Dance Real Slow (20 page)

“No,” I say, grabbing her around the waist and pulling her close. “I want you here. I
need
you here.”

“No you don't,” she says, kissing me on the tip of my nose. She walks around to the other side of the truck, waving goodbye to Calvin before climbing in. “You'll do fine,” she says through the glass. “Be nice.”

Then it is only Calvin and me, alone behind the house, waiting for the arrival of his mother. There is so much I had wanted to say to prepare him, but instead I choose only silence. We build a small fort using twigs
and stones and then I take him inside and wash the sticky green Popsicle from his face and hands.

She is driving a white Ford Taurus and I watch her from my upstairs window. She sits still for some time, long enough to check her face twice in the rearview mirror and look into a large brown purse at her side. Calvin yells out that someone is here, someone is in the driveway.

I call him to the stairwell. “It's your mother,” I say, tucking in the front of his sweater. He pulls back, complaining he doesn't like it that way. “Listen, keep it in for me.”

He huffs and the two of us walk to the front door. He looks surprised, because normally we use the back entrance. But normally his mother does not come to visit.

“Hello,” she says, clinging briefly to the door handle of her car before walking up the pathway.

“Say hello,” I whisper to Calvin. He does not seem terribly thrilled by Kate's arrival until he sees that she is carrying a dictionary-sized package beneath her arm.

“Is that mine?” he asks.

Kate smiles and nods. In two years she has not changed much physically. Her hair is lighter, blonder, and her skin is dark from sun. A small silver cross hangs from her left earlobe and she has a pair of tortoiseshell sunglasses clipped through an open buttonhole of her denim shirt. She is wearing no makeup, save a gentle rub of lipstick the shade of blood oranges. The hollows of her cheeks seem deeper, slightly. Leaning down, she will not surrender the package until Calvin gives her a
hug. She lets out a moan, from her diaphragm, and then wraps her arms around Calvin's back, dropping her chin over his shoulder. Calvin seems to know this is important and he does not struggle, as he does with his grandmother or strangers, or sometimes even with me. Kate runs her fingers up his spine and neck and through the feathery ends of his hair. When she turns her face to breathe, like a swimmer, I can see she is crying. Slowly, she releases him, blotting her wet cheeks with the heel of her hand.

“Okay, now enough of this,” she says, reaching for the box at her side. “I didn't really know what to get.”

Hurriedly, Calvin scratches through the wrapping paper to reveal a miniature DC-10 airplane.

“The batteries are supposed to be inside.”

Calvin peels back the ends of the box, pulls free his aircraft, and accidently flips the switch that turns a set of red wing lights blinking.

“Enamored,” I say, watching him clutch the flashing toy against his chest.

“Really, I had no idea what to get him. I mean, little boys are so hard to shop for.”

I nod, walking onto the grassy hump of soil that is our front yard. Kate starts to follow, then stops midway, between Calvin and me, as if waiting for an invitation. Turning to face the two of them, to face the house, I raise my arms as if nailed to a crucifix, opening one palm and gesturing upwards, outwards.

“This is our life,” I announce. “This is how we live.”

Mostly, Kate spends the evening observing Calvin: watching him run his new airplane across the floor, eating half a bowl of alphabet noodle soup or a piece of bread smeared with strawberry preserves. These are things she has not seen him do, things he was almost too young to do alone before she left. When he puts on his pajamas, she reaches over and rubs his round belly, seemingly fascinated by its gummy, resilient texture. She sits on the edge of his bed and tells him about her trip to Bali, about how people had to watch the ground while walking, otherwise they were bound to step right on a lizard—squishing it. Finally, she tells him how she would wheel him in a shaded carriage to a park in Ann Arbor when he was a baby and talk to him, just like she's talking to him now. Before we turn out the lights, she kisses him on his forehead, cheek, and then hard on his neck.

“I had nearly forgotten how sweet he is,” she says in the hallway.

We sit at the kitchen table and I pour out two glasses of Scotch, with lots of ice, the way Kate likes it. She rolls the tumbler quickly between the palms of her hands, beads of perspiration flicking from the glass, catching the light like dust motes.

“You look well,” she says, between sips.

“This place agrees with me.”

“It's not too small?”

I shake my head and walk over to the sink, running some cold water into my glass.

“You and Harper getting along all right?”

“Sure. Work's fine. Quiet.”

“Not much need for the great litigator out here, huh?”

“Things change,” I say, stirring my drink with one of Calvin's abandoned Popsicle sticks. “You never know how life's going to jump up, fuck with you.”

“Like maybe a wife leaving.”

“Or a mother,” I say, turning to peer out the window at her clean white car in the drive.

“Or a mother.”

Walking to the table, I spin a chair and straddle it, backwards, laying my forearms across the top of the headrest.

“How's your life?” I ask, looking directly into the almond-hued irises of her eyes.

“Different. Different than when you knew me.” She stops to take another drink. “I've seen a lot—been so many places I never knew, never even imagined existed. Bali, Zanzibar, Beijing, Toledo—”

“Ohio?” I ask, smirking.

“Spain. Toledo, Spain,” she says, missing my attempt at sarcasm. “That's education. Semesters, summers—whole years abroad should be required curriculum at all colleges.”

She quiets, suddenly, fingering a torn page from one of Calvin's coloring books. It is a picture of a baker holding a tray of freshly made cakes, pies, and sticky buns. Calvin has crayoned the confections mostly orange and pink.

“Last March we drove to St. Louis,” I say.

Kate smiles, uncomfortably. She is another person, someone I no longer truly know.

At our wedding reception, index cards were left at the place setting of every guest. Printed across the top of each card was the inscription, “Advice for the newlyweds …” Most of the responses were humorous, and we read them all later in bed on our honeymoon. Not so long afterwards, when I was packing for Calvin and my move to Kansas, I found the cards, hairy with mildew, stored in a shoe box. All the answers are right here, I thought, simply for the asking. You, too, could solve each and every marital problem by rifling through these index cards, searching for the proper advice—the cure for whatever ails you. One I remember, even now, ended with the phrase: “Don't lose the connection. It is special, it is rare.”

But something inflated between us, quickly, and would not burst.

“Thank you for letting me come,” she says, smoothing out the wrinkled coloring-book page against the hard surface of the table. “It means the world to me.”

Beside the closet in the front hallway we discuss plans to meet tomorrow morning for brunch. I hold open Kate's coat and she slides her arms through. She asks if she can keep the colored page, and when I say yes, she neatly folds it into four sections and places it inside her purse. Staring down at the muddied tips of her shoes, she manages, “I'm sorry.”

“For what?”

“For things. That our lives became so separate. That things turned out so different than we planned. And”—slowly, she nudges wider a crack between the front door and the molding, and from where I am standing, behind,
I can see her lower lip tremble—“that I have not been there every evening to kiss Calvin good night.”

Nothing is easy about Kate trying to bleed her way back into Calvin's life, back into our lives. We hug awkwardly, rapidly, and then she drives back to her motel room, alone, with me on the front step in my stocking feet.

Cigarette smoke filters through a vent in the Tarent High locker room and Noah is standing on a chair, waving the smoke toward his face before inhaling deeply. He has not seen me enter, but I throw a broken piece of chalk at his hip to call his attention. They have won, again, and are wandering about the small, cement room dressed in towels and boxer shorts. Midway through the third quarter, after Eric Shaw sank a jump shot to put the Trojans ahead by 19, I realized that I had very little to do with the success of this team. It is a talented collection of athletes and the best thing I can do is offer some well-timed advice and then stand back and enjoy.

“You played a good game,” I say, handing a Kleenex to Chris Rayles, who is rather vigorously picking at his right nostril. “Practice, tomorrow, usual time.” Before I leave them, I ask, “Would someone please do me a favor? Last person out tonight flip the lock on the double doors.”

Calvin and Kate have spent the day together and are waiting for me in the front lobby. This is the first home game Zoe has missed, but we are meeting her at Cale's for a quick bite once her shift has ended. When I arrive, Calvin is speaking rather emphatically to an
older gentleman in a maroon jacket, explaining the two switches on his airplane: one to operate the lights and the other, the engine noises.

“And do you have any idea how fast this type of jet travels?”

“Not really,” says Calvin, rubbing the nose cone with his thumb. “But it's fast. Faster than my dad's car.”

This causes both Kate and the older man to laugh.

“Faster than my car?” I ask.

“Prob'lee.”

“Okay, then,” I say, lifting the bangs from his eyebrows.

At Cale's we take a table in the rear, beside an unplugged Addams Family pinball machine and a slanted painting of two fishermen hauling in a net at high sea. Calvin kneels on a chair and waves his airplane across the room at Zoe. For several minutes we are still, listening to the jukebox rumble from one twangy country song to the next. Some men would not put Zoe, or themselves, in this situation. Thorny, hazardous. But now I am selfish. More than anything, I need her support. And Kate will not show spite; she will mind her tongue. She is grateful, I know, that I have allowed her into our lives again, however short the visit.

Finally, Kate opens a menu and says, “She's very pretty.” As if staged, called, Zoe carries over a cork-lined tray with three bottles of Budweiser, placing them in front of Kate, Calvin, and me.

“You let him drink beer?” asks Kate.

“It's orange juice,” says Zoe. “He likes it in these bottles.”

Then Zoe drops the tray to her side and reaches for Kate's hand. “Hi, I'm Zoe.”

Kate introduces herself, too, and I apologize for my lapse in manners.

“We're used to that by now,” says Zoe, winking at Kate and Calvin. “You'll have to excuse me for a few minutes. Just need to total my receipts and then I'll be finished.”

She cannot take long enough. If I were standing on the outside, peering inward, I would give this whole little scene a gentle bump, like someone trying to keep a spinning silver ball from dropping between the flippers on that Addams Family pinball machine. Watching Zoe and Kate together in the same state, in the same
room
, leaves me short of breath. I make eye contact only with Calvin and some old guy sitting at the table behind us.

After fried-chicken baskets all around, we drink coffee and Kate tells Zoe about her uncle's ranch in north Texas, near the Oklahoma border town Zoe recently visited. At one point during their conversation, Zoe removes a small notepad from her purse and writes down something Kate says about a blue peeling around some of the cattle's noses. When their discussion aimlessly wanders to Calvin, who is nearly asleep, his head resting against my thigh, I mention that perhaps we should get him home.

She has not seen her son in half a lifetime, his lifetime, and we spend the evening discussing diseased bovines.

“Oh, it is late,” says Kate.

Zoe maps out directions on the back of a napkin
from the parking lot of Cale's to Kate's motel. She does this without Kate's asking.

“Thanks.”

“Here's the only tricky part,” says Zoe, pointing to the black webbing of lines. “At this second stoplight, take the soft, angling right—not the hard one.”

Beside the cars, Kate kisses Calvin and thanks Zoe and me for being so kind. Again, we make plans to meet tomorrow, sometime in the late morning. Then she leaves and Zoe follows me home in her truck.

“You don't say much to her,” says Zoe, shirtless in bed.

“I don't know what I'm supposed to say.”

“You're not
supposed
to say anything. But it looks so difficult for you—like you're really struggling.”

“I am.”

“With what?”

“I'm struggling not to explode. Not to start screaming at her—go absolutely nuts.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean, why?” I ask, laying my book on the nightstand. “The real question is why haven't I done it yet. Why haven't I ripped her a new asshole for leaving—for leaving Calvin.”

“Gordon,” she says, sitting up, bracing herself against the headboard. “If you feel a need to do this, then do it. But you've got to have it out with her, tell her what's upsetting you. Not for her sake, but for yours.” Zoe's breasts hang free, nipples rimmed in random Braille, shaking as she speaks. “Maybe this isn't only
about Kate trying to make her peace with Calvin, but about you making peace with her. Christ, make peace with yourself.”

“Peace, always peace. Maybe I don't want peace.”

“Shut up, Gordon,” she says, switching off the light above her side of the bed. “Act like a man.”