“I’d buy a Trakehner mare,” Marion said. “One that’s already started. I’ll hire a good trainer, and we’ll win dressage and show jumping events all over the country. We’ll have our picture in all the horse magazines.”
“What about you?” Linda asked me.
That was easy. “Pay off the house and set aside some money for Robby.”
“For college,” Marion said.
“Or travel or his own house. Maybe to start a business.” He might not be any better at school than I was. Paying off the house—what a relief that would be. With a senior keeper salary, I could make a little extra payment even without Tipton loot.
Jackie said, “I want a brand new house. One that nobody has lived in before me, with new rugs and new furniture.”
“A house in a new development?” Linda asked. She looked guileless, but I knew this for a set-up.
“Oh, yes. On a cul-de-sac, with new little trees in front and a perfect lawn. Everything fresh.”
Denny could be counted on for a major rant about housing developments, something along the line of, “That’s your dream? To pay someone to trash a forest or some farm land so you can have a new house instead of fixing up an old one? That’s what’s destroying the world today—people expanding everywhere, paving everything, wrecking ecosystems for ego satisfaction. You’re gonna need more than feng shui to get over that karma.”
But he didn’t say a word. Linda and I shared a look, puzzled.
Someone needed to pick up the lance Denny used for tilting at windmills, but before I opened my mouth, Jackie said, “Don’t you guys start with me. I was raised on hand-me-downs, and I get to dream any damn dream I want.”
“Okay then. Let’s talk about Bowling for Rhinos,” Linda proposed. “I said I’d lead it, but you all have to help, or we’ll be humiliated in front of AAZK.”
Bowling for Rhinos used to be exactly that. Chapters of the American Association of Zoo Keepers would round up pledges, go bowling, collect the pledges, and donate the money to rhino conservation. The fundraiser had evolved beyond bowling, but had kept the rhino focus. It had raised millions over the years for reserves in their native countries, no small accomplishment for a few hundred modestly-paid animal keepers. Linda had decided Finley Memorial Zoo should wake up and join the effort.
“Do we want to bowl or do something else?” she asked.
Pete proposed charging for a dinner in the Education Department’s classroom, which we would cook, followed by a behind-the-scenes tour. Cheyenne said to just ask people for money for a good cause and not make extra work for ourselves. Marion suggested selling zoodoo from the manure pile behind the elephant barn, a more organized effort than allowing individuals to load what they wanted by appointment. “We could even can it as a gift item,” she said.
Selling zoodoo sounded good to Linda. “I’ll ask Neal,” she said, as we gathered up our lunch trash to depart.
Denny was off in some other space.
***
He was in the employee parking lot, a tall shape leaning against my front fender, almost invisible in the dusk. “Hey,” I said, once I recognized him and my heart restarted.
Denny said, “Ire. Need to talk to you. Meet me at the Roost?”
“I have to get Robby at day care. How about tomorrow morning?”
He didn’t say anything.
“What’s this about? Can’t it wait?”
A silence. “Yeah, sure.” Defeat sagged in his voice.
Shit. One more thing piled on. “Okay. I’ve got thirty minutes. I’ll see you there.”
He nodded, pried himself upright, and walked to his ancient van.
At the Vulture’s Roost Tavern, we sat where we always sit, at the rustic wrap-around corner table. It seats six, eight in a pinch, and that’s where we migrate when Hap rounds us up for beer therapy. Strange to be just two. I ordered a glass of their bad white wine, which beat their appalling merlot, out of habit and to have something in my hands. Denny ordered a pint of Winter Warmer.
“’sup?” I asked, afraid that I already knew. “Sorry about losing the tortoises.”
He brushed that off. “I know you’ve got the Tiptons to deal with. So no worries if…”
“If what?”
He blew out a breath. “I saw Marcie last night. Maybe you can do some girl thing for her. I got nothin’.”
Something went wrong in my stomach. “She seemed okay on Monday.”
“I went over to pick up some CDs I left at her place.” He gazed around the tavern, ignoring the waitress delivering his beer. “I didn’t think it would be like this. I thought we could still be friends.”
“And?”
“She looked…broken.” His gray eyes were cloudy, and all his fizz had gone flat. “Way uncentered. She didn’t make sense.”
My stomach did more of that bad thing. Until this debacle, Marcie had always made sense. She had lived in the calm center, and I counted on that. It came to me that Denny had relied on her for his reality checks as much as I did. It came to me that the Marcie I’d known for years was in eclipse right now.
He picked up the beer glass and looked at it. “What did I do that was so bad? It wasn’t working. It wasn’t good for her.” He put the glass back down. “I just wanted to hug her and make her stop.”
But he hadn’t. He’d hung tough and now he was asking me to make it all right.
I sat back in the booth. What did I know that was of any use? I’d dumped Denny when Rick came along and then leaped into marriage. Rick and I had separated and were barely reconciled when he died. Those episodes and a string of bad-judgment affairs in high school and college were the sum of my experience in pair-bonding. That, and watching my parents and Pete and Cheyenne. Surely there were lessons from the successful couples I knew, not that I was likely to figure them out here and now. I picked my way carefully. “You said you broke it off because you were too different and both trying too hard.” Captain Entropy and Ms. Tidy-Time—for sure it would be hard.
He nodded, focused on the still-untouched beer.
I said, “For a social species, we’re really rotten at being together.” I tried the wine. It was as bad as I remembered. What did I want to have happen here? I pushed the wine away. “You talk like you’re hopelessly different. But you keep evolving toward each other. Look, you’ve got a steady job, you’re not addicted to anything, you don’t steal or beat people up. You’re not a crazy hippie.” I never imagined myself saying that. I finished up. “She’s not—she wasn’t—as timid and repressed as she was, more open to new things. You did a lot for her confidence, you know.”
Denny winced. He leaned back on the bench. “She bought a vegan cookbook. Before we broke up.”
That was a shock. Marcie’s curried chicken, her lamb chops marinated in lemon and garlic…
“I’m not even a vegan,” he said. “I should be, but I try not to obsess.” He drank a little beer, put the glass down, and set his elbows on the table, leaning toward me. “A month ago she pasted a little picture of a snake on every one of her chocolate bars.”
Huh?
He nodded. “She wanted me to find her a lizard for a pet.”
I got it. “Marcie was trying to get over being scared of reptiles. And she expanded into food she thought you might like better. Met you half-way. And that was the problem?”
“More than halfway. Like, seventy-five percent. Ninety percent.”
“So…”
“She shouldn’t have to do that for anybody. She is who she is and it’s great. She deserves someone who can mate for life. Somebody not like me.”
“All the compromising was on her side.”
“It’s like a cottontail rabbit and a fringed lizard, like in some stupid kids’ book where nothing pairs up with its own species. We only made
it this far because I’ve got my own place. Living together would drive us both over the edge.”
True. Denny’s place was a rotting rented house with an untrained Rottweiler bouncing off the walls, tanks full of reptiles and amphibians that other people had discarded, his comic book collection stacked hither and yon, and a kitchen best described as a disaster.
“You could evolve toward neater and cleaner,” I said, knowing it was lame.
“Not like Marcie’s.”
No, that would not happen. Marcie had a white leather couch, spotless. Her cats’ litter boxes never smelled. Her napkins matched the tablecloth.
Denny leaned his head back against the wall, throat bared, hands loose on the table, and stared at the ceiling. “I couldn’t be what she needed, so she warped herself to make it work. I could see her own energy and how she kept shoving it down and denying it and changing it. You do that, it’s going to blow out someday, like Old Faithful. Then she’d hate me.”
She wanted you, I didn’t say. She tried her hardest to make it work. Little snake drawings on candy bars, they twisted my heart. And Denny’s. It was enough to penetrate his thick skull, and let him see what I’d known from the start. I studied him, wishing I could change him into Marcie’s ideal match, appalled by this latest demonstration of my powerlessness.
He said, “It was taking advantage. It was unbalanced. Get her to see it.”
I felt no satisfaction at being right all along. Like my toddler, I wanted what I wanted, and that was for Denny to make Marcie happy again.
What I said was, “I’ll do what I can.” It already felt like defeat.
***
“Go have fun,” my mother said. “Say hi to Marcie for me.”
“Not fun. Not looking forward to this.”
I returned within the two hours I’d promised, wrung out. Marcie hadn’t wanted to talk to me, then she couldn’t stop. Seeing him had shattered the control she’d shown at our lunch. I didn’t understand it, I couldn’t fix it, I just let her talk. I never found an opportunity to suggest how he saw it.
“Are you and Denny together now?” she asked through sobs. “You could always have any guy you wanted.”
I pushed aside the hurt that she believed I would betray her and her out-sized notion of my attractiveness. “No way. In fact, I’m seeing someone else, a guy from Animal Control.”
“Denny’s always had feelings for you. I always knew that a part of him wasn’t available for me.”
“Marcie, it’s just his loyalty to Rick. He’s trying to be there for Robby, the only way he can honor their friendship. It’s not about me. He and I are done with each other. You’ve seen that—we bicker non-stop. He drives me crazy.”
How could she be so calm and sensible for other people’s problems and fly off the rails so thoroughly with her own? My turn to be the adult was long overdue, but all I could do was witness the bleeding. I did that for an hour and a half. Somehow Denny had been the splint on her sterile childhood and her timid personality, someone who let her live with courage, even with joy. With him gone, she seemed more wounded than ever.
“You can’t keep suffering like this. You remember that therapist you saw in college? Call her. Promise me you’ll call her.”
After she agreed and I confirmed that she still had the phone number, I hugged her and promised to be back in a day or two.
Was this what Marcie felt like after my melt-downs over Rick’s drinking, his death, my fears about being a single parent? I wanted to turn the car around, go back, and apologize.
I needed someone to talk to about my fears for Robby, about the dead people in my dreams, about Calvin retiring. It wasn’t going to be Marcie.
Chapter Nineteen
The parents were watching TV when I came in. “Robby went to bed okay?”
“He was fine,” my mother said. “How’s Marcie?”
I dropped to my hands and knees and rooted around in the liquor cabinet below the television screen until I found a bottle at the back. I took it into the kitchen and returned with a couple fingers of scotch in a water glass. Settled next to my mother on the sofa, I gulped down a good portion of it and emerged gasping.
She muted a commercial. “That bad?”
“That bad. Denny broke up with her a couple of weeks ago, and she’s devastated. It’s not getting any better.”
In the silence that followed, out of the corner of my eye I could see emotions, advice, and observations warring on her face. She said, “I’m sorry. I like Marcie.”
I was appreciating that mild comment when my father’s voice startled both of us. “Good thing, if you ask me. That kid’s a dingbat. She can do better.”
So much for mild.
“Dad, you’ve hardly met him. He’s full of verbal bullshit, but he’s a good person. Just not the right person for her. He’s done his best to help me and Robby.” I surprised myself. Why was I defending him, after all the damage he’d done?
I sipped the scotch. Loyalty. Honesty. That was why.
My mother’s self-control evaporated. “Dear, do you really want to drink all that? Tomorrow’s a work day, isn’t it?”
I finished the scotch and reached into her lap to push the mute button and reactivate the show. “I’m going upstairs to read. See you in the morning. Sleep well.”
“Let me get you some aspirin…”
Upstairs, I brushed my teeth while the alcohol burn doubled back from my alimentary canal and circled up into my brain. I yielded to it, willing mind and muscles to relax. I’d never get to sleep otherwise. Marcie, Liana, Jeff and Tom—sleep wasn’t going well these days. Why did scotch and toothpaste have to be such a nasty combination?
I settled into the narrow bed, careful not to wake Robby crashed out on his mattress on the floor, turned on the reading light, and opened The Last Tortoise by Craig Stanford. The book was good, but alcohol didn’t help my focus. Was pair bonding a loser’s game? Marcie had given it her best shot and flamed out. The scotch helped me convince myself that tonight Marcie might have hit bottom and tomorrow she would start rebuilding. I could hope. In the meantime, I missed my friend. I was just plain lonely.
Ken hadn’t called and that was probably good. Not meant to be, et cetera. So why did I feel like a spineless loser when I thought of him?
It was only nine o’clock. I activated my laptop for a little research, then stepped out to the bathroom where I wouldn’t disturb Robby. I opened up my phone and dialed. “Hey, you awake? It’s Iris.”
“I’m awake. What’s up?”
“I found out about a reptile show that starts Friday. You said you kept box turtles as a kid. Maybe you’d like to go.”
Ken said, “Never been to a reptile show. Where is it?”
“A hotel south of Portland off I-5. Starts at ten in the morning. I want to ask the vendors about customers for illegal tortoises.” I gave him the hotel name and the freeway exit.
“Meet you there?”
“Yeah. That would be good.” Not spineless. Sloshed and forlorn and foolish.
***
Friday morning I stood in a Holiday Inn banquet room staring at tables with rows of small creatures in clear deli containers, like so many scoops of potato salad or slices of chocolate cake. Little snakes, lizards, hairy-legged spiders. This “show” was really a sale. Each vendor had a sign or banner at a table where his or her wares were displayed. Price tags on the containers ranged from tens to hundreds of dollars. I’d never seen animals in such barren housing in my life, and it jarred all my zoo keeper sensibilities. Those sensibilities were already bruised from telling Neal I had a family emergency and had to take the day off. I was here to seek the other end of the Tipton tangle of string—their customers.
Spotting Ken and joining up felt entirely natural. He looked good, much better in a green chamois
shirt than that dubious Hawaiian thing. We edged along with the crowd, circling the room. The customers were mostly families with school-aged children, probably thanks to a teacher in-service day. A bearded man and a teenage boy both shopped with snakes wound around their necks.
“Let’s get some coffee and come back,” he suggested after our first circuit. “I saw a restaurant off the lobby.”
Excellent idea.
Ken ordered blackberry pie and, at my nod, two pieces. He ate with a focus that matched my own. When his pie was history, he looked up. “Cool event.”
“It’s more fun with somebody else. Thanks for coming.”
“My pleasure.” He shifted on the seat. “I’d like to have a bearded dragon. Someday when I have a stable place to live.”
“My husband, Rick, had a pet iguana. He was the zoo’s reptile keeper.”
He studied his coffee cup. “That Denny guy has the job now?”
“Right.”
Ken stirred a packet of sugar into his coffee. “How are all those tortoises doing? I got the impression there were a lot of them.”
“Twenty-five or so. One is pretty sick. Pneumonia, I think.”
“Denny’s looking after them?”
“He’s micro-managing by nagging. They’re all in quarantine and he’s not allowed in. He’s making the vet tech crazy.” I finished the last of my pie.
“The zoo bit off a lot.”
“You’ve got that right. The hospital is maxed out. But not forever. One of them was chipped and the vet found the source. We’ll be able to send some of them back to Madagascar, to the breeding facility they were stolen from.”
He nodded in his thoughtful way. “More coffee?”
“Nope. Ready to roll when you are.” He didn’t argue over splitting the bill.
My phone rang and I stood in the hallway outside the restaurant with Ken waiting at a polite distance. Craig said, “I wanted to follow up with you about photographing the tortoises. You remember from lunch? We talked about it.”
“Oh, sorry. Dr. Reynolds said no, not until they’re all healthy, and the quarantine period is over. I was going to call you tonight.”
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