The River Valley Series

by Tess Thompson

  The question surprised her. “I was teasing. I’m not used to people talking so freely about God as if He really exists. My friends in Seattle never talk about this kind of thing—they’re too busy being smart.”

  “I remember that from my Nashville days.” He cocked his head, serious now. “Really, what would you ask God if you could?”

  She spoke quietly. “Why does he hate me?”

  His eyes filled with tears. “Lee.” He reached for her hand but she withdrew it from the table’s surface, resting it on her lap. They sat like that for a few moments, the weight of her comment between them. She stared at the salsa bowl, empty except for flecks of cilantro and spices stuck to the insides of the curved ceramic. “Lee,” he repeated her name, this time so tenderly that she lifted her face to look at him. “God doesn’t hate you and both He and I wish we could take away your pain.”

  She felt the tears start and reached for his hand. “I’m sorry. I’m a terrible date.”

  “No, you’re perfect.”

  “Thank you. Thank you for taking me out.” She pulled her hand away and fiddled with her hair, suddenly self-conscious. “You a recovering Catholic then or you still with the church?”

  He smiled. “Recovered. The Catholic Church is not for the free spirited. Oh, I shudder when I think what my mother would think if she heard me say that. She’d yell at me in rapid Spanish. She might even try to beat me with a stick.” He paused and they both chuckled, the tension gone. He twisted in the booth, one of his feet brushing against her crossed ankles. A shot of energy ran through her. “As a kid I kept looking for God in the midst of all that ritual but found him inside my own heart after my brother died.”

  “I’d think that would make you doubt God, not get closer to him.”

  “I hit so low the only thing I could find was God, way down deep inside me.” He blinked and ran his hand through his hair. “Am I scaring you off with all this religious talk?” He held his lip between his thumb and his index finger, studied a chip and said under his breath, “That’s part of my problem with women.”

  “You talk too much?”

  His brown eyes were sincere. “Yeah and about all the wrong things.”

  Maria set steaming plates of enchiladas, tamales, and refried beans on the table. “Enjoy, mi amor.” She patted Tommy’s shoulder and he rested the side of his head for the briefest of moments on her hand, the familiarity between them of people who’ve known and loved each other for a lifetime. Lee felt a rush of envy and like an outsider. She ate a small bite of enchilada, detecting a slight smoky flavor from the sauce. “Delicious.”

  “Best Mexican you’ll ever have,” he said.

  They ate in silence for a few minutes and Lee was surprised to see Tommy’s meal almost gone when she looked up from her plate. She put down her fork, her appetite suddenly replaced with the familiar guilty feeling in the pit of her stomach. How could she be enjoying herself this much?

  As if he read her thoughts, he said softly, “It’s just dinner.”

  “I know,” she said.

  He said, “After my first divorce—”

  She interrupted, “First divorce?”

  “Uh, yeah. I’ve been married twice. I mentioned that earlier.”

  “Yes, I guess you did. It just didn't sink in until you said it again.” She sat with this knowledge for a moment. What kind of man married twice? A good one with either bad luck or terrible taste in women or both? “Two? Really?”

  He raised an eyebrow and smiled. “Right. Two. What can I say? I'm an eternal optimist.”

  “Two. Well, better than three, I suppose.” After all, who was she to pass judgment, given everything? Strangely, it made him more appealing. Maybe she wasn’t the only one with some history. She felt relieved. Two divorces was a kind of failure that he must feel deeply. He wasn’t perfect after all and he might understand how another person was flawed, how they might have a trunk full of baggage. Yes, she thought, I could live with that. But then she remembered she had a cold-blooded killer looking for her. Not exactly the same, she thought, as two benign ex-wives. She wasn’t free to fall in love with this man. She knew she should tell him the truth before it was too late. But she remained silent, pushing aside the thoughts.

  Tommy was looking at her now, trying to read whether his past was some kind of stop sign or not. She went on, casually, trying to put him at ease. “Have you dated much since your last divorce?”

  “I don’t think I should answer that.”

  She laughed. “Oh, God, how many girlfriends has it been? A dozen? Two dozen?”

  His face was somber. “This is my first serious date since my second divorce.”

  She felt a shot of ice go through her. “That’s impossible. I see how the women look at you.”

  He cleared his throat. “Look, I’m not a saint. There have been a few women I’ve spent time with over the years, so to speak, in a casual way. But they knew the score going in—nothing serious. I learned a lot from my marriages but they were so difficult to get over I haven’t wanted to risk getting my heart broken again.” He paused and she could see him weighing whether or not to say it. “Until now.”

  She changed the subject, fast. “Tell me about your marriages. What happened?”

  The first marriage was to Sherri, the piano player in his band when he was just out of college. She was this willow branch of a girl, tall, pale blond, with long fingers that whipped up and down the piano keyboard with such grace that it mesmerized him. But there was this part of her that craved attention from other men. He wanted to extinguish it by making her belong to him and talked her into getting married. It was a mistake to try and cage something that wanted to be free, but he was young, romantic, in love. She had this need to be desired by men as a validation that she was worth something, combined with a compulsive attraction towards older men. All of which made him worried all the time that she would cheat on him. He was suspicious and jealous, never able to relax into the relationship because of it. He was only happy at the end of the night when she was tucked next to him on their lumpy mattress in their cramped apartment. He knew in those moments that she was his for at least the next seven hours.

  One day after his afternoon shift at a coffee house, he came home early. He opened the door as quietly as he could in case she was napping. Their band played late into the night and she was pale all the time, like she was tired and malnourished. He worried about her and wished he made enough money so that she wouldn’t have to work at the diner in the mornings as a waitress. For all these reasons he tiptoed over the hallway’s musty green carpet to their front door and made sure his keys didn’t rattle and twisted the doorknob so it wouldn’t make a clicking sound when he closed it. So he didn’t actually see them, he heard them. There was a soft moan, one he knew like it was eternally etched into his heart, and the creak of the bedsprings, then the man’s voice.

  The voice belonged to their next door neighbor, who was fifty if he was a day. Tommy stood rooted in the doorway, unable to move or think. After a moment he turned and walked out the door, as soundlessly as he entered. He sat in his ’82 blue Honda Civic, watching the window of their bedroom. After a while, the curtains moved and he saw her open the window a crack and then move away from view. After a few seconds she stepped back into the frame of the window and looked towards his car. She flinched when she saw him sitting in his car, a small movement illustrating guilt. Then he saw her understand that he knew. She stood in the window for a long moment as if considering what to do next and then she turned, disappearing from sight. A few minutes later the door to the apartment building opened and she came out with his light blue suitcase, her mouth set and determined. She walked to his car, opening the passenger door with her long beautiful fingers and then shoved the suitcase onto the floor mat over the coffee stain from her spilled coffee cup months before. She said, “You can get the rest of your stuff later. I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be married. I’m too young and the way you are, well, it
makes me feel like I’m suffocating.”

  He concluded his story by saying, “It took me eight years before I was willing to try again.”

  Lee pushed her plate aside and wiped her mouth with the napkin. “But you did.”

  “I did. Blindly, too. Without reserve.” He was twenty-nine the year he met Heather, and thirty when they were married. She was the daughter of a Dallas doctor, a debutante, with an art history degree and a job in a modern art gallery in Nashville. She was spoiled but intelligent, feisty, funny, the life of every party. Her father threw them a huge wedding, the kind that is written about in the society section of the newspaper. He remembered standing in one of the upstairs bedrooms of her parents’ palatial Dallas home before the ceremony, wondering if this was the right thing. He was a poor musician, still trying to make it as a singer, and she was the daughter of sophisticated, white Texans. Heather’s mother watched him and he imagined her calculating how dark their children would be once he broke into their blond, blue-eyed gene pool. He knew she hated him and wondered if that hatred would spill over into their marriage. He worried that one day Heather might wake up and see his dark skin, his depleted bank account, and his crazy loud Mexican family as a liability instead of a quirky, interesting novelty. But as he stood that day looking into the garden of her parents’ house, he couldn’t imagine she could ever change and he married her because he loved her. He quit the band and went back to school to become an EMT. He got a job with the fire department and they decided to try for a baby. They tried and tried, and she did change, with each day that passed without a pregnancy. She got this hard quality, fed by her obsession, taking her temperature twice a day and plotting ovulation, calling him at work to tell him to come home, that it was time to make a baby. Their intimate life became more and more forced and he began to feel depressed and isolated. He spent more time away from their home, away from her, because he could see how she watched him, blaming him for their lack of children. After a year she insisted he get tested and it turned out it was him, just as she suspected. The doctor thought it might have something to do with the pesticides when he was a child, but really they couldn’t know why. They had been married for four years and although she said she didn’t blame him, it all fell apart after that. They lived together like hostile roommates for another year. He could feel her seething with anger and blame, hating him for who he was, an immigrant’s son poisoned by a rich man’s orchards. He started going to therapy. He tried to get her to go with him but she wouldn’t, saying no one in her family was ever crazy and that she didn’t need to be cross-examined by some shrink. He tried to explain to her that the therapist wasn’t an attorney and that they help you work through issues and it wasn’t about being crazy or not. But she was gone, the fun-loving open girl he married. After another year he left. They were divorced six months later. Six months after that she married the young, blond doctor at her father’s practice. He heard they had four children now.

  Lee shifted in her seat, played with her knife, shook her head. “I’m sorry. I mean, about the baby thing.”

  “It’s been difficult, thinking I won’t get to know what it feels like to be a father. My former shrink would probably say that’s why I have this compulsion to help the kids in town. Y’know, fulfilling some kind of fatherly need.”

  “Doesn’t matter if that’s the case. You’re still doing a lot of good. When I was a kid, my mother was, well you know. It was the art department at school that saved me.”

  He gazed at her for a moment. “May I ask you something?”

  “As long as I don’t have to answer if I don’t want to.”

  “Fair enough. Were you happy with your husband?”

  She avoided his eyes by studying the Mexican print of a cross between a row of cactuses. “I didn’t think much about it. Happy, not happy, what does that really mean? I was committed. We had a shared vision about the kind of life we wanted.”

  “Vision?”

  “Dan was obsessed with this mantra, ‘Millionaire by Thirty,’ and we made a lot of decisions around that idea.”

  “Is that what you wanted, too?”

  Her face was damp with perspiration. “Honestly, I don’t even know. I was afraid to spend my life in poverty. I craved security, stability, all the things I needed as a kid and didn’t get.” She picked up the salsa bottle and rubbed her fingers over the ridges on the glass. “I was lonely a lot because he worked all the time. We weren’t close like I imagined we should be but we never fought. He was always nice to me, generous, respectful. There was love but there was also a large distance between us. Looking back I see how disconnected we were and how willing I was to accept things the way they were without asking for more.”

  “Why didn’t you?” he asked her, his eyes probing but his voice gentle.

  “I didn’t know how, which he interpreted as remote, unemotional. But it’s not the case and I always thought I’d have time to tell him, later. I didn’t know there would be no later.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She put down the salsa bottle. “There was no passion between us and I longed for that.”

  He ran his fingers up the inside of her arm. “I find it hard to believe a man could keep his hands off you given half the chance.”

  Her arm tingled with goose bumps. “In the beginning he worked hard at that part of our relationship but after a while he gave up on me.”

  He shook his head, grasping her arm in his hand. “Give me half a chance and I’ll show you how good it can be.”

  “I might disappoint you.”

  “No way.”

  “All the stuff you went through, did it make you this way?”

  “What way is that?”

  “So comfortable with yourself.”

  “I know what I want. I know exactly who I am. That’s what you get when you’ve lived and loved as deeply as I have. That’s the prize.” He took a gulp of wine. “I don’t want you to think I’m a stalker or anything but I saw you the morning before I met you at the restaurant.”

  “Let me guess, was I wandering the streets looking for a job?”

  “No, you were coming out of the grocery store and you had on this lime green pea coat and tall black boots. There was a little girl giving away puppies and you leaned over to pet them, so graceful, the way you moved, and I could see the profile of your face as you held one of them and I can’t explain it, because it’s never happened to me before, but I sensed you on another level than just what I could see with my eyes. I thought, the man that’s with that beautiful creature is the luckiest man on the planet. And then there you were that afternoon at the restaurant, beautiful even soaking wet, and I couldn’t believe my luck that you didn’t wear a ring.

  “Then we got the call about your fire and finding you sick and scared and pregnant and, I don’t know, I guess I thought it might be fate.”

  “Fate?”

  “I know. Everything logical says to give you time, but this feeling of urgency just keeps poking at me, like it has to be now or it will never be.”

  She stared at him. “You don’t know me.”

  “I know you have a secret. I know it’s something that scares the hell out of you because you have the look of a hunted animal. And I know you should tell me what it is so I can fix it and we can live happily ever after.”

  She smiled. “You’re a lunatic.”

  He shrugged his shoulders, sighing without a hint of apology. “I know.”

  * * *

  On the way home they were quiet, listening to an old Emmylou Harris CD Lee remembered from her childhood. When they reached River Valley she should have insisted he drop her at her home, she knew that. Instead, she kept silent when he passed the turnoff for her driveway, closing her eyes and enjoying the rhythm of the car over the bumpy road and the lyrics of the song. “I would walk all the way from Boulder to Birmingham, just to see you, to see your face.”

  Inside his house, she sat on the couch, listening to his movements from the ki
tchen, the opening and closing of a cupboard, the whistle of his tea kettle, and the clank of a cup and saucer. He came into the room carrying a tray. “Just tell me I haven’t scared you off.” He sighed, put the tray on the coffee table, and ran his hand through his hair, looking like a worried puppy.

  Right then she wanted to tell him about DeAngelo, how it hung over her and affected everything she did and thought but instead she motioned for him to sit with her. She brought his hand to her face and breathed in his skin, salty and clean. She played with the calluses on the tips of his fingers and pictured them moving on the neck of his guitar and then imagined them running along her skin. “I can’t commit to anything. I’m leaving town as soon as I get on my feet.”

  “Alone? With a baby?”

  “I’ve been alone all my life.”

  “I see that but everyone needs help at some point.”

  “Last time I trusted someone, look where it got me. It’s best to rely on yourself.”

  “Like I said, I was born an optimist and I aim to change your mind.” He smiled, with an inkling of sadness around his eyes, and kissed her, long and hard, until they were breathless and pressing into one another like crazed teenagers. He looked into her eyes, frightening her with his intensity, and she moved her eyes to his mouth, wondering what and how much he saw when he gazed at her that way. “Stay with me tonight,” he said. She nodded, yes.

  He pulled her from the couch and led her to his bedroom. The bed was a four poster king, elevated from the floor at least four feet and she wondered how she could get in it without looking like a clumsy ox. He lit two candles on the bedside tables, turned off the lamp, and joined her in the middle of the room. “I want to be able to see you,” he said. He unzipped her dress and it fell to the floor around her feet. He ran his hands along the skin of her arms, gazing at her body, and she stiffened, inert with fear, unable to step out of the discarded dress, naked and vulnerable.

  “Have I scared you?”

  “I was married for a long time.”

  “We can stop right now and have tea.”