If I'd Never Known Your Love (13 page)

"I can see why my dad asked us to wait. I can't imagine studying when we could have
been doing this."

You laughed. "I take it that means you liked it?"

I plucked a piece of grass and lightly ran the tip down your side. "Can we do it
again?"

"When did you have in mind? Remember, I'm leaving tomorrow morning. Early."

"Now?"

You shook you head. "Uh-uh."

"Why not?"

You held up the empty condom wrapper.

"It's only good for one time?" If I'd known, I would have taken Fred's entire stash.

"So now what?"

You put your hand at the back of my neck and brought me to you for a kiss. "Now we
lie here in the sun and listen to the birds and eat the lunch you packed and—"

How could you talk about listening to some stupid bird when all I could think about
was your lips on my breast and your body between my legs? "I guess that means it
wasn't as good for you as it was for me?"

"Why do you say that?"

"You're so...so., .casual about it. "Today was the most important day of my life.

Nothing before had even come close. And here you were cloud-gazing like it was any
old day.

"I'm sorry. It's just the way I am, Julia."

I threw the grass at you. "You could at least tell me you liked it."

I know that I'd given as good as I got and I wanted you to be as eager for it to
happen again as I was. But maybe most of all I wanted to know that while you were in
Detroit you would remember me with the same longing that I had for you. I didn't know
until that moment how afraid I was that you would go home and find someone you liked
better.

How could I compete with sophisticated city girls? Everything I knew about the world outside Kansas I'd learned
from magazines.

You didn't say anything for a long time and somehow I managed not to jump in with
inane chatter to fill the silence. I could see that I'd dampened the joy that you'd been
experiencing only moments before and didn't understand what was happening. Had it
been awful for you and you were afraid to tell me?

"You have to realize that sex isn't the mystery for me that it is for you, Julia."

You confused me with that. "Are you saying I'm not—"

"My mother was a prostitute."

You said it with such acceptance that it almost seemed you were talking about the
plot of some R-rated movie. In my world bad mothers were women who fed their kids a
steady diet of fast food. I couldn't conceive what it must have been like for you growing
up with a woman who earned the rent money selling her body.

"Always?" I asked, seeking a good memory.

"Yeah—always. When she brought her Johns to the apartment, I'd be sent to the
corner market to buy cigarettes, or if she didn't have the money for cigarettes, I'd be
shoved out the door to stand in the hallway until she was finished. That's when she remembered I was even there, which was only about half the time."

"How old were you?"

You sent me a penetrating stare. "This was how I lived. All my life. I've never associated sex with love or
tenderness or caring, only money."

"Not even now?" I said, my heart in my throat.

"I'm learning. But it's been hard. You want me in a way that has nothing to do with
people using each other. I don't understand that. And I don't trust it. Not completely.

Not yet."

"What can I do to help you?" I had a project. I would find a way for you to see the
good in people. In me. I would do whatever I could to give you the joy and trust and
love you'd never had.

You ignored my question.

"I've never seen a man look at a woman the way your dad looks at your mom," you
said. "And your mom looks back at him like he's the most handsome, sexiest, funniest
guy on earth. Robert Redford could be standing next to Clyde and your mom wouldn't
see him. "You plucked off the grass that I'd thrown at you and tossed it aside.

"The idea of loving someone like that is as foreign to me as palm trees and white
sandy beaches. I know they exist, I want to experience them, but I don't have what it
takes to believe I'll ever feel that sand between my toes. I want us to have what your
mom and dad have, Julia. I want it so much it hurts."

"My mom and dad really look at each other like that?" Not that I'd ever seen.

"All the time. You don't see it because you don't want to, or maybe you're blind to it
because they're your parents."

Back then I didn't know how to respond to you when you said something like that. I
was too young, my life before you too sheltered, to really understand what you were
saying. "You mean they look at each other like this?" I put everything I had into the
look I gave you, batting my eyelashes and grinning seductively.

You laughed, but I saw a wariness, as if you were thinking it had been a mistake to
talk to me about your mother. "Yeah, just like that."

"I love you, Evan McDonald. "There it was. The fit as natural and right as a fox
wearing its own fur. "And I'm going to love you when I'm fifty years old exactly the way
I love you now." At the time fifty was as old as I could imagine and the same as saying
forever. "If you let me."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"If you don't find someone else when you go home."

You moved toward me so that we were nearly nose to nose. "What are you talking
about?"

You really had no idea. "Detroit."

"Detroit isn't my home anymore. It's just another city. My home is here. With you.

For the rest of my life, wherever you are is where I want to be. How could you not know
that?"

It wasn't the I love you, too, that I'd been looking for. It was a whole lot better.

C H A P T E R 8

David put in his three hours at the typewriter, ate his first meal of the day—a bowl of stale cereal—grabbed his tool belt and headed back to the dock to fix the loose board he'd found that morning.

He liked repair work but found more satisfaction in creating the small, one-of-a-kind chests and boxes he made when he needed something to do that had nothing to do with writing. He created his boxes out of layers of contrasting woods glued together in varying patterns, experimenting with color and texture and grain. The finish received as much attention as the construction, and when he was satisfied he'd reached his self-imposed standard of perfection, he gave the box away.

Of the dozens of boxes he'd made, he'd kept only one. Crude in comparison to the others, the wood ordinary white pine, the hinges scavenged from a bin in an old-fashioned hardware store in Enid, Oklahoma. For the past dozen and a half years it had been the depository of the one or two invariable bad reviews that accompanied the publication of his books. They were the only ones he kept, ignoring the ones that proclaimed him a genius and the conscience of the hedonistic eighties and self-indulgent nineties. He used them as reminders of the futility of writing for anything but his own approval.

He saw Julia standing on the dock as soon as he rounded the final turn on the path.

She had her back to him, and for an instant he thought about retracing his steps and returning when she'd left. Not until that moment did he realize that his months of solitude had left him with a proprietary feeling about the place. He didn't like knowing that he was no longer there alone, free to come and go without conscious thought or consideration of another person.

He stopped to watch her. By anyone's definition she was a classic beauty. She had the features idealized in marble thousands of years ago by sculptors in love with perfection.

She was thinner than the Greek and Roman ideal, her hair shorter, the sadness in her eyes something not even the most skilled artisan could capture in stone.

Despite being annoyed that she was there, David felt a completely unexpected attraction. Obviously, he'd been alone too long. He needed to stop trying to find himself, and get back into the world. The simple fact that he could be attracted to a woman who'd come there to mourn her husband was insane.

She heard his approach and jumped, a fleeting look of panic crossing her eyes. An embarrassed smile followed. "I keep expecting a bear to wander out of the woods."

"I think the hunters cleared them out of this area a long time ago. At least, I haven't seen any while I've been here." David stopped at the end of the dock and put one hand on the waist-high piling, the other on his hip. "I noticed a board coming up this morning and figured I'd better fix it before one of us tripped and took a header into the lake."

"I already fixed it," she said. When he didn't say anything, she added, "I found some tools in the garage. I hope it's okay that I borrowed them."

"Of course it's okay." He shrugged. "Just not expected."

"What? That I can pound a couple of nails? I can fix leaky toilets, too, and cranky sprinkler systems, and wobbling ceiling fans, and you should see what I can do with creaky floor boards." She softened the words with a smile.

"I didn't mean I thought you were incapable, just that I was surprised you'd want to. I was told you were here on vacation." She appeared fresh from a shower, her dark hair damp and curling in a loose cap around her face. Dressed in red shirt, tied at her waist, and white shorts that showed off lean, muscular legs, she seemed a different woman from the one he'd met that morning, younger and somehow less guarded.

"It's been a long time between vacations. Obviously I don't know how to relax anymore."

He shifted his hand to the hammer in his tool belt. "Give it a couple of days. This place will either impose its pace or drive you back to the city."

"What do you do around here? For entertainment, I mean. Is there a theater in town?"

"You'd have to go into Redding for that."

"A video store?"

"The grocery store carries twenty-five or thirty titles, but any that aren't ten years old are gone by noon ."

"Sounds like I should find a bookstore."

He hesitated. "I've got a couple of boxes of books I'm donating to the library. You can go through and pick what you want." To make sure she didn't misinterpret his offer as an invitation to visit, he added, "I'll bring them by later and leave them on the porch."

"Thanks."

"Well, I guess I'd better get back."

She shoved her hands in her pockets."Yeah, me, too."

He caught a movement out of the corner of his eye at the edge of the clearing and turned to see what it was. A flash of white moved between two Douglas firs and then cautiously appeared next to a low- growing gooseberry bush. It was the dog he'd been feeding for several weeks and had named Pearl for her thick, almost iridescent white coat.

Where she'd appeared reasonably healthy before, she now looked emaciated and desperate.

"Shit,"
David muttered.

"What's wrong?"Julia followed his gaze.

"She's had pups." He should have known she wasn't plump because she was healthy.

How could he have been so stupid?

"Who—" But then she saw what David saw."Oh, my God. She's so skinny."

"She's been gone almost a week. I figured the coyotes had finally gotten her."

"She's
yours?"

"She's a stray. Or more likely, she was dumped. That happens a lot around here.

Whoever had her probably discovered she was pregnant and didn't want to deal with it.

I haven't been able to get close enough to see if she has tags."

"She looks like she's starving."

"I'm amazed she's still alive. I've been leaving food out for her, but plainly not enough. I just assumed she was also getting fed somewhere else. I had no idea she was pregnant."

"What have you been giving her?"

"Whatever I had around the house."

"I'm going to see what I have," Julia said. "Keep an eye on her for me, please."

"She's not going anywhere." David took off his tool belt and laid it on the ground.

Pearl watched his every movement.

Within minutes Julia was back, a stack of sandwiches on a plate. David held up his hand when she moved his way. Maybe it was men Pearl feared. "She doesn't trust me.

Why don't you try."

Julia nodded. She slowly started across the clearing.

"Talk to her," David said."Tell her that she’s a good dog—and that she's beautiful."

They were the words he'd used to gain the little trust Pearl had allowed him.

Snatches of Julia's coaxing drifted to him, things about babies and being a mother mixed with the words
good
and
beautiful.
She was within twenty yards when she stopped, held out one of the sandwiches and then gave it a small toss forward. Julia then backtracked about ten feet and lowered herself to her haunches, purposely looking to the side and not directly at Pearl.

David kept his gaze locked on Pearl, ready to move should she misinterpret Julia's retreat and in her desperation become aggressive. Instead, a wave of pity shot through him so strong it became impossible to remain a bystander in Pearl's life.

She trembled as she left the safety of the forest and neared the sandwich, almost falling when she lowered her head to snatch it. Two bites and it was gone. She lifted her head to look at Julia, then at David.

Julia placed the plate on the ground, stood and backed away.

"It's okay," he mouthed, sending words of encouragement to Pearl that she couldn't possibly hear or understand. "Go for it."