“She was a skinny pathetic little thing who got dumped by some jerk who had an affair with her best friend, then married her.”
“Could we give her a name, please?” Lee requested.
He looked up at her and the fingernail clipper stopped sliding. “Cathy,” he said, “Cathy Switzer.”
Lee sat with her arms crossed on the table, motionless, studying him.
He threw down the fingernail clipper and went on. “She talked about him all night long. Couldn’t stop. How he never liked her to go bowling. How he never came to see his kids anymore. How the first guy she saw after the divorce never came back after one date. And when I walked her to her door she said over and over how she knew she’d talked about him all night long and that I was never going to come back either. Then she asked me to kiss her.” He let his eyes wander to Lee and settle there. His voice lost its rough edge. “She said she was lonely, and that she trusted me because I was a cop, and would I just kiss her once and that she didn’t care if I pretended she was someone else.”
The silence seemed to run itself out into minutes before Lee asked, “And did you?”
It took some time for him to answer, time during which their glances collided and held.
“Yes,” he finally said, so low it sounded like someone else had spoken in a faraway room. Their stillness, both with arms crossed on the table, remained absolute. The ambivalence of her question remained: did he kiss the woman, or did he pretend she was someone else? He thought it best not to fill in the entire truth. The strain in the room got to him, however, and he realized it was the same for her. They had both been dancing around their feelings for each other, afraid to admit them, afraid of this vast difference in their ages and the unwritten rule of propriety it posed. They could go on pretending friendly indifference forever, but he knew and she knew that feelings had begun stirring between them, and one of them had to get it out in the open, because it was hell holding it inside. But there were things she should know first, things he’d told rarely in his life that were important for her to hear.
“I think it’s time I told you a little more about myself, Lee. Bear with me, if you will, because some of this you’ve heard before, and it’s rather a long story , but until you hear it all, you can’ t understand where I’m coming from.”
Christopher shifted in his chair, making the wood snap and creak. He picked up the nail clipper again and squeezed it in his palm, concentrating on it as if it were a scientific experiment. “I’ve told you some of what it was like when I was growing up. How my mom and dad left me to take care of my little sister. All they cared about was where their next drink was coming from. Groceries didn’t matter . If there were any in the house, fine. If not, hell with it.
“There was this grocery store two doors down from the apartment where we lived. The Red Owl. I found out what time of day they cleaned out their produce department and I used to make sure I was back there in the alley when this guy named Sammy Saminski used to bring all the wilted stuff out and put it in the Dumpster. Some of it was pretty good yet, edible. Sammy would let me take it home. He was a smart guy, Sammy. Didn’t take him long to figure out Jeannie and I were living on the stuff. So eventually he started bringing out better stuff. I knew it was still plenty good yet, but I took it anyway. And that’s why I learned to cook, so there’d be something on the table for Jeannie and me.
“Mavis and Ed, they might come stumbling in at ten o’clock, maybe midnight—we never knew. How they survived is a mystery to me because I never saw them eat. Just drink and fight, that’s all. She used to call the cops on him every once in a while and that’s when I first got the idea I’d like to become one, because when I saw that officer walk in in his clean blue uniform I thought for sure he was going to take Jeannie and me away and put us in someplace better, and it was the only time in my life I ever felt safe. It didn’t last long though, because instead of taking us, they took the old man. He’d stay in the clink a day or two, and while he was gone Mavis seemed to be around a little more taking care of us. But then Ed would be back out, and he and Mavis would take up their drinking again as if she’d never called the cops in the first place.
“One time when she called them, he had the DTs. He was standing in front of a medicine chest pulling back his lips and looking in the mirror, and he thought there were worms eating his teeth. I can remember Mavis yelling, ‘Ed, Ed, there’s nothing there!’ And he raved, ‘Can’t you see ’em, Mavis, the goddamn things are eating my teeth!’
“That was one of the worst times I remember. Jeannie and I were both crying. Hell, we didn’t know what was going on. And that policeman came and I wanted so damn bad for him to take us out of there. But he didn’t.” Christopher stared at the fingernail clipper in his hand, then seemed to pull himself from the past and shift his weight on the chair. He settled his back against it and went on.
“Sammy Saminski got me on the payroll at the Red Owl when I was fourteen. He lied about my age. By the time I graduated from high school I was managing the produce department and I’d saved enough money to put myself through two years of vocational school. When I could, I’d give some to Jeannie. She hoarded it away without telling me, and when she was fifteen years old, she ran away.”
Christopher cleared his throat. “I think I told you once before that my parents still live here in Anoka. Still drink. Still fight. I don’t have anything to do with them.”
He looked at Lee—dear, sweet Lee—and decided he didn’t care if she saw love in his eyes. He was damned tired of trying to hide it.
“And then you come into my life. And do you know what you are to me? You’re all the things they weren’t. You’re everything a mother should be. You’re kind and loving and caring; you’re there for your kids no matter what they need. You earn a living and provide for them. They can talk to you about anything, and you love them—you genuinely love them, and they love you back. And all of a sudden I’m right in there being treated like I’m one of them. Then Greg dies and I feel like I’ve taken his place. And you know what? I love it.”
His volume had lowered to a coarse whisper. “Then this woman Saturday night . . . she asks me to kiss her and she says it’s okay if I pretend she’s someone else. And you know who I was thinking about, don’t you, Lee?”
“Christopher, stop!” She jumped up, crossed the room, faced the kitchen sink with her back to him.
“I’m so damned mixed up, Lee.”
“Stop, I said!” He could hear terror in her voice.
“You don’t want to hear this.”
“I don’t want to lose your friendship and that’s what’ll happen if you go on with this.”
“Yes, I know . That’s why I’ m scared.”
“Then drop it. Now. Before any more is said.”
He considered awhile, waiting for her to turn and face him. When he realized she would not, he whispered, “All right.”
She turned on the water. Took a drink. Turned off the water. Set down her glass. All these motions having nothing to do with thirst. Neither of them had looked at the other since she’d leaped from her chair.
She said quietly, “I’ve got to go.”
An aeon seemed to pass while neither of them moved. Then he asked a question.
“How old are you?”
She made a sound—chortle? grunt? he wasn’t sure which—and moved to the door, opened it before she spoke.
“Old enough to be your mother.”
She went out and left him sitting on his kitchen chair.
Left behind, he remained right there, brooding, disappointed, angry with himself for reading her wrong and opening his mouth, fearing their friendship would end now. Well, what the hell, she was probably scared, too, and she had a lot more at stake than he did.
After twenty minutes he shot to his feet, found his truck keys, drove to the police station, stalked into the squad room and went directly to the computer in the corner. It was on, its screen a quivering green.
He pushed QMR and waited. Nokes sauntered in eating an apple and said, “What the heck are you doing?”
“Looking something up.”
“On your day off?”
He slowly turned his chair seat around and gave Nokes a wincing look of long-suffering. “Nokes, haven’t you got anything better to do than stand around here crunching that apple in my ear?”
Nokes shrugged and walked down the hall to the communications room.
Query Motor Vehicle was waiting when Christopher turned back to the screen, asking him to put in his initials before it would give out any information.
He entered his initials and the machine sounded a beep, giving him the go-ahead.
He typed in her license plate number, pushed the code button and swung around in his chair to listen for the printer in the communications room. It began clattering and he walked down the hall to the room where tonight’s dispatcher and records technician, Toni Mansetti and Ruth Randall, were sitting on their respective chairs doing their jobs. Nokes had hooked his buns against a table edge, crossed his legs and was finishing his apple while lazily watching a couple of split-screen televisions that monitored the city parking ramps across the street.
The printer stopped clattering and Christopher reached over Ruth Randall’s shoulder to rip the sheet off.
He left the communications room reading the info from the Minnesota Bureau of Drivers’ Licenses.
Lee Therese Reston
1225 BENTON STREET ANOKA 55303
SEX/F. DOB/091848. HGT/506. WGT/130. EYE/BRN.
PHOTO#: 8082095102. NO VIOLATIONS
NO HIT
QDP NAM/RESTON, LEE THERESE. DOB/091848 He read the last item again: Date of birth: 9-18-48.
She was forty-four years old.
* * *
LEEhad left Christopher’s apartment just as upset as he was. How dare he! she thought, lying awake in the dark that night. How dare he wreck the fragile balance they’d managed during these past couple of months! She needed him, treasured the times they spent together, because she could talk to him about things nobody else seemed to understand. She could be herself— sorrowful or gay—and he accepted whatever mood she was in.
How dare he ruin that by intimating he had other-than-friendly feelings toward her? Anything else was unthinkable, given their ages and his relationship to this family as a whole. Why, Janice had a crush on him! Joey thought he was the neatest thing since pointed footballs, and every other person in the entire family knew how much time he spent around here.
Good god-afrighty, imagine the gasps if anybody got wind of this.
Especially Mother.
AUGUSTturned the corner into September and Christopher stayed away. Joey started football practice, then school. Lee arranged her working schedule so that she could go to his junior high games in the late afternoons once each week. At the shop huge bronze and maroon football mums started coming in. The arrangers began putting miniature cattails and preserved gold maple leaves in their fresh bouquets. A new batch of FTD containers came in, shaped like mallard ducks.
Janice moved into her dorm at the university, and Lee stubbornly withheld Christopher’s offer of help, pressing her lazy son (who rammed his body against football dummies every afternoon for two hours but said he was too tired to help move the furniture) into duty instead. The three of them—Joey, Janice and Lee—spent a beautiful Sunday afternoon in mid-September lugging Greg’s mattress, box spring and bed onto Jim Clements’s pickup truck and hauling it thirty miles into the city, then up two flights of stairs at the dormitory.
Janice bid them goodbye with a hug and a promise. “Don’t feel so bad, Mom. I’ve got my car so I’ll come home a lot on weekends.”
That was, very possibly, the worst week of Lee’s life. She began to understand why a lonely woman would ask a strange man to kiss her even though she knew perfectly well he was never going to ask her on a date again.
Such splendid fall days.
Such beautiful fall nights, and after supper—lo!—Joey would come out of the bathroom smelling like deodorant with his hair freshly combed and wearing clean sweat socks and shoes.
“A bunch of us kids are going to walk uptown and get a Coke,” he’d say. And a bunch of them—boys and girls together—would come in a group and spirit him away. Later, at a very respectable hour, they’d be back in the yard, hanging around the front steps talking and laughing in the moonlight. One of them, she overheard, was named Sandy Parker.
Lee began to feel like a useless old woman.
THENon September eighteenth (a day she’d been dreading as much as she’d dreaded her first root canal) at precisely 10:32 A.M. (she would forever recall the time because she was so used to tracking delivery times, she actually tracked this one made to her) Ivan Small, the delivery man for her biggest competitor, Forrest Floral on Fourth Avenue, entered her shop bearing an arrangement of American Beauty roses so huge it made Ivan look like a walking bouquet. “Mizz Reston?” he said from behind his burden, then set it down on the counter and stepped to one side so he could see her. “I don’t know what’s going on, but we got an order to deliver this to you here at your shop.”
“Are you kidding?” she replied.
“God’s truth. Forty-five of them,” he said. He wore an expression like the lion in The Wizard of Oz.
“Oh God.” She covered the bottom of her face and felt herself begin to blush while Sylvia, Pat and Nancy stood in wonderment.
“They’re from Mom and Dad,” she said hopefully. “Or Lloyd. I’ll bet they’re from Lloyd.”
“There’s a card.” Ivan plucked it from the foliage and handed it to her.
So help me God, if it’s from Christopher and Sylvia reads his name over my shoulder, I’ll drive over him with his own cop car!
The card said: Your secret is out.
Now she’d have some fancy explaining to do.
“Thank you, Ivan,” she said. “Oh, wait!”
She opened the cash register and got out five dollars, and felt ridiculous tipping somebody else’s flower delivery man at the door of her own shop.
Ivan accepted, said, “Thank you, Mizz Reston,” and left.
The second the door closed, all three women asked, “Who are they from?”
“I don’t know,” Lee lied.
“Well, have you been . . . dating anyone?” Sylvia actually seemed to trip over the word.
“Heavens no.”
“Then how do you explain it?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
She took them home and put them in the middle of the kitchen table where never in all her years as a florist had she bought this many roses at one time. The damn fool! These things ran thirty-six dollars a dozen at retail. He’d paid well over one hundred dollars, not counting tax and delivery, for an item she could have gotten from her supplier for half that.
She couldn’t help being charmed. Sitting there on her kitchen chair squeezing her mouth, she held in a laugh, but soon it escaped, lilting through the room and making her heart feel light.
“Lallek, you young fool,” she said aloud, “what am I going to do with you?”
Joey came home from football practice and actually paused for a full fifteen seconds on his way to the refrigerator.
“Wow, Mom, did you bring them home?”
“They’re not throw-aways from my store, if that’s what you mean.”
“Where’d they come from then?”
“I don’t know.” She had put the card in her billfold on her way home. “There are forty-five of them.”
“One for every hamburger I’m going to eat as soon as Janice gets home and we take you out to eat.”
“Are you serious, Joey? Janice is coming home?” She leaped from the chair, the roses forgotten.
“That’s right, so get changed. We’re going to take you out to the restaurant of your choice. As long as the bill doesn’t run over twenty dollars.”
Janice came bounding in with a great big
hug. “Happy birthday, Mom! Did Joey keep my secret? . . . Gosh, did you bring those . owers home?”
“I’ve been wondering if they’re from Grampa Lloyd. I don’t think Mom and Dad would spend that kind of money.”
“Grampa Lloyd, huh?” Janice headed toward the bathroom, looking at the flowers over her shoulder. From behind the closed bathroom door she called, “W asn’t there any card?”
Lee Reston pretended she didn’t hear, and by the time they were in the car heading for the Vineyard Café, the card was forgotten.
9
SHE was afraid to call him. Two weeks passed. Three. Then on an afternoon in early October Lee stood on the bleachers of Fred Moore Middle School with a sparse collection of other parents. Down below a game was in progress. Up above weather was churning. A morose layer of low gray scud clouds tumbled along before a pushy wind. Debris, caught in the chain link fence, flapped against it like a playing card against bicycle spokes. The field was wet; they’d had rain the night before. Even from here Lee could see she’d have fun trying to get the stains out of Joey’s uniform. He was a defensive lineman, a position that garnered little glory in most games, especially from moms of ninth graders without men beside them to explain what was happening. But suddenly the line broke and she saw her clumsy son spurt through, eluding tackles, sidestepping arms, running an abbreviated U-turn and hauling the opposing quarterback smack off his pins!
She stuck her pinkies between her teeth and whistled. “Hey, way to go, Joey!” She whistled again, this time without the fingers, brandishing one fist in the air. She yelled at the top of her lungs, “You could show those Vikings a thing or two!”
On the street above the field, officer Christopher Lallek parked his black-and-white squad, turned up the collar of his navy blue winter jacket and slammed the door.
Down below, white and blue jerseys darted around like dots on a video screen. He threaded his way inside the chain link fence and giant-stepped down the bleachers, searching for Joey’s number. There it was, number eighteen, blue. He was halfway down the steps when the kid made a damned good sack, and the Fred Moore parents sent up some noise. He glanced along the bleachers to his right and there was Lee. She was dressed in a thick blue denim jacket almost to her knees. Her collar was up. Her cheeks were red. And she had two fingers stuck in her mouth, whistling.
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