One Small Thing (6 page)

“No. It’s not my parents,” Dan said.

Avery breathed in and sat on a stool. “Well, what then? Work? Was it Steve trying to get you to come in tomorrow? God, let him stew. He’s had you on a leash for months. Right now, we’ve got guests, Dan. Luis wants the whiskey. Work can wait for later.”

“It wasn’t Steve. It was a social worker. From Stanislaus County.”

She shook her head. “What? Why would a social worker call you? About what?”

“The past. A long time ago. Things.” He pushed back in his stool, and then swung his legs around, standing up. He began to pace up and back the length of the French doors leading to the patio and pool, his hands in his pockets, his face pale under his dark hair. “I don’t know where to begin.”

Her stomach tingled with nerves, and she stood up, pushing a stray hair off her face. Whatever it was, it couldn’t happen now, and she hoped she could make it disappear altogether. “Look, we can’t get into whatever it is now. We have guests. There are people outside waiting for you.”

Dan looked up and into her eyes. “There are other people waiting for me now.”

Waving her hands in front of her, she backed away. “No. Not now. Later. Later. Let’s do the coffee and clean up and, just, later.”

“But she called three times, Aves. I can’t not call her back.”

Avery slapped her hands on her thighs. “It’s a holiday, Dan. Remember? God! It’s not Steve or your parents. What could be so important in Stanislaus County that in any way involves you? Why do you have to be so nice to everyone? Christ, everyone you care about is outside.”

She was breathing fast, and she put a hand on her throat. Maybe she would stop talking. Maybe she wouldn’t say anything else, something she would regret and need to make up for, and he would listen and they could go back outside.

Dan shook his head. “Not everyone. My parents aren’t out there.”

“You said this wasn’t
about
your parents.”

“It’s not.” Dan walked toward her. “I’ve got to talk with you about it. It’s about someone I used to know. A long time ago.”

Avery backed away. “So we’re supposed to leave everyone outside? Dan, think. We can’t have some kind of big talk right now. Please, please wait until everyone leaves, okay? I don’t want—I don’t want my mother to see us like, well, this. Okay?”

Dan rubbed the sides of his face, sighed, and stood up. “Okay. But after. Right after.”

Avery sat on the couch in the family room, listening to the echoing sounds of Dan pulling the grill into the garage, the last of the neighbors shouting goodnights across the cul-de-sac, fireworks exploding on some other street. She swallowed and grabbed her knees. This—whatever this was—should not be happening. Her heart pounded, and her head ached, and not from the crack and boom of fireworks or the lingering sulfur. Somehow, this had to be Jared’s fault. Dan was always different when his brother was here. Jared had always been so friendly and warm to her—so different than Dan’s parents—but it seemed he was holding a secret over Dan’s head. So maybe it wasn’t really about the call. She’d noticed something was wrong when Dan had stood up, walking away from the table, leaving Jared in mid-story.

She breathed in deeply, thinking about Lamaze breathing, the mitigating of pain. But her body still hummed. Stress. Anxiety. She’d have to call that acupuncturist first thing Monday morning.

The garage door rumbled closed, and then Dan was in the laundry room, shutting the door behind him, walking into the family room. He looked at her, his face still, his lips pulled into an expression of what? Fear? Anger? She rubbed the heel of her palm against her forehead, and wished she had taken some aspirin.

“All right,” he said, sitting down next to her, his arms crossed.

Avery shook her head, crossed her legs, wishing for a second for a notepad and pen. She felt as if she was at PeopleWorks, needing to organize the entire day’s work, printing up the schedule of calls and client visits, emailing her co-workers directives, reminding them of meetings. Whatever was bothering him, she had to take care of it. Nothing was going to mess things up now. All this worry was ridiculous. She’d fix everything.

“So what is it?” she said.

“This social worker.”

“Right.” Avery nodded. “You’ve already told me that.”

Dan looked at her, his dark eyes full of tears. “The social worker called to tell me that an old girlfriend of mine died.”

Avery breathed in quickly and then let her mouth fall open. “What old girlfriend? The one from Cal? What was her name? Jordan?”

“No, not Jordan.”

Avery sat back, her shoulder blades and neck muscles relaxing. Jordan was too close in time to her, a Sigma Alpha Epsilon Pi girl, all waist-long blonde hair and tan legs. When Avery had found a stash of photos Dan had kept from that time, she’d put them in a plastic baggie and hid them in a shoe box in the garage. But a girlfriend from before that, from high school, was different, far away. Easier. He hadn’t talked about this girl once in all the years she’d known him, so this grief would be quick and manageable. Over soon. Fine.

“So who?”

Dan sat back against the couch cushion, his body slumped in a U. “Randi. From high school. And after.”

Avery patted his shoulder. “I’m sorry. You never talked about her.”

“It was a long time ago.”

Just as she’d thought. Moving closer to him, their thighs rubbing, she nodded, relief making her feel light. “Even so, it must be strange for someone you know—someone that young—to die.” She left her hand on him and felt the blood and warmth under his skin. She wanted all of him naked against her in bed, pushing her stomach against his butt, her arm across his shoulders. She was so tired. It was eleven-thirty. All she could think about was taking her Clomid and finsishing the clean up so she could go to bed.

“No, I never talked about her. I didn’t want to.”

“Why did the social worker call you? Why is social services involved? Seems kind of weird.” Avery looked toward the kitchen. There were a few pots to clean and the coffee pot to rinse. She should also go ahead and reset the sprinkler system, having turned it off for today so it wouldn’t go off and startle unsuspecting kids. And the lights. She had to turn off the front porch lights.

“Because. . . .”

“What, Dan?”

He shifted and moved toward her, grabbing her right arm. She almost pushed away, and then stared at him, feeling her body rev up with nerves again.

“Because Randi had a son.”

“Oh.” She watched his face, saw how the muscles in his lips and under his eyes were trying to tell her something. “Oh. Oh.”

Dan scooted closer. “I don’t know what it means yet. I’ve got to call this Midori Nolan back. I don’t know exactly why she called to tell me, but you have to know. I was with Randi for all of high school and until I went to Cal.”

Avery pulled her arm out of his hand, feeling his imprint even as she placed it in her lap. “I don’t understand.”

“She was my girlfriend for a very long time. There was some mention of me in her papers. I’m involved somehow.” Dan nodded, as if his movement would convince her. What did he think she was? A child?

“All of high school? Before Cal?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s only a year before you met me.” She stared at him, feeling everything in her face gaping, mouth, eyes, ears. “You’ve never said a word about her! You’ve never told me one thing. You were with her for what, eight years and you never mentioned it?”

“I didn’t want to talk about it. We had a good relationship at first—you know, normal high school stuff, dances and dates, but later it changed.”

“Changed how?” Avery asked, wishing she hadn’t as his face shifted, his shoulders fell forward. For a second, he looked like his dad. Just like Bill.

“Bad. My life, well, it was out of control. We got into some stuff.”

“What kind of stuff, Dan? For Christ’s sake, just tell me.” Avery tapped her foot against the coffee table.

“After high school we moved into an apartment, and I started working at Lemore’s Hardware, and then I got fired—“

“I thought you went to school. Sacramento Valley College.”

“Not right away. Randi’s parents had kicked her out, and we decided to move in together. My parents—“

Avery shook her head. “Yeah, they must have loved that. They wouldn’t even let us sleep together at their house when we were engaged.”

“Right.” Dan put his head in his hands, and Avery bit her cheek, feeling the soft, pink skin pulse with pain. “So we’re living together, and we were—we were drinking. First it was pot. And then coke. And then we didn’t do much else but drugs. So, I got into some things I shouldn’t have. I did some things that I wish I hadn’t. I took—I stole from my parents.”

“You stole from Bill and Marian.”

“Yes.”

Avery looked at Dan as if he were the
Bay Area
report in the
San Francisco Chronicle
, her eyes narrowing as she tried to figure out the motive for a crime. “For the drugs? You stole from your parents to buy drugs?”

Dan nodded, resting his head in his hands. She watched his breathing, the rise of his ribs, the tense muscles under his shirt. She almost reached out to touch him, not to comfort him, but to determine if he was still the same man she knew, the man without this particular past, this terrible story.

“Why?” she asked, shaking her head. “What happened?”

Without looking at her, he shrugged, mumbling into his hands. “It was a different life. She was—I wanted to be with her.”

It was with these words that Avery felt herself float off the couch, lifting slowly above herself and Dan, looking down at the two people on the couch. She could feel her body, but she wasn’t connected to it. And it didn’t really feel that strange, hovering over the horrible conversation. It was something she must have done before, practiced, learned by heart. Maybe it began when her dad was recovering from exploratory surgery in the hospital, everyone stiff and shaking in the plastic chairs, her body rising above them all, looking down on the rectangle of the bed, the grief that spiraled upward from her mother and sisters.

From up here, it didn’t seem strange that Dan had lived with a girlfriend Avery had never heard about before, that he drank, stole, did drugs, worked in a hardware store, had a baby. Why not? It didn’t bother her up here; in fact, all she really could see were the pots in the kitchen, the coffee maker, her pill in its bottle, the bright outdoor lights. From here, there was tomorrow with its litany of pills, phone calls to her doctor, walk with Valerie and Tomás to Monte Veda Park.

“Aves!” She rushed back inside herself, felt her tight chest, a band around her middle, pulling, pulling.

“What?”

“It got worse. My parents—they called the police. They didn’t press charges eventually, but they cut me off.”

Images ran through her head from movies and TV—dark apartments, high people flung back into momentary ecstasy on ratty mattresses. Nothing but the need for more stimulus, more high, now, now, enough so that they’d break into relatives’ houses, stealing what would give them what they needed.

“I don’t believe it.” But she did believe it. It all made sense.

“We lived a terrible life. It was like there was no morning or night, just—well, the same awful flatness every day. Jared refused to come over.” Dan paused, and now Bill and Marian’s absence, remoteness, coldness made sense to her. They couldn’t trust him yet, all these years later. Despite his degrees—despite her—he still might take what they had.

“Randi started to steal—“

Avery shook her head quickly and stood up. “You know, Dan, this is too much. We get this call from some strange woman and now you’re telling me this? You lived some slimy, drug-addict life, and you never thought to tell me about that? What if you’ve got some disease? What did she die of anyway?”

Dan shook his head, his whole body limp. “I don’t know.”

“Great. What if you have it? What if you’ve given it to me?” She put her hands over her eyes.

“You know I was tested for HIV and Hepatitis and STD’s before all this started. This baby stuff.”

“But before that! When we got engaged? When we were first married! You marry me with this secret past and don’t mention it?”

Dan stood up and tried to put his arms around her, but she shrugged him away and backed up. He dropped his hands to his sides. “I had myself tested then, too. For everything. I was always fine. I would have told you then if I wasn’t. I promise you.”

“Promise me? I thought we promised each other a whole bunch of stuff. I thought we told each other everything. I thought we were living the same life.” Avery sat down on the rocking chair she’d bought at
I Bambini
, and covered her face with her hands, feeling tears pool under her palms, rocking herself into silence.