Promise of Safekeeping : A Novel (9781101553954)

by Dale, Lisa

  “I don’t know if I like it,” Lauren said. “But I guess I see what you mean.”

  They walked on. When her friend spoke again, her voice was soft, as if she didn’t want to disturb the peace of the evening. “Did you give Arlen your note?”

  “Will did.”

  “Are you sure he did?”

  Lauren glanced at her friend, whose eyes were narrowed in suspicion. “He’ll deliver it.”

  “It just seems odd to me. That he’s making you work for him. If he’s such a great person, why is he making you help?”

  “He’s not making me. Maybe at first I thought he was. But not anymore.”

  “So you’re hanging out with him voluntarily?”

  “Looks like.”

  “Hmm,” Maisie said. “Interesting.”

  Lauren laughed. “It’s not like that.”

  “Oh no?”

  “What else will I do all day while you’re at the office?”

  “Knowing you, I’d say work compulsively and worry about your newest case.”

  “Exactly. So you should be happy for me that I’m hanging out with him.”

  “I am happy. I just think there might be a little love-connection thing happening.”

  Lauren turned away as images of the morning’s surprising dream flashed through her mind. She could remember more now—the way the mattress bent under Will’s elbows, his body like a shadow moving over her. The way he’d gripped her hair, held her face in two hands.

  Will was not her type; she’d never dated a man like him. Instead, she dated only the men she regularly met: men with MBAs or JDs, good haircuts, and understated ties. She’d thought she preferred men who did gentlemanly things like buy her dinner or hold open the car door. But now she second-guessed herself. Given the fact that she was still single, perhaps she didn’t know her type at all.

  Although most of her colleagues were married and busy juggling a life of kids and careers, she’d never felt a desperate need to be romantically attached. She’d always figured that when the right guy came along, she would know it, fundamentally and perfectly, in the way that she knew things about people. But years passed, and this man—the one who was meant for her—hadn’t made an appearance. Or, if he had, Lauren had been too focused on her career to see him. Most men were intimidated by her—she knew that. And while sometimes she enjoyed her own power, she also felt that it was a force field keeping people from getting close to her. She supposed she couldn’t have it both ways.

  Until she met Edward. Because he broke the mold.

  For six months she’d cared for him. On their first lunch date, she was so overwhelmed by him—his intelligence, his movie-star good looks, his impeccable fashion, his taste for all things expensive, and his love of whatever was “the best.” She started going to Phoenix as often as she could, and he would come to her hotel room late at night. Or he came to Albany. The conversation was light; the sex, heavy. They made love with the passion that they brought to their work, as if the conversation of naked bodies was a kind of debate or argument. She’d been so, so sure. She would have sworn on her life that he loved her. And maybe he did.

  She dragged the sole of her sandal along the ground. “Even if Will is attracted to me—and, I admit it, even if I like him—nothing’s going to happen.”

  “Well, why not?” Maisie asked.

  “Because I’m leaving soon. I’ve put everything on the line to come down here. My whole life. I’ve got to get back.”

  Maisie steered them down the newly paved paths of the centuries-old cemetery. They walked slowly. Lauren thought back over her day. Over Will. There was a mystery about him that she hadn’t yet solved—and it intrigued her, energized her. Certain things didn’t add up or fit what should have been a relatively straightforward profile. She knew his core values—that he was a good person who not only looked after the people he cared about, but who went out of his way for them. Generosity like his was rare, a treasure few people could find no matter how many old sofa cushions they looked beneath in a falling-down barn.

  But aside from that, there were blanks. He was closed off about his background. She’d tried to ask about his family, his childhood, his life outside of picking, but he was even more guarded than she was—and that was unusual. She guessed he wasn’t always so standoffish—that he was only like that with her—and the thought was disappointing. She wanted them to open up to each other, if only for a few days.

  The old cemetery was beginning to darken, shadows growing and reaching among the stones.

  “We’ve got to get back,” Lauren said.

  “Right now?”

  “It’s getting dark.”

  “We’re fine. Nobody’s gonna bother us.”

  “I know,” Lauren said. “But I’d just feel better.”

  “Okay,” Maisie said.

  They started back over the undulating hills toward the car. Around them, the headstones glowed against the dusk, brighter than everything around them, each one a marker of the past. And though she didn’t consider herself overly romantic, she wondered if she, too, held on to things, perhaps when she didn’t realize. She wondered about her own symbols, the things she got attached to. She felt her phone bumping against her pocket. And then she knew.

  While Maisie walked around to the driver’s side of the car, Lauren flipped open her cell phone and scrolled. She supposed she’d been hoping Edward would call her. As if words could make it right.

  She glanced up at the cemetery one last time. The fading sky had turned the white headstones a soft yellow pink. The grass was scorched brown in places where the sun and drought had taken their toll. Without letting herself think, she deleted Edward from her phone. She should have done it weeks ago.

  “Everything okay?” Maisie asked through the open window.

  “Great,” Lauren said. “How do you feel about catching a movie?” She couldn’t remember the last time she’d gone to see a movie in an actual movie theater. She found that she desperately wanted to.

  “Now you’re talking,” Maisie said.

  On Saturday morning, Will and his brother Scoot, who was Scott when he was born, stood out in Will’s backyard looking hard at the sky. The land was flat—about one acre with a wide oak tree that dropped fat acorns in the fall, and a little shrub that flowered hot pink in July. A small barn stood at the back of the lot, serviceable enough but needing a coat of fresh paint. Will and Scoot pondered the dome of sky above them, paint cans close at their sides. The clouds were uniform and middling high, a yellowish gray that could have meant rain, or not.

  “What do you think?” Scoot asked.

  “I think we better hold off. No sense in risking it.”

  “Suits me.”

  They put down their cans on the concrete patio Will had poured last year; then they walked to the old barn. Will pulled a strip of white paint from it. It was brittle in his fingers. “I guess we can get to rearranging the inside. If you’re up for it.”

  “Yeah, I’m game.”

  Will hauled open the door; it scraped the dirt. Behind him, his brother gave a soft whistle.

  “Hoo, man. That is a serious lot of crap.”

  Will laughed and stepped into the dark of the small barn. It smelled of dust, and dry rotting wood, and a thousand mildewing things. His heart hurt a little to think of the way the years had worn down his favorite picks. Wood that wasn’t regularly polished would split and bend. Iron that wasn’t given a fresh coat of paint would rust. Rubber left to its own devices would sag and crack. But he loved this barn, and everything in it. All the forgotten, broken things.

  “So what are we getting rid of?” Scoot asked. He was older than Will, and bigger around the middle. His head was large and bald, and while thinning hair might have made another man look aged and weak, the whole family agreed that Scoot hadn’t started looking like his real, tough-as-nails self until after his hair had fallen out—as if it was baldness that was his natural state and his years of having had hair were
the anomaly.

  “I don’t have a definite plan,” Will said.

  “But we’re getting rid of something.”

  Will looked around the barn, piled high with his finds—the ones he couldn’t bear to put in the store to sell. “I suppose we are.”

  They got to it. Scoot began digging through the first-floor’s worth of stuff, asking, “What’s this?” and “What does this do?” and, “How about this goes to the shop?” Where the floor had been obscured, they climbed over piles—Will knew another person would think it was all garbage. Things snapped under their feet, wobbled when they reached out to steady themselves.

  “What about this?” Scoot asked. He held up a tin car—flecked green paint and a missing tire.

  Will shook his head. “That’s a Dick Tracy cop car from the early thirties. I’ve got to keep that.”

  Scoot put it down. “Okay. This?”

  Will mulled it over. His brother was holding a movie projector from the 1960s. It was broken, but Will had been meaning to fix it up one of these days to get it back to its former glory. He could probably sell it for a fair return. “Naw. I got plans for that.”

  Scoot put it down roughly. “You got plans for everything.”

  Will looked over his treasures—each one held stories within stories: the story of when he’d bought it, and the story of its life before it came to this barn. He felt bad that such amazing finds weren’t getting better treatment in somebody’s house, sitting in somebody’s kitchen or living room, and inspiring endless conversations. In those situations, antiques like these came alive. But now they were dormant, collecting dust and years, waiting until they could wake to life again.

  His collection had started innocently enough. When he’d first started picking, he’d sold almost everything he found, for as much or as little money as he could get. The point was just to make a buck. To get Arlen a better lawyer and to get out of poverty and his mother’s house. But as the years went by, and Will saved up some money to open the shop and live in the apartment above it, he felt courageous enough to put his heart on the line and risk falling in love with some of his own picks. The organ from the old church in Fredericksburg. The rusty chassis of an Indian motorcycle that would never move again. And the keys—always the keys—that were so inexpensive to collect and yet endlessly intriguing.

  When he fell in love, he fell hard. The items he picked seemed to draw from him a life of their own. And once that happened, Will was obligated, indebted, charged with the task of caring for the items because he knew nobody else would be able to care about them as much as he did.

  He’d planned to use the old barn for a workshop, to refurnish, resurface, and repaint. But instead, as he allowed himself the leisure of collecting, the barn began to fill. And fill. And fill. And now there was no floor to speak of except for a patch, no loft except for a platform that was piled high with his things. The barn itself seemed to be growing tired of sheltering all these objects that Will had fallen in love with and promised to take care of. And Will was getting tired too.

  “What about this?” His brother held up a little piano fit for a child. It was plastic, and not very old.

  “That?” Will scowled at him. “Are you kidding me? Do you know what that is?”

  “A kid’s toy.”

  “Your kid’s toy. It’s the same one you used to bang on when we were kids.”

  “You saved it all this time?”

  “Well, okay, technically it’s not the same one. But it’s the same model.”

  “So I guess we’re saving it in case I decide to take up playing piano with one finger again?”

  “I didn’t think you could play that well.” He took the toy from his brother’s hands. Then he set it gingerly down on top of an older piano, a real piano, that hadn’t played a note in fifteen years. He glanced around the barn and knew he wouldn’t be getting rid of anything today. “C’mon,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “We’re not done with this,” Scoot said.

  “Yes, we are.”

  Outside, the first raindrops flecked his shirt and skin. The sound of the padlock’s muscular click when it closed was a welcome relief.

  At first, Lauren didn’t think she was being followed. She felt a noticeable strangeness as she walked through Shockoe Bottom, her yoga mat over her shoulder, her water bottle sloshing at her side. But she didn’t think the pricking at the back of her neck was necessarily ominous. Instead, she’d written off the feeling as being residual guilt, a result of having slept in late on a Saturday morning. Not yet a week away from Albany, and already her routine was getting sloppy and soft. By the time she’d opened her eyes, her office had called twice and she’d had to put out two minor fires before she’d gotten out of bed. If she’d risen earlier, the fires would have been little more than match-sized flames.

  So, as she crossed the street, she thought, Guilt. Guilt was giving her the unpindownable feeling of something not quite right. Rizzi had called to beg her to talk to Burt—to at least call and check in. And Lauren had said that, yes, of course she would. She’d meant to. She’d meant to again and again. And yet, there was always a good reason not to call him: like dinner with Maisie, like a hike through high weeds with Will, like a walk through downtown. She’d felt within herself a kind of loosening over the last few days—as if the heat had not only made her muscles slacken, but had softened her own definition of herself as a busy, productive workaholic. Each time she meant to call Burt, she thought of what it was that she really needed to say to him, and she found herself tongue-tied. So she did not call him at all.

  Now she walked through Shockoe Bottom, through corridors of brick and mortar, past shops with tall bay windows advertising vegan sandwiches or massages. She passed big factories that had gone condo; stenciled white letters on red brick advertised flowers, rug making, and power tools. Some probably dated to the early twentieth century. Despite the pace of traffic and modern convenience, Richmond had an oldness about it—as if the present were happening on the backdrop of the past. Among the tattooed buildings, she thought of Burt, and work, and her dream of Will—and still the strange feeling of something she couldn’t quite place lingered.

  She stepped out of a patch of sunlight and into the shade of a small tree; then she shaded her eyes to look around.

  Was she being followed?

  She squinted behind her: women pushing sport utility strollers, men with canted heads talking on phones, children walking heavy-footed and pointing at things. No one was behind her. No one on the street looked dangerous. But still, the feeling lingered.

  In all her years of getting the occasional threat of vandalism, she’d never once had a feeling of being followed. Not like this.

  The thought occurred to her: Arlen.

  She stopped walking, crossed her arms, and stood in the middle of the sidewalk looking around. In her chest her heart began to sputter, but she shushed it quietly—closed her eyes and exhaled. Arlen would have read her note by now; she wondered if he was looking for her—or, if not looking, then just being curious about her, to know what he was in for if he agreed to meet. Lauren stood motionless on the rounded tip of a street corner, exposed and in the sun. If Arlen wanted to see her, she wanted him to know that she was prepared for it. She waited, ready. She thought, Come on.

  But if Arlen was following her, he didn’t show.

  The sidewalk was empty except for a few people, some walking Lauren’s way also with yoga mats and towels. Some looked at her when they passed. Lauren stood until she began to realize how foolish it was to be putting so much faith in what was likely enough her imagination. Gradually, the feeling of being followed subsided, leaving behind it the strange sense of being completely and vulnerably alone.

  She would see Arlen soon; she could feel it. She adjusted her yoga bag on her shoulder and walked into class.

  Eula’s mother didn’t like to eat her vegetables. So twice a week Eula drove to the nursing home to make sure she did, co
axing her through swallow after swallow of corn, kale, and peas. Even mashed potatoes had become a problem lately, with her mother saying they were too mushy or too dry. Nobody tried Eula’s patience like her mother—but she supposed it was payback. She’d never liked vegetables as a kid.

  “Here we are, Ma.” In the cafeteria, she set her mother’s tray down gently before her. The room was quiet, soft voices not quite echoing but taking on the hollowness of a big space. Cheery pictures of lemons and oranges brightened the walls between the windows, and at plastic tables, senior citizens sat hunched over rectangular red trays. Eula straightened her mother’s dinner before her. “Look. Lemon and herb chicken. And peas on the side.”

  Her mother gave a little frown but said nothing. They’d gone through this ritual so many times that she knew there was no sense in fighting. Eula picked up her fork and stabbed at the chicken. Thick globular sauces saved it from being dry as the napkin she used to wipe her mouth. She chewed slowly, settling into the rhythms of the room.

  “I got a little raise at work yesterday,” Eula said after a few minutes. “It’s not much. But when I get paid next week, I can take us out to dinner. How would you like that?”

  “I’d like it just fine,” her mother said. “Will your husband be joining us?”

  “What husband?” Eula asked carefully.

  “Well, your husband, of course. Arlen. Is that boy coming too?”

  Eula pushed her peas around her plate. She didn’t want to eat them either. “I don’t think so, Ma.”

  “Good for nothing,” her mother said. “Men.”

  Eula sighed. For the past couple weeks, her mother had been imagining that Arlen was still a part of their family. Perhaps she’d been responding to the news that Arlen had been let out of prison. She might have heard his name mentioned by a gossiping staff member, and perhaps she’d seen him on TV. Either way, Eula ached every time her mother said his name.

  She’d thought, when Arlen had first been let out of jail, that she wouldn’t have any trouble coping. So he walked free. Big deal. What did that mean to her now that she’d gone on with her life?