Adventures with Max and Louise (30 page)

“I’d love to. Now, can we go meet my friends, or is your head too swollen to fit in the door?”

I crane my head toward the restaurant. “Naw, they’ve got a double door.”

He takes my arm. “Perfect. By the way, you look amazing.”

D
INNER AT
B
ELIZE
flies by. Carrie and Mark, both architects and kayakers, are great. The mojitos are crisp and fresh and slide down easily. Chas is happy to let the rest of us talk food and kayaking and laugh about high school mishaps. By the time the check arrives, we’ve all agreed to kayak through the San Juan Islands this coming August even though Chas insists that we stay in hotels, not camp. Carrie and Mark laugh at their rich friend, saying they’ll pitch their tent in the front yard of our fancy bed-and-breakfast. Chas says fine, we’ll serve them leftovers from room service. An entire heated discussion ensues about the finer qualities of campsite cooking and how food tastes so much better when consumed out of doors. We spill out into the dark, rainy street on a mojito-induced high, promising to do this at least once a month.

On the drive home, Chas lets me choose the music, Dave Matthews, which we listen to with the top down, heat blasting. Chas drives fast enough so that the rain barely touches us. It isn’t until we’re at my front door that I realize my hair is a mad, frizzy mess, and mascara is probably streaming down my cheeks. He escorts me to the front steps, lifts my chin, and kisses me softly. I fold my body into his, wrap my arms around him, and push us into deep, hungry kisses. He presses me against the door, pulling my hair off my face with both hands.

Just when I think I’m going to rip the perfectly pressed shirt off his torso and we’re going to have sex on the front steps, he pulls back. “I have a confession to make.”

Here it comes. Not only is his sister gay, but he is. Or he’s realized I remind him of his sister, or worse, his mother. I muster up a smile, trying to wipe the mascara that may or may not be streaming down my face. “Okay . . .”

“I knew you were going to invite me to Food Fest a while ago.”

An enormous sense of relief floods me. That’s it? “You did?”

“Yes, yes, I did. I had a work thing that night, and I got out of it. My dad’s going instead.”

I straighten my hair, wondering why he felt the need to tell me this in the middle of hot sex.

“ ’e’s telling you ’ow important you are to ’im. ’e planned ahead to be there for your big thing and changed his life around for you. Act happy, you daft girl,” Max spits out.

“Great; thanks for doing that. That was really thoughtful.” Chas seems pleased.

“Oh, for mercy’s sake, you’ve had ten cocktails between the two a ya! The boy probably realized he was soft as a slug and needed an excuse to slow things down,” Louise opines in disgust.

I burst out laughing. Chas furrows his brow, perplexed. “I’m really glad. Super. I’m so wiped out, I’m getting hysterical here. Thanks for a great night. That was really fun,” I say and snort.

The smile is back on Chas’s face. “Someday, huh? It’s not every day I have dinner with a celebrity.” He lingers on the top step.

I lean over and kiss him on the lips, trying to get the image of a limp slug out of my head. “I’m a long way from that, but it was an amazing day. Good night, Chas.”

“ ’Night.” He gives me one last kiss and hurries back to his car to put up the convertible top. He takes a white towel out of the trunk and quickly dries the beige leather seats before jumping in and waving goodbye.

I wait until he’s driven down the street before gently opening the door and creeping upstairs. There’s a folded note on the landing with my name on it:
Some guy named Wolf called to remind you about your climbing trip Thursday. Wanted to know what size shoe you wear. Told him I can barely keep track of my daughters’ middle names and birthdays. Lock up. Love, Dad.

I lock up the house, run my hand along the grandfather clock, and dream up excuses to get out of climbing with Wolf.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

I
T’S THE DAY
of Food Fest, and I still haven’t thought of a plausible excuse to get out of climbing. Every time I called Wolf with a perfectly reasonable sprained ankle, migraine headache, or simple exhaustion, he told me that climbing is a panacea for all ills.

“Even broken legs?” I’d quipped. He launched into a story, a lie really, about a friend who’d climbed Mount Hood with a broken femur. Yesterday I phoned him with my foolproof, last dodge excuse: concern for his mother. No one, I pointed out, not even the most seasoned hostess takes the day off before hosting 120 people for dinner.

“You’re not the hostess, my mother is,” he’d deadpanned. Well, yes, I’d countered, but I am her crutch, her organizer, and without me she’ll feel overwrought and anxious.

“No, she won’t,” he’d said easily. “Make sure you get plenty of rest and drink a lot of water today. It’ll make a difference. See you at the restaurant at 7:00 a.m. Believe it or not, it’ll be fun.”

He’d hung up before I could add that I was doing this out of an obligation. Thanks to me, he’d been embarrassed on television. This is not and will never be construed as a date. I had the whole speech prepared.

Despite the tedium of dealing with Wolf, I am excited, thrilled even, to be leaving the city and my frantic schedule behind. I’ve raided Denise’s closet. Her wardrobe, besides her freaky artist’s gear, is straight Seattle girl, heavy on the fleece, dating back from when she was seeing a designer for Patagonia. Her lime green pullover is a size too big, but this morning I’m not worried about my appearance.

Louise insists that this is a good sign. “The man don’t care what you look like. He likes what’s inside. That’s the kind of man every woman wants, even if you look like Beyoncé. We all get old; we all wake up ugly some mornings. This boy, he sees beauty with his eeeearrrs.” She lingers over the last word, rolling it around in the back of her throat.

Ignoring Louise, I’ve decided, is a good idea. She’s ruining the sugar high of my crush on Chas, calling him names, belittling him like a petulant, jealous friend. Maybe Max is right: it’s a class thing. He comes from wealth; therefore, he must be bad. That reasoning, or any other, won’t work with me. I’m falling in love.

Last night Denise stuffed my bag with enough fleece for a Mount Everest ascent. “Just in case,” she insisted, jamming in another hat and a pair of sweats as I left her apartment. She’s happy for me. “At least one of us is dating,” she said, hugging me.

“It’s not a date,” I’d replied. “We’re barely even friends.”

She laughed. “Does he know that?”

Sasha and I meet at Schubert’s at six in the morning, going over last-minute notes and agreeing we’ve done all we can. The rest is up to the dozens of suppliers, cooks, wait staff, and technicians we’ve hired. Lionel is seeing to the music. The flowers should arrive in an hour. Sasha admits that she’s glad the job of arranging them has fallen to her alone. She’ll enjoy the solitude before the rest of the staff arrives. Before I get into the van, I promise to leave my cell phone on in case Sasha has any questions. She shakes her head, looking surprisingly vulnerable for such a tough, stylish woman.

She wraps her black sweater tight around her slight frame. “No. I want you two to have fun. Enjoy.”

As Wolf pulls the van away from Schubert’s, we leave her at the curb, standing guard over the rented Food Fest tables and chairs stacked neatly by the front door. She rests one hand on a stack of plastic chairs as she waves. Wolf stops the van and rolls down his window.

“Mom, go inside, there hasn’t been a folding chair theft here in decades.”

“You be back in time liebling, you hear me?” She shivers slightly in the morning chill.

“We’ll leave in plenty of time. Look, go inside and have some breakfast. I’ll have Molly back early. I promise. Would you please go inside? You’re freezing.”

I wave of guilt washes over me. Sasha begged me to delay the climbing trip until after the festival. Wolf insisted that it had to be today, the day of the biggest event in the restaurant’s history. Sasha is pinning all her hopes for the restaurant’s future on tonight. It has to be perfect.

When I asked Wolf why we couldn’t go climbing after Food Fest, he was vague and secretive. “Mom will be fine. She’s one of those people who worries about everything like it’s an Olympic sport, and she’s going for the gold. In reality she plans everything to the nth degree. That’s why she hired you. She does things right.”

My schedule of phone, radio, and web interviews is intense. Every day Liz e-mails me a schedule, sprinkling in a list of bookstores for me to phone and arrange book signings. I fall into bed at night, exhausted. When I woke up this morning, I went over my checklist for the tenth time to reassure myself that I wasn’t abandoning Sasha.

As the battered purple van pulls away, I am grateful that I’m on the passenger side and can’t see Sasha’s small form waving goodbye. No matter how well prepared we are, I feel like a traitor.

Wolf leans out, blows her a kiss. “Please go inside. We’ll see you soon.”

“Have fun!” I hear her say with forced gaiety.

Wolf turns his attention to the road and gives me a quick grin. “I love leaving town, don’t you?”

Nodding, I hand him one of the lattes I’ve made in the restaurant bar.

Wolf takes a sip, leans over, and squeezes my knee, leaving his hand there long enough to feel his warmth. “Thanks.”

I put my hand over my knee, trying to assess the butterflies in my stomach.

“They ain’t from bloody fear of heights!” Max chortles. “Not yet anyway.”

Watching the pedestrians hurry on their way to work, I sip my latte with a tiny smile. As the hideous van carries us onto the on-ramp to I-5, I’m grateful that I am not in their ranks.

The van winds its way up from the tiny outpost of Index. I remember my last drive into the mountains with Chas, buried deep in the comfort of leather seats, listening to music while he finished up business on his phone. By contrast, the drafty van rattles and chugs, alternating freezing drafts with blasts of heat from the finicky heater. Wolf watches me out of the corner of his eye, responding with a smile when I look back.

Feeling embarrassed, I blurt, “What?!”

He shrugs. “I like looking at you,” he says.

I am staggered by his honesty, caught off guard. I let the wheels eat a few more miles before talking.

“I have to go to the bathroom.” I wish I had something more eloquent in my arsenal. I don’t know what else to say.

“All right, we’ll stop.”

He pulls over at a barn red country store with a single gas pump out front. The inside of the store, which has missed the whole stained-glass, pottery-wheel hippie revolution, looks musty and dark. They sell everything from nails to ice cream sodas. A wooden Indian holds a dish of pennies at the register. The place reminds me of mom. It always took us hours to cross Steven’s Pass on our way to Lake Chelan because she had to stop at every mom and Pop bakery, farm stand and junk store along the way. She’d linger over the green glass telegraph lanterns, holding them up, watching the sunlight filtering through the cracked, bubbled glass.

“See that?’ She’d say to me. “That glass is over a hundred years old. That old fly trapped in there could have been buzzing around Lewis and Clarke for all we know.”

“Come on mom, we wanna get to the lake before the sun sets,” I’d whine, more interested in my tan line.

When I come out of the bathroom, Wolf is outside, bending over beside a row of wooden cutouts made to resemble people bending over exposing their upper buttocks to the world: bend-over people. I burst out laughing and the sun comes out in his face.

“You’ve got the best laugh. It’s kind of like a snorting giggle,” he says, dropping a fist full of candy into my hand.

“Snorting, huh? Thanks.” I examine the assortment of taffy, gum and Tootsie Rolls.

His mouth is busy chewing away. “Penny candy,” he says, waving his hand toward the gas station store. “Last place on earth that sells it.”

“Yeah, here and 7-Eleven.”

“Kill joy.” He opens the creaky van door for me.

A middle-aged couple in a sedan pulls in. The wife watches us, noting Wolf’s attentiveness as he helps me into the van. Wolf closes the door and pauses for a moment, smiling. I wait for him to say something but he just stands there holding the van’s dented door as though the moment were complete.

The middle-aged wife puts her hand on her husband’s shoulder. They watch us. She says something, and he nods. They walk into the tiny store, and I wonder if he will buy her penny candy. I try to imagine Chas among the bent-over people, anticipating my laughter.

“He stops at the Shell station, luvey,” Max says. “Nothing like this dirty old stinkhole.”

Fifteen miles down the road, we pull off the main highway and drive in silence. In places the heavy evergreen boughs touch overhead, blocking out the sun. The forest is damp and foreboding. As we grow closer, Wolf’s manner becomes serious. He pays closer attention, careful to pull over when a logging truck enters the roadway. Few cars pass. When we finally pull to the side, I assume we are taking a rest stop. Wolf shuts off the engine and turns to me with a broad grin.

“We’re here.” He beams as if we’ve reached Shangri-La.

I stand off to the side of the gravel parking lot, which is really just a wider spot in the road, and watch Wolf unload the climbing equipment and carry it to the trailhead. On one trip he thrusts a small box into my hands.

“I forgot to have you try on these.”

Inside the box are soft slippers with rubber soles and elastic laces. I don’t want to hurt his feelings, but they are not my style. What kind of a guy buys ugly shoes for a woman he likes?

Wolf drops a load of ropes at my feet and takes the shoes from my hand. “They’re climbing shoes, princess. Try them on.” The way he says
princess,
it’s a compliment.

Grinning at my own stupidity, I plop down into the grass, tug off my shoes, and slip them on.

“They’re a bit long, but I think they’ll work,” I say. “Thank you.”