For his part, Kyle accepted our praise and congratulations with his usual shrug, and I tried to rein in my tendency to be overly effusive, which Nadina had told me frankly was “friggin’ embarrassing.” The students planned on hitting Dairy Queen after the game, so James and I headed out to the parking lot.
“Give you a ride home?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Thanks—it’s not raining. I think I’ll walk.”
“Can I walk with you, then?”
Hesitating, I nodded shyly, and we started up the hill. Since the open house we had seen each other a few times, once for the promised walk around Green Lake and coffee, and the other times briefly at work or Camden School events like today’s basketball game or last week’s mentor-student indoor rock-climbing activity. James had behaved himself more circumspectly than even I would have wished, I had to admit. There had unfortunately been no need to ask him not to fawn on me in public—putting his arm along the back of my chair at the game had been the most audacious thing he had attempted—and on our walk he had devoted himself to getting to know me better, asking about my family, my childhood, my likes and dislikes. Taking my cue from him, I had done the same.
Unlike Troy, who was the youngest of three brothers, James grew up sandwiched between a pair of sisters. Both of these sisters were married, one living in Spokane and one in Richland, just a few blocks from his parents, and I gathered from some of the comments he dropped that he was the petted family darling, something for the women to worry about and focus on. How was poor James? When would he settle down and move back to eastern Washington to be near the rest of the family? Never mind that there was no video game industry in the Tri-Cities; in his mother’s opinion, James could do just as well working as an engineer in Hanford’s vitrification plant. “Technical is technical,” she declared. “Or you could drive UPS like your cousin Ashley’s husband. They have a great benefits package.” James relayed this remark good-humoredly. “All the people who tormented me in high school still live in Richland, working the gas stations and Jiffy Lubes—I’d be afraid whenever I had to gas up my UPS truck.”
It made me squirm to think I was probably a couple years ahead of his big sister in high school, not to mention imagining what his womenfolk would think of James dangling after an unpromising, older widow, when I’m sure they thought most women not half good-enough for him. At least I wasn’t twice-divorced with three children from different fathers. Sigh. And “dangling” didn’t really describe his behavior. Maybe he had taken to heart my claim that I wanted to hang out as friends and was already dating someone else. When I had made such a claim, I’d thought in all sincerity it was what I wanted, but it didn’t stop me from feeling regret mixed with my relief.
“Were Kyle’s parents what you expected?” asked James, breaking into my dissatisfied thoughts. It was a chilly, misty day, and I was glad to have the uphill walk to warm me up.
I laughed. “Not at all! If it weren’t for Mrs. Bateman’s obvious resemblance to Kyle, I might have suggested they switched babies on them at the hospital. Imagine Kyle having such a hard-nosed businessman for a father—one who must have been a lord of all creation in high school.”
“It makes sense to me,” James countered. “Kyle’s been pretty clear that he doesn’t want to fill his father’s shoes. Maybe fear that he couldn’t turned into an effort to sabotage himself.”
Pondering this, the pieces clicked together. “You’re right. That’s almost what Mrs. Bateman was saying—that Kyle had to differentiate himself. He wasn’t going to be a star athlete; he has no interest in business; and his dad seemed to have big college expectations for him. Well, Kyle took care of those, though it sounds like he’s traded in one kind of burden for another. I think Mr. Bateman isn’t going to let him just go do whatever he wants now—he’ll just give up on those top computer-science schools and shoot for one tier down.”
James nodded. “At least Mrs. Bateman isn’t afraid to speak her mind—she’s definitely all for Kyle choosing his own destiny. I think she’ll keep pushing back on her husband.”
“That surprised me,” I wondered. “She looked so fragile and retiring. I would’ve guessed Kyle’s dad wore the pants in that family, but I think she may have at least one leg on.”
After a beat, James said, “Who wore the pants in your marriage?” He had such a natural way of asking things that it was rather like talking with Nadina. There would be no uncomfortable tears shed on my behalf, no awkward shoulder pats.
I grinned. “It was like there were several pairs of pants in our marriage, and depending on what it was, sometimes Troy wore them and sometimes I wore them and sometimes we both had a leg on. I did all the money stuff, but in lots of other areas, I felt comfortable letting him cast the deciding vote.” I laughed shortly. “And sometimes we still fought over the pair of pants and ran different directions and split them down the seam.”
“Something funny?”
“We were married eight years, and the holidays never did get sorted out,” I explained. “In fact, it got even worse after Min was born because then our families really wanted to monopolize us. We would end up trying to please both sides and getting in huge fights ourselves.”
“So where will you be this Christmas?”
“Don’t tell Daniel, but I think Perry and my parents are planning to congregate up here, and I’ll probably have to do some time with my former in-laws as well, with and without my family. Should be a blast,” I added, unable to keep a note of sarcasm from my voice. “What about you? Will you head across the pass to Richland?”
“Yes, ma’am. Go bounce my nieces and nephew on my knee, hear about my mother’s latest career plans for me, and probably get introduced to at least one homely friend of my little sister’s who has a great personality.”
“You’re awful!” I cackled, pushing him.
Quick as lightning, he grabbed my hand and hung on to it. “Want to get some dinner tonight? I could skip singles.”
For all that I’d been worried he didn’t like me anymore, I felt a wave of panic and pulled my hand away, balling it in a fist and answering lightly, “I cook on Wednesdays. And you should go to singles because you’re most definitely single. How will you keep rejecting your little sister’s homely friends, if you can’t say you’re making an effort to resolve the problem yourself?”
“I am making an effort,” replied James dryly. “But sometimes the cure is trickier than the disease.”
We had reached the Palace doorstep. Ignoring his comment, I asked, “Will you come tomorrow night for open house?”
“Do you want me to?”
“Yes,” I said meekly. “Very much.”
“Then I will.” Before I could react, he leaned forward suddenly and kissed me on the cheek. My hand flew to my face, and I saw him grin, as he turned away, whistling, and headed back down the hill to Camden School.
Chapter 24: Home Truths
Joanie was playing with her food and driving me nuts.
Phyl and I were verbally sketching out our Christmas decorating plans: who would get the tree, whose nativity sets we would put where, what the outdoor lighting scheme should be, and so on. Ordinarily Joanie would have plenty of opinions, but for the past ten minutes she sat in sullen silence, pushing food around her plate listlessly.
“What is the matter with you?” I demanded waspishly. “Are you not in the mood for Christmas or the hash I made or both?”
She looked up at me with hollow eyes. “Don’t talk to me. You lack sympathy, Cass. Phyl, tell her.”
“Tell me what?”
Phyl laid down the box of multi-colored icicle lights for which she’d been studying the energy usage graph. “I think Daniel won’t object if I put up lots of these—the LEDs use so much less electricity, and I can run them on a timer.” Joanie made an impatient sound, and Phyl added quickly, “Roy is giving Joanie a weird vibe.”
“‘Weird vibe!’” shrieked Joanie indignantly. “He’s suddenly saying he n
eeds some space!”
This was news. I tried, but couldn’t recall, this ever happening in Joanie’s dating history. Of course there was that guy who she claims dumped her freshman year in high school, but Phyl and I suspected she’d made that story up so that other women wouldn’t find her too obnoxious. “Back up,” I ordered. “What are you talking about?”
“Ever since he came back from Florida—you know, at Thanksgiving—he’s been distant,” she complained. “Before he left, he was starting to talk serious, asking me things like how I felt about kids and what I pictured when I got married.”
“Well, no girl has had more opportunities to picture herself married than you,” I interrupted. “Some women never even snag one fiancé, and you’ve had three.”
Her eyes narrowed irritably. “This is what I meant, Cass. You lack sympathy.”
“Roy knows about your three ex-fiancés, doesn’t he?” I persisted.
Stabbing a chunk of sweet potato with her fork, Joanie confessed reluctantly, “I just mentioned Keith, and then I fudged the other two into ex-boyfriends.”
“Ex-boyfriends!” I echoed scathingly. “You’re like the Henry VIII of engagements. You can’t blame Roy for not wanting to be Anne of Cleves.”
“Who the hell is Anne of Cleves?” hollered Joanie, losing patience. “I want to talk about me!”
Phyl laid a cautionary hand on my arm. “Do you think he was going to propose then got cold feet, Joanie?”
“I don’t know what happened,” she snapped. “Yes. No. Maybe. All I know is that Sunday after church he tells me he wants to slow down a little, and I’ve been waiting for him to call since then, and here it is Wednesday.”
“Do you even want to marry him?” I asked point-blank.
Not surprisingly, Joanie waffled. The first two times she began to speak, she thought better of it, and she finally even took a giant bite of dinner to stall. “Yes, of course I do,” she insisted, after swallowing it down with a sip of water. “That is, not right straight away. I mean I like him a lot. Oh, hell, I don’t know if I want to marry him, but I don’t want him to break up with me! I want to decide. I want to dump him, if there’s going to be any dumping.”
“You,” I replied, “are as bad as Daniel.” Ignoring her indignant gasp, I pressed on. “You don’t sleep around, but you have the same habit of holding back in relationships and shying off from commitment. To get out of real intimacy, Daniel tells himself he’s bored, and there’s always someone new and interesting around the next corner. You, on the other hand, flirt with real intimacy until it comes too close, and then you run away. But it’s the same thing, in the end. You both just have the good fortune to be unnaturally attractive; otherwise you wouldn’t have nearly as many victims to try this on.”
Phyl’s eyes were round and Joanie was sputtering by the time I finished my little lecture. It wasn’t that I’d never laid it all out there before in our friendship, but losing everything had stripped me of patience and diplomacy.
I was pretty sure Joanie would let me have it in return, and she didn’t disappoint. “I’m afraid of intimacy? Me?” Her voice rose an octave, and she was soprano to begin with. “Who the hell is it who’s been hiding out in a cave the past year and a half? Don’t tell me about those dumb teenagers you’re hanging around with or those nerdy programmers at Free Universe. If anyone with potential tries to get closer, you’re the ice queen—look at how you’ve been keeping James at arms’ length! And don’t give me that ‘it’s too soon’ crap, Cass! You know perfectly well you’re just afraid.”
“Not without good reason,” interjected Phyl, but I cut her off.
“So I’m afraid!” I conceded. “‘Once bitten’ and all that, but what on earth are you afraid of?”
Her temper evaporated, and she deflated abruptly. “I don’t know. Probably of divorce. My family isn’t really big on marriage, if you didn’t notice. I guess I think if I could just find that perfect soul mate, divorce wouldn’t even be a possibility.”
“I don’t believe in soul mates,” I declared. “There are six billion people on earth, and about half are men. Are you telling me that out of three billion men, you think there’s only one perfect person you’re compatible with? I bet there are at least 100,000 I could make a marriage work with, but I’m pretty easygoing. Still, I bet there are at least 25,000 men who you could stand to have around for the next fifty years.”
“You think Roy is one of the 25,000?”
“Sure, but I thought Keith was, and Peter was, and Steve would’ve worked, too. They were all good Christian men who loved you. Not ugly, not dumb, not mama’s boys.” I covered her hand with my own. “If you like Roy, and you haven’t ruled him out, why don’t you just ask him tonight what’s going on? You’re not usually afraid of being direct.”
“Understatement,” said Phyl.
Joanie fidgeted. “I’ve just never been in this position. But, yes—yes, I will ask him. Even if he breaks up with me, I’ll be expanding my emotional horizons. Come on, Phyl, we better head over for Chaff. That Roy just better show up.”
As Phyl was pulling her coat on, she ran over and added in a low voice, “I wanted Joanie to run our decorating plan past Daniel, but she’s such a grump—if you get a chance—?”
Suppressing a sigh, I nodded. Things had been rather awkward between Daniel and me since our midnight conversation the other week, and I couldn’t tell if I was the problem or if he was. He was quieter, to be sure, and I was uncomfortable, so the few conversations we had in the interim were stilted. But clearly his new interest in making normal-people conversation had outlasted the one night, and now I found that I was the one being evasive.
After the girls left, I cleared a space at the table for my Free Universe projects. Riley had made all kinds of edits on my truffle-hunting pig draft, and I riffled through the stack of pages, shaking my head. He seemed to be laboring under the assumption that gamers would appreciate each pig having its own distinct voice, realism apparently having its limits. An hour later, I had nothing to show for my time other than a few random pig exclamations (“Oinkreka!”) and a whole lot of other lines I’d crossed out in frustration. No wonder farmers chopped them up and made them into bacon.
A rustling and thumping on the front porch drew my attention, and glad of the distraction, I hopped up to investigate. Peering through the safety glass I made out lots of greenery and a bright blond head, and throwing open the door, this strange sight resolved itself into Daniel, wrestling a six-foot Christmas tree up the steps. “Daniel!” I cried in delight. Had he been any other person on earth, and had he not been struggling with a heavy fir tree, I probably would have hugged him, but as it was I settled for clapping my hands and bouncing on my toes in excitement. It was a beautiful Douglas fir, and I inhaled the sharp scent with delight, squidging against the wall so he could get by. “I can’t believe you did this! Phyl and I were just debating whether we should hit up Wayne or Roy to help us get one home.”
Daniel looked absurdly pleased by my response. “You only had to ask me. I didn’t know if you girls already had a stand, so I bought one too. Can you get it out of the passenger seat?”
Backing out of the driveway was a pick-up truck, which answered the question of how on earth he got the tree home, and I wondered how much extra delivery cost. Zipping back inside, I directed Daniel to the corner Phyl and I had chosen for our potential tree, and between the two of us we managed to get the trunk into the stand and adjust the screws so it wouldn’t tilt. “It’s perfect, Daniel!” I rejoiced. “Thank you so, so much.”
“When were you planning on decorating it?” he asked.
“Well, we didn’t even imagine we could get one before the weekend, but now that we have one, I’d better get started tonight, so everything will look nice for tomorrow’s open house.”
I don’t know exactly how it happened, but the next thing I knew Daniel was in the garage with me, helping me get down various boxes of decorations. Nor did he beg off
once we were inside; when I was lifting the lid off the first plastic container of ornaments, Daniel was perched on the arm of the couch, digging into his dinner.
Like an idiot I started with my own ornament collection—had I thought about it I would have consigned it to the attic for a couple years. “When my Grandma McKean died, I got her little glass birdhouse ornament—she was a big bird-lover,” I said eagerly, rummaging through the top layer and not bothering to worry about whether or not Daniel gave a rip about my grandmother. “I hope it’s not broken.” Grabbing a likely-sized lump, I ripped the tissue paper off to discover, not a glass birdhouse, but rather a pair of ceramic booties emblazoned with “Baby’s First Christmas,” followed by the year and, handwritten, Min’s birth date. Tomorrow.
Really, I had been doing okay about Min’s approaching birthday. Okay, well, other than the one afternoon I spent on that website for kidnapped kids that takes a child’s picture and computer-ages it, I had managed to tamp down any other emotions welling up. Having the ceramic booties roll out suddenly into my lap wasn’t fair. Emotional ambush.
I don’t know how long I sat frozen and mute with grief—it could have been one minute or ten; all I know is that after some stretch of time I felt someone gently pluck the booties from my lap, wrap them back up in paper, and replace the lid on the ornament box. “Cass,” came Daniel’s tentative voice. Some still-functioning part of my brain noticed that he sounded uncertain. “Cass, I’m sorry.”
My face was wet. Oh, crap. Crying. In front of Daniel. It seemed to happen more frequently than I liked. Do you mind? I wanted to ask. Your sympathy makes me totally uncomfortable, and I wish you would go back to acting like a shallow playboy. Turning blindly, I flipped the lid off another random box. Phyl’s stuff, thank God. Obviously hers, since it all looked either handmade-by-poor-people-from-various-developing-countries-to-foster financial-independence, or else store-bought but manufactured Responsibly and Sustainably.
Mourning Becomes Cassandra Page 24