“We spent a week there, painting houses and building a classroom onto their small schoolhouse. It was hard work. I hauled cinderblock for three days straight.” I keep expecting Jack to fidget or move somehow, but he doesn’t. “We stayed in the home of some villagers. It was a humble place, but to this day I remember how much love and joy was in the house. They didn’t have much—it was a two-room structure with a dirt floor and a corrugated metal roof. Liliana, our hostess, kept it as spotless as if it were a penthouse in Manhattan.”
As Jack’s words continued to fall on my ears, I could feel the air in the room change. I don’t really know him well—a cup of coffee and some stories of Al Brown’s didn’t exactly make us close friends. But even so, I feel a sudden empathy touch my heart, like the whisper-light brushing of a fluffy down feather.
I couldn’t possibly know what he was going to say next, but undeniably, I knew it was the heart of the story—and the heart of the man.
I focus back on Jack’s words. “Late on the fourth night, a fight broke out in the streets of the neighborhood where we were staying. It turned out that there were a lot of drug dealers working in the mountains around the town. On that particular evening, one of the members of one of the drug gangs came into town to visit his own mother, who happened to live next door to Liliana. He was ambushed by a rival gang as his family sat down to dinner.
“We all heard the sounds. Like loud, lethal popcorn. Then the screams followed. My mom turned toward the closest window to see what was going on. A stray bullet broke through the window and hit her. She was killed almost instantly.”
Jack pulls his gaze from the far away point he had been fixed on and looks down to study his hands. He looks over them carefully, turning the right one over and then the left, and his gaze fixes on his slightly cupped palms.
“Sometimes,” he says in a low, halting voice, quite unlike any manner in which I’d previously heard him speak. “Sometimes, I think I can see her blood right here, on these. We wouldn’t have been there that night if it wasn’t for me.”
Silence dropped on the room with the crushing weight of long-suffering truth.
My instincts took control of my own hands. Reflexively, I softly slide my two palms across Jack’s and link through his outstretched fingers. I had watched his eyes as he told the story and knew each word was making him retreat farther into the deep, deep world of memory. I can see that he is still in that world, unconscious of sitting in a kitchen in Wimberley, Texas, or even of my own small presence.
I need to do something to let him know that he is not alone, and that he is very far from the mountains of Jalisco. But as much as I want to bring comfort at this moment, I know that I cannot wash that bloodstain he sees from his hands. I look up to the wall, where the whole story began.
“The mirror.”
“Oh, yeah.” I feel the sensation, like the rasping tear of Velcro, as he pulls his gaze from our clasped hands and focuses toward the silver piece hanging high up on the wall. My statement had actually been one of simple fact, not a question. But Jack wouldn’t have known that without being inside of my head, and so he continues his story.
“Her funeral was here in Austin, about a week later. The day afterward, my dad and I come home from my aunt’s house and there’s a box sitting on the porch. It’s addressed to Marianne Cooper. My dad opens the package, and inside is that mirror. I’d even forgotten she’d bought it on the first day we were there and had it shipped to our home. My dad told me then that it was her way of letting us know she was always looking down on us.”
The left-hand corner of his mouth twisted wryly. “I knew she was in Heaven, but honestly, the whole idea didn’t give me much comfort. I mean, why would God take someone who’d gone on a trip to help others and just end their life like that? I didn’t get it then, and I can’t say I really get it now.”
“And so that’s why you stopped going to church.”
Another hint of wryness comes through with his reply. “How did you know?”
I can’t help but remember my most recent foot-in-mouth incident with Jack over coffee. How do I keep doing this? But instead of trying to explain—which usually digs the hole of my embarrassment even further—I choose to answer simply, without any attempts to laugh off my preceding words.
“In addition to being my boss, Al Brown is a good friend of my family. I had dinner at his house last night, and when I mentioned I was coming out to the ranch today, he told me he used to know you well.”
“Yeah, he taught me in Sunday school. That was a long time ago.”
“He said the same thing. He also mentioned that he still sees your dad at church every week, and every time, there’s an empty seat saved next to him.”
Jack’s fingers disengage from between mine. He pulls away and walks over to the window. I follow behind at a tentative distance, unsure of whether he is in need of space or a friend at this moment. I want to say something, but my tongue feels icy… as if it is frozen with the fear of saying the wrong thing.
“Jack.” I’m amazed at how my voice sounds clear, just like the rolling river outside the kitchen window we’re standing in front of. “I’m sure your mother didn’t intend for her death to take you away from people who cared about you and wanted to help you.”
“Time does not heal all wounds, Kate.”
“I agree, Jack,” I said, thinking of my gut-level reaction to hearing about Mark’s engagement, followed so soon by randomly seeing him…and her. Certainly, there’s nothing life-and-death about Mark’s place in my life. But I do understand that feeling of having your comfortable rug pulled out from under you.
“You do?” He raised an eyebrow at me, but his face remains chiseled and still.
“Of course I do. Some memories may fade, but the experiences and people that make us who we are, stay with us forever. It’s like they become part of our DNA. We wouldn’t be the same without those moments and those people.”
He looked down at me with total focus. I felt my mouth go a little dry.
If he couldn’t move that piercing look in his eyes and turn them away, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to either. I could already feel something fidgety inside my bones. I struggled with myself to just stay put and keep breathing like a normal person, and I tried not to focus on anything in particular. I needed to think about lots of things, anything really, except Jack Cooper’s eyes.
Or his lips.
Or the sound of the short intake of his breath as he closed the space between us to just centimeters.
Seemingly without warning, Jack’s arms reach out, fold around me, and pull me close, and what I feel right now scares me, however, it’s not entirely because of my swirling emotions. It’s because of his.
Jack Cooper is a strong man—a gifted businessman, a community leader—but I could swear I felt a drop of something wet in the strands of my hair as his cheek brushes the crown of my head. There’s barely enough space between us to slide a beach towel. I look up at him.
“Kate,” he says simply, rawness scratching across the one syllable. Jack nods once with both deliberateness and force. “I have spent the last fifteen years trying to be my father’s son because that young man in Mexico paid too high a price to be his mother’s.”
I watch the muscles in his throat contract as he swallows. When he opens his mouth to speak, I have to lean toward him to listen, so soft are his words.
“But I hear my mom’s voice in you, Kate.”
So close to me that he only has to tilt forward, Jack touches his lips to my forehead lightly. For once, words fail me. I can’t logically process what’s going on. All I can do is feel, a silent acknowledgment of the actions around me.
The whisper of a kiss can’t have lasted more than a few seconds, but when Jack pulls away, a chill flutters across my skin, a hollow contrast to the soft warmth which touched it just a heartbeat before.
“Kate…I…” he stammers.
I hope his fumbling for words is a sign of em
otion, not of regret. He continues. “I wish I had the excuse of saying that I didn’t know what came over me, but that would be a lie. But this…” he gestures toward the items set out on the counter, ready for the gathering of co-workers in just a few minutes. “This has to be business.”
I try to push past any residual pinpoint of tingle still lingering from the surprise embrace and collect the pieces of my thoughts. I need to put them back together again. Jack is right. And on top of all that, I have a date with someone else in about twenty-four hours.
But I hate the thought of just dismissing that kiss.
It can’t mean anything long-term, it just can’t, but for right now, I want to wrap my fingers around that firefly of a moment that just seconds ago was lit up with electricity and excitement.
It feels like something I want to hold on to and never let go of, but I don’t exactly understand why.
I turn my head, anxious to see Jack’s face, just to see if any trace of emotion is still visible in the cobalt of his eyes, but he’s left the room. As for me, I’m left with a still-too-real memory I’m not quite sure what to do with.
Before the others arrive, Jack and I spend the rest of our time setting up different areas of the house and backyard for the afternoon. He attends the built-in custom grill on the deck outside and I stay inside, taking care of a million little details and finishing touches for the food.
I occupy myself with placing soda cans in a metal laundry tub filled with ice and laying pickles out on a plate. I take extra care to arrange plastic knives, forks, and spoons in tall containers, making sure that they’re all evenly spaced and each utensil is pointing in the same direction. Anything to stay busy, very busy.
I’m trying so hard not to think about the recent past. The way we left things—almost by default—bothers me. He acted like it was a big mistake. I acquiesced because I was too shell-shocked to even attempt a conversation. But since condiment-arranging is just not all that mentally stimulating, my mind keeps wandering. Every time it does so, my brain cells snap right back to the same place, as though it were a scratched CD that skips with a screech to the same point in a song, over and over.
Jack has carried the burden of his mother’s death for a decade and a half. This morning has shown me that more than just the impracticality of an office crush, Jack Cooper is something I can’t have, can’t want, in a man. I want picket fences, apple pies, and lunch after church on Sundays.
But then, there’s what I felt when we both let our guard down.
Because he was honest with me, then I have to be honest with myself—he is everything I do want in a man.
Except that I’ve found him fifteen years and one business project too late.
The doorbell rings and I gratefully run to answer it, more than ready for someone to break up both my thought patterns and my now-apparent stalling in the kitchen.
“You must be Kate.” The middle-aged man at the door stuck out his hand. “I’m Rich Mullen, one of the vice-presidents at Lone Star.” He gives a protective shoulder squeeze to the girl on his right. “This is my daughter Nicole. She’s a senior at UT, working on her biology degree, and is actually interning with the zoo right now, helping set things up.”
“Hi, Kate. Glad to meet you,” says the curly-headed blonde in the doorway.
“It’s nice to meet both of you, too, Nicole and Rich. You’re the first ones here,” I say. “We’ve got tons of sodas and snacks in the kitchen. Nicole, you can put your bag down out on the back porch, if you would like.” I can see sunscreen and flip-flops sticking out of the top of the large blue-and-white bag, and I assume that’s all her stuff for fun-in-the-sun later.
“Oh, thanks. Hey, I see Jack out back, too. Dad, can you grab me a drink before you come out?”
“Sure thing, Nic. Let me get some of this, too, and I’ll be out to say hi to Jack also.” He gestures towards the guacamole and queso, then makes a beeline for the table of munchies which I have artfully arranged during those precious minutes of stalling. The table is right next to the window, where the incident which precipitated those minutes of stalling took place.
“I’m a starvin’ Marvin.” Rich laughs at his own joke. “It’s a long way out here and I haven’t had any food today besides a cup of coffee for breakfast.” Rich plucks a red plastic plate off the stack at the left end of the table and moves counterclockwise around the rectangle, adding chips and dips to the plate as he walks.
“It’s good to have you on the team, Kate. Jack speaks very highly of you.” Plate filled, Rich sits it down and turns to pluck two sodas from the washtub. “He was very impressed with your presentation earlier this week. He said it was basically impromptu but knowledgeable and well-done. I wish I had been there to see it, but my youngest broke his arm the night before, and I’d had some late hours at the hospital.”
“Oh, thanks for the compliment, Rich.” Knowing that Jack talked to his business partner in a positive manner about me does take away some of that ice-cube feeling which has lingered in my stomach. This is a good thing because I don’t think there’s any pill or liquid on the market designed to cure kiss-induced indigestion. Too bad. I could use more heart-warming and less heart-burning right about now.
“Hey, y’all, I’m h-e-e-e-e-re!”
Ah, the arrival of Laura Lynn.
No one else in Hays, Travis, or Williamson counties could stretch out a simple four letters to eight syllables.
The door, flung open to better frame the Queen Chimp in both natural light and maximum drama, also allows me to see the rest of the afternoon’s arrivals—Cindy and Logan—arrive separately and begin to get out of their respective cars.
Let the party begin.
As soon as everyone fills the house, the afternoon quickly morphs into a full-fledged—if somewhat awkward—party. Although I know Al Brown is the official zookeeper of our crazy habitat, for today, I feel a bit like a zookeeper-in-training. I stand just inside the doorway to the back patio, taking everything in, when the sound of a chimp in the middle of a conversation clearly breaks through.
“Well, Cindy, since you and I had worked so closely on creating the presentation, I thought it would be good to let other team members, like Kate, be involved in some aspect so they could have some exposure on the account.”
Oh, barf.
I know that’s probably the least mature phrase I’ve thought in a year. But seriously, Laura Lynn’s blatant brown-nosing and fictionalizing makes me wonder if Jack keeps air-sickness bags somewhere in this kitchen. I spent days—and some very late nights—working on nothing but that presentation and the research behind it. And now, all of a sudden, the Queen announces to her assembled court that I’m a charity case?
I’ve done more than my fair share of the work and been there every step of the way. Unlike Laura Lynn, who herself missed one of our planning meetings in the office because of the aftermath of an unfortunate eyebrow waxing incident over lunch.
I’m trying to decide if I should casually speak up or just allow discretion to truly be the better part of valor, when a voice joins the conversation. It’s Jack, his smooth baritone riding in like a knight on a pigmentally challenged horse.
“Really, Cindy, Laura Lynn…deferred…to the right person. Kate stepped up to the plate and knocked it out of the park.”
Since the kiss, Jack hasn’t so much as slipped even a covert glance my way, so I am taking even more pleasure in the compliment than I normally would in this type of situation.
“Oh, well, sure.” Cindy’s face slides upwards into a positively lacquered smile. “I’m glad to see our newest Assistant Account Executive making the most out of any opportunity she receives to better learn about our business. It’s so hard when you lead a team like this—making sure everyone has opportunities to shine.” The way she places strategic emphasis on “Assistant” causes pinpricks of sensation to poke at the skin cells covering my cheeks. I know they’re beginning to flush lightly.
Jack clears his v
oice to speak, and so begins the “working” part of our day. So, it looks like there’s no time like the present for me to kick off the KBC—the Kate Betterment Campaign. It’s time to prove what I can do.
The business part of the day goes quickly. Jack starts a brainstorming exercise around the “Zoo Who?” theme. As a group, we come up with several solid themes and small outreach campaigns. Everything flows smoothly. Almost too smoothly, in fact.
Next, it comes time to break into teams in order to flesh out the campaigns we’d all just brainstormed. Nicole raises her hand up almost shyly, just parallel with her ear. “I’ll pair up with Logan.”
With the ferocity of a primate sniffing out a fresh banana, Laura Lynn shoots an objection out of her mouth. “But Logan and I always partner together. We’re like a team.” She grinned, a smile that was more Scarlett O’Hara than sincere. “Aren’t we, Loge?”
Logan looks to me like a caged primate, internally battling his rather hopeless situation. I can see that he knows freedom is right there, just on the other side, but that the freedom would come with a price.
Will Logan be man enough to shake off that façade of a follower chimp?
Caught up in the reality TV-ness of the moment, I perch on the edge of my patio chair, fingernails gripping the plastic mesh which makes up the chair’s seating area. He needs prompting. “Oh, come on, Logan.”
Jack spoke first, a single quizzical name. “Kate?”
Jack Cooper has officially purchased a season ticket for the Kate Cormick “open-mouth, insert-foot” series. Why, why do I always embarrass myself when he’s right in front of me?
Sigh.
If I stay silent in response to Jack, I’ll confirm Cindy’s assertions that I’m a minor-leaguer on the Brown & Company team. But every time I speak up, I seem to send myself back to the dugout, anyway. “I just meant that it might be good if we aren’t on teams with people from our own offices. You know, keep mixing things up a bit.”
Gorilla Dating Page 7
