“Your father went home,” she said. “He had to pick the lock to let me in—and I hope that’s all right.” She stopped to swipe a strand of loose hair back behind her ear with the pinky finger of her left hand, her characteristic gesture. Or one of them. She had hair too. Squirrel-colored hair. “I just thought we might have something to eat because, you know, with Kutya here and I don’t have to work tomorrow, I just thought I might as well, you know, stay.” She was grinning. She had something in her hand—a stirring spoon, his grandmother’s stirring spoon with the rust flecks in the shiny metal and the hard yellow plastic handle. “What do you say about that?”
What did he say? He said nothing, not yet. This was a concept and it was going to take a minute for it to seep in because he hadn’t thought it would go like this, not when he was out at the camp and knew that he’d left his pack behind in the backseat of her car, where it still was, the 151 and all, but right now, in this moment with her there and the dreadlock dog and the light spilling through the windows till his grandmother’s stirring spoon glowed like a wand, a magic wand, he felt so close to calm it was like a spell had come over him. And yet, and yet—there was something there still to keep the wheel spinning, and it was his father, the thought of his father, who’d gone home now, for now, but would be back anytime he pleased and with a new doorway to walk through too.
“You talk to my father?”
“Yeah. I knew him, you know, from school.”
“You talk about me?”
She shrugged. “A little.”
“What did he tell you?”
The dog pulled his front end low to the floor and stretched, the banner of his tail waving as she bent to him to scratch his back, right there in his sweet spot, but what she was doing, whether she knew he knew it or not, was stalling so she could think of what to say next. She straightened up. He was ten feet from her, in the living room still, watching the light. “He said you were going through a rough patch.”
A rough patch. That hit him like a slap in the face and he had to laugh, but it wasn’t like the laughter in the car after they’d stolen the dog back, but more of a noise that caught in his throat as if he’d swallowed something and couldn’t get it out. “Rough patch,” he repeated and laughed again. “Did he tell you about the playground? About my car? About the Chinese? Did he tell you I don’t have a job?”
“No,” she said, and she crossed the floor to him and squeezed his arm at the bicep, leaning in to touch her soft lips to the side of his face. “All he said was you’d hit a rough patch, but I don’t care about that. I like you, you know that?”
He didn’t answer.
“And since I’m here anyway I looked in the refrigerator—which is impressive the way you keep it, neat, neater than mine, by far—and found the hamburger there and the chicken sausage, and since you had all these spices and cans of stewed tomatoes and whatnot, I just figured I’m hungry and I’ll bet you are too. Okay? So let’s have some wine and maybe sit out back for a while and let the sauce cook down. You’re going to like the way I make spaghetti. Everybody says it’s the best.”
She was holding on to his arm still and the light was flowing over the dog where it lay in the rug of its fur on the kitchen floor and the smell of the simmering sauce was tugging at his glands, the salivary glands that looked like trussed-up sacks of tapioca pudding in the illustration in his biology text from school, and another phrase came to him that had nothing niggardly in it at all: Go with the flow. He said it aloud, “Go with the flow,” and she gave his muscle another squeeze.
PART IV
Mendocino
12.
THE WHOLE IDEA OF a vacation, of a travel vacation, was to clear out the cobwebs, put your troubles behind you and come home refreshed. Well, it hadn’t quite worked out that way, had it? As he reminded Carolee every chance he got. His stress level was so high the first week home he had to go to the doctor to check on his blood-pressure medication and see about a refill on his Xanax, which he never took anymore, not since he’d shut the door behind him at the high school for the last and final time. It wasn’t enough that they’d been attacked or that the ship had been delayed in Puerto Limón for a full twenty-four hours while the Costa Rican bureaucrats conferred with the cruise line bureaucrats and the State Department flunkies so that when the boat did finally get to Miami they’d missed their flight to San Francisco or that the flight they did manage to get on was delayed for three hours because of fog on the other end—no, it was the press, the press was the real and continuing plague because they kept the whole thing going when all he wanted was to turn the page and forget about it. They didn’t care what he wanted. They never even asked. They just came after him.
Within an hour of his walking out of that room in the bowels of the ship, even before he and Carolee had got through the first bottle of Perrier-Jou?t sent compliments of the captain and delivered by Kristi Breerling herself, his cell began ringing. Exhausted—wiped—and half-drunk too, he wasn’t thinking and just put the phone to his ear and rasped, “Hello?”
A voice came back at him, an unfamiliar voice, distant but clear. A man’s voice. “Mr. Stensen? Sten Stensen?”