Promise of Safekeeping : A Novel (9781101553954)

by Dale, Lisa

  He moved beneath the shade of a small tree, gathering strength. The house was large and white, with black shutters and striped awnings that put Arlen in mind of a domino. There was a brown package left on the front stoop—someone had ordered something; he wondered what—and a new pink shrub flowered next to the garage. The windows were all shut tight, opaque with blinds or curtains, as if they had been sealed specifically against him.

  He could picture himself moving down the black asphalt driveway, to the front door with its half circle of window at the top. He could picture himself digging for a key, letting himself in—a nonevent. He saw himself coming home after work to this house, a bag of groceries on his hip, a little treat—chocolate ice cream or fresh strawberries—for Eula tucked inside. In his flannel bathrobe, he picked up the paper from the walk, tucked it under his arm—in his mind he could do those things so effortlessly, things that didn’t matter at all.

  All right, he thought. He coached himself. He bounced a little on the tips of his toes, like he’d once done in high school before a big game. He thought, as if there were more than one person in his head, Let’s go.

  But no sooner had he stepped off the curb toward Eula’s house than the front door opened. A woman appeared.

  She was small with wide shoulders, light brown hair that scrolled inward at her chin like curls of parchment. She was wearing a charcoal skirt that ended sharply at the knee. She was locking the door. She was picking up the cardboard box at her feet. She was talking on her cell phone. She was Eula, going about her day.

  Arlen’s throat locked. He felt weak with hesitation. In his mind, he called out to her, willing her to turn her head and see him. Eula, please.

  She must have heard.

  With the box under her arm, her keys in one hand, her phone in the other, she straightened up and looked in his direction. She glanced away, talking on her phone, then looked back at him again. He waited. Prayed. She raised her hand with the keys in them to wave at him, only a few fingers extending, before she nearly dropped the box. Then she was getting in her car. The engine turned over. Arlen made like he was walking somewhere. She backed out of the driveway, then disappeared down the road. The neighborhood grew quiet except for the sound of the interstate, roaring somewhere nearby.

  Eula … She hadn’t recognized him.

  Arlen shoved his hands into his pockets. The sun made his neck sweat. The house stood straight-faced but pitying, watching Arlen go. He thought things through: there was only one conclusion to come to that he could see. If Eula didn’t recognize him—and she obviously hadn’t—it was because he wasn’t himself anymore.

  He wanted to know her again. And he wanted her to know him. But he needed to find the part of himself that was still worth knowing—the man he was before, the man she’d fallen in love with who held a job, who went to church, who cared.

  He thought of Lauren Matthews, of what Eula would say if she knew he was no longer the kind of man who could forgive. When he did see Eula again—and he would see her—he didn’t want anything bad hanging over him. Step by step, he made his way back to the bus stop, feeling like he was inching closer to Eula, to his old life, even while he walked away.

  Maisie, who had the day off, insisted on taking Lauren down to the canal walk to eat their breakfast. They parked Lauren’s car beneath a high overpass and headed down to the old canal, a slick of milky green water boxed in by white concrete. The sound of traffic seemed to come from everywhere, all sides and above. In the distance the floodwall loomed twenty-five-feet high, imposing and stately. It had been built to keep the James River from swallowing the southwest side of the city, and its surface had been etched to show the flood levels of storms from the past. Lauren shivered to see it—the impossibility of such high and raging water, when the only water here was the green murk of a two-hundred-year-old canal, lethargic as a dormant volcano.

  They walked along the shoulder of the waterway, beneath low bridges and around angular walls, until they came to a few tables and chairs that had been set out on glistening white slabs. She pulled out a chair and opened her paper bag. Maisie waved when a canal boat full of tourists chugged by.

  “So why did you cancel your trip with Will today?” Maisie asked, her elbows propped on the table and her bagel held between two hands. “Don’t get me wrong—I love hanging out with you. But it seems odd.”

  “It is odd,” Lauren said. “He kissed me.”

  “He did? When?”

  “Yesterday. When we were at his mom’s house.”

  “How was it?”

  “It was … ” She tried to think of how to describe the kiss: she thought of the feeling of the ocean surf pulling against the backs of her knees, hard enough to take her legs out from underneath her; she thought of the tug of gravity just as a plane’s wheels come off the ground. She could not perfectly explain. “It was … ”

  Maisie threw her head back and hooted. “You’re speechless? How do you like that? And we thought he hated you.”

  “Hate or not, he kissed me.”

  Maisie sat back in her chair. “So why in the world are you having breakfast with me instead of wearing his T-shirt and trying to find where he keeps the mugs?”

  “I like Will.”

  “And?”

  “Time’s running out. I’m going to wait one more day, two tops. Then I’m gone.”

  Maisie shook her head, looking down. “You don’t always get this whole romance thing, do you?”

  Lauren was quiet. For all her research into human behavior—into courtship rituals—she simply hadn’t had much real-life experience at all. Work had always seemed the greater priority; she’d believed that if she could establish a strong footing in her career, her love life would fall in line. It had to, after all. She’d imagined that love was a thing to passively invite and then to conquer. Once she was on top of the world, love would sit like a puppy at her feet.

  At least, that was how she thought it might be. But all these years of working and working and working, and love had not fallen into line.

  “It doesn’t have to be so complicated,” Maisie said. “What if Will just wants a quick little fling? Wouldn’t that be fun?”

  “Will doesn’t do frivolous.”

  “How do you know?”

  “His heart’s as big as the moon.”

  Maisie put down her bagel, considering Lauren with speculation. “I think you’re not telling me something.”

  Lauren laughed. “All right. Fine. I like Will. A lot. And I’m worried that what I’m feeling is just a rebound thing. Will deserves better than that.”

  “A rebound? From who?” Maisie asked.

  Lauren looked down. “A guy I was sort of seeing. Edward.”

  “You were seeing someone?”

  “Sort of seeing.”

  “For how long?”

  “Six months.”

  “That’s long for sort of,” Maisie said.

  “It wasn’t like we were together every day.”

  “Because you work too hard,” Maisie said—a statement, not a question.

  “Because I have ambition. And because he lived far away.”

  Maisie reached out and took Lauren’s hand. “Did you love him?”

  “I thought maybe I did. Or maybe I could. But now, every day that goes by, I’m wondering more and more what the hell I was thinking.”

  “What happened?”

  Lauren hesitated. There were many possible answers, all of them right. I didn’t pay attention. I saw what I wanted to. He didn’t love me after all. She thought over the past few months, the past few weeks of being without him, and it struck her that she could summarize all her complicated and unwieldy feelings about the situation in three little words.

  “He was married,” she said.

  Maisie was speechless.

  “He never told me. I didn’t know.”

  “How is that possible? Nobody gets anything by you.”

  “That’s what I thought too. But Edwa
rd did. We saw each other once every few weeks—I assumed he had trouble sneaking away from work to see me. But actually, he was sneaking away from his family, not his job.”

  “Oh God, Laure. I’m sorry.”

  Lauren nodded. “It’s okay. It’s probably better anyway. I always felt like Edward was in competition with me. I figured it was something we could work through over time.”

  Maisie crumpled her breakfast bag into a ball. “I think this is the perfect opportunity.”

  “For what?”

  “For you to sleep with Will. Have a fling. Get this other guy out of your system.”

  “But like I said, I don’t want to make things messy …

  Maisie stood. The frustration on her face was undisguised. “Will’s a big boy. He knows what’s what. If you want him, Lauren, then why not go for it?”

  Lauren took a sip of iced tea. Last night, the idea of going to bed with Will had been electric and imminent and thrilling—but here in the midmorning sun, the possibility seemed remote and much easier to consider in a logical way. Will was probably the only person she’d ever met who couldn’t care less about what she did for a living. She couldn’t impress him—at least, not if she was trying to. She would never be a trophy to him because of who she knew or how much money she made. And yet, when she dared to indulge herself, she thought maybe he liked her anyway.

  “Well,” she said, “if we don’t have a fling, I have to do something about Will.”

  “Why?”

  “Because. I’m thinking about him way too much. There’s something about him I can’t figure out—and you know I can’t resist a challenge. Plus, he gives me this feeling of … I don’t know, security? But at the same time, everything’s up in the air.”

  “Oh, dear,” Maisie said.

  “What?”

  Her face was drawn in concern. “That doesn’t sound like a fling at all.”

  Will was having a showdown with an old lead glass lamp he’d found on the side of the road. The lamp shade was gone, but the clear crystal base was beautiful—really interesting and different. He loved it. He’d loved it so much that when he tried to put it in the corner of his shop where he stocked lighting, he found he didn’t have the heart to leave it there, where someone might buy it and take it away. Now it sat on the counter and he felt that it was showing off to him, taunting him, since he could not let it go.

  And yet, he had to. Some nights, especially when the wind was high, he listened to the old wooden boards of the barn creaking outside his window, and he worried that it was going to burst its joints. He’d packed so much in there. Each year, he promised himself that he would clean it out. That he would sell off the things that he really didn’t need. And each year, he did not.

  He looked up when he saw Lauren come in, and to his surprise, he felt relieved of a hundred worries he hadn’t known he was carrying: the worry that she would avoid him, the worry that he’d insulted her, the worry that she would not show her face again. He hadn’t meant to brush her off last night, but he hadn’t meant to kiss her either. He was entirely out of control, and it scared him. He’d fantasized about her on and off for years, but that had been when she was more illusion than woman—when there was no actual chance of being with her. He hadn’t thought it was possible for his feelings about her to be more complicated and convoluted than they were when he hadn’t known her.

  He walked around the counter to meet her. “Hey. What are you doing here?” He tried to keep his voice light. “I thought you were hanging out with Maisie today?”

  “We did hang out,” Lauren said. “We had breakfast.”

  “I thought you wanted a day off from picking.”

  “I do.”

  There was something different about her. She looked the same, but a little more conscientiously dressed. Makeup and nice shoes. She wore a black cotton shirt that looked so soft it seemed to drip off her. Her toenails were painted a color between plum and cherry, and her sunglasses were perched on the top of her head. She wore a khaki skirt that made Will’s imagination flash: the hem of it riding his wrists.

  He tried to put the image from his mind, and yet yesterday had brought a new intimacy between them that set his dreams crackling and spitting flame. All night he’d twisted in his sheets. He turned over the days and hours in his mind, appraising the minutes with scrutiny: the way she’d laughed at certain kinds of jokes, the way she stood up straighter when she was thinking hard, the way her arms had come around his neck. She’d opened up to him, more than he ever would have expected, emotionally and physically. During their travels, she’d told him about her family in the Hudson Valley, about her first year at her firm, about a pending promotion. She talked about what it felt like when her brother had been in jail, and how much she loved the judicial system—believed in it—but only if there were people who could defend as well as prosecute. Each day, she’d seemed a little more relaxed. Until now.

  “Everything okay?” he asked.

  “Oh yes. Everything’s okay. No problems at all.”

  “Then what is it?”

  She glanced toward his office. “I don’t know if I want to talk about it standing in the middle of the store.”

  “Sure,” he said. He gestured for her to follow him into his office where she would be more comfortable and they could both sit down. He tried not to imagine what she might think of it with its old couches and beat-up desks.

  He gestured for her to sit on a love seat and she did; he dropped himself into his desk chair. “So what’s bothering you?”

  “Nothing’s bothering me, exactly.”

  He considered her—how put-together she was. How cinched up. She’d been the same way when she’d walked into his shop seven days ago. But he knew enough about her now that he recognized the difference between real confidence and a reproduction.

  “What do you want to talk about?”

  She straightened in her seat with a little wiggle, as if she had an itch between her shoulder blades that she could not reach. “You kissed me.”

  He was ready. “I won’t apologize for it. If that’s what you’re thinking. You kissed me back.”

  “I did,” she said. She held his gaze, held it as if she’d taken his face between her two hands. He got up and went to sit beside her on the couch. He didn’t think it was possible for a person’s blood to hurt. But his did. It was an ache that had no precise location.

  He risked moving closer. She was wearing perfume and he hated it. He hated her strappy black sandals and her mascara. All pretenses of the woman who had televised book signings and gave advice on morning talk shows. As far as he was concerned, her most honest moments were not when she was parading around in spike heels, but when she was standing in a beam of sunlight that made her hair shine the color of claret, when she turned to look at him over her shoulder, smiling, and calling for him to see what she found. He liked her better when she was sweaty and exhausted. He wanted to make her be that way.

  “What do you want from me?” he asked.

  “I want you to kiss me again. For starters,” she said, her voice as even and practiced as if she were reading from a teleprompter.

  He didn’t like it. He didn’t move. “And then?”

  “And then I go back to Albany.”

  He hesitated. He supposed he should be happy. He knew he couldn’t have a relationship with her, with any woman. The fact that Lauren wasn’t looking for anything serious should have been a relief—he could have her and work her out of his fantasies, so that when she left, she left, and hopefully took his twisted-up affection with her. It was the perfect setup. And yet, he felt heavy to think of the road ahead: a few days, or even hours, of pleasure, and then—withdrawal. Some part of him cried out to protect himself. And yet, some other voice told him, Now is all you have.

  He waited too long.

  She stood. “Forget I said anything.”

  He grabbed her wrist. “Wait.”

  She was standing a foot to his left, looking
down at him with a crease between her eyebrows. “Wait,” he said again. He couldn’t bring himself to stand, to embrace her. It seemed wrong—too intimate in some way. For a moment, he felt caught between desire, propriety, the question of allowances and offerings. His blood was beating hot, the first shimmery fibers of arousal coalescing, tightening, and yet all he could do was hang on to her wrist like it was the rope his life depended on. At his eye level, the hem of her skirt—so blunt and practical—stood in contrast to the curves of her legs.

  He felt lost. He looked up at her face, where that placid and protected look she sometimes wore was on the brink of cracking, and he wanted to crack it. So, with his free hand, he brushed the backs of his knuckles along her skin, along the unnamed province between the front of her thighs and the insides. Her skin pebbled, her muscles jumped, and he found the back of her knee with his fingers.

  “Will … ”

  He looked up to watch her, and he gripped her wrist more tightly. He brushed the skin above her knee, ran the pads of his fingers behind it, felt the expanse of her thigh beneath his palm. She didn’t stop him. Beneath her soft skin were rivers of hardened muscle. His fingertips brushed along goose bumps. He gave her plenty of warning, plenty of time to reach out and say Stop. But she held still. His hand moved higher, past the thickest part of her thigh, her head fell back, and he found the truth: she wanted him. Now. At least, for this moment, she did.

  He moved closer to the edge of the sofa, but would not let her sit. Not even when her muscles began to tremble. Not even when her legs began to shake and she gripped his shoulders to stay on her heels. She steadied herself on his shoulder. He held her hip with one hand, fascinated by the quickening of her breath, the whimpers in the back of her throat, the heat that meant there was nothing in the world for her, no sensation but those he gave. Moments passed that might have been hours—until she cried out, nails digging into his neck, and her body jerked forward. He stood fast, held her up just as she went slack against him. Her breath was ragged in his ear.