Off Course

by Michelle Huneven

  And rightfully so, Donna added. As an aide at Evan’s school, she saw him on the playground. He was shy and quiet and terribly sweet. His classmates’ offhand savagery—their loudness, shoving, and teasing—frightened him more of late, and he’d taken to parking himself by any adult who wouldn’t shoo him off.

  Cress was grateful for the information and wanted to hear more, but Donna’s eyes had started to shine. “I have some news, too,” she said.

  “I heard a little something,” Cress said.

  “It’s not little.” Donna was in love. In love and mesmerized by twenty-two-year-old Scott. “Wait till you meet him, Cress. He’s the most gorgeous man you’ve ever seen. I’m dying to have his babies.”

  * * *

  In the fall, the Hapsaw’s north fork shrank and stilled, and those channels cut off from the main flow stagnated. Cress caught whiffs of it when a breeze came up from the river as she drifted through her sparsely furnished house, drinking coffee, reading books, sometimes sitting at her typewriter. She was on her own here now most of the time. Two afternoons a week, she went down to serve her golf ladies lunch, and there was usually a banquet on weekends.

  Reliably, Quinn came to her Tuesdays and Thursdays, and sometimes for a stray few hours when he could. As he walked through her door, a sandbag slid off her chest, her vision brightened, relief rushed in like a fast-acting drug, a shot of liquor knocked back. They cooked together: pork chops, biscuits, green salads. He browsed through her newspapers and magazines and offered up whatever might interest her. The situation in Lebanon was worsening. The actress turned princess was dead in a car wreck. People in Chicago had died from poisoned Tylenol. Oh, and Glenn Gould—wasn’t he the pianist she liked so much, the hummer?—he too had died.

  For days she listened to the English Suites, the Well-Tempered Clavier, setting the little record player’s arm to automatically repeat.

  Because she expressed an interest, Quinn brought over a fly-tying kit, clamped the tiny vise to the table, showed her how to wrap feathers and tufts of fluff onto gold hooks with black thread; a swarm of Royal Coachmen collected by her salt shaker. When he stood to make the pan gravy, Cress sat and tied a fly using her hair, some yellow straw from a place mat, the fuzz from her blue mohair sweater. “See what you catch with that,” she said.

  By late October, they were building fires in the ugly but efficient woodstove—it looked like a blackened fifty-five-gallon drum on its side, with a small isinglass window through which they watched the flames curl and lick from their usual creaky perch, the wicker love seat. Without fail, before he left, they went to bed. Their bodies still snapped together like magnets.

  She stayed hopeful for a day or so after his visits, then dread and sadness gathered again, like beggars tugging at her hem, stealing into her rooms. Over the long weekend, the need to talk about him grew intense and constant, as if she had to conjure him in words, and discuss all he’d said and done that week in her search for clues to her future. (“I don’t know how I thought I could live without you,” he’d said. But then he and Sylvia drove to Sacramento for a weekend to see Annette at Davis—he’d been hundreds of miles away without Cress knowing, and she’d only learned about it afterward from a chance remark.)

  She felt like a child, perhaps like Evan himself, in trying to fathom what the adults were up to, a blurred and fragmentary mystery, with rare hints offering only the most oblique, partial insight.

  Tillie now greeted any mention of Quinn tersely. What’d you expect, going back? You’ve lost any strategic advantage you had. Don Dare heard her out, so he could have his turn, first to mourn Donna, and then to praise Elise, the long-limbed, gawky pediatrician with small, clear eyes and a managerial briskness, who had big plans for him.

  At Beech Creek, over shift drinks, Cress found a confidante in generous, nonjudgmental Lisette, who took it in stride that Cress’s boyfriend was married and could not be named.

  * * *

  She met him at the Staghorn on a Thursday afternoon—they needed to get out, drive around—and after a beer each at Murdock and Fountain Springs, they stopped at the Koffee Kup for a quick bite. Once, Quinn said, he’d been eating breakfast here with Caleb—steak and eggs, exactly what he was having now—only that time, when his food came, there were black flecks all over his plate—the eggs, the hash browns, the steak. Caleb’s meal was fine. But his was not. He showed the waitress. Had the cook sprinkled on some spice? The waitress took his plate back to the kitchen. The cook was puzzled and prepared a new plate, which looked okay at first, but soon, Quinn saw the black flecks over everything.

  He sent the plate back again, and around the time his third batch of eggs was sputtering on the grill, he remembered trimming his beard that morning. “I was too embarrassed to tell the waitress, but I left her a ten-dollar tip.”

  His stories, Cress realized, never involved Sylvia, Annette, or Evan. Had he set his family off-limits to her? Was he being polite, pretending that her rivals did not exist? Or had his marriage and family life been so uneventful that nothing amusing, nothing worth relating ever happened? Or was it Quinn’s sense of balance and fair play: since they knew nothing of her, she’d know nothing of them?

  * * *

  In the dusty, dim Coach ’n’ 4, Dalia waved from the door. The next day at Beech Creek, Cress apologized for not inviting Dalia and the judge to join them.

  “It is odd,” Dalia said, “how out in public Quinn is with you.”

  “He assumes everyone’s as private and closemouthed as he is,” said Cress. “Or maybe he wants to get caught and it’s his way of forcing the issue.”

  “I’d bet on forcing the issue,” said Dalia.

  * * *

  Thanksgiving came, and then Christmas, those times of deep family burrowing. He vanished for weeks. Cress worked long hours at the club, then roamed her small house, restless, furious, and bereft, until the calls came late at night, whispered, barely intelligible, from his mother’s bedroom, or the wall phone in his own kitchen. I’m thinking of you. I miss you. I hope you’re having a wonderful holiday.

  * * *

  She walked every morning to the top of Dawkins Lane, a steep mile up, then back. Every day, she passed a man with a chest-length beard and a long, faded red ponytail lunging small white spotted ponies in a ring. They began to wave to each other, and one day he walked down to the road and introduced himself.

  (“Oh I know Trey Kidman,” Quinn said. “Pop and I put in his cabinets. He called us a month later to say the hardware failed on a drawer. We’d used high-quality German sliders, so we went to see if they’d got a defective set. We opened the drawer—a bottom drawer, more’n a foot deep—and they’d filled it with dried beans—fifty, seventy pounds of ’em. Drawer was sagging off its rails.”)

  Trey waved her down, gave her chard and onions. Mint, beets, pesto he’d made last summer. He hailed from the Pasadena area, too—Arcadia, he said. In the early seventies, the rocky, cheap land on Dawkins Lane enticed him and a few fellow city-bred trustafarians to try the country life. You could buy a four-bedroom farmhouse with a barn and thirty acres for the price of a one-bedroom condo in Duarte. He and his wife bought fifty acres and built their own glass-and-wood home. “Dawkins Lane had a great little communal vibe for a while,” Trey said. The newcomers bought milk goats, pigs, ponies, laying hens, then sought their neighbors’ expertise on animal husbandry and irrigation, which flattered the old-timers and subdued their mistrust. But the never-ending physical work, hot summers, snakes, unenlightened hill folk, and eternally tunneling ground squirrels eroded the novelty. Plus, years without a decent radio station, foreign movies, a bookstore, or—as time passed—Montessori or Waldorf or even private Catholic schools—sent most of Trey’s comrades back to the suburbs. He and his wife stayed, but they had long given up on self-sufficiency. His wife had gone to work at the state hospital, and with her degree from Scripps College, she had risen swiftly through the ranks and was now a top administrator. Trey stayed ho
me, did the cooking and the child care; he gardened, raised those spotted ponies, and generally led the life of a gentleman farmer, pot enhanced.

  When Trey invited her in for a cup of tea, Cress followed him through the wood-walled house with its floor-to-ceiling windows and casual, layered dishevelment of books and papers, clothes and toys. In the kitchen, herbs and baskets hung from beams; a glass conservatory off to one side was filled by oily branching pot plants. While Trey puttered at the stove, Cress studied the cabinets, now dented and grubby around the handles. The cedar still glowed. “I like your cupboards,” she said.

  “Designed them myself, and found a local guy to make ’em. The wood’s soft, so they’ve gotten a little battered.”

  “I like that,” said Cress. “The lived-in look. Who made them?”

  She could not pass up the chance to hear his name.

  “Oh God. Lynn will remember. I wrote it down somewhere. A father-son outfit up the road. See that? Dog food’s in there, and the dogs know it.”

  Long deep scratches had formed a furrowed concavity in one low door.

  Trey sent her home with a spidery branch of marijuana. “Dry it for a week,” he said. “That’ll add a little sparkle to your day.”

  * * *

  Quinn didn’t like any of it: that Trey Kidman talked to her, that she’d gone inside his house, that he’d sent her home with pot, that the branch now hung by dental floss from the wall-mounted can opener by her kitchen sink.

  “I haven’t smoked for years,” said Cress. “I thought maybe you and I…”

  “I’m not going anywhere near it,” said Quinn.

  “Could be fun. Tillie swears it’s an aphrodisiac—”

  “Tillie has a lot of ideas.”

  “Hey! Have you ever even tried it?”

  “Why would I try it?”

  She had never seen this particular snarl on his face—for once, he forgot to hide that roan incisor. “Why, you’re a prude!” She gave him a playful push. “An uptight stick-in-the-mud!”

  He turned away. “Call it what you like.”

  “You’re serious? You really don’t approve?”

  “You have to ask?”

  “God, Quinn, it’s no big deal.” And to prove it, she fed that perfectly good hank of weed to the woodstove.

  * * *

  The banquet waitresses at Beech Creek had suggestions for Cress. She should perm her hair, get contacts, wear more makeup, curl her eyelashes. Did she or did she not have a boyfriend? How could she not know? Well, she should come with them into Sparkville when they partied after-hours. Do a few shots. Snort a little something. That’d get her up and running. Why not? Lots of men hung around, she’d meet someone. “Cress,” said a twenty-year-old, “how come you’re here, working with us? After all your college and stuff. Can’t you get a real job?”

  * * *

  “Quinn Morrow? That’s who you’ve been talking about?” cried Lisette. “I know Quinn, and Sylvia.”

  Lisette’s seven-year-old son had attended a summer science camp with Evan. “Really, Cress? I picture you with someone so much looser and funnier.”

  “He and I had a lot of fun up on the mountain.”

  “He did have a way with the kids,” said Lisette. “They flocked to him. He just didn’t have a lot to say to the rest of us.”

  Cress had noticed Quinn’s affinity for children, and theirs for him. They were drawn to his hat, as to any costume. He’d wag just the top of his fingers to a child staring out a car window or peeking over a café booth and they’d never stop staring and wagging fingers back at him. Dogs, too. Dogs came up for a pat and watched Quinn intently, as if he would tell them what to do.

  “Her I hardly know at all,” Lisette said. “She’s so shy. But always so well put together—especially for someone living in the hills. I remember, she made cupcakes as perfect as store-bought.”

  * * *

  “I may not be faithful, but I am loyal,” he said.

  “Whatever that means.” Cress pulled herself up by the iron bedstead.

  “I may not be great at monogamy, but I am loyal. To my wife. To you.”

  “Ahh—the sophistry of the philanderer,” said Cress.

  “The who what of what?” He climbed on top of her, pinned her arms down, tangled his legs in hers. “Say that again?”

  “You heard me the first time.” And refused to repeat.

  He rasped her cheek with his unshaven jaw. “Don’t sour on me, Cress. Not now. Not yet.”

  * * *

  He showed up at ten in the morning, a first. He had that gray face, that walloped stoop. She’d been dressing for work and only had a few minutes before she had to leave. She made coffee quickly, her hands shaking, scattering Yuban over the countertop.

  He ran the flat of his thumb around the rim of his cup. He looked ill, unsteady, remote. “This is not how I wanted it to go,” he said.

  Someone had blabbed, and Sylvia moved out. She packed a suitcase, took the boy, and went to live with a girl friend somewhere in Sparkville.

  Cress checked a burst of excitement. “How would you want it to go?”

  “You know,” he said.

  “I don’t, actually.”

  “Then you haven’t been listening to me.”

  She’d done nothing but listen to him!

  “I’m listening now,” she said.

  “It can’t have anything to do with you and me.”

  Oh that. Right. Yes. “So she has to say that the marriage is over for her, too,” said Cress. “Or something to that effect.”

  “She says she loves me and wants to stay married, but that this”—Quinn lifted his hand and let it drop—“is unbearable.”

  “For everyone,” said Cress.

  “She won’t see me again till I give you up.”

  “Is that why you’re here?”

  She stood against the kitchen sink with her back to Noah Mountain and steadied herself for the blow. Surely, that’s why he had come, at this bright morning hour, to accomplish the final, necessary thing. He curled over his coffee, glowering, suffering. At least this time he wasn’t doing it over the phone.

  He shivered, as if coming awake. “I can’t bear not to see you.”

  She stood straight in her Beech Creek–issue polo shirt and navy blue skirt. “Here I am,” she said.

  Twenty-Two

  Quinn moved back to his mother’s place so Sylvia could have the Sparkville house. Their old double-wide was full of boxes and furniture from his mother’s remodel, so he set up in the little travel trailer. He picked Evan up from school twice a week and brought him to eat and watch TV with his grandmother before they bunked down in the trailer.

  All the other nights, Quinn came to her. With no fanfare, a life together began. Almost a life. An offhand life. She couldn’t look directly at it, for fear it would dissolve. She certainly couldn’t speak of it, for fear that Quinn, hearing his actions turned into words, might recoil and repudiate them and her. Still, he showed up midafternoons, often with groceries. They cooked together, or they went out to bars and restaurants. They held on to each other on the hard bed and slept the whole night clasped.

  In the morning, he left the house when she went for her walk, or before. He was opening his mother’s kitchen and living room into a great room. Sometimes he helped Caleb on an addition in Sawyer. He rented hours at a wood shop to build cabinets for both jobs and began building furniture on spec. When Cress worked late, she met him afterward for a drink, or they caught Donna’s last set at the Sawyer Inn.

  He was never at her house when she was not. “Why would I want to be here without you?” he said.

  She couldn’t say, Because you live here. He didn’t.

  They drove up to the Hapsaw Lodge to have dinner with Don Dare and Elise, whose crisp, cool managerial manner wasn’t easy to warm to. But she climbed rocks, and had plans for Don and the life they’d spend together. Dalia and Judge Crochet invited them for steaks at the Murdock Grill, and ano
ther time to see Chariots of Fire, followed by drinks at the Coach ’n’ 4.

  Quinn discovered that the small barn at Cress’s house had a mechanic’s bay, a concrete trough, three feet wide, ten feet long, where a person could stand up and work under a car. Quinn changed his truck’s oil there, then showed Cress how to change the Saab’s. He made her do each step. It took her forever to get the plug out. If she ever went into business, he said, she’d have to call it Poky Lube. Or All Day Oil Change.

  * * *

  A small coal of happiness lodged behind Cress’s heart. She was working on the diss again, slowly getting back into it, a couple of hours every day. Better get that degree, she thought, or he’d be choosing between two waitresses.

  If Quinn ever spoke to Sylvia or met with her, he didn’t say. Cress didn’t ask. She knew better than to force an outcome. He had to be with her of his own free will.

  * * *

  “Had a long talk with my mom yesterday,” he said. “She wants to meet you.”

  They arranged for the next day, after Cress fed her lady golfers.

  Running for lemon slices, cups of ice, and tiny pitchers of skim milk, Cress felt more tenderly toward the Hackettes; she saw them as practice for the mother.

  “At the Staghorn?” said Dalia. “That’s weird.”

  “You go to the Staghorn.”

  “Not to meet my future mother-in-law.”

  “We’re just meeting there,” Cress said. “Probably we’ll go out after. For steaks or something.” But she was ad-libbing.

  In Beech Creek’s ladies’ room, she pulled on clean jeans and her fuzzy blue sweater. She shook her fine hair down over her shoulders, brushed it vigorously. Lipstick. Oh, but she had a flat, wide, ordinary face. Quinn didn’t love her for her looks, that much was certain.

  Men in work clothes lined the Staghorn bar. At the far end Quinn and his mother already grasped drinks. His mother was no beauty, either. Nor did she remotely resemble the golf ladies with their brightly colored golf skirts, lacquered coifs, and paste-pearl chokers. The mother had Caleb’s long jowls and a smoker’s leathery skin. Her straight, chin-length bob was a yellowed white.