The Winter Lodge (34 page)

She laughed to cover an unexpected visceral reaction to the idea of him handcuffing her.

“News flash, Rourke. I’m a grownup and you’re not in charge of me.”

“Maybe not, but guess what? I’m the chief of police and this place is in my jurisdiction. So don’t be surprised if I decide to patrol—”

“You wouldn’t.”

“Watch me.”

“You’re nuts.”

“What’s nuts is you staying here. Dammit, Jenny. Why are you being so stubborn about this?”

“It’s not me being stubborn,” she said. “It’s a declaration of independence. I’ve lost everything, Rourke. And the only thing that makes it bearable is that I have a chance to start over from scratch.”

“This isn’t starting over. It’s hiding.”

“Screw you, Rourke.”

“We tried that,” he snapped. “It didn’t work.”

“That’s it,” she said, about to lose it. “You’re out of here. You’d better leave, or I’ll—”

He tugged on his gloves, one at a time. “You’ll what? Call the police?”

Food for Thought

by Jenny Majesky

Comfort Food

There is almost always food involved in the happiest moments of our lives. Maybe not the big fireworks moments—a marriage proposal, the birth of a baby—but the quiet times, like when you’re a kid, and you bring home a good report card. Someone almost always gives you a cookie.

And then there are the not-so-happy times. That’s when comfort food means the most. As a girl, my grandmother had scarlet fever and, tucked in bed, she could smell the scent of cinnamon from her mother’s baking and forever after, the scent of cinnamon was the scent of love.

Comfort food is also important when you get together with your girlfriends to sit around and talk. It’s not possible to do that without food, if you ask me. My grandmother always baked with great joy, and she knew that food can be comforting because of the associations we make between the food and the people around us, or the emotions the tastes and smells evoke. Spiced with nostalgia, scented with love, a taste of true comfort food is like getting a hug from someone special.

POLISH APPLE STRUDEL

3-4 tart apples, peeled, cored and sliced thin

1 piecrust

2 tablespoons butter

1 (5-ounce) jar walnuts in syrup

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon allspice

1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom

3 tablespoons brown sugar

3 tablespoons honey

1 tablespoon cornstarch

1/4 cup plain breadcrumbs

Preheat oven to 375°F. Sauté apples in butter over gentle heat until they soften. Add walnuts, spices, brown sugar and honey. Then add cornstarch and stir to dissolve. Cook until the mixture thickens.

Roll the dough into a rectangular shape and place on a piece of parchment on a large baking sheet. Spoon apple mixture down the middle of the rectangle, bring the edges up and pinch to close. Score the dough with a few slashes along the top. Sprinkle breadcrumbs over the top.

Bake for about 30 minutes, until golden brown. Let stand for 10 minutes or more. Serve plain or with a dollop of sweetened sour cream.

Twenty-Five

1998

D
ear Mom,

I’m still engaged to Joey. I know you’d probably say I’m too young, if you even cared, but we decided on a long engagement because he doesn’t want to leave me alone on some army base, far from home. Marrying Joey makes sense once he gets out of the service. Gram’s not doing so hot and she needs me to stay close. And all Joey wants is to settle down in Avalon and make a life here. Gram is just crazy about him. She keeps telling me what a wonderful guy he is and what a great husband he’ll be. When he came back on leave last year, we picked out wedding bands at Palmquist’s, and they were on layaway forever. I just brought them home and I feel a very strange giddiness—nerves, maybe? Because the wedding bands make the future seem so real.

We’re not rushing into anything, though. The rings will wait. Everything will wait. Joey’s been deployed, and since he’s a ranger, he can’t even say where and what he’s doing because it’

s a top-secret mission. He had forty-eight hours to say goodbye to me. Rourke and I saw him off at the train. Rourke’s a police officer now, did I tell you that? He got his degree in law enforcement and is working in Avalon. I think his family is horrified by it all, since he’s the only son of Senator Drayton McKnight and is supposed to “do better” than being a small-town cop, but that’s another story. I’m supposed to be writing about Joey. My fiancé.
Fiancé.
It looks so official in writing. At the station, Joey promised he’d come back in one piece. It was all I could do not to cry, but Joey was all smiles. He’s so devoted to the rangers. One of his battalion buddies told him that if he’s conscious when the medevac carries him out, it means he didn’t try hard enough. They laugh a lot. Maybe that’s how they deal with the danger.

He had a bit of news for me—he’s asked Rourke to be his best man, and of course Rourke said he would. And then Joey asked Rourke to take care of me while he’s gone. Those were his exact words: “Take care of her, man. I know that’s old-fashioned, but I’m not shitting you. Look out for her.”

Rourke said he would, as if he even had a choice.

Why do guys always feel like they need to look out for women? Hel
lo
, it’s almost the new millennium and I’ve been running a business on my own since I was seventeen. I think I can look after myself. It’s sweet of Joey to worry, though. Sweet, and maybe a little smothering.

And then he kissed me so long and hard that I started feeling self-conscious. Don’t get me wrong—I wanted that kiss. He’s a soldier, and he was going away again. I wanted to imprint him on me, somehow, but instead, all I could think about was that we were standing in a crowd of people, sucking face like there’s no tomorrow. I wish I could have just let the kiss sweep me away and make me forget the whole world, but my mind kept wandering to the spectators around us. Then Joey had to get on the train—“See you around, sweetheart,” he said as though he was just going to the next town instead of halfway around the world. And then he was gone.

As I watched the train pull out of the station, I didn’t look at Rourke. I couldn’t. I was afraid of what I’d see in his eyes.

Have you ever had that feeling, Mom? That if you look at something, then you’ll be forced to acknowledge it, and everything will change?

So Joey’s overseas, doing things I can barely imagine, and life goes along. I run the bakery, I take care of Gram. I don’t see much of Rourke these days. He dates a lot of different girls and he works hard. He calls now and then to ask about Gram and the bakery. Honoring his promise, I suppose, to “look out for me.”

And why in God’s name am I questioning any of this? Joey adores me. I adore him. After we’re married, he wants to live at Gram’s for as long as she needs us. He has a great dad. I love Bruno like a father. Each time we meet, Bruno folds me into his thick, strong arms. He smells of hair oil and peppermint gum, and he told me Joey had a heart like a lion.

And Joey has enough certainty for both of us. He knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I’m it for him, and I always have been. Joey claims that even when we were kids, he just knew.

I wish I could say the same. But guess what? I
still
don’t know.

Every year, I tell myself, I finally don’t need you, Mom. Finally, I’ve outgrown my needing you. And then I find myself wishing you were around, because I have so many questions. How do you know you’re doing the right thing? Is there any way to tell, or do you just have to go for it, hope for the best, and pray it wasn’t a giant mistake?

What good does it do to want something I can never, ever have? And here’s the thing.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think so—I get the idea Rourke feels the same way. And he’s just as scared as I am.

President Clinton was being interviewed on NPR about U.S. intervention in the Kosovo war, and Rourke wanted to listen, because he suspected that was where Joey might have been deployed. Instead of listening to the radio, he turned his attention to Naomi, his girlfriend. Well, she wasn’t his girlfriend anymore as of ten minutes ago. Once again, things hadn’t worked out.

“You’re a complete bastard.” Naomi yanked a T-shirt on over her head, covering her best assets. Her head popped out, and she glared at him. “A complete and total bastard.”

He wondered why he bothered. He kept going into these relationships thinking—hoping, praying—that this would be it, that she was the one he was looking for. And then, inevitably, things deteriorated. Wanting it to work out wasn’t enough.

Feeling weary, he peeled back the covers and got up and found a pair of shorts. Getting dumped was undignified enough. He might as well get dressed. “I never wanted to hurt you,” he said, nearly choking on the words. He’d said them too many times before, to too many women.

Clinton was explaining how the nation was now out of debt, the budget balanced, the economy stable and it was time to turn our vision outward, to peacekeeping in the larger world.

“You don’t even see me,” she said. “You don’t even know who I am.”

God. She was right. He didn’t know who she was. He only knew who she
wasn’t.

“I’m sorry,” he said. And that was true. He was sorry for her. Sorry for himself. And sorry he kept looking for something he’d already found but couldn’t have.

She left without another word, a beautiful woman, now damaged by him. He hated himself for doing that, for inflicting wounds she didn’t deserve. By the time she was on the road, headed back to the city, he’d nearly forgotten how they’d met. Was it at a summer concert at Woodstock, or at a bar down in Kingston? Maybe she was one of the women his mother had set him up with. Although his father had never forgiven him for becoming a cop and moving to a tiny river town, his mother kept trying to bring him back into the fold, introducing him to polished, educated young women as though they were offerings.

He ought to swear off women altogether. But that was impossible. Women were…like air.

Necessary to survive.

He could do better. He would do better. It was just a matter of focus and discipline.

These were things he considered himself good at. They were traits that had been drilled into him, and he practiced them every day on the job. It ought to be a simple matter to extend that to his personal life. Why did he even need a personal life, anyway? He should stick with what he was good at—police work. Crime investigation and crisis intervention, public safety, tactical awareness, bringing offenders to justice were all he’d ever wanted to do. That’s the ticket, he thought. Focus on the job.

Each day as he dressed for the morning briefing, he felt a sense of irony as he put on his protective vest, his carbon-fiber holster and ASP. His own father had sponsored the state regulation requiring body armor for peace officers. Now that Rourke was a grown man, Drayton McKnight was suddenly interested in protecting his son.

Rourke held steady to his vow, focusing on what he was good at. He worked overtime for the good citizens of Avalon—and for the bad ones, too. Sometimes his calls were absurd—a citizen complained that his neighbor’s black Lab kept fouling his yard. The next day, the dog’s owner reported that someone had spray painted a Day-Glo orange obscenity on the side of his dog. Other times, they were heartbreaking—a high-school girl overdosed after being sexually assaulted. An elderly citizen had been scammed out of her life savings. He treated each call as a serious matter, from a complaint about a loud party to a domestic disturbance. His job was not exactly an adventure, but this was the right place for him. Sometimes he thought he was crazy to make his life here, a spectator to Jenny and Joey’s love affair, but he felt a deep sense of connection to Avalon. This was where, as a boy, he’d discovered what freedom was.

He used his personal time to study—negotiation, administration, community relations. He adopted dogs that had been impounded or abandoned and devoted his free time to training them.

Every night at the end of his shift, he checked his e-mail. Joey was an excellent correspondent, and with e-mail, communication was instantaneous. Rourke sometimes learned breaking news before it broke. Despite the screening process, Joey offered a vivid picture of his life in an undisclosed location, which seemed to consist of physical discomfort and boredom interspersed with the pure adrenalin rush of life-or-death action. Joey ended nearly each note with a reference to Jenny: “Keep an eye on my girl.” “Eat a kolache for me.” “Tell her I’ll be home before she knows it.”

Lately, his battalion seemed to be on the move, and Joey’s correspondence was more sporadic. He was going on night ops now, often transported with his battalion in a specially configured Chinook helo. He had a stomach bug but concealed it because he didn’t want to miss out on the action, which sounded typical of Joey.

Rourke was in the backyard one night, letting the dogs out for one last run, when he heard the phone ring. Although it was well past ten, he stayed up late with them to make up for his long hours on the job. He gave the soggy tennis ball one final lob and sprinted to the kitchen, wiping his hand on his jeans and then searching for the handset. Too late. By the time he found it wedged between the sofa cushions, the voice mail had kicked on. Muttering with impatience, he listened to the message.

“It’s me,” she said, and didn’t have to explain who “me” was. Ordinarily, she would offer a cheerful greeting, but tonight there was something in her voice. Something that froze Rourke in his tracks. “Please,” she continued. “I need you to come over. Please.”

He forgot he was a public safety officer as he drove to her place, running stop signs and speeding as though pursued by demons. He surged into the driveway, got out of the car and took the porch steps three at a time.

Jenny was waiting for him at the door. He knew before she even said a word. One look at her face, and he knew.
Joey.

She was drinking champagne—the bottle of Cristal she’d been saving for Joey’s homecoming, and it was nearly gone. She shook her head, mute, and then seemed to melt against him, pressing her cheek to his chest. He set aside her glass and held her. She didn’t cry, didn’t make a sound, but she was shaking from head to toe.