Their father stared at Charles for a few long beats, his mouth taut, one eyebrow slightly raised. Then he shrugged, turned, and hefted his backpack over his shoulder. And off they went, loading the tent and supplies into the back of the car. Charles spent the weekend reading and watching TV with his mother. She didn’t mention that he seemed to have miraculously recovered.
Charles wondered if, in a way, that was what made him really fall in love with Joanna. He’d begun dating her because she was beautiful and because she’d struck up a conversation with him at a bar near his office, capping off the night with an open-mouthed kiss. She was so different from Bronwyn: not as rigorously mannered, not as prudish. What really sealed the deal, though, was when Charles brought her to meet his parents. Though Joanna seemed antsy with his mom, freaking out as if she’d done some great damage to the house when a paper towel she’d thrown into the trash missed the can and landed on the floor, she seemed at ease with his dad. James struck up a conversation about Scotch with Joanna after she admitted that she’d tended bar during college at Temple. She told him about a beer-making course she’d taken at Temple, bored with philosophy electives. Her final beer project was pretty decent; she’d like to try making it again sometime. “Bring it over with you if you do,” Charles’s father had said. “I’d like to give it a try.”
Charles had been flabbergasted. His father hadn’t paid a mote of attention to any other girl he’d ever brought home, though of course, they weren’t serious. At one point, his dad even met Charles’s eye and gave him a terse, approving nod. Charles felt a little lift inside him, as if he was eight years old again, showing his father his report card. On the drive home from the house that day, he’d asked Joanna if she wanted to go on a trip with him. They went to Jamaica, lying on the sand, eating goat and organic vegetables, watching movies under mosquito netting. Joanna was the type of girl who plunged right off the cliff into the ocean without looking down. She didn’t tell Charles what shirt to wear for dinner. She didn’t mind when he got a little loud after drinking too many Red Stripes. She made friends with the wait staff and the bartender but not in a slightly condescending sort of way, as Bronwyn might have done, and one of the bartenders invited them to an after-hours, staff-only party in one of the caves. On that trip, Charles fell more and more in love with Joanna. She was refreshing and intoxicating, a cool gin and tonic after years of heavy red wine. He still had dreams about them in Jamaica, swimming in that clear water, their legs entwined in that small, hot room. They were their ideal selves there. Funny how remoteness could do that.
A bus huffed from the curb, giving way to a fleshy, apple-shaped cleaning woman in a pink cleaning uniform leaning against the glassed-in elevator that led to Suburban Station. Her face was red, as if scoured with steel wool. Her smock stretched across her breasts and stomach, the skirt stopping just above her square, blockish knees. Now that Charles was on a search for cleaning women, they were suddenly everywhere.
He could hear her barking into her cell phone in Russian. There was something utterly capable about the way she stood, the way she spoke, the manner in which she glared across the street, daring someone to make fun of her outfit. She definitely wasn’t the woman who’d found his father in the bathroom, who held captive the secret of those final intimate moments. For if this woman would have found him, Charles knew, his dad would have lived.
When he got back to the office, they were all in the conference room: Jake, Jessica, Becky, and Steven. The Back to the Land woman was in there, too. Just a woman. Not a large mountain man, not a small Indian elder, not a small girl walking a deer on a leash. The woman wore a tweed business suit and leather pumps and carried a brown suede bag.
“Sorry I’m late,” Charles said. Everyone had their notebooks out, and there were business cards strewn across the table like confetti. “I had to run out for something, and …”
“This is Charles Bates-McAllister,” Jake interrupted, a bit wearily. “Another editor on the team.”
The woman stood up and introduced herself as Mirabelle DeLong. She was barely five feet tall, with a pointy chin and bright eyes that reminded Charles of a fox. Sitting back down, she said how happy she was to be working with them and how she admired their other projects and was certain they could do wonders for Back to the Land, which had been a brainchild of two businessmen in the eighties. Their hope was to build Back to the Land communities in all fifty states, providing a sort of anti–housing development—an alternative way of living.
Charles bit back his skepticism, picking at a dry piece of skin on the inside of his palm. Looking over, he noticed that Steven was doodling crosses in his notebook.