The Wanderer

“Well, since we’re sharing confidences...”

“Cooper, I work in this town. My kids go to school here, my aunt’s a teacher here. Lou’s known Ray Anne a long time. In a word, no. I have truly dense areas in my brain, but not that dense. Really, she’s not my style. I never did have a mother fixation.”

“I never had a mother who looked like that,” Cooper said.

They ate in silence and by the time Cooper pushed away his plate, Ray Anne had left the restaurant. “So, Mac, did the family desert you tonight?” he asked.

Mac sat back. “Not exactly. It’s Lou’s bunco night with some good friends from Coquille and she’ll be out late. I picked up a pizza for the kids and ran for my life.” He wiped his mouth with his napkin. “I stood at the door, threw it in and said I’d be home in two hours. They jumped on it like starving hounds.”

“Two whole hours?” Cooper asked with a laugh.

“I have to check homework. If I don’t check homework, Lou’s on me like a cheap suit.”

“Checking homework. That can’t be so bad.”

“You checked homework lately, pal?”

“Whose homework do you think I’d check?”

“Well, that’s not the point, Cooper. The point is, it’s torture. If I were in school now, I wouldn’t have graduated sixth grade. In short, I’d rather give up a nut. But that’s the price of fatherhood.”

* * *

Lou stood in front of the bathroom mirror in only her panties, gently lifting her breasts. Then she took a side view and sighed. Although they were small, she felt they drooped to an unflattering degree; they used to be perky. She let them go. Then with her fingers gently pulling at her cheeks, back toward her ears, she wondered for the millionth time if she could look ten years younger with a face-lift.

“Lou, come back,” Joe called from the bedroom.

I’m not greedy, she thought. Just ten years.

She sighed again and went back to the bedroom. Joe Metcalf was fifty and, besides being handsome, he was in terrific shape. George Clooney shape. He was strong as an ox, wide-shouldered, flat-bellied, with long legs, big wonderful hands and beautiful teeth. As she approached the bed, he turned off the TV and opened his arms. “What were you doing in there?” he asked, his lips going immediately to her neck.

“We call it freshening up,” she said, tilting her head back to give him more of her neck.

“I bet you were brooding.”

“Now why would you say that?” she asked, pulling back.

“Because it’s something you tend to do. I think all our problems would be solved if you brought me out of the closet. Why are you keeping me a secret, Lou? Why am I still ‘bunco night’?”

She hesitated. It was so complicated. Mostly it was his age—ten years younger. Even though his hair would be gray if he grew it out, with that shaved head, he could pass for forty-five. “I don’t want the kids to feel vulnerable, to feel like my attention could be sliding away from them.”

“It won’t, Lou. We’ll spend whatever time together is reasonable for you. I have kids, too.”

“Yours are on their own.”

“Thank God,” he said with a sigh. He rolled onto his back but he kept an arm around her. Joe was the divorced father of a son and daughter, twenty-five and twenty-three, respectively. “They still have way too many needs, however. A wallet drain.”

“They’ll be married with children before you know it,” Lou said. “And so will mine. And I’ll feel like a great-grandmother. Oh, my God.” She dropped her head onto his naked shoulder.

He laughed at her and his hand found her ass. “Best-looking great-grandmother in the state, maybe the country.”

She lifted her head, messy red-gold curls flopping around. “When you’re seventy I’ll be eighty. Eighty.”

“Christ, like you’re screwing a nineteen-year-old. I hope I live to seventy. I can’t wait to see what you bring to eighty!”

Lou and Joe had met through an online dating service. They made a date for coffee and he looked, well, mature. When she asked, “How old are you?”, he answered, “How old do you want me to be?” She had answered, “Fifty-nine,” and he said, “Consider it done.”

It was weeks before she learned the truth. She thought he just looked damn good for his age, which men had an annoying tendency to do. It had been programmed that way by the world—men became distinguished while women faded and aged.

He’d been divorced for ten years, had tried dating from time to time but nothing really clicked and he wanted to meet someone he had things in common with who would join him for movies, dinner, social things. Oh, he liked to eat, went to movies seldom, but... “Okay, the truth? I wanted to have sex again before I died. With someone I liked.”

What a coincidence. So did she.

He was a retired air force colonel who now worked for the Oregon State Police as a trooper. It was his mission to retire, for the second time, at sixty. And now that he’d recovered from his divorce—his ex was remarried and his kids had completed college—he could count on a comfortable old age. Part of his job in Coos County was to assist the Sheriff’s Department. That was a little close for comfort for Lou.

“I don’t see why,” he argued. “Police people are like a family. They intermarry all the time.”

“Marry!”

“Well, we have to be going somewhere!” he said. “Besides, Mac and I get along fine. He likes me. We work well together when we have to.”

“Let me think, let me think!” she had pleaded. She’d been pleading that for a year.

But Lou’s little secret was that this was all she’d ever wanted. If she’d met him when she was twenty-one, she’d have married him in a heartbeat—provided he hadn’t been eleven. She’d have been a good wife to him. In fact, what she’d always wanted was a home, a spouse, kids. Crazy as it seemed now, she’d never even come close. She had been twenty-five when her brother and sister-in-law had Mac, thirty-five when their deaths left him orphaned and she became his parent. She’d been only forty-four when Mac came to her and confessed his girlfriend was pregnant, and fifty when Cee Jay left him and the three kids. While raising Mac’s kids was hard work—cutting into her social life and sleep, costing time and money—if she could, she would kiss Cee Jay for giving her these precious children.

Once or twice a week, she met Joe. Sometimes they went out for dinner, sometimes they stayed in, sometimes they even went somewhere other than his house for the night. She stole a long weekend from her family to go to Victoria with him—that was fabulous. He brought out her best self and she adored him. She just didn’t want to saddle him with an old woman, which she felt she would be before long. And she didn’t want anyone to laugh at the idea that she thought she was young enough for this, for him. Not the way they laughed at Ray Anne. Even Lou found Ray Anne ridiculous.

He slid down her panties. “It’s up to you, babe—I don’t want to push you too much and I’m not giving you up. But I sure like the way you play bunco.”

* * *

There were two situations that always tempted Cooper to cut and run. Being at complete odds with his environment, as with the Army or certain jobs. Or feeling a little too comfortable and secure. That had happened to him a few times, a couple of which were very difficult. There were a couple of times he’d been with a woman with whom he thought he could go the distance. He’d had visions of the kind of happy home his parents had. When it didn’t work out, he was dealt a double blow—he was not only informed he’d let the women down, a painful enough thing for a man who’d been doing his best, but he had suffered the pain of loss and isolation. Naturally he tried to avoid both—work unsuited to him and women he couldn’t hold on to. For the past several years, he’d avoided romantic relationships that could gut him in the end. That whole not-sleeping, feeling the deep ache that came from failure, enduring the sudden loneliness of being rejected...it was bad for his disposition. He only got involved with women he didn’t care about too much. He just didn’t like the risks he associated with settling down.

Cooper thought it might be in his best interest to put up a for-sale sign on this beach property and take off. It might be the safest thing to do. But the train wreck of a bar/bait shop tugged at him. He wasn’t sure what that was about. He had no real stake in it. It was a gift, a piece of luck.

It was nice to be back on the water, even though the bait shop was a pimple on the otherwise beautiful landscape. It was a disaster; fixing it looked about as easy as scaling Everest. He didn’t know where to start—or whether to start.

Cooper couldn’t remember ever having such difficulty making a decision. He generally made his decisions too fast, without really thinking things through. Enlisting in the Army, taking a job or quitting a job. Then there had been two engagements, five years apart, that were probably doomed from the start even if he hadn’t seen it. He surprised himself this time. The Cooper he thought he was would have either sold or leveled that dying old shack by now.

He felt an odd sense of peace. And it scared him to death.

* * *

A couple days later, Cooper found himself watching a quiet sunset with an empty beach. The fishing boats had docked. Cooper headed for town, the long way. He thought he’d like either a burger at the diner or pizza. But as he approached the high school, he saw the football field was all lit up, the parking lot overflowing. He could hear cheers and the thumping of high school band music even with the windows up. He turned in to the school, drove around to the back and then hunted for a space but ended up on the back overflow dirt lot. There were buses representing the Carver High Badgers and as he walked toward the field, he could see that both the home and visiting bleachers were full.

By God, the whole town was there.

He paid his five bucks, but the bleachers were so crammed, he just hung around the end, standing. There was an announcer on the loudspeaker. He saw Eve on the sidelines and wondered which of the cheerleaders belonged to Gina. He watched a few plays. The score was 10–7 in favor of the Badgers nearing the half. He picked up from people that Thunder Point never beat Carver High, at least not in too many years to remember. And then, with the clock ticking down to the half, there was a fumble, a recovery and— “Dupre has the ball and runs it! Going, going, and we...have...touchdown! Sixty yards and touchdown for the Cougars!”