“Do you think you could help me out?”
“Lady, I don’t want to get into trouble.” He paused, then added, “Jobs are scarce around here.”
Holly felt guilty. She was jeopardizing the young man’s employment. “I get it. Money is scarce, too. So . . .” The boy watched as Holly dug into her pocket. “Here’s a twenty. “She pushed the bill into his hand and with both hands folded over the money, she looked at his face. He looked embarrassed, or aroused, as if couldn’t tell one from the other. She held onto his hands and took a step toward him. “You get my lumber to the location I’m about to describe, and there’ll be more where that came from. I’ll meet you there and you can follow me to the exact place. Fair?”
He looked around. “Fair enough, lady.”
“And when I’m done, since you’ll be the only other person who knows where my secret tree fort is, you might just find a nice girl of your own willing to give you a kiss.”
Early on in their marriage, having Sunday dinner with Kathy’s parents had become an inviolable tradition. Even as the kids’ activities overwhelmed their weekend schedules, they maintained this date. John had always thought it important for his kids to spend as much time with their grandparents as possible while growing up. They wouldn’t be around forever. But one thing he had realized early on was that he didn’t want his kids’ view of life poisoned by Kathy’s parents’ small-town politics and prejudices.
Now, with the boys away at college, Kathy had lengthened their Sunday evening get-togethers, which John found less amenable. When the boys were younger, he had more patience for the banter and more tolerance for his father-in-law’s narrow view of the world. Now he could barely keep his mouth shut. He missed his own dad’s expansive view of the world and the long talks they’d had about law and history and travel.
“Look, hon, he’d said on the way home from one of their recent visits to her parents’ house, I can’t do this anymore. I can’t sit around and pretend to agree with your father.”
“That’s obvious,” Kathy snipped. “Seems you can no longer find a respectful point in the argument to clam up … not even for my sake. I can’t believe the things that come out of your mouth. Your political views have done a 180, John.” As soon as they’d walked in the front door, she’d stomped up to bed. “Sometimes I don’t even recognize you,” was the last thing John heard before the bedroom door slammed shut.
He slept on the couch that night.
It seemed to John, though, that lately it was everyone else’s views that had changed, and hardened. Sometimes he felt like the whole town was under some sort of spell, regular people who’d been perfectly rational just a few years ago now spouted bizarre conspiracy theories as if they were the gospel truth, and no amount of evidence could convince them they were wrong.
After that night on the couch, Kathy had begun to make excuses for him right after they’d eaten Sunday lunch. He’d say his goodbyes and make his exit. Last week, she’d completely excused him from having to go at all. She’d even stayed later at her parents, coming home after he’d gone to bed. And when he got up the next morning, he found her in the guest room.
Feeling guilty, John had gone with Kathy for this Sunday evening’s dinner, but had excused himself before dessert. “That reminds me I’ve got some council business that needs to be taken care of before tomorrow,” he’d said after his father-in-law once again brought up the detention center and how much of a shame it’d be if part of his grandson’s inheritance ended up with a retirement home for terrorists built on top of it.
On the drive home, the fiasco at the March council meeting occupied him. Who had been the culprit to open up Pandora’s box about DHS’s interest in his site in the first place? He still had no idea.
He pulled into the garage and opened the truck door. He stopped, hand hesitating above the garage door button. What was that pounding? It sounded like a semi-automatic rifle going off in slow motion, missing a bullet or two in the round. He ignored the noise and went into the house, changed into his favorite pair of sweats and an old Cardinals sweatshirt, faded with age, but rich with comfort. His New York Times magazine was waiting for him on the table between the couch and the television.
This first weekend after the end of Daylight Savings Time brought darkness to the house earlier than he wanted. When he was a kid, the lack of daylight meant no extra time after Sunday dinners to hang out with his buddies. But it also meant Thanksgiving and Christmas vacations, days off from school, were around the corner. And winter. The melancholy wrapping around him could only be blunted with a bottle of beer, which he poured into one of several frosted mugs he kept in the freezer for such occasions. No one in Saluki was happier when the microbreweries in Chicago, St. Louis, and Indianapolis, began making deliveries through a distributor in town. At least the local liquor store was one business still booming.
He made himself comfortable in the recliner, flipped to the magazine’s table of contents, and clicked on the TV to CNN.
“For God’s sake,” he said when a news flash scrolled across the bottom of his screen. Donald Trump was considering a bid for the presidency. Then again, maybe it made perfect sense, he thought. With Reagan, we’d had our Hollywood movie star, maybe it was time for a reality TV star.
As he listened to the news and flipped through the Times, the pounding he’d heard in the garage started up again. Although muted, it was insistent. Maybe Charlie, his neighbor to the west, was working late in the barn. He turned to ESPN to check the football scores. How had the hapless Rams fared earlier in the day? His phone beeped a text message. Kathy was going to spend the night at her parents.
Wow, he thought, that hadn’t happened in a long time. Was Kathy staying because she wanted to keep her elderly parents company or was she staying because she didn’t want to come home and face him? Or sleep in the guest room? Either way, being at home in solitude made him happy. He drained the last of his mug, foam remnants clinging to the glass, and returned to the bar in the butler’s pantry for a refill.
Surprisingly, the second beer hit him hard, even on a full stomach. He thought about heading to bed early with a book, but the noise outside got the better of him. He got up, threw on a light jacket, and slipped into his old gardening and mowing shoes. Once outside, he followed the direction of the noise. It was coming from the far corner of the vacant hospital property, where a few acres of woods-the triangle of property he’d told Holly about-had not yet been cleared between the cornfields and the Interstate. As he drew closer, he stopped to gaze at the line of trees pinned against the last remnant of daylight. It’d be full dark soon.
He looked up at the clear outline of the moon, glowing bright against an empty steel blue canvass of sky. He pushed through some overgrown brambles and on toward the noise. Then, through the clearing he saw the makings of … what? The pounding persisted, but he still couldn’t see anyone. When he was about half a football field away, the pounding stopped. So he stopped. The quiet became more disruptive than the noise. He walked further and finally yelled. “Hello? Who’s there?”
Silence.
But someone was there. He heard a faint rustling. He walked further until the shapes materialized out of the shadows. A treehouse. Or fort. Something like the one he’d built in these very woods many years ago. And then he saw her. Holly.
There she sat, in a corner, legs splayed out against the floor, torso propped up against plywood, breathing heavily. As he got closer, the fresh scent of sawed pine, its sweet-smelling weather resistant toxic concoction, filled the air. She still hadn’t noticed him. He stood there looking at her. She was wearing a man-tailored shirt, tied at the waist, her belly button exposed, and John noticed her mid-section wasn’t flat, but uniformly rounded, as delectable as any flesh he’d seen in the flesh in years. Or maybe ever.
Then she noticed him, and a slow grin spread across her face. John walked up to her and tilted his head back to study her face. Tiny flecks of sawdust lined her brows, and her sk
in glistened with sweat, grit, and dirt. He wanted to devour her.
“Fancy meeting you here, John Harold Veranda, Esquire. Am I trespassing on the ancestral estate? Are you going to have me arrested? I’d get up and run, but honestly, I don’t have the energy.”
A plug of testosterone coursed through John’s veins, the alcohol from his beer an accelerant, the target thankfully not obvious from the outside of his sweatpants.
John walked over to the treehouse where she sat on a platform about five feet above ground. “So, this is what Holly Chicago has wrought. The start of the gallery, I presume?”
He surveyed the workmanship. “A tape measure and some drawings should have played a role in the construction, you know.” He walked around the structure as if he were a building inspector. “Good use of the trunk and branches. Three walls, but open to the sky. Nice. Beauty, a solid F. Symmetry: zero. Gaps: A shit pot full. Forethought: Absolutely none.” Holly crossed her arms and beamed. He climbed the short ladder up, sat down, and scooched his ass closer to her.
“Certainly an art and a tradition lost to the current generation of kids catered to with pre-fab playhouse kits delivered from Asia through big-box stores. Although, in my experience, dwellings such as yours are built by kids under the age of ten.”
She turned toward him “I couldn’t wait, John. I wanted my facts on the ground. This is the start. My gallery … maybe it’ll be a museum one day. Artists like Maya and Penndel can display their work. Others, too. Hell, who knows, maybe even you! Do you paint or draw? Never mind. What was I thinking? Lawyers don’t paint. Sorry, I know, I’m babbling like an idiot. But, God I feel good! I know I must not look so good.” Holly yanked on her shirt, exposing a bit of cleavage, and brushed the sawdust. “I mean, I actually built something. Who cares if it’s ugly, or unaligned, or whatever. So, please don’t malign it, John Veranda, with your surgical strikes of sarcastic wit.”
“Well, it is a treehouse.”
Holly threw up her hand in dismissal. “Call it what you wish.”
“And as a lawyer who can’t paint, I must remind you, you are violating someone’s property rights.”
“Oh please, who could possibly care about a ramshackle plywood shed stuck in a tree on a strip of useless land this close to the Interstate?” Holly scrunched up her mouth and lowered her voice, then she leaned closer to John. Her arm brushed his and sent an electric shock through both of them. “Are you that protective of your land, your holdings, your ancestral manse that you can’t spare a corner for art? It’s not the promised land. It’s not overflowing with milk and honey promised for you and only you. Oh, what a fine day it is for biblical euphemisms. It is Sunday after all—” She stopped talking. “I’m still babbling aren’t I?”
“A bit.”
“Boy, do I ache.” She twisted at the waist and arched her back. Then shifted her weight to the other side of her body and did the same. “I think I have a bruise the size of Illinois on my right thigh. I have a totally new respect for carpenters. It’s damn hard building something!”
“No one builds something like this alone. I could have helped,” John said softly, which caused Holly to look over at him.
He looked at her hands. So small and perfect. He wanted to pick up them up, hold them, find out what hers felt like in his.
She broke the spell. “Ask me how I got the lumber out here.”
“How did you get the lumber out here?”
“I flirted with a kid working at Lowe’s and gave him forty bucks. And I lied to him.”
“A lie on top of a bribe?” John raised his eyebrows in mock surprise. “Tsk, tsk.”
“Money doesn’t always motivate, Veranda. Sometimes you need fantasy and illusion.”
“Or hope, faith, ideas.”
“Same thing.” Holly sighed deeply, yawned, then stretched, more sawdust falling away from her.
“How did you lie?”
“I told the kid I was building a treehouse.”
“Evidently, that’s not a lie.”
“I flirted with him. I told him I had my first kiss in a treehouse. And I led him to believe he might get lucky … get a kiss of his own in a treehouse if he delivered the lumber.”
John picked up her hand before he could think twice about not picking up her hand. He turned her palm upward, and stroked her fingers one by one, tracing over the new blisters. He could sense her body grow taut. He wanted to pull her close and taste the sweat and sawdust on her skin.
“Actually,” she said, “I was never kissed in a treehouse. I smoked a joint once in a tree fort along the Des Plaines River, but I was never kissed. And just so you know, I had no intention of letting that kid kiss me. I used him to get what I wanted. I can be mercenary like that.”
“Well, I doubt any of that was the kind of lie that will make much difference in the world. Or keep you out of heaven. There are lies and then there are damned lies.”
“Yes, and then there are statistics. Isn’t that how the saying goes?” Holly paused, looking at up at him with the look of a child seeing the Milky Way for the first time. Her eyes shone in the dim light. “How does a lie become a damned lie? If a lie like this one is only a lie for a few hours, is it actually a lie? I mean, what if it came true?”
“I think the rule is that if it isn’t true when you say it, then it’s a lie.” Holly seemed not to hear him. “Do lies have half lives? Can they deteriorate? Or are they like particles that hang in the air forever, tormenting you like allergies and hay fever? Are they invisible like the gases we’re breathing, wafting here and there? Keeping us alive or killng us? Can the stain of a lie lift permanently from the fabric of your being or always remain a faint reminder? Yes, I’m babbling again.”
John squeezed her hand, his heart thumping like a bass guitar and pedal drum in sync.
“And besides, lies beget lies. Once you throw that pebble down the slippery slope, the avalanche begins and eventually catches up with it. With you,” she continued.
“Why is that?”
“Truth navigates among precariously balanced obstructions.”
“My God, Holly, why do I feel so inadequate around someone who makes so little sense?”
“I’m the one who feels inadequate.” She leaned closer. “I don’t want to be a liar, John Veranda.”
John thought an entire war could have been fought in the few seconds that were now stretching into an eternity.
She whispered in his ear, her warm breath, moist enough to make him shudder. “Make my lie go away.”
Holly looked up at the sky and closed her eyes. Waiting for someone else to act was futile. She pushed herself up abruptly with her right hand, aching, raw from the work. Raw from her need to take and be taken. Waiting for the rest of the world to come to her was a joke, a lesson to be relearned constantly. She had waited decades for her father. No word, no explanation. Her memories of him teetering towards nothingness. Either he was imprisoned, or he was dead. Believing either would be the end of hope. If he were alive, he would have found his way back to her. She shouldn’t be thinking of her father right then. Shit. What was the matter with her? Right this second, this moment, all she wanted was for John Veranda to take her in his arms and make love to her.
As she tried to right herself amidst aches and pains in places she hadn’t felt in years, she felt the tug. John had not let go of her hand. Nothing confused her more than the volatile mix of instincts and emotions, crowding out the line of logic that always seemed to stretch infinitely, then snap. Flee and she’d deny what she felt for this man. Acquiesce and enter a world of illegitimacy and deceit, the world where the web of lies would only lead to her becoming a fleeting, romantic statistic in another man’s life.
John stood, and pulled her to her feet.
She looked up at him. “My lips are chapped. I have to pee. And I smell like a lumberjack.”
He reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out his lip balm, and took the cap off. Holly sucked in her breath as John pull
ed her toward him. “Close your eyes.”
She did as she was told, and slowly, methodically, he painted her lips with balm. Then he leaned into her and touched her soft, faintly glistening lips to his own.
Every pore of her skin opened to the world. The world that had stopped turning on its axis. She gave herself over to the moment. All she knew was the feel of John’s lips, the smell of John’s scent, the possibilities of … He was all she wanted. The kiss was light and delicate and tentative and sacred. When she finally pulled away, she buried her nose into his shirt and breathed in.
Pure relief enveloped her to know she could feel this way. Giddy, Holly opened her eyes and leaned her head back. What she saw first was beyond the branches of the trees, the evening sky above her, above the fort with no roof. Pale blue had given way to deep dark gray. Blackness would soon overtake the sky, it seemed, in a fraction of a second. And in a few wispy clouds, streaked with the colors of sunset, she saw the shadow of her father. Whether the angry clouds of colliding weather systems, or the gentle pillows of cumulus, she always saw Elias Haddad. She saw hope. And she saw disappointment.
She had no idea how much time had passed. John could have already made love to her for all she knew. When her brain re-engaged, she looked back down, and he was watching her. Reality rushed into her still-open pores and slammed them shut. She felt like she’d been hit in the head with a 2 x 4. She wanted him. But he was married. She’d given herself over to the moment, to a dream, to this man, but she knew the man would have to be given back. It was impossible. He would eventually leave her just like-
She stepped back. “Okay, you’re dismissed.”
“Oh my fucking god, Holly. Don’t do this. Didn’t you feel the earth move when the tip of your tongue met the tip of mine? Didn’t you feel the rip in the space-time continuum? I think we breached something on the order of the Grand Canyon on the head of a pin.”
The Moment Before Page 23