The Space Between Sisters (13 page)

“What are you two talking about?” Sam asked, but he realized, with a sinking feeling, that he already knew. “Byron, this isn't one of your bets, is it?”

Byron looked a little sheepish. “It's a pool, Sam. But it's all in good fun,” he insisted. “Just something to keep things interesting around here.”

“Unbelievable,” Sam said, shaking his head. “You are unbelievable.” And then, because he couldn't help being curious, he asked, “What's the bet?”

“Whether you two will go on a date.”

“One date?”

Byron nodded.

Sam pulled his wallet out of his pocket and took out a twenty-dollar bill. “I want in,” he said, holding it out to Byron.

“You can't get in on your own bet,” Byron said, appalled.

“Then pull the whole thing,” he said.

Byron looked unhappy, but he took the twenty. “This is not how it's done, Sam.”

“It is this time.”

“Ah, Byron,” Linc said, his mouth twitching in a barely repressed smile. “Tell Sam what else you wanted to bet on.”

Byron gave him a dirty look.

“Let's have it, Byron,” Sam said.

“Well, I thought about another bet. This would have just been between Linc and me.”

“And what would that have been?”

“It would have concerned whether or not you”—here Byron lowered his voice—“whether or not you and Margot closed the deal.”

“Closed the deal?” Sam repeated.

Byron cleared his throat, and because he was normally so proper, he looked embarrassed as he explained, “You know, had sexual relations.”

“And how were you going to know whether this happened or not, Byron? Did you honestly think I was going to tell you?”

“No.” Byron shook his head. “We just assumed that if it happened, you'd be in a better mood than you usually are.”

“Never mind,” Sam said, snatching the twenty-dollar bill out of Byron's hand. “Just pull the whole thing. And don't ever bet on my personal life again, is that clear?” he added, though he was less angry than amazed. Amazed that his life, so consistently uninteresting to him, could be interesting enough for anyone else to actually bet on.

He hurried out the front door and found Margot putting flyers under the windshield wipers of cars in the parking lot.

“Sam?” she said, looking up. “You don't mind that I'm doing this, do you?”

“No, it's fine.”

“Who doesn't love a hoedown, right?” she said.

“Right. Uh, Margot,” he said, leaning on the car. “Would you like to go out with me sometime, maybe get dinner or something?”

“I'd love to,” she said, her face lighting up.

“When's good for you?”

“Tonight,” she said, without hesitation.

“Oh, all right. I'll have to see if I can get a babysitter. It shouldn't be a problem, though. Do you want to grab something at the Corner Bar?” Sam asked, of a place in town where you could get good beer on tap and a decent hamburger.

“That sounds great.”

“I'll pick you up at seven.”

“I'll see you then,” she said.

He turned and started to go back inside, but she called after him. “Sam?”

“Yes?” he said, turning around.

She smiled again. “I thought you'd never ask.”

F
inding a babysitter, though, was easier said than done. Sam didn't need one very often—he usually saved his socializing for the weekends, when his kids were with their mom—so he only had a short list of people he could call on. He worked his way through it pretty quickly. Lonnie Hagan, his children's favorite babysitter, was on vacation, and Miss Suzette, Cassie's baton twirling teacher, already had a commitment. That left Justine or Linc. They'd both pitched in during emergencies before, with
mixed success. (Justine had given his children elaborate henna tattoos of skulls that he'd found somewhat morbid, and Linc had helped them build a near professional blanket fort that had taken Sam days to dismantle.) Still, he trusted them both, and when he found out they were busy, too, he realized he'd reached the bottom of the barrel, otherwise known as Byron. Byron loved the kids, and they loved him, but at night he was apt to be watching whatever televised games he'd taken bets on that day, and Sam suspected that his boys would see this as an opening to slip away and do what it was they most wanted to do, which was to find different ways of blowing things up. Nonetheless, Sam was on the verge of asking Byron to babysit when he walked by Poppy, who was arranging condiments on a shelf.

“Sam!” she said, waylaying him. “Can you answer a question for me?”

“Of course.”

“Why would you sell this here?” she asked, holding up a jar of light mayonnaise. “It's an abomination. I mean, taking the fat out of mayonnaise? That's just wrong.”

He looked at her quizzically.

“I'm kidding,” she said, putting the jar on the shelf.

“Oh, right,” he said, feeling the not unpleasant confusion he often felt when he was with her.

“I did need to talk to you about the Red Vines, though,” she said, as she continued stacking jars on the shelf. “I know we agreed on one package per day, but I've been having two and sometimes even three. I'm not used to this all-access approach to them. Maybe you should put them behind the counter, just to be safe,” she suggested, gracing him with another one of her lovely smiles.

He nodded.
Yes, she was definitely flirting with him.
Even Sam, who'd been out of the game for a while, could tell this.

“I'm kidding, again,” she said, when he didn't say anything.

“I know,” he said. I'm just . . .”
I'm just distracted by you, by everything about you. But most of all, for some reason, right this second, by the little hollow at the base of your neck. How did you get it so tan? And what would it taste like if I kissed it?

“I should get going,” he said, abruptly, moving on. “I'm trying to find a babysitter for tonight.”

“Sam,” she called after him. “I'll babysit for you.”

He stopped. “You will?”

“Why not?” she said. “Cassie and I can work on her twirling. Her performance is only two weeks away now.”

“Well, there are the boys, too.”

“I can handle them.”

He hesitated.

“Oh, come on. It's the least I can do,” she said. “You gave me a job, didn't you? And, by the way, I wouldn't charge you for tonight. It's on the house.”

“That's not necessary,” he said. “I'll pay you the going rate.”

She shrugged, unconcernedly. “What time do you want me to come?”

“Six thirty?”

“Okay,” she said. “Is there, uh, anything going on in Butternut tonight that I should know about?” she asked. “Anything . . . exciting?”

“There's nothing exciting going on in Butternut. You should know that by now,” he said, and then he made himself say something more, something he hoped would put them back on the professional footing they belonged on. “I'm going on a date.”

“Oh . . . that's nice,” she said, and she smiled politely, and went back to stocking the condiments. But he'd seen it anyway. Just for a second, when he'd told her, he'd seen the expression on her face. And when he went back to his office it wasn't Margot he thought about, but Poppy. Poppy who'd been disappointed when he'd told her he was going on a date.

W
hen Sam got back to the cabin that night after his date with Margot, he found Poppy on the living room floor, scooping Legos into a plastic bin.

“You don't need to do that,” he objected. “We're used to stepping on them. It probably wouldn't feel like home if we didn't.”

She smiled but kept picking them up. “I don't mind. How was your night?” she asked, casually, looking not at him but at the Lego strewn rug.

“It was . . . fine,” Sam said, and because it felt wrong to watch her pick up his childrens' toys alone, he knelt down and started to pick them up with her. Had it been fine? he wondered of the night. He hoped, for Margot's part, it had been. But for his part, it had been a mixture of tedium and tension. Tedium because, other than the town they lived in and the people they knew, they had almost nothing in common. And tension because, while Margot was careful to broaden her conversation to include topics other than the nature museum, there was always the possibility, Sam felt, that she would suddenly start lecturing him on the environmental hazards of sulfide mining in Northern Minnesota,
or on the reasons why the northern long-eared bat should be put on the endangered species list.

On the drive home, they'd finally lapsed into silence, Margot humming along, a little self-consciously, to a song on the radio, and Sam puzzling, silently, over the night's central mystery. Here was an attractive woman whom he wasn't attracted to, an interesting woman whom he wasn't interested in, and a nice woman whose niceness only served to make him feel guilty for not appreciating her niceness more. Maybe it was that guilt that made him kiss her a little more enthusiastically than he'd intended to when he left her at her front door. He'd have to answer for that kiss tomorrow, he thought, when Margot came into Birch Tree Bait, first thing, to get her coffee.

“How'd things go here?” Sam asked, throwing the last Legos into the bin.

“Well, let's see,” Poppy said, sitting back on her heels. “From what I could tell, the boys were on their best behavior. And everyone seemed to like dinner, which was chicken nuggets, French fries, and Popsicles. Should there have been a vegetable in there somewhere?” she asked, frowning slightly, her blond hair shining in the lamplight.

“In a perfect world,” Sam said. “But, you know, it's not.”

She smiled. “Right. Then, after dinner, we tried to play the Game of Life, but it didn't really get off the ground.”

Sam nodded. “Cassie just likes to fill up her car with the little pink pegs”—the little pink pegs signified that a player had had daughters—“and drive it around the board.”

“Yeah, I figured that out pretty quickly.” Poppy laughed. “After that, the boys went up to their room to play, and Cassie practiced twirling a little, and then we tried out some new hairstyles on
her, and then . . . oh, and then she showed me her dolls. Did you know that one of them is in a coma, Sam?”

“I did. Cassie got sunscreen in its eyes, and now they won't open, so she decided she was in a coma.”

“Well, we talked to her a little, anyway. Your daughter heard somewhere that's what you do with people who are in a coma. You know, in case they can still hear you.”

“Exactly,” Sam said, standing up, and Poppy stood up, too, brushing her blue jeans off. They were faded and worn at the hems, and her pale blue wool sweater—it was a chilly night—had a hole in one of the elbows. But it didn't matter, Sam thought. She would have looked beautiful in a brown burlap sack.

“Then, after that,” Poppy said, “they all got ready for bed, and Cassie went right to sleep, after I'd checked all the places in her room a ghost could be hiding, but the boys”—she shook her head—“I'd leave them in their room, and they'd be in their beds, and then I'd come back, and they would have just popped right back out of them again.”

“They do that.”

“Eventually, though, they went to sleep,” she said. “And that was our night. Until, just now, I started to pick up the toys and you came home.”

They stood there for a moment, smiling at each other, and Sam realized that neither one of them wanted her to leave.

“Would you like something to drink?” he asked.

“I'd love something,” she said. “What have you got?”

“Coffee, tea, soda, beer, wine.”

“I'd love a glass of wine,” she said. “Just one. But only if you're having one, too.”

“Sure,” he said, heading into the kitchen, and wondering,
vaguely, if he was breaking some unwritten rule of parenting. Something like,
Don't drink with your children's babysitter.
But he was pretty sure he'd already broken the rule that came before that:
Don't lust after your children's babysitter.

Sam took a bottle of white wine out of the refrigerator, opened it, and filled two wineglasses, while Poppy sat down at the scuffed pine table, which, in this cabin, served as the unofficial center of family life. “Sorry about this,” he said, setting the wineglasses on the table and trying to clear away some of the clutter that had accumulated there over the course of the day—a pile of half-finished drawings, several dog-eared children's books, and the cereal boxes that no one had bothered to put back in the cupboard after breakfast that morning.

“Oh, no, don't do that,” Poppy objected, as Sam tried to shuffle the drawings into a neat stack. “Leave everything where it is. It's nice. I like a little chaos. My sister, on the other hand . . .” She shrugged, picked up her wineglass, and took a sip. “Wow, this is really good,” she said.

He drank some, too.

“Do you know a lot about wine?” she asked.

He nodded, a little distractedly. “When we lived in Minneapolis, I was a partner in a wine distributorship.” He wasn't thinking about that, though. He was thinking about her eyes. They were so blue.
Cornflower blue,
Sam thought.

“Is that why you carry so many different kinds of wine at Birch Tree Bait?” she asked.

“Uh-huh. The expensive ones don't always sell that well, but every once in a while someone comes in who really appreciates a good bottle, so I keep ordering them.”

They were quiet for a moment, and Sam, looking at Poppy, was glad they were sitting at the kitchen table. It seemed less in
timate, somehow, than the couch, more . . .
appropriate
. So why, then, did he suddenly imagine himself tugging on one of her earlobes with his teeth? He rubbed his eyes, and drank some more wine, and said, apropos of nothing, “I had a long night tonight.”

“Did you?”

“It was a first date.”

“Oh, well, that explains it. Some of the longest nights of my life have been first dates.”

“Have they?”

She nodded. “Honestly, I've had first dates that were so excruciating the only thing that saved me was knowing that if I could get back to my apartment by 10:55, I could be in my pajamas, watching a
Seinfeld
rerun by 11:00.”

“That bad, huh?”

“That bad. I mean, have you ever been on a really
amazing
first date?”

“Yes,” he said, honestly. “I have. My first date with my ex-wife was amazing. I knew, by the end of it, that I was in love with her.”

“
You did?
Wow. That must have been one hell of a date.” She sipped her wine.

“Actually, on paper, it was a disaster,” Sam said. “My car was in the shop so we had to take the bus. We were just kids—both of us were still in college—but even then we knew it was not an auspicious beginning for a date. Then, while we're on the bus, it starts to rain. No, I don't mean rain. I mean
pour
. So we got off the bus and ran to this Chinese restaurant, which was just a couple of blocks away, but by the time we got there we were soaked. And there was a long wait for a table, and we had to just stand there, dripping, until they seated us, like, an hour later. And then, when the waiter came over, Alicia asked him if we could order the fried rice without the shrimp. And she explained
to him that she was allergic to shellfish and that if she had even the smallest amount of it, she'd go into anaphylactic shock. And he said ‘no problem,' but I think there may have been a language barrier there, or something, because when he came back with our order, there they were, right on top of the fried rice, five
huge
shrimp, staring straight up at us. And the two of us started laughing, laughing so hard that we just had to leave some money on the table and get out of there.

“And when we got outside, it was still raining, so we got soaked all over again, only now, in addition to being wet, we absolutely reeked of Chinese food. It could have been a nightmare. But instead, while we're standing there on the street corner, all I could think of was that Alicia looked beautiful. The raindrops on her hair looked like little glass beads, and her complexion was so perfect, it made her look like she belonged in a soap commercial or something. Then she smiled at me. She just . . . smiled. And I remember it so well, because I could feel it happening. It was like everything in my life just . . . clicked into place. And I thought, ‘This is it. She's the one.'”

Poppy toyed with her wineglass, a little pensively. “That's a nice story,” she said, finally. “But . . .”

“Yes?”

“It doesn't have a happy ending.”

“You mean . . . because we got divorced?”

She nodded.

“Well, that was still years away. Before that, there was a lot of happiness. There still is. I mean, we have three beautiful children together whom we love, I think about as much as it's possible to love anyone. So, in that sense, there are no regrets.”

“No, of course not,” Poppy said quickly. “I didn't mean that. I meant . . . what happened between the time you stood on that
street corner and the time you got divorced? How do you fall out of love with someone? Or is that too personal?” she added.

“No, it's not too personal. It's hard to explain, though, without resorting to an old cliché. We drifted apart.”

Poppy frowned. “But here's the thing about ‘drifting apart' that I've never understood. Can't you
feel
yourselves drifting apart? Don't you know it's happening
while
it's happening? And isn't there anything you can
do
about it?”

He thought about that for a moment. “It seems like it should be that way, doesn't it? But for us, no, it wasn't like that. Later, looking back on it, I could see it happening. But at the time . . .” He shook his head. “Think about it. Between the two of us, we had, eventually, two jobs, one house, three kids, two cars, and, as I remember it, several goldfish with incredibly short life spans. We were so caught up in the day-to-day of our lives that we couldn't see the big picture anymore. For all of that, though, our marriage might have survived. If I hadn't been . . . unfaithful.”

Sam saw it again in her expression: disappointment. And this time, she didn't try to hide it. “You cheated on her?” she asked, and Sam felt her lean, almost imperceptibly, away from him.

“In a sense, I did. But not in the way you're thinking. There wasn't anyone else. It turns out there are other ways you can be disloyal in a marriage, and, in my case, it wasn't with a person. It was with a place.”

She looked at him, puzzled.

“I was married to her,” he explained, “and I was raising our children with her in suburban Minneapolis, but in my mind, I never left this place. There was always a part of me that was here. Maybe the biggest part of me.”

“By ‘here' you mean Butternut?”

He nodded. “I grew up here. About three miles away from
where we're sitting right now, actually. And I loved it. When you're a kid, of course, you're not necessarily aware of something like that. You don't wake up every morning and say, ‘God, I love this place. To me, it was just home. All of it: the cabin we lived in, the lake, the woods. I don't think I ever thought I would leave it. Not really. Not
permanently
. My parents, though, had other ideas.”

He stopped, drank some more of his wine. “They loved it up here, too,” he continued. “But it's hard to make a living this far north, and, like a lot of people who live up here year-round, they learned how to do a little bit of everything to make ends meet. They wanted more for my brothers and me, though. There was no question we were going to go to college, and no question, either, that if we came back here, it was only going to be to visit, not to live.”

“You had other plans, though,” Poppy remarked.

“I did, but I didn't know it until Alicia and I had children of our own. That's when I realized how much I missed it up here. And how much I wanted them to grow up in a place like this. Already, I could see how it was going to be, raising them in the suburbs. I knew they'd be like a lot of kids today. The outdoors would be a destination for them; a place you make little forays into, preferably armed with things like insect repellant, and bottled water, and UV protective clothing. I wanted them to just . . .
grow up
outside, the way I did, so that it wasn't a separate place, it was just where you were. How you lived. And I wanted to teach them all the things my parents taught me, how to hunt and fish and canoe.”

“You couldn't just have come up here on the weekends?” Poppy asked, gently.

“I tried that. When Alicia first started working for the DA's
office, she was drowning in work. She still is, actually, but then she was so worried about doing a good job that she started not just staying late at the office but bringing work home on weekends, too. And I thought, to help her out, and to give her some peace and quiet around the house, I'd bring the kids up here, and we'd stay with my parents at their cabin—this was before they'd retired and moved to South Carolina. At first, it was just a few weekends here and there, but then it was every other weekend, and then it was every weekend. I told myself it was just temporary, just until Alicia got settled in at work, but the truth was, every time I packed up the car to make the drive back to Minneapolis, I dreaded it. And then one day, I remember—it had been several weeks since we'd been able to get up here—and I drove the kids up on this beautiful fall day, and we went for a walk down by the lake, and I thought, ‘For the first time in weeks I feel alive, really alive.' At home, I realized, I was just phoning it in.”