Before He Finds Her (20 page)

“You just lost me.”

“Well, I brought up another vase later.” She squinted, as if trying to figure out what she was missing, and smiled. “Of course—why would you know? I run the flower shop downstairs.”

“Ah.” Ramsey motioned to his two bouquets. “So you aren’t exactly paying for these.”

“Are you kidding? On my salary?”

“Won’t you get in trouble?”

She smiled. “I manage a small flower shop for a very large chain. I think there’s like a thousand stores. No one cares if a few flowers get donated to a worthy cause.” He must have flinched, because she said, “What’s wrong?”

He couldn’t bear to tell her that
a worthy cause
was the best compliment he’d ever been paid. So he said, “It’s just... I got to be honest. I’m gonna be here another few days. And I’m sort of getting used to the sight of fresh flowers.”

Her outfit yesterday, he learned later that day when she ate her bagged lunch in his room, was because of a job interview. She was a college senior, business major, with an eye on the pharmaceutical industry—specifically the corridor of companies between Princeton and New Brunswick: Merck, Johnson & Johnson, all the biggies.

She sat in the chair beside his bed, one leg underneath her, sipping from a sweating cup of Diet Coke.

“You can’t imagine,” she said. “They hire you right out of college, no experience, and you can pay back your student loans so fast.” When she named the starting salary, Ramsey was pretty sure she had it wrong.

“What would you actually do?” he asked.

“Drug rep.”

“Yeah, okay, but what would you
do
?”

She shrugged. “Meet with doctors and their office staff, talk about the drugs your company makes, give them free samples and other swag.” He didn’t want to admit that he’d never heard the word
swag
. She must’ve read confusion in his face, because she added, “You know—coffee mugs, pens, stuff like that.”

Ramsey nodded. “And that makes them buy your drugs?”

“I guess,” she said.

“So what about the flower shop?”

“That’s just getting me through college. The pay is terrible, but it’s super easy. And there usually isn’t much to do, so while I’m there I can study.”

“And hang out with creepy older men.”

“You aren’t that much older.”

“I thought you might say I wasn’t creepy.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Well, are you?”

He actually had to think about it. “No.”

She watched the TV a minute. Downhill skiing. No one crashed. “So what happened to your leg?”

Telling her about the leg meant telling her about his job at the utility company, and how proud he’d been to pass his CDL exam on the first try, and how the best and freest days of his life were gone, gone, gone before he’d even had a chance to climb a single pole for real.

“You’ll find another job,” she said, as if the whole mess of his life could be capped like a pen. “An even better one.”

“I will, huh?”

“Of course. You’re a take-charge kind of person. Like me.”

He laughed. “Did you not hear everything I just told you?”

“Sure, but that was the story of your past. It ended with you here, in the hospital, talking to me. Now it’s your present.”

“You’re saying that today is the first day of the rest of my life?”

Her face reddened. “I know that sounds cheesy, but it’s true.”

He wanted to believe that he could emerge from the hospital as if from a cocoon, transformed from anything he’d ever known or been. And of the many reasons why he began to fall so quickly in love with Allie, one of them was because he yearned to become worthy of her too-generous assessment of him. And in that way, she was already correct—in falling for her, he was taking charge of his life.

“Hey, do me a favor?” Ramsey asked, and looked over at his roommate. “Bring that guy some flowers tomorrow. I’ll pay for it—the kid hasn’t had a single visitor.” His roommate looked over and waved, then looked back at the TV.

“Okay,” she said, and whispered: “Can he really not talk at all?”

“Nope,” Ramsey said.

“Bummer. Yeah, I’ll bring him something.” She stood up. “Well, I know where to find you.”

The next day, the roommate got his flowers. Ramsey’s came with helium balloons.

The day after that, both roommates were discharged. It was Allie’s day off, but she’d already given Ramsey her telephone number.

The roommate was being kicked out first, so Ramsey said, “See you, man,” and strolled around the hospital for a while so the kid could pack his things and leave in peace. That was what the nurses wanted, anyway—for Ramsey to walk walk walk. So he went the length of the hallway, then the hallway above and the one below. When he returned, his leg was throbbing a little. His roommate had left a slip of paper on Ramsey’s pillow.

Topaz Trucking
, it read in neat letters. Below it, a phone number.

Bobby Landry is my uncle. He’s a training manager there. (I noticed your bad leg isn’t your driving leg.) Is your CDL Class A? That would help.

Take care,

Vic

P.S.
Don’t tell Bobby where you met me.

P.P.S.
Don’t blow it with the flower girl.

To his own astonishment, Ramsey didn’t blow it. The vow he made to change his life was no transitory side effect of the good meds. It was real and lasting, and every bit as solemn as the vow that Eric had made years earlier to quit drinking and thank Jesus for every last thing. In fact, first on Ramsey’s own agenda was to deal with his booze situation. He was reasonably sure he wasn’t an alcoholic, but he knew he had to cut way back. Eric still put a dollar into a shoe box every day that went by without him taking a drink. Ramsey tried a ritual that suited him better: one drink whenever he drank, and no more. If that didn’t work, he’d try something else.

He dialed up Topaz Trucking, met with the mute kid’s uncle, and a week later enrolled in the company’s training program.

At home, he followed his doctors’ orders to the letter, stretching the leg and cleaning the wound meticulously. And while he was in the spirit of cleaning, he bought a new vacuum and a mop and some Windex. He bought a napkin holder for the kitchen table. He bought a kitchen table for the napkin holder.

He also began making lists. He listed things to do each morning: forty sit-ups; fifteen push-ups; walk to the ocean and back, followed by fifteen minutes of leg stretches; wash any dishes/pots/pans in the sink; read the front page of the newspaper; learn a new word from the dictionary.

He listed current skills and skills he’d like to acquire. He listed short-term goals (pay all bills on time; stay sober for three months; learn some more chords on the crappy electric guitar that was gathering dust in his closet), and he listed things he felt grateful for (living this long; meeting Eric; having health insurance when he got injured; meeting Allie).

Meeting Allie. Of course she was the reason he did any of this, why he awoke each morning with energy and optimism rather than festering in his dark bedroom all day and letting his leg harden into a permanent, painful handicap. Each day brought the possibility that he’d see her. She might come over after her shift with takeout, and maybe she’d stretch out on his sofa and study for one of her classes. Or maybe they’d watch something dumb on TV. Or maybe they’d go into his bedroom, and she’d be gentle with his injured leg and less gentle everywhere else.

Like Ramsey, she was alone in the world. When she was a freshman at Monmouth College on a soccer scholarship, she told her evangelical parents about dating one of her teammates, and that was pretty much that. Within the year, her mother and father had sold their home in Freehold and moved to the Florida panhandle, where the weather was warmer and the people more God-fearing. Allie was told, explicitly, that she wasn’t welcome in their new home.

“The funny thing,” she said, telling Ramsey the story in his apartment one night, “is that Amanda and I were only together that one semester. Turns out, I like guys.”

“Glad to hear it,” he said. “But that was it with your parents? You never patched things up?”

“We talked a few times on the phone. My father agreed to let me back into their lives if I agreed to fly down there on my own dime and stand in front of their congregation and admit to my sin and pledge that I’d stay pure until marriage.”

Ramsey smirked. “I hate to break the news to you, babe, but you ain’t so pure.”

She hit him with a sofa cushion. “If I needed their money, I might’ve said whatever stupid thing they wanted me to. But they were broke, and I was paying all my own bills. So I didn’t see the point.”

“People sure are different,” he said to her.

“Yeah, they were always intense, but it got a lot worse over the years.”

“No,” Ramsey said. “I mean...” He was thinking about the difference between Allie and himself: how his own response to his family’s dissolution was to become a degenerate, while hers was to play varsity soccer, earn a 3.5 GPA, and manage a flower shop. He shook his head. “Never mind.”

She started spending the night—once, then twice, then a few nights a week. They’d just about gotten into a regular routine when Ramsey’s training period ended. It figured that he’d be hitting the road just when he finally had a reason to stay in town. Yet when he factored out the utility company, which had canned him for good the day after his late-night climb, he wasn’t qualified for anything that paid more than minimum. And working for Topaz Trucking was a great deal. The company was paying for his training, and there was a guaranteed job at the end with a salary even better than he had been making not climbing telephone poles. And for the second time in his life, Ramsey had a job he could actually stand—one with a future, too, provided he didn’t do anything stupid again, like slicing up his driving leg.

As a rookie, he went over-the-road, meaning anywhere and everywhere. But unlike a lot of truckers gone for three, four weeks at a time, he had it pretty easy. Home every two weeks for four days.

Those were good days.

He was home for Allie’s college graduation and cooked dinner from a recipe in the Sunday paper. He was leaving the next morning. After the dishes were washed and the two of them were on his sofa with
Led Zeppelin IV
playing on the stereo, he took Allie’s hand and said—casually, but with his heart pounding—“So if we got married, would you be okay with that?”

Fifteen days later they landed at McCarran International Airport and were in Vegas fewer than six hours before a grinning minister at the Xanadu Drive-Thru Wedding Chapel declared them man and wife. Flower bouquet, boutonnière, five-by-seven photo, marriage license: eighty-seven dollars, plus tax. Back in their motel room, they propped the photo up on the dresser, and Ramsey couldn’t stop looking at it. He’d never seen that expression on his own face before. One of the words he’d learned recently from the dictionary was
effervescence
, and that was close, but the more accurate word was a lot simpler.
Joy
.

12

By 1991, six years later, Allie was a senior sales rep whose boss was grooming her for management, and Ramsey was doing damn fine, too. He’d built up enough goodwill at Topaz that they started keeping him east of the Mississippi, usually seven days away rather than fourteen. He and Allie remained man and wife, remained in love, the love having become more nuanced, perhaps—less desperate, but more dependable, a love as essential to each of them as their blood and bone, inseparable from the life they had created together, the child they had created.

Which was why Ramsey’s phone call with Eric on the morning of June 10 completely blindsided him.

The argument that morning between Ramsey and Allie had been over Meg’s day care. Meg was two and a half, and her December birthday made her one of the oldest in the Ladybug group. Allie thought she should move up to the Grasshoppers, where she’d be one of the youngest. Let her learn from the older kids, Allie said. Let her be challenged. Ramsey thought: She comes home happy every day. Why rock the boat? Besides, she was challenged enough, navigating a dozen other kids and two teachers every day. She’d be challenged her whole life, same as everyone. Why rush it?

They didn’t shout at each other, Ramsey and Allie. That was never their way. And this fight that Ramsey and Allie were having, it was about nothing. Meg would be fine in either group. Ramsey knew this. But he also knew that Allie was being short-tempered with him lately, as if any view he held was the wrong one. From time to time she brought work-stress home, especially at the end of the quarter when there were reports to complete, but her stress had always shown itself as an unspecified moodiness, a cloud that settled over the house for a couple of days before lifting again. This was different. Her impatience seemed directed specifically toward him.

So when she said for the fifth or maybe the thousandth time that she wanted Meg to be
challenged
, that it was important she be
challenged
, Ramsey said, “For Christ’s sake, Allie, it’s fucking day care, not NFL training camp.”

He didn’t intend to sound mean or rude—okay, rude maybe—but people hear what they want to hear. And her dismissive reply—“Oh, fuck you, Ramsey”—felt worse than if she’d hit him. In all their years together, neither of them had ever said that to the other, even kidding around. And because he was hurt and stunned, he left angry later that morning on a weeklong haul without so much as a good-bye. Last time he’d done that was three years earlier, and it had ended with him frightening that poor hitchhiker in his cab and then nearly drinking himself to death.

Driving the familiar roads that began most of his trips, he felt awful about the fight and how he’d left. She had looked especially attractive this morning. The outfit she had on, and her hair, curled with the iron she used... whatever it was, Ramsey would have preferred to part for the week with a proper good-bye in the bedroom, rather than fighting about day care in the kitchen. And now he was alone in his truck, heading away, and Allie was alone in the house, and although they’d talk on the phone tonight or maybe tomorrow, the hurt wouldn’t fully resolve until he returned, which was too long.