Heart-Shaped Box (Claire Montrose Series) (8 page)

Jessica raised her voice to a normal level. “Did you hear what Tyler is doing these days? He’s Minor’s chief of police!” She turned the full wattage of her smile on Dante, blinking her heavily made-up eyes. “That guy over there” - she pointed to a man with faded blond curls and a pot belly perched about stick-thin legs - “is Tyler Kraushaar. He used to be Claire’s boyfriend.”

“
No, he didn’t!” Claire interjected, stung. Back when they were friends - before Jessica climbed the social ladder of Minor without so much as a wave good-bye - had she let the other woman bruise her ego so easily? “I listened to records in his living room one time. One time!” She refrained from mentioning that Jessica had done a hell of a lot more than listen to records with half the men in the room. “And that was twenty-three years ago.”

“
Twenty-three years, Claire? Can you believe it? We’re old now, Claire. Old!” Suddenly dejected, Jessica slumped in her chair.

Claire said, “What about that actress I see on TV sometimes? You know, the one who says life begins at forty?”

Jessica waved a disparaging hand. “Well, for her, plastic surgery began at twenty-eight, so what does she know?”

“
You guys aren’t old,” Dante said. He was eighteen months younger than Claire, so it was easy to be magnanimous.

“
Huh!” Jessica snorted. “Men don’t have to worry about turning forty. They have to worry about turning ninety, and even then they can father children. They just can’t recognize them or pick them up.”

Dante realized it was better to change the subject. “So when we met out in the parking lot, you were saying that you’re acting on Broadway.”

“
I finally feel that I have found my calling. There’s something about playing a part in front of a thousand people that gives you so much more energy than trying to emote in front of a bored cameraman and a director who would much rather be doing music videos.”

Dante leaned toward Jessica. “What shows have you been in?”

Envy pinched Claire’s heart. Couldn’t he see how shallow Jessica was?

The wattage of Jessica’s smile increased. “Le Miz, of course, and-”

A woman’s shout stilled all conversations.

“
Two, four, six, eight! Who do we appreciate! Yeah Richard! Yeah Richard! Yeah Richard!”

It was Cindy, who seemed to be relieving her days as Minor’s head cheerleader. She had kicked her high heels under a chair. In lieu of pompoms, she shook a crumpled napkin in each fist. At each repetition of Richard’s name she leaped higher in the air, the muscles in her tanned legs flexing. Richard - Claire had to keep reminding herself not to think of him as Dick - watched her, goggle-eyed.

Jessica leaned over to Claire. “Cindy’s husband doesn’t look very happy, does he?”

Claire followed Jessica’s gaze. About a dozen feet away, Kevin Sanchez sat alone at a table. A tall, darkly handsome man, graying at the temples, he wore a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. His right elbow rested on the table, so that the gin and tonic in his hand covered the set of his mouth. He couldn’t hide the narrowing of his coal-black eyes, though, as he watched his wife shimmy her hips in front of a computer multi-millionaire.

A few of the women in the crowded room were whispering to each other, shaking their heads, but Richard still only had eyes for Cindy as she shouted his name while she twisted and danced. Her hips swung, her hands clapped, and even her head bounced from side to side, so that she looked like a nodding toy dog in the back window of a car. She landed in a full side-to-side split that made all the men smile, and then bowed from the waist.

Richard, flushed to his hairline, began applauding. He got to his feet, still clapping, only now he was calling out, “Bravo! Bravo!”

Jessica leaned over to Claire. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” she stage-whispered.

“
What’s that?”

“
That I still hate Cindy just as much as ever.”

A man’s voice cut through the din, his tone high and girlish and mocking. “Cindy, oh Cindy, can I kiss you?”

Heads turned. It was the drunk guy in the orange tanktop. Claire vaguely remembered him from high school as one of the people who used to stand across the street from the school, smoking. He stood in the back of the room, one arm looped around a pillar as if for balance, his face twisted and ugly.

A woman nearby tried to shush him, but his call came again. “Cindy, can I kiss you?”

In a flash, Tyler was upon him. “All right, buddy, I think you’ve had enough.” Tyler grabbed the guy’s wrist, doing something to it that allowed him to lead the drunken man out of the room like an overly tired child.

All eyes went to Richard and Cindy. He was looking down at the table, his face scarlet. His right thumbnail slipped into his mouth and he began to nibble it industriously.

Cindy leaped to her feet. Into the still shocked silence she said, “Of course, Richard can kiss me.” She leaned over and theatrically presented her cheek - and a wide expanse of cleavage - to him. Richard’s head bobbed forward and he gave her a quick peck. Then he leaned back and called out in a raised voice that trembled slightly, “A round for all my old friends from Minor. On me.” The bartender rolled his eyes while the rest of his body sprang into action. With one hand, he began squirting drinks from a plastic hose, while setting beer bottles on a tray with the other. With one hip he closed the cooler door, while simultaneously kicking the dishwasher door closed with his other foot.

“
What did that bit about kissing Cindy mean?” Dante asked.

Jessica said, “I think Richard went on exactly one date in high school. He took Cindy to the movies. She was about seven steps above him on the social ladder, so God knows why she said yes. Anyway, at one point during the movie, he asked if he could kiss her. Unfortunately, it coincided with a time when there wasn’t much on the soundtrack, and a lot of people in the theater heard him. And the next Monday at school, Cindy kindly filled in the details for anyone who wasn’t there. For months he couldn’t walk down the hall without guys yelling “Cindy, can I kiss you?” after him.”

“
So did Cindy say yes the first time?”

Jessica snorted. “You clearly don’t know Cindy very well. I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole reason she went out with Richard in the first place was to humiliate him. She had a way of finding your weak spot and working on it.”

Watching the other woman’s mouth crimp, Claire wondered what weak spot of hers Cindy had exploited. Then Jessica’s lips broadened into a smile.

“
Just think how stupid Cindy feels now. She could be living in a thirty-thousand- square-foot lake-side mansion in Seattle instead of still being stuck in Minor, Oregon.” Jessica opened her mouth to say something more, when an expression of delight blossomed on her face. Claire followed her gaze. Wade Merz was beckoning to Jessica, holding a glass out to her in invitation.

“
Excuse me,” Jessica murmured, and was off like a shot. Claire turned to apologize for her, and was surprised to find Dante watching Jessica, an unreadable expression on his face. Instead of saying anything about Jessica, Claire excused herself to go to the restroom.

As she cut past Richard’s table, he looked up from the woman he was talking to and gave her a smile. Claire was still mad at herself for being pleased that he remembered her. Would she have felt the same way if he worked in a factory instead of being responsible for employing thousands of people who worked in factories?

“
Hi, Claire - long-time no-see. Say, do you know Martha?” Claire vaguely remembered Martha Masterson, a quiet woman who had sat behind Claire in advanced English. She had always worn a white plastic headband that pulled her hair back from her high forehead. Now her thick dark blond hair was cut in a flattering pageboy and her large gray eyes were no longer hidden by glasses. “She and I are both refugees from the Bi-Phy-Chem Club, only neither of us got too far away. She does” - he turned back to her, a theatrically quizzical expression on his face -” what is it - organic chemistry research? Anyway, something I barely understand.”

Martha gave his arm a playful push. “Don’t tell me you don’t understand it. If you hadn’t tutored me, I wouldn’t have done so well on my chemistry advance placement exam. Thanks to your help, I got enough credits to enter college as a sophomore.”

“
That’s the thing, though. I only understand chemistry up through the college freshman level. Not the post-doc work you’re doing.” He turned back to Claire. “What about you, Claire? What are you doing?”

Her answer felt inadequate. “I volunteer with the SMART program. It’s a program to teach at-risk kids to read.”

“
Hmm. Very noble. Do you have any children yourself?” She saw him glance at her left hand.

“
No, at least not yet.” Her bladder sent up another distress signal. “Say, would you excuse me for a second?”

As she continued to pass through the crowd, Claire heard scraps of conversation from combinations of people she would never have imagined together. Cindy was telling a table full of people Claire recognized as former hoods about her career “in the spirit industry.” Wade seemed to be putting the moves on Jessica, and her face was alight as if the whole thing wasn’t fueled by a half-dozen vodka tonics. And Tyler was talking to a restless-looking Rebecca. Claire caught a snatch of his monologue. “So I drew my gun and I said, ‘Do you want to bet who is gonna to fire first? Because I shoot to kill, buddy!’”

“
Hey, Clairice! It’s been a long time.”

She turned. Sawyer Fairchild. He was clean-shaven now, his dark hair gone silver at the temples in the way that seemed only to happen to men.

“
I guess since I’ve been following your career, it doesn’t seem as long to me.” She had forgotten how he had used to call her Clairice. Like the other kids, she had preened at any sign that Sawyer had singled her out.

“
I’m flattered. I hope I’ve made the kind of decisions you can support.”

“
I’m a dyed-in-the-wool liberal. The worst kind. So I’m all for the Portland urban growth boundary, better schools and gay rights.”

Making a face, Sawyer slapped himself on the cheek. “I’m doing it again, aren’t I? Running for office. And tonight’s supposed to be about seeing old friends. Have the last twenty years been good to you?”

She nodded. “The last few years, especially. I’m definitely having more fun than when I was seventeen.”

Sawyer opened his mouth to reply, but just then a half-dozen women waving cocktail napkins descended on them, asking “the future governor” for his autograph.

Claire mouthed a good-bye in his direction, then again made her way toward the bathrooms, which were behind a partition that held a payphone. The women’s restroom door was labeled the She-Pee Room and featuring a cartoony-illustration of an Indian (or should she say Native American?) woman sneaking behind a teepee. She took her place in the long line for one of the four stalls. Nina, one of her old circle of friends, fell in behind her. Her once long blond hair was cut short now, a feathery cap that suited her small features. They hugged each other stiffly, each unsure of how much pressure to exert.

Nina broke their awkward clinch. “So what are you doing with yourself these days, Claire? And when did you get married?”

“
Mostly volunteer work,” Claire said, thinking of Rainy, the seven-year-old girl she was slowly and painfully trying to teach to read this summer, despite the distractions of television and a never-ending series of new “dads.” “And Dante and I aren’t married.”

“
Dante? That’s a fancy name. Is he foreign?”

“
Born and bred in New York City.” She could tell by Nina’s expression that this was tantamount to being foreign-born. “What about you? What are you doing now?”
“I sell real estate part time, but mostly I watch after my grandkids. They’re the only good thing that came out of my marriage to Gene, even if it was indirectly.”

“
Grandkids?” Claire echoed with a rising sense of horror. She hadn’t given much thought to having children yet, yet here someone she knew for a fact was two months younger than her already had multiple grandchildren.

Finally it was Claire’s turn for a stall. She sat down just as something rattled in the stall next to her. There was the sound of a loud exhale followed by the hiss of something being sprayed, and then a quick, sucking inhalation. Drugs? Claire wondered, sniffing the air experimentally. But when she and the woman next to her pushed open their stall doors at the same time, Claire saw it was Cindy - slipping a blue asthma inhaler into her purse. The other woman did not even acknowledge Claire’s presence. She just quickly washed her hands and left.

The tables of the Hoe-Down Room were littered with crumpled napkins and empty beer bottles glasses, some marked with lipstick. Reunion-goers who had little kids - or those who could simply no longer stay up late - had already gone back to their hotel rooms. About three dozen people remained in the bar, talking quietly while drinking Full Sail Ale under the gaze of glassy-eyed elk, deer, and one moth-eaten buffalo.

When the scream ripped through the air it froze everyone in place. A woman’s scream, high-pitched, wordless. Then Claire began to realize there were words within the scream, run together into nonsense.

Belinda Brophy-Muller scrambled through the double doors. Her staring eyes did not see any of the old classmates who gaped at her. And now Claire could make out the two words that ran together in harsh cadence.