A Hasty Wedding

There was a stack of romance novels under the coffee table—a new addiction, one she now could see was quite related to her feelings for her boss. It was a safe way to explore her feelings without making a fool of herself.

The way she would have if she had said yes to his invitation to accompany him to the dance.

She wandered through to her bright but small kitchen, put her purse on the table and traded her shoes for her slippers.

Of course, she reminded herself, she hadn’t exactly said no, either.

She had said she would think about it, and true to her word that’s exactly what she was doing.

The lovely feeling of homecoming dissipated, and it occurred to her that of course she was going to say yes. Eventually.

With a moan of something approaching terror, she went into her bedroom. It was another room that gave her great pleasure, a peaceful feeling. Her big four-poster bed with the white eyelet lace cover and pillows provided such a beautiful contrast to the rough-hewn gray logs of the walls. It was a room that would have looked in place a hundred years ago. It was a restful space.

And that restfulness was completely lost on her.

She threw open her closet door and began to sort frantically through the meager items hanging there. After realizing she had not one suitable thing to wear to a barn dance or any other kind of dance, she went into her tiny bathroom and looked in the mirror.

She took off her glasses and studied her eyes. Hesitating, she reached for a small pot of makeup.

An hour later she stared at herself, aghast. She looked precisely like Bobo the Clown.

She found herself making the call she never thought she would make.

“Mom? I need you.”

Four

B lake lay awake and restless in his bed until he could stand it no more. He hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep in weeks. He would lie down, and the horror of all those people getting sick would start to replay in his mind. Especially the kids. The fear in their eyes. The paleness of their skin. Running the first ones to the hospital in the old van. Then the old yellow school bus. And then the ambulances coming, one after another.

Rationally he knew it wasn’t his fault.

Irrationally, he believed it was his job to look after them, and that he had failed, just like everyone else most of these kids had ever placed their trust in.

The helpless fury came then. Who would hurt children? Especially ones like these, who had already been hurt so damned much by life?

After punching the pillow a few more times, and getting his legs tangled up in the covers, he finally got up. The room had a distinct chill in it, so he pulled on his jeans, then flipped on the light. His bedroom, like his office, was free of clutter, and had about as much character as a barracks. Metal frame bed, gray blankets, white sheets. Clothes folded neatly on the chair underneath the window. Somehow those rooms had been vastly preferable to the constant bickering of his mother and father when they had been together. After they had split, his home life had deteriorated even more. He knew with that razor-edged intuition of children, that neither of his parents wanted him. He put a cramp in his mother’s manhunt, his father was cold and indifferent. Blake came to wear the label worn by so many children in pain: incorrigible.

These were the kind of rooms he had come to manhood in. Plain, no frills foster home bedrooms and detention center dorms.

Then he’d arrived at the Coltons’. Meredith had delighted in making a room just for him, asking him subtle questions about his favorite colors and his favorite sports, leading him up the stairs one day and throwing open the door of a room he had never seen before.

“This is for you,” she’d said.

Just for him, a bedroom that had been every boy’s dream. She’d tactfully overlooked his interest in motorcycles, which had been the cause of most of his grief, and decorated in a baseball motif. The walls were covered in baseball posters, and there were matching blue, red and white curtains and quilt. She had found him a signed Joe DiMaggio ball and put it in a glass case. The bat, which had hit a winning run in a California Angels game that Joe Colton had taken him to, was signed by the team and mounted on one wall. There had been a desk and a computer and a stereo and a study lamp.

But the truth was, he’d been sixteen when the Coltons took him in, and his tastes were already formed. He felt at home with a certain monkish austerity, or maybe deep inside himself he did not believe he deserved all the fuss, did not quite believe he would ever be the kind of wholesome all-American boy who would fit in a room like that one.

Brushing aside the memories, Blake went out to his kitchen and flipped on a light. There was paperwork all over the table that he had wanted to get to tonight, but even though he couldn’t sleep he didn’t want to do it now.

His decorating theme of no-personality repeated itself in this room. It looked like a kitchen in an empty apartment. Except for the papers on the Formica table, it was a barren landscape. No canisters on the counters, no magnets on the fridge, one little soup stain on the stove the only evidence someone actually lived here.

Out his window, he could see the ranch and all its buildings. Emily’s House for the young unwed mothers, the Homestead that lodged temporary residents, kids waiting for fostering or adoption or to go home, and the Shack, a halfway house for juvenile delinquents. There was a school and a gymnasium and an art studio. In the center of the buildings was a green area and baseball diamond, and on the outer rim of the ranch were barns and corrals and fields and pastures.

He might have allowed himself a moment’s pride, since much of this had been his doing, but the ranch seemed unbearably uninhabited, like a ghost town. Even the livestock had been moved because it would have been far too expensive to start trucking in water for cattle and horses.

His eyes were drawn across the roadway to Holly’s little cabin. In the window boxes her red geraniums were gilded silver by moonlight. The cat was enjoying the rocking chair on the porch. It looked like the kind of homey scene someone with some artistic talent might want to capture. Cat in a Rocking Chair at Midnight.

He looked for any shadow of movement, the ranch grounds bathed in the soft orange of the yard lights they had installed just last week, in case whoever poisoned the water came back to finish the job they had started.

He shook his head, not wanting to get back on the merry-go-round of fury and helplessness.

He gazed instead at the darkened windows of her cabin and bet her kitchen didn’t look like this.

Come to think of it, he didn’t really want to think about her either.

He opened his fridge and inspected the contents. One carton of milk of dubious age. One package of cheese which had not been that shade of green and blue when he had originally purchased it. Mustard and ketchup, neither of which he thought would make a very appetizing sandwich on its own. In the crisper were two withered apples and a package of slime that he deduced had once contained lettuce.

He glanced out the window again and told his mind firmly not to go there.

It went anyway, right into her fridge, where there would be neat rows of delicious and healthy things to eat. Fresh milk, cream for her coffee, oranges and apples and pineapple spears, maybe a neatly packaged leftover chicken potpie or tuna casserole. She probably had chocolate chips to make cookies, and lard to make pies.

“Or maybe her fridge looks exactly like this one,” he told himself.

This preoccupation with food was a brand-new one. When the kids were in residence the camp cook fed him along with everyone else and didn’t mind him scrounging through the fridge for leftovers in the middle of the night. He loved Dagwood sandwiches, and seeing how many things he could squish between two slices of bread. Whole pickles, thick slices of beef, jalapeño peppers, tomatoes.

His mouth watering, he opened his freezer compartment. The Häagen-Dazs was at the very center of a frigid cave of thick, wavy ice.

“There is a God,” he muttered, and took it out. He lifted the lid, and inspected the intricate and frosty crystals that had formed on the surface. He knew trying it was the act of a desperate man, but he got a spoon, and hazarded chipping into the ice cream. He tasted, paused, smiled.

He wandered into his living room and sat on the sofa. It was expensive black leather, not particularly comfortable. Tonight it felt cold to lean his bare back against it. He had a chrome and glass coffee table, which he put his feet up on.

“Decorations by Harley,” he decided, looking around critically. Maybe he hadn’t ever really put his penchant for motorcycles behind him. This was what being tired did—made a man’s mind go places it didn’t generally go.

And tonight his apartment seemed to him a lonely place. Without personality and without soul.

Not to mention cold.

Abruptly, he got up, feeling as if he was being pulled by a magnet. He went down the narrow stairs to the office below. There was only ash left from Holly’s fire, so he carefully rebuilt it, enjoying the ritual of shaving kindling, lighting the match, blowing the embers to life, feeding in progressively larger wood. He liked his fires man-sized, not like those little piddly things she lit.

By the time he had the fire roaring, his ice cream was nearly melted, but he settled himself on her sofa, the afghan over it warming his bare back, and sighed with something that dangerously approached contentment. It was cozy down here.

But difficult as hell not to think about her when it was all her little touches that made this room so much nicer than the one directly above it.

The truth was he couldn’t believe Holly Lamb had told him she’d think about allowing him to escort her to the Coltons’ dance. That was almost a no.

From her. Miss Mousey.

What had he expected? The truth? He’d expected her to fall all over herself saying yes, because that’s what women, in his experience, did.