairs, where I put him down.
He went immediately to focus his attention on the door, though he had stopped growling.
I followed and put my ear close to listen, but heard nothing at all.
After turning on the light that illuminates the yard and much of the driveway between the house and the street, I looked out the window over the kitchen sink, but saw nothing. All was quiet and seemingly peaceful around the house as I turned on lights, checked the deck, and looked out other windows, Stretch following closely behind.
“Silly galah. I think you must have had a nightmare,” I told him. “Did that gray tomcat of the neighbors’ invade your dream territory?”
I turned off the lights and we both went back to bed.
Needless to say, I slept in a bit the next morning, and it was once again Stretch who woke me just after eight thirty, this time with a whine that said he needed to go out for his morning constitutional.
I put on my robe and slippers, then took him down and opened the door wide enough to let him slip out. Then I opened it wider, for, to my surprise, on the top step lay a small, neat package wrapped in a plastic bag from the grocery store and taped closed. So much for accusing Stretch of responding to nightmares!
As I picked it up I could feel that the package had the weight and shape of books and my mind turned immediately to Lew Joiner, with whom I regularly shared them. But why would Lew stop by in the middle of the night? I wondered as I let Stretch, who had finished his business in record time, back inside. I took the package to the kitchen and used my poultry shears to cut open the taped end of the bag and pulled out the contents. On a whim I had bought the shears and not once since had I ever used them on poultry, but instead found them handy for slicing open anything packaged in paper or plastic, which I often find impossible to tear.
It was indeed books, but not from Lew. On the counter before me, held together with a rubber band, lay the two Patrick O’Brian sea stories that John Walker had mentioned picking up at Andy’s Bookstore the previous Thursday—the day before I met him on the spit. Removing the rubber band, I found that between the books was a folded sheet of paper, which I opened to read the following:Dear Maxie,
Thank you so much for making my last few days so enjoyable—for sharing your house, your friends, and particularly yourself. I travel light and do not collect the books I read. So I hope you will find a place in your library for these, if you don’t already have them. If you do, please give them back to Andy with my thanks.
Give Stretch a couple of pats for me.
Gratefully,
John Walker
I stood staring at the note for a long minute, then read it again.
He must have caught the Homer Stage Line bus that had left at eight thirty that morning, I decided. Why else would he have walked over from the Driftwood Inn during the night to quietly deliver the books to my front step, not realizing how sharp Stretch’s hearing was when it involved his home ground? I wondered why he would have walked all the way across town and back again in the cold when he could have left the books at the hotel in my name. But maybe he had taken a taxi.
I found myself a little disappointed that he was gone, thinking he would have fit well into our relaxed and casual small-town population. I wondered briefly where he was headed after he reached Anchorage at the end of the trip. But it really didn’t matter and it was highly unlikely that I would ever hear from or about him again.
I couldn’t have known just how wrong I was!
It was after ten o’clock by the time I had showered and dressed for the day, fed Stretch, and eaten my own breakfast. I was about to head upstairs to start on that closet when the phone rang.
“Good morning,” I answered it cheerfully, half expecting it to be Joe letting me know he had made it home.
There was a slight hesitation. Then a woman’s voice spoke in my ear.
“Mrs. McNabb?”
“Yes.”
“This is Julia at the Driftwood Inn. Did you know a John Walker who was staying here? He mentioned your name.”
“Yes,” I told her. “I met him on the spit when I took my dog out for a walk on the beach Friday afternoon. I gave him a ride back to town and, when he said he would be staying over the weekend, invited him for dinner on Saturday, with a group of friends and neighbors.”
“So you didn’t know him before that? Do you know where he was from?”
“He never mentioned it, seemed a little reticent, so I didn’t ask.”
There was a hesitation of several seconds before she spoke again.
“Can you hold on a minute, Mrs. McNabb?”
“Yes, of course, Julia.”
I waited, listening intently, but she evidently covered the receiver with her hand, for all I could hear was indistinct mumbling from the other end of the line. Then a man’s voice spoke in my ear.
“Mrs. McNabb?”
“Yes.”
“This is State Trooper Alan Nelson. I’d like to speak with you about Mr. Walker. Could you possibly come here to the Driftwood Inn?”
“What’s this about?” I asked, slightly perplexed.
“I’d rather fill you in when you get here,” he told me. “At the moment I can’t leave or I would come to you. Will you come?”
“Yes, of course,” I told him. “I’ll be there shortly.”
Hearing the receiver replaced on the other end of the line, I hung up, too, wondering what could possibly have inspired the call with its request for my presence. Julia’s voice had sounded a bit strained as I thought about it, so something must be amiss, especially with law enforcement involved. But how could it include John Walker?
Though we have local police, the Alaska state troopers for our part of the state are based in Anchor Point, so they must drive almost twenty miles when their presence is required in Homer. This was clearly one of those times, unless Trooper Nelson had been in our town for some other reason—a not-impossible situation. Still, it must be fairly important for him to be calling me in search of information.
“Well, so much for the closet,” I told Stretch, who had ensconced himself comfortably on the throw rug before the fireplace, in which I had earlier started a small fire to take the night’s chill from the house. “I wonder what could bring the law to find out what I know—and don’t know—about John Walker. He certainly didn’t seem like much of a lawbreaker, but I suppose you can’t always tell, can you? Still, I doubt it’s anything too serious.”
Considering, I readied myself for the drive into town, took Stretch to the car, and was on the road in less than ten minutes. On the passenger seat below Stretch’s basket I put the two books and the note John had left on my doorstep. Though I wasn’t sure just why, I had picked them up at the last minute. Something about the wording of that note had given me an uneasy feeling, especially the first line he had written: Thank you so much for making my last few days so enjoyable—for sharing your house, your friends, and particularly yourself.
It reminded me of what he had said the day I met him on the spit when, at the Driftwood Inn, he had come around the car to the driver’s window and thanked me for the ride. Then he had said, Maybe I’ll decide to spend what’s left of my life at the end of the road, and that I had thought it was an odd way of telling me he liked Homer.
Giving myself a mental shake, I quit speculating and concentrated instead on my driving. Evidently I would soon fin d out what was amiss. I pulled up outside the inn and parked beside the marked car State Trooper Alan Nelson had obviously driven, left Stretch in his basket, and went to the front door, taking the books and the note with me.
As its tinkling bell announced my presence, both Julia Bennet, the owner of the Driftwood Inn, and State Trooper Alan Nelson looked up from the table at which they were sitting.
“Mrs. McNabb?” he questioned, rising and holding out a hand to shake mine as I affirmed my identity.
He was a tall, slender man who looked about the age of my son, Joe.
“Thank you for coming,” he said.
Julia brought me a cup of coffee and we all settled at a round table by a front window of the office area. Officer Nelson’s hat, gloves, and clipboard lay in front of him by his coffee cup.
“I understand from the woman at the hotel that you knew Mr. John Walker,” he said, with a glance at the report form on the clipboard.
“Well,” I told him, wondering at his past tense use of the word, “I can’t say I really knew him. I met him by chance last Friday, out on the spit, and gave him a lift back into town when it started to rain. At my invitation he came to my house for dinner on Saturday night, with a group of friends and my son, Joe, who was visiting from Seattle.”
“So you hadn’t known him before last Friday?”
“No, but he seemed a nice sort of person, with a congenial sense of humor, and fit in easily with the group on Saturday evening.”
“Who was there? I may need to talk with them as well.”
I gave him the names of the group and he wrote them down: Joyce and Marty Berman, Harriet Christianson, Lewis Joiner, and son Joe, who I explained had gone back to Seattle on Sunday.
“And none of them had met him before?”
“Not to my knowledge, and I think I would have known if they had.”
“Well, he may have said something to one of them that would be helpful.”
“Such as?”
“Did he say where he came from?”
“Not to me, but I didn’t ask,” I told him truthfully, then found myself thinking back to Joe’s assessment of John Walker, so I told him that, too.