Rowing in Eden (25 page)

“She's not a mutt, Ryan. Don't say that. I hate that word. ‘Mutt.'”

He shrugged. “She lives over there,” he said, and pointed to the trailer court. “I bet you're too young to even remember when the trailer court was the ice rink.”

“No way! They didn't have enough records so they always played ‘Sunday Kind of Love.'”

“That's right.” He smiled. “And ‘Rubber Ball.'”

“See? I've been around for a while. I remember when Mason's had nickel cones and”—she hesitated—“and the roller coaster was still running at Funland.”

He raised an eyebrow at this last assertion, then asked,
by the way
, had her sister Martie mentioned talking to him at the Romero the night before? “She wanted to tell me I was a bum, and I better stay away from you if I know what's good for me.”

“Don't pay any attention to her,” Franny said in a rush.

“Franny.” He opened his hands in a reassuringly helpless gesture. “I can't pay attention to her.”

When he next hurried off to set up a group of golfers, she wondered if she could inject “purple mountain's majesty” into a poem about him, for both the comedy and the rightness of it, the way it expressed the glory and the dopiness of her love.

A pair of little kids in plaid sailor suits approached the knee-high barn that was the course's last hole, and she smiled at them. The barn was an easy hole-in-one if you knew—as Franny knew from years past—that the swinging doors on the front opened on the count of three. She was debating telling them—would it ruin their fun?—when here came Ryan, this time carrying a case of pop bottles from the manager's house to the snack shop. As he approached Franny, she leaned forward from her perch on the fence to drop a kiss on his arm.

“Whoa!” He smiled, but frowned, too, before he was past. Then he turned to whisper over his shoulder, “You don't want me getting fired, do you?”

“Of course not.” She ran her hand along the rough blocks of
the exterior of the shack while, inside, he busied himself with packing bottles of soda into an old refrigerator. She could see how it was: Each time he tilted his head one way or the other, he shaped her, chipped away at her. Which meant it might very well be necessary for her to pretend to be someone else so that he would not actually be able to change her into whatever it was he had in mind.

“Here.” He stepped from the shack, holding out a bottle of Coke. “And don't look so worried. My dad owns this place. I'm not likely to get canned. So, what'd you tell your folks today?”

“I'm at the park, swimming.”

He grinned and toed her beach bag. “Your swimsuit in there?”

“Hey, lover boy.” A woman in a cut-off sweatshirt and cut-off jeans stepped up to the shack. “Who's your friend?” she asked and gave Franny a grim up-and-down glance.

Hefty,
Franny's dad would call her.
A hefty old broad,
although the woman was probably no more than twenty-five.

“Karen, this is Michelle,” Ryan Marvell said. “Michelle, Karen Johanson. Karen”—he made a teasing bow of deference—“is the wife of the boss.”

The woman whose husband Bob Prohaski had threatened. Karen Johanson. “How do you do?” Franny said.

The woman rolled her eyes. “Okay, Ryan,” she said, “now that I've met Michelle, here, would you like me to tell her to get her butt off the fence, or do you want to do it?”

Immediately, Franny slid from the fence; immediately, wished she had not.

“Okay,” said Karen Johanson. “Now maybe you can do the batting cage, Ryan? If you're not too busy entertaining?”

“Now, don't worry about Karen, Michelle,” Ryan Marvell said. He winked at the woman as he began to back toward the batting cage. “Karen doesn't really mind if girls come by now and then.”

“He shouldn't be so sure about that,” Karen Johanson muttered; then she lifted the hinged piece of countertop that allowed employees into the snack shack and began to clip packages of potato chips to a display rack.

Stck, stck
, went the baseballs as Ryan Marvell tossed them into the pitching bin.

Franny stared down at her sandalled feet and the bright crushed limestone that surrounded the snack shack. When she stared at her feet and the crushed rock—and not at the golf course or the cornfields at the back of the property or the swamp to the west—she could imagine herself in a Mediterranean country, some hot and dry and exalted land where people wrote poetry and honored their passions, someplace like the land in the poster on Rosamund's wall.

Other girls came by Mother Goose to see Ryan Marvell. The idea filled her with despair. She closed her eyes. She whispered to herself,
Nayr.
His name backward, a spell, a lover's incantation.
Nayr.
Martie had done that, once, during a bad period with the ROTC member. Not that it had done much good.

The hiss that sounded when Karen Johanson lit a match for her cigarette made Franny turn.

“You smoke, Michelle?”

“No, thanks.”

“I wasn't offering you a cigarette, just asking if you smoked.”

Franny nodded. “You have to understand,” she said—very slowly, so the words would come out right—“I'm used to being around people with manners, so you confuse me.”

“Uh-huh.” The woman aimed a finger Franny's way and pretended to fire a shot. “Gotcha.”

Her cheeks hot, Franny turned to lean on the fence and watch the pair in the sailor suits begin to work their way around the course a second time. They would have to be brother and sister, she supposed. And their mother was probably that pretty redhead who waited—windows rolled up, engine running—in the Mother Goose parking lot.

“Siren!” the pair of kids began to shout and, sure enough, an ambulance now headed down Lakeside Drive, a streak of white and red coming around the curve just beyond Woolf Beach.

Franny wished, as she always wished, that the ambulance would
stop, soon, nearby, so that she would know that the driver had reached the proper destination, delivered help.

“Siren!” Gleefully, the little kids ran toward the parking lot, but the ambulance shot past before they reached the car of the redheaded woman. Even the trailer court setter seemed to know not to try to chase the thing.

“Hey, here comes a buddy of mine.”

Franny turned as Ryan Marvell stepped up behind her and pointed to the dusty sedan now entering the Mother Goose lot.

Every inch of Ryan Marvell's friend carried the even anonymous coat of dust common to workers just off a shift at the cement plant. The moist flickering eyes and mouths of Pynch's local cement plant workers always struck Franny as eerie—that look of live men trapped inside dead. Still, Franny recognized Ryan's friend. He had helped Tim Gleason take Eduardo to the hospital. He had stood on the bank with Tim Gleason to argue with Ryan Marvell the night she and Ryan met. Warren something-or-other. Now this Warren crossed the lot, calling, “Marvell, you got scalped.” He nodded Franny's way. “Miss Wahl. I guess your parents will think twice before they ever let you get near one of your big sisters' parties again, hm?”

Ryan pretended to protest, and Franny laughed, but after that, Warren addressed all of his comments to Ryan Marvell. It seemed Warren had spent the past weekend at the teachers college he would attend in the fall, and Ryan asked him questions about the trip, and then both boys joked about Ryan's attending Stanford Fanning Fellow in the fall.

“But, hey, man,” Ryan said, “how could I leave Pynch when Franny's here?”

Without answering, Warren looked up the road toward the causeway. “I wonder if that's the ambulance that passed me on my way here,” he said.

“Is it good or bad if the siren's off?” Franny asked, not just Ryan, but Warren, too, because it had been her experience that a boy would answer a girl's question whether he liked her or not, and
whether he knew the answer or not, and it might help things if Ryan witnessed her in conversation with his friend.

Before either boy could answer, however, the trailer court's setter streaked out into the road, and the ambulance rode over the dog, a quick lift of the right-front tire, and the ambulance drove on as if the driver had not even noticed.

A cry rose from the group at Mother Goose. The car behind the ambulance braked for the dog in the road, which lifted its head, howled miserably, and careened off in the direction of the causeway and swamp.

“Where're you going?” Ryan Marvell shouted when Franny started after the animal. “Come on back!”

She held up one finger—just a moment—but did not turn around. Really, she felt gratified to have a purpose that was not him. She was useful now, running down the road in an effort to help the dog.

Somewhere in the swampy ground that lay west of the manager's house, a splashing sounded, and it grew louder as she drew near. “Here, puppy,” she called. A stand of cattails buckled and parted but she could not see into them. “Let me help you, pup.”

With a howl, the creature shot from the swamp, and up onto the shoulder of the causeway, then zigzagged across Lakeside between the passing automobiles, and ran toward the makeshift parking lot at Woolf Beach.

“Sorry!” Franny called to a driver forced to come to a dangerous stop on her behalf. “Sorry.” She hurried across the road. Ryan Marvell and his friend still stood in the Mother Goose parking lot, but she did not give him any sign that she noticed him there. Because she did not want him to think that she would assume he continued to watch for her.

“Here, buddy.” She crouched down, and called beneath the cars parked on the grass at Woolf Beach. “Here, pal.” She whistled. Clapped her hands. “Here, buddy.”

While she moved between the rows of cars, someone on Lakeside Drive began to honk very insistently. Someone parked on the
shoulder of the road? She did not turn to look at the source of the honking until she recognized the voice calling, “Franny! Franny Wahl!”

Her mother. Standing up in the convertible to call to her.

Franny raced toward the car. Just across the road, at the edge of the Mother Goose lot, stood Ryan Marvell and his friend, and she called ahead of herself, “There was a dog, Mom. It got hit and I'm trying to find it. I think it went under one of these cars.”

Peg Wahl lowered herself into the driver's seat. “You need to get in,” she said.

She looked ashen. She knew everything. The golf course manager's wife had figured out everything and she had called Peg and told Peg everything—

“That Bob Prohaski—” Peg turned her face straight ahead as Franny climbed into the car. Her voice was strangled. “He—”

“What?”

Peg put the car in gear and pulled back on the road. She reached for Franny's hand. “I got a call as I was leaving the dentist's, Fran. That Bob came by the house today after you'd gone. Ginny was still there. She told him you weren't home. She thought he'd left, but then she heard him yelling for you, and, by the time she went outside, he was in the lake. Your boat was out on the water and apparently he was trying to reach it, and”—she glanced Franny's way—“he got in trouble.”

“Oh, Mom!” In alarm, Franny lowered her head to her knees. “What happened?”

“I came as soon as Ginny called. There was an ambulance on the way. Somebody next door went in after him—”

“But the ambulance went by already! You have to follow it, Mom. What's it mean if they don't run the lights and siren?”

Peg shook her head. “Let's just stay calm and go to the house. We don't know that the ambulance you saw was the ambulance Ginny called. Let's just wait and see.”

Franny wrapped her arms around herself, tight. If Bob Prohaski only were okay, she would like him again. She would. She would.
Please, God. “It's my fault! I didn't answer, once, when I was out in the boat and he was calling me! He probably thought I was hiding from him!”

“Now, sh, come on, honey. We don't know”—Peg broke off to look in her rearview mirror—then said an indignant “somebody in that car made an obscene gesture when we went by!”

Franny grasped her ankles with her hands. She could not bear to see Lakeside Drive, and how slowly they moved up it.
Please, God
, she prayed,
if only
—but her heart rebelled.
Please, let him be okay, but don't make me have to love him.

When she felt the car turn, she knew they had reached the main drive, and she sat up. There was Ginny Weston, running toward the car. “He's gone!” she called as Peg brought the car to a stop.

Franny and Peg gasped, and reached for one another.

“Not like that! He
left!”
Ginny Weston began to cry. “I shouldn't have called the ambulance! I'll pay for it, Mrs. Wahl, don't worry.”

“But—where's Bob?” Franny asked.

“He hightailed it out of here, as mad as a wet hen.”

“Well, thank goodness.” Peg smiled at Franny.

“But we have to find him, Mom. To make sure he's okay.”

“Ginny said he was okay, Franny.”

“He could be hurt!”

“Oh, I doubt it.” Now that she knew she was not in trouble, Ginny Weston seemed to be irritated with the boy. “He stuck out his thumb and somebody picked him up—bang—wet clothes and all.”

Even so, Franny persuaded Peg to drive her back toward town. “I'll watch the right side of the road, and you watch the left,” she said, and when they reached the causeway once more, she asked Peg to keep an eye out for the setter, too.

Franny caught a glimpse of Ryan Marvell, on his way to the batting cages.

Oh
, Peg said—trying to distract her, Franny could tell—
did Franny know that Roz had received another letter from Turner?
In
Peg's opinion, Turner seemed like just the one for Rosamund. Actually, Peg was thinking she might make one of her enamels for his father for Christmas. Of course, only if Turner and Rosamund were still serious at Christmas. Though maybe it would be more appropriate to send it to the mother. The problem was, Peg had a
feeling
she'd like the father better. Because the mother sounded like she might be too hoopty-doo.