He gave her a sympathetic smile. “I’m sure that wasn’t the case.”
“And how can you be so sure?” she asked suspiciously. If this was the point where he was going to turn on the bullshit charm, she was planning to finish off her beer and call it an evening.
“I’ve never met Ellie,” he began, “and I’m sure she’s amazing, just as you say. But you had the same mother and father and you’re pretty amazing, too. You’re smart, and you’re funny, and you’re pretty as all hell. If some horny teenage boys thought that it was OK to go out with you and check out your sister at the same time, well then they were assholes and you’re better off without them. But me, I’m just happy to be sitting here with you.”
Sarah stared at Brad open-mouthed for a full 30 seconds before she realized what she was doing and closed her mouth with an audible click. Her previous resolution was gone now. If that was Brad’s version of BS, then she wanted to hear more of it. A lot more.
The silence was getting uncomfortably long, and the way he looked at her was uncomfortably intense, so Sarah tried for a joke to lighten the mood. “Just wait until you meet Ellie,” she offered, and then immediately regretted it. “Not that I’m inviting you to meet my family or anything,” she stammered, regretting the addition even more.
He laughed and lifted his beer for a swallow, his eyes holding hers over the rim of the glass. “Actually I’d like to meet her, and your father. If they’re half as interesting as you, that would be a dinner table I’d enjoy sitting at.”
She looked at him with no small amount of skepticism. “You and my Dad would get along great. He’s a big sports fan, he can probably tell you things about your career that even you’ve forgotten. Ellie knows nothing about football, but she has this way of talking about anything with anybody. You and she would be best friends inside of ten minutes.”
“They sound nice.”
“They can be. I mean, we’ve had our share of fights, especially around holidays after everyone’s been under the same roof for a little too long and tempers start to fray. But Ellie is my best friend, and I know I can count on my Dad for anything. They’ve been there for me, and I try to be there for them.”
He nodded, looking at her with his disconcertingly blue eyes until Sarah felt the need to turn the attention back on him.
“What about you? Do you have any siblings?”
“Siblings,” he said, as if trying out the word to see how it felt on his tongue. “I haven’t heard that one in a while. Brothers and sisters, you mean? No sisters. One brother – Duke. He’s a couple years older. He lives out in Utah, trying to be a mountain man.”
“Seriously? Up in the mountains and everything?”
He grinned. “No, no actual mountains. And I’m making fun of him, which isn’t very nice since he’s actually a really great guy. He’s just not much for people. When I was a kid everyone thought he was going to be the one who played pro ball, he was the god of high school football. But at graduation, when all the big programs in the country were begging him to accept their scholarships, he fooled us all by going into the Marines instead. When he got out, he took his new wilderness skills and went off by himself. I see him every now and then, but I know he’d rather be alone and I try to respect that.”
“Why is that? Did he see anything in the Marines? Is it trauma, do you think?”
“Nah. To hear him tell it, he spent most of his time in-country in the motor pool, fixing up vehicles when they broke down. I just think it’s how he’s made. My Dad, when we were growing up he taught us to be men in the old ways: strong and silent. Duke just took the ‘silent’ part more to heart.”
“You’re not much for silence, are you Brad?” Sarah teased.
He laughed. “Not around you, Sarah. You just pull the words right out of me.”
It was nice, the two of them talking in that darkened bar. In time Sarah began to feel very comfortable with him, and they both leaned back in their chairs and chatted about this or that, sometimes lapsing into a gentle silence that didn’t feel uncomfortable in any way. Sarah was aware that she barely knew Brad, but somehow he already felt like an old friend.
14
The night felt pleasantly cool and almost damp against Sarah’s face after the more stale air of the bar. Lit for the night, the shops along Main Street had the look of an old town as envisioned by Disneyland, like something outside of time that was far too idealized and perfect in its way to be real. She walked for a time in silence with Brad beside her, and she tried to identify that quality that she was seeing but couldn’t quite put a name to. Finally it came to her: authenticity. Tall Pines was exactly what it was and nothing else. The people who lived here were not trying to impress anyone; they weren’t putting on an act or dreaming of the day when they would finally be able to be themselves. They were who they were, and it had never occurred to them to be anyone else. It was refreshing. For the first time during her stay here, she realized how wonderful that could be.
Beside her she could feel Brad struggling for conversation in a silence that was beginning to grow too long. She decided to help him out. “If this were San Francisco, things would just get started right now. You and I might be on our way to dinner now, with maybe a club after.”
“That sounds pretty good right there.”
“Do you wish you were there?”
“Only if you were there, too.”
The flattery made her smile. It had been a while since an attractive man had shown interest in her. Though if she was being fair, she had to admit that it had been nearly as long since she had given men a chance to show interest in her. “Are you always this big of a flirt?” she teased.
“Not at all. Quite the reverse, actually. I guess you inspire me, Sarah.”
She took his arm and enjoyed the feeling of his solid bulk beside her. It felt nice, very nice. She used the connection with him to steer him into a right turn at the next corner, heading home. It was time to bring this evening to a close before it got put of hand.
“I think about going back sometimes,” she said. “I don’t feel ready yet, but I know the day is getting closer when I’ll have to. One way or the other.”
“That will be nice, right?” he asked. “Get back to see your friends? Take care of that other thing you’re not telling me about?”
She looked at him quizzically, and he snorted. “It’s obvious that something went wrong in San Fran, and I’m willing to bet it has something to do with that business thing you were telling me about, the mistakes you made or whatever. If you don’t want to tell me about it, that’s fine, but there’s no point in pretending that you don’t have unfinished business there. It’s written all over your face. And it’s a very pretty face, too,” he added in a teasing voice, with the sort of smile that Sarah guessed he usually flashed to the cheerleaders after the game.
“Unfinished business is a good name for it. And I will tell you all about it, but not tonight. It’s a long story and I’m getting tired.” They were getting close to her cabin now, and she didn’t want him getting any ideas about her inviting him in. “Why don’t you come over for dinner tomorrow and I can fill you in on all the gory details?” she said before she realized what she was getting herself into. Immediately a feeling of anxiety began building in her chest, but it was too late to take her offer back now.
Brad seemed surprised, but at least it was a pleasant surprise. “Yeah, that would be great. I’ll bring … what should I bring? Wine or beer?”
Sarah was so busy mentally kicking herself that she barely heard the question. “Whatever you like. It doesn’t matter,” she mumbled. Mentally she was going over the things she would need to do by dinner time the next day: clean the cabin, decide what she was going to make, go to the store, hopefully find the ingredients she’d need….
“I’ll bring wine. You drank beer tonight, but my guess is you’re more of a wine person.”
“Hmmm,” Sarah responded. She’d already decided to keep it simple –
pasta with some sort of simple sauce. Buy some fresh bread, throw together a salad. It would be OK. She could do this. She’d keep it simple, and she’d wear … oh God, what would she wear?
“Wine it is, then. I’d ask whether you want red or white but you’re not really paying attention to me anymore, are you Sarah? OK, thanks for the invite, I’m looking forward to it. Goodnight,” he said, and leaned forward to kiss her on the cheek.
Sarah accepted the kiss by leaning slightly into it, but otherwise she was barely aware that Brad was there, or that he had kissed her, or that now he was walking away in the gathering gloom, headed back to his father’s place. Her mind was rummaging through her closet and running through the plates and cups in her father’s kitchen. She was pretty sure that there was enough there for two settings, but did anything match? Tomorrow evening was she going to find herself putting out a novelty glass decorated with the picture of a dancing hula girl? There was no telling. As she fumbled for the key in her pocket, she made a note to check the kitchen before going to bed. There was a long list of things to do, and she knew she’d start to feel better as soon as she got started.
15
The following day was something of a blur for Sarah. The night before she had checked the cupboards and found a motley collection of glasses – three water glasses, two wine glasses, and a depressingly large collection of shot glasses that her father had collected in the course of a life that apparently involved more alcohol than Sarah had ever imagined. As a collection it wasn’t going to do for a large dinner party, but it was enough for two, and that was all Sarah cared about. If at some point she woke up and realized that she had invited several people over for a dinner party, she would simply check herself into the hospital and be done with it.
That left two primary things, which Sarah reflexively was thinking of as “deliverables,” as if they were milestones in a software development project. The first was a clean apartment, which was going to involve a fair amount of dusting and quite a bit of vacuuming. Sarah had been good about picking up after herself since she arrived, and it certainly helped that she had been eating most of her meals at the diner, but she had never gotten around to confronting the dust problem and there was no putting that off anymore. After that, there was the question of dinner. Her first instinct was a good one – stick to something easy, which meant pasta – but she found that part of her also wanted to make a good impression, and she wasn’t going to manage that by cooking the sort of meal that the average college student would find unchallenging. She didn’t have an answer for that question, so Sarah did what she always did: she turned to the Internet.
Her first stop was a recipes website, one that she had used before that included a lot of user rankings for the various recipes. By sorting the recipes by user ranking, you could be pretty confident that what you were making was at least conceptually sound. Brad was something of a man’s man, which meant that the pasta should include meat of some sort, and she also guessed that he was the sort of person who liked powerful flavors in his food.
A little bit of searching and sorting and she had her answer: a recipe for a relatively simple Italian dish of pasta, red sauce, and sausage. Serve it with crusty bread and a salad and it should do the trick. She liked that the ingredients included things like “spicy Italian sausage,” canned chicken broth, and frozen spinach – those sounded like the sort of thing that she’d be able to find in the local grocery store. The website also had a nice feature that allowed you to adjust the ingredients for the number of servings, and she spent a few minutes considering her strategy on that front. On the one hand, there would only be two of them, but on the other hand one of the two was enormous and was probably used to eating large, hearty meals. Eventually Sarah settled on four servings – just to be safe – and clicked the button to adjust the amounts. She found a slip of paper and wrote down everything she needed, then headed for the door.
Her first stop was the flower shop, though she knew that she was shopping for herself, not Brad. She had a strong suspicion that he wouldn’t notice a vase full of flowers if she wore it on her head as a hat, but still – a little life and color would feel soothing, and right now a little soothing would go a long way. She breezed into the shop and breathed deeply of the air inside, heavy with life and layered aroma. Yes, this is just what she needed.
“Can I help you?” she heard from the back of the shop, and then Diane came out, wiping her hands on her apron. “Oh, it’s you! Sarah, you don’t come in nearly often enough. I never see you!” she said in a mock-scolding voice.
Sarah smiled. Already she felt better; there was something about Diane’s manner that put her at ease. She would have made a wonderful mother. “Hi, Diane. I’m having someone over for dinner tonight and I need something for the table. I was thinking maybe sunflowers?”
“Someone?” Diane asked, her voice taking on a theatrically conspiratorial tone. “Who is this someone? Anyone I know?”
“He’s not a boyfriend,” Sarah countered.
“But he is a ‘he.’ How interesting.”
“Diane, shush. We’re just friends.”
“Everyone is ‘just friends’ until they aren’t, honey. So you said sunflowers, and that would be nice. What color is your tablecloth and napkins?”
Sarah blanched. She hadn’t even thought of that. “I don’t think I have a tablecloth, and the napkins might be made out of paper.”
Diane’s professionalism showed in the fact that she didn’t react at all to what Sarah had said. “So the wood of the table will set the background color. I assume it’s wood?”
“Yes, wood. We won’t be eating off of a card table. I suppose I should thank my father for that much, at least.”
“Well then, the yellow of the sunflowers will go nicely on the table, unless you want to offset the color with a bit of a highlight – daisies, maybe? Or possibly something red, for romance.”
“No red! There’s far too much red in the cabin already. And besides, I told you – we’re just friends. Romance is not the theme.”
“Yes, just friends, of course you are. How silly of me to forget!” she called over her shoulder as she bustled about, collecting flowers from a big white bucket and gathering the greenery that she would wrap with them. “So, what will you be serving?”
“I’m going to keep it simple. Pasta and salad. Bread and wine. Maybe ice cream for dessert.”
“All good. The food doesn’t really matter when a young man and a young woman get together, of course.”
“Diane …”
“Yes, yes, just friends. I’m just saying, is all. If you like the company, the food isn’t so important. And if you REALLY like the company…”
“Stop, please!” Sarah said, laughing, as she took money out of her purse to pay for the flowers, which Diane had arranged artfully with the greenery as a backdrop and then wrapped in tissue paper and cellophane. She took the flowers and put them under her arm. “Thank you, Diane,” she said, and then added: “Wish me luck!”
Diane beamed. “Honey, you have youth, beauty, and brains. If you had good luck, too, it would just be unfair.”
Sarah smiled and waved and walked out of the store barely holding back her laughter. Diane sold flowers, sure, but the product she really offered was the incredible knack she had for making her customers feel great. Sarah would be willing to pay for that feeling even if it didn’t come with flowers.
The next stop was the grocery store, where she found Sam busy arranging the salad greens in the display. “Sam, just the man I need,” Sarah said, feeling surprisingly flirtatious. Already she was getting in the mood for the evening’s festivities.
“Afternoon, Sarah,” he answered, and looked her up and down approvingly – almost too much so for a married man. “I see you’ve already been visiting with Diane, but you are far more lovely than any bouquet of flowers. How can I help you today?”
Sarah handed him the list of ingredients. “I’m making dinner, and this is what the
recipe calls for. Please tell me that you have everything on the list.”
Sam scanned the paper, nodding as he went. “Yup, we’ve got all that. The sausage is frozen, though. I hope that’s OK?”
Sarah shrugged. “That will be fine, Sam. I didn’t expect you to slaughter a pig out in the back just to make me fresh-ground sausage.”
“For you, Sarah, I would happily slaughter a pig, but I think you’ll like the stuff I’ve got. I grill that sausage on the Fourth of July, and my friends all rave about it.” He took a hand basked and started moving through the store, consulting Sarah’s list and collecting items from the shelves.
“I’ll also be making a salad,” she called to him, though that fact would have been obvious enough since she was selecting greens from the produce selection. With a start she realized that she had forgotten to put salad dressing on her list. Something told her that Brad would not appreciate eating his greens plain, as if he were some kind of giant, flannel-clad rabbit. She filled a basket with arugula, a few carrots, and a container of cherry tomatoes, then went off in search of a salad dressing that did not hail from the famous Thousand Islands.
16
Thirty minutes later she was back in the cabin, staring at the pile of groceries and feeling somewhat dazed. Sam had thrown in a package of pine nuts, which he insisted on giving her for free – he nearly always gave her something for free, now that she thought about it. Not for the first time, Sarah wondered what had possessed her to invite Brad over. She had never had anyone over for dinner in her apartment in San Francisco, unless you counted Ellie which Sarah didn’t because, no matter what she might have been planning, they always ended up eating at a restaurant anyway. The last time she could remember cooking dinner for anyone but herself was just after college, during a brief period in which she was trying to woo a much older man who, she thought, considered her something of a child and to whom Sarah was trying to prove that she was capable of adult tasks. As it turns out, that was the worst possible strategy; the gentleman in question had, it turned out, approached Sarah entirely because he thought her very young and inexperienced and, as a consequence of these things, rather sexy. The more Sarah thought about that, the more freaked out she got, until she could no longer look him in the face and stopped returning his calls.
Cabin Fever Page 9