Clean Slate

Chapter 24

  In mid-afternoon, Carrie finished her work for the day, and went out to back the VW out of the driveway and park it in the street. Brian opened the garage door and looked at his car. It was a beautiful piece of machinery, but it looked like it belonged on a showroom floor or in a slick magazine ad, not in his own garage.

  "I love this car?" he asked. "It's nice, but is it me?"

  Carrie stood back and folded her arms, looking back and forth, first at Brian and then the Lexus. She shook her head.

  "I wouldn't have thought so. But there it is."

  "Hmmm. Well, do you want to drive?"

  She seemed surprised. "You don't want to?"

  "Later, maybe, after I know my way around more. Have you driven it before?" And then he had second thoughts. This car had a lot more power than hers. He pictured her speeding around corners and gunning the engine, maybe scraping the side of its faultless surface against something solid and stationary.

  "No. I'm a little in awe of it. But I will if you don't want to. Or we could go in my car."

  "Let's do that then." He closed the garage door. Maybe they didn't even need a second car. Maybe he could save it in pristine condition and sell it years from now as a classic car. Make a fortune.

  "I guess we have a big payment on this?"

  "No, you paid cash."

  "I did?" He was shocked. "I must make really big bucks."

  "I told you that, didn't I? That you do very well?"

  "I didn't realize you meant this well." He shook his head. "No wonder you married me. You recognized my financial potential." He peered into her face with a question, a clue about how she felt about him. But she just laughed.

  "Sure. Right. When we got married your plan was public interest law."

  So, he'd lost his idealistic young fervor.

  "Are you disappointed in me? Did I sell out?" He said it lightly, but really wanted to know. He was looking for clues about where he'd gone wrong and landed in the guest bedroom. They got into her car.

  "No, not really. We talked it over when you were deciding which offer to take, about the advantage of having enough money for me to finish school, and for us to travel while we're still young. And getting something socked away for college for kids." She strapped on her seat belt and caressed her stomach before starting the car.

  "We thought of it as a stage in your career. That there's time later for something more beneficial to the world."

  Brian flinched. "So I bought a luxury car for cash. That doesn't exactly sound like I'm on track."

  She looked at him curiously as she pulled out into the street. "I guess that was my point when we argued about it."

  She took him back over the hill past the college and over the freeway to the onramp. The hills were covered with evergreens, punctuated with the stark, mostly denuded branches of deciduous trees

  "Do you want to see town or countryside?" She moved from the onramp, with minimal space available to merge, onto the right lane of the freeway. The engine chugged along in spite of the fact that she was flooring it, only gradually building enough speed to keep pace with the traffic. The cars coming up behind her were moving into the lane on their left. Drivers turned their heads to glare at her, but she was oblivious.

  "Anything will do. It's just nice to be out."

  They drove for an hour, out into the emerald green farmland with its dairy cattle and brick silos, through an outlying small town, and back through suburban strip mall sprawl. New subdivisions were popping up around the city. The downtown itself was a mixture of turn of the century brick buildings and less elegant structures, with a few sleek new multistory buildings interspersed, and more under construction. Mostly they talked about what was outside the car window.

  They were idling at a red light downtown when Carrie asked, "Do you want to go out for an early dinner?"

  "Sure, if you do."

  "Okay, we're going to one of our favorites." She whipped around a couple of corners and parked in front of a funky looking storefront place in the middle of a block of older buildings. There were neon Corona and DosXX signs in the window.

  "It's not so much Mexican as Southwest," she said.

  It was barely five o'clock but there were only a few tables still free. The walls were painted in bright warm colors, hung with even brighter paintings featuring otherworldly folk-creatures as well as the more mundane cacti and howling coyotes wearing kerchiefs around their necks. The hostess greeted them with familiarity and showed them to a booth in the back.

  The hostess asked, "Would you like something to drink to start? The usual?" Brian nodded, curious to see what his usual was. It turned out to be the dark Dos XX beer, which was good. The beers arrived with chilled, salt-rimmed glasses and cut limes, and a basket of chips with a wooden bowl of salsa. He almost choked on the salsa.

  "There's another thing you've forgotten," Carrie smiled at him. "Hot stuff. You have to sneak up on it."

  He wiped his watering eyes and looked over the menu. Not the same old combo plates with refried beans and rice. Side dishes like hominy and nopalitos, and imaginative entrees with blue corn tortillas. The waitress, in an off-the-shoulder Mexican peasant blouse with bright embroidery around the ruffle, brought them a basket of sopapillas, little pillows of golden-fried dough all puffed up, with a squeeze bottle of honey and pats of butter.

  "Are you ready to order?"

  He had his eye on a couple of possibilities.

  "Carrie? What do I usually have?" The waitress looked at him, puzzled. He guessed it did sound strange. "I'm trying to decide between the carnitas and the chile rellenos with shrimp."

  Carrie ordered a pork stew with posole.

  "Okay, I'll take the rellenos." He handed back the menu.

  It had been, how long? Not even two full days since Carrie had rescued him at the motel. He relaxed back in the booth and watched her tip her beer bottle up and sip from it, ignoring the glass. He watched her neck muscles move as she swallowed. Her neck was delicate and her hands were delicate, almost everything about her was petite, elfin. Well, not everything. She was a voluptuous elf, maybe. And at the same time she had such a solid presence, she had weight. What was the word? Gravitas. She was real, a person you should take seriously. He had already noticed that he frequently had the impulse to speak lightly, to joke his way away from difficulties. Carrie had humor, and a sense of fun, but she didn't seem to use it to cover up anything. He had to remind himself it wasn't possible that she was perfect. Common sense told him that.

  Her wariness at their first meeting -- to him it felt like the first meeting -- had softened, and their initial tentative, self-conscious way of conversing had segued into something more natural. If it weren't for the thoughts of Katherine that couldn't be resolved and put away for very long at a time, he felt almost as though he could just sink back into their relationship like a warm bath. But that idea made him think of her naked, and he put it away, for the time being.

  While they ate, Brian asked her questions, mostly about her childhood. It kept them talking in a casual, first date sort of way. She answered him easily, thoughtfully, smiling at some of the memories she unearthed. He found out that she had always read books voraciously from kindergarten on, and spent her free time in the summers reading in the library, or on the way home from the library as she walked, or in her bedroom with the door closed. Sometimes she read in a big tree in her back yard, invisible and quiet behind the leaves so that her brothers wouldn't find her to pester her. She tried writing stories but they never sounded any good to her compared to the books she was reading. She was beginning to think she might try again now.

  "If you want dessert, they have homemade flan."

  "Not for me. I'm full. But you go ahead." They ordered coffee and she ordered the flan, and dug into it as if she hadn't already had a full meal. He watched her eat until she looked up and caught him staring at her.

  "I was still hungry," she said. "Do you want a bite?" He dipped his c
offee spoon in to taste it. It was creamy and delicious, but he left the rest for her.

  "It must be the eating-for-two thing," he said, shaking his head as she pushed away the empty bowl and sat back against the seat, smiling in satisfaction.

  Were they having a good time together? It seemed so to Brian. The beer and the food and the intimacy of her stories of childhood mellowed him. As they walked back to the car, on impulse he moved closer to her and put his arm around her waist, but she slipped away gracefully to look in a store window. When she looked at him next it seemed as though she had a question in her eyes, but he had no clue about what the question was.