Always (34 page)

The bag was a heavy boxing bag, and my stomach squeezed: it was the same brand as the one I’d used for my class. This was my mother, I told myself. I was just teaching her to punch. It would not end in blood and death and the feeling that I’d done more harm than good.

The bag looked brand-new. I checked the hook and chain, nonetheless, ran my hands over the casing. Smooth and soft. Acceptable for her beginner’s hands.

I had a sudden flash of Kick’s small hands.
I like her very much.

“If you’re going to hit with both hands, you’d better take off your wedding ring.” She touched it, then twisted it off and put it in her pocket. No tan line.
Maybe you’ll find out tonight.
“And your shoes.” Her sandals were low-heeled, but I didn’t know enough about her balance to be sure. She slipped them off. She seemed more comfortable in bare feet than most of my class had. I held my hands up, curled my fists. She copied me inexpertly. “Imagine the pads at the base of your fingers are an iron bar. Don’t clench too hard. All tension should be in the wrist. Okay?”

“Okay.” The whiteness around her knuckles eased.

“There are seven basics to learn about striking. One, strike from a firm base. Two, most of your power comes from the torque generated by—” She was shaking her head. “What?”

“Show me.”

“All right.” Different rules for my mother. “Hold the bag for me like this.” I showed her how to get behind it and brace it against her shoulder. “Ready?” She nodded seriously. I hit it, hard.
I like her.
She moved back half a step. I hit it with the other hand.
I like her.
She set her feet and her face. I let fly with a right-left-right combination.
I like her very much.

My mother’s serious expression smoothed, replaced by a bland mask. I didn’t have to turn around to know that Yoga Boy and Bat Ears were watching.

“Show me again,” she said. And I obliged with a left-right-left. “Do I have to make that noise?”

“What noise?”

“That ‘ush’ sound. Sometimes a ‘hut.’ ”

Ush. Hut.
Well. “Make whatever sound you like. Anything. Just as long as it pumps air from the deep part of your lungs.”

“Does it hurt?”

I looked at my fists, the pinking knuckles. As we swapped places I started worrying about her spraining a wrist, breaking a finger, crushing a knuckle. Not being able to get her wedding ring back on. “Start gently.”

She assumed the same position I had, took a moment, then punched. Coordinated, but too careful to be graceful.

“Again. Try the other hand.”

She stepped into it, and connected squarely, but the bag didn’t move.

“Stop being careful now.”

She hit the bag. She was only two inches shorter than me, and despite having gained ten pounds or so in recent years, she was strong. I had seen her wallop a tennis ball hard enough to smash an opponent’s teeth out. She should have made me stagger.

“Again,” I said. “Remember to breathe.”

She hit the bag, and huffed as though trying to blow out the candles on a birthday cake. Tidy, controlled, self-contained.

“Don’t think about those people watching you.” I said it loud enough for the man and the woman to hear. The woman’s ears turned beet red. She looked like Mickey Mouse after a gallon of Thunderbird.

“Comics,” I said. It was faintly embarrassing talking about this to my mother. It felt more personal than talking about sex.

“Comics?”

“Comic sounds.” I gestured for her to swap places. “When Spider-Man hits the Green Goblin. Pretend that’s you. Blam!” Thump. “Pow!” Thud. “Whap!” Movement would carry me through. My blood pumped. “It’s not you standing there, not a recently married career diplomat in the gym of the Fairmont. You’re on the wild
fjell.
You’re a troll, or the Hulk smashing the farmhouse.” Thump, thud. “A golem destroying an SS Panzer division.”

Her eyes kindled. I braced the bag.

“Norway fighting the Danes.”

“Ha,” she said, “Hothead Paisan!” and walloped the bag. I staggered back. She crowed and thumped it again. “That surprised you!”

The whole of the next ten minutes surprised me. After Hothead Paisan, it was characters from newspaper strips, then TV cartoons. She began to laugh like a berserker, sending me staggering back six inches every time she hit the bag, sending Bat Ears and Yoga Boy sniffing from the gym in high dudgeon. We took turns, running through all the Loony Tunes characters, then the Wacky Races—she was particularly fond of the Slag Brothers and their clubs—and ending with Roadrunner. Every time her fist thumped meatily into the bag, she seemed to expand, glow more brightly.

Her knuckles were glowing, too. “Time to stop,” I said. “Your hands will hurt if you don’t ice them soon.”

She looked at the bag, slitty-eyed as a cat by a mouse hole.

“And I’m getting hungry.” My muscles hummed, coursing with oxygen. If someone cut me now, the blood that splashed on the floor would be crimson.

WE HAD
prairie fires—tequila shots with nine drops of Tabasco—and oysters on the half shell, followed by more shots. She clenched her fists and stuck them in the crushed ice where the shellfish had nestled.

I remembered our first night in Seattle, Dornan looking at the last oyster.
For once I’d be prepared to fight you for it.

“So,” I said. “Hothead Paisan?”

“That surprised you.”

“It did.”

“Eric has all the comics. He has a roomful of comics. Comics spin-offs from TV shows, too. He’s partial to the strong-woman genre. Xena, Warrior Princess. Buffy.”

All the ones where the troll doesn’t win in the end. Mostly. “Are there any Norwegian comics?”

“Do you know, I’m not sure. But Eric would know.”

We talked about Eric and his biotechs. About her day with software companies and wrangling over source code and security intellectual-property issues. I told her about my run-in with Mindy Leptke at the
Seattle Times.
“I just wanted her to print a follow-up about Kick. The caterer. It’s not fair that her business should suffer.”

“Indeed,” she said.

“So now I have to get her proof.”

“Will that be easy?”

“I don’t know. The basic rule is, follow the money. I know who is behind this—a woman called Corning—but I don’t know how far it goes, how deeply woven into local politics. I don’t know who she hired. Once I know that, I can take it to the papers and get Kick’s name cleared. So, on paper, yes, it should be easy. But . . .”

“But life rarely works like that. There are often so many other matters that require our attention.”

“Yes.”
Maybe you’ll find out tonight.

After a slight pause, she said, “I never did meet your other friend. Julia.”

“No.”

“I had thought perhaps, when you first mentioned Dornan . . . but then I realized not.”

“No.”

“No,” she agreed. She took her wedding ring from her pocket and slid it back on. Yellow and white gold. Clean style, heavy gauge. Substantial. “Eric and I will be here only another few days.”

“Yes.”

Someone tapped a microphone. We turned to look. A jazz trio was getting ready to play. We turned back to the bar. I shook my head at the bartender’s raised eyebrows and made a signing-the-tab motion. “It might be nice to meet Kick before we leave,” she said.

“It depends.”

“I see.” She stood. “Meanwhile, with that reporter, before you present her with information, insist on a final review and veto for her article.”

“Yes.”

“And don’t worry, you’ll know what to do.”

FIFTY YEARS AGO THE U.S. ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS DAMMED AND DIVERTED
the waters of the Chattahoochee and Chestatee rivers to form a twenty-six-mile -long lake, Lake Sidney Lanier. It’s named after a poet who, ironically, wrote about the natural beauty of Georgia, including “The Song of the Chattahoochee,” which, these days, was being reduced to a moribund murmur as cities, farmers, and recreation-seeking citizens took a bite out of it.

Housing surrounds the lake like scum on the edges of a stagnant pond, everything from rentals to log cabins to palatial CEO second homes.

Therese’s place was an eighties-built four- or five-bedroomed social-climbing recreational space. There was parking for a dozen cars, and decks visible from every angle. I was hoping I’d arrived late enough—six o’clock instead of five—to avoid the inevitable Tour of the House, complete with requisite “Oh, my goodness,” “Oh, how cute,” and “How in the world did you come up with such amazing colors?”

I rapped on the frame of the screen door and Therese opened it wearing the modified country-club casual wear usual for these things, including boat shoes. I deposited my dish—green beans sautéed in bacon fat, with lemon and oregano and chopped tomato—on the kitchen counter with a dozen other containers and made my way through French windows to the deck that jutted out over the water. On the east side was a huge hot tub, big enough for a congressional delegation, steaming aggressively in the sixty-five -degree early evening. Built-in benches ran around the perimeter of the deck.

Suze, in cut-offs, muscle-T and Keen sandals, clearly hadn’t got the country-club-casual memo. Nor had Kim, the only other person out there, who glittered in a sparkly halter top, deep-blue nails, and a fancy hair clip. Even the heels on her pumps glittered. I sat next to Suze, who gestured with her can of Coors to a cooler under the bench.

“What’d you bring?” she said as I popped my can.

“Green beans. You?”

“Three-bean salad.”

We drank beer.

“Lotta beans,” Suze said eventually.

Kim joined us. She held a frosty pink cocktail, which she raised in my direction. “Hey.”

I nodded. “Where’s everyone else?”

“Getting changed.”

Suze squeezed her can and tossed it in a box lined with a garbage bag. “Therese just happens to keep around bathing suits in, you know, fifty zillion sizes. For her guests. So they can either throw themselves in the lake or parboil themselves like lobsters in the party hot tub. Or the pool.”

“You didn’t fancy a dip?”

“Hot baths should be private, and it’s getting too cool for the other kind.”

When I looked at Kim, she flicked her nails in the direction of her hair and makeup: she wasn’t going to get wet for anybody after all the trouble she went to.

THE EIGHT
of them—Sandra hadn’t shown up, either—had forged a classroom relationship based on common ignorance, but here on the deck overlooking Lake Lanier, as the sky shaded from Limoges butterfly blue to Wedgwood to inky Delft, even level-the-playing-field bathing gear could not disguise their differences. Tonya’s hair had been carefully ironed for the occasion, and she kept smoothing it, worried about humidity; rings winked on four of Christie’s fingers—probably from her toes, too, though those were in the tub—and in her left nostril, and a rose tattoo twined over her shoulder; Therese’s arms and legs were bare of any ornament but fabulous grooming—nails manicured and buffed but not polished—and glowing great health; Nina wore spiderwebbed varicose veins on thighs and calf and spent more time than probably was comfortable sitting up to her waist in the hot tub. She was also drinking a lot, something bright green.

They had all left their shoes right by the tub, as though bare feet were somehow unnerving.

Balanced between the cool March lake air and the warm foaming tub water, between social situation and a meeting of strangers, alcohol, food, and the southern woman’s gift for small talk held the evening together: recipes, husbands, pets. Inevitably, the talk turned to children: Therese’s twins, a boy and a girl, Kim’s two girls, Nina’s grandchildren.

“I don’t have kids,” Suze said.

“Well, of course you don’t,” Pauletta said.

“What’s with the ‘Oh, of course’?”

Pauletta adjusted the gold cross hanging between her breasts, splashed idly at the water foaming by her leg and said nothing.

“I don’t have kids, either,” Christie said.

“Nope,” said Nina, “but you will. I can tell.” Perhaps it was just the confidential, you’re-one-of-us tone, but I thought I detected a slight slur.

“How do you mean?”

“With some people you can just tell these things. Some people you can’t. So how ’bout you, Aud. You got kids?”

“Not as such, no.”

Pauletta flipped her ponytail from one shoulder to the other. “The hell does that mean?”

“It means I don’t want to talk about it.”

Everyone in the tub closed up slightly, like water lilies preparing to shut for the night, and smiled extra hard. Suze and Kim looked away, as though not wanting to be associated with such a blunt breach of the social code.

“So,” Nina said, “where you come from they don’t talk about their kids?”

Where you come from. Planet Different.

Therese stood up. “It’s getting cold out here, don’t you think?” No one admitted what she thought. She stepped out of the tub and slipped her shoes on. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we all went in and ate some of the lovely food we’ve brought.”

One by one they began to climb out, and I noticed how each one, before even picking up a towel, put her shoes on.

Nina stayed in the tub. I didn’t think she felt confident of getting out without falling down. When we were the only ones left on the deck, I took a towel from the pile, shook it out, and carried it over to her. I held out my hand.

“Haul yourself up on this,” I said.

She reached for my hand but instead of pulling herself up she pulled me close. “I gave a daughter up for adoption once, too,” she said sadly. “She’d be about your age. I think about her. I wonder what she’s doing, if she’s all right. I wonder if she keeps herself safe. It’s so hard to keep kids safe in this world.”

"Yes,” I said. "Come on, now. Let’s get to the kitchen before the food’s all gone. I’ll help you. Wrap this around your shoulders. Sit here. That’s right. I’ll get your shoes. Okay now? Good.”