by Ruthie Knox
“You sure?” He stopped walking.
“I’m sure.”
“All right. But if I see it, I’ll grab it back for you.” He steered her around to his front, pulling her tight against him. “So, really, how are you doing? You okay? You get any sleep with that racket on the beach?”
“I’m fine.”
“You look tired.”
I am tired. I’m so tired, and I can’t figure a way out of this impossible situation.
It’s everywhere. It’s all over me. I want a hug.
“I’m fine.”
He frowned. “I wanted to do something for you last night. Take you to a hotel, maybe. Give you a back rub. I feel weird about us being, you know, out of sorts.”
His other arm came around her, wrapping her tight. Carmen laid her head against his chest. “You could change sides,” she said.
He stroked her hair. “I can’t do that, baby. I have to do what I think is right, and that means looking out for Roman’s place.”
“Why do you care so much about Roman?”
“I’ve known him a while. He’s a good guy. He does good work.” He stroked his beard, considering. “We’re friends.”
“It’s like you’re talking about a completely different man from the one I know.”
Noah chuckled. “Yeah, I think there’s probably a lot of stuff we don’t see quite the same way. But I like that about you. How sharp you are. How cool you seem.” He lowered his mouth to her ear. “How what you really want is to melt all over me.”
“I don’t—”
“Want to talk about that. Yeah, I know. Tell me what you do want to talk about.”
How you make me melt. Why I like it. Who you think I am, and what you think we might become.
But it wasn’t the time or the place, and she wasn’t the woman to take the risk.
“This,” she said, looking toward the parking lot. “Why are you encouraging this?”
“I know it’s wild, but these folks want to help, and you have to admit it’s getting the job done.”
“I don’t have to admit anything.”
“Aw, come on. Don’t be like that. If we hang in, it’ll get better, you’ll see. This whole thing—” He gestured toward the crowd by the van. “—it’s not going to last forever. That’s what I keep telling myself, it’s temporary. Roman will come back and fix everything, and in the meantime we just keep doing what we have to. You know, I was talking to my son last night—I have a son, Will, he’s four—and he said—”
“You have a son?”
“Yeah. He’s a good kid, you’ll like him. I was telling him about what was going on here, the funny parts, like you do, and he said, ‘It sounds like camping!’ He’s never been camping, but he likes to pretend he’s going camping. He runs around in his underwear and his backpack with this short length of rope tied around his waist—I swear, I don’t know what’s going on in his head half the time.”
Noah had begun kneading her shoulders. He was smiling, that same delighted smile he’d beamed from between her legs, and every word he spoke made her heavier.
Her feet were pools of lead.
“So Will tells me he wishes he was here, because this sounds like the best thing ever. I had to make him promise not to hassle his mom to bring him to Sunnyvale, ’cause he was really into it. And after that, I thought, you know, maybe he’s right. Maybe we just have to go with the flow. Try to have fun. It’s not like this kind of thing happens every day, right?”
“Right,” she said.
You have a son, she thought.
“Here, look.” Noah pulled his phone from his back pocket and swiped his finger over the screen. “That’s him.”
It was. Noah with a little boy, both of them on boogie boards, wet in the surf.
Noah’s son had blue eyes and dark hair. He didn’t look like his father at all, except for the smile.
“I’ve only got him every other weekend,” Noah said. He tapped open an app and started scrolling through more pictures. “We take turns with Christmas and school holidays. Here’s this climbing wall thing he wanted to do at the mall. And that’s him with Mickey Mouse.”
Swimming pool. Go-karts. Chocolate all over his face.
“There’s the bed I got him for his birthday.” A red race car. “He loves cars.”
Noah checked her face and put the phone away. His smile was sheepish. “I overcompensate for not being much of a dad, I guess.”
“I’m sure you’re great.”
She was sure of nothing.
She wanted her clipboard.
She wanted something to feel familiar, certain, fixed.
And for Noah to stop looking at her like he could read her thoughts on her forehead.
Children were messy. Life was messy, and all Carmen had wanted for years was to keep from falling into a hole. To steer clear of further danger and heartbreak, avoid risk, skirt around pain, shut down terror. There was no place in her strategies for children.
“I surprised you,” he said.
“No, it’s—”
“I should have told you before. I was going to, but there just wasn’t a time that seemed good. We were—”
“Too busy fucking like bunnies.”
He didn’t like that. He reached for her.
Carmen took a step back.
Funny how, when she hurt him, his instinct was to gather her close.
Hers was to drive him away.
Her skittish gaze came to rest in the parking lot, where there was now a man with a video camera pointed at her.
“What the fuck?” she said.
Because there wasn’t just a video camera. There was another man with a boom mike. They both had bags over their shoulders, black nylon tote bags that looked as if they contained equipment.
Not amateurs. Professionals.
“Oh,” Noah said. “That must be what Kirk wanted to talk about. He said he knew this videographer who wanted to come out and film.”
“Why?”
“Mitzi and Gus both think it will be a good thing to get the media on this. Get the word out about the Key deer, stop the development in its tracks.”
“There aren’t any Key deer!”
“Mitzi says that Ashley says—”
“What’s the matter with you? Don’t you have a mind of your own? You work for Roman. Not Ashley. Not these—these crazy people. Why do you think I haven’t called the police and had you all evicted from the property?”
Noah wiped his hand over his mouth. “The goodness of your heart?”
“I don’t have any goodness in my heart.”
“I don’t believe that, baby.” He reached for her shoulders.
Don’t call me baby.
Carmen brought her hands up between his arms and pushed them off her. “Look. I haven’t called the police because I don’t want them driving out here and drawing attention to what’s going on. I don’t want some idiot picking up the story, some newspaper reporter or morning radio moron—or, God, a bunch of nature-loving bloggers writing about how the noble Key deer is endangered by Roman’s development. It’s not true. There aren’t any deer.”
“So if there aren’t any, the people who study that stuff will come and figure it out, and then Roman can build, but at least we’ll know—”
“No. That isn’t how it works. How it works is studies and then more studies, and lawsuits and obstructive judges, and articles in the paper, news coverage—it gets all fucked up! Have you thought what it will look like for Roman to have people with signs talking to the cameras about what an evil bastard he is? How easy is that going to make it for him to buy up the rest of the property he needs to get his hands on? How friendly is the Chamber of Commerce going to be, or the people who offer tax incentives? Use your head, Noah. This is bad for Roman. This is bad for everybody.”
“I hadn’t thought about that.”
“Thinking isn’t your strong suit.”
He sucked in a breath, and Carmen hated that she�
��d said it. She shouldn’t have, didn’t believe it, didn’t consider him stupid, but God, she was having such a hard time, and she didn’t have her thumb on anything, anything.
“That was an ugly thing to say.”
I know. I’m sorry.
I like you. I like you so much.
She couldn’t make herself tell him.
“Call these people off,” she said instead. “Or it’s going to get uglier.”
He shook his head. Sorrowful this time. Sad that she’d gone there.
When he lifted his eyes, she could see how much she’d hurt him. She could see that he cared about her, and that was hard, too.
To be cared for, when she hated herself.
“Maybe the video isn’t such a great idea,” he said. “I’ll talk to them.”
He left her there. Alone among strangers, cold in the heat, so cold she was shivering.
Carmen walked slowly to the porch.
She picked up the rock. Weighed it in her hand. Set it aside.
She wasn’t a woman who threw stones. Not normally.
She didn’t run.
She didn’t fall in love.
What she did was bring things under control. This new problem with the videographer left her with only one way to do that.
Those commune people—they wouldn’t listen to Noah. They didn’t care about Roman or Heberto, what was good for them, what was supposed to happen here. They cared about their protest. Their loyalty was to Ashley Bowman.
They cared about ideals, grand gestures, stupid love.
Carmen flipped through her papers until she found the number she’d inked onto the bottom sheet.
Senator Bowman, it said. Private line.
She picked up her phone, took a deep breath, and dialed.
CHAPTER THREE
The morning they left Coldwater, Michigan, behind, Ashley spent half an hour with Carly, bent over the maps on their phones, talking through what it might be fun to see and what they wanted to avoid.
“Chicago,” Carly said. “And Gary, Indiana.”
“You want to go to Gary?”
“I want to not go to Gary. Or Chicago. I hate driving up that way.”
“The Jackson Five were from Gary,” Ashley pointed out. “We could tour their childhood home.”
“Seriously?”
“I have no idea.” Ashley googled it while Carly thumbed over her screen. “Actually, no,” she said after a minute. “There aren’t any tours. And all these reviews say to visit this neighborhood during daylight hours only, and stay no more than a few minutes.”
“Pass,” Carly said. “Let’s go around to the west, through Rockford.”
“What’s in Rockford?”
Carly poked at the screen of her phone. “NickelWorld.”
“Which is?”
“An arcade where you can play for a nickel.”
“That’s what you want to do today?”
Carly shrugged. “Jamie and Dora would like it.”
“Sold. Anything else on your agenda?”
Carly looked over to where Dora was hanging off Jamie’s leg, squealing with laughter as he dragged her around the campsite. “I’m enjoying not having an agenda,” she said with a smile.
Ashley could respect that.
Later, when she presented the itinerary to Roman, he accepted it without complaint, then boxed her in between the driver’s-side door and the Escalade so he could kiss her.
And kiss her.
And kiss her some more.
He’d turned off his phone. After he finished torturing her with unconsummated foreplay, he plucked hers out of her now-limp hand and turned it off, too.
“Let’s ignore the rest of the world,” he said. “Just for today.”
She couldn’t come up with any reason to disagree.
They hit NickelWorld before lunch. Ashley and Carly were profligate with their nickels, losing spectacularly at one game after another. Roman and Jamie played Donkey Kong on the same two nickels for nearly an hour, until Dora started to whine and they all left to grab a snack and get back on the road.
From Rockford, they carried on to Madison, Wisconsin, where they stopped first at the REI.
Ashley tried and failed to get the tent pole fixed. Roman, meanwhile, picked out another tent, an air mattress, and a neat little flint-and-steel tool. Jamie spent five hundred dollars on a lot of expensive camping doohickeys he couldn’t possibly have a use for, then chased Carly around the parking lot with a recycled plastic spork, threatening to poke her in the butt.
Good times.
They caravanned downtown and parked. Roman and Ashley sat on the steps of the enormous white capitol building while Stanley walked a slow circle around it, working out the tightness in his hip and muttering to himself.
Nana and Jamie opted for a free tour of the opulent interior, leaving Carly to hold Dora’s hands as she walked up and down the four million steps and then circled around and around a tall bronze statue of a woman in flowing robes with her arm stretched toward the heavens.
Forward, the plaque said.
Dora got dizzy, plopped onto the statue’s foot, and giggled at the sky.
Ashley stretched her legs out over the stairs. She dropped her head against Roman’s shoulder and let the word beat through her.
Forward.
Eventually, Nana and Jamie emerged blinking from the building and asked about an early dinner before the last push of driving.
“I know a place,” Roman said.
He led them a few blocks to the contemporary art museum, where they climbed a glass staircase to the rooftop sculpture garden. The restaurant was expensive but informal. After some negotiation, they were seated outside, Nana and Stanley sharing a couch and Roman and Ashley standing at a table while Carly and Jamie took turns talking with them and chasing Dora around the garden.
As they looked over their menus, Roman frowned and said, “I thought they’d have more vegetarian stuff.”
Ashley studied hers. “No, it’s fine. There’s a bunch here I can eat.”
She ordered risotto cakes and corn-and-tomato salad, both of which turned out to be amazing. She relished every bite, sipping white wine Roman had ordered and visually tracing the twists and turns of the sculpture visible from their table—a bright snare of metal and sunlight.
Over Jamie’s protests, Roman paid for the meal. He seemed pleased that Ashley had finished her food, more pleased when they stopped for frozen custard and she ordered two different flavors in a waffle cone because she couldn’t make up her mind between pistachio and Moose Tracks.
He made a pig-snuffling noise at her when she took the first bite. She offered him a taste, and when he leaned close she held the cone at just the right angle to smear cold custard all over his nose.
He laughed, so she had to kiss him, and he had to transfer the ice cream from his nose onto hers, at which point Stanley observed that sex made some people unbearable to be around. Nana chucked him on the shoulder, hard.
Roman gave Ashley a napkin, still grinning.
He held her hand on the walk to the Escalade. They were at the back of the group, meandering at Dora’s start-and-stop, investigate-everything toddler pace.
“How far from here is it?” she asked him, careful to keep her voice down. “Where you grew up.”
“Just over an hour.”
“Will we go past it, or …?”
“No, it’s to the west.”
“You came here to Madison a lot?”
“In high school. Once my sister, Samantha, could drive, we’d see artsy movies at the Orpheum down the street.”
“Do you miss her?”
He lifted his gaze from the sidewalk to meet Ashley’s eyes. “All the time.”
She thought about that. What he’d lost, or maybe what he’d given up.
He kissed the back of her hand.
When they got back into the car, he didn’t say anything for a hundred miles.
Forward.
> They found campsites at an unremarkable commercial campground near Green Bay at about eight o’clock. Dora had already cashed in her chips. Ashley set up the new tent, a shocking bright orange, and Roman laid out their stuff inside, inflating the air mattress with a small battery-operated blower and arranging their bags around the sides of it.
Ashley watched him through the screen as he zipped open the sleeping bags and laid one on top of the other. He picked up their pillows last and placed them side by side, then sat back on his heels and scanned the interior of the tent. Leaning way out, he rolled up one tent flap more evenly.
“Well?” he asked, without glancing her way. “Will it do?”
“It looks great.”
He turned. “You should come in and see.”
Ashley stepped out of her sandals, unzipped the flap, and backed into the tent, leaving her flip-flops on the nylon square she’d staked to the ground.
A welcome mat. She’d never seen a tent with a welcome mat before. And here Roman had bought them one.
She supposed it was silly that he’d done all this. Spent good money on a tent they might only use once. Made them a bed. Provided a welcome mat.
She sat on the air mattress. Tested the bounce.
When she lay down on her side, Roman did the same, testing the stability with an elbow before he gradually lowered his weight.
Their eyes met.
It didn’t feel silly.
It felt like a homecoming—the sort of homecoming where you worked all day until your eyes felt gritty and you needed a shower and food before you could even begin to unpack everything that had happened to you, and then you opened your door and found the person behind it who would care.
The one person who would worry about your tired feet.
The person who would tell you to sit down and take a load off, hand you a beer, give you ten minutes before he even asked about your day.
When Roman scooted closer, studied her face, trailed blunt fingertips over her hairline, that’s what she felt. That she’d come home. To this feeling. This man.
“It’s comfy,” she said. Because she couldn’t say the rest of it.
“I hope it doesn’t deflate in the middle of the night.”
“We’d be fine if it did. Have you ever slept on the ground?”
A flicker of emotion in his eyes. “Yes.”