“Sounds good,” Sten said, “but we really just stopped by for a couple minutes. I was thinking I’d hang that door and Carolee wanted to go through some of her mother’s things—”
Without another word, without even bothering to glance at her or even pretend she’d picked up on the invitation, Carolee just brushed right by her, passed through the gap in the wall and went on across the yard and into the house to leave her standing there with Sten, who looked—what was it?—pained. The sun glinted in his hair. He was wearing Ray-Bans, so she couldn’t see his eyes, but the rest of his face seemed to shrink away, the Amazing Shrinking Man, now you see him, now you don’t. This was hard for him. It was hard for her too.
“Really,” she said, “I’m making chicken cordon bleu—it’d be no trouble.”
“No,” he said, letting one hand rise and fall, “we can’t stay. I brought a couple of boxes—” And here he stepped over to the car, flipped open the rear hatch and raised them in evidence, eight or ten new cardboard boxes, folded flat. “Most of the junk’s going into the dumpster, but there are things she’s sentimental about, though Christ knows where we’re going to put it all.” He let out a laugh. “You’re supposed to be scaling down at my age.”
“Yeah,” she said, nodding, as if she could know. “But how about a drink? You’ll have a drink at least?” She smiled. “I’ve got wine open. And I make a killer margarita.”
For the next half hour she tried to stay out of the way as Carolee stomped in and out of the house clutching boxes stuffed with odds and ends and Sten tinkered with the door to get it flush, looking in odd moments like Adam, but she didn’t want to go there. Like father, like son. Though she couldn’t feature Adam hanging a door or changing a washer or anything like that. He was more the outdoors type, and here it came to her with the force of revelation: more the horticultural type, more the grower, the pot farmer, and why else would he be so secretive out there in the woods all day every day? She tried to picture it, the spiky-leafed plants, a whole field of them nodding in a gentle breeze and Adam hauling water up from some creek, working his muscles under the blaze of the sun. It was time he let her in on the secret. Time he trusted her. And showed it.
Then the door was hung and Sten had a margarita in his hand, which Carolee, looking daggers, had refused, and she had no choice but to put the potatoes in to bake though she wished they would just leave before Christabel showed. Or Adam. Adam could waltz in any minute now—it was close to five and his internal clock would be ticking—and who knew what kind of reaction he was going to have? As like as not, he’d just jump right back over the wall and disappear. Like at the pizza place. They were having a nice discussion, even if Adam was a bit rocked on that ale and the hits of rum he kept sneaking from the canteen, and she was explaining Redemption Theory to him, how Roger Elvick had uncovered the whole fraud the government was perpetuating by issuing birth certificates so they could use every baby born as collateral for the loans the Federal Reserve gave the government after they went off the gold standard and how they’d put him away in some mental hospital and given him electroshock just for telling the truth to people, when she looked up and saw Sten standing there in the crowd by the bar with the blond woman she’d assumed was Carolee, and that was the end of that.
Adam had let out a low hiss of a curse, then turned his head to look and cursed again. Before she could think he was up and out the door and she had no choice but to follow him. Thing was, she couldn’t find him. He wasn’t in the car. And she sat there and waited for half an hour or more, till after Sten and his wife had left and gone up the block and around the corner to where they must have parked their own car, and then she drove around for another hour, going up and down the back streets that went ghostly in the fog. She saw cats. A coyote. A couple of drunks stumbling home. But no Adam. Finally, she’d given up and gone back to the house—which had to be fifteen miles from town, but what else could she do? When she woke in the morning, he was there beside her, curled up in the fetal position.