“He’s not my dream guy. I’m not dating him. And he’s not always a grouch. And I’m not modeling anything lurid.”
“I bet deep down he’s mean.”
Cassidy’s guess was just the opposite, but she kept it to herself. She was beginning to think he was a really decent man, all wrapped up in being a guy.
Jo wasn’t a fan of boats, her dad had been a deadbeat Alaskan fisherman and boats always reminded her of the stench of fish and too much beer. But she only made Cassidy beg a little before caving in.
They cast off and were underway even before they’d stowed their belongings below. Except, here on the catamaran, it wasn’t “below,” it was “in the salon.” She glanced wistfully at the dock out the long, narrow windows.
“This is it, Jo, if we jump now, we might still make it.”
Her friend shook her head, “You got me on this damned thing, you don’t get off so easily. It doesn’t look so bad anyway.”
And it didn’t. Russell’s boat below had been a combination of beautiful mahogany shaped into pleasing curves, items neatly stowed in custom cubby holes, and a complete mayhem of sawdust, tools, and half-ripped out sections. There had been a hole right in the middle of the floor that opened to concrete a few inches down. Being in a boat on the water and seeing that it was filled with concrete hadn’t made her feel right at home. When Russell had answered her question that it wasn’t just concrete, but rather about six tons of concrete and iron boiler punchings, whatever they were, she’d considered swimming ashore. Through the hole in the floor, she’d seen a thin film of water washing back and forth over the concrete. It had been mesmerizing and left her feeling a bit ill. She’d spent very little time below during the sail with his parents.
Dave and Betsy’s salon was like a warm living room. Everything was neatly stowed. There were a hundred homey touches. A quilt throw on a settee, a small group of pictures along the only bit of open wall. Tiny curtains for each window. Water stains on the table, fraying on two chairs in particular. It was lived in and cozy.
The others were on deck, Russell, the owners, and an old man with more white beard than face. Cassidy glanced at Jo and they both moved farther into the boat. At the end of the salon there were two sets of a half-dozen stairs to either side, leading down into the hulls of the catamaran.
They tip-toed down the set to the left. A tiny kitchen, a galley, wrapped ingeniously around the steps. Forward lay a small bedroom, barely bigger than the double bed stuffed in it. More quilts and pictures, though definitely a guest room. A tiny bathroom with toilet and shower tucked behind the door.
At the other end of the hull was a floating office. A laptop, a fair number of books, mostly novels. Three books, all with similar titles, were grouped off to one side. They were by Dave and Betsy Howard.
She slipped the first book free of the elastic bungee cord that ran across the front of the bookshelf and showed the cover to Jo.
“Cruising Over Fifty.” Jo read aloud.
Their hosts smiled from the cover, looking much as they did now, wearing a tiny bikini and a Speedo respectively.
“If I look that good at fifty, I’ve won the lottery and gone to heaven.”
Cassidy flipped to the copyright page. Ten years ago.
“They’re over sixty now. Damn!” She checked the picture again. Fit without the harsh lines of gym machines and definitely no cosmetic surgery. She slid the book back into place.
They returned to the salon. Jo turned for the cockpit, but Cassidy crossed the salon and descended into the other hull.
A couple of seats were built into the hull at the foot of the steps. To the left was the master bed. A sweater tossed on the made bed, pillows still showing the dents of their owners heads. Toward the bow, a small sink and a closed door.
Jo plucked her sleeve. “Enough, Miss Snoopy. There is a line between curious and nosy.”
“I’m nosy.”
“Right,” Jo headed up the short flight of steps and Cassidy turned to follow. Behind the door was the unmistakable pumping sound of a marine toilet being flushed. Clank, gurgle, clank, gurgle. It was the first thing Russell had taught her about his boat, this one sounded exactly the same. Someone else was aboard, maybe old, white-beard’s wife.
The girl who popped out of the door knocked Cassidy back onto the settee at the base of the stairs. Her bikini revealed far more than it covered. She had blond hair, the casual fitness of being in her early twenties, and serious curves of someone quite dangerous.
She inspected Cassidy with a quick glance from boat shoes and creased navy pants to her silk blouse. She’d never been assessed and discounted so quickly.
Then the woman’s face broke out into such a large smile that Cassidy doubted the expression that had been there moments before. Dangerous like a shark this one.
“You must be Cassidy. Hi, I’m Teri.” She held out a hand and grabbed Cassidy’s with a grip that would have fit better in one of those mano-a-mano guy moments. “Russ said you’d be coming.”
“He didn’t mention you.” Nice, Cass, real nice. But it didn’t phase her new acquaintance a moment.
“Yea. Well, with Tommy gone, I was at sorta loose ends. Kinda invited myself aboard, you know.”
“Tommy?”
“My ex. I kicked him overboard. He wanted me to go climb this stupid rock, and after all this training, he like wouldn’t take me with him. I was, you know, really pissed.”
“Ex-boyfriend? I sorry.”
“Ex-husband. Two years, three months or some such. At least that’s what he said. Fun, but what a waste. He was so, you know, protective. There are times when a girl needs someone to watch over her, it’s kinda charming, but not all the time fer crying out loud.” She shrugged in a way designed to lift her generous bosom and make it look as if her breasts were about to spring from their tiny bits of cloth.
Jo stuck her head back down, “You coming? Oh, hello.”
Jo got the introduction, without the attacking handshake.
They didn’t even have to glance at each other to share the thought. This girl was as wild as Perrin had been in college, with none of the class or sophistication. A disaster waiting to happen.
Back on deck, the dance began, and Cassidy started to feel far worse than a bit of seasickness. She looked longingly back at the marina, now just a tiny cluster of masts disappearing rapidly behind. This boat was much faster than Russell’s. They’d raised sail while she was below, but the wide catamaran had stayed so level she hadn’t noticed when they got underway.
Dave stood at the wheel. Instead of a narrow cockpit where everyone’s knees were always bumping together in a friendly little circle, here you could spread out. There were two couch-sized places to sit. A small table bolted to the deck between them. They didn’t need the wide-bottomed, heavy mugs to avoid spilling drinks.
Russell stood by Dave and chatted about the “set of the sails” and “monohull vs. twin-hull leeway.” While Cassidy was congratulating Betsy on her beautiful boat, Teri joined the other sailors. In moments she was cranking a handle on a winch and talking about the “lie of the wind.”
Cassidy and Jo joined Betsy and Perry for iced tea. It was bitter on her tongue as she watched Teri bend and flex while she worked with the ropes.
And Russell didn’t stop watching Teri for a moment.
# # #
Cassidy moved to the bow once they’d anchored, wishing she’d had the foresight to bring a book. It was an idyllic setting. Night was falling and the city was a shining backdrop as the last of the daylight was replaced by sparkling office and apartment lights. Myrtle Edwards Park was a throbbing mass of people. Half of the population of Seattle must be jammed in there to watch the fireworks. A band cranked out some serious dance tunes that made her feet twitch despite how she was feeling.
A hundred or more boats clustered as close as the police would allow to the fireworks barge. There were power yachts that must be over a hundred feet long and three stories tall.
Ski boats, fishing skiffs, two-person sailboats scuttled around close while a three-masted sailboat cruised by in deeper water. She wanted to ask about it, but that would mean facing Russell and the permanent attachment to his hip. Teri had staked her territory and Russell played along as if everything was completely normal.
How had she so misjudged him? Perrin had been far closer to right. Jo had simply shaken her head sadly, even before Cassidy could ask the question. It wasn’t her imagination. At some point, she’d have to return to the cockpit and watch Teri continue to work at seducing Russell. For all she knew, Russell had been consoling her in the night since her ex had departed. She could easily imagine the woman producing big rolling tears that would drip down onto her heaving bosom on cue.
At least she hadn’t invited him to the condo. There it was, she looked shoreward, not a dozen blocks away. A dozen blocks to safety and a hundred yards of freezing water she couldn’t cross. It might as well be a hundred miles. She was good and surely trapped.
“Pretty boat.”
The voice came from a canoe close beside the catamaran. A pair of boys in their teens were looking at the boat the same way Teri was tracking Russell.
“Thanks. Um, but it’s not mine.”
“Still, it’s cool.”
“Yea, cool.”
She’d rather be anywhere than here.
“Where are you guys from?”
“Wenatchee, you know, east of the mountains.”
“Did you paddle the whole way?”
The one in front rolled his eyes, but the one in the stern laughed.
“Nah, just the last little bit. We parked pretty close this morning.” He nodded toward the beach.
There was a flash and a thump from the barge. A thin trail of sparks soared upward. She followed it and was rewarded by a huge flash. A moment later the bang arrived so loud and hard she could feel it as much against her chest as her eardrums.
Sometimes the answer was so obvious, it was hard to believe she hadn’t had it earlier in the long, weary evening. She looked over her shoulder and saw Jo look her direction. Dave, Betsy, and Perry were chatting quietly. Russell and Teri were nowhere to be seen. They must be down below together, doing what she didn’t want to know.
Cassidy rocked her head toward the canoe.
Jo glanced over, paused for a moment and nodded. She made a shooing motion with one hand that none of the others noticed.
Cassidy tilted her head in a question.
Jo nodded again. She was sure.
“Hey, guys.” They were both still staring upward like frogs dazzled by a flashlight.
“Yeah?”
“I’m not feeling real well. Could you give me a lift to the beach?”
“Now?”
“Uh-huh.”
They both shrugged. “Sure, climb on in, lady.”
Moments later, as the second warning boomed overhead, she stepped onto terra firma and felt much better.
“Thanks, guys, you’re great.” She kissed each on the cheek. The one in front groaned, but the one in the stern leaned into the kiss for a moment.
“Any time, lady, any—”
The first big firework cut off his sentence as it soared aloft and burst like a huge chrysanthemum.
She was the only one moving away from the beach as flecks of colored light flew through the sky and lit the upturned faces before her. She didn’t turn back to look for the sailboat.
# # #
“Hi, this is Cassidy.”
“Hi, Cassidy. This is Russell. Look, I feel—”
“I’ll be out of town for the next couple weeks, but I will be checking for messages. Thanks.”
There was a nasty little beep.
“Shit!”
Nutcase scrambled away from where he’d thumped his hand on the table.
“No, that isn’t what I meant. Look, um, could you give me a call?”
Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!
“No, you won’t will you.”
He wouldn’t either if he was her.
“Look, your friend Jo, she read me the riot act. I had no idea. Every time I tried to get near you, you ran off.”
Good trick on a sailboat. He’d stopped chasing as soon as he got the message that she wanted nothing to do with him.
Jo had actually laughed in his face when he’d said that.
“I didn’t even notice Teri. She isn’t anywhere near your league. She’s just a lonely kid.”
He was sounding really pathetic. There had to be some way to cancel this message.
“Cassidy, I didn’t…” but he had. “I wanted to… shit!… I wanted to spend some time with you when I wasn’t being freaked out by my parents. I wanted—”
A beep cut him off.
He heard the click as his cell phone disconnected the dead call.
# # #
“Miss Knowles.”
“Cassidy.”
“Cassidy, thanks. You said that there are wines that aren’t real types of wine? I don’t understand that.”
Thirty-five students of the Culinary Institute of America eagerly awaited her answer. She always had a great time at the CIA summer-series classes. About the end of the first week, she couldn’t imagine why she didn’t move back to New York to live along the Hudson River and teach oenology. Invariably, by the end of the second week, she remembered why she never did. But this was the first week and her session had been booked out within hours of the class announcement. At least a dozen of the staff stood along the back wall to listen in.
She’d once sat in those chairs and listened just as eagerly to Craig Claiborne when he’d deigned to lecture. She was standing where Craig had stood and Palmer and Prudhomme and a host of other greats before her. She was either really good or fooling everyone.
“There are new wines all the time. Traditionally, the types of wine were based on grape and region. Bordeaux still only comes from Bordeaux, France. So, here you are, a new wine producer. You want to make your mark. What do you call your wine?”
“You just make up a name?” He was perhaps twenty years old, way too young. Sitting in the first row. Over the phone the night before, she’d bet Jo fifty cents that he’d chat her up afterward. Damn cute and he knew it.
“They’re called varietals. They have some of this grape, a bit of that. No one knows exactly what, except their vintner of course. She’ll know to the nearest thousand pounds what grapes are used. Nearest hundred if they’re really good.” Not that she could tell. Damn Russell for being right. She didn’t really know what happened behind the scenes. Didn’t know the life of any wine at the level a vintner did. Always a step back. A step away from the heart of the process. From the process that had consumed her father’s life.
“So, the vintner declares their wine by the grape, or doesn’t. I had a Sangiovese from a cliffside winery in Cinque Terre. The grape wasn’t labeled. Sangiovese is not much help to separate the winery from the herd, it makes up over ten percent of the total Italian grape crop, a quarter of a million acres. The label instead said, ‘pizza wine’. Simple, to-the-point marketing.
“Suddenly we have the ‘pizza wine’ grape. Or the ‘Fume Blanc.’ Sounds grander, means whatever the vintner wants it to mean, same thing. Marketing. The higher end wines are generally true to their grape, cabernet sauvignon for example. Note that I said higher end, not necessarily better. Wine is matched to meal, occasion, and palate. A $28,000 magnum of Romanee Conti ’85 probably won’t be nearly as good match for a pizza as that twelve dollar varietal. But you don’t often compare a burgundy grand cru with a bit of Sangiovese marketing.”
Was that what Russell was doing with his daily phone messages? A bit of cheap marketing. Or had she really misread the situation?
Jo, even patient Jo, was getting tired of her long distance second-guessing.
Russell’s first message had been desperate. Then he’d left three more trying to explain he hadn’t noticed what Teri was doing before giving it up as a bad cause. She’d thou
ght that was the last of him.
The next day, a new message. One deliberately lighter, much less assertive, but also less unsure. The history of the Mukilteo lighthouse. He’d done some digging. One hundred and fourteen weddings there since it was decommissioned. An admiral who couldn’t sleep at night because a fog horn sensor went off whenever the moonlight reflected off the white seawall. He had the wall painted black so he could get his sleep.
The next day, no call from him. Instead an invitation from his mom to drop down to New York for the weekend, a quick two-hour train ride.
The day after that, a poem that had nothing to do with wine, boat, or lighthouse, but rather flowers, hummingbirds, and wings beating with love. Way over the top, but so charming she was still weak in the knees. Or maybe in the head.
She didn’t want to call him back, didn’t want to have to tell him to stop. Admit it Cassidy, you don’t want him to stop.
She didn’t notice when, at the end of class, the young questioner did indeed try to engage her attention. She walked away and left him talking to empty air.
Even before she was clear of the building, she’d pulled out her cell phone to see what the next message was.
# # #
“One more chance.”
There was a silence on the phone to Cassidy’s opening salvo.
“Are you there?”
“Yes, just trying to catch my breath.” The sound of reprieve in Russell’s voice couldn’t have been greater if a firing squad had just been sent back to barracks.
“Your mom was great by the way. They took me to the Four Seasons and completely spoiled me.”
“She’s good at that.”
“So?” She’d waited until she was home to call. Waited until his messages repeated themselves in her head so much she couldn’t sleep. Messages about the success and closing of his business. Of his childhood dreams to go sailing. Of the progress of his cat on her never-ending quest for the perfect nap. All passed on in two-minute clips allowed by her voicemail. At first he’d stumbled, been cutoff, beeped out in mid-word. By the end of two weeks of silence on her part, he had the timing down. Each message ended with a hook that made her want to start the next. A winding tale as soft and comfortable as his cat’s.
Where Dreams Are Born (Angelo's Hearth) Page 22