Promise of Safekeeping : A Novel (9781101553954)

by Dale, Lisa

  “Of course I am,” she said, more curtly than she’d meant to. He scooted closer to her across the long bench seat and put his arm on the backrest. He wasn’t crowding her, but he was closer. He smelled like a long afternoon in the sun. And to her complete shock, she—who liked men who regularly used hair product and cologne—wanted to press her face against him and breathe in.

  “Arlen’s a good man,” Will said. “I’ve known him since we were just boys.”

  “Did you grow up around here?” she asked, to distract herself.

  “No.” He laughed. “You ever been out to cow country?”

  She smiled slightly.

  “That’s a big city compared to where I lived.”

  “So Albany must be—”

  “The Kingdom of Oz,” he said.

  She was surprised when he took her hand—not to hold it, but to press the tips of his middle and ring fingers to the inside of her wrist. Such a light touch—and startlingly intimate. She wasn’t surprised that Will was easy about touching her; after watching him all day, she could tell he was comfortable in his own skin. She briefly considered drawing her arm away, setting boundaries, but she found she didn’t want to. The ribbon of attraction that had formed within her now curled on itself like a twist of smoke hanging in the air. Curiosity compelled her to sit still, apart from him except for the press of his fingertips on her wrist.

  “Your heartbeat,” he said. “What did the doctors say was wrong?”

  She stared with intense focus at his hands, the circles of dirt under his nails, the whitish-gray scars set here and there on tanned skin. She rarely liked to acknowledge weakness, but there was something about Will that made her feel safe. “I’ve had episodes of irregular heartbeat. Palpitations. It’s … it’s a little scary when it happens. Like your heart is an alarm clock going off—like time’s running out.”

  “They don’t have drugs to help?”

  “They have lots of drugs,” she said, thinking of Jonah and the endless medications he was on, the medications for his medications; she did not want to start down that road. The pressure of Will’s fingers on her skin shifted, and heat rose within her. When she spoke, she made sure her voice was even. “This is just a … a stress thing. I can get it under control on my own.”

  “What if you can’t?”

  “I can,” she said.

  Will brushed the slightly raised cord of a tendon with his thumb. “It’s getting faster.”

  When she looked up at his face, there was no way to describe what she felt except the word collision. The impact of one thing and another. In the streetlight, Will’s eyes were an indefinable shade of green gray that she wanted so much to name but that eluded her even as she looked directly at him. Her face flushed. She knew with certainty that he was attracted to her. She drew her hand away.

  “Let’s go in,” she said.

  From the back of the pickup Will retrieved a box of their picks, and then she followed him into the antiques shop. She had a good view of his body as he walked. He was fit and trim, dressed in work clothes but not quite as rumpled as he’d been on Belle Isle. At one point during the afternoon, he’d lifted the bottom hem of his shirt to blot his face with the fabric, and she’d seen the strong, coarse muscles of his stomach and chest, the slight shading of dark hair. She’d had to look away.

  Of course, she knew enough about herself to recognize what this was. Rebounding. Things had fallen apart with Edward only a month ago, and she’d done her best not to spend that month wallowing. Now here was Will—attractive and enthralling in the way that an overgrown garden could be enthralling: a tangle of thorny roses, a weedy flower bed, stems putting down roots on rock. Everything Will was, was the opposite of Edward. Lauren needed to watch herself and take care.

  “Ladies first,” Will said, pushing open the shop door with one hand. Inside, he went to the counter and set down the box of things that he’d come away with today—a glass vase, a jump rope, a cast-iron horse. The old phone was still in the truck.

  “Arlen?” Will called.

  Lauren held her breath, coaching herself. This was what she’d come to do. To see Arlen. To throw herself at the mercy of his forgiveness. To confess to and face fully what she had done—and, maybe, be absolved.

  There was no answer.

  “Did you tell him I’d be here?” she asked.

  “He knew you were coming with me today.”

  Lauren frowned. She caught Will’s eye—the slight apology there—and she knew he was thinking the same thing she was.

  “I’ll just check upstairs,” Will said.

  Lauren held her breath as Will ducked into a room that must have been an office; then she heard the sound of his feet climbing stairs. She looked around at Will’s collected treasures. Some things stuck out from the heap: an original box of Crayola crayons. A folksy painting of a cow. A birdcage. A bell. Above her head, she heard Will’s boots thump the floor.

  When he came back, he didn’t need to speak for her to know that Arlen wasn’t here. What worried her was Will’s reaction. He was trying to appear calm but the set of his shoulders had shifted incrementally. He leaned forward, just a little, when he walked. He didn’t so much as glance at her. He walked to the counter, reached underneath, and pulled out a gray tin box with a flimsy lock on the front. Will popped the box open. It was empty.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Will said. “He’s gone.”

  Lesson Five: If you’re reading a person visually, you should be listening too. Tone, rhythm, diction, volume, even the micro-pauses we unconsciously take to breathe—all of these characteristics give insight into a speaker’s true feelings or character. Someone who speaks more loudly than a situation calls for may be insecure about being heard. Someone who speaks too softly might be shy, or she might be demanding your attention by asking you to focus, to lean in, to listen hard. The words we actually speak are only one tiny part of the way we communicate; words, after all, are first and foremost sounds.

  CHAPTER 5

  Arlen hadn’t wanted to meet the woman who would one day be his wife—not at first—though he’d heard all about her. A sweet girl, his mother had told him as she stirred big pots of peanut soup on the stove in her house. And you need to get yourself a girl, Arlen. I won’t always be around to keep you in line.

  Arlen found that the best way to get his mother off the subject of this Eula person was to not respond, to let his mother just burn herself out. With each new description, Eula became more beautiful, more intelligent, more generous, more everything. She was a good cook, and Arlen’s mother wanted a girl who would cook for him since he’d never so much as lifted a finger to butter bread. Eula had ambition too—she was a senior in high school and she made top marks, especially in her computer classes. Plus, she towed the line when it came to religion; she was the daughter of a deacon at his mother’s church. Arlen, who had to listen to his mother’s monologues about the endless talents of Eula Oates while he was scarfing down dinner, sometimes asked polite questions, sometimes changed the subject, and sometimes told his mother, flat out, No.

  Eventually, when his mother grew tired of waiting for Arlen to show interest, she arranged for Eula to come over to the house to help her with canning the peaches that grew in the far corner of the property. Eula, who wasn’t exactly dutiful but who didn’t mind helping either, had walked into the house while Arlen was drinking straight from the milk carton with the refrigerator door open and his oldest pair of work jeans on. When he turned to her, he felt as if he’d been hit in the chest with a basketball, the breath knocked out of his lungs. He asked her out that day, sure that she’d come to the house in secret pursuit of his affection, because she and his mother were obviously in on the scheme together. But Arlen’s mother hadn’t known Eula as well as she’d thought: Eula hadn’t fallen on her knees in gratitude that Arlen had asked her out—not by a long shot. She’d finished stocking the jars of fresh preserves in the pantry,
and then she’d said, Maybe. But I don’t know.

  The summer storms came and went, and for two months, Arlen did his best to win Eula’s attention. He started going to church again; he ironed his own suit because his mother wasn’t getting the pleats exactly right. He dropped by the drive-in movie theater where Eula collected ticket stubs; he saw the same three movies half a dozen times. When he could stand it no longer, he found out from Will that Eula was quite possibly seeing another guy.

  First he was angry. Then beaten. He avoided the drive-in. He began to mope. His mother dropped his plate of eggs and bacon down on the table with an accusing thud. “Didn’t I raise you to be better than this?” she asked him, jabbing her pointer finger. “You want something, you gotta fight for it. You can’t give up.”

  Another week passed before he dragged himself back to the drive-in, where he was probably the only person in the field under the giant screen who watched the film alone. He was adjusting his radio when he heard a knock on his window, and when he turned his head, a man he didn’t know was there scowling at him, bending down.

  “You Arlen?”

  Arlen rolled down the window. “Who’s asking?”

  Eula was running up from behind the man a moment later, breathing hard, her eyes wide with panic. She wore an orange shirt and little shorts that showed off her curves. She took the guy by the arm. “Don’t. Leon, don’t. Please?”

  Leon shook her off him, so violently and condescendingly that it made Arlen fume. “No, no, no,” Leon said. He tugged the door of Arlen’s car open. All around them, people had started rolling down their windows, paying attention to the drama that was unfolding under the big screen. “You said this is the guy who’s been coming around bothering you?”

  “I didn’t say he was bothering me,” Eula said.

  “Well, he’s bothering me,” Leon said. He wasn’t a big man—nor did he seem to be any older than Arlen—but his eyes had an out-of-control luster that Arlen would later come to recognize as the precursor to violence. Designs of lightning bolts had been razored into the man’s hair above his ears. His hands were oversized for his smallish frame, but he held himself like an athlete. He leaned on Arlen’s car, overly cool. “Why don’t you get on out here and talk to me?”

  Arlen didn’t hesitate. He heard Eula making excuses, saying, This is ridiculous, and, Leon, you leave him alone. But the words barely registered. The movie went on. There was some amount of posturing and posing. Arlen could still remember the unflinching hardness of Leon’s eyes. People shouted for them to shut up or fight already. The eyewitness accounts were conflicting: Some said Arlen threw the first punch. Others said not. However it began, the outcome was clear: Leon was a broken, sniveling, and bloody mess on the ground.

  By the time the police came, Arlen was sweating and so pumped full of adrenaline that he couldn’t feel his knuckles beginning to swell. But he had regained enough of his composure to know he should be embarrassed. With Eula shaking her head and looking on, a cop put handcuffs on Arlen’s wrists and pushed him against his own car. He’d broken Leon’s nose, and an ambulance was on the way to take him to the hospital. Arlen was escorted to the police station, and though the cops had to do their job, Arlen had found them to be a mostly polite bunch with a screwed-up sense of humor. They said Arlen should apply to join the force. Leon had been giving them hell for a long time.

  The next day, Eula came to the house again with a Tupperware container full of homemade tomato soup and a batch of cookies. She was sweet as sweet could be, making small talk with his mother, explaining that Arlen hadn’t started it, painting a picture of Arlen as the great defender of women, children, and small animals everywhere. Arlen wasn’t sure his mother bought it, and he didn’t care. He’d fought for what he wanted. That evening, when they sat watching the sky go dark and Eula kissed him, Arlen would have fought a thousand more battles for her to have her kiss again.

  It was only later, when he was sitting in the interrogation room at some police station in a city he didn’t know very well, that the true price of winning Eula’s affection had become clear. The detective told him: Tell us about the guy you beat up down in Virginia two years ago. The cops stood looking at a folder that Arlen wasn’t allowed to see, smirking at one another and saying, You put this guy in the hospital, and, Really did a number on him. Arlen hadn’t known how to defend himself. He was the stranger who had shown up in town just when the senator’s wife had turned up dead. And someone in the building where Arlen’s cousin lived swore she “recognized” Arlen from the police sketch that had been running on a perpetual loop on the local news. The cops called Arlen’s tiff with Leon a prior, which Arlen knew was not a good thing because to say he had a prior meant that they thought of that fight as the crime prior to the current crime. Slowly, the notion of being innocent until proven guilty was revealed to be untrue in countless little ways.

  Once he was firmly entrenched in prison life, Arlen thought back to the fight, to the smell of summer earth, grass, popcorn, and car exhaust. To the way Eula had looked at him when they sat together on his mother’s porch, her girl’s eyes wide with apology and pleasure too. He got to spend two years with Eula, got to make love to her for the first time and hold her afterward, got to marry her, got to move their few belongings into an empty and waiting house. And he knew if he had to choose between not having Eula or having the fight all over again, he would roll up his sleeves a second time, knowing full well where it all would lead, but thinking of nothing besides how badly he’d wanted her to love him.

  The cops picked up Arlen walking through Jackson Ward with an open bottle of Wild Turkey in his hand. He hadn’t even bothered to wrap it in a brown paper bag. When they asked Arlen where he lived, he’d said, Nowhere. But he gave them Will’s name.

  Now Will stood begging the police officer, a guy who was friends with one of his brothers but whose name he could no longer remember, for a little mercy. They were standing on the sidewalk. The darkness was yellowed with porch lights and streetlamps. Around them the people of the neighborhood were staring out from their stoops and windows. Will reasoned: Yes, Arlen had been drinking. But he hadn’t been bothering anyone. He hadn’t been driving. It was no big deal.

  The officer seemed unconvinced.

  “You do know who this guy is, right?” Will pointed with his thumb toward the cop car, where Arlen sat hanging his head.

  “Should I?”

  “You hooked yourself Arlen Fieldstone—the guy they just let outta prison? Nine years he was in there, without having done a thing wrong.”

  “That’s the guy?”

  Will nodded. “Yeah. Poor bastard.”

  The cop crossed his arms. “Man. Talk about the short end of the stick.”

  “There’s gonna be a lot of questions if you bring him in. Lots of reporters, I mean. Asking questions and such.”

  “I hate reporters,” the man said.

  “Think you might cut him a break?”

  “I shouldn’t.” He glanced about as if he expected someone to be watching him. “You taking responsibility for him?”

  “Yeah,” Will said. “I am.”

  The officer clasped Will on the shoulder. “You’re a good man.”

  Will nodded solemnly. “Arlen is too. When he’s sober.”

  “Aren’t we all,” the man said. “Get him home. And tell your brother I was asking about him.”

  “Sure thing,” Will said, and he hurried before the officer changed his mind. He collected Arlen from the backseat of the squad car, steadying him with a firm hand, and then he walked at Arlen’s side slowly, so slowly, as if they were taking a leisurely evening stroll. Arlen smelled of sweat and whisky, and the way he shuffled along in his wrinkled clothes and wouldn’t meet anyone’s eye put Will in mind of a homeless man.

  Will helped Arlen into the passenger seat, then shut the door. The smell of sweat and alcohol was strong. Will had to hold his breath until he could roll down the window. The hot night air offered no
relief.

  “So on a scale of one to ten, how plastered are you?” Will asked.

  “Eighty proof.” Arlen laughed a little. “You mind stopping at the drugstore on the way back? Cop took my whisky. I need a replacement.”

  Will grated his teeth together and started the car. “And what money are you gonna buy it with?”

  “Oh, right,” Arlen said brightly. “Course I’ll pay you back.”

  Will sighed and drove through the tangle of University of Richmond buildings, dark now except for the occasional flash of a security light and campus phone. People more shadow than flesh slumped along the sidewalks, lingered outside of doorways, or sat nodding off at bus stops.

  “Here’s all of it,” Arlen said, and he reached awkwardly into his pocket and pulled out the wrist-sized wad of money from Will’s cashbox. He tossed it on the bench seat between them. “Minus the Wild Turkey.”

  “What were you gonna do? Take off with it? Skip town?”

  “Where would I go? Disneyland?” Arlen snorted. “To see if Eula’s gonna put me up for the night? Pull the other one.”

  Will shook his head. In the glare of the passing streetlights, his knuckles against the steering wheel had gone pale like eight little moons.

  “And how’d you do today?” Arlen flapped Will’s chest with the back of his hand. “Get any action?”

  Will glanced over to see Arlen’s face—a white, white smile that reeked of sneering. “Course I didn’t get any action. Wasn’t looking for any.”

  “No?” Arlen’s chuckle was low, slightly menacing. “You think I don’t know why you dragged that girl out with you today?”

  “Arlen—”

  “Don’t you Arlen me. Sound like my momma. I might’ve been in prison for the last decade, but I know that look a man gets when he’s talking about a woman. And I seen it on your face.”

  “You’re not making sense,” Will said through clenched teeth. Arlen was dangerously close to the truth. And if Arlen knew it, Lauren knew it too. The thought was unnerving. He didn’t want her to have any more pull over him than she already did.