“A walk sounds best. A brisk, hard, long walk.”
“How about the paved trail west of the Coon Rapids dam?”
“Perfect.”
“Should I pick you up?”
“Sure.”
“What time?”
She checked her watch. “I’m through here at five-thirty. How about six? I’ll pick up some sandwiches to take along.”
“Perfect.”
“See you then.”
She called home immediately. The phone rang nine times and nobody answered. She called The Gap at Northtown. Someone named Cindy told her Janice wasn’t scheduled to work that day, which Lee already knew. She called Kim’s house. Kim’s mother said the two girls had gone down to the university to do some preregistration for fall quarter. She didn’t know what time they’d be back.
“Well, if you talk to her, tell her not to eat supper and to meet me at the house at six.”
“Will do.”
Sylvia had the day off, so Lee locked up the shop herself, swung by the Subway sandwich shop and picked up four combination sandwiches containing everything but the kitchen sink. At home she charged into the house, calling, “Joey, you here?”
“Yo!” he hollered from the depths of his room.
“Wanna go walking with Chris and me?”
“Where?”
She was passing his bedroom door, unbuttoning her waistband as she answered. “Walking trails over by the dam.” He was lying on his bed reading a Hot Rod magazine.
“Hey, yeah! Only, would it be okay if I took my Rollerblades instead? That walking stuff is heinous.”
She laughed and said louder, closing her bedroom door, “I don’t care, but hurry and get ready. He’ll be here at six. Did Janice come home yet?”
“Haven’t seen her all day.”
Well, Lee had tried.
She changed into a pair of faded purple knit shorts with a matching T-shirt, put on tennis socks and a pair of Adidas, ran a brush through her hair, wiped her face with a Kleenex, slapped on some fresh lipstick and was shutting off the bathroom light when Christopher knocked on the front door.
“Ready?” he said when she came around the corner into the front hall.
“Yup.”
“Where are the kids?”
“Joey’s coming.” She raised her voice. “Hey, Joe? You all ready?”
He came barreling down the hall and did a Tom Cruise stockingslide onto the shiny front hall floor, carrying his Rollerblades.
“Where are your shoes?” Lee said.
“I don’t need shoes. I’m gonna skate.”
She pointed with an authoritative finger at his bedroom. “Get! Your! Shoes!”
Grumbling, he went back to get them. When she turned around Chris was snickering.
“Gnarly adolescent boys!” she whispered. While Joey was gone she jotted a note for Janice and left it on the kitchen table. Gone walking with Joey & Chris. Sandwich for you in frig. Home early. Love, Mom.
“Shut the front door when you come out, Joey!” she called, following Christopher outside, letting the screen door slam behind them. “What kind of sandwiches?” he asked, showing pointed interest in the white sack as they walked toward the Explorer.
She hefted the bag. “Salami, ham, cheese, mayo, black olives, lettuce, tomato, onions, Oil of Olay, sassafras root, watercress, potato dumpling, peanut butter, sauerkraut and pigs’ ears. What do you mean, what kind of sandwich? You expect a person to remember what they put in those things over there?”
Laughing, he opened the front door of the Explorer for her. “Sorry I asked.”
She clambered in the front, leaving the back for Joey. He came out a minute later and they were off, with the windows down and the evening breezing against their ears.
“Thanks for suggesting this, Christopher, it feels so good.” She lifted her elbows and face, shut her eyes and ruffled her hair with both hands. “If I have to talk to one more banker or insurance representative or gravestone salesman, I think I’m going to scream.”
Christopher glanced at her askance, caught her in profile with her elbows and breasts outlined against the far window. When she broke her pose, he quickly returned his attention to the road. “None of that tonight. The purpose of this walk is to forget all that. Deal?”
She flashed him a smile. “Deal.”
The stultifying heat of July had burned itself out and left a more temperate August. By the time they reached the dam it was 6:30 and pleasantly warm. The sky appeared hazy, as if viewed through a steamy window, its colors opaque melon and lavender, while the sun burned through in orange so muted one could look at it with the naked eye. The air smelled of summer’s end—drying crops and crisping weeds and the graininess of dust and harvest.
At the dam the Mississippi thundered over the lowered gates, and cars with bicycle carriers were lined up door to door in the angled parking slots. Serious cyclists, in their helmets and gloves, were resting against the guardrails, still seated on their bikes, watching . shermen working the more placid waters above the boil.
Joey grumbled while he put on his Rollerblades. “See, I told you I didn’t need shoes.” When he finished, he said, “I’m hungry. Can I have my sandwich, Ma?”
“Sure.” She fished it out of the sack and handed it to him over the back of the seat while he hung his feet out the open door. “Just make sure you don’t leave the paper somewhere along the trail. Have you got a pocket?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
He stood beside the truck, wearing a blue baseball cap, scissoring back and forth on his blades, peeling the paper down and taking a first bite big enough to stuff an entire Thanksgiving turkey, then talking with his cheek bulging. “Hurry up, you guys!” In the last year his nose seemed to have mushroomed and lost its boyishness while the rest of his features hadn’t quite caught up. His hands had grown to the size of Maine lobsters.
Standing beside him, Lee observed her son and wondered how to get him from fourteen to nineteen in the shortest time possible. She loved him, but this crude, gangly adolescent stage was really the pits.
She leaned across the truck seat and looked in the sack. “You want your sandwich now, Christopher?”
“I’d rather walk on an empty stomach, if you don’t mind.” He was busy finding his sunglasses, threading the earpieces into their hotpink string.
“Me, too. We’ll eat after.”
“Better yet, I’ve got a fanny pack under the seat. We could take the sandwiches along and eat at a picnic stop.”
“Sounds good.”
Christopher slipped on his sunglasses, locked the truck and carried the blue nylon bag around to Lee’s side. She filled it and he buckled it around his waist with the zippered pouch at the rear.
By then Joey was already thirty yards away, swaying gracefully on his Rollerblades, eating his sandwich, caring about little else.
She watched him and said, “Lord, if only he were that graceful on his own feet.”
“The miracle is, they actually outgrow it.”
“Meanwhile I’m raising the hormonal hurricane. I never knew noses could grow so fast.”
They were laughing as they struck out on their walk, heading west along the North Hennepin Trail. It took them through open grassland dotted by brown-eyed Susans and wild asters, between fields of ripe corn where pheasants foraged, through copses of trees that sliced them with intermittent shade. It curved around small marshes where red-winged blackbirds sent forth their distinctive summer call. It passed the remnants of distant farms and an occasional newer house, which looked misplaced next to all that preserved parkland. Bikers occasionally surprised them from behind, passing them in swift puffs of wind, pedaling hard. Other joggers and walkers met them head-on, nodding or speaking winded hellos. Sometimes Joey was visible, sometimes not. He went and returned at will, zooming back at them along the blacktop trail with his blue cap reversed, adding further insult to his adolescent bad looks.
In time Lee squinted at the emp
ty blacktop path that caught the setting sun and turned it to liquid gold. Joey had gone on ahead; the trail stretched for miles, clear out to Elm Creek Park Reserve in the town of Maple Grove.
“I wonder where the hormonal hurricane is,” she said.
“Don’t worry. He’ll be back.”
“Are you ready to turn around yet?” she asked.
“Anytime.”
They reversed directions, turning their backs on the glare and checking their watches.
“A little over an hour already,” Christopher noted. “You tired?”
“Darn right I’m tired, but it feels good.”
“Do you do this regularly?”
“Irregularly. In the summer. How about you?”
“I work out regularly in one way or another. Summers a little more outside. Winters, I work out a little more in the weight room, especially after a bad day at work.”
They needed their breath for walking, so talking ceased as their shadows grew long on the trail in front of them. The air cooled and frogs began croaking. At a place where the trail crossed a blacktop road a picnic table sat in a clearing. Beside it were bike stands, a garbage can and a drinking fountain. Lee used the fountain first while Christopher waited, standing behind her, watching the curve of her backside as she bent forward to drink. He was growing—he’d discovered—more and more familiar with her curves. She straightened and turned, backhanding her mouth and smiling behind her hand.
He leaned on the fountain with both hands, elbows jutting, sunglasses hanging free and tapping the side of the fountain. She watched the side of his neck as he swallowed, the rhythmic beat of his pulsating skin just below one ear, the line of his backbone beneath his T-shirt, ending where the fanny pack projected from the small of his back. It had been a long time since she’d studied a man’s outline in the particular way she found herself studying Christopher’s.
He straightened with the sound men make—“Ahh!”—masculine and throaty, a sound she hadn’t heard much around her house for many years. With a forearm, he wiped his brow.
“Sandwiches, sandwiches!” she said, clapping twice like a bedouin calling for dancing girls.
“Get ’em out,” he said, presenting his back.
She worked the zipper, keeping her eyes on it and nothing else— silly woman, admiring a man fifteen years her junior!—and fished out their supper. At the picnic table they sat down on opposite sides, unwrapped their sandwiches and ate.
And studied each other with mayonnaise in the corners of their mouths. With their hair imperfect and wet around the edges. And their complexions ruddy and unsmooth from exertion. Wearing some of the oldest clothes they owned. Experiencing a comfort level they found with few others.
“So . . .” she began, wiping her mouth on a hard paper napkin printed with an orange-and-black logo. “Any more high-speed chases?”
“No, thank heavens.”
“So what’s new at the department?”
“I’ve been made a firearms instructor.”
“Wow . . . congratulations.”
“Just one of several.”
“Still . . . an instructor. Does this mean you’ll have to make room for another badge on your chest?”
“Not a badge, just a little pin.”
“What does a firearms instructor do?”
“The correct title is range officer. I have to set up quarterly qualification shoots with our duty weapons at the shooting range.”
“Where’s that?”
“Little park maintenance building behind Perkins.”
“The one where the weight room is?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve been in there. Greg took me in once, showed me how the targets move on the metal tracks and put a pair of ear protectors on me and shot off a few rounds. So you have to give the tests?”
“I can design them, too. Next month we’re going to be having a gamma shoot that the whole county will participate in.”
“What’s a gamma shoot?”
“It’s done with a gamma machine—it’s sort of a simulator .”
“And you design the shoots on the simulator?”
“No, the ones I design are done differently.”
“How?”
“Well, I’m working on one now. The officers will have to start in the basement and run up three flights of stairs, down a hall, open a door and shoot out six red balloons from a field of twenty-four multicolored ones in two minutes.”
“Two minutes?” It seemed long to her.
“Have you ever tried shooting off six accurate rounds in two minutes? Especially when you’re breathing like a steam engine and your adrenaline is pumping? If you’re on a SWAT team, maybe you’ve got a gas mask on. Or maybe it’s a low-light situation and your reds are flashing, changing the color of everything around you. It’s not easy. Even worse, in the test I’ve designed, they’ll have to do it six times, on six different lanes.”
“You dreamed this up yourself?”
He shrugged. “There are films and books to give you ideas, and I’ve been through a lot of qualifying shoots myself in nine years on the force.”
“You must be good.”
“As good as some, not as good as others. I tend to get less rattled than some of the guys. At least until it’s all over . . . then the shakes begin. Like that day of the chase.”
He talked about that awful time after all high-risk situations when the adrenaline stops pumping and the shakes set in. How hard it is to concentrate after that, to sleep, to return to normal routine.
“That’s why I came and fixed your hose. Couldn’t sleep . . . just had to work off that excess energy.” A lull fell. Sometimes when this happened—as now—they found themselves studying each other’s eyes a little too enjoyably. “So . . . enough about my life. What’s going on in yours?”
“Well . . . let’s see.” She pulled herself from her absorption with him. “School will be starting soon. Right after Labor Day for Joey, two weeks later for Janice. She’s had to pay her own way, so it’s taking her longer than usual. She was at the U doing some preregistering today. Next week Joey starts football practice, and I’ll have to think about taking him out to do some school shopping. His nose isn’t the only thing that’s been growing this summer. His ankles are hanging out of every pair of jeans he owns.” She folded her waxed paper and put it into the sack, then looked off across the open field to the south where twilight was settling. “I hate to see Janice go back to school. The house will seem so empty.”
“Will she live in a dorm?”
“Yes.”
“So you’ll have to move her back. Do you need help with that?”
“I can borrow Jim Clements’s truck again.”
“Let me know if you need a strong back.”
“Thanks, I will.”
They sat in silence awhile. A sparrow came and pecked at some crumbs around the garbage can. A gray-haired man and woman came by and said hello. When they’d moved on, Christopher sat with a question in his mind, afraid to pose it, afraid that if he did he might spook Lee and that would be the end of these pleasant times with her. But they’d become friends, good friends. They’d talked about their personal feelings time and again, so what was wrong with talking about this? Ask her, an inner voice urged. Just ask her. Instead, he rose and threw their trash into the garbage can, gathering courage. Returning to the picnic table, he straddled a bench and rested one arm on the tabletop, looking off at the grass.
“Could I ask you something?”
“Ask.”
He turned to watch her face. “Do you ever go out on dates?”
“Dates?” she repeated, as if the word were new to her.
“Yeah, dates.” He rushed to explain. “You know, Greg talked a lot about you, but I never heard him mention any guys in your life.” He allowed a stretch of silence, then asked, “So do you?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because when Bill died my kids were enough f
or me. I just never felt the urge.”
“Nine years?” he questioned. “You never dated anybody in nine years?”
“Boy, you’ve really got your figures down, don’t you?” Before he could react to her observation she went on. “They’ve been busy years. I went to school and started a business. Joey was only five when Bill died. The others were fourteen and sixteen. I didn’t have time for dating. Why do you ask?”
He glanced at the grass again. “Because it seems to me it’d be good for you. The way you were today in the shop when I came in, frustrated to the point of tears, handling all this stuff you’ve had to contend with since Greg died. Seems to me dating would be a distraction. It’d be good for you. Somebody to talk over your feelings with, you know?”
She said quietly, “I seem to talk my feelings over with you,” then rushed on as if catching herself at an indiscretion. “And I have my family, the kids . . . I’m not lonely. What about you?”
“Do I date?”
“That’s the question here, I believe.”
“Now and then.”
“Who are you dating now?”
“Nobody special. Girls are sort of put off when they find out you’re a cop. I guess they’re afraid to get serious because they think you’re going to get blown away or something . . . I don’t know. It’s a stressful lifestyle, especially on wives, they say. Ostrinski keeps trying to get me to go out with his sister-in-law. She’s divorced, has a couple of kids, had a bad marriage to a guy who lied to her for four years while he played around with anybody and everybody, including one of her best friends. I finally told Ostrinski, okay, I’ll take her out. Saturday’s the day , but I’ m not looking forward to it.”
“Why not?”
“Two kids, an ex-husband, all this past history she’s trying to get over . . .” He gave a rueful shake of the head.
“Sounds like me,” Lee remarked.
“You aren’t saying your husband—”
“Oh, heavens no. We had a great marriage. Maybe that’s why I haven’t dated. What I had was so perfect it’ d be hard to . . .”
“Hey, you guys, here you are!” Joey came swooping off the path, panting, bumping over the grass, dropping both palms flat on the picnic table, smelling execrable. “Gol, you know how far I went?”