“So this is a nostalgic visit for you—this trip,” I prodded. Tell me about your life. Share with me. Treat me like one of the grown-ups.
“I guess. Let’s try one of those backward moves, you know, as we come out of the top of the eight,” he said. “Are you game?”
“Sure—you mean to the left and back?”
He nodded. “And then I’ll swing around—you’re the pivot point, or whatever they call it.”
We skated the edge of the circle and swept up the middle, then left, backward, around, and then backward again, and around, and one more time.
“Hey,” he cried. “We’re good together!”
Damn right.
“Let’s try waltz position,” he suggested. We rearranged ourselves and began cautiously. “I learned how to skate in waltz position from Skeeter Dicou, the hockey coach in middle school, believe it or not. Bjorn was my partner.”
“Romantic,” I said.
We swirled easily. It was like dancing in a dream.
“We hated it, but old Dicou said we had to be absolutely flexible.” He laughed. “That was his favorite word—flexible.” He skated backward now, pulling me along with him. “I’m talking too much,” he said.
“I like the stories.” Our cold, smoky breaths mingled and dissipated.
“You tell me one, then.”
I tried not to flinch from his direct gaze. “My favorite Christmas was the year we got Ruffy.”
He began laughing. “I’d like to hear your version; I’ve heard Bjorn’s.”
“Well, Ruffy was in my stocking. His little baggy beagle face hung over the edge just so, panting.” I imitated Ruffy’s panting. It pleased me to entertain Richard. “He couldn’t have been in that stocking all that long. I’m sure Dad stuffed him in there just before Bjorn and I came downstairs.”
He nodded, grinning. Beyond his shoulder, a pink glow appeared on the horizon. A couple of cars, the first we’d seen, drove east on the boulevard. He pulled me closer and swung me around sharply.
“Tricky,” I said, but we pulled it off nicely. “Anyway, I was ecstatic to see that dog in my stocking, and he was obviously very excited to meet me.”
Richard shook with suppressed laughter.
“He was very, very excited to meet me. He licked my face and when I put him down, he danced around my feet and begged me to pick him up again—”
“You speak doggie?”
“Of course. Well, then Mother reminded me that there were other things in my stocking besides that dog. So I reached into the stocking and my hand sank into something warm, wet, and putrid—dog doo!”
“Bjorn uses a different vocabulary.”
“Whatever you call it, it was disgusting. I screamed my head off, but in the end it was still my favorite Christmas.”
“I remember the Christmas you got Ruffy for similar reasons, actually.”
“He peed on you when you picked him up!”
“You remember?”
I remember everything about you, I thought. I said, “Mother made you take off your pants, so she could wash them. You sat in the kitchen—that was before it was remodeled—”
“In her wraparound apron in front of the stove,” he finished.
“She probably made you drink Russian tea.”
“No, she gave me hot chocolate with extra whipped cream.”
I saw him as if it were yesterday sitting on one of the old kitchen chairs we used to have, holding the Santa Claus mug in his hands. “Don’t come in here, Katie,” he had yelled at me when I stood in the doorway. “Go away.”
And I had asked Mother, “Are you washing his underpants too?”
I must have smiled, because Richard asked now, “What are you thinking?”
“I was still wondering if you were wearing underpants under that apron,” I said, laughing.
It was then, as we twirled at the edge of the ice close to the snowbank, that my skate caught on a bump in the ice and, losing my balance, I fell against Richard, who struggled for a few brief seconds to keep us vertical but failed. We crashed to the ice, limbs flailing in all directions.
“Are you okay?” Richard hovered over me.
“My glasses—” The whole world seemed hidden behind a gray, gauzy film. I heard a car on the road above us but could not see it, not even a shadow. “I can’t see.”
He twisted around. “Oh geez,” he said. He reached in back of him and, turning, handed me my glasses. “I’m sorry,” he said.
One sidepiece had completely broken off, and the other was badly twisted. Knowing better, I tried to straighten it, and it snapped off in my hands. Luckily the frames and the lenses were almost intact. One lens had a deep crack running through it. “From glasses to pince-nez,” I said to Richard, who still crouched over me. “Do you think it’s an improvement?” I tried to balance the frames on my nose, but they fell into my lap.
“Can you see anything without them?” he asked.
I looked into his face, which was inches from mine. “You,” I said. “I can see you.”
I don’t know if it was the fact that I wasn’t wearing my glasses just then, and I was prettier without them, that moved him to kiss me—that would have been Ashley’s reasoning—or if it was that he had wanted to kiss me all morning, glasses or no glasses, or if it was simply impulsive. Richard kissed me. “Kate,” he said, his lips grazing mine as he spoke. Then his mouth closed down on mine, but it was not, as the phrase book says, “like soldering heat that joins metals.” It was warm like summer. And he did not, as the phrase book says, take my mouth “with a savage intensity,” nor did he “smother” my lips “with demanding mastery,” nor did he “devour” me, nor was it a “punishing kiss.” I wouldn’t have liked any of that macho stuff. His hands—when had he removed his gloves?—held my face, and I reached up and held his wrist. It was like summer, his kiss was. Have I said that?
Frankly, I’m finding that writing a three-paragraph kiss is difficult—impossible, maybe. I’m thinking that what it felt like explicitly and where our tongues were explicitly and that usual kind of three-paragraph detail is none of your damn business.
The phrase book is right: I did “breathe lightly between parted lips” when it was over. We grinned at each other, a little foolishly, maybe. He pulled me up to my feet.
So now it’s time for the full-body kiss, because his arms did slip around me easily, drawing me in, and I wound my arms around his neck. He kissed my hair; I kissed his face, which smelled of soap, and then, “reclaiming her lips, he crushed her to him.”
Even if that were true, I could never write such a thing. Even if his touch was “divine ecstasy,” even if the warmth of him was “intoxicating,” even if my body was “tingling,” I couldn’t write that. It sounds stupid.
I can tell you another thing: he did not “lift me into the cradle of his arms.” I’m six feet tall, for pity’s sake!
And though we were smashed together in a pleasing way, my “soft curves” were not “molded to the contours of his lean body.” This was Minnesota in December. We had so many clothes on, we might as well have been steel-belted radial tires.
I don’t mean to put it down. It was delicious kissing Richard. I was born to kiss him. I just don’t want to talk it to death.
We parted, reluctantly. “I could spend all day here,” he said, his lips on my hair.
“I don’t want to go back either.”
“You think they’d wonder if we didn’t show up?”
“I think they’d call the police.”
Our lips touched lightly. “Mmm.” I don’t know who said it. “Mmm.”
He took my hand and led me back to the place where we had left our boots and the thermos of coffee. I held my glasses up to my eyes to keep from getting dizzy. We sat down on a bench close to the ice, with the quilt that had protected the thermos covering our legs. Richard poured coffee into the thermos cup. “We forgot an extra cup,” he said. “We’ll have to share, cooties and all.” He grinned.
“It’s a little late for worrying about cooties.” I sipped the coffee, which was still hot.
We passed the cup back and forth. He poured more coffee from the thermos. “I couldn’t go to Bjorn’s wedding last summer,” he began, holding the cup in his lap, his long slender fingers folded around it. “I had a Fulbright to study in Germany.”
“I know. It happened pretty fast,” I said. I was twisted toward him, my arm propped up against the back of the bench, my glasses secure in my lap. He was all I wanted to see anyway. I remembered being disappointed when I found out Richard wasn’t going to be there to be Bjorn’s best man.
“In the fall, when I got back, Bjorn, of course, showed me the wedding pictures.” He looked down into the coffee and then at me. “And there you were looking—I mean, I was expecting pigtails and—”
“Dead mice?”
He grinned. “Maybe. I expected to see Bjorn’s little sister—”
“Boo?”
He nodded. “Yeah, that little sister. I think I always had a little crush on you—”
“No, no. I was the one who had the crush!”
“Anyway”—he sipped the coffee—“when I saw the pictures, I wanted to see you, Kate.”
That’s when the sun lifted above the horizon, sending silver rays glinting across the ice, and a chorus of angels descended in a cloud, glitter in their hair, singing, “Gloria, glorissima.” Or perhaps it was one of those hallucinations. My glasses were in my lap, after all. But Richard Bradshaw had come to see me. Moi. We did a lot more kissing.
We pulled apart when a car stopped above us and the doors opened and shut. Richard turned to look. “The police.” He grinned.
I held my glasses in front of my eyes. It was a small boy and his dad.
“Will you hold on to me?” the boy asked. He carried brand-new skates.
“You bet,” his dad said.
I watched Richard. “What goes around, comes around,” I mused.
“Come on,” he said, screwing the lid onto the thermos. “Let’s let them have the place to themselves.”
The rest of Christmas day, which is Chapter Nine, continued with an embarrassment of riches, emotionally speaking. When we got home, everyone sat around the kitchen table eating Danish (or “Swedish,” as my father calls them) with coffee. They were a disheveled-looking bunch, still in pajamas. I liked it. They looked like a family.
“What in the world happened to your glasses?” Mother asked. I was holding them up to my face with both hands.
“We fell down and so did the glasses,” I said.
“I can only waltz with Bjorn,” Richard said.
“No, no, he’s a great skater,” I said. “My skate caught on the ice—”
“There’s snow all over your hair. Was it snowing?” Mother asked.
“It just started a few minutes ago. It’s snowing really hard now,” I said, brushing the top of my head. I began laughing, helplessly. I’ve been kissing Richard, I thought.
Richard, who must have been thinking just about the same thing, grinned. “We took the convertible with the top down—hope you don’t mind. There’s only a little snow in it.”
“You and Boo went skating alone?” Bjorn’s credulity was stretched. “In the convertible?”
“Kate and I went skating alone in the convertible,” Richard corrected. His arm went around my shoulder. “And we had a terrific time.” He was owning me as an equal in front of Bjorn—in front of everyone. My face flushed with satisfaction.
“Yes, terrific about covers it,” I said.
Mother looked at Dad. Bjorn looked at Trish. Fleur locked eyes with me as usual, a funny smile curving her lips.
“I don’t think we were missed,” Dad muttered.
“Something’s going on,” Bjorn said.
“Good guess, Einstein.” Trish patted the top of his head.
“Any Danish left? I’m starving,” I said.
“Me too,” Richard said.
Mother passed us the plate of Danish. “Take two.”
WE DIDN’T OPEN presents until everyone had showered and changed.
Richard gave me a volume of Dylan Thomas and changed the inscription in the front immediately, crossing out “Boo” and writing in “Kate,” lengthening “Rich” to “Richard,” and adding “With love.” “It needed revising,” he said, handing it back to me.
He liked the book on the Boundary Waters a lot “Let’s go on a canoe trip next summer.” He was looking straight at me. “You want to?”
Bjorn, who was pulling a new sweater over his head, said, “Great idea! We could drive to the end of the Gunflint Trail, leave our car at—”
Trish tugged at his sweater. “I don’t think you’ve been invited.” She laughed.
“You’re kidding.” He looked like a hurt puppy.
I burst out laughing. “Let him come, Richard,” I said. “Let the big baby come.”
Then I got chased around the house by Bjorn, who made wild threats to lock me in my room until I was thirty.
The rest of the morning passed peacefully. Dad had gotten fly-tying equipment, as well as a new fly rod—a Sage, which is supposed to be superimpressive but looked like anything you could get at Target or Wal-Mart. When he learned that Richard had been tying his own flies for years, he attached the vise to the dining room table and made Richard teach him how to make “woolly buggers.”
Fleur and Mother sat together in the kitchen poring over recipes for the Christmas cookbook. Fleur said she would be the guinea pig and try all the recipes this spring. “That way,” she said, “if some instruction isn’t clear, we can revise the recipe.”
I wondered if she wouldn’t like having my mother for a mother. The idea made me sad.
I sat on the sofa and read some Dylan Thomas, but between having to hold up my glasses and having to read through the crack in one lens, it was easier to do nothing but listen to the English carols playing on the stereo. Once I brought my glasses up to my face to look across the room into the dining room at Richard’s dark head next to my father’s, bent over the vise. Would I dislike him one day? Would I throw a blender at him? His head shot up unexpectedly. Our eyes held across the space of two rooms. “Merry Christmas,” he called. My dad glanced back and forth at Richard and me and bent back down to finish the stone fly he was trying for the first time.
“Merry Christmas,” I said. Throw a blender at that head? Never.
I must have fallen asleep, because I didn’t hear the doorbell ring, didn’t hear Ashley come into the room. It was as if I awoke in her midsentence almost. She was showing me her new diamond earrings. “They’re one carat each,” she squealed. “From Hudson’s.” Her voice was too loud, the inflections too exaggerated. She was playing to Richard in the other room.
“Wait.” I felt disoriented and then, realizing my glasses were in my lap, held them up to my face. “They’re lovely,” I said. I wondered how her mother, a kindergarten teacher, could possibly afford two carats of diamonds. Ashley must have really pushed her to her limits. “And I got this new dress I wanted too.” She had brought it with her in a Dayton’s shopping bag, a beaded burgundy two-piece dress. She held it against herself after making sure to move out of Richard’s line of vision. Not that it mattered. He wasn’t interested. He and Dad crouched together over the table, tying impossible knots with nearly invisible thread.
“It’s stunning,” I said, and I wasn’t lying.
She folded it back into the bag and whispered, “I’m wearing it on New Year’s Eve. I really hit the jackpot this year.”
Did she mean with Christmas presents or with Richard as her date for New Year’s or both?
“Santa Claus must have struck it rich.” My head had been on the sofa pillow, but now I sat up.
“Oh, she always says she doesn’t have money, but she does.” Ashley referred to her mother. She squeezed herself down onto the sofa in the space where my head had been, where she could get a clear view of Richard in the dining room.
“What happened to your glasses?” And, without waiting for an answer, lowered her voice to a whisper. “Did he give you anything?”
“Which question would you like me to answer first?”
“Oh, sorry.” She giggled. “The glasses.” She pretended that our relationship was the same. Had it changed only for me? I knew I would never again ride to school with her, or share homework, or entertain her when some boy was not available. I would not be her sidekick.
“I broke them skating,” I said.
“Yesterday? I didn’t know you—”
“This morning,” I said. “Richard and I went skating this morning.” I looked her straight in the eyes. If I had not known her so well, I would not have seen the almost imperceptible change behind her eyes when I said “Richard” instead of “Rich.” Richard and I. It was so small, that alteration, it could not be called a change of expression—just a tiny light of recognition, of suspicion maybe.
“Did you do it on purpose? You look terrific.” Her voice was low, conspiratorial.
Too ridiculous to answer.
“Bummer,” she said. “Did he give you anything?”
I held up the book. “Dylan Thomas,” I said.
“Oh, a book.” I could tell that this was not something she would have wanted from him, and that she was delighted that I had received it. She didn’t open it. Was I disappointed?
“Did you give him anything?”
“A book on the Boundary Waters.”
She feigned disappointment in me. “You should have let me go with you to shop.”
Suddenly, bad marriages came into clearer focus. I had had a bad marriage with Ashley, I realized, in a metaphorical sort of way. And now I wanted to throw a blender at her sexy little head.
“Oh, here’s your present.” She took a carefully wrapped package out of her canvas bag. “Merry Christmas,” she said, leaning her cheek briefly against mine.
The Unlikely Romance of Kate Bjorkman Page 9