She explained that the word was three syllables, not two, and that it meant a final judgment. The day when every soul is called to account for its sins.
And that’s what I was remembering at the community picnic when I was walking back toward Cindy in a kind of slow-motion haze. This is my reckoning, I kept thinking. But it’s not even the final one. This was only the Cindy reckoning. There was also bound to be a McClaine reckoning. And probably a Donnie reckoning of some kind, though in truth I was actually looking forward to that one. Most likely there’d be a Pops reckoning too. And maybe even a legal reckoning, which actually made me sick to my stomach that day because of the courthouse looming above me.
It’s funny how many fears and thoughts and agonies can go crashing through your brain while you’re walking in a slow-motion haze toward the woman you love.
“Oh honey,” Gee had told me back when I was little and scared and thinking me and everybody I loved was going to have some kind of wreck like my mother did. She reached out while she was driving to squeeze my hand. “Not wrecking. Rec-kon-ing. They mean entirely different things.”
But what she failed to mention was that they feel pretty much the same.
“You need to tell me what’s going on,” Cindy said.
I looked into the bouncy house to see how the girls were doing. Emma was sitting in one corner, bouncing up and down on her butt while Dani and the other kids kept trampolining from wall to wall.
To Cindy I said, “Now’s not the place or time for that.”
She reached down then and took hold of my right hand and lifted it toward her. It was only then I realized I was still holding the sheet of paper, but all balled up in my fist now. She pulled back my fingers and pried the paper loose and opened it up again, looked at it for a second and then grabbed me around the wrist and dragged me back behind the bouncy house. There was an empty space of maybe four feet between the bouncy house and the courthouse, with a long orange extension cord running from the bouncy house power unit to an electrical outlet carved into a granite block. The hum from the blower that kept the bouncy house inflated made a low, steady echo against the granite.
Cindy said, “Who were those men? And what’s this about you and that Shelley being friends?”
“I never saw those guys before today.”
She held the paper up in front of my face. “You have these boots,” she said. “Are these your footprints?”
“They could be,” I answered “Or they could be a million other guys’.”
“Where was this picture taken?”
“Cindy, come on. We’ll talk about this at home.”
“How do you know her? Were you in her house?”
“It’s not what you think.”
“My father knows, doesn’t he? Do you want me to ask him?”
I moved closer and put my hands on her shoulders. She’s as rigid and cold as a slab of stone. “Sweetheart. Listen. I swear to God. I met that girl once for maybe five minutes. I said maybe ten words to her total. Nothing happened. And nothing ever would. I swear that to you on my children’s souls.”
She was blowing one quick breath after another out between her lips. And then her eyes started to tear up and her body sagged a little beneath my hands. “You and the girls are my life,” I told her. “The only life I will ever want or ever need.”
Bit by bit her breaths got slower, every exhalation a little longer than the last. Finally she broke eye contact with me, looked at the back of the bouncy house for a few seconds. Then she folded up the piece of paper and slipped it into her hip pocket. She said, “I think it’s time we pack things up and head back home.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” I said.
We drove home from the picnic without much talking, same as I expected we would. Every now and then Cindy would turn around and ask the girls a question, like what was the favorite thing you did today? Something that would get them chattering again for a few minutes. Pops sat in the back with a girl on each side of him, hugging up against him. Sometimes he would tickle one of them and I’d get startled by a quick burst of giggles.
Most of the way to Pops’ place I followed an Escalade moving maybe forty miles per hour tops, so it didn’t take me long to start hating the driver and the vehicle itself. What the hell is an escalade anyway? I wondered. I know what an escapade is, and I know what it means to escalate, but the word “escalade” did not make any sense to me. In fact I got so impatient with the driver in front of me, who seemed to think it was necessary to slow down and tap his brakes every twenty feet or so, that I finally started thinking out loud. Pops surprised me by knowing the answer to my question.
He said, “You’ve probably seen a dozen movies with escalades in them.”
“Like this stupid Cadillac in front of me? That’s the only kind I’ve ever seen.”
“You never seen soldiers trying to climb into a castle or a fort using ladders?”
“Yeah. And most times they get burning oil dumped on them.”
“That’s called an escalade. Trying to scale a wall with ladders. It’s where the word ‘escalator’ comes from.”
Cindy turned halfway in her seat and gave Pops a big smile. “I’m impressed,” she said.
He said, “I tend to have that effect on the ladies. Right, girls?”
“I still don’t see what that has to do with a vehicle,” I said. “What wall is that vehicle climbing?”
“What does Lumina have to do with my little car?” he asked. “What that word really means is the open space inside my intestines.”
“Ewww!” Dani said, which was probably the effect Pops was going for.
“How do you know all these words?” Cindy asked.
“You didn’t know I’m such a brainy guy, did you, sweetie? Truth is, I’ve been playing a lot of Scrabble with a former English professor. She whups me good every time, but at least I’m learning a thing or two from my beatings. It’s got so that now, every time I hear a word I don’t know, I look it up.”
Cindy said, “Maybe that’s something you should try, Russell.”
“What? Playing Scrabble?”
She said, “No. Learning a little something.”
For Cindy to say that in front of the girls and Pops, it hit me like a slap. My face went red and hot. And I realized then how angry at me she still was. She was still stinging from being humiliated at the picnic, from the suggestion that I’d been cheating on her. She’d been stewing about that the same as I’d been stewing about those McClaine brothers and what their next move might be.
So I sat there with my mouth clamped shut and my stomach churning until I pulled up in front of Pops’ place. Then I told her, “I’ll be right back. I need to make a pit stop.”
In the lobby I gave Pops a quick hug and told him, “I’m going to hit the head. I’ll call you in a day or so.”
Then I hustled down the hall to the men’s room and made it into a stall maybe half a second before I started throwing up. I gagged and spit until I felt like crying.
When I came back out of the stall to wash up, there was Pops leaning against the wall. “I’m fine,” I told him. “Something I ate, I guess.”