And the Dark Sacred Night (17 page)

“Sounds good,” says Jasper. “Everything okay by you?”

“Okay enough,” he says. “I think I have a lead on something.”

“Yeah?”

“Know the artsy new mall, the one they’re building in that old stone warehouse on the river down near Quechee?”

Jasper puts away the breakfast dishes, which Kit must have washed.

“They need an on-site manager, kind of a liaison between the developer and the contractor. Had a good interview yesterday.”

“Good for you,” says Jasper. “Any strings you need me to pull?”

“No, Dad.” Kyle doesn’t meet his eye. Did Jasper insult him? Why does talking to his son have to feel like teetering his way along a tightrope?

Jim and Kit are still in the living room. Coward that he is, Jasper wishes they’d return to the kitchen.

“Kit’s looking great,” says Kyle.

“He is.”

“Showed me pictures. Lucky. His kids are good-looking.”

“Sandra, too,” says Jasper. “He landed a good one.” Inside he cringes; sometimes he feels as if every compliment he pays someone else in front of Kyle might be read by Kyle as a reference to something Jasper is sure his own son can’t do or will never have.

But Kyle chuckles. “Smokin’.”

“Well.”

Jasper starts toward the living room just as, abruptly and far too loudly, music throbs out of the stereo speakers. Jasper gasps; he hasn’t used the record player in years. “Holy F. Christ, that still works?” he shouts over the onslaught of guitars. Music as a pack of hounds.

“Good as new!” Kit calls back, turning down the volume.

“Let it blast!” says Jim. He begins to dance in front of the sofa. Kit is kneeling by the cupboard that holds the records, pulling them out and sorting them into piles.

Jasper strains to recall the singer’s name. Bob Marley. “A lot of those records belong to your mother,” he tells Kit. “Welcome to help yourself. I never play them. Take the turntable, too. Give your kids a taste of the past.”

Jim has begun to sing along as he dances. He moves oafishly and manically, like a bear that’s stepped in a yellow-jacket nest. “ ‘In this life, in this life, in this
oh sweet life
…’ ”

Jasper stares at him. “Looks like somebody needs a night on the town with his wife.”

Jim pauses, laughing. “Jazzman, this is vintage.” He waves his beer bottle, as if to toast Bob Marley. “And boy am I hungry.”

“There’s plenty for everyone,” says Kit.

“Oh good,” says Jasper. “Got me a frat house now. A frat house with a hole in the wall.” The corner of the room is finally closed to the elements, but silvery insulation glints through the gap. The cosmetic interior work comes last. Jasper suspects he’ll be alone again by then, all his visitors gone. He pulls firewood from the barrel beside the fireplace. He’d like a beer, but he will abstain, for Kyle’s sake. Well, for his own, too.

Once the fire catches, he heads quietly upstairs. He’s sheepish about the impulse, but Kyle’s discharge counselor at his first rehab told Jasper that precautions are more than wise; they’re kind. They’re about support, not suspicion. In the bathroom, he scans the shelves inside the medicine chest. He removes the bottle of Percocet left over from the rotator-cuff business he went through last summer and, after a small hesitation, the naproxen he takes on days his hip acts up (most days). He shoves the vials into his pocket and is about to leave when he sees Kit’s toiletry case sitting on the tank.

Cursing quietly, he opens the bag and rummages through, half fearful. He’s had enough surprises this week. Nothing, thank heaven, but a tiny bottle of Tylenol. “Score one blessing,” he hears himself say, Viv’s little way of thanking the cosmos for unearned favors.

He flushes the toilet as an afterthought, washes his hands. As if to conceal a crime. In the mirror, the geezer shaking his head looks more
irritated than sad. Which makes him, genuinely, sad. The presence of Daphne’s son is, he realizes, making him miss Vivian more than he has in a while. The wife who left him without any such intention.

In the morning, the instant Jasper steps outside, here it is at last—a fragrance crisp and specific as new leather, terse and bitter as steel: the smell of incoming snow. The sky is gray but still timid: two hours, he’d wager, till the first flakes arrive. Once again, he leaves before Kit (or Kyle) wakes—this time because he wants to get his workday over with early.

He can tell that Loraina is on the phone with their snowboarding vendor. The salesman is a young Turk who’d flirt with a flagpole; Loraina’s giggling and blushing. Everyone wants to be Shaun White these days; the boys who board now sport those cocker-spaniel tresses, wear torn jeans (onto the slopes!) and graffiti’d jackets, vamp their way to the lifts. Jasper will never get it, but he doesn’t have to. He just has to rake in the dough.

Stu has shown up on time for a change and is making sure (or pretending to make sure) that all the rental footwear is organized correctly, by size and binding type, on the shelves in back. He puts on an obsequious show of greeting Jasper. Jasper tries to play gruff. At least Stu isn’t growing out his hair.

Loraina hangs up.

“The dudester ask you to elope?”

“We’re almost there, but he’s old-fashioned. He’s taking his time. May come to you for permission, since you’re the closest I’ve got to a dad.”

Their running joke is that since only Jasper has met the salesman face-to-face, he may well envision Loraina as a husky-voiced babe, a Scarlett Johansson or young Sigourney Weaver. (The names Bette Davis and Lauren Bacall, Loraina informed him, would mean squat to a kid like that. Probably wouldn’t know Meryl Streep from Merle Haggard.)

“I tell you, that boy has a crush on me,” she says, smoothing her dowdy fleece vest against her waist: a very alluring waist when freed from Polartec and other less-than-sexy fabrics.

Jasper’s first job is to update the whiteboard with the latest reservations
and any special clinics. Stu maintains the schedule online and prints it out for Jasper every morning. It’s also his least favorite job. Leaning against the counter, he lets himself be distracted by the local paper, lying by the register. The lead story is a rhetorical plea for snow—as if you can petition for it. Jasper skims the predictable text about the weather outlook around the state. When his eyes reach the fold of the paper, he lifts it from the counter and snaps it open. Just below the fold, he spots a story that would be secondary to weather only in a state like this one. Not that any of the so-called news in this gimcrack rag would register on anybody’s Richter scale. But there are exceptions to every rule. To wit:

SENATOR BURNS HOSPITALIZED
.

God, thinks Jasper. Actually, yes,
God:
this sort of coincidence leads you to believe there’s got to be one lurking somewhere, and He’s the kind of guy who favors fart cushions, pulls quarters from behind His ear, puts cling wrap over your toilet bowl.

“Something of interest?” says Loraina, seeing Jasper’s face.

“I thought Burns retired ages ago. Must be as old as this mountain.”

“Speak for yourself.” Loraina looks at the article over his shoulder. “You know, there were rumors he’d retire, but then there was that scandal with the guy who’d have run for his seat. Remember the business with the Polish exchange-student nanny?”

“Missed that election, I guess. Have to confess I don’t always vote.”

“Have to confess I don’t ever. Register, they nab you for jury duty.”

“You are a terrible citizen,” says Jasper. “Shame on you.”

“I pay my taxes. That’s plenty of civic sacrifice, buster.”

From the meager paragraphs beneath the tiny picture, Jasper learns that Ezekiel Burns is eighty-three, eleven years older than he is. He is in stable condition after suffering a stroke while playing tennis—indoors at some swanky club, no doubt.

Burns is one of those politicians with a PR shtick that makes him look like an up-from-the-manure success story. While it’s true that he grew up on a dairy farm during the Great Depression, the farm was a paradise of more than a thousand acres and half as many cows, Burns’s father an agricultural impresario. The guy flew around the country lecturing men in three-piece suits eager to plow their fortunes, purely for profit, into rural land as different from their
club-lounge domain as the Sahara Desert. To Burns the Elder, dairy wasn’t so much milk and cheese: it was a commodity as imperial in its potential as gold bars in Fort Knox or hotels in Atlantic City, a commodity to protect from the profit-killing effects of local unions and French imports alike.

But that’s history, about which Jasper doesn’t give a hoot. What Jasper wants to read about is Ezekiel Junior’s current family, wife and children. Nothing, of course. It’s not an obituary. Not yet.

Jasper eyes Stu, who’s helping a customer—a very pretty customer—try on one of those new, featherlight Patagonia jackets. Later, when Loraina goes out to get lunch (Jasper will be sure to send her), he’ll ask Stu for a favor—and Stu will jump. The kid may be exasperating, but when it comes to using the Internet (Christ, just keeping track of this new Facebook page that Iron Man Rod regards as some kind of magic bullet), Stu is an ace. Jasper will have him find out if the Other Grandmother is still alive and kicking. That will be step one. Can’t do any harm just to know that much.

They had been married for five years when, late one summer night as they lay together in bed, trying to sleep in the humid stillness and the clamor of crickets, Daphne said to Jasper, “Don’t you sometimes long to hold a baby again, go back to when your boys were tiny?”

“Never,” he said without missing a beat. Not to be cruel but because this was something he’d worried about when he fell for Daphne, something she assured him he needn’t fear.

He heard her breathing, felt her shifting toward him, caught the flowery vapor from her body and hair.

“But you do,” he said. No point in playing dumb.

“Yes.” She touched his naked arm.

Jasper knew, or thought he knew, what was going on. Kit was fourteen; he’d entered the years of willful withholding and casual scorn that child-rearing experts told you were cause for rejoicing. They’re finding their independence! Their hormones are surging! They’re growing up!

Rory had been entering this zone of defiance just before Vivian died; clearheaded woman that she was, she’d bought a book or two. So now it was Kit’s turn to turn aside; and frankly, from what Jasper
could tell, he was going about it a good deal more gently than most boys.

“You miss the old Kit, that’s what you’re feeling,” said Jasper as Daphne stroked his arm.

“It’s not about Kit.”

“Don’t think you can be so objective, darlin’. I’ve seen the looks he gives you—gives us both. I’ve seen how it hurts you, his pushing you away.”

“No,” she said. “I mean yes, but this is something different. This is me finally waking up to the realization that being a mother is what I love best. I became a mother too soon, I know that. But because of that—and believe me, I see how ironic this is—because of that, I never fully embraced it.”

Damn the tireless, obnoxious insects, thought Jasper. He needed sleep; he did not need
this
. He said, “You’re a great mom. Not just to Kit. To my boys. How I got so lucky there, I’ve still got no idea.” Had he ever voiced his gratitude? Was that part of her itching for more?

“I love Rory and Kyle. It took a little time, but I woke up one day to find out I love them
fiercely
, sweetheart. Just in time to send them out into the wild blue yonder.” She sighed mournfully.

He had to wait now, see where she was headed.

“So what I find myself thinking,” she said, “is that there’s room in our family for one more. Just one.”

He inhaled sharply. “You’re not pregnant.”

“No.” As an afterthought, she laughed. “But.” Her hand moved from his arm to his hip. They lay on top of the sheets, naked, nothing to interfere with the contact between their bodies.

“Daphne.” A caution.

“Jasper …” A plea.

“Daphne, no more babies. We settled on this.”

“Five years ago, Jasper.”

“My mind’s not changing.”

“We didn’t know what to expect back then. Now we know how well we work. Together. All of us.”

The heat of her body against his felt oppressive. “Five of us is plenty. When we’re all here, a full house. A crack poker hand.”

“And how rare will
that
be, now that Kyle’s off to Burlington?”

“Daphne, darlin’, we work well together because it’s just right,
this family we’ve got. And no way could we afford to have you quit your job, not with another kid.” He resisted pointing out how old he’d be when this hypothetical fourth kid left the nest. Never wise to remind her how much older he was, how
very
much older he’d seem in another twenty years.

She moved away. She said quietly, “Families aren’t balance sheets.” Beneath the sweet fragrance of her perspiration, Jasper could almost smell her reasoning at work, her powers of persuasion churning to win his agreement.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not going to be changing my mind.”

“It’s late and we’re tired. We’ll talk more when we’re fully awake.”

Had that been the beginning of the end? Jasper wondered when she left. Most certainly the end of the beginning. Or had it been a sign that they were doomed from the start? Not that such niceties mattered.

“Oh my,” said Rayburn when Jasper told him about this can of worms. “Don’t you know that law of physics?”

“I stopped at biology,” said Jasper. “And cheated to pass.”

“Second wife’s gotta have at least whatever the first one had. If not more. The law of matrimonial equilibrium.”

Jasper didn’t bother to answer.

“Two kids for Vivian, ergo, two kids for Daphne.”

“That is the most cockamamie thing I ever heard,” said Jasper. “Vivian got an early death. You think Daphne wants that?”

“Parse my advice till the cows go to Harvard, but you’ll see I’m speaking the truth here, boss.”

One thing Jasper did not ask Rayburn was whether he thought Jasper should say yes to Daphne. After all, it didn’t matter. He was certain, and furthermore, they’d agreed on this before they married.