Family Blessings (23 page)

He knew what was coming and experienced little joy in the presumption.

Nevertheless he again took pity on her and moved to the base of the stoop, which put their heads on the same level.

"Listen," she whispered, and he heard her swallow as she put her hands on his collar. "I know you're not coming back again either, and that's all right . . . I mean, really it is!" She spoke anxiously. "I mean, I talk too much about Mark and I know that.

But before you go, would you mind very much if I kissed you? I mean, it's been a long, long time since he left, and I know you don't like me or anything, and I don't want you to go away thinking I ask strange guys to kiss me all the time. You're a cop, like Pete, and I truSt you . . . I mean, I know you think this is a pretty dumb thing to ask, but it's been . . . I've been . . . I've been so lonely . . . and . .

.

and it would be the sweetest thing you could do for me if you'd just stand there and . . . well, I don't care . . . pretend I'm somebody else if you want . . . and let me kiss you."

Something in his heart twisted. Lonely he understood. Lonely was Judd Quincy waiting with his foot against the wall of the 7-Eleven store.

Lonely was little Chris Lallek waiting for his mom and dad to come home so he could ask them for money for a band uniform. Lonely was this skinny, divorced woman laboring under the delusion that she didn't love her philandering husband anymore.

He didn't wait for her to kiss him. He kissed her-an honest, fullmouthed French kiss, holding nothing back. She felt like a bundle of kindling wood in his arms, and he put from his mind the way her gums showed when she smiled, and how unnatural her hair looked, all tortured up three times bigger than her narrow little face.

He'd kissed enough women that he felt the universal pull of all that went along with it, he gave himself over to that universality, to the pre-mating ritual of running hands over backs, and tongues over tongues, and fitting two bodies together so that the line of one obscures the other.

It stopped when Cathy ran her hands down the rear pockets of his jeans and made a place for him between her thighs. His sympathy didn't extend quite that far.

He pulled her arms from behind his neck, stepped back and gripped both her hands hard.

"Listen," he said throatily. "I gotta go. You take care of yourself now."

"Yeah. You too."

When their hands parted and she stayed on her stoop, he couldn't help but breathe a sigh of relief.

I Odd, for a woman he hadn't particularly liked, she stayed on his mind a lot the next couple of days. Then he realized why: He was comparing her to Lee Reston. She had a Dolly Parton hairdo, not Lee's short, unaffected cap, which took wind and weather as it would. She had a profile like an eleven-year-old girl, not the rounded curves of maturity. She had a bony, emaciated face instead of a full, healthy one. And those gums--ye gods. Had he really French-kissed her? Well, hell, the kiss hadn't been so bad if he really stopped to think about it. Cathy Switzer's greatest shortcoming was simple enough for Christopher to understand: She wasn't Lee Reston.

Damn, but that woman stayed on his mind a lot. Not a day went by that he didn't think of her and manufacture excuses to see her, which he most often decided not to act on.

Several days passed after his date without either seeing or speaking to Lee. Then one day he was standing in his kitchen scooping ice cream into a bowl when someone slipped a piece of paper under his door. He reacted like a policeman: leaped and yanked the door open suddenly, to confront whoever was on the other side.

And there was Lee, leaping back in fright.

"Christopher!" She pressed her heart. "Lord, you scared me! I didn't think you were home. I thought you were working days."

"It's my day ofœ" He looked down the hall both ways, then at the envelope on the floor. "What's this?"

"Something of yours I found stuck between Greg's papers. I think it's an insurance card. I must have picked it up when I was taking some things out of your kitchen drawer."

He opened the envelope and perused the item. "Oh yeah . . . I was looking for this."

"Sorry." She shrugged.

"You could have mailed it."

"I know. I was passing by."

He studied her in her green canvas skirt, white blouse and slip-on shoes, her healthy middle-age robustness so different from Cathy Switzer. He had done the right thing, he'd tried a date, tried meeting someone new, but it had only served to point out how much he enjoyed the woman standing before him in the hall.

"Wanna come in?" He stepped back and motioned toward the kitchen.

"No. I've got to go home and fix supper for Joey."

"Oh. Well, okay then." They stood awhile coming to terms with her correct decision before he dropped one shoulder and said, appealingly, "Well, hell, you can come in for a minute, can't you?"

"What were you doing?" She bent forward from the waist, going up on tiptoe to peek around the open door.

"Having a bowl of ice cream."

"At suppertime?"

"Yeah. You want one?"

She settled back down on her heels. "No, I really have to go."

"All right then," he said, accepting her decision, but wishing if she was going to go, she'd go, because they both knew it wasn't what she wanted to do. "Say hi to Joey. I gotta go," he added with a hint of irritation, "my ice cream is melting."

"Well, you don't have to get mad at me." If someone were to point out how childish they sounded they both would have made loud protestations of denial.

"I'm not mad at you."

"All right then, could I change my mind about the ice cream?"

He waved her in, shut the door and followed her into the kitchen, where he took out a glass dish and scooped out ice cream. "You want topping?" He opened a cupboard door and hung a hand from it while taking a tally of its contents. "There's chocolate, caramel and . .

" He picked up a moldy bottle of something, turned and made a perfect shot into a garbage can next to the stove. "I guess there's just chocolate and caramel."

"Caramel," she said.

He drizzled some straight from the jar, caught the stalactite with a finger and sucked it off. Recapping the bottle, he put it away, found spoons, then brought the two sundaes to the kitchen table.

"Sit down," he ordered.

"Thanks."

They ate in silence until half their ice cream was gone. Then Lee asked, "So how was your blind date on Saturday?"

"Great," he answered. "She owned her own bowling ball."

A stretch of silence passed before Lee asked, "So, are you going to see her again?"

"Why do you ask?" He watched her carefully, but she refused to meet his eyes.

"I was just wondering, that's all."

He got up and took their bowls to the sink, rinsed them both and put them in the dishwasher. When he finished, he stayed clear across the room from her, catching his hips and both palms against the edge of the countertop, studying her back while she remained at the table waiting for his answer. After an uncomfortable stretch of silence he sighed--an enormous effort to relieve the tension in his shoulders--and spoke resignedly.

"No," he told her.

She twisted around in her chair and stared at him but said nothing.

"She was pathetic," he added, pushing off the cabinet and returning to the table, where he took the chair at a right angle to her. A fingernail clipper lay on the table. He picked it up and let it slide between the pads of his thumb and index finger time and time again, turning it end for end each time his fingers touched the table.

"She was a skinny pathetic little thing who got dumped by some jerk who had an affair with her best friend, then married her."

"Could we give her a name, please?" Lee requested.

He looked up at her and the fingernail clipper stopped sliding.

"Cathy," he said, "Cathy Switzer."

Lee sat with her arms crossed on the table, motionless, studying him.

He threw down the fingernail clipper and went on. "She talked about him all night long. Couldn't stop. How he never liked her to go bowling. How he never came to see his kids anymore. How the first guy she saw after the divorce never came back after one date. And when I walked her to her door she said over and over how she knew she'd talked about him all night long and that I was never going to come back either. Then she asked me to kiss her."

He let his eyes wander to Lee and settle there. His voice lost its rough edge. "She said she was lonely, and that she trusted me because I was a cop, and would I just kiss her once and that she didn't care if I pretended she was someone else."

The silence seemed to tun itself out into minutes before Lee asked, "And did you?"

It took some time for him to answer, time during which their glances collided and held.

"Yes," he finally said, so low it sounded like someone else had spoken in a faraway room. Their stillness, both with arms crossed on the table, remained absolute. The ambivalence of her question remained: Did he kiss the woman, or did he pretend she was someone else? He thought it best not to fill in the entire truth.

The strain in the room got to him, however, and he realized it was the same for her. They had both been dancing around their feelings for each other, afraid to admit them, afraid of this vast difference in their ages and the unwritten rule of propriety it posed. They could go on pretending friendly indifference forever, but he knew and she knew that feelings had begun stirring between them, and one of them had to get it out in the open, because it was hell holding it inside. But there were things she should know first, things he'd told rarely in his life that were important for her to hear.

"I think it's time I told you a little more about myself, Lee.

Bear with me, if you will, because some of this you've heard before, and it's rather a long story, but until you hear it all, you can't understand where I'm coming from."

Christopher shifted in his chair, making the wood snap and creak.

He picked up the nail clipper again and squeezed it in his palm, concentrating on it as if it were a scientific experiment. "I've told you some of what it was like when I was growing up. How my mom and dad left me to take care of my little sister. All they cared about was where their next drink was coming from. Groceries didn't matter. If there were any in the house, fine. If not, hell with it.

"There was this grocery store two doors down from the apartment where we lived. The Red Owl. I found out what time of day they cleaned out their produce department and I used to make sure I was back there in the alley when this guy named Sammy Saminski used to bring all the wilted stuff out and put it in the dumpster.

Some of it was pretty good yet, edible. Sammy would let me take it home. He was a smart guy, Sammy. Didn't take him long to figure out Jeannie and I were living on the stuff. So eventually he started bringing out better stuff. I knew it was still plenty good yet, but I took it anyway. And that's why I learned to cook, so there'd be something on the table for Jeannie and me.

"Mavis and Ed, they might come stumbling in at ten o'clock, maybe midnight--we never knew. How they survived is a mystery to me because I never saw them eat. Just drink and fight, that's all.

She used to call the cops on him every once in a while and that's when I first got the idea I'd like to become one, because when I saw that officer walk in in his clean blue uniform I thought for sure he was going to take Jeannie and me away and put us in someplace better, and it was the only time in my life I ever felt safe. It didn't last long though, because instead of taking us, they took the old man. He'd stay in the clink a day or two, and while he was gone Mavis seemed to be around a little more taking care of us. But then Ed would be back out, and he and Mavis would take up their drinking again as if she'd never called the cops in the first place.

"One time when she called them, he had the DTs. He was standing in front of a medicine chest pulling back his lips and looking in the mirror, and he thought there were worms eating his teeth. I can remember Mavis yelling, Ed, Ed, there's nothing there!" And he raved, Can't you see em, Mavis, the goddamn things are eating my teeth!"

"That was one of the worst times I remember. Jeannie and I were both crying.

Hell, we didn't know what was going on. And that policeman came and I wanted so damn bad for him to take us out of there. But he didn't."

Christopher stared at the fingernail clipper in his hand, then seemed to pull himself from the past and shift his weight on the chair. He settled his back against it and went on.

"Sammy Saminski got me on the payroll at the Red Owl when I was fourteen. He lied about my age. By the time I graduated from high school I was managing the produce department and I'd saved enough money to put myself through two years of vocational school. When I could, I'd give some to Jeannie. She hoarded it away without telling me, and when she was fifteen years old, she ran away."

Christopher cleared his throat. "I think I told you once before that my parents still live here in Anoka. Still drink. Still fight. I don't have anything to do with them."

He looked at Lee dear, sweet Lee and decided he didn't care if she saw love in his eyes. He was damned tired of trying to hide it.

"And then you come into my life. And do you know what you are to me?

You're all the things they weren't. You're everything a mother should be. You're kind and loving and caring, you're there for your kids no matter what they need. You earn a living and provide for them. They can talk to you about anything, and you love them--you genuinely love them, and they love you back. And all of a sudden I'm right in there being treated like I'm one of them. Then Greg dies and I feel like I've taken his place. And you know what? I love it."

His volume had lowered to a coarse whisper. "Then this woman Saturday night . . . she asks me to kiss her and she says it's okay if I pretend she's someone else. And you know who I was thinking about, don't you, Lee?"

"Christopher, stop!" She jumped up, crossed the room, faced the kitchen sink with her back to him.