The Secrets We Carried

by Mary McNear

  “I work. A lot. I own my own business. And what else? I’m single. Those are the basics.”

  “Have you ever been married?” she asked, thinking of Gabriel’s revelation.

  He looked surprised. “Nope.”

  “Ever wanted to get married?” Quinn asked, though she wondered at her tendency to ask people personal questions.

  “Not really,” he said. “I don’t think I’d trust myself to take on that level of responsibility. You know, till death do us part. That, and I realized, at some point, that it’s better for me to keep things simple.”

  “Simple?” Quinn asked.

  Tanner nodded. “It’s why I rent, instead of buying. And why I have the minimum number of possessions. It lets me preserve the illusion, I guess, that I could move out at a moment’s notice. Just . . . go anywhere.”

  “Or come here,” Quinn pointed out.

  He smiled.

  “You said you owned a business? What kind?”

  He took out his wallet, extracted a business card from it, and handed it to her.

  LIGHTMAN SAND AND GRAVEL CO.

  TANNER LIGHTMAN, PRESIDENT

  Underneath this was the company’s address and phone number in Minneapolis. She nodded and started to give the card back to him, but he shook his head. “No, hold on to it,” he said.

  She smiled and slipped it into her back pocket. “I don’t know a lot about the sand and gravel business,” she confessed.

  “No. I didn’t think you did,” he said, amused. He tipped his beer bottle back and took a drink.

  “How does it work, though?” Quinn asked, warming to the topic. “I mean, let’s say I wanted to buy some gravel. How do you sell it? By weight?”

  He nodded. “It starts at one-eighth of a ton and goes up from there.”

  “One-eighth of a ton? Okay, let’s say I wanted that much gravel. I call you up, from Chicago, and I say, ‘Tanner, I want one-eighth of a ton of gravel.’ Now what? You deliver it, in what, a dump truck?”

  “To Chicago?” He shook his head. “No, I’d probably tell you to go with a local guy.”

  She laughed. Is it successful? she almost asked. Your business? But she didn’t need to ask him. She knew, intuitively, that it was. People wore success, the same way they wore clothes, and if you were observant, you could almost always see it on them. Tanner was successful. Which made it all the more surprising, to her, that he wasn’t married. Yet. That he didn’t have a family. Or a house in the suburbs. Didn’t have, in short, all the trappings of the comfortable, middle-class existence his success entitled him to. And why didn’t he trust himself with the level of responsibility those things would have required? She might have asked him—there wasn’t a lot she wouldn’t ask people—but somehow this seemed too personal.

  “Why don’t we talk about your work?” he said. “I think it’s more interesting than mine.” He finished his beer and signaled for another one. “I googled you. I ended up reading your article about the creative writing workshop for veterans. I liked it. A lot.”

  “Thank you. I loved writing that. I’m going to do a follow-up on it, I think. One of the guys I profiled, Angel, is going to have a play produced.”

  “Really?”

  “Or workshopped, anyway. Still, it’s a big deal.”

  “To Angel,” Tanner toasted.

  “To Angel,” she agreed, clinking glass to bottle. She was tipsy now, but it was a good kind of tipsy. A fun kind of tipsy. Especially with the rain lashing the windows outside and Jon Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” playing on the jukebox.

  “I think I’ve got some more quarters,” Tanner said, when the song ended.

  An hour later, after he’d challenged her to a couple of games of tabletop shuffleboard—which she suspected he let her win—they were back sitting at the bar, though Tanner still left occasionally to feed quarters into the jukebox. “Okay, listen,” he said, “just listen to the lyrics of this song. They are so perfect.” He spoke with the conviction born of the several bottles of beer he’d already drunk that night.

  “Is this ‘Summer of ’69’ again?” Quinn asked, listening to the opening chords of the Bryan Adams song.

  “Yeah, but listen. Just listen.”

  She laughed. “Tanner, I’ve listened to it. This is, like, the fifth time you’ve played it.”

  But he couldn’t be reached. He sang along.

  I got my first real six-string

  Bought it at the five-and-dime

  Played it ’til my fingers bled

  Was the summer of sixty-nine

  Quinn finished her latest glass of wine. She’d lost track by now of how many she’d had; there was a scattering of empty bottles on the bar had she cared to investigate, but she didn’t care to. She bent her head toward Tanner’s now and sang the chorus of the song with him.

  Oh, when I look back now

  That summer seemed to last forever

  And if I had the choice

  Yeah, I’d always want to be there

  Those were the best days of my life

  “Great song,” Tanner said, when it was over. He signaled to Gunner, who was standing down at the other end of the bar playing a game on his cell phone. “You know how much I loved that song when I was thirteen?”

  “How much?” she asked.

  “I asked for a six-string guitar for Christmas.”

  “Did you play it ‘’til your fingers bled’?”

  He shook his head. “No. I only ever learned one song on it.”

  Quinn raised her eyebrows. “‘Summer of ’69’?”

  “Yep.”

  “Tanner,” Quinn said. But this struck her, suddenly, as hilariously funny, and Tanner started laughing too. By the time Gunner came over with the beer, they were both doubled over, and Quinn was trying not to fall off her bar stool.

  “Here,” Gunner said, setting the bottle down on the counter. He looked like he wished they’d call it a night.

  “Thank you,” Tanner said, recovering himself. He checked Quinn’s wineglass and saw that it was empty. “Oh, and another wine, Gunner. Your finest bottle,” he called, to his retreating back. Quinn cracked up again.

  “WHOA, QUINN. CAREFUL,” Tanner said, sometime later. He came over and took the two remaining darts out of her hand. “That last one went a little wide. Maybe the shuffleboard would be safer.”

  “I rock at shuffleboard.”

  “You said you rocked at darts, too,” Tanner teased, before going to retrieve the missing third dart, which Quinn saw now had gone far wide of the board. Good thing it hadn’t hit someone. Like the bartender. She looked around. He was nowhere to be seen.

  “What happened to Shooter?” she asked Tanner, after he’d put the darts away.

  “Shooter? You mean, Gunner?”

  “Yeah. Where’d he go?”

  “Home, Quinn,” he said, facing her and putting his hands on her shoulders. His touch was like him, she thought. Light. Easy. “I released him from his responsibility.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “Why not? I paid our tab, and I gave him a big tip. I told him we’d lock up on our way out.”

  “Do I owe you anything?” Quinn asked, looking around for her raincoat. Her wallet was in the pocket.

  “Not a thing,” he said, his hands still on her shoulders. She liked them there.

  “This was fun,” she said.

  “It was.”

  Why were they talking in the past tense? Quinn wondered. The night wasn’t over yet.

  Chapter 23

  Early the next morning, as a thin light filled the cabin, Quinn untangled herself from Tanner’s sheets and, being careful not to wake him, eased out of his bed. She looked around for her clothes. They were not folded on the nearest chair. It hadn’t been that kind of a night. She found them, instead, in a little heap on the floor on the other side of the bed. She picked them up and went into the bathroom to dress. When she was done, she allowed herself one quick look in the medici
ne cabinet mirror. Her hair was a little wild, her mascara a little smudged, but otherwise she looked almost human. If only she felt almost human. As it was, she had the makings of a world-class hangover: ferocious thirst, pounding headache, sped-up heartbeat. She looked around for a cup, and when she couldn’t find one, she turned on the cold-water tap, bent over the sink, and drank from the faucet. Very classy, Quinn. She splashed some water on her face, and then patted it dry with the corner of a hand towel, avoiding her eyes so as not to leave any mascara on it.

  When she tiptoed out of the bathroom, Tanner was still asleep, lying on his stomach, the covers around his waist, one arm dangling over the side of the bed. Even from across the room, she imagined she could feel the warmth emanating off his body. He stirred and mumbled something in his sleep, and there was a part of her that wanted to get back into bed with him. But a bigger part of her wanted to leave, preferably before he woke up. She found her coat in the closet, surprised that one of them, probably Tanner, had had the presence of mind to hang it there, and pulled her boots on beside the front door. And then she opened the door just wide enough to angle herself through it and clicked it shut behind her.

  She stood on the steps of his cabin and looked out at the lake, or what should have been the lake, but was now a thick, cottony layer of fog. Everything was silent but for the rain, which fell softly, dripping off the eaves and pocking those few clumps of snow left beneath the pine trees. Even that snow, she knew, would be gone by the end of the day, taking with it one of the last signs of winter. She took the concrete footpath back to her cabin, relieved that there was no one, at this hour, to see her do this. Already she was feeling defensive about last night, though, in truth, the one person, other than Gunner, who might guess where she had spent it, and whom she had spent it with, was Annika.

  But as she let herself into her cabin and tossed her coat on the bed, she reminded herself that she didn’t owe Annika an explanation for last night. She didn’t owe anyone an explanation for it. After all, no one was going to get hurt, were they? Not Tanner, and not her. And, as for Jake . . . Jake was beyond anyone’s ability to hurt—and had been now for over a decade. She yanked off her boots and went to curl up in the wingback armchair, its leather cool against her pounding temples. She’d had fun, and she’d needed some fun. Let it go, she told herself. Chalk it up to the stress of being back here, or the temporary loneliness of your existence, or to the need to blow off steam, or to the rain, or to the airplane bottles, or . . .

  No, she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t shake the feeling that what had felt right to her several hours ago through the fog of alcohol felt wrong to her now. And she knew why. She hadn’t let herself see this last night, but this morning, in the light of day, she saw it plainly enough. Her attraction to Tanner was grounded in his resemblance to Jake. And not only in his physical resemblance to Jake, in his gold eyes and cowlicky hair, but in his mannerisms, too, his tics, and even his figures of speech. Some of these similarities were hard to quantify; there was a “Jakeness” to Tanner that she couldn’t translate into words. (Or maybe, she considered, there had been a “Tannerness” to Jake. He wouldn’t be the first younger brother who had imitated his older brother, whether consciously or unconsciously.) But some of these similarities were obvious. The way Tanner, like Jake, closed his eyes when he was listening to a piece of music he loved. The way he tipped his head back when he laughed. Even the way he used the word ridiculous to mean that something—a restaurant, a movie, even a person—was great. Jake had done these things too. Oh, God, she thought.

  It was at times like this—times when Quinn was forced to question her own judgment—that she asked herself if she might have been different if she’d been raised by a father and a mother. If she’d had more of a “feminine” influence over her life, would she have made different decisions? Would she have had different character traits, or life goals, or love interests? Would she have gone home alone last night? She didn’t know. But that didn’t stop her from speculating about it.

  “You’re like a guy,” a boyfriend she’d had in college had once said to her. “What do you mean?” Quinn had asked, surprised. (By then, she’d long since put her tomboyish ways behind her.) “Well, you just go after what you want,” he said. “You don’t apologize, or explain, or worry about doing what you want to do. You just . . . do it.” At the time, Quinn hadn’t known whether to be flattered or offended. She knew what he’d said wasn’t entirely true. Maybe this was what she projected to the rest of the world. That didn’t mean that she didn’t wrestle with her decisions and worry about the consequences of her actions in her head. In the simplest sense, though, she understood what this boyfriend had meant. After all, in many ways, her father had raised her like a boy. When she was a child, he didn’t buy her dolls; he bought her Lincoln Logs, an Erector set, and a miniature workbench. When she fell and got hurt, he didn’t coddle her but picked her up, dusted her off, and said, “Try again, Quinny.” He played catch with her in their yard after school and spent hours explaining the rules of football to her during televised weekend games. He taught her how to hunt (something she’d never taken to), how to fish (she liked this better, more for the tranquility than the sport), and how to drive his truck on backcountry roads. He brought her to the timber company he worked at, which specialized in reclaimed wood, and took her, step by step, through the business, as though she, too, might be interested in working there one day. She wasn’t.

  But here was the thing about her dad: he accepted that. Some of his interests became hers; others did not. Still, he told her she could do whatever she wanted to do, have anything she wanted to have, provided she was willing to work hard for it. He encouraged her in her writing. But as for the actual writing itself? For that she would have to credit the mother she’d never known.

  “Your mom was a writer,” her friend Lilly Hess had said to her at school one day, when they were seven years old. They were sitting at a table in the cafeteria, trying to stick their straws into slippery pouches of chocolate milk. “No, she wasn’t,” Quinn said. “Yes, she was,” Lilly said. “She was going to write a novel. My mom told me.”

  As soon as her dad picked her up from school that afternoon, Quinn asked him, “Was my mom a writer?” “Well, yes. She was,” he’d said, taken aback. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Quinn asked, affronted that Lilly Hess should have known this before her. “It’s complicated,” he said. But Quinn wouldn’t bend. “Why don’t you ever talk about her?” she asked. When he couldn’t answer this, Quinn settled into a stony silence. “Quinny,” he said, when he’d pulled over. “The year your mom died . . .” He stopped, almost overcome with emotion. He took a deep breath and went on. He explained to her that the year her mom had died he’d missed her so much that he wasn’t paying enough attention to the other important thing in his life, which was Quinn. A friend of his had pointed this out to him, and that day he’d decided he needed to try to put the past behind him, and to move forward, and to stop looking back. To do that, he’d needed to stop thinking about Quinn’s mother, Celia, all the time. And that meant, of course, that he needed to stop talking about her all the time too. “Perhaps,” he’d said to Quinn then, “perhaps I overdid it.”

  Quinn understood, sort of. She was impatient, though. Once her friend Lilly had introduced the subject, Quinn wanted to know more about her mother. She wanted to know everything about her mother. And not just her name, and where she was born. She knew that already. She’d met her grandmother Shaw—a woman she hadn’t particularly liked—a couple of times when she was small. She wanted to hear about the good stuff.

  Was she really a writer? she asked her dad. Yes, she was. When Gene had first met her, she was working for a free Chicago weekly whose offices were over a pet shop. Did she ever write a novel? Well, no. She didn’t. She wanted to, but she didn’t have time to. How did they meet? At a Chicago Cubs game. She and a friend were sitting in front of Gene, and it was obvious from their conversation that neither o
f them knew the first thing about baseball. Gene took pity on them and spent the rest of the evening explaining the finer points of the game to them. Her friend liked Gene, too, but at the end of the night, it was Celia whose phone number he asked for. That was the start, he explained. What was their wedding like? Quinn asked, jumping ahead. It was small. Celia’s mom, Grandmother Shaw, wasn’t happy about the two of them getting married. Grandmother Shaw had “come from money,” her dad said. It was a phrase that fascinated Quinn. And her grandmother had thought that Gene was too “rough around the edges.” This, too, was mysterious. Quinn had never known her dad to be rough before, not with anyone else and certainly not with her.

  The questions continued, but the answers never satisfied Quinn. Her dad wasn’t a storyteller. Which meant that the things he told her about her mother often felt piecemeal or random. She hadn’t liked pears, for instance, he’d mentioned once. Or, Fig Newtons had been her favorite cookie. She wasn’t afraid of bugs in general, he’d explained, but for some reason she was afraid of beetles. She’d planted a garden when they’d moved up to Butternut, he’d told Quinn, but hadn’t known when to pick the vegetables. The zucchinis had grown to be the size of baseball bats before the raccoons had gotten to them. She had the best sense of humor, he said, and always knew how to make him laugh. But when Quinn had asked him to describe her sense of humor, he’d shrugged and said, “Well, you know, she was just funny. I can’t explain it.”

  Later, when Quinn was older, she’d spend hours going through the box of photographs her dad had saved of her mom. She was pretty, Quinn thought. She looked happy. In many of the pictures, she was gazing, fondly, at Gene, and later, at the baby snuggled in her arms, or the toddler sitting on her lap. Photographs, though, don’t unlock the secrets to someone’s personality; for these Quinn turned to the yellowing copies of the free weekly paper she’d worked at that Gene had saved. Again, she was disappointed. It wasn’t that her mother didn’t write well, she did. It was that the subject matter of her articles—a new neighborhood recycling center, a long-running bingo game at a local church—didn’t tell Quinn anything about her innermost thoughts. In the end, Quinn concluded, her mother was a fine writer; she was more than fine. (She wrote with what Quinn’s high school English teacher, Mrs. McKinley, had called “verve.”) But what did Quinn do with this? She became a writer herself.