Before He Finds Her (12 page)

Dear Aunt Kendra and Uncle Wayne,

I’ll be back in a few days
.
Please, please don’t worry.
I promise I’m okay.

Love,

She hesitated. Melanie? Meg? Finally, she decided on “
M
.” She left the note on the kitchen table, beside the salt and pepper shakers.

Then she was on her way.

7

September 21, 1991

In a day, the world would end dramatically. But right now it was just another dreary Saturday morning in New Jersey, the sky a misty and monochrome gray as Ramsey walked from his car to the Kinko’s.

At 6:30 a.m. the copy shop was empty except for a young man behind the counter sitting cross-legged on a table and eating a banana. One more large bite before coming over to Ramsey, who set his coffee cup on the counter, removed the hand-drawn invitation from his pocket, and unfolded it.

“I need a hundred fifty of these,” Ramsey said, sliding it across the countertop. “But typed up all nice.”

The young man was already thick in the jowls and starting to sag. He looked at the paper and said nothing until he’d swallowed the gob of banana. “I can set you up on one of the computers over there.” He nodded toward the far wall.

“No, I don’t use those,” Ramsey said.

“It’s simple.”

“Simple enough for you to do it for me?” The three twenties were already out of Ramsey’s wallet and on the counter.

Sixty bucks sounded all right with Danny Chester, Customer Associate, and twenty minutes later Ramsey was leaving with 150 invitations—large, eye-catching typeface on bright blue paper. Danny had thrown in an image of a kid’s teeter-totter in the top right corner, maybe hoping for a tip.

Task one was complete with ninety percent of America still in bed.

Main Street Music didn’t open until ten, leaving Ramsey with time to stop by the Shark Fin Marina, not far from his present location. Before long he was approaching the marshes on his left and the Shark Fin Inlet on his right. Despite two decades having passed, everything looked the same, and he wondered now why he’d never thought to pay a visit here before, considering it was a rare place from his youth that held warm memories.

He drove toward the boatyard—the road unpaved gravel, still—where at this time of year about half the boats were in the water and half were dry-docked. The smell of burning diesel always reminded him of the boatyard, but it hadn’t occurred to him before now how much the rows of dry-docked boats resembled trucks at a yard or a loading dock, and how his love of these boats—many of them thirty-five or forty feet or more—might have fed his attraction to the big rig, which was like a yacht on wheels, its cab a marvel of efficient interior space, pushed along by a massive diesel engine.

Ramsey parked his car in one of the visitor spaces by the docks and inhaled the sweet, rotting smell of the inlet. The water this morning looked glassy, with just a single charter boat creeping at no-wake speed toward the bridge that led out to the ocean. This time of year the water remained warm but the wind could whip. With summer gone, only a few boats were needed to satisfy the demands of the most ardent fisherman. Ramsey was too far away to read the boat’s name. A seagull hovered over the stern, but the boat wasn’t weighed down yet with fish. The gull swooped up and, cawing, veered off toward the ocean.

Ramsey walked over pebbles to the boatyard, trying to identify any of the half dozen men he passed. Some of them looked younger than he was. When an older man with a clipboard stepped out of the office, Ramsey approached him and asked whether his father’s old boss, Bruno, still worked there.

“Bruno Crawford?” The man sniffed up a bunch of snot and grimaced. “Afraid he died eight, ten years back.”

Ramsey nodded. “I used to come here as a kid. My old man worked here, and Bruno was always good to him.”

“Bruno was before my time, but I only ever heard good things.” He held out his hand. “Donny Mazza. I manage the yard.”

“Ramsey Miller.”

“Glad to know you, Ramsey. You a boater?”

“Not really,” he said. “I keep a thirteen-foot Boston Whaler on a floating dock in Silver Bay.”

“That’s just the boat you want for tooling around the bay.”

“It is,” Ramsey said. “Wish I had more time to take it out.”

“Don’t we all?” Donny looked around at the boats, the water. “The boat owner’s curse—we’re all too busy.” He smiled at Ramsey. “Now what can I do you for?”

“I was in the area, is all,” Ramsey said, “and thought I’d drop by and kick around a few old memories.”

“Been a long time?”

Ramsey did the math. “Twenty-four years.”

“Well, it’s good to have you back,” Donny said. “Tell you what. You relax, take in those memories, and let me know if you need anything. We got a full pot of coffee in the office.”

“Nah, I don’t plan to linger,” Ramsey said. “I was hoping Bruno might still be around—I’m having a party tomorrow and wanted to invite him.”

“I’m awfully sorry to be the one to rain on that parade,” Donny said. “Dino’s still here, though.”

“Who?”

“Little fellow with the one bad eye? He goes back longer than anyone. Not sure if he goes back twenty-four years.”

A few names came to mind: Bert. Chuck. He tried to recall Dino and conjured up a small, trim man in the same greasy clothes they all wore, but maybe that was only his imagination working. “Say, Donny, you don’t by any chance want to come to a block party tomorrow in Silver Bay? There’ll be plenty of food, and my band’s gonna play a set or two. You’d like it.”

“Wish I could—but tomorrow I’m working all day.”

“Then come by after.”

“Can’t.” The shift in Donny’s smile was almost imperceptible. When he said, “Thanks, though,” his voice dropped a few decibels.

Crazy fuck
. That’s what Donny Mazza was thinking.

“I ain’t crazy,” Ramsey said.

“Never said you were, friend.” The smile looked false now, frozen.

“Yeah, but you thought it.” Ramsey felt his heart rate quicken, the blood rush to his hands and feet. He demanded—-commanded—that he stop this, pronto. He wasn’t twenty anymore, and he wasn’t drunk, and this was no hole-in-the-wall bar. He took a breath. Softened his face. “I’m playing around.” He didn’t dare lay a friendly hand on the other man’s shoulder. It would be taken the wrong way. Instead, he forced a smile of his own. “You’re a good sport.”

He shouldn’t have come. The past was nothing but a fish straight out of the ocean—slippery, and never as pretty as you think. Without another word, he returned to his car, every step of the way feeling the shame of Donny Mazza’s stare.

He rumbled back along the gravel road, retreating hastily from his past to the safety of his to-do list.

He walked every street in the Sandy Oaks development, placing an invitation into each mailbox, and tried to figure out why he’d been willing to beat the hell out of some dipshit boatyard manager who did nothing to deserve it. How was it, he wondered, that he was still a breath away from that sort of madness? After all these years, had he really changed so little?

Then again, he hadn’t gone through with it. He’d walked away. Surely that said something. But not much. And he wondered what miniscule difference—a slight change in inflection, a single extra utterance—might have led to a different outcome. As a kid he’d heard his father at the boatyard once talking with another man about how the United States and the Soviet Union had nearly blown up the earth over missiles in Cuba. The war never happened, but it just as easily could have. That’s what stayed with Ramsey for years afterward: The fact that the world had survived didn’t mean that anyone had behaved well or wouldn’t push every-thing over the brink the next time around.

He could save time by driving from mailbox to mailbox, but he wanted to press his feet to the asphalt in this neighborhood of families. By now Allie knew many of their fellow owners of half-acre plots of soft sod and border shrubs and close proximity to the better primary school. To Ramsey, the people were basically interchangeable; they certainly didn’t give two shits about him. But like he said to Eric, the point of this party was to treat them like lifelong chums.

Even David Magruder, whose mailbox was crooked and loose on its stand. Ramsey had never spoken to the man but knew what he looked like from TV—long face, balding, big teeth. Yet he exuded utter confidence when he told you what was “on tap for the weekend.” A TV weatherman must be the only job in the world with no penalty for being wrong half the time.

Ramsey briefly considered skipping this house. But no. If Ramsey was serious about being magnanimous, then he
must
invite Magruder. He slid an invitation into the mailbox.

Three more streets. Then he’d turn to the other tasks on his list—sound equipment rental, ball pit rental, materials to buy for the stage, kegs to reserve, fire pit to dig, food to buy and prepare… the list was long, and he looked forward to doing all of it.

Seventeen hours later, he was still checking off items, though he’d accomplished a hell of a lot for one day. Even figured out the pony situation. (As simple as looking in the yellow pages under Party/Children.) The woman promised a healthy and gentle Rocky Mountain pony as well as a trained Great Dane to lead the pony around.

The afternoon’s rehearsal went smoother with Wayne there. His excuse for having gone AWOL the night before was lame—“girl trouble.” Even after three years of living in Jersey, there were still flare-ups with this girl Kendra back in West Virginia who’d stayed stuck on him.
Cut the cord and find yourself a Jersey girl!
Ramsey had wanted to say on any number of occasions. But he knew that love was a messy thing, and he wasn’t going to get on the kid’s case today—not after Wayne had convinced his manager at the music store not only to rent Ramsey a P.A. but to run it during the gig.

Wayne was basically a decent kid trying to figure shit out, same as anyone. It hadn’t taken him long, a couple of years earlier, for him to barf out his story the day Ramsey came into the music store for strings: raised in foster care in West Virginia, ditched the on-again/off-again girlfriend (or tried to, anyway), and left home at seventeen on a Greyhound bus the moment he’d scraped together two hundred bucks, nothing but a knapsack of clothes, his acoustic, and a vague notion that seeing the ocean might be a good thing.

“Actually, it was my foster dad’s guitar,” Wayne had said. “I figured he owed me.”

Ramsey smiled. “I take it your family wasn’t
The Waltons
.”

He thought maybe the kid wouldn’t get the reference, but Wayne shook his head and said, “Man, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

Ramsey wasn’t about to get into a pissing contest over who had the crappiest boyhood, so he let it go.

In the couple of years since, Ramsey sometimes broached the topic of Wayne learning a trade and making a real living. The kid always brushed him off, which was fine—he was young with no obligations—but Ramsey couldn’t help trying to steer him in the right direction, like Eric had done for Ramsey. One thing Ramsey had come to believe, you had to pay it forward. Otherwise, the planet was fucked. Of course, a young man alone in the world wasn’t going to seek out guidance. Not the right sort of guidance, anyhow. So you had to reach out, show him you gave a damn by overpaying him to clean your truck or change the oil and filters, and while he’s there with the hood up, you teach him a thing or two about the engine.

Asking him to join the band, though—that was no simple generosity. Not with Wayne’s fancy chords and clean solos. Truth was, Wayne was too good for Rusted Wheels, but evidently the camaraderie, or at least the free beer, meant enough for him to keep showing up most of the time.

Their rehearsal today ended around five, and despite all he still had to do, Ramsey took Allie and Meg out to their favorite restaurant overlooking the bay. Meg behaved herself, scribbling on the paper place mat with crayons given to her by their waitress and chattering to herself. Allie and Ramsey watched Meg, watched the bay, and spoke little, but the restaurant was festive enough from other people’s conversations that their silence didn’t announce itself.

Now, at 1:30 a.m., Ramsey carried the trays of hamburger patties out to the garage refrigerator. He drove to the 24-hour Exxon station for another twenty-pound bag of ice.

He wouldn’t try to sleep tonight.

Last night hadn’t gone well. Allie clicked off her light and they kissed and he tried to imagine that it was long ago with the jagged scar still fresh on his thigh. Allie had just moved into his apartment over the laundromat with the dryer-exhaust smell and the squeaking bed that made them laugh. But none of it would stay fixed in his mind.

They fumbled awhile in the dark, he and Allie, until he slid her hand away and said,
Babe, I’m sorry.
He explained that his back hurt from all those hours on the road. He went to the kitchen for a heat pack, and when he returned he told Allie he was going to try the trundle bed for a while, see if the hard mattress might help.

When he returned home tonight from the gas station with the bag of ice, rather than go upstairs he wiped down the kitchen counters and scrubbed the downstairs bathroom, because that was the one the guests would be using. At 4 a.m. he sat in the living room with his guitar and a pair of headphones, closed his eyes, and started to run through some of the songs in the set. He soon abandoned those for his all-time favorites. Zeppelin, the Stones, the Allman Brothers, Skynyrd, Hendrix, the Who, the Doors, the Dead. It was nothing less than the soundtrack to his whole life he was strumming, everything electric and tinged with blue.

He felt his breathing slow and his muscles relax, similar to how his body responded to being on the road these past few months. When he was behind the wheel, all the human struggles—wives and husbands, rich and poor—faded away, leaving only the soothing sounds of a well-tuned engine and wide tires rolling over a hot highway.