Torch

  “I told Lisa we’d meet her and Josh at the courthouse at noon,” Claire said a few minutes later, returning to stand next to him with an empty tray, as if his presence the next day had been agreed on. “Can I get three bourbons on the rocks?” she asked Leonard. Together they watched as he lined up the glasses and poured the drinks. Bruce had the feeling that Claire was waiting for him to speak, silently daring him to dispute her or praying he would agree to go, one or the other, so she could respond.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” he said as she placed the drinks on her tray.

  “Did she tell you what came in the mail today?” Leonard asked Bruce before she left again, and then turned to Claire, “Why don’t you tell your dad?”

  “Oh,” she waved her hand in front of her face, as if she were embarrassed to even think about it. She looked tired and pretty, like her mother, only darker, now that she’d dyed her hair brown to cover the bleach blond she’d done last summer. “I finished those classes I had to take. I did them online. So now I have my degree.”

  “It came in the mail today,” repeated Leonard. “A fancy piece of paper with calligraphy and a big golden seal.”

  Claire stared at the bourbons on her tray. “It’s a little behind schedule, but at least I can say I finished up.” She looked at Bruce with the eyes she looked at him with lately, private and tentative, as if she were peering out at him from behind a curtain.

  “That’s right,” he said. “Better late then never.”

  Her eyes flickered away. “True.”

  “Your mom would be proud,” said Leonard, more to Bruce, it seemed, than to Claire. She took her tray and walked away from them and he was glad again, in a remorseful way. “I’m proud too,” he said to nobody, though Leonard heard him and nodded. He went to the till and began to count the day’s money, stacking the bills into neat piles and binding them in rubber bands.

  “How’s Mardell doing?” Bruce asked.

  Leonard paused in his counting and glanced up. “Her sister’s coming for Christmas. The one from Butte. How’s Kathy?”

  “She’s good.” He took the last sip of his Coke and shook the ice in the glass. Since he’d married Kathy, he detected the slightest disapproval from Leonard and Mardell, the slightest lowering in their esteem. “Well, what about the kids?” Mardell had huffed back in June, when Bruce had told her the news, as if they were still in diapers. And then, before he could reply she said, “I can take them, if need be.”

  “Take them where?” he’d asked sharply, not caring whether he hurt her feelings, though she’d always been something of an aunt to him and Teresa.

  “Take them in,” she exclaimed, and then looked at him with undisguised shock and disdain. Her hair was sheer white and styled into a dense yet airy bush, like cotton candy spun around a cone. “They need a mother, you know. Or at least a mother figure.”

  “Well, I’m not going anywhere,” he said, softening. “I got married, that’s all.”

  “Oh, Bruce, I know,” she said apologetically, and began to cry. She took her glasses off so she could wipe her eyes. He put his hand on her arm. “I didn’t mean anything. It’s just that …”

  “It’s that you miss Teresa,” he said.

  “I guess that’s it,” she said, with a tone that told Bruce that that wasn’t it at all—or rather, that was only part of it. That behind her longing for Teresa, there was judgment for what he had done so soon. He’d heard it already, all around town, without actually having to hear the words. So soon, so soon, like an inane bird swooping over his head, calling to him everywhere he went. It made him love Kathy more, or at least to feel more protective of her, like it was the two of them against the world.

  Leonard hadn’t been there when he’d told Mardell about marrying Kathy and he made no mention of it the next several times Bruce came into the bar, until one day he asked Bruce how Kathy was in a voice as plain as day, as if he’d asked that same question for a thousand years.

  “Hey, Len,” Bruce said now, standing and pulling his coat on. He opened his wallet and set two dollars on the bar. “I better get home before the roads get worse.”

  “You’d better,” he agreed.

  “Tell Claire I said bye,” he called as he walked to the door.

  Leonard waved him off, signaling he would. It’s what he did all the time.

  • • •

  “There you are,” said Kathy when he got home. “I hope you’re not too hungry,” she said and smiled, sly and flirtatious. “Or I should say, not hungry for food.” She pulled him to her and kissed his ear. “I got a positive on my ovulation stick, which means we have to do it now.”

  “Now?” he asked, running his hands up her sides. She laughed and pulled him into their room. Despite their troubles with conceiving, they always had fun in bed.

  “What do you think?” he asked, when they were finished.

  “About what?” She was lying the wrong way on the bed, her feet propped up on the headboard in an attempt to assist his sperm in their mad journey to her egg.

  “About being pregnant. Do you think this was the one?”

  She inhaled deeply and closed her eyes, pondering the question. A few months before, Gerry had told her that she would know when it happened. That she would feel a bolt of energy or a shot of light: the spirit of their future child, taking root.

  “I feel something,” she said, and opened her eyes. “A kind of intensity in my womb, but I don’t know if I can say for sure.” She turned her head to face him, keeping the rest of her body perfectly still. “What about you? What do you feel?”

  He felt sleepy and hungry and he yearned for a cigarette, but he thought it unwise to mention any of those things.

  “I feel like maybe this was it,” he said, and she smiled and big tears blossomed in her eyes. He hovered close but didn’t touch her, afraid that to jostle her would ruin their chances of conception, but then she began to cry harder and he placed his hand on her arm ever so delicately, as if her flesh were wet paint, waiting to dry.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, wiping her face with her hands. “It’s that sometimes I just … I mean, how ironic can it be that I inseminate cows for a living and I can’t even get myself knocked up?” She looked suddenly at him, her eyes bright with offense, as if he’d contradicted what she said. “It’s my job, Bruce. And I can’t manage to get it right when it comes to myself.”

  “It’ll happen,” he soothed.

  “It will,” she said emphatically, her mood shifting suddenly. “It’s that I’ve gotten all off-kilter. That’s why it’s not happening.” She sat up even though thirty minutes hadn’t passed since they had finished making love. “I need to find my center. I need to do a reading. Would you mind, honey, if I went over and spent the night at my cabin?”

  “Your cabin?”

  “Just for the night.” She stood and began to dress. “Kind of like a retreat, so I can get centered.”

  “You could do it here,” he offered. “I could sleep out on the couch.” He went to her and tried to hug her so as to prevent her from putting her pants on, but she only patted his arms and continued on with what she was doing.

  “I need to get centered, Bruce. This baby stuff has put me off balance. It’s taken over my entire psyche with negativity.” She pulled a sweatshirt over her head.

  “But it’s cold there. It’ll be freezing, Kath.” He had the feeling that someone was pressing a boot against his chest.

  “I can start a fire. I did it for years.” She came and put her arms around him. “This will be good for both of us. It will give us perspective on this whole journey.”

  “What about the roads?” he pressed, though she only chuckled at him and walked from the room. He followed her into the kitchen, where she was loading her backpack, taking a container of yogurt and a banana, some rye crackers, and a few bags of Fertile Blend.

  “Now, don’t forget to drink your tea tonight. And there’s a casserole in the oven. I set the timer for you.?
?? She looked at him and laughed at the hurt expression on his face. “You’re being silly, hon,” she said, pushing her hand into his hair.

  “It’s that I’ll miss you,” he said. This was the second time she had left him. She had done it back in September on the night of the equinox, and he had hated it then too.

  “Love you.” She kissed him and began to walk out the door.

  “And I wanted to talk to you about something too,” he said, to keep her home.

  She turned abruptly with her backpack slung over her shoulder. “What?”

  “Josh’s hearing is tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?” she said with some surprise, though he had told her about it weeks before. She set her backpack on the kitchen table, still holding onto the straps. “What do you want to talk about?”

  He shrugged. “Whether we should do anything.”

  “Like what?”

  He shrugged again, not wanting to mention that he could go and sit on the bench outside the judge’s chambers with Lisa and Claire, not wanting Kathy to either encourage him to go or get moody and defensive because he had suggested it. He didn’t know which she would do and he didn’t want to know.

  “I’ll hold him in my thoughts,” said Kathy, lifting her bag again. “I’ll burn some sage.”

  After she left, he put his boots and coat on and sat out on the porch with the dogs. The rain had stopped by now. For several minutes he listened to the ice clattering and tinkling in the branches of the frozen trees and then he lit a cigarette. He smoked out here again, the way he used to do when Teresa was alive, though Kathy hadn’t asked him to. It seemed like the right thing to do, the civilized way to live, and it gave him an excuse to be off by himself, which he liked to do most nights. He didn’t like it this night, however, with Kathy off at her old house. His enjoyment of his solitude depended entirely on Kathy being thirty feet away, dozing in their bed, he realized now, feeling a swell of anger toward her rise inside of him, though he knew he didn’t have the right to be mad. Before they had married she’d warned him that this might happen, that from time to time she would need her space and he’d told her that he would need his too. It felt true then, but it was a lie. He didn’t need his space. His space was a box of grief, the place where Teresa lived now, and he wanted more than anything to keep it closed. When he was alone without Kathy he had too much time to think, too much silence to fill the void, and Teresa would come at him in the smallest, most penetrating ways.

  Without wanting to, he remembered her now, remembered a particular meaningless day the autumn before when she had made batches and batches of zucchini bread and how, later, they’d driven around together, bringing a loaf to everyone they knew, bringing a loaf, even, to Kathy, who hadn’t been home. They’d left it on her porch, on top of a pile of neatly stacked wood. He could see it there now, feel the damp heft of it in his hands, which he shook to break the memory loose. He was grateful he had only his memory to keep Teresa around. Grateful that Claire and Joshua had packed up everything that had belonged to their mother and taken it away. When he’d walked into the house after they’d gone his body filled with a daffy joy. He was free, or so it seemed. He could start anew now, with Kathy and Kathy only.

  But he hadn’t been freed entirely. On occasion something that had been Teresa’s would emerge from the depths of the house: a dried-up pen that said REST-A-WHILE VILLA on its side, a leather bookmark embossed with her initials that Joshua had made in school, a tube of pink lipstick that she’d worn when she went to work or town. The sight of each of these things stopped him short, though he had to pretend otherwise if Kathy was in the room. It was like coming across a bear in the woods: you were supposed to stand still and remain calm, against every impulse. He couldn’t bring himself to throw Teresa’s things out. When he had the chance he secreted the things he’d found out to his truck, where he put them in the glove compartment and never looked at them again.

  He went back inside the house after smoking two cigarettes and stood in the fluorescent light of the kitchen. The timer Kathy had set had gone off already. He turned the oven off and opened the door, the heat hitting his cold face like a fist, and removed the casserole. The top had baked to almost black, but he could see it hadn’t been ruined entirely. He set it on top of the stove to let it cool and got a beer from the refrigerator, not caring whether it would impede his sperm. He pulled his wallet from his pocket and began removing all of its contents. He and Teresa used to call it his office—his wallet—because Bruce kept it so packed full of important things. Bids and business receipts, notes about his customers. Months ago, he had put a tiny blue scrap of paper there that had Joshua’s cell phone number written on it. At last he found it and picked up the phone.

  Joshua’s voice sounded alarmed, once he recognized who it was. Bruce had never called him before, though he’d meant to whenever, in his passes through his wallet, he’d seen the number.

  “How you doing?” he asked Joshua.

  “Not too bad.”

  Bruce removed a tack from the corkboard near the phone, trying to think of what to say. This was possibly Joshua’s last night of freedom for a while, though Bruce could not convince himself to believe that was true. The judge would see how young he was and take pity, despite his crime. It’s what Bruce had thought all along, since the phone call from Claire back in August.

  “Is everything all right with you?” Joshua asked tentatively.

  “Yep.” He jabbed the sharp end of the tack into a callus on his thumb and didn’t feel a thing. “So I guess tomorrow’s the big day,” he said, though Joshua knew that Bruce knew this for a fact. “It sure came up quick.”

  “Yep,” said Joshua. There was a rustling sound, as if he were going from one room to another.

  “I was thinking I’d come over with Claire, you know, but I got this job out at Doug Reed’s place, back by the Paradise Town Hall. They’re weekenders,” Bruce explained. He pulled his pack of cigarettes out and lit one up. “They got a big house that they just redid and I’m finishing up with the small stuff, some shelves and cabinets. I was going to say you could stop out there tomorrow morning on your way, in case I can’t make it to the courthouse after all. I’m going to have to play it by ear, to see how much I can get done.”

  “I got plans in the morning,” said Joshua without any emotion in his voice and then he added, more gently, “with Lisa.”

  “Of course you do, bud. I was just saying, if you had the time. I know your hearing’s not till the afternoon.”

  “Twelve thirty,” said Joshua.

  “Right,” Bruce said. He took another drag from his cigarette. “I told Claire you should bring some of your drawings to show the judge. The ones of cars and things,” he suggested. “It would help the judge see you’re a good guy. To sort of build your case.”

  “Maybe,” said Joshua, though Bruce could tell he wasn’t even considering it.

  “Well, good luck if I don’t end up seeing you.”

  “Thanks,” Joshua said.

  Bruce sat there long after Joshua had hung up, the silent phone pressed to his ear. He sat so long the telephone became a part of him, an extended plastic ear—warm and vacant, expressive and familiar. At first he had the sensation that he was on hold and simply waiting, that someone would come to him eventually on the other end of the line. And then, after several minutes, the notion that he was on hold left him and another feeling took its place, that he was about to either cry or punch the wall, or that he would do both in quick succession, but his fear of doing either roused him from his trance and he put the phone back on the receiver.

  He went to the refrigerator and got another beer and then went to the stove and stared at the casserole and poked a finger into its center. It had cooled entirely now, but he wasn’t hungry anymore.

  “Tanner,” he called. “Spy.”

  They came clattering into the kitchen, running and then sliding on their nails when they reached him, loving him the way nobody else did, t
he way they always had.

  “Dinner,” he said, and set the casserole down before them on the floor.

  The road was a frozen river the next morning as Bruce drove down it, slow and steady, in the first gray light of day. When he turned into Doug Reed’s driveway he lost his concentration and his truck fishtailed and skidded into the mailbox mounted on a metal pole that didn’t budge. He shifted into reverse and backed away from it and crept up the driveway. His glove box had sprung open with the impact and he reached over to push it closed, though it wouldn’t go because something was jammed in its hinge. Teresa’s lipstick, he saw, and let it be.

  Doug Reed’s house smelled like new carpet and glue, fresh paint and sawdust. There were slate floors and ten-foot windows that faced out over Lake Nakota, and a hot tub sunk into the floor. The kitchen was especially state of the art, with a special machine that could chill a bottle of wine in five minutes and a garbage disposal that could grind even the thickest bones. George Hanson had put in the garbage disposal the day before and, afterward, he and Bruce had stood around testing it out, pushing in kindling from the bucket near the fireplace and listening as it ground the wood to nothing in the depths of the sink. Bruce was the last man in, the one to finish up, installing the kitchen cabinets he’d made and building in bookshelves.

  He walked through the house to the living room along the sheets of plastic that had been set down to protect the carpet and turned up the thermostat and then went into the kitchen. He poured coffee from his Thermos into the little cup that served as its cap. Through the huge windows, Lake Nakota was spread out before him, covered with a layer of gray ice. He could see the cross atop the church on the opposite shore, almost a mile away. He wondered what Kathy was doing now, if she was even awake yet. He hadn’t slept well without her. Their bed was like a ship that had become unmoored. He kept waking and remembering that he was alone and then it would take him some time to fall back asleep. He dreamed of Teresa, but he didn’t recall the dream and didn’t try to. Kathy always remembered her dreams and then wrote them down in a little notebook she kept in the drawer in the bedside table. She would tell him about them each morning, while he showered and dressed and made his coffee, following him from room to room.