She made no more efforts at conversation, but devoted her attention to dinner. Dawson set the table with the dishes she handed him, and they sat down to the type of meat and potatoes meal she knew he loved. She had embellished the table with candles and refilled their wine glasses, and they sat across from each other like two lovers, smiling through candlelight, drinking wine. She talked about the changes she and Shane were planning to make the kitchen more workable, especially when there would be more mouths to feed as students arrived. He already had three people lined up to start in May, she said. Dawson watched her face when she spoke of Shane, and a sinking feeling began to gnaw at his guts. Her eyes sparkled when she talked about him, and her face took on a dream-like quality. And suddenly he knew that what she wanted to talk about was ending their relationship herself.
She had made a chocolate pie for dessert, and she bustled about now whipping cream to put on top. Dawson plugged in the coffeemaker she had set up previously and cleared the table, then set it for coffee and dessert. She brought the pie to the table and set it before him with the pie cutter. She had made a bearded face with maraschino cherries and colored sprinkles, a confectionary Santa Claus. Dawson cut the pie and speculated on what she was doing. He was supposed to assume she was seducing him with food and buttering him up for a plea of forgiveness, and then she was going to drop the bomb about Shane. This was all intended to break his heart, of course, for he’d realize what he was losing.
Cassie sat across from him and sipped from her coffee cup. They were using delicate china, and he thought how well she could fit the part of the refined rich man’s wife, if she chose. There was definitely more to her than met the eye, and perhaps he had never fully appreciated what a complex person she really was. In her father’s house, she had been fettered by the limits of her environment. Here, she seemed to be blossoming like a plant suddenly brought out of a darkened room.
“More coffee?”
“No, thanks. I’m stuffed. Everything was wonderful.”
“Thank you. The coffee is Shane’s own blend. He buys beans and mixes them and then grinds them himself just before making a pot of coffee.”
“Really. Tell me about Shane.”
Cassie’s forehead wrinkled. “Like what? You know Shane.”
“Not really. I only know what we shout at each other whenever we get too close.”
“Shane doesn’t shout.”
“True. He keeps his nasty remarks down so only the receiver can hear.”
“Sonny, what’s wrong with you? I didn’t ask you here to discuss your scene with Shane. That’s your problem and his. I don’t even want to know what it was about.”
“Oh, you must have heard it for yourself. At least my half. Didn’t he tell you the rest?”
“I heard you shouting, but I can only guess at why. I missed most of it. And no, he doesn’t talk about things like that with me.”
“What does he talk about?”
“How to change the kitchen. What we can do to make things easier for Shelby. Sometimes he talks about her.”
“Like what?”
Cassie shook her head. “I don’t think that’s something we need to talk about.”
“So, what do we need to talk about?”
“Us.”
“Do you want to beat around bushes or just get to the point?”
Cassie’s face flushed and tears welled in her eyes. “Sonny, why are you so hateful?”
“Oh, thanks. Nice approach.”
“Sonny, I’ve gone out of my way to make this a nice evening, and you’re being an ass!”
“What’s the point? We’re going nowhere, Cass, and we both know it!”
“But why?” Her voice was rising as she leaned toward him.
“Why do you think?”
“Sonny, we were going nowhere before this damn baby! Admit it! Why the hell won’t you touch me?”
“You know why!”
“Sonny, I can’t get pregnant anymore! We can make love for the next four months and nobody could accuse you of being like your father!”
“Right! With Claude Bennerup’s bastard between us! Thanks, but no thanks!”
Cassie rose to her feet, her eyes wild. “It’s not Claude Bennerup’s! You goddamn bastard, it’s not Claude Bennerup’s!” She was standing beside him, looking down as he sat wide-eyed. “I hate you, Sonny! I know that now! I hate you! Say what you want about Shane, but he’s done more for me in a week than you did in eight years! And I’m not talking about sex! He never laid a hand on me except to help me when I needed help, but he was as kind and understanding as anyone could ever be! More than you have ever been! I’ve listened to you piss and moan for eight years, and you’ve never done a goddamn thing for me! Well, now I finally realize that, and it’s over! I’m done listening to you, Sonny! It’s over!”
Dawson sat speechless. She had said so much so fast, he was completely overwhelmed. Cassie turned and stormed out of the room leaving him sitting alone. The candles flickered in his peripheral vision as he stared unseeing into the dark kitchen beyond. What did she mean it wasn’t Bennerup’s? Then why had she told him it was? And whose was it? Who was she really protecting, and why? Did she really think he would accept Claude Bennerup’s kid better than somebody else’s? Whose? Why didn’t she make the guy take responsibility for his kid? And what was her relationship with Shane if it wasn’t sexual? What had Shane done for her that he had never done? What did Shane know about Dawson now that she had apparently spilled her guts to him?
Dawson rose from the chair and went to find her. She was nowhere on the first floor. He climbed the stairs and looked into the rooms on the left. No one. One of the two doors on the right was closed. He went up to it and rested his forehead against the wood.
“Cass?”
“Go home, Sonny.”
“Can I come in?”
“No. it’s locked.”
“So unlock it.”
“Go home.”
“I want to talk to you.”
“I told you. I’m done listening to you.”
“Cass, whose baby is it?”
Her voice, when she answered, was soft and dripping with disdain. “You goddamn bastard. That’s all you care about. Not me. Not us. But whose baby it is. Go to hell, Sonny. And don’t do anything stupid like breaking down the door. You’ll pay for it many times over if you do.”
Dawson was stunned. He stood motionless for the longest time, then finally turned away from the door and started down the stairs. By the time he reached the bottom, tears were brimming in his eyes and trickling down his cheeks. He sat in a chair in the darkened living room and put his face in his hands. Then he began to cry, great body-wracking sobs like nothing he had allowed in the past ten years.
When Cassie came downstairs the next morning, Sonny was asleep on the couch. She left him a note saying she had gone to pick up Jeanine and would he please be gone before noon.
Then, she slammed the door beside his head and drove away in his truck.
Chapter Nine
January 1988
Bobby Glenn, despite the youthful sound of his name, was the aging emphysemic patriarch of the dregs of Chatham society. His children by his three wives populated their own section of Chatham Ridge, a number of them living in trailers located on Bobby’s land. The land itself, once a fairly prosperous hill farm, now sprouted more litter and junked metal parts than grass. A standing, if bitter, joke in town was that the Glenns lived in trailers so when they had completely filled their backyard with garbage, they could simply move the house. A little girl whose family had the misfortune of living next to the Glenns’ property, was moved to compose a poem in third grade that read: “The wind it blew, it blew so hard, it blew the trash from Bobby’s yard.”
Bobby’s grandchildren were a tragic lot, several of them retarded or deformed as the result of incest and inbreeding. One of the normal ones had shot himself when he was fifteen; a second one attempted to shoot herself but only managed
to destroy her face while leaving her brain untouched. Bobby’s two sons by his housekeeper were grossly obese, and an annual event in the Glenn family was taking Ronnie and Gordon to the feed store at Chatham Four Corners to weigh them on the grain scale. Together, they were rapidly approaching a thousand pounds.
In addition to the farm occupied by his extended family, Bobby also owned bits and pieces of land throughout Chatham. They all held trailers or small cabins that Bobby rented out for a minimal fee since he also gave them minimal, if any, attention. They tended to be rented by those who could afford nothing better and were often the sites of violence, both domestic and general. One of the trailers, an old bullet-shaped relic, sat where Bobby’s childhood home had once stood. The original house, a magnificent colonial, had burned down one night under mysterious circumstances, but not before Bobby’s then seventy-year-old mother and her seventy-five-year-old lover had bailed out of a downstairs window. Stories were that the old man had come out into the below-zero night wearing only a smile; no mention was ever made of what Hattie Glenn was wearing.
There were other stories, too, about Hattie, including one that she and her grown children, with others from Chatham and surrounding towns, held religious meetings in the old colonial that ended with a session of group sex. Men and women paired off in a totally blackened room where no one was allowed to speak. Thus they proclaimed it an anonymous religious experience with no lustful undertones, a strictly spiritual rite. Several of the men had the habit of trying to rip off a piece of identifying fabric from their partner’s clothes, however, and more than once Bobby Glenn had come out with a piece of his mother’s dress.
The bullet-shaped trailer with its cracked yellow windows and smelly dank interior was the least popular of Bobby’s rentals and often stood vacant. For the past few weeks, however, it had been occupied, much to the old man’s delight. Unlike the bitch who had inhabited it last, this tenant didn’t seem to care if the toilet froze or the outside door wouldn’t shut. He was content to piss in the snow and tack a blanket across the doorway. He was rarely there anyway, spending a lot of his nights lying in a drunken stupor on the floor of Gordon Glenn’s trailer. Personally, Bobby didn’t care what the Indian did. He simply collected his weekly rent and left Dawson Penfield alone.
About a mile south of Bobby’s estate, just into Chatham Center, Grant and Larry spent their evenings in the latter’s kitchen. They sat with rolls of plastic tubing specially made to carry sap. It was heavy-walled yet flexible and colored purple or green to absorb heat but discourage bacterial growth. They cut the tubing into two-food lengths for droplines that would come directly out of the taps in the trees. They would, in turn, be attached by plastic tees to connecting lines that would collect and carry the sap down to the large-diameter main line.
When they had cut five hundred droplines, their next project would be to attach a plastic spout on one end and a tee on the other. To accomplish this, they kept a bowl of hot water between them in which they inserted the ends of the droplines. When the plastic had softened enough to stretch, they forced the appropriate end of the spout or tee into the lumen of the tube. Once inserted, a series of ridges on the spout or tee kept the tubing from coming off. To remove one, it was necessary to make a vertical cut in the line and peel it off. The spouts and tees were designed to snap together so that a closed loop could be achieved to keep the interior clean when it was not in use. The lines could then be hung on the trees ahead of time and the actual taps put into the trees when the sap began to run in March.
They worked in Larry’s kitchen because he was the official caretaker of his son now that Suzanne had returned to her evening job as a nurse’s aide. Occasionally, they were joined by Larry’s brother Leon who mostly came to talk but sometimes helped. Sugar season itself would see many people coming by, for a sugarhouse in full operation is always an impressive sight. It draws young and old like a magnet and is as much a part of March in Vermont as town meeting and changeable weather. Old friends and strangers would stop at the sight of the columns of steam and come inside to savor the smell and see the evaporator at work.
On weekends, when they were not working construction at the old Dayton farm, they returned with tubing in hand to lay out their lines and plan their tapping of the trees there. The side hill and underbrush made it difficult to impossible to use snowshoes in some areas, and so the going was slow and exhausting as they worked their way through snow that reached anywhere from their knees to their waists.
When Cassie realized they were in the woods along the front of the house, she invited them in to warm up whenever they wished and offered them a hot lunch as well. Shelby had yet to return from Boston, and Shane was now gone every weekend. Cassie had the house to herself, and she craved the company. From what Grant could tell, she was no longer associating with Sonny at all, which was understandable since Sonny had gone to drinking worse than ever and was reported as living with one of the Glenns. He still showed up for work most days, but he was often in terrible shape and of questionable value on the job.
On the first Saturday after New Year’s, Larry and Suzanne had a family birthday party to attend, and so, after a day of working in the woods, Grant decided to treat himself to a movie in Hanover. Good Morning, Vietnam was playing, and all he needed was a quick sandwich from Wyman’s Store and he’d be on his way.
Sonny’s truck was in Wyman’s parking lot when he arrived, and Cassie and her sister Jeanine were inside the store. He told Cassie where he was going, and she laughed. She and Jeanine were on their way to the same movie theater in Hanover to see Moonstruck.
“Moonstruck. Sounds like a romance,” he smiled.
“It is. Cher and what’s his name …”
“Nicholas Cage,” Jeanine said.
“I think I’d rather see Robin Williams,” Grant said.
Cassie shook her head and wrinkled her nose. “It’s a story about Vietnam. I don’t want to see that. Even if it is Robin Williams.”
“Well, we could still go in one car. I don’t know which movie is longer, but it would save gas if one – or two,” he smiled at Jeanine, “of us don’t mind waiting for the other.”
Cassie shrugged. “It works for me.”
Cassie sat between Grant and her sister on the bench seat in Grant’s truck, and he was well aware of her thigh pressing against his on every left turn. Apparently she was as well, because she kept moving away from him whenever she could, while working hard to keep the conversation light, talking about the projects at Dayton farm, asking him what he had done for Christmas, and speculating about the quality of the upcoming sugar season. She seemed nervous and possibly even uncomfortable, and he smiled to himself, wondering what that meant. Was she regretting this trip together, worried that he would think of it as a date? Or was she hoping that it might be?
They went their separate ways in the theatre, and the two women ended up waiting in the lobby for almost twenty minutes for his movie to end. Cassie was tired and irritable by then, and so he drove her and Jeanine home without stopping for the hamburger he was craving after his light supper. He hadn’t seen her since.
Now it was a new weekend, and Grant had two tickets to a Dartmouth hockey game. Suzanne was working, and Larry was baby-sitting. He contemplated asking Cassie to go with him, but he doubted she would go. Still, he had nothing to lose by asking, and at least he’d know if she was truly uncomfortable with the idea of going out on a date with him. To his surprise, she immediately said “yes.”
Thompson Arena was packed with spectators despite the fact that Dartmouth’s hockey team was nothing to write home about. He ushered Cassie into their seats high above the rink, replete with the sensory onslaught of bright lights, colorfully dressed people, and incessant noise. The hum of pre-game excitement brought back his college days with a rush. He sometimes missed the social interactions college life had provided. Life in Chatham was definitely on another plane, and he realized he needed this once in a while. He glanced at Cassie
, afraid she would be overwhelmed, but she seemed as delighted with it all as he. Her eyes were bright as she looked around her, and when she met his glance, she gave him a big grin.
The two hockey teams skated out onto the ice, and the crowd roared. Dartmouth students began to chant as the players skated their warm-up routines. Cassie gave an excited little wiggle in her seat, and Grant laughed. He had made the right decision.
Both teams skated reasonably well, and at the half the score was two to two. Cassie was fascinated by the Zamboni that came out to resurface the ice between periods and insisted on watching it travel in its ever-tightening circles before she would leave her seat. When it was finished, they walked the upper deck of the arena to stretch their legs, then returned for the second half of the game. Dartmouth lost, three to two, but it didn’t really matter to them. The action had been fast and the crowd lively. When they went back out into the cold January night, Grant felt invigorated and well-entertained. Cassie held onto him as they walked the icy parking lot, and he smiled at the feel of her arm in his. Back at the Dayton farm, she had an apple pie waiting for their return.
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