Maybe his father knew he was lying, but Pop didn’t press the issue. He was grateful for that. In fact, Pop hadn’t mentioned the girl again.
Not that Fender forgot about her. He could close his eyes and see her on that hillside—the green eyes wet with tears, the bewildered look, the long reddish-blond hair—all of it would come back to him. Then he’d shrug it off, because it reminded him that he’d turned so abruptly and headed for the car. In the middle of a funeral, no less. To him it was yet another sign that he was morally bankrupt and probably going to hell.
Because his train of thought about the girl usually ended in a picture of him frying for all eternity, he tried not to think about her. Tried being the operative word. There was the ring, after all. Every night he passed the ring box on his dresser as he went to brush his teeth. Some nights he’d open the box just to check that the ring was still in there. And it would be, the pear-shaped diamond reflecting up at him like a cat’s eye in a dim room, sparkling.
After some months, as the weather turned cool, it was easier to walk past without picking it up. But it was still there, and it still summoned the vision of that lovely young woman, dress fluttering in the breeze, standing under the burden of her loss.
A realization struck him one night in bed, and the force of it sat him straight up out of a deepening sleep. As he’d been dozing, the sickening pop of metal and glass echoed somewhere in his memory, and he saw the flash of a slow ambulance pulling away. Then the dry, sunny day at the cemetery flickered in his drowsy mind. Hell or no hell, it was right to give her the ring. Find her and give her the ring. Even if his mad dash to the car the day of the funeral had doomed him, she gave him the resolve to find her. It certainly wasn’t his moral fortitude. No, it was the girl herself who asked him to do this for her. Or at least that’s how it seemed as he sat up in bed one night.
So, he did some detective work. He looked at Brad’s address on the sales slip, and then spent at least a good month talking himself into it first. In fact, all the soul-searching took Fender into the autumn months.
When he went to the house in November, there was a chill in the air. The tips of the mountains were already piled with snow, and flurries had been threatening the valley on a regular basis. The weather matched the house’s mood; it was quiet, and in the gathering dark of a fall evening, it seemed to hold no promise of the girl. Maybe she moved after he died, genius. She may never even have lived here with him. Fender hated his own stupidity sometimes.
He sat in his car for at least half an hour, contemplating the sad face of the house. He realized it was not within his power to get out of the car. He just watched the sycamore in front of the house let its leaves drift to the sidewalk.
He was still sitting there when the car pulled up—a little white hatchback. It zipped into a parking space in front of the house, just down from Fender’s car. The car’s lights winked off, and the driver’s door swung open. There was snow on the bumper and at the base of the windshield.
Fender held his breath. She got out of the car. It was the girlfriend, no question. The long hair was swept up in a sloppy ponytail, her slim form outlined in a black turtleneck and black leggings. From where he was parked and in the increasing darkness, he couldn’t see her face very well. Oh, but it was her. Then he realized he should breathe again and gasped noisily.
She began to take something out of the hatchback of her car. A clue to her life. What would it be?
She hauled out a pair of skis and a big black parka with the words Blackwolf Ski Resort across the back. She was a skier. Of course she is, Fender remembered. Brad had told him she was. He felt an idea forming in the crevices of his brain. A skier. Maybe he could track her down at the resort.
He’d been sitting here long enough. He started the car and turned in the seat to back out of the space. His elbow leaned against the steering wheel, and his heart jumped as the horn blared into the night. Sweet Jesus! Fender peeled out, flying past the little white car and its owner.
Ginger jumped when she heard the car’s horn. She turned around as its engine revved too high and the black sedan peeled out.
That was weird. She tucked her parka under her arm. She’d forgotten to turn on the porch light this morning, and it was getting dark quickly. The faded two-story house sat quietly under its bare sycamore tree. She still wasn’t sure how she felt about the house. Sometimes it was a familiar friend. Sometimes it just reminded her of Brad and what had happened to him. She’d resolved to worry about staying or selling it after some time had passed, at the very least after ski season was over.
Because she didn’t want to think about that now. Tonight she was going to start living her life again, no matter how hollow it made her feel.
After he’d hounded her for weeks, Ginger had decided she’d go out with Bode, a ski patroller. She said hello to him every day at the top of the Deercreek lift, where he manned the patrol lookout. He was a little younger than she was, but he was always very sweet and had been especially nice to her since the word got out about Brad. This season, when he saw her, he’d always ski along with her for a few feet and ask how things were going. This little routine had been going on for three weeks when, one day, Bode touched her elbow and stopped her from heading down the cat track.
“Ginger?”
“Yeah?” She looked into his scruffy face.
“Hey, can I ask you something?” He shifted on his skis and stabbed at the snow with the tip of his pole.
“Sure.” She looked past him at the eight-year-olds she was supposed to be teaching. They pummeled each other with snowballs. “You better ask me quick, though—the natives are getting restless.”
“Yeah, those little guys are cute. I think it’s great how you teach ’em to ski. Really great.” He smiled at her. They just stood there, smiling at each other.
“Bode, what were you going to ask me?”
“Huh? Oh, okay. Hey, I was thinking you could go out with me. We could go have pizza, or if you don’t like pizza we could have Chinese, and it would be casual—not serious ’cause I know how you felt about Brad and all—geez, I didn’t mean to remind you about that—but anyway, do you want to sometime?”
“I don’t know.”
“Hey, you know, you’re so pretty, and you seem so sad, and I thought you might deserve a nice night out.” He smiled really wide again, and his sun-streaked hair hung in front of his eyes.
The Ultimate boys. He’s just like one of the Ultimate Frisbee boys in the park during the summer. “That sounds good. When do you want to go?” Ginger breathed in deeply.
So, now she was hustling into her house to get ready for a date. They were going to Peking, the Chinese restaurant downtown, and she was terrified. A couple times today, as she’d gotten off Deercreek lift, she’d thought about canceling. It was too soon. Brad would’ve thought it was too soon.
But then she’d seen Bode, and it seemed like it wasn’t the worst idea in the world. He’d been tossing pistachios into another patroller’s mouth in front of the patrol shack. That’d reminded her again of the Frisbee boys. Some part of her thought it might not be too bad to go.
She pulled on her jeans and tried to ignore the terrible feeling clutching at her heart. She felt as if she were drifting. No routine, no regular way to handle this. She’d relied on familiarity, patterns, to keep her life on track. A date with another person had never been part of the routine while Brad was…Oh, Brad. She blew off the tight feeling in her chest. Screw this. I’ve got to go out, and that’s it. It’s time to be alive again.
A car pulled up in the drive. It was Bode. She grabbed her keys and got the hell out of the gloomy house.
“I’m a snake.” Bode announced sixty-eight minutes later as they dug into the General’s chicken. Ginger paused mid-chew. Had she misheard him?
“What did you say?”
He swallowed a very full bite. “I’m a snake.”
She wondered if she was supposed to protest. He’d seemed nice enough
this evening. “Okay…”
“What are you?” He smiled at her and stabbed his chopsticks into a big pile of lo mein.
“Excuse me?”
He shook his head. “You have no idea what I’m talking about. Chinese zodiac. What sign are you?” He pointed a chopstick at the placemat on the table, the animals of the Chinese zodiac pictured in an illustrated wheel.
She took a minute and looked. “Dragon.”
“That’s cooler than a snake. I sound like I’m not a good guy.” He chewed and thought about it for a minute.
“Are you?” Ginger wondered what he might say.
Bode had already moved on. “Am I what?”
She smiled. Frisbee boy. “Nothing. You’re pretty quick with the chopsticks.”
He nodded and launched into a story, waving his chopsticks around aimlessly. “I’m the youngest of three brothers. Back when I was little, if I wasn’t fast, I’d end up with no food on my plate.” He shoveled another mouthful of rice into his mouth with the sticks sideways. She listened and watched him eat and talk. He seemed only vaguely aware that she was there. He’d probably talk and eat like this with or without someone across the table.
Snake or no, he was definitely entertaining.
Three hours passed with a lot less pain than Ginger had expected. As Bode parked his car in front of her house, she felt pretty good. She’d even stopped checking the time on her phone after the main course. He’d kept the conversation moving through dinner, and they never once touched on the subject of Brad.
“Do you want to come in for a second?” She heard it come out of her mouth.
After some glasses of red wine in the living room, Ginger found herself on the couch with Bode. Now he was definitely paying attention to her. Definitely knew she was there. Things felt increasingly intimate. The conversation had stalled, and he touched her arm. He rubbed her shoulder in light circles with his fingers. She tried to think of something funny or witty to say to distract him, or her, from the fact that he was working up to something.
Ginger could see where this was heading. She felt a twinge of dread.
He was still for a moment and looked into her eyes. “You’ve got a stray hair.” He brushed the hair off of her cheek. Then he leaned close to her and kissed her.
“You’re a really beautiful gal.” Bode rubbed her back. He said it again. “You’re so beautiful.”
If he kept talking, he was going to ruin it. Who says gal? She hated the word gal. The hair move was a little cheesy, too. Everything that came out of his mouth now sounded tired and well-practiced. He was a player—that’s what everyone on the mountain said. Maybe he really was a snake.
She couldn’t quiet her brain. How many women had he used these lines on? She started to feel a little claustrophobic.
At that moment, there was an awful shredding sound from the center of the room. It sounded like the seams being torn out of something.
“What the hell was that?” Bode sat up on the couch.
Ginger reached behind her and turned on the light. Zoë stood in the center of the rug with Bode’s red Patagonia parka in her teeth. The zipper had been torn completely out.
“Hey, dog! That’s my coat!” He leapt off the couch and tried to wrench the shreds out of Zoë’s mouth.
“God, I’m sorry. She’s being protective, I guess.” Ginger left off there.
“I think I’m going to go.”
“Okay.” Ginger didn’t put up much of a fight. It wasn’t time to try this yet.
Chapter Five
IN THE WEEKS AFTER his potentially humiliating experience on her street, Fender tried to forget the girlfriend. He hoped she hadn’t noticed the black car fly by her, but he knew it was unavoidable. Even he could smell burned rubber after the peel-out. How cool was that? So suave.
He still had the diamond. He didn’t have the guts to walk up to the door of her house and ring the doorbell. He kept trying to picture it: “Hi, you don’t know me, but I’ve held onto a ring your dead boyfriend bought from me three months ago, and I thought you might like it. Oh yeah, and I picked it up off the street after he got flattened out front of my store.” Yes, that would be truly the best introduction to a woman he’d ever make.
Actually, it’d probably just skip a lot of the steps Fender usually went through with a woman, before they got to the part where she slapped him or slammed the door on his toe and burned his underwear in a pile on the street. He never did seem to get along with women very well.
Maybe it was because he and Pop had lived alone for so long. After Fender’s mother had passed on, it was up to Pop to run the jewelry store and the house and make sure Fender didn’t end up in the penitentiary. Pop always said that considering the circumstances, he felt Fender had a halfway normal childhood. Fender didn’t know about normal. But then again, he figured he could have grown up with Ward and June, and his true warped self would have shone through (or turned up like a persistent fungus—it kind of depended on how Fender was appreciating his personality that day).
During Fender’s youth, Pop and he had spent lots of quality time over blue topazes and platinum settings in the store—and having heart to hearts on the way home from the police station.
Fender’s memories of the time right after Mom died were dim. Lots of tears, rooms too quiet, and sometimes Pop in the bedroom with the door closed and sounds of crying. Fender tried to be good, to stay out of the way and under the radar. But later, after he survived his grammar school years and emerged as a teen, Fender had found he just didn’t give a shit what other people thought. One night he got arrested for releasing the parking brakes on all the cars parked on Sherman Hill in the east end of town. That was pretty damn fun to watch: the cars slowly cruising, driverless, down to the bottom of the road, rolling right into the barrow pit at the end of the lane.
Another time, after he’d passed through that phase, Fender had tried to talk to Pop about his mom over a tray of amethysts set in fourteen-carat gold.
“Pop?”
“Yes, Sonny?”
“What did Mom love about me? Do you remember?”
Pop had stopped placing the rings in the tray and looked out the plate glass windows, staring at something far, far in the distance. “Your mom loved the future in you.”
“What do you mean?”
“She loved talking about what you were going to be like when you grew up, that’s all.” Pop made a snorting noise, pulled out a blue handkerchief, and blew his nose, hard.
Fender felt his hands go clammy. “We don’t have to talk about it anymore, Pop.”
Pop shook his head. “No, it’s fine, Sonny. She would’ve liked you here with me. I know that. She loved it when we had Kowalski re-do the lettering on the storefront to read ‘Barnes and Son’ when you were born. That made her year when we did that. She gave me a hard time about it, said I was ‘predetermining destiny,’ but she really loved the idea of it.” He cleared his throat and tucked his handkerchief back in his pants pocket. “And she’d love it that you’re learning about the business. Take these amethysts, for instance. If you grab a loop, I’ll show you why this one here is ten times the ring that other one is.”
And the moment was over, just like that.
Poor Pop. Fender looked back on his “wasted youth” and didn’t feel regret; he just felt sorry for his dad. Oh, to have a son who excelled in mediocrity, with a side of troublemaking. This was yet another reason to never have children; they might inherit his juvenile delinquency. And another reason not to get married. But Fender was constantly reminded why he despised marriage, regardless. Every time he’d craft a delicate setting with a pale, clear diamond, and it went on the hand of a crass, selfish gold digger, or some cheating, sweaty lout gave a necklace of blood red rubies to his unsuspecting, hard-working wife, Fender remembered how he felt about the sacred institution.
And so today, Fender stood behind the counter at the store, trying to decide which bar to end up at after he closed. Downtown was busy
with holiday shoppers, and Fender was worn out. Business was good, but it was tiring, actually selling jewelry instead of goofing off.
And then he saw it: an unmistakably huge frizz of blond-streaked hair. Oh, Jesus. Naomi. Jimmy’s Naomi. As in get-me-a-canary-diamond-or-I-will-tie-your-balls-in-a-knot Naomi. God, he’d called all over town to get a yellow diamond for ol’ Jimmy. Fender remembered the pained tone of Jimmy’s voice after he’d told the poor guy how much it’d cost to get the one he’d found in Portland. But Jimmy had spent the money, all in the name of love, marriage, and the American dream.
“Excuse me.”
The hair was hovering in front of him. Oh Lord, she said something. “Can I help you?”
“Do you remember me? I came in here with Jimmy.”
“Yes, I remember you. Naomi, wasn’t it?” Fender felt a headache coming on.
“Let me tell you what I’m here for, and you tell me if you can help me.”
“Okay.”
“How much is the ring worth?” She took it off her finger and chucked it on the counter. Fender cringed as it clattered against the glass of the display.
“Well, now, that’s not totally easy to say. It’s a custom ring, you know.”
“Look, just tell me what it’s worth. I want to know what Jimmy was willing to spend on his second wife. You know, the runner-up, the second-best choice, the consolation prize.” Here she sucked in her breath, like she was going to discuss some horrible atrocity. “His trophy wife.” Her voice was sour, like lemon squeezed into a weak drink.
You’re one hell of a trophy to win. “Well, Jimmy bought it as a gift. I don’t think he intended for you to know what it cost. It kind of spoils the sentiment, doesn’t it?”
“What it does is tighten his hold over me. That’s what my therapist says. She says no woman should be bought for a shiny piece of glass. She says Jimmy wants me to think I can be bought or sold like property, that he owns me. Like our wedding gave him power over me.”
The Jeweler Page 3
