The News of the World (14 page)

Paris did not take his hand. She backed a step and said, “I don't remember you.”

He placed a white plastic bag against my belly and whispered, “For you.” I looked inside; it was a six-pack of Rolling Rock. “I didn't know if you could get a real brew in this state.”

So it all started that night at the Park Cafe. Stacey joined us from the office and she sensed the tension right away. Paris had resisted all of Dalton's good-willed attempts to stir her memories of the old doughnut days. She'd even repeated her
eons ago
line once. I had been matter-of-fact, that is,
cold,
I suppose. He was just too jolly. At one point he had pulled his trouser cuff up to reveal no socks in his new Italian shoes and said, “We're talking vacation here. At the office, it's all socks. There's a dress code just like Dorcet!”

The Park Cafe is not a place to go if you are going with someone who talks too loud. They drywalled the ceiling and no sound escapes, and there was Dalton dropping names at ten decibels. He worked for Parker and Ellis Investment Bankers. He had spent Christmas on St. John's. His father bought a new boat called
The Trickle Down.
Throughout the dinner he called me
Mr. McGuire
and Stacey,
Stacey.
Stacey smiled through all of this, and I simply addressed my pot roast. Paris moved her chair closer to me than usual and talked conspiratorily to me about our plans for this year's kite, which we were planning to make and launch on Saturday.

The next two days, Dalton skied. I drew him a map to Alta, gave him the Honda, and sent him along. The first morning when I handed him the thermos full of coffee, he looked at it as if it were an award and shook his head. “You guys in the west!” he said. “Coffee from a thermos. You guys got it made.”

He returned each evening with tales of encounters with young females, describing them as “Narly Madonnas” and describing the conditions as “harsh,” a word that in his vocabulary meant
wonderful.
I think. Evenings we'd have
brews
and
suds
and even
brewskis
, and Dalton would say “Hey” a lot in the fashion of the Great White North. He and Stacey would stay up and talk an hour after Paris—and then I—had gone to bed.

When Stacey came to bed after the first night, she turned to me and said, “Be kind, Michael. He looks up to you.”

“Sure he does. I married the faculty fox.”

“No. Dalton's not doing as well as it seems. He's been deferred from the training program at Parker and Ellis. And Rebecca Eastman, remember?”

“Yeah.”

“She just got married in January.”

“I'll be kind to him,” I said. “I'll try to try harder.”

The next night Dalton and Paris and I were all watching the news. One of the leading stories was the weather, a spring storm in Ohio, which everyone was calling the Midwest and which is actually the Mideast, and when Mark Eubank came on, he was his adrenal self. He kept making antic, sweeping gestures and moving around the satellite photograph a lot, like a high school basketball coach in one of his last time outs.

Dalton said: “What is wrong with that guy?”

“He's just our weatherman; he's doing a pretty good job.”

Stacey came into the room with some cheese and crackers on the mallard plate my parents gave us a couple of Christmases ago, a plate we hadn't ever—to my knowledge—used. In one hand she had a glass of white wine. “Who's doing a good job?” she said.

“Snowbank,” Paris said. “Dalton doesn't like Mr. Snowbank.”

Stacey looked at me. “You want some wine?” and then added “Anybody?”

“I'll have a brewski,” Dalton said from his deep slump in the butterfly chair. Stacey started back toward the kitchen. “Michael?” she said to me. “Anything for you?”

“No, nothing for me. Thanks.”

“No brewski, Dad?” Paris said.

When Stacey had returned with Dalton's can of Rainier and we were watching the sports, she raised her glass and said, “Cheers, everybody. Dalton, we're glad you're here.” Paris raised her empty hand and I tapped her knuckles. “And,” Stacey went on, saying exactly what I wanted her not to, “tomorrow's Michael's birthday. We'll have to do something special.”

“Let's take him skiing with us,” Dalton said.

I stared at the footage of Wayne Gretzky scoring from the wing for a moment too long and said, “No, thanks. You two go. Paris and I have plans.”

“Birthday kite. Tomorrow we make our kite, right, Dad?”

“Well then, you better get to bed,” Stacey said.

“Don't go without a fight, kid,” Dalton smiled.

Paris stood. “I don't need to fight,” she said. “I've got a big day tomorrow.”

“How old will you be?” Dalton turned and gestured to me with his beer can.

“Thirty-seven,” I said.

He took a long slug from the beer and then said, “God, I'll bet you're glad it's half over.” And he laughed a wit's four-note laugh. I smiled at him. Paris had slipped away.

“Yeah, Dalton,” I tried to hold the smile. “It's a relief.”

LATER
, with too much energy to go to bed and not enough stamina to sit up and watch an old
Twilight Zone
on cable with Dalton and Stacey, I prowled around the garage, checking the ski rack and securing their skis for the morning. I climbed up in the pickup bed and pulled three blue bamboo poles from the rafters for our kite, and set them on the workbench. We had about fifty blue and fifty red poles from when I coached the ski team at Dorcet. They were the slalom course one year and when they were all replaced, I kept them for some reason, for this reason, I guess: fifty kites. I looked up. I would be able to make a kite a year until I was almost ninety.

As I put on my pajamas I could hear the television. Dalton's voice came: “What a geek.” He was addressing the set. I looked in on Paris and she made that little throaty moan that meant I was supposed to come in and sit for a minute.

“It's going to be a great kite,” I said to her. She turned and curled up to me where I sat and put her head alongside my leg. “What's the matter, Paris?” I could see her eyes open, looking hurt. I whispered, “What do you think of Dalton?”

“He's too old to have nicknames for beer.” And then she tightened against me and began to cry.

“Paris … Paris,” I said. “It's okay. You're right, but he's our guest for one more day. We can be nice for one more day, right?”

She nodded against my leg, but the crying intensifed a touch and she clutched me tighter. I leaned down and turned her face into the small light. “Hey, lady,” I whispered again. “It's not half over. Dalton was kidding. Your dad's not going anywhere. Do you hear me?”

“He'd miss me too much, wouldn't he?” she said, her lower lip interfering with the words a bit.

“He would.” I patted her back and realigned the covers. “He would. You and I are here to stay.”

SATURDAY.
Kite day. My birthday. Dalton was taking a night flight back to New York. Things were going to be all right.

I offered to fry up a quick breakfast for Stacey and Dalton, but Dalton was in a hurry. He was excited to have company for a change and said, “No thanks, Mr. McGuire. We've got to hit the slopes. Let's just stop and get a coffee and some doughnuts at the Seven-Eleven, okay, Stacey?”

“Okay,” she said. “Are you sure you two don't want to come with us?”

“Mom,” Paris answered. “We've got a kite to build. It's going to take all day.”

“Have fun,” Stacey said, leaning to kiss me.

“You too,” I said. “And Stacey,” I pointed at her. “Keep your arms folded.”

She shook her head at me as if to say
you sad old fool,
and she and Dalton drove away.

Our kite did take us all day because of material problems. We made the bamboo crossbar in an hour, notching the string sets at each tip and measuring it all with a precision it may not have required. It was a perfect five by three foot cross. But there was no string left from last year, and then I remembered using it on the tomato plants, and the visquine we had planned to use as the sail itself was marred with brown paint. Someone had used it as a dropcloth. So Paris and I ruined the midday cruising Grand Central (now Fred Meyer), Skaggs (now Osco), and ending up at a reliable standby, The West Side Drug Store, which under new management had just been painted blue, which anyone with any sense of history could see was wrong. I hated all the changes. Fred Meyer! And Skaggs, oh please:
Osco?
That sounds like a bad penny stock. But finding the golden drugstore of my youth painted blue, that hurt like a personal insult. Even so, they had four dusty rolls of sturdy kite string, obviously left over from the old days. And the visquine we found at Ketchums, which is also on its way down, but I'm not going to discuss that. By the time we had a late lunch at LaFrontera and had bowed the kite with string, faced the bow with plastic and trimmed it clean, it was after four
P.M.

Paris stood up, and the kite was taller than she by a foot. Through the clear plastic, her blurred image appeared to be underwater. “It's beautiful, Dad,” she said. “It's so big it won't need a tail, right?”

“Right,” I said. We'd learned that lesson last year.

We were both anxious to fly it, but decided to wait until the skiers returned and then take everybody down to Liberty Park for a trial.

Stacey and Dalton pulled in at about five-thirty, sun-burned and exhilarated. “Whoa! Get back!” Dalton called to me. “This woman is harsh! She is totally denied amateur status! Hand her the trophy now and let's have a brew!” He passed me on the way to the fridge. “She can ski!”

Stacey came up the stairs. “We had fun,” she said. “It was a little slushy this afternoon, but we had fun.”

“Mom, we've got the kite. Let's go down to Liberty Park. We'll all go and fly it!”

“Let me take a quick shower and we'll do that. We can pick up some burgers on the way down, okay, Dalton?”

“Sounds good,” he said. “I'm buying. My plane isn't until nine. I'd like to see this kite.”

While Stacey was in the shower, Dalton said, in a quiet sober voice I hadn't heard before, “New York is such a grind. I hate to go back.” He punched softly at me. “You guys in the west have got it made. All right if I have another beer?”

LIBERTY PARK
has its beginnings in April. It begins to fill with park people. The young men who polish their cars in groups. The sunbathers in pairs on pastel towels. All the sensible couples walking two dogs on two leashes, marching the perimeter. People play tennis in street clothes, and groups of skeptical children give the playgrounds a first try.

We arrived at the park as the sun was closing in on the Great Salt Lake. I wasn't worried about the time: twilight was longer every evening and I wanted the breezes. The wind was south, so we decided to stage from the big new hill north of the pond. There was only one couple on the far side, making out on a blanket. “Don't look, Mother,” Paris laughed. Stacey and Dalton sat halfway up the hill with our white paper bags of sandwiches and fries and that six pack of Rolling Rock, which I had saved for my birthday. Paris and I went down to the level ground and set up.

The breeze was small but steady, and on the first try when Paris released the transparent kite, it held in the air and then rose, slowly, taking string as I backed up.

“Don't you need a tail?” Dalton called.

“No!” Paris yelled back. “We know about that!”

Paris took the controls while I was busy tying the second roll of string to the first.

As the two of us backed, step by step up the hill, the kite now out over the pond two hundred feet, we passed slowly by Dalton and Stacey. He handed me one of the cold Rolling Rocks and said, “Looks good, chief. This Bud's for you.”

“It's perfect,” Paris corrected him.

We let out the second roll of string and I tied on the third. From the top of the hill we could see the sunset through the trees. The kite was out over a hundred yards. We sat down and began letting out string on the third roll.

“Let's send a message, Dad.”

“Okay. Go get a pencil and paper from Mom.” Paris ran down fifty yards to where Dalton and Stacey were talking. From where I sat they looked like any other young couple in the park, their shoulders almost touching. I wondered if they'd held arms on the lift. Stacey did that. She held your arm on the lift and laughed and bumped your head softly with hers as you talked on the way up.

Paris returned with a pencil and part of paper sack. It was getting dark, and I had tied on the fourth and last roll of string.

“What are you going to send?” I asked her.

“Is Dalton Mom's boyfriend?” I looked at Paris, but she was looking down at them in the thickening twilight. Their muted voices floated up to us. The transparent kite was getting hard to see. The pull was even and steady as it took the last of the string. A glint from the shiny plastic blinked at us every few seconds.

“Write your message,” I said. “It's getting late.”

Paris bent to her lap and pressed some words onto the white sheet.

“Here, let me tear it so it will slide,” I said, but she held the message back. “I won't look at it.” She handed it to me and I tore a slit in the center. “Now fit it onto the string and walk it out a little ways.” Paris stood and set the paper on the string and pushed it away about twenty feet, pulling the string down as she went. When she released the cord, it bopped up and her white note began to hop and slide up the inclined line.

“What did it say?” I asked.

“It wasn't to you,” she said.

When the message went over Stacey's head, I saw her point up to it. She turned on an elbow and called, “What does it say, Paris?”