Reason To Believe (6 page)

Now, there was a word he didn't much like, unless he was the one doing the testing. He tended to fail them, sometimes for lack of interest, others maybe for lack of purity.

Like the time he'd sat up on the hill for three nights and two days, doing the
hanble ceya
his father said would help him find direction in his life. Thirteen years old, and all he wanted to know was, which way to the place where they keep the horses? But he'd gone up there, and he'd done what his father had told him to do. He'd tested his endurance. He'd gone without food or water, and he'd seen his first big pink elephant.

Only it wasn't an elephant; it was a stout red roan horse.

His father had said that the horse would come back to him one day, in the flesh. And it had. Twice. He'd gotten bucked off one once. Broke his goddamn arm. Another time he'd bet on a red roan in a Calcutta team roping and lost fifty bucks. Since then he'd stopped looking for that damn horse. So much for tests and foolhardy vision quests.

Ben shook his head. "I don't have time. I keep tellin' the ol' man, I can't take that kinda time."

"What does he say?"

"He says I sound like a white man." A no-win notion that made Ben chuckle. Like trying to pass a Mustang off as a Thoroughbred.

Not that he had any use for a damn hay-burning Thoroughbred.

"Auto repair business is good this time of year. I can't just take off for two weeks." But he felt pressed to add, "I guess I have been gettin' back into the, uh... some of the old ways a little more lately."

"Really?"

Oh, yeah, she liked that all over. "The sweats are good," he allowed, figuring at this point he had to milk whatever interest he could drag out of her. "I thought I'd forgotten how to talk Indian, but it comes back. You hang around the ol' man, it all comes back. Some things easier than others, but I figure I'll hang in there, you know, for something to do." He glanced away and added, unbidden, "Helps me stay away from the bottle."

"That's good," Clara said, and she meant it, but her crisp tone invited no further discussion.

And so the weighty silence took over again.

It
was
a good thing he'd stopped drinking. But she didn't want to talk about it. The sweat lodge, yes; his first language, certainly. His bout with alcohol, not really. It made her feel stupid, knowing that in all the time they'd lived together, she'd never considered that he might actually be an alcoholic. It had never seemed that bad. Maybe once or twice a year he'd go off on a half-hour errand that became an all-nighter, or he wouldn't come home from work until Sunday morning. But usually she'd been able to find him and coax him home. In fact, she'd thought
she
was doing a pretty good job of keeping him away from the bottle. He'd only slipped when
she
wasn't looking.

His DUI had come as a total surprise to her, mainly because she didn't find out about it until six months after the fact, when their insurance rates had skyrocketed. She couldn't believe he hadn't told her. More than once she had confidently made the claim that she and her husband never kept secrets from each other.

God, she'd been blind.

And she'd failed. She didn't want to think about it any more than she wanted to discuss it. Failures of that magnitude could not be erased.

"I'd better get that bed made up. You must be tired, and tomorrow promises to be—"

"It's early yet," he said, touching her knee to forestall her flight. "Annie doesn't have to miss school for this probation appointment, does she? She's already missed—"

"There's no school tomorrow. Teachers' Convention. I can only take part of the day off." She settled back down, albeit tentatively. "I have to put the finishing touches on an exhibit," she explained as he withdrew his hand. Its warmth lingered, like a melancholy memory.

She smiled wistfully. "Remember when Anna used to love to go to the museum with me, especially at night when I was preparing an exhibit? She thought it was wonderful that we had a special key. She'd tell her teachers that she could be in the museum when it was closed to 'regular' people."

"She liked being around all that old stuff as much as you did."

"She doesn't anymore." Her smile faded. "And I can't believe she got a deficiency report in history. She knows this stuff. She won't do her assignments, that's all."

"I'll talk to her about it."

"Oh, like that's going to turn her around."

"What do you want me to do?"

Good question. What
did
she want from him now? Not his touch, surely. Answers—sensible ones, at least— were harder to come by whenever he touched her.

"Talk to her, I guess. Maybe she'll listen to you. She thinks it's all my fault." She shot him an accusatory glance.
"Everything
is my fault."

"You want me to tell her it's my fault? I've told her that."

"You haven't told her..."

About the other thing Clara refused to discuss.
He waited expectantly for her to name it, but be
damned
if she would. It was his juice, and he could go right on stewing in it.

"She doesn't need to know any of the gory details, Ben. She's a child.
My
feeling is that we have to spare her as much of that as... as we possibly can."

She paused, daring him with a cold look to come up with any more feeble objections. But of course, he didn't. Why should he? He knew she wasn't about to discuss his sins with anybody, especially not Anna. She was trapped in her own code of ethics, which was just the way he liked it. Damn him. He always came out looking like the good guy. How in the hell did he manage that?

"When you come up to see her... what do you two talk about?"

"Whatever she wants to talk about, which usually isn't anything earth-shattering. Just, you know..." He shrugged, clearly at a loss for memorable examples. "She asks about different ones she remembers. Some of her cousins. My sisters."

"How are they?"

He gave her a dubious look.

"I want to know," she conceded. "I'm asking, too."

"They're all about the same." He eyed her speculatively. "Annie always asks how I'm doin'. Like she really wants to know."

"And what do you say?"

"Depends on how I'm doin'. Usually I'm doin' okay." They shared a quiet moment, an unintentional exchange of soft looks. Then he asked, "How are
you
doing?"

"Me, personally? I'm fine. I'm taking an exercise class. I just had my annual—" She forgot herself and readily reported everything to him, the way she used to. "You know,
that
checkup. The one I hate. But everything's fine. I think I've even lost a few pounds."

"I think you've lost more than a few." He smiled. "But you look good. You look..."

"Are you sure you don't want something to eat? There's plenty of—"

"I'm not hungry. I'm not tired." He laid his hand over her knee, warming up the same spot he'd touched before—and disturbingly more—with a reassuring squeeze. "I'm doin' okay."

She avoided his eyes as she stood quickly, shedding his hand. "I'll get the sheets on, so the bed will be ready whenever you are."

She grabbed a set of sheets from the top shelf of the linen closet. She wished she had some new ones. They'd slept together on all the sheets she had for that bed. She wondered whether he'd recognize the old blue and white tulips.

When she bent to the bed-making task, she felt his presence, even though he hadn't made a sound coming to the doorway. He stood there watching her, and she was certain she could hear his thoughts about the sheets. Sissy sheets, he'd called them, predicting the flowers would wilt the night they broke them in.

But if the memory was truly in his thoughts, he kept it to himself.

"You put more bookshelves in here, huh? Feels cozy."

The room had been almost bare for a long time. When they'd bought the house it was going to be the baby's room. None was immediately on the way, not then, but they'd planned for it to be a bedroom for the second child they were going to have someday. It had, in the end, become the "spare" bedroom.

"It's a
guest
room," she reminded him, putting him in his place, as though he'd said otherwise. "I wanted it to feel cozy. But it serves more purposes, with the desk and a place to put more books."

"You get much company?"

"No." She opened a dresser drawer—the dresser they had refinished themselves, making it almost a match for the bed, but not quite—and took out an extra blanket. "My mother was here last spring."

"How did it go?"

"It was fine. I took her to work with me. She wasn't very interested in the museum itself, but she enjoyed meeting people. She's good at that." Ben had always been most tolerant of her mother, who was at times quite difficult to tolerate. "Anna was on her best behavior. Her grandmother kept buying her things, playing the bestower of gifts."

"Annie ate that up, huh?"

"I think she accepted it for what it was worth. She's not easily fooled. Unlike her mother."

She refused to look up when he came into the room, stationing himself on the other side of the bed. If she looked up, he would look into her eyes and see what she wanted him to say. That
he
was the fool. Not she. But he wouldn't say it because they both knew it wasn't true. Still, that was what she wanted to hear, and he would see it and know it for sure if she looked up at him. And he'd have something else over her. Another power.

She unfolded the flowered sheet, then flipped it across the bed. He caught it by the corner, and together they tucked it under the corners of the mattress. It was their original bed and the first piece of furniture they'd bought. It seemed small now, but they'd had a small room then, and he'd assured her that anything bigger than full size would be a waste, as close as they slept together. When they'd moved to Bismarck, they'd bought a new set of bedroom furniture, four matching pieces with a queen-size bed, so that his feet wouldn't hang so far over the end. But the new bed had given them more width than they'd needed. Most of the time.

She smoothed out the top sheet, worn soft by their bodies during so many nights that were so long past. He followed her lead. She watched his hand, inches from hers, caressing the cotton as though in his mind it covered a woman's thigh. Hers, maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe his fantasies were less specific than hers, or, rather, more specific and less pure.

Stop it, Clara. Either way, you absolutely could not care one whit less.

But she took a martyr's pleasure in testing herself, letting her hand linger close to his. His wide gold wedding band looked almost delicate on his big brown hand. He had marvelous hands. Skilled in so many things. Masculine. Incredibly masculine. It gave her pleasure to see hers next to his and think of them as partners.

It
had once
given her pleasure, but enough was, surely, enough. She snatched the top sheet off the dresser and snapped it open, letting it fly across the bed, hoping to catch him off guard and make him flinch. But she didn't. He caught it, smiling as though he'd heard her silly thoughts. She glanced away quickly, her face hot.

"I can get a room somewhere if it bothers you."

"If what bothers me?"

"Havin' me sleep here."

"It doesn't bother me at all." It wasn't a lie if she willed it hard enough to be true. She tossed him a pillowcase and decided to let him finish the job himself. She jerked the cord on the blinds and made them
thwack
shut. The plant she'd hung in the window captured a hank of her hair in its droopy leaves. She reached for its greenhouse hook.

"You takin' that out?" He chuckled softly. "I promise not to breathe on it or anything."

"You always complained about too many plants. It's getting to be a jungle in this house, you said."

"I was just teasin' you, mostly." He moved closer, eyeing the plant with newfound fondness. "I kinda got used to having them around. Bought myself one of those spider things like you've got in the living room, but I must not've watered it enough or something. Finally threw it out."

"You might have given it too much water. Most people make that mistake."

"Yeah, maybe."

"This one doesn't seem to be getting enough light here." She made a production of studying wilted leaves and steadfastly ignoring his warm proximity as she prattled on. "Anna gave me this years ago. It was just a tiny thing. So was she. Her teacher gave her some cuttings, and she started it herself." She pinched off a sad-looking stalk. "Every time it gets spindly like this, I start to throw it out, but then I just cut it back. It always comes back to life."

"You always had a way with plants. You still got the kind you used to put on all the cuts and insect bites?"

"Aloe?" She nodded. A glimpse of the bulge in the pocket of his blue chambray shirt reminded her of the time she'd used aloe juice to soothe a cigarette burn on his arm. He'd been a little drunk, a little silly, as she recalled. "I still have aloe. Maybe I was an herbalist in a past life. A simpler life. Maybe I was a cook, or maybe I used herbs to doctor people up."

"Maybe you were an Indian. You like all that old Indian stuff so much."