Once Upon a Time, There Was You (11 page)

Sadie stares at the ceiling, slows her breathing. In an odd way, relaxes. If she dies today, she got to live. And now she’ll see what happens next. She hopes she can come back and tell others not to worry.

And if she is allowed to live, she … What? She imagines herself walking away from the shed, whole and uninjured, released back into her life. She imagines walking in the door to their flat and seeing Irene in the kitchen, imagines calling out, “Mom?” and Irene turning to see her, her face lit up like it always was when she came home, then changing when she saw that something had happened. Or maybe she wouldn’t tell her mother. Maybe she would keep it to herself instead of feeding Irene’s fears. Maybe there would be something noble in that, turning the tables and protecting Irene, for a change. And so now she imagines walking in, making excuses to her mother for her absence, making her believe that it was a mini-rebellion, and she was sorry for any worry she’d caused, then going into her bedroom and sitting at the side of her bed and holding her old stuffed animal rabbit against her middle, smelling her child self at the top of its head.

She thinks if she does get to live, if she does get to walk out of here like that, she will forgive the man, so that she can unburden herself as much as she can of everything that has happened today. She will forgive him so that he does not own any part of her life. She knows how to do that.

When Sadie was in seventh grade, her best friend turned against her. It was for no reason Sadie could discern; the girl just chose suddenly to make Sadie’s life miserable. When Sadie visited her dad not long after all that abuse started, she told him
about it. He listened, lying on the floor of her bedroom as she lay in bed. It was always her favorite time with him, when they talked before she went to sleep. And when she had finished talking, he told her about how kids could be really vicious at that age, especially girls, and that what her friend was doing had way more to do with her own self than with Sadie. He said, “I know you feel bad about it, but here’s what I want you to do. Create an imaginary box. Into that box I want you to put all the wrong things Isabel did to you. Put all those things in there, and put your hurt feelings about those things in there, too. And then put the box high up on an imaginary shelf. Just put it away. You don’t have to deny anything, but you don’t need to have it out, either. Just put it away, and maybe someday you can look at it again and see it another way. Most of all, remember this: You didn’t do anything wrong. It’s just the way things worked out between the two of you. For now.”

Once more, Sadie moves to the wall and strains to see something through the cracks of the little shed, but it’s no use; all she can make out is a narrow line of green. She goes back to sit on the mattress and puts her head in her hands. Her eyes are swollen from crying. She has no idea where she is. She has no idea what time it is, and regrets the fact that she no longer wears a watch, that she relied on her cellphone for that. She hears a noise outside and stiffens, but apparently it was an animal; there are diminishing rustling sounds, then silence. A mountain lion?

She lies down and closes her eyes and waits, her body straight. Waiting is all she can do, and so she does it as well as she can.

10

S
aturday afternoon, John sits on the patio at W. A. Frost, waiting for Tom Meister to show up. They’re going to have lunch and talk about financing John’s latest idea for refurbishing the hotel on Wabasha. Tom is the only mortgage banker John knows who’s a bit of a sentimentalist, a practical romantic, really; and that’s exactly the kind of banker he needs for this project. He’s worked with Tom before, and he likes him. They’ve developed a casual friendship; whenever a client gives Tom tickets for a Vikings or Twins game, he invites John to come along. For his part, John occasionally meets Tom for a drink and provides an ear for the man’s woes with the opposite sex. Tom is a thirty-seven-year-old womanizer who can’t settle down, but he likes to think the problem is much more complex than that. John just lets him talk. Tom’s got a good sense of humor and perspective; he’s not one of those guys sitting at the bar all hunch-backed and damp-eyed, blubbering into his beer. A few weeks ago, in fact, when he told John about his latest disaster, he slid onto the barstool beside him, loosened his tie, and began singing the lyrics from a country-and-western song:
You done stomped on my heart/And you mashed that sucker flat
. Then he ordered a boilermaker and some buffalo wings and said, “Okay, ready for this one?”

Tom is chronically late for most appointments, but every now
and then he shows up on time, so John always feels compelled to arrive at the appointed hour. Ordinarily, he brings a book or a newspaper, but this time he has forgotten. He could peruse the menu in the overly studious way people sitting alone do, but he already knows what he wants: the fried egg BLT and the curried carrot soup. He supposes he could check his email, but he did that not fifteen minutes ago, just before he came into the restaurant. He was looking for a message from Amy, which he did not find. He’d thought of sending her one, but in the end decided against it, not sure if he was honoring the need to give her or himself space. It had hurt when she left the way she did; but then, suddenly, it had not.

He leans back in his chair, watching people come onto the patio with the benign interest of a cat stretched out on a window ledge:
Pretty girl. Nice briefcase. I know that man from somewhere—an actor at Dudley Riggs’s Brave New Workshop?

At the table next to him, two women sit down and begin talking in low tones with their heads practically touching. He’d bet anything they’re engaging in the time-honored practice of man-bashing. He discreetly moves a bit closer and hears, “Oh, please, she’s always been sensitive about that. And everything else! She’s such a little drama queen. If he had a functioning brain cell, he’d dump her.”

Well. So much for assumptions. He thinks again of emailing Amy, speaking of assumptions. It could very well be that her behavior the last time they were together embarrassed her, and she’s waiting for him to make the first move toward reconciliation. Probably he should wait awhile longer, though. Best not to rush these things.

He watches an older couple eating their lunch, and their ease and enjoyment in each other’s company is obvious. He bets they’ve been married for over fifty years, although the last time
he thought that, he asked the guy, whom he met in the restroom, how long he’d been married to the woman he seemed so happy to be with, and the guy said, “Oh, hell, we’re not married. Why do you think we’re jabbering like a couple of jaybirds? This is just our second date!” John looks for wedding rings on this couple’s hands: yes. And so he decides that they’ve been happily together since their twenties. They fought, but they fought fairly. They understood and believed in commitment. It did happen.

He looks at his watch. Tom is now half an hour late; John will wait another five minutes and then give him a call. He looks up into the trees to see if he can spot any birds or, even better, nests. He used to pay Sadie a quarter for every bird’s nest she spotted. He wanted her to be skilled in the art of noticing, and he liked teaching her about the ingenious architecture of those tiny abodes. She liked the Baltimore oriole nests most of all, she told him, on the day he showed her one, and when he asked why, she said it was because they seemed the hardest to build. Always after a challenge, that one. It was a good quality, so long as it was not taken to extremes.

She’ll be rock climbing today, presumably is doing it right now, in fact. He wishes he were with her. He’s missed out on so much of her life, and he resents it. But Irene was hell-bent on moving to the coast, and he doesn’t want to live in San Francisco. There’s too much
there
, there. He is put off rather than charmed by Lombard Street and the trolley cars and Fisherman’s Wharf. He dislikes the gawking tourists, carrying on about the Golden Gate Bridge and how they wish they could live in such a place as this.

What he likes is the subtler style of his own town, the nonblaring treasures that abound: Mickey’s Diner and Manny’s Steakhouse. The alcoves at the St. Paul cathedral, the houses tucked into Crocus Hill. The gigantic international grocery store on
University and Dale; the venerable used bookstore on Snelling, the omnipresent lakes. He and Sadie both love the annual Minnesota State Fair, the tractors and the quilts and the blue-ribbon cakes and the engaging patter of the men selling Miracle knives. They like the sight of the 4-H kids sleeping next to their cows and the towering Clydesdale horses that are dressed up in bells and hand-oiled, brass-trimmed harnesses to pull the Budweiser wagon. Every year, they join the throngs of admirers who stand before the sculpted-from-butter heads of Princess Kay of the Milky Way and her attendants. These are displayed with a noticeable lack of irony in refrigerated cases. Best of all, they like the church tent, where stout, kindhearted women wearing faded floral aprons serve meatball sundaes.

St. Paul spawned the Wolverines, a band whose members wear threadbare tuxedos and play 1920s and ’30s jazz songs, many of which they scored themselves by listening again and again to old records. It has Garrison Keillor’s Common Good Books. There’s the conservatory at Como Park. The James Hill House. The Mississippi River Boulevard and Summit Ave. Even the cold winters and the humid summers of St. Paul, John likes them, too. In part it’s because—he smiles ruefully, thinking this—they are a challenge.

He checks his watch again, and when he looks up, he sees a woman coming out onto the patio. It’s Amy, and she’s with a tall, good-looking man, who is laughing loudly at something she just said. She hasn’t seen him, and so while she has her back to him, he leaves his table and asks to be seated inside, in a far corner, so she won’t pass him on the way out. As soon as he is reseated, he begins drumming his knuckles on the table. When he sees Tom come in, he calls out his name and rises to wave him over.

“Hey,” Tom says, pulling out a chair and sliding into it. “Sorry I’m late.” He folds his sunglasses, slips them into his front
pocket. He looks around the room, raises his chin to the young woman a few tables over who’s waving at him. She’s lovely, with thick blond hair that hangs down to her waist.

“So, Tommy,” John says.

“Get this,” Tom says. “That blond woman who looks like Barbie? That’s her name!
Barbie!
Hey, how come we’re not out on the patio? It’s dark in here. And it’s beautiful outside.”

“It’s quieter in here,” John says. “So as I told you, I’m thinking about a residential hotel, and here’s the beautiful thing. An extended-stay hotel runs about three thousand a month. Renting an apartment costs about a thousand a month, but it’s empty, and it provides no services. I’ll be the place in between, for about eighteen hundred, so I’ve got a competitive edge already. But by putting it there on Wabasha in that great old hotel, I’ll have virtually no competition. I want a restaurant in there that can service both the public and the residents, and I want a rooftop garden—there’ll be a view of the river from there. I’ve already talked to a structural engineer—putting it on top of eleven stories won’t be a problem.”

Tom blinks. “Hello. How are you? Did you order yet?”

“Sorry.” John hands him a menu. As soon as they’ve placed their orders, John starts in again. “Think of the guys who come here for business for six, eight weeks. They’re displaced from their homes and their families and friends. They need a comfortable place, they need the companionship of others like them. I’ll give them that. And more. For example, they won’t have to incur the cost of everyday maid service, but I’ll offer someone to come in and tidy up whenever they want.”

Tom nods, thinking. “How many rooms?”

“One hundred sixty-five.”

Tom stares into space, doing calculations in his head. John knows him well enough to see that he’s not immediately enthusiastic
about the idea. He’ll need to personalize it more. He leans back while the server puts his lunch before him, takes a bite and waits for Tom to do the same—he, too, ordered the fried egg BLT.

“Damn, this is good!” Tom says, after he takes a bite.

“Yeah,” John says. “So, listen. This idea isn’t just for business-people who travel. Let’s suppose your girlfriend dumps you.”

Tom’s fork stops midway to his mouth, and he looks at John.

“Suppose you’ve been living with her and she all of a sudden gives you the heave-ho.”

“Yeah, I’ll try to imagine that,” Tom says.

“All right, so you’re out of there and you’ve got nowhere to go except maybe your sister’s pull-out sofa. But you don’t want to be in your sister’s house with her asking what happened
this
time and the nieces and nephews rifling through your duffel bag and asking you to play Candy Land every five minutes. You don’t want to see your sister and her husband sitting and watching a movie at night all cozy and getting bowls of ice cream for each other. You don’t want to crash with your friends for nights on end, either, you’re too old for that bullshit. You’re not sure what your next move is; you just need some time alone to think.”

Tom nods. “Yup.”

John leans back in his chair. He might pretty much have him, now. “You come to my hotel and there’s a comfortable room, and you can be alone if you want to. But there are also other people so you don’t have to be alone. Might even be some other people who’ve been dumped.”

“Some guys to talk to,” Tom says.

“Not just guys,” John says, and he can tell by Tom’s face that the deal’s all but done.

“So what are we looking at?” Tom says. “Eight, nine million?”

“Nine point five.”

“I’ll talk to Bill Montgomery this afternoon; we might be able to get you in for a meeting by midweek.”

After lunch, John goes out to the parking lot, and there is Amy again: the guy has just opened the car door for her. And now she sees him, too. She is startled, but then she smiles and waves. He waves back, unsmiling, then dives into his car and takes off.