It Happened One Night

by Lisa Dale

  After her shift had ended, Karin veered off the walkway to the motel where her father was staying, and she made a beeline straight for the front of the building. It was getting dark early now, the streetlights flickering on during what seemed like early afternoon. The trees were bright orange and red on the distant mountains, brilliant as flames against the cold slate sky.

  When she rounded the corner of the motel, Calvert was waiting for her in the doorway of room 41, just where he’d said he’d be. His breath rose in thick white clumps. He wore a tired brown jacket with white wool at the collar, old jeans, and big tan boots. His hands were folded across his chest to keep warm.

  “You hungry?” she asked.

  He nodded, eyeing her as if he expected her to follow up with the words Well, too bad.

  “Well, come on. Let’s go.”

  He followed her to the van.

  For the first leg of the ride to the restaurant, he didn’t try to make small talk and Karin was glad. Being in the same space as him again took some getting used to. About a week had gone by since she’d agreed to help him, and as the days had passed Karin had been doing a lot of hard thinking. She was starting to look at Calvert’s reappearance in a different way. She had before her the opportunity to talk to him, one adult to another, for the first time. Maybe she deserved an explanation for how he’d raised her. And maybe he deserved the chance to explain.

  The houses passed by—the lake peering between trees on their right-hand side—and mile by mile, the distance between buildings shrank until the country gave way to the energy of the city, with its busy sidewalks and intersections strung with traffic lights. As she pulled into the parking garage, he held out a handful of bills; she gestured for him to put them in the center console so she could keep her eyes on the winding concrete ramps. “What’s this?”

  “The money I owe you for the three days at the motel.”

  She peered into the dimness of the low-ceilinged garage, concentrating perhaps a bit more than she needed to on finding a spot.

  “And I wanted to thank you,” he said.

  “It wasn’t a big deal to loan you the money.”

  “Yes, thanks for the money. But thanks for calling the dogs off too.”

  Karin rubbed her palms hard against the leather of the steering wheel, more than a little embarrassed. She slid the minivan into a free space and cut the engine. “How did you know it was me?”

  “I would have done the same thing,” he said.

  She nodded, warring with the urge to apologize to him. It suddenly struck her how insane the whole thing seemed. She may have overreacted a bit.

  “Don’t say sorry,” he said. “I wouldn’t want me showing up in town either after all these years. You did the right thing.”

  “Let’s just go eat,” she said.

  A few blocks later they were seated in two wooden chairs, looking over their menus in silence. The restaurant, which sat near the corner of Cherry Street and South Winooski, had bright beige walls, a long diner-style bar, and big picture windows that offered views of the busy street. When the waitress came to the table, Karin ordered buckwheat pancakes with local maple syrup, and Calvert got a tortilla filled with chorizo sausage, scrambled eggs, and Monterey Jack. He folded his menu and set it on the table, but Karin picked it up and handed it directly to the waitress before she left.

  He crossed his hands in his lap. “So how long you been married?”

  “Three years,” Karin said.

  “He a nice guy?”

  “The best. He’ll be a good father. Once we have kids.”

  Calvert took a sip of his water. “And when will that be?”

  “Hard to say,” Karin said, her throat tightening around the only words she could manage.

  He didn’t follow up. “And how’s Lana doing with her… thing?”

  “I guess she’s fine. Healthy, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Is that boyfriend going to take responsibility?”

  Karin laughed. “You should know better than that.”

  Calvert grew silent.

  “What?” asked Karin. “What is it?”

  He picked up his napkin and tore the corner off. “You remember the day Lana graduated from high school?”

  “Sure. We gave your ticket to the neighbors.”

  “Well, I went.”

  “You did not.”

  “I sat up on top of the hill, in the woods where the kids liked to go smoke pot after the football games, and I watched the whole thing.”

  “Did you do that for mine?” Karin asked.

  “No. No, I didn’t.”

  The sounds of clinking silverware and music bled into the silence between them. Karin stared absentmindedly at the waitresses hurrying around the crowded room, hardly able to process what she’d heard.

  “I’m sorry,” Calvert said.

  Karin couldn’t look at him. “I wanted so much for you to like me…”

  “I did like you. It’s just… Lana was always easier to get along with because she didn’t seem to care as much about anything.”

  “She cared,” Karin said, angry. “She just never showed it.”

  “That may be. I ain’t trying to make an excuse for myself. It’s just—once Lana graduated I knew you girls would have no more reason to stick around. I knew you’d be gone the second you could go. So I sat up there on the hill above the football field and listened to all the terrible speechifying, and I thought to myself, I should get square with them. But you know as well as I that I’m nothing but a coward. And there was nothing I could have said or done to make it right back then.”

  “I’m not sure there’s anything you can do now,” Karin said. “Maybe your feelings have changed over the years, but mine and Lana’s haven’t. You could be made pope tomorrow and you’d still be the same old Calvert to us.”

  “I can’t apologize for how I raised you because you two girls just about raised yourselves. But I can tell you that if I knew back then what I know now, I would have done things differently.”

  Karin watched him closely, resisting the urge to hold her arms out to him. She heard a deep, tremulous vulnerability in his words. And though the part of her that was still angry screamed in her ear not to believe him—not to fall for it—she rejected that negative voice. Calvert needed to reconcile with the past as much as she did. She thought of how hard the last few months had been—how difficult it was to grapple daily with her own anger. It would be a balm to both of them to forgive, even if they could not forget.

  “I appreciate what you want to do,” Karin said slowly. “So if you want, I can forgive you.”

  Calvert looked down at his plate, so quiet Karin thought he must be hiding tears.

  “But I’m going to tell you this,” she went on. “Forgiving you doesn’t mean we can be one big happy family again. Do you know what I mean? There’s too much between us. Too much history. That stuff… it doesn’t just go away.”

  “I know that,” Calvert said. “I don’t expect to be invited to Christmas dinner. This was just something I had to do. I thought I might be able to help you girls, to make up for everything. And once I’m done here, I’ll go.”

  Karin nodded. She wished her life could be like others’ lives in books and movies, when prodigals could come back, reconcile, and everything would be happily-ever-after perfect in the end. But real happily-ever-afters were so much less flamboyant and more complicated than in movies. Sitting here talking to Calvert was closure. And she was glad for it; it satisfied her. But she wasn’t about to ride off into the sunset with him by her side.

  “We don’t really need help,” Karin said. “So I guess you have no reason to stay here anymore. I guess you can go back.”

  “But what about…” His voice trailed off. “Lana still won’t talk to me. Would you talk to her for me? Would you tell her… tell her…”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe you could ask her to cut her old man a break.”

&nbs
p; Karin took a deep breath, remembering how she’d made Lana confront Calvert with her instead of doing it on her own. “I don’t know if I can do that. That’s between you and her. And I think I’ve already asked too much of her when it comes to you.”

  Calvert worried the hem of his sleeve.

  “But I’ll think about it,” she said.

  The waitress came to the table, setting their plates down one at a time. “Pancakes for you, tortilla for you… Can I get you anything else?”

  Karin looked at her plate, heaped with mounds of food. Even without taking a bite, she already felt full. “Thanks,” she said. “I think we’re fine for now.”

  Gene was waiting for her in the kitchen when she got home from the Barn that evening. The room smelled like buttered toast and scrambled eggs. Breakfast for dinner had always been his specialty, and yet she wasn’t thrilled at the idea of eating two breakfasts today.

  “Hey,” he said, not turning around. “You’re home late.”

  “And you’re home early.”

  “I called your cell.”

  She put her purse down on the table and took off her coat. She’d turned off her cell phone at the table with Calvert. She must have forgotten to turn it back on. She took off her coat and hung it on a peg by the door. So much had happened to her today. So much she wanted to share with her husband. It was hard to know where to start.

  “Do you want an egg?” he asked.

  She sat down at the table, watching the folds across the back of his sweatshirt shifting as he moved the spatula around.

  “I ate,” she said. “I had dinner.”

  “With who?”

  “With Calvert.”

  For a moment he didn’t move. He only stood there, motionless, as if waiting for something else to happen. “Why?”

  “Because I needed to,” she said.

  Quickly he turned around, the spatula raised in the air. “But you’ve spent every day since the moment I met you telling me how much you hate him, how hard it was growing up in the boardinghouse. I don’t get this.”

  She studied the wrinkle between his eyes, the furrow in his forehead. “Why do you sound annoyed?”

  He turned away from her again, scraping the bottom of the frying pan. “I just think it’s weird that you want to see him all of a sudden.”

  “It’s not, though,” she said. “I’m telling you, I feel… better.”

  “Well, good for you,” he said.

  “Gene… what… where is this coming from?”

  “The man is a scumbag. Karin, when I met you, you wouldn’t sleep if a door wasn’t locked. You wouldn’t take a shower unless someone else was home with you. And now you’re telling me that you’re having father-daughter night?”

  “I’m learning to not be so angry,” she said, unsettled by the growing sense of how close they were to having another fight. This wasn’t what she’d expected; she’d thought he would understand.

  “You know what I think?” he asked.

  She didn’t answer.

  “I think you’re desperate. I think you’re reaching out to Calvert because it’s driving you crazy that we can’t have a baby. As if being his family again will make up for the family we can’t have. Karin, I don’t want that jerk in our lives. Who knows what trick he’s leading you into. Has he asked you for money?”

  “No,” she said. “Well, sort of… but he paid me back. What happened is, I—”

  “Karin—This is crazy. Can’t you see that? This is Calvert we’re talking about.”

  She stood up, furious. For the first time in weeks she’d felt the first glimmers of peace, like she could see the world a little clearer and it wasn’t all bad. “I don’t understand why you can’t support me in this.”

  He sighed. “I’m sorry. I just feel like I have no idea who you are these days. You keep springing things on me. You’re completely unpredictable. And I don’t know what to do with that.”

  She was quiet. She could see where he was coming from. She had been putting him through a lot. “I think I’ve surprised myself too.”

  He said nothing for a long time. At last he turned back toward the eggs, and she could see that the set of his shoulders had loosened. “Well, I’m glad you went to see him if that’s what you needed to do.”

  “Thank you,” she said, and she tentatively slipped back into the kitchen chair. She didn’t know why, but she had the odd sense that there was something he wasn’t telling her, something he knew but couldn’t say. She supposed she was being hypervigilant again. Paranoid. She tried to let the feeling go. She had no use for that kind of thinking anymore. And she supposed there was no sense in going into the details of her situation with Calvert either, especially since Gene obviously didn’t want to hear. She wanted to focus on the positive from now on.

  “Is it too late to place an order for a scrambled egg?” she asked.

  “I thought you said you weren’t hungry.”

  “I think maybe I am,” she said.

  October 9

  Lana sat in the dark of the passenger seat of Eli’s car, pinching extra fabric on the fingertips of her gloves with studious concentration. In the two weeks that had passed since she’d kissed him, she’d been stymied about what she would say to him when he returned from his latest trip. When she was a little girl in Calvert’s house, Karin had taught her never to open the door to any room she was alone in, not even an inch. Because once the lock was slid back and the door cracked open, security was breached. Some part of her felt like that now with Eli, that curiosity had compelled her to open the door just enough to peek through, and now he would never allow her to shut it completely again.

  “Where exactly are we going?” she asked.

  He looked over at her in the darkness and his glasses caught the gold glint of a streetlight passing overhead. “Almost there.”

  She laughed—a nervous laugh for no reason, then went back to playing with her gloves. Wherever they were going, she knew what kind of conversation they were going to have when they got there. She wouldn’t be able to deny that she was physically attracted to him, but she could stress that they were friends or they were nothing. As lovers, they had no future together. Their lives were headed in two different directions. But as friends, they might get by.

  Then, if that didn’t work, she would admit that she depended on him to enforce the boundaries of their friendship as much as she depended on herself. She would point to his sense of duty and honor and beg him not to ask more of her than she could give.

  She looked out the passenger-side window. The night was sharply cold and the sky was clear and teeming with stars. He turned onto a small deserted driveway past the athletic fields. She began to suspect the worst.

  “This is probably illegal,” she said.

  “Probably.” He pulled into a clearing that wasn’t quite a parking lot, then cut the engine. “Come on.”

  She didn’t move.

  “You want to talk? Let’s talk. But I want to be outside walking when we do.”

  He got out of the car, not giving her much choice but to follow. She called on her deepest wells of courage and unbuckled her seat belt. Outside the car’s warm cabin, the air was freezing, burning her cheeks. She had to jog to catch up with him; he covered the ground in long strides.

  Around them, the trees had turned gold and red. Lana couldn’t see them, but she could smell them—the bright sweetness of leaves fermenting on the branch. The grass under her sneakers crushed, brittle as breaking glass.

  “Eli, this is stupid. What is this going to prove?”

  He stopped, then took a few steps back and reached for her hand. This close, he smelled like chestnuts and tree bark. There was a knot in his brow, so when he spoke she expected him to sound angry. Instead his voice was soft.

  “Patience,” he said. His hand wrapped firmly around hers with a kind of entitlement she’d never expected, and he held it as they walked on. She didn’t look at him when they stopped walking at last. She
knew the width of his shoulders compared to hers, the slight lift of her chin needed to meet his eyes. She knew the space between their feet was mere inches, and that he was looking at her, reading her better than anyone else ever had.

  “You know where we are,” he said.

  “Yes, I know.”

  She looked around—looked anywhere but at his face. The scenery had changed ever so slightly in the last decade. There was a building on the hill to the north that hadn’t been there ten years ago. There was a path now where the wheels of many golf carts had worn the grass down to thin brown treads. The season was different as well; she and Eli had been out here in the early summer for finals week. A time for testing. Now the leaves were frozen on the branches, dulled by darkness but made to glow otherworldly by frost and moonlight.

  “Eli…” She met his eyes carefully, her heart beating hard. She could see his pupils, fathomless as black holes. The feel of him, even all those decades ago, was still with her—the tough rise of his thigh behind his knee, the weight of his hips bearing down. “Come on,” she said, keeping her voice light, almost teasing. “Take me back.”

  “Not yet. I’ve put off having this conversation with you for way too long.”

  “If we could just go somewhere else…”

  “I want you to tell me a story. From the beginning. I want you to tell me the story of what happened. Right on this spot.”

  She thought, This can’t be happening. She looked down at the grass beneath her feet as if it might have answers. Her heart beat hotly in her throat. How could she say the words aloud, words that she couldn’t so much as whisper to herself? “This is silly. Come on, Eli. You’re such a joker sometimes. Let’s go get—”

  “Lana.” His voice had a cold, solid edge. “Tell me.”

  “Please. Don’t do this.”

  “Fine. If you can’t tell me, then I’ll tell you.” He put a hand on her rib cage, where her coat had fallen away from her body. “This is where we saw the fireball. Lana… this is where we made love.”

  She felt his words as if they were more than sound, almost as if he’d come into her body once again, a second time. And yet they were standing a foot apart, each in coats and gloves, and it had been years since that moment had passed.