Orchids and Stone

by Lisa Preston

  His face stayed impassive. “We can make do with just your truck until the Honda’s fixed. The guy said it might only be a week or two.”

  “Come on,” she said. “With four of us in the house for the weekend? How can we all go see your dad in the morning?” She pointed to the small space between them on the bench seat. Her little Toyota pickup had seatbelts for three. Stretching to four was claustrophobia-inducing. Given her loose tools, work gloves, and other equipment in the cab, it was cozy for the two of them when they were getting along.

  He looked away. “I guess one of us could stay home in the morning, miss seeing my pop. You or one of the kids. Or maybe we could all cram in here.”

  She parked at the car rental agency. “I want to rent a car. It will make the time while we’re waiting for yours to get fixed easier. It will make this weekend easier. I’ll pay for it. Look.” She pointed in the window of the business. “There’s no other customers in there so it will be a fast transaction. Come on.”

  She was out of her truck before he could argue more. He caught her at the rental agency’s door and opened it for her.

  Inside the business, the lone young woman behind the counter whispered into the phone that she had to go. Then she hung up and asked how she could help them.

  “We’d like to rent a car,” Daphne said. “I’d like to.”

  The young woman had red-streaked black hair and a nose piercing. She pulled a multipage form from underneath her countertop and clicked it onto a clipboard. “Okay, you just fill out this form, initial here, here, here, and here”—the woman checked various boxes on the form as she spoke—“then sign at the bottom. And I’ll need to see your ID and a major credit card. What kind of car did you want?” She pulled out several sets of car keys from a drawer and played through them, her long fingernails clicking like claws.

  Daphne blinked at the clerk, then placed her shiny new driver’s license on the counter. “If you don’t take checks, I’ll pay cash. I don’t have credit cards with me.”

  The clerk hesitated, her fingers still playing through sets of rental car keys. “I still need to see your credit card, even if you’re paying cash. We need the number for your deposit. A major credit card. Like Visa or MasterCard or American Express.”

  Turning her back to the clerk, Daphne faced Vic, glanced at his front pocket, where he kept his wallet, and gave him a meaningful look. “I don’t have a credit card right now. My wallet was stolen.”

  Behind her, the clerk repeated, “We don’t rent cars to someone without a major credit card.”

  “Vic, the bank’s closed already but I can draw three hundred out on my ATM. I can do it tomorrow and Sunday, too. I can give you nine hundred over the weekend, see? I will take care of the Honda, of my accident. Just use your credit card and rent us a car, please.”

  “Let’s go, Daph. I’m going to be late getting my kids. We don’t need another car. We can get by, make do.”

  She stared beyond him to the front of the office. Tourist posters adorned the walls and a large display of fliers offered various diversions for the visitor. Daphne kept her gaze trained in the middle ground between Vic and outside, on the display case. “I want this. I can’t do it. You can. So, do this for me and I’ll pay you back. Please?”

  There, if he didn’t comply, he’d be using his possession of credit cards against her loss, winning through attrition.

  He hooked his thumbs into his front pockets.

  They never argued like this. One always gave in soon enough. And they never did it in public. Daphne stiffened. “Vic, what’s the problem?”

  “You. You’re just fixing problems with money,” he said. A blush seeped across his neck and face even as he voiced his protest.

  “What you just said doesn’t even make sense.” She white-knuckled her own belt loops.

  He gave a tiny nod and stepped up to the counter, where the clerk eyed them as an interested spectator of their spat. Vic shrugged, as much to the clerk as to Daphne, and said, “I’m not the only one not making a lot of sense, am I?”

  His long-suffering attitude was more than Daphne could bear. She walked away and out the door.

  CHAPTER 18

  Outside the car rental agency, Daphne looked across the sidewalk at her truck and took five deep breaths. They were about a mile away from where she’d had the accident the day before. Inside, Vic was renting a car because she demanded he do so. She pushed back through the door, but avoided the service counter. Instead, she loitered at a display stand of traveler information. Wooden racks held dozens of tourist fliers. A smaller display occupied another wall, promoting local offerings. A bed and breakfast inn, an alpaca farm, blackberry preserves, a weekly community street fair. Another B&B. Daphne thought of a little bed and breakfast where she and Vic stayed on Lopez Island years ago, their first getaway together. It was before she’d met Jed and Josie, although of course she knew about them. Her fingers trailed over the cards.

  Fliers for island getaways and driving trips, including trips to Mount Baker, beckoned. Snowboarding! Skiing! Inland attractions beyond the Cascades called, too. See Apple Country! See a Bavarian village right here in Washington!

  She thought of her mother, taking a minibreak with Blanche. She wondered if her mother’s bridge partner and family were glad to have her mother along for the weekend, and she scrunched her shoulders, stifling regret and relief at having not succumbed to her mother’s pressure to go along.

  This guilt drove her back to looking at the fliers for a distraction. Pike Place Market. The Space Needle. Winery tours. More hotels, motels, and other places to stay. Local guest houses and vacation rentals, a place called the Rainier Court Vacation House.

  If she and Vic could get away together again—next weekend he wouldn’t have the kids—maybe they could figure things out. She watched him accept his credit card back from the clerk. Did he think they needed to figure things out? Probably not. He’d talked several times over the last winter about them going to the next level, whatever that meant. He’d been the one to suggest she move in years ago. He made do, he was happy. She knew it was her life alone that brought murk to mind, no matter the distraction she might want to blame on Jed and Josie and their hideous mother.

  I need to figure things out for myself.

  Should she go away? Alone? She pulled out a flier for a local spot, the Rainier Court Vacation House.

  “I happen to know that place is rented out,” the clerk called out to Daphne, while pointing to places on the contract for Vic to initial. “Someone rented it when they got their car here yesterday.”

  “Oh, I’m just …” Daphne waved the clerk off, mindlessly folding the flier in half, in quarters. Then she shrugged and pushed the card deep into her jeans pocket.

  If she wanted to escape Vic’s house to think, she could go to her mother’s house. She could go home.

  But then she’d have to look at Suzanne’s empty bed as she went to sleep.

  “See you at home?” Vic asked as he got into the white four-door rental. Daphne nodded and mused again on the nature of home. As soon as he said the word, she pictured his blue saltbox, Grazie, and noisy or silent kids on alternate weekends. She pictured herself and Vic making dinner together, sharing one plate, trading foot rubs on the couch.

  Daphne drove and thought about that home and how it had come to be hers.

  Jed and Josie were beautiful and interesting and scary. Sometimes they were so special and touching. And sometimes—conflicted, pulled children that they were—Daphne ached for their anger.

  When she first met the kids four years ago, the school year was starting for them. They hadn’t seen their father for weeks and weeks. They were huggy and smiley and exuded desire to please him. And so had come their ready acceptance of Daphne, who’d been equally ready to please Vic, reciprocating the kind and loving attention he showed her.

  Before Vic, she’d never dated a guy with kids. Now that she’d been with him in her late twenties and early thi
rties, seen friends have to figure out the stepparent thing, she realized the odds of such encumbrances increased with age. And she felt guilty for thinking of a boy and a girl as encumbrances. Not that she didn’t like them and love them, but they were victims of a nasty divorce, and Daphne had come to see that their past made all the difference in their present.

  She loved Vic, knew she was happier with him, more comfortable, than she’d ever been with any other man—not that there had been very many. There was the plumber, a guy who’d become a jerk and then got jerkier, showing his true colors, and she’d ended up deciding she would never date a guy associated with work again. There were a couple of men Thea had set her up with, educated men with plans. Men who smoked and talked and talked and found her lacking when she didn’t know or care about international politics. There was the guy she’d met on her own, flirted with at a restaurant. He’d been rough and she dumped him hard within a week. There hadn’t been another man with children, though.

  Thea had told her many horror stories of dating divorced men, dealing with the kid thing. Daphne’s first months with Vic were kid-free because Jed and Josie were away at their maternal grandparents’ for the summer, but they were in Vic’s thoughts, his spoken memories, his wishes. His obvious concern and love for his children intrigued Daphne, no matter how Thea warned that a man with kids was not worth the extra effort.

  And when she’d gotten her first chance with them, when they were seven and eight years old, they were still awed by their father living in what had been their G-Pop’s house, instead of with them and their mother. They were quiet and friendly and responsive, and they thought Daphne was pretty cool. Daphne thought they were pretty cool kids, too.

  And Vic’s ex had hated it. Cassandra reached into the kids’ minds with tentacles of hate. In response, Vic had put his arm around Daphne and told her again and again how he loved her, how special she was. Daphne wanted to believe him when he said they could figure it out, work it out.

  He was the first man who listened to her and asked the right questions, made the right murmurs when she talked about her family. She still felt shame that it took her so long to tell him all she knew and feared about the past. She still felt honored that he told her so early in their relationship about realizing—after a blood bank donation—that he was not his son’s father. That he’d set aside concerns about paternity because fatherhood was what he felt. He loved and cared for his children like a father, and this defined him.

  Cassandra had cheated on Vic just like Ross Bouchard—and Lindsay Wallach—had cheated on Suzanne. Daphne grimaced at the thought, comforted by reassuring recent memories of how Vic had handled their encounter with Lindsay.

  Sometimes Vic could drive her nuts or say the wrong thing, but what balanced that was knowing she wholly returned the favor. By now, she knew they could be a couple for the rest of their lives. But for Cassandra’s manipulations, she’d seen no reason for them to ever stop.

  And by now, she’d driven toward downtown instead of going straight home, ruminating all the while.

  Pike Street ended in the quintessential Seattle indoor-outdoor market, and she pulled into a rare parking space just as someone in a Hummer pulled out. The fish throwers were hollering to each other, tossing whole salmon. Teeming crowds circulated, parting to pass around street musicians and buskers.

  At the farmers’ market section, where bins of every produce imaginable offered color and shape, Daphne bought a phallic-looking butternut squash, with a long, thick stalk and bulbous end. Vic had never outgrown his childhood lech for baked squash, and Daphne, never much of a cook, had found it a challenge to try to get there with him. He said hers was the best he’d had, better than his long-dead mother’s.

  She bought some chocolates for herself and Jed, some jicama for Josie, who was of late on a calorie-conscious kick, and she dawdled over a display of herbal remedies intended to cure arthritis and joint pain. What in the world would they do with Grazie?

  What would she do with herself?

  “Home, I guess,” she said aloud, and smiled when she didn’t draw strange looks from passersby for talking to herself.

  Two strange cars hogged the driveway at Vic’s house, forcing Daphne to park on the street. After a moment, she remembered the white four-door was Vic’s rental car, but the other was different, at once sporty and luxurious. A woman with frizzy hair sat in the front passenger seat, looking at the house’s open front door. Daphne paused at the car. The woman stared ahead, refusing eye contact, so Daphne continued on, a shopping bag in each hand.

  On the brick steps, a sleeping bag and loose pile of books blocked the entrance. A voice that didn’t belong there bounced inside, a woman’s voice.

  Daphne felt herself wilt. Cassandra was inside the entryway, bursting out of a white camisole and black Capri pants. She shouted to the kids about the white car outside and whether their father had bought a new one, like she suspected, or if it was a rental, like he claimed.

  “We don’t know,” Jed said, his voice plaintive.

  “Don’t keep secrets from me. No matter what he tells you.” The woman’s scorn was for everybody.

  “Mom! We’re not keeping secrets. Not from you.” Josie’s frustration gleamed from every pore of her red face.

  “Don’t take that tone with me, missy. Just because you get away with murder over here where there are no rules. I’m your mother and you will respect me.”

  “I do, I do, Mommy.” The girl’s voice sounded teary with stress.

  Hamstrung, Daphne thought, as Josie pled. Those poor, good kids were hamstrung by their mother.

  It would always be this way.

  She stopped Vic as he stepped outside to retrieve the books and sleeping bag. “Ahem.”

  “Daph, hi.” His face brightened from the impassive mask he wore in front of his ex.

  “I don’t like Cassandra inside.” They could tell she was in their kitchen now.

  “Me neither,” he whispered into her mouth as he kissed her. “If she stays more than a minute, I’ll push the fridge over on her.”

  “Fair enough.”

  She followed him inside, but he went down the hallway with Josie’s things. Daphne turned into the kitchen and came face-to-face with a woman who had four inches, thirty pounds, and piles of temperament on her.

  “Oh, look,” Cassandra said. “It’s my husband’s fiancée.” After a smirk and a beat, she added, “My ex-husband’s.”

  Daphne felt gates in her mind clang shut, decisions rendered about how the evening would go with Vic and whether or not she’d even stay tonight. Had Vic announced that they were engaged? If he had, could she legally kill him for the offense?

  She set her shopping bags down on the counter and stepped back to the front door, holding it open for Cassandra with a set smile.

  And Cassandra did return to the front door. She nodded to her friend in the car and raised her voice while pointing at Daphne.

  “Vic’s girlfriend.”

  Daphne knew Cassandra was making an announcement to neighbors and traffic passing by. She tried to think how best to deal, what to say and do, and she knew Vic’s mind churned the same muddy waters. Back when they first met and she’d asked about his ex, he’d told her the woman was unfailingly awful to him and he was determined not to treat his children’s mother the same way. He didn’t want the kids to see behavior so unworthy. Daphne loved his determination to take the high road and followed suit from the beginning.

  He came to her side and took her hand.

  And then Cassandra said, “Our divorce wasn’t even final when he shacked up.” She turned on the front threshold to face them. “And yesterday you blew off your daughter’s volleyball game.”

  “Daphne was going to go to Josie’s game,” Vic said, “but she was delayed. It almost never happens. It’s never happened with Daph. Again, I’m sorry I was late to get them this afternoon.”

  “Cassandra,” Daphne said, “we had a threatening phone call yes
terday.”

  “I don’t make threats.” She turned on Vic. “I told you. It was a promise. If you’re late again, if you don’t meet your commitments, you can expect things to change.”

  Vic made eye contact with Daphne, closed his eyes, and gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head. Daphne nodded then roused herself because Cassandra stepped past them to the kitchen. Now Daphne remembered the fat white purse she’d seen on the counter when she set down her grocery bags. In the kitchen, she decided Vic had one minute to get his ex out of the house. Emptying her grocery bags, Daphne smiled at him when she saw his hopeful appreciation of the produce.

  Cassandra eyed the vegetables too and gave Vic a wistful look. “I used to make you squash and eggplant. I made it right here for your dad, too.” She looked around the kitchen. “How’s Lloyd? Does he ask about me?”

  “You can go visit him,” Vic said. “You can take the kids to him, too.”

  Daphne smiled. They’d worked on this, on not getting baited into whatever Cassandra wanted to hash over.

  Four years ago, when Daphne met Jed, Josie, and the wicked ex for the first time, she thought she was ready. Vic had prepped her, warned her, given examples of the outrageous, skin-prickling comments Cassandra made.

  She’ll outright lie to the kids and start screaming if I contradict her. Tells them I don’t pay child support. She tells them wrong times to give me for pickups or teacher conferences. I’ve learned to barely talk in front of her and confirm everything. Believe me, Daph, it’s best not to engage her at all.

  Daphne had agreed with Vic, even advised him. Answer what you want, not whatever she demands. Be oblique. Without knowing from where she got her ideas, Daphne felt certain they’d work better than milk with a cat like Cassandra.

  The woman amazed Daphne, like watching a human train wreck that never finished, never released a final clang and let dust settle. The mental games became more sly, inventive, and unpredictable. And more, Daphne had seen how the woman’s venom seeped into her kids. The problem had increased, instead of becoming manageable. Hers was a poison with a cumulative effect.