Off Course

by Michelle Huneven

  “You can’t all fit in the trailer,” Cress said.

  Caleb’s family would be camping in the Rodinger house, in sleeping bags. Sylvia and Evan would be in the trailer, with him.

  “Did you invite them?”

  “It was their idea.”

  “Will I see you tonight?” she said.

  “Got the trailer to clean. Some deep bachelor squalor to dispatch.”

  “Have fun,” she said.

  “Don’t be like that,” he said.

  “Like what?”

  “Sarcasm doesn’t suit you,” he said.

  * * *

  She drove down the hill with Don Dare to see Donna sing. The Sawyer Inn was a two-story wood-sided building at the edge of town. The restaurant was in front, the lounge in the back, a dozen hotel rooms upstairs. Donna packed the place: in among the hotel guests and various locals, Cress recognized Beech Creek Country Club members and a famous painter from Los Angeles with his glamorous young wife. (“They have a place up on Noah Mountain,” Don said.) Donna sang “Blue Bayou,” then “Okie from Muskogee,” which provoked stomping and hollering from the cowboys and loggers at the bar. She called a mandolin-playing sheriff onstage, then Mason the banjo player, and finally a dentist. “I see Felton the Extractor’s brought his fancy Martin ghee-tar tonight—” Donna said. “Well, pull it out, Dr. F., show us how you do!”

  Afterward—it was past one o’clock!—the banjo and mandolin players came over to Donna’s house. She lived on the river south of Sawyer in a raffish neighborhood of old vacation shacks. Her roommate, a cheerful, very large young woman named Norma, had baked chocolate chip cookies. Don built a fire in the woodstove, and there was another hour of music and enough drinking so that even Cress sang the choruses.

  In a sleeping bag on Donna’s sofa, Cress thought of another sleeping bag—and Evan only a few feet away.

  Later still, she was awakened by faint swipes of a guitar chord and bawled words—Donna! Donna! Please, baby. Let me in! Felton the Extractor was serenading! Don Dare emerged from Donna’s bedroom buttoning his jeans. “Occupational hazard,” he told Cress. “Half the guys in any audience fall in love with her.” Don went out, talked to Felton. Got the expensive Martin back in its case, the lovelorn dentist back behind the wheel.

  In the morning, Cress and Donna drank coffee at a picnic table while Don reinforced Donna’s deck railing. The Hapsaw gurgled and gushed just beyond the back gate. “Quinn’s wife is sure around a lot with her pies and snow dates,” said Donna. “I mean, how bad could their marriage be?”

  “He never said it was bad.”

  “I wouldn’t put up with it,” said Donna. “The Meadows is your territory. He has no right to bring her there. That’s disrespectful to you.”

  Cress and Don drove back up the mountain around one. Just above the Hapsaw Lodge, they passed the blue Imperial heading down, dark-haired Sylvia at the wheel, the plump sister-in-law sitting shotgun, the children vague silhouettes in the backseat.

  “Day shift heading home,” said Don Dare. “Night shift on the way.”

  * * *

  “Any coffee made?” he asked, hat in hand.

  She hadn’t expected him so soon, with the flush of family still on him. “I could make some. Or shall we ski?”

  It was their time to ski, three in the afternoon, the shadows long and blue. “Not today,” he said.

  “There’s bourbon, too.”

  “I really shouldn’t drink,” he said. “I stopped for years. I thought I could manage a little. But I can tell. I’m tapering back on.”

  His gaze was frank and direct. As he came inside, she saw a change in how he carried himself: he seemed unburdened, easier, much more adult. Where had all that pain gone?

  “Coffee it is,” she chirped, and busied herself with the kettle, the tap, the Yuban can. He poked the fire, added a log. They sat, finally, side by side, on their usual wicker perch, curled over cups.

  “This probably isn’t any good for you.” He leaned into her for a moment.

  “Probably not,” said Cress. “Or for you.”

  “It has been,” he said. “In ways I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

  “Try me.”

  He glowered at the fire. “Last night Sylvia wanted me to come up and get you to have dinner with us.”

  “And you said…”

  “I didn’t think you were home.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “Would you have come?” he said.

  “Are you kidding?”

  “She knows we’re friends,” he said.

  “One look at us together and she’d know a lot more.” Cress stood. “What were you thinking?”

  “I saw it as a way we could keep on. After I come off the mountain.”

  “I’d say that the family-friend option expired long about Thanksgiving.”

  They drank coffee. The plate glass made its cooling, cracking noise.

  He said, “The longer this goes on, the harder it’s going to be.”

  “I know.”

  “I really don’t want to hurt you,” he said.

  “Good.”

  “But if we keep going, that’s what’s going to happen.”

  “I know.”

  He hunched now, with his elbows on his knees, face in his hands.

  “Louder,” said Cress.

  “I said, We should probably shut this thing down.”

  She had been expecting some sort of announcement like this from the start. She’d imagined it as a blow, a shove into sadness, but in fact, it gave her a small lift. Here was a way over the fence. They could part, and do so more easily than she’d thought possible. She scanned herself for disappointment or pain and found only agreement. Yes! Be done now! Why not stop before feelings grew unmanageable? “I think that’s best,” she said.

  His trademark sharp, shocked glance hit with a sexual pang. But she wasn’t frightened off. “I really do,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t want it to end like this.”

  She tapped his knee. “This isn’t a bad ending.”

  * * *

  She gathered their plastic coffee cups and washed them in hot water with a big squirt of soap. The water up here was naturally soft, so the suds were dense and not easily dispersed. She dried her hands and dialed Donna’s number—Donna would so approve!—but the line was busy. On second thought, she didn’t want to dissipate her resolve with talk. She felt strong, clear. She paged through New Yorkers till dark, then made herself a toasted cheese sandwich and read about excessive consumerism during the Black Death. She closed the screen on the fireplace, the two small chain-link curtains that made the fire seem like a play on a stage. She went up to bed, her mood steady, sturdy. For weeks now, this break had glimmered, a faint gray streak on the horizon. Better to have it over and done, when the cost was only a manageable, almost pleasurable ache.

  There was something off, something unformed in what he’d proposed, an immaturity or denseness: Did he really think she’d be a family friend?

  Later, drifting toward sleep, she came again to the old dogged confusions and crisscrossed tracks of her future. John Bird would take her back, no doubt, as unaffectedly as he had let her go. You’re a bit of a pilgrim, he’d said when she announced she was moving alone to Pasadena and not to Minneapolis with him. Actually, it was worse than that: he’d said: There’s still some Gypsy in you. Yipes. Never mind. She could visit Sharon in London or her old drawing teacher in Tucson. An idea would take hold—as one did when she’d moved to California, and another did when she’d moved up here. She need only keep an open mind, and wait. At least, here at the Meadows, she’d had adventures. Adventures in love: the phrase made her smile.

  In the morning, still in bed, she tentatively probed yesterday’s events. She found a general, faintly fluish ache. She’d miss his low voice, the reliable pleasure of his physical presence. His own tincture of sawdust and bad cologne.

  But Quinn was a dope
. As if she’d sit on the cheap ugly couch with the ever-flowing mill wheel and chat! What lovely teacups, Sylvia. What clean counters and floors. Congrats on the sports trophies, kids. So when’s your dad getting home?

  * * *

  She skied alone in the silent, radiant white world. Out near Camel Crags a coyote with a thick reddish coat trotted amiably alongside her for a full minute before he struck off into the woods. Another day, she watched an enormous pinecone lurch across the snowy road, its invisible engine a gray squirrel. Omens, good ones, she thought. She’d made the right decision.

  By Spearmint Creek, in fading light, she met another skier. Tom Streeter had a rifle on his back, a pistol in a shoulder holster, a sheathed knife on his belt. A pair of binoculars swung from his neck. “Seen that six-pointer come through here?” he asked, studying the tracks. Cress had a hard time speaking; she wasn’t used to encountering heavily armed men when alone in the woods. Tom’s flat gray eyes flickered at her. “Seen anything else I should know about?”

  Cress waved vaguely upstream. “I saw a deer eat a fish once, over there.”

  * * *

  Her parents came up for a meeting with Rick Garsh and the finish carpenters to choose cabinet doors, banister styles, hardware, and tile. Cress retreated to her loft bedroom under the pretext of working. She sat at her desk and read the file for Chapter Three until she had to take a nap. She sprawled on the bed, then jerked awake to see her mother standing down at the foot.

  “Sorry, I thought you were working.”

  “I bored myself to sleep,” said Cress. “It’s part of the drill.”

  “Will you be done soon?” her mother asked.

  “Sure hope so.” She did hope.

  “And what will you do then?”

  “I don’t know, Mom. Find a job.”

  “From here?”

  “I’ll move somewhere. Soon as I save up enough.”

  “With the phone bills you’ve racked up, that won’t be easy.”

  “I said I’d pay. How much?” Cress swung her legs off the bed. “I’ll write you a check right now.”

  “I’ll look at the bills and let you know. Will you go back to Pasadena?”

  “I don’t know, Mom.”

  “But you’re on track.”

  Mmmm. The track: degree, job, husband, babies, PTA president—or, given her credentials, treasurer.

  * * *

  Cress heard her parents talking before they left for the meeting with Rick. Her mother was leaning toward one of the more expensive knob styles. Don’t forget, her father said, to add 10 percent to the price. Sylvia said that she could never forget, not so long as she was married to him; just as she could never forget the price of gas or postage stamps, a gallon of milk. Just this once, though, she would like to own something because it was pretty and felt good to touch, something that wouldn’t tarnish or break overnight, something appealing for reasons other than it was the cheapest one available.

  Sam said that Rick Garsh would be more than happy to provide her with all manner of fancy knobs and cabinet doors, large and small appliances. If she liked, Rick could spend all her money in no time flat.

  Cress stayed in bed until they left the house.

  * * *

  Her mother returned alone from the meeting. “I have to say, the new place is more beautiful than anywhere we’ve ever lived. Though your father is fit to be tied that it’s costing so much more than he thought. He and Rick are over there going through the line items on the invoice, one by one. Way, way, way too much tension for me.”

  “Those two are giving each other a run for the money,” Cress said.

  “Neither had any idea what he was getting into!” Her mother gave a bark of laughter and hit her wedding ring on the table. “This new house will be luxurious, though it’s nowhere near as extravagant as Rick would like it to be.”

  “You should have it exactly the way you want it.”

  “I pick my battles. It’s so hard for your father to part with a penny. Now, Cress—have you met the finish carpenter yet?”

  Cress stilled. “Which one?”

  “The main guy, the older one. He has the most beautiful, deep voice. He should be on the radio with that voice.”

  “I sort of like the younger one better,” said Cress.

  “Homely as a mud fence!” her mother said.

  “But smart and very funny. They’re both pretty backwoods.”

  “Real diamonds in the rough!” said Sylvia. “Though the main one—his eyes are really quite remarkable. Such an unusual light green.”

  “I thought you liked his voice.”

  “Oh, that voice … you should hear it, Cress.”

  “I’ve heard it. You know he’s married, Mom.”

  “Oh honey, I wasn’t suggesting anything like that. I just want you to hear that basso profundo. I wonder if he sings.”

  * * *

  Plump drops of condensation rolled down the lodge windows. On her plate: a slab of gravied roast beef, a shoe-sized baked potato, broccoli with fluorescent-orange cheese sauce. Family Night again. She was at a long table with Don, Brian and Franny, River Bob, and Freddy. Onstage, Donna sang “Coal Miner’s Daughter.” Quinn and Caleb, leathered up in vests, hats, and boots, sat with Rick and Julie Garsh. How dare he drink beer, laugh, eat with them! Cress hadn’t spoken to him in twelve days.

  “Where’re you going?” Franny said.

  She’d stood up without knowing it. “Home.”

  She slammed around the A-frame for a pen, a pad of paper, bourbon, ice. She sat to write in ink the final imprecations, the words that could never be rescinded, that eliminated any chance of reconciliation—or goodwill. The Garshes, Quinn—really? Are you so whorish? Too ad hominem: he wouldn’t read past that. She crumpled the paper, tossed it (aim perfect) into the fire. Dear Quinn, I thought our time together was something to hold close. But seeing you suck up to Rick and Julie Garsh tonight—exuding all that phony mountain man bonhomie—made me sick to my stomach. How I ever let you … The sliding glass door rumbled on its tracks. Her pen stopped. Quick! Crumple and toss. Aim perfect.

  * * *

  “I hated being at that table. With those awful people. And you so near.”

  “Don’t.” He’d reached to touch her face. “Why were you sitting with them?”

  “Caleb and I met Rick to go over the supply list, then Julie showed up.” He tried, and failed, to grab her wrist. “I can’t be up here and not talk to you.”

  He had on his good leather jacket and hat. Cold air bloomed off him, and that faux-musk scent. “Talk away,” she said.

  “I miss our time together. Our hard bed.”

  “You’ll live.” She put the kitchen table between them. “What—you want to start again, only to stop in a few weeks? We’ve already come this far. Let’s keep going.”

  “I haven’t come an inch.” Quinn took off his hat, raked his hair. “I am not in good shape. Every day gets a little worse.”

  Because of her? Cress wondered. How marvelous was she? “What makes you think it will be any easier later on?”

  “It won’t be. But we’ll be apart. Here, I can’t bear it. Having you so close. Skiing out there without me.”

  She’d been stricter with herself, mostly. And maybe not as hard-hit.

  “You can borrow the skis anytime you like,” she said.

  “Goddamn the skis.”

  From these few feet, she considered him anew: his aging, swarthy skin and rocky temper, the coarseness of his hair; his creased, darkening brow. All that sadness. Having him here, in her house again, was a relief, and gave her comfort, despite all qualms. His voice buzzed in her bones, quickened her heart. She yearned to touch him. He lived so easily in his body, like a loping coyote or deer, graceful and keenly alert. But he didn’t even pretend that he wanted her for the long haul, which, finally, made him not so interesting and allowed her some remove. “So what is it that you’re after? Another night? Another month of hanging out, or how
ever long you’re here?”

  One palm swiveled outward.

  “It can’t be like before,” she said.

  “I won’t pester you so much,” said Quinn.

  “That’s not it,” said Cress. “I want to be clear about the future. When it’s over, that’s it. I won’t be stopping by for pie or family chats.”

  “I get it.”

  “And she can’t come up here again. Ever. This is my neck of the woods.”

  He moved with a soft ruck of leather. “Fair enough.”

  * * *

  She thought that she would never again inhale that mix of soap and sawdust and tinny cologne, never clasp his work-muscled shoulders and arms, brace her forehead against that straight bar of collarbone. Never grab the coarse, black-brown hair wired with white or glimpse that roan tooth he so assiduously hid. Lovely to be flung over and around him again, his familiar, lived-in body.

  Fourteen

  They skied to the big rocks. They met again on the wicker love seat, passed a plastic cup of bourbon, climbed the stairs to the unyielding bed. He went home, as usual, with Caleb early Friday afternoon.

  Over the weekend, Cress worked a Ducks Unlimited banquet, where one of the attendees set up a table to sell his tiny, elegant watercolors—his many attempts at duck stamp art. Cress spent her share of the pooled cash tip on a two-by-four-inch portrait in jewel tones of a floating red-breasted merganser. A belated Christmas present, it was small enough to keep hidden, and generic enough, should it be discovered, not to arouse suspicion. She wrapped it cleverly, in a kitchen match box, so he’d slide it open and see: quack, quack.

  Only he didn’t appear Sunday night at his usual time. Nor did he ski on Monday or stroll up later that night. Ditto Tuesday: no Quinn. Annoyed, yet determined not to stalk, Cress did ascertain that his truck was at the trailer. And the Rodinger house emitted the usual banging and sawing. When Wednesday passed with no sign of him, she didn’t know what to think.

  Thursday, she had to work a luncheon at Beech Creek. She’d pulled on green rubber boots to walk down her unplowed driveway when Quinn stepped inside the A-frame. His face was pinched, clayey. “What happened?” she said.