Family Blessings (22 page)

His nose isn't the only thing that's been growing this summer. His ankles are hanging out of every pair of jeans he owns." She folded her waxed paper and put it into the sack, then looked off across the open field to the south where twilight was settling. "I hate to see Janice go back to school. The house will seem so empty."

"Will she live in a dorm?"

"Yes."

"So you'll have to move her back. Do you need help with that?"

"I can borrow Jim Clements's truck again."

"Let me know if you need a strong back."

"Thanks, I will."

They sat in silence awhile. A sparrow came and pecked at some crumbs around the garbage can. A gray-haired man and woman came by and said hello. When they'd moved on, Christopher sat with a question in his mind, afraid to pose it, afraid that if he did he might spook Lee and that would be the end of these pleasant times with her. But they'd become friends, good friends. They'd talked about their personal feelings time and again, so what was wrong with talking about this?

Ask her, an inner voice urged. just ask her. Instead, he rose and threw their trash into the garbage can, gathering courage. Returning to the picnic table, he straddled a bench and rested one arm on the tabletop, looking off at the grass.

"Could I ask you something?"

"Ask."

He turned to watch her face. "Do you ever go out on dates?"

"Dates?" she repeated, as if the word were new to her.

"Yeah, dates." He rushed to explain. "You know, Greg talked a lot about you, but I never heard him mention any guys in your life."

He allowed a stretch of silence, then asked, "So do you?"

"No."

"Why?"

"Because when Bill died my kids were enough for me. I just never felt the urge."

"Nine years?" he questioned. "You never dated anybody in nine years?"

"Boy, you've really got your figures down, don't you?" Before he could react to her observation she went on. "They've been busy years. I went to school and started a business. Joey was only five when Bill died. The others were fourteen and sixteen. I didn't have time for dating. Why do you ask?"

He glanced at the grass again. "Because it seems to me it'd be good for you. The way you were today in the shop when I came in, frustrated to the point of tears, handling all this stuff you've had to contend with since Greg died. Seems to me dating would be a distraction. It'd be good for you. Somebody to talk over your feelings with, you know?"

She said quietly, "I seem to talk my feelings over with you," then rushed on as if catching herself at an indiscretion. "And I have my family, the kids . . . I'm not lonely. What about you?"

"Do I date?"

"That's the question here, I believe."

"Now and then."

"Who are you dating now?"

"Nobody special. Girls are sort of put off when they find out you're a cop. I guess they're afraid to get serious because they think you're going to get blown away or something . . . I don't know. It's a stressful lifestyle, especially on wives, they say.

Ostrinski keeps trying to get me to go out with his sister-in-law.

She's divorced, has a couple of kids, had a bad marriage to a guy who lied to her for four years while he played around with anybody and everybody, including one of her best friends. I finally told Ostrinski, okay, I'll take her out.

Saturday's the day, but I'm not looking forward to it."

"Why not?"

"Two kids, an ex-husband, all this past history she's trying to get over . .." He gave a rueful shake of the head.

"Sounds like me," Lee remarked.

"You aren't saying your husband--" "Oh, heavens no. We had a great marriage. Maybe that's why I haven't dated. What I had was so perfect it'd be hard to . .."

"Hey, you guys, here you are!" Joey came swooping off the path, panting, bumping over the grass, dropping both palms flat on the picnic table, smelling execrable. "Gol, you know how far I went?"

"Clear to South Dakota, judging by what time it is," his mother replied.

"You mad, Mom?"

"Actually, Christopher and I were talking so hard I hadn't even noticed it's nearly dark."

"Jeer, am I relieved. Guess what? I ran into this girl I know . .

. Sandy Parker? And she's having an end-of-the-summer party at her house the last week of vacation and I'm invited."

"A party? With girls? And you want to go?"

"Well, Sandy's not like the other girls. She likes to Rollerblade and fish and stuff like that." He swung his hat bill around to the front and used it as a handle to scratch his head. "I can go, can't I, Ma?"

Lee and Chris pushed up off the table. "You can go." The three of them headed back toward the blacktop trail where Joey immediately pulled ahead. "Wait by the truck for us, okay?" she called after him.

For the short remainder of their walk, and all the way back to Anoka, Lee and Christopher found little to say. He was going out on a date next Saturday and they both knew it was an antidote for the him-and-her Situation they'd been nurturing since June: the two of them with their mismatched ages, beginning to enjoy each other's company a little bit too much.

Joey jabbered all the way back to the house, unaware of the deflated moods of the two with him. Back at home, Christopher walked them to the door then waited while Lee unlocked it and Joey passed them in his stocking feet, carrying both his shoes and his skates, his stockings filthy.

She watched the screen door slam behind him and muttered, "I give up."

Neither she nor Christopher laughed as they would have earlier in the evening. Somehow their mood had dulled.

"Joey, come back here and thank Chris!" she called.

He reappeared in the entry hall and said through the screen door, "Oh yeah . . . hey, thanks, Chris. It was fun."

"Sure thing. Night, Joey."

He disappeared and a moment later the bathroom door slammed. Lee stood on the step above Chris, telling herself she had no right to react this way to his dating a young woman his own age.

"Yes, it was fun. Thank you. You rescued me again and I needed it."

"So did I."

Joey came banging out of the bathroom and flashed past on his way into the kitchen where the cupboard and refrigerator doors started opening and closing. Lord, it was hard to sort out these feelings with a teenager banging around.

"Well, listen . .." Lee said. "Have a good time Saturday night.

Give the woman a chance. Who knows . . . she might turn out to be somebody you like a lot."

He dropped his foot off the step and stood in what she'd come to think of as his cop pose, weight distributed evenly on widespread feet, shoulders back, chest erect, chin level with the earth. His key ring was looped over his index finger and he gave it a jingle, then snuffed it in a tight fist.

"Yeah, right," he said, deep in his throat. "Who knows."

He'd already turned away before saying, "Goodnight, Mrs. Reston."

Chapter 8.

ON Saturday night Christopher, Pete Ostrinski, his wife, Marge, and sister-in-law, Cathy Switzer, had a date to go bowling.

Summer leagues were done, winter leagues hadn't started: the lanes would be half empty.

Pete and Marge lived in a nice new house over in the Mineral Pond addition on the east side of town: split entry with two bedrooms up, finished, two down, unfinished. The seams still showed between the rolls of sod in the front yard, and inside, the place smelled like new carpet and paint.

Pete answered Christopher's knock and walked him up into the living room, where toys shared equal space with furniture and the two women were waiting. He kissed Marge on the cheek. When introductions were performed, Cathy Switzer rose from her chair and shook Christopher's hand, her palm was damp. She was blonde, sharp-featured, relatively attractive in a bony way, but when she smiled her gums showed.

"Hi, Chris," she said. "I've heard a lot about you."

He smiled. "That makes two of us."

Pete said, "Marge has got some drinks out on the patio," and they I trailed after him, attempting to make conversation. Outside, drinking a Sprite while the others drank margaritas, Christopher covertly assessed Cathy Switzer.

Her hair was fluffed up into a huge arrangement of disheveled corkscrews that must have taken her some time to accomplish. He quite hated it. She had tiny breasts, skinny hips and an unearthly thinness that gave her the frail look of a matchstick.

Plainly thought: She didn't look healthy.

He remembered Lee's admonition to give the woman a chance, and remarked, "Pete tells me you work for a plumbing supply."

"Yes, in the office. I'm going to school two nights a week though, to get my realtor's license."

So she had goals and ambition.

"And you bowl on a league, I hear."

The conversation bumped along like all conversation on all blind dates has bumped along for aeons. The baby-sitter came home from the park with the kids, providing a welcome diversion just before the foursome left for the bowling alley in Pete's car.

Cathy Switzer--it turned out--brought her own ball.

The first time she delivered it down alley number five, Christopher expected to see her skinny little arm snap off at the elbow. Instead, she went into a downswing in perfect form, right leg crossed behind left, shoulders canted in a perfect follow-through, and put enough backspin on the ball to throw pins halfway to the scoring table, had the setter not descended to scrape them away, still whirring.

naturally, she got a strike.

Everybody clapped, and Cathy blushed as she returned to her seat next to Chris.

"Nice," he said, grinning at her askance.

"Thanks," she said with a pleasing balance of pride and humility.

' They had a lot of fun, playing three games, all won by Cathy in her size seven blue jeans with her top-heavy hair, matchstick arms and her gums that showed when she smiled. Afterward they drove down to Fridley to T. R. McCoy's for some burgers, fries and malts, and sat in a rainbow of neon with Fats Domino's "Walkin' " on the jukebox and James Dean smiling down off the walls beside a 59 Merc.

"I like this place," Cathy said. "Mark and I used to--oops!" She covered her lips with four fingers. "Sorry," she whispered, dropping her eyes to the black Formica tabletop.

"That's okay," Christopher said. "Mark's your ex?"

She looked up at him like Betty Boop and nodded.

"The divorce has been final for nine months, but I still slip and mention him sometimes when I'm not supposed to."

Across the table Marge said, "The ass."

Pete nudged her arm. "Marge, come on now, not tonight."

"All right, sorry I called the ass an ass."

Things got tense after that and they decided to call it a night.

When they got back to Pete and Marge's house it turned out Cathy had no car, so Christopher offered to drive her home. In his truck he turned on the radio and Cathy stayed buckled onto her half of the seat.

"You like country?" he asked when the music came on.

She said, "Sure."

While Willie Nelson tried his darnedest to sound less than pitiable, she said, "Sorry I mentioned my ex."

"Hey, listen . . . it's okay. I imagine you were with him for a few years. You've got two kids, I hear."

"Yeah, Grady and Robin. They're five and three. He never comes to see them. He married my best friend and he's busy with her kids now."

He wondered what to say. "That's tough."

"You're only the second guy I've been out with since my divorce.

The first one never called back."

"Probably because you took him on the pro bowling tour."

She laughed and said, "Mark hated it when I bowled. It was okay for him to go running all over the country taking my best friend to bed, but he didn't like it when I went out with the girls from work to our bowling league."

He began to regret telling her it was okay to talk about this guy.

"What hurts worst," she went on, "is that a lot of the stuff he'd never do with me and the kids, he does with her and her kids. I know because I talk to his mother, and sometimes she slips and mentions things."

She talked nonstop about her ex-husband, barely pausing to give directions to her townhouse. When they got there, she said, "Oh, are we here already?"

"Wait there," he said, got out, pocketed his keys and went around to open her door.

"It's been a long time since a guy has done that for me," she said.

"That kind of stuff stopped long before Mark divorced me.

That's sort of how I knew something was going on."

He trailed along after her to a concrete walk that took two turnS between buildings and led them to a ground-floor door without an outside light. There she took one step up and turned to him.

"Well, I've enjoyed it," she said. "Thanks a lot for the bowling and the burgers and everything."

"I enjoyed it, too," he said. "Especially the bowling, even though you beat everything in sight. It's fun to watch somebody do something that well."

"You're sweet," she said.

"Sweet?" he repeated with a chuckle. "I'm a lot of things, but sweet I don't think is one of them."

"Well, you put up with me crying on your shoulder all night about Mark.

That's sweet, isn't it?"

"Hey, listen," he said, taking a step backward. "Good luck. I know it's hard losing someone that way, but I hope everything works out for you and your kids."

She stood in shadow so deep he couldn't make out her face. He had the impression her hands were stuck into the tight front pockets of her jeans, and her puffy hair created a faint nimbus in the dark around her head.

Suddenly he took pity on her. "You know, Cathy, you ought to get over him. Somebody who treats his wife and family like that doesn't deserve any tears."

"Who says I cry about him?"

He saw himself getting in deeper than he wanted with this deluded woman and backed away another step. "Listen . . . I've got to go.

Good luck, Cathy."

When he got a yard down the sidewalk she stopped him. "Hey, Chris?"

He turned.

"Would you . .." She paused uncertainly. "Come here?"