The Never-Open Desert Diner (16 page)

I
felt like a man who hadn't noticed his heart had stopped beating until it had begun again. The thought sounded foolish. My heart had started beating again, and the feeling was something brand-new and frightening.

Claire kissed me. “Ben,” she said, keeping her lips close to mine, “I have something I need to say to you.”

“Okay.”

“I don't think I believe in happy endings anymore.”

“I'm not sure I ever did,” I answered. “But I always wanted to.”

“You think it's okay if maybe, just for now, I believe in happy presents?”

“I think it's fine,” I said, “as long as you're always in the present.”

For the next hour we were in every moment of the present, making love again, slowly, until the sun was full and hot and we lay completely spent and sweating again. We sat naked together on the steps holding hands and did our best to stare down the morning sun until we were almost blind.

I saw him then, up high and far to the north, not hiding, just standing between some dwarf juniper and sagebrush. I didn't say anything to Claire, or allow myself to be angry or even embarrassed. I truly didn't care if Walt was watching us or for how long or what he thought about us, or me. Claire kissed my shoulder. I kept an eye on Walt. He disappeared. I wondered if once, maybe a long time ago, he and Bernice had made love on this same porch. When he looked down on us, did he see himself and Bernice? Was the dream of Desert Home alive again? Was he alive again? It was the best I could hope for him. Maybe it was the best I could hope for Claire and myself.

Claire asked me what I was thinking. I didn't want to tell her. “I would tell you,” I said, “except it's too embarrassing.”

“How embarrassing can it be?” She pointed to the trail of her clothing leading from the walkway out into the street. She pointed to her feet and the only article of clothing between us, one white sock that had slipped below her left heel.

I hesitated. I started again. Finally, I succeeded in telling her about being a man who didn't realize his heart had stopped until it had started beating again. It sounded even worse with my voice behind it, but no less true. I didn't say anything about imagining Walt and Bernice on the porch.

Claire was silent. She raised my hand to her lips and kept her eyes on the empty desert streets in front of us. “Oh God, that
is
embarrassing. Thank you,” she whispered.

“For what? Embarrassing myself?”

“Yes,” she said, “for embarrassing yourself. You did it for both of us. Now I don't have to. I don't think I could have embarrassed myself as well. You're actually quite good at it.” She flashed me a grin. “You've forever changed the world of kitchen window treatments for me.”

“Ma'am,” I said, “do you suppose you could find it in yourself to never mention that again?”

“Can't,” she answered. “I couldn't even if I wanted to. It's a dear moment. I consider it our first date.”

I dropped my head. “Congratulations,” I said. “You just made it worse.”

“You're a brave man, Ben Jones. There aren't many men who would take the risk you did in telling me how you felt. I'm not talking about being embarrassed. There's rejection. And losing your…”

“Self-respect?”

“Yes. That's as good a word as any.”

“Only if it wasn't true.”

We were quiet for a while. Then Claire said, “Remember when you told me you considered Walt a friend, but you couldn't speak for him?”

I answered that I remembered.

“That's the moment I started to like you. You accept Walt the way he is. You understand him in ways I'm just beginning to. He does like you.”

I pointed to my face.

Claire smiled. “Yes. I know. You said yourself he was an old asshole who was set in his ways. He's old-fashioned.”

I caught her glancing over my head up toward the arch.

“Is he still there?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “He's gone now. He was up there before dawn.”

I hadn't been aware of him as early as Claire had. It was that sixth sense she had. “It didn't bother you?”

“No. He was just checking on me. And you. You know he had to fight you, Ben. I bet he ordered you to stay away from me.”

“He did. In fact, for Walt, he was quite vocal about it.”

“He was testing you. Seeing how serious you were. If you gave up, he wouldn't have respected you. If you asked him to explain it, he'd probably say something about ‘honorable intentions.' ”

“You think so? That would mean he's thinking like…”

Claire finished for me. “A father? That I'm here with him is proof that while his bite is the same as his bark, he's changing, trying to change. His daughter or not, I'm Bernice's daughter. I'm a part of the woman he loved, still loves. What happened to my mother…losing her, it still causes him pain.”

This was territory I knew had to be difficult for her. I'd been hoping it could remain unspoken. Claire's eyes began to fill. I didn't know what to say. There was nothing I could say. I squeezed her hand. She pulled it away with the rest of herself. “Don't. You don't understand.”

My instinct told me that she didn't want me to understand. What she felt and lived with couldn't be shared or understood by anyone else. I knew she was right.

Her jaw set. She raised her knees up under her chin and held herself close. She would speak of it or not. The best I could do was shut up.

There had never been a time when she reminded me more of Walt. Perhaps, if I had known Bernice, Claire might have reminded me of her mother. Maybe I understood better than anyone. It was possible that I had also been the child of a rape. Mercifully, that was something I would never know. Claire knew. Walt knew. And now I knew. But only Claire lived with the seed of knowledge that she had been conceived not in love, not even in pleasure, but in violence and inconceivable pain, and she owed her life to that terrible event.

The moment for Claire to speak of it passed. I watched her thoughts move like a spirit through her small body. Her shoulders relaxed. She shivered briefly, though the cold of the morning had lifted long before.

“I told you I met Dennis in high school?”

I couldn't remember if she had or not, but just the mention of her husband almost made me wish for the subject we had just avoided.

I nodded and she continued.

“He was the only person I'd ever met who loved the cello, who loved music, as much as I did. We were constantly battling for first chair in the school orchestra. We made love for the first time in a practice room at our school. I had just turned seventeen. The school was empty and quiet. It was dark outside. The only lights in the room came from the shaded bulbs on our music stands.

“We had been playing our cellos for hours, not talking, just playing and playing, rehearsing for our senior recitals. I honestly don't know how we got from our practice to making love. I've thought a lot about that evening these past few years. For me, at least, it was natural, as if one led seamlessly to the other, like related movements in a symphony.” She laughed at herself. “Now it's my turn to be embarrassed. But that's the way it seemed to me then. It wasn't just raging hormones and teenage sex. Not for me anyway. Some girls I knew got drunk or high and had sex with some guy and blamed it on alcohol or drugs. Not me. Sweet little Claire was undone by the cello. After that, Dennis and I started having sex every time we practiced together. It's a miracle I didn't get pregnant. The four got mixed up together somehow
—
Dennis and me, the cello and sex. Of course, over time, I thought of the four as Dennis and me, the cello and love.”

I smiled thinking of sweet little Claire.

“What?”

I apologized. “I was just imagining sweet little Claire.”

She dug an elbow into the one rib that might not have been broken or bruised by Walt's boot tip. “I was always small. Not so sweet sometimes. My mother took me into a music store when I was five. She only left me alone for a couple of minutes. The next thing she knew I had a bow in my hands. My parents had me try the violin for a year. I was only interested in the cello. I would throw tantrums like you wouldn't believe. I started taking lessons on the cello
—
a kid's scaled-down cello. I still had to sit on pillows until they had a special stool made. Did you ever play an instrument?”

I admitted I had. I refused to tell her what it was.

“Come on,” she begged. “Percussion? Saxophone? I've got it! Clarinet.”

The idea of me playing a saxophone or a clarinet was too much. “Bagpipes,” I said.

Claire didn't laugh. “Really?”

“Really.”

“I've always rather liked them. They're kind of supernatural. Whenever I've heard one it's made me feel strange. Haunted. Do you still play?”

I told her I didn't. She seemed to know that in some way, if only in my mind and for myself, I still played.

“Yo-Yo Ma did a duet with a bagpipe. Do you know who he is?”

It was not a name that could be easily forgotten. I remembered it from the night in the Walmart parking lot with Ginny. “Yes,” I said, “I do. He's a cellist.” I was proud of myself. The combination of bagpipes and cello was something hard for me to imagine.

“You're making that up,” I said. “Bagpipes and cello?”

Claire shook her head. “No, I'm not. It's wonderful. Sometimes instruments that you'd think shouldn't go together just do.” She giggled like a little girl. “My turn,” she said. “I just had an image of boy Ben tramping around with these big bagpipes. I'll bet you went out into the desert all alone and played your little heart out.”

It took a lot of effort to resist meeting her eyes with mine. Sure, it was a wild guess. Maybe a not-so-wild guess. She barely knew me. Still, we knew things about each other that were more than what could ever be told.

Claire wondered what she had said. I shrugged and began to think about the end of my company. Ben's Desert Moon Delivery Service was now officially one day closer to going the way that so many small companies had gone, especially in the past few years. I needed to say something about it to Claire. In her case, I really couldn't fail to show up one day. Josh came to mind. She didn't seem worried, but I was. I had always been prepared for her to suddenly be gone from Desert Home. Now that possibility had become part of saying good-bye to 117.

“What?” she asked. “Jesus, Ben. The face you've got on under the one Walt gave you is even worse.”

“Claire,” I began, “I'm just about broke. No,” I added, “I
am
broke. Any day might be my last day driving 117. Between the economy and the fact that I mostly deliver to people who don't have much money to begin with. I'm sorry to have to tell you
—
you should know, that's all. It means no more fancy restaurants. For a while at least.”

She folded her hands in her lap and made a show of pursing her lips. “Okay,” she said. “It's tough news. It changes everything, Ben. When I first saw you flopping on the ground under my kitchen window, I said to myself, ‘Claire, there's the man for you. Probably has a secure, well-paying government job.' ”

“You don't care?”

“Of course, I care,” she said. “But you care more. I know you do. That's more important. I'm not even surprised you're going broke. Everything is either twenty thousand dollars or free. Walt says you don't run a business
—
you run a charity.”

“I know what Walt thinks,” I said. “For a long time I did okay.”

“It isn't just a job, though, is it?”

“No,” I said. “I guess it isn't.”

“It's part of who you are. It's something you love. Maybe there's a way. I'd never want you to give up something you love.”