The Fives Run North-South (23 page)

Shaking his hand, he turned toward the parking lot and moved quickly through the cars. To the back of the parking lot, where he’d parked his red SUV. He got in quickly and drove away.

BOOK III: THE ENDING

25

“O
kay…what was that?” Ben asked, his mouth hung open. Then he remembered they were in a restaurant. And he had been eating.

“Don’t hate me,” Cary said, cowering.

“Of course not, but…”

“You’re wondering if I’m a crazy person, a liar, or some stalker woman, aren’t you?”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

“Can I explain?”

“Nothing would please me more at the moment,” Ben said.

“It’s a bit of a long story,” Cary said, looking around the restaurant, where the crowd was starting to thin.

“I don’t have anywhere to be tomorrow morning. The night’s young as far as I’m concerned.”

“Can we go somewhere quieter?” Cary asked.

Ben shrugged. “Sure,” he said. “You have any ideas?”

“This is going to sound awful, and I don’t blame you if you think it’s a bad idea. But what about my place?”

“That makes you, me, or both of us exceptionally trusting. But what the heck, I’m in.”

Cary’s house was large, in an affluent subdivision. Much like the place Ben’s father described as the home of Adam Mann. The cab dropped them at the front door, and after walking up the nicely trimmed footpath, Cary unlocked the door and turned off the security system. She brought him through the tall foyer and into a small sitting room in the back of the house. There was a small wet bar, wine cooler, and beer tap. She offered him a drink.

“This is proving to be among one of my more interesting first dates,” Ben said.

“I like to stand out,” Cary said, as she handed him a mug of beer. She lifted her glass of white wine. They toasted and took a drink.

“I like this place,” he said.

“Want to buy it?”

“Not really. You selling it?”

“This was our place, Fred’s and mine. He picked it out. Filled with memories, many of them kinda bad. I want a hip little place closer to the city. It’s time to dump this McMansion and the lifestyle it represents.”

“So, is it time for the long story?” Ben asked.

“I suppose it is,” she said. “Although I’m not the storyteller you are. Fred always rolled his eyes when I told him stuff. He said he didn’t appreciate how I tended to repeat every sentence three times, using slightly different words each time. His favorite line was: ‘Cary, the point of almost every fucking story is to have a fucking point.’“

“I’ll try to be a little more patient.”

She sipped her wine. “I don’t mean to make him out to be a complete ass. You just get to the point in your marriage when that’s just how he seems, not really how he really was. Neither was he the amazing heroic person I perceived him to be when we met. Oh, I’m doing it again, aren’t I? I’m all over the place.”

“Like I said, I have no pressing engagements to get to.”

“Well, let me start off with the basics. Unlike Suze and Adam, we didn’t meet in college. He didn’t get me pregnant; in fact, we never had kids. He didn’t start a company, and wasn’t a CEO.” She held up her hands. “I know what you’re thinking: so much in common, right?”

“That’s not really what I’m thinking, but I knew my father. Real life never leaked into his books. It was one of his rules.”

“I guess I hope that’s true,” Cary said. Without a word, but after looking at his empty mug, she got up, pulled another beer from the minifridge, and handed it to him after popping off the cap.

“He’d say his stories came from other places, that his life was too uninteresting to feed the pages of a good piece of fiction. He felt protective of his life and of me, and didn’t want the millions in his audience to peek through the window. But I’m here to hear your story. So go on.”

She inhaled. “Okay, well, like I said, we met after college. I was introduced to him by a mutual friend. He was a hot shot MBA, bound and determined to set fire to the corporate ladder. I was a spoiled daddy’s girl who was smart enough to know that landing a man who could continue my father’s tradition was going to be my key to happiness. All I had to do was convince him I’d support his career efforts and wouldn’t embarrass him at company parties. Along the way, we did fall in love. Seemed like that American dream thing. But I’ve seen it
often
—
sometimes
as soon as you get that
extra
-
large
home, the game changes a bit. You’d think we were in a tiny,
square
-
box
starter
-
apartment
the way we started getting on each other’s nerves. It took years to get there, but eventually, even though I didn’t embarrass him at parties, I seemed to embarrass him in the privacy of our own house. Short fuse answers, little spats and annoyances. You know the drill.”

Ben shrugged.

“I suppose it’s how lots of couples are. And your dad got it right in the story when Adam and Suze went from good to bad and back. I’m not silly enough to think that’s why there’s a connection. There are two things, and like in the book, they happened about the same time.”

Cary heard the phone ring once and then stop. She got off the couch, tucked her magazine in the rack, and went into the kitchen. The single ring: their signal. Fred had left work, time to get the house and dinner ready. As she usually did, she recalled in the early days (before cell phones) when he’d called from his desk. Last call of the day, simply to say “I’m on my way.” Once, they’d have a small chat as Fred made his way back. Now just the ring. She couldn’t remember when it had changed, and she was sure there was a logical reason. Probably having to do with the likelihood that in the time it took to have that conversation, more work slipped into his inbox causing him an additional delay escaping the office. The
single
-
ring
trick probably helped him make a quicker exit. It had now fallen into the simpler routine, and was made from his cell phone as he pulled out of the company parking lot. No reason not to talk now, except that it took a certain energy he probably didn’t have.

His commute was about thirty minutes most days. If it was longer, she could anticipate some static in his mood. Waiting in line, traffic lines in particular, did that to
him
—
a
man used to cheating the system and finding a way to the front of the queue when it was possible. She’d thrown together lasagna earlier, which she took out of the refrigerator and put in the oven. It would be done about fifteen minutes after he got home. She poured herself a glass of wine and switched on the local news, hoping the weather would be good tomorrow because she’d made outdoor plans. She was on her second glass and the news had changed over to a gossip show when she pulled the finished lasagna out of the oven. She
double
-
checked
her watch.

Great
,
she thought.
Must be a doozy of a traffic jam.

She remembered being stuck in traffic with Fred once, seeing him grow agitated. He’d said: “When we get to the front of this, we’d better see some carnage. This much of a holdup for a fender bender is simply not right.”

She’d found herself laughing. He looked at her, shocked by both her reaction and his own statement. He’d started laughing, too. It had become their sick, inside joke when thinking of traffic jams.

Soon the evening set in, and she became worried. The lasagna had gone cold, or at least unappealingly warm. She picked up the phone and called his cell. Just rang then went to voice mail. She started to feel like she’d swallowed a rock, and sat on the couch holding her arms to her stomach when she heard his car pull into the garage. She stood up and walked toward the back door as it flew open with more vigor than usual.

“Good God, Fred, where…?”

She froze when she saw him, his hair blown to the side, his shirt untucked, and a
wide
-
eyed
look that was foreign to her.

“Not now, Cary,” he said, walking by her, nearly bumping her aside as their shoulders grazed.

“Jesus, Fred…are you all right at least?” She looked out into the garage. His car looked fine. No sign of damage.

“Just give me a minute. It’s all okay. Just give me a fucking minute.” He was walking away from her, dialing his phone. He walked to his office and shut the door (again, with a little too much mustard). From the other side of the door, she heard him talking on the phone.

He was in there for about fifteen minutes. Cary resumed her position on the couch, this time hugging a stomach that had no interest in lasagna or wine. The smell of the aging food was actually starting to make her nauseous. When he came out, he had calmed down a bit. He walked over to her as she stood up. He opened his arms and she embraced him. She was shocked by the energy in his hug. He didn’t say anything, but she felt his entire body start to relax. They stood that way for a long time, and as the seconds passed, Cary felt the years and the moments with this man coalesce, and for an instant they slipped time and escaped the murkiness that had swallowed their relationship. Eventually, he pulled back.

“Sorry,” he said. “Something came up.”

“I’ll say,” she said. “Want a glass of wine?”

He nodded. She went into the kitchen and poured from the bottle she’d started. “White okay?” she asked.

“Anything’s fine.”

He took the glass from her and took a large swallow. “I’m going to change. We’ll talk over dinner. Smells like spaghetti?”

“Lasagna. It’s gone cold, but I’ll throw it in the microwave.”

“Sounds good,” he said, but he was talking to the floor, not her.

“What I didn’t know that night,” Cary said to Ben, “was that much like Adam in your father’s book, Fred was facing a serious threat at work. He shielded me from much of the struggles he had at his job. He was the senior vice president of operations for Manover Mechanics. Manover is a large company that deals with auto assembly machinery replacement parts. Like all companies in that industry, they were battered a bit by the economy three or four years ago. There were some in the company who thought that Fred mishandled some things, that he wasn’t adaptable enough for a volatile environment. He also made an
enemy
—
some
guy who’d been running their sales and marketing and had been promoted to a position higher up the organizational ladder than Fred. While he wasn’t Fred’s direct boss, he was at the same level and was having some influence. Because of that, the heat was increasing, and Fred was feeling the pressure.”

“Hmmm,” Ben said.

“I found all this out later, about when I was reading chapters of
Dented
.
I can’t say how much that explained his wild behavior that night, or if it was all because of the incident on the road. But it turned out to be a night that’s burned into my
memory
—
both
the good and the bad of it.”