Loving Chloe

by Jo-Ann Mapson

  Loving Chloe

  A Novel

  Jo-Ann Mapson

  To Deborah Schneider, my agent and friend,

  whose courage in matters of the heart

  is both enviable and inspiring

  She never shook the stars from their appointed courses,

  but she loved good men,

  and she rode good horses.

  —MARGOT LIBERTY, “Epitaph”

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Part 1

  Cameron, Arizona

  1

  “Ow, dammit!” For one lengthy, inarticulate minute, Hank Oliver wondered…

  2

  “How far along do you think you are?” Dr. Lois…

  3

  Nine girls and eleven boys stared up at their new…

  4

  After awhile, all it took was one almost-accidental flick of…

  5

  Chloe set down the ballpoint pen and stretched her cramped…

  6

  “Goddamn son-of-a-bitch cheap-shit pot holder!” Chloe flung the useless square…

  7

  Hmm. No mention of Hank’s “offbeat love affair” and how…

  Part 2

  Tuba City

  8

  It was into a true Phoenix rainstorm that Junior Whitebear…

  9

  “Get in and try not to piss me off,” Corrine…

  10

  Like an old Kodak slide forgotten in the projector, the…

  11

  Over his bouquet of yellow roses, Hank smiled broadly, as…

  12

  Before breakfast the temperature hit eighty degrees. Henry senior opened…

  13

  Hours after the Johnsons left, this disappointing holiday was thankfully…

  14

  The windshield of the Jeep grew thick with snow, each…

  15

  I guess it would be selfish of me to ask…

  16

  Chloe made the call from the Trading Post pay phone…

  17

  “Because I think there’s a little more to being a…

  18

  The little girl outside the drugstore looked nine, maybe ten…

  Part 3

  Canyon de Chelly

  19

  “This is not about anything other than me needing to…

  20

  Junior’s current state of mind—which he felt bordered on…

  21

  Every day since she’d made that promise in Sedona, Chloe…

  22

  Junior pulled Chloe against him, feeling the heat of their…

  23

  The Greeks appropriated all the credit, but it was the…

  Part 4

  Cameron, Arizona

  Twenty Years Later

  24

  It’s late November, but nobody’s explained that to the town…

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise FOR Loving Chloe

  Other Books by Jo-Ann Mapson

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  This novel is a work of fiction. Although it contains incidental references to actual people and places, these references are used merely to lend the fiction a realistic setting. All other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Part 1

  Cameron, Arizona

  1

  “Ow, dammit!” For one lengthy, inarticulate minute, Hank Oliver wondered if he might be hallucinating. As was his habit, left over from a scholarly life lived with great deliberation, he gathered evidence before committing himself to any one belief.

  His thumb throbbed from accidentally striking it with the claw hammer he’d been using to drive the last few nails into the corral fence. There were black-and-yellow California plates on the old pickup and horse trailer pulling to a halt out back of his cabin. It appeared startlingly out of place, like one perfectly assembled establishing shot from a period movie. Hank stood at the edge of the handmade corral, listening to the drone of the old truck’s steady engine. To his left stood the small, newly roofed cabin, and above, the blue-black Arizona sky was rapidly changing into night. On this remote stretch of country road there were no other houses, no porch lamps or streetlights, nothing to illuminate Chloe Morgan’s expression and deliver him a clue as to what she was feeling. All he’d managed was her brief profile in the headlights, her face pale and startled, her eyes as fixed as a jackrabbit’s.

  Three tries and he finally managed to hang the hammer on the fence rail and to begin to believe she was here, that Chloe had indeed, as he’d so often wished, come to him from California. She opened her driver’s-side door and the white shepherd dog leaped over her and out of the cab, running off to mark her territory in the scrub. Chloe slid out of the truck right after Hannah, but instead of coming to him directly, which was typical of her horsewoman’s style, she hung back in the glow of the headlights. Turning her body sideways, she placed her right hand flush against her ribcage, just below her breasts.

  Did she have heartburn from eating junk food while crossing the desert?

  It wasn’t until she turned her head and gave him a tentative smile that he recognized the posture for what it revealed. From the Mona Lisa on down to women he held the door for in the supermarket aisles, he understood: Chloe was pregnant. And considering their history together, that meant he, Hank Oliver, was pregnant, too.

  From the raw-cedar fence posts to her truck lay ten feet of red dirt and sandstone. How long should it take a grown man to cover such a distance—five strides, four? To Hank each step erased their three months of separation. As soon as he took her into his arms, he felt the assertive little speed bump of her belly against his own, announcing itself. It was mid-August, the kind of flawless northern Arizona weather that went down as easily as lemonade—and now felt like it might come right back up. The cabin was only partially insulated. The pipes needed wrapping if anyone was going to attempt winter here. Since June he’d been behaving like the proverbial grasshopper, living each day loosely, avoiding the hard look he needed to take at his fractured, jobless life. But with the arrival of the truck, all that fooling around had come to a halt. Nearby he heard the dog barking and the horse in the trailer bang an impatient hoof against metal. He took hold of the woman he loved and buried his tear-streaked face in her hair. Late this year or early the next, Hank Oliver was going to claim his first breathing tax deduction.

  “Happy birthday,” he remembered to say.

  “Look here,” she answered, patting her belly and laughing in that whiskey-barrel voice that never failed to make his blood run hot. “Look what you already gave me.” Then she grinned and stuck out her tongue, and after that Hank was good for nothing.

  After they’d unloaded the horse, walked him around the property, and let him sniff all the edges of the new corral, Hank shut him inside the fencing. He tossed the colt a flake of hay from the trailer while Chloe dragged a trash can over and filled it with water.

  “You want to come inside?” Hank asked.

  “No, I thought we could stand out here all night.”

  Nervously Hank led her to the cabin his grandmother had left him. Chloe might only be passing through, using him as a rest stop on her way to a new life elsewhere—and who could blame her, after last year? Since their lives had intersected the previous winter, Chloe’d lost a great deal. Her beloved old horse had died an ungraceful death, she’d been arrested for slugging a cop in that ridiculous land development debacle, and Hank’s own jealousy hadn’t helped. Now there was the complication of a baby. A million options e
xisted, and each sat like a separate stone in his stomach.

  From the old Germantown blanket he had hanging on the wall to the secondhand rocker he’d in a fit of whimsy painted robin’s egg blue, Chloe sighed her approval. “Whoa,” she said softly as she kicked off her Tony Lamas onto the wood floor. “If this was my place, you couldn’t pry me out with a crowbar.”

  He thought of saying, It is yours, if you want it. Or nailing the door shut to keep her to himself, like some well-intentioned feudal overlord willing to sacrifice whole countries in the name of love. But if in the last eight months Hank had learned anything at all about this woman, it was that turning locks and demanding covenants were the quickest way to spook her. He stood dumbly by, watching her inspect his quarters, which all at once seemed so like her own digs back in the California canyon that he felt certain in his heart she’d stay. He showed her the three-legged metal horse he’d found in the cabin wall when he replaced some dry-rotted boards. He drew back the curtains to reveal the spectacle of the Arizona night sky. With no city lights to compete against, so many stars pierced the canvas it still took his breath away.

  “I can’t tell you how small it makes me feel when I look at that every night,” he said.

  She took hold of his hand and cupped it beneath her breast, swollen by the pregnancy. “I know what you mean.”

  Her ways were always this direct. Her anthem could have been “Let’s Cut to the Chase.” To Hank’s surprise they made it all the way to the bed.

  By a stroke of divine luck, he’d changed the dirty sheets that morning, replacing them with a worn-to-softness set bought at the thrift store. The smooth cotton was chilled to crispness against their bodies. At night the temperature dropped swiftly, five and ten degrees an hour. Chloe shivered and said, “It’s colder than I thought it would be.”

  Hank pulled an old Pendleton blanket over her shoulders. “Two months from now, everyone tells me ‘cold’ takes on an entirely different meaning. Think you’re up to it?”

  It was a large, multifaceted question, one he regretted asking the moment the words left his mouth. “Oh, I can hang pretty tough,” she said, pulling him on top of herself, so ready for making love that the moment their clothes were out of the way she drew him inside without any pretense at foreplay. To Hank it felt as if somebody had built a strong, engaging little fire between her legs. Doing without her had disciplined him, made him thoughtful and sober regarding much of his life, but that kind of governance ended here. Sliding inside her slickness felt like resuming the long, slow arc of an extraordinary dance, one he was an old hand at performing and had missed acutely. Here, in their embrace, all things became one body, one wild, howling song. No time had passed, no hurtful words had sunk their stony arrowheads into the heart’s tender flesh. Everything was as soft and familiar as the sheets, and they fell headlong into themselves, giving up, no grace or pretense whatsoever.

  An hour later, when they stopped to rest, they could hear Thunder whinnying from the corral.

  “Maybe he wants more hay,” Hank suggested.

  “Always, but the little beggar doesn’t need it or he’s going to end up on Richard Simmons.” She kissed Hank’s nose and muttered, “All this wide-open space is probably freaking him out. I just hope the bonehead doesn’t try to jump the fence.”

  “If he did, somebody would catch him and bring him back. That’s the kind of people they are around here. Old-fashioned. Decent.”

  “Sounds like you’re trying to push real estate.”

  “Only to you.” Hank ran his fingers across her belly, above the line of her pubic hair, tangled and damp. He felt all over the definite round of baby riding high on her abdomen, its hardness tucked deep inside like a well-kept secret.

  “You mind?” Chloe said, pulling on his pillow.

  “Take it,” he said, settling flat on the mattress while he thought of the myths he’d studied involving motherhood, the primitive cultural notions that, back in graduate school, fixed to paper, seemed so fascinating. Chukchi female shamans believed in the fertility of sacred stones. The female tree-embracers maintained that hanging umbilical cords from branches and caressing bark was how to make a baby. Early myths dismissed the idea that men played any part in this admittedly magical event. They indicated that fatherhood had been revealed to men only by the women, those careful keepers of the cosmic calendar, those true centers of the tribe, and was probably done with regret. He recalled a text on Ethiopian culture he’d read in graduate school that at first glance had sounded so profoundly simple: A man may spend a single night by a woman, and then rise up to leave her, but a woman carries the fruit of their coupling nine months, directly under her heart. That child can never be dismissed from her heart entirely, not even when grown into a man, not even when she, or the child, is no longer living. The Indian children who sometimes rode their ponies across his land offered a similar piece of wisdom. You got to mind your grandmothers else they put you up on Spider Rock.

  Chloe brushed his hand away from her belly. “Stop inspecting me.”

  “Why?”

  “For one thing, it tickles.” She sat up in his bed and began braiding her hair by the candlelight. “You have such a funny look on your face, Hank. What in hell are you worrying about? I haven’t even been here three hours and already you’re brooding.”

  “I’m not brooding. I’m thinking about babies.”

  “For God’s sake, what about them?”

  He smiled. “The fact that we made one seems rather spectacular to me.”

  “I think they call that biology,” she said, her fingers reaching the end of her blond braid.

  “There might be a rubber band on the dresser,” Hank told her, but Chloe let it fall loose and immediately started in braiding all over again. Her skin seemed to glow, as warm and lightly scented as the burning beeswax candle in a saucer atop his dresser. Pregnancy had darkened her nipples to a dusky plum, enhanced all the aspects of her he’d previously found irresistible.

  “I need you to tell me something, and I need you to mean it,” she said soberly, fingers working furiously now, this new braid tight and stiff.

  He propped himself up, his weight balanced on one hand and elbow. “I’m listening.”

  “Say something happens, you meet somebody else, or I fall off a horse and get paralyzed—”

  His smile sobered. “Jesus, speaking of borrowing trouble. You’re not riding horses until long after this baby arrives. Don’t even talk like that. That’s inviting bad luck.”

  “No, it’s planning for the future. If something happens, you have to promise me you won’t turn your back on this kid.”

  “What makes you think I’d turn my back on our child? I’m so damn happy to see you I can’t think straight. I love you, heart, soul, horse, and dog. The dog can sleep on the bed. In the bed, if that’s what you want. That doesn’t sound like father material to you?”

  She traced her fingers over the faded pattern in the sheets. “I just don’t want it on my conscience, Hank, bringing an unwanted child into the world. I know what it feels like not to belong.”

  “This baby already belongs, Chloe, just like you belong here with me. I’ll keep you both safe.”

  For awhile she was quiet. “I wonder what your mother is going to say about that.”

  He could stand it no longer. He took hold of her wrists and pulled her down to him, kissing odd places that he’d overlooked in their hurry—her elbows, the indentation at the small of her back, the curving sides of her belly, her weak ankle that gave her the slight limp he found as intriguing as it was distressing. It was his fault she’d cut the cast off before the leg was properly healed. Chloe limped because he had pushed her to commit to something she was not ready to give.

  “Iris a grandmother? She’ll be overjoyed. Take up knitting.”

  “And old Henry senior?”

  “The hell with him.”

  Chloe smiled shyly, as if she wanted to believe him. They began seriously to investiga
te each other, figuring out how their bodies—his summer-toughened and stronger from all the work he’d put in on the cabin, hers shaped so differently that it required some adjustments—would fit now that the initial blast of passion had cooled.

  “This feels so right,” he said, laying his cheek against the inside of her thigh.

  She reached down and gave his nose a tweak. “Not there. At least not yet. I want you back inside me,” she said. “Hurry up. But pace yourself, Professor Oliver, because I’m telling you right here and now, I expect you to make me happy all night.”

  As he balanced himself on his elbows and moved to do what she asked, Hank couldn’t help feeling himself hold back, just a little, out of concern for the baby.

  24 August

  Dearest Mom,

  I trust you’re well and that Dad is out there on the course, perfecting his chip shots and replacing his divots. The days here are warm, clean, and much too short to get all my work done. You wouldn’t recognize the cabin. The roof went on snug and held watertight in the last storm. Chloe and I found a great little used wood stove at the Big Tree Swap Meet in Flagstaff to replace Nana’s drafty old Franklin, which I sold to an antique dealer (made $5!). All it needed was new glass in the doors, and on a trial run, the kitchen got so hot we had to crank open the windows. Great little stove, well-constructed. With care it could last twenty years.

  This is my roundabout way of informing you and Dad that Chloe’s with me again, forever, I hope. The day after she got here I asked her to marry me, but she said—wisely, I think—what was the rush, and given the situation, shouldn’t we take things slow and ask each other the big questions after we’ve weathered the winter together. So, I guess in some ways my future is still up in the air. However, there’s one thing we both know for certain that I’d like to share with you. We’re having a baby. We think it’s due in February, and I’m extremely happy at the prospect of becoming a father. I had sort of given up hope of things ever panning out in that particular area. Believe me, I’m smiling as I write this. So, anyway, we’re planning to stick around here, a fresh start for both of us. Northern Arizona University could only offer me adjunct classes, so I’m interviewing at Ganado Elementary up in Tuba City. Teaching third grade is not what I expected to be doing at this time of my life, but somehow big changes feel right, so wish me luck in your old stomping grounds.