by Ruthie Knox
Here’s why.
She wrapped her arms around her stomach and kicked the box hard enough to dent the side.
Whatever was in there, it couldn’t hold in this shapeless pain.
No explanation could make it go away.
CHAPTER TWO
Stanley cleared his throat.
“Cut,” he said.
“Right.” Ashley reached for the cards and pulled a stack off the top, setting it down to the right of the deck on the concrete picnic table. “Sorry.”
He put the pile back together and dealt. Ashley tried to refocus on the card game. Her mind was a wayward child today, constantly wandering off to find Roman. Dragging her gaze along with it like a bedraggled security blanket.
Stanley hadn’t said anything, but she knew he’d caught her straining for a better angle on the action over at the campsite. For a seventy-something guy, Stanley didn’t miss much.
She needed to stop looking.
A crow landed on top of the next table over. Stanley reached behind him into a bucket and tossed a handful of feed onto the ground. The crow hopped down to peck at it.
“One of your pets?”
“Broken wing,” he said. “Few years ago.”
Stanley was like the Dr. Doolittle of eastern Pennsylvania. Animals came to him, and in some mysterious, nonverbal fashion he figured out what they needed. She’d seen him feed owls, pet deer.
He was animal-like himself, actually—a great big bear of a man in a red flannel shirt, with a few days’ white stubble and the growly manner of someone who’d been disturbed in his hibernation.
Not toward Ashley, of course. He liked Ashley. But with other people, Stanley could be a bit of an ass, if he bothered to talk at all. At the campground, he cleared fallen limbs, cut firewood with a chain saw, fixed problems with the hookups, and performed dozens of other outdoor jobs. He had a bad hip from his stint in North Korea, but he didn’t let it sideline him, although he had been forced to give up his driver’s license several years ago. His brother, Michael, handled the office, the camp store, and any tasks that required the exchange of more than a few terse words with customers.
“You didn’t ante,” Stanley said.
“Oops.” She threw a matchstick into the middle of the table.
As he dealt the first three cards, her eyes drifted back to Roman kneeling beside the fire pit with Michael standing next to him. From twenty feet away, Ashley couldn’t hear what Michael was saying, but Roman had his head bowed, his attention focused on the stick between his palms and the wood board he’d balanced it in.
Michael looked up. Beamed. Waved at Ashley, then jogged over.
He was younger than Stanley, only a few years past retirement and easily the most ebullient person she’d ever met.
“Didja see this setup? I think he’s almost got it now. This is so cool. Never seen anybody do this before. You guys should come over and watch.”
Stanley grunted.
“Maybe in a little while,” Ashley said.
Roman had been working on the fire for five hours. Which was insane, but then, that was Roman. Single-minded to the point of insanity. He’d spent the first two hours whittling sticks. Dozens of sticks. Then another couple hours doing something mysterious with a board and a piece of string. Now he was just using the board and a pointed stick, twirling it between his palms. Michael was right—Roman seemed to have figured out his method.
He gave it his complete attention.
“I’m gonna grab a beer,” Michael said to Ashley. “You want one? Or a soda? I think we’ve got that soda from Catawissa you like. Black Cherry.”
“Sure.”
“Stan?” he asked.
“Beer.”
Michael bounced inside, headed for the refrigerator in the camp store.
Ashley looked toward the fire pit.
When Roman had come back from the shower, he’d been wearing a long-sleeved blue bug-repellent shirt, the sleeves rolled past his elbows to expose the black hair of his forearms. Beneath it, he had on a black lightweight wool T-shirt and stiff canvas pants with a hammer loop on one deep pocket.
All dressed up in his stiff, unfamiliar clothes, he ought to have looked like Camping Ken. It would be so much easier if she could see him that way. Never mind that it would be one more petty act to objectify him, ridicule him inside her head. Petty was okay sometimes, if the alternative was too frightening to look at straight on.
The alternative, in this case, was to admit that Roman looked like Roman no matter what he wore. Old-man pajama pants, bespoke suits, camping pants, workout clothes. Shirtless in jeans, sockless in his loafers, half-naked and all wet, smiling at her from the mud—Ashley always liked the way he looked. The way he moved, the way he talked, the way he was …
Stanley cleared his throat. Again.
Ashley turned her attention back to the cards and rubbed the embarrassment from her forehead. She was so far from having her mind in the game, she might as well have left it in North Carolina. Rolling around in the mud with Roman.
She managed to win a hand, though. Michael arrived with her soda, then jogged over to the fire pit, shouting something to Roman and carrying an extra can of beer for him.
She tried to focus on the cards. Her pile of matchsticks grew larger, which was good, because she’d nearly lost her whole stake during that spate of Roman-gazing.
She was staring blankly into the woods that surrounded the campground, listening to a truck rumble past in the direction of Centralia, when Stanley asked, “He your boyfriend?”
“Hmm?”
“The guy you’re with.”
“Oh. No. That would be—no.”
Stanley scratched his neck and looked at Roman. “What is he, black?”
“Um, I’m not sure. Maybe? He’s Cuban.”
“Thought Cubans were white.”
“The white ones are.”
Stanley grunted.
Ashley looked toward Roman again. He’d sat back on his heels, the toes of his lightweight hiking shoes bending where they met the ground. He held something cupped in his palm, and with his right hand he ground it into a fine powder between his fingertips.
How many times in his life had Roman had to answer that question—What are you, black?
She’d asked it, too. Where are you from? Just a slightly more genteel version of the same damn thing. As if the answer would sum him up somehow, make him comprehensible.
The truth was, she’d started getting to know Roman when he sat down in front of her with a bag full of sandwiches he wouldn’t let her eat. When he’d consumed them with deliberate care, wiped his fingers on a napkin, and walked away—and then sat in his car all night, making sure she stayed safe.
Roman had revealed himself when he put on mirrored sunglasses at seven o’clock on an overcast morning and rode through a hundred miles in silence, his posture so stiff that she’d worried about him.
He told her who he was when he did five hundred sit-ups. When he followed her to the pond and groaned at the grip of her mud-smeared fingers on his cock.
He showed his hand in fastidious silence, careful costumes, and the disciplined meanness he turned on himself.
“I guess he’s Afro-Cuban,” she said. “Mestizo, you know?”
“Mixed.”
“Everybody’s mixed, Stanley.”
He grunted again.
“Why does it matter?”
“Doesn’t.”
“Then why’d you ask?”
He looked at his cards. “Your move.”
Ashley had a pair of fours. “I fold.”
She shoved the pile of matches in his direction, and Stanley swept up the cards and began shuffling.
“Usually you’re like Michael,” he said. “Blabbing everything.”
It was true, she’d always blabbed to Stanley. When he’d started coming to Sunnyvale, she was fourteen and newly launched in the world, still adjusting to her grandmother and to the idea of happiness. She’d
blabbed at him all winter long, because he said so little. Because he was so different from her father, a politician who talked a lot but never meant any of the nice things—only the criticisms.
Stanley meant what he said. He let her talk. He didn’t judge.
Or if he did judge, he kept it to himself, which amounted to the same thing.
“Maybe I’m maturing,” she said.
He smiled at that and dealt the cards.
“You lose a tooth?” she asked.
“Need a new bridge.”
“Ah. Well, I need answers to a million questions.”
“You and me both, girlie.”
That made her smile, too. She threw four matches into the middle of the table, hoping three tens would beat whatever Stanley had.
He assessed her face and threw in six of his own matches.
She looked at the pile. Looked at her tens. “Fold.”
Stanley shook his head and swept all the cards and matchsticks toward himself.
“You’re running scared.”
He meant the cards, but she couldn’t deny the truth of the observation more generally. Not when she’d spent the past five hours quite deliberately not opening the boxes in the trailer.
Those boxes scared the crap out of her.
Even scarier, the way her eyes kept getting pulled back to Roman, as if he were the purpose of all this.
Her turn to shuffle. She eased the cards together, broke their backs, tapped them into a perfect rectangle. Again.
Again.
“Grandma sold Sunnyvale to Roman a few years ago,” she said. “I thought she was leaving it to me, but he’s going to knock it down and build a resort. I’m trying to make sure that doesn’t happen. Mitzi thinks he cheated Grandma. She thinks if I go through the boxes Grandma left me in the trailer, I might be able to find some evidence, a note or tax records or something.”
She was about to deal when Stanley said, “Cut.”
She set the deck in front of him. He cut it, and she took it up again and dealt three cards.
“What for?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you find out he cheated her, then what?”
“I save Sunnyvale.”
“And?”
“And I live there in the winter, like always. And you guys come down. Like always.”
“For how long?”
Forever.
That was her answer, but it was too childish to speak out loud. Stanley would be eighty years old soon, if he wasn’t already. There was no such thing as forever.
“I’m not sure,” she said lamely. “It’s home.”
“You know the place is a dump, right?”
“It’s not a dump. It just needs updating.”
Stanley chuckled. “You can update it, but it’ll still be a dump.”
“You guys come back every year. Why would you pay to stay at a dump?”
“Mike always complained.”
“He complained? About what? You live at a campground.”
“You don’t have to tell me that.”
“What do you want, a four-star meal?”
“I don’t. But Mike’s been getting brochures from those all-inclusive resort places. I think we’re going to try one in the Bahamas.”
“So you’re not coming back even if I save it?”
“Not this year.”
When she didn’t respond, he added, “We’ll be sorry to miss the company, though. You and Esther and them.”
She tossed her cards down, childish in her disappointment. “No matter what I do, it’s pointless.”
“No, it ain’t.”
“I thought I’d fix it up some. Attract new people, too. I mean, I know it won’t always be exactly the same. I know that. But I want to keep it the same for a while. In Grandma’s memory, you know? I think she’d like that.”
“Hmm.” He pointed at the pile of matchsticks. “Your bet.”
Ashley reluctantly picked up her cards and looked them over—red, black, clubs, diamonds. She tried to breathe. The matches were vibrating. Her leg, jiggling under the table.
“I can’t do this,” she said.
She wasn’t even sure what she meant.
At the fire pit, Michael whooped. Smoke swirled around Roman, whose palms rubbed back and forth on the stick, spinning it. Spinning. He bent sideways, low to the ground, and blew, squinting against the sting.
A flame flickered into being.
Without thinking, she was on her feet. She’d spilled her cards on the table, flipping a few of them faceup. Straining to see. Elated that he’d done it.
Stanley glanced at the fire. Then at her face.
“Thought I taught you to bluff better than that,” he said mildly.
The back of her neck went hot. “We’re not …”
He waved his hand at her. I don’t want to know.
She sat back down, and they returned to the game.
She lost. Lost again.
She was running out of matchsticks. And excuses.
“Did you know she’d sold?” she blurted.
He shook his head.
“Did you know she was sick again?”
He lifted his seamed face. “We weren’t that close.”
“I don’t understand it.”
“You should talk to Esther.”
Her grandmother’s other best friend, Esther, lived in Wisconsin. She was Mitzi’s opposite—grandmotherly where Mitzi was sleek and sexy, conservative where Mitzi was permissive. “You think she knows something?”
“If anybody does.”
The fire had grown a foot tall now, and Roman had left off feeding it tinder and started putting in chunks of wood as big as his wrist.
Their eyes met over the flames. She felt his hands on her, his fingers in her hair, his mouth at her breast, drawing up her desire and focusing it to a point.
She felt the impossibility of it.
Some people could breathe fire to life, but she wasn’t one of them.
Focused on the flames again, Roman smiled at something Michael said. In his triumph, he smiled his real smile, easy and bright.
Stanley reached across the table and covered her hand with his. “Susan wasn’t the type to hide things. If she felt like he’d cheated her, she’d have said.”
Ashley looked at his hand, crooked knuckle joints and liver spots, heavy and warm.
When he took it away, she picked up a match from the kitty and scraped it over the rough edge of the concrete tabletop. She watched the flame burn down until heat pinched her fingers, and then she shook it out.
“I have to look, though,” she said. “Just in case.”
CHAPTER THREE
When it got to be 5:30 and Ashley still hadn’t come out of the trailer—much less asked him what he wanted for dinner, shopped for the groceries she’d need to make the dinner, or cooked the dinner—Roman knocked on the door of the Airstream.
“Go away.” A layer of aluminum and plastic muffled her voice, but he could hear the wrongness in it.
The fire popped and crackled. It was 80 degrees out and starting to cool off. The sky was clear, the breeze just right.
Ashley Bowman was sitting in a trailer with the door closed and her new drapes blocking out all the light.
“Open up.”
“I’ll come out in a while.”
“What are you doing?”
“Just going through these boxes.”
“It doesn’t take all afternoon to go through a dozen boxes.”
A soft scraping sound, and then she flung the door open, nearly catching him in the nose. “It does when you take a lot of breaks to sob uncontrollably, okay?” Her eyes looked too small in her puffy face. “I’ll be fine tomorrow. I just need you to leave me alone for a while.”
Leave her alone. Exactly what he should do.
If Heberto were here, he would be working. Cut off from cell access, he’d head for a bar in the closest town, tune the wall-mounted TV t
o CNN, and commandeer a landline and the fax machine.
If Heberto were here, he would tell Roman that what Ashley Bowman did alone in that trailer for hours on end was none of Roman’s goddamn business. Not unless he could figure out a way to turn it to his advantage, make a profit on it.
And if Roman protested that he was worried about Ashley—that he’d been trying for two hours but he couldn’t stop worrying about her—Heberto would start talking about Cuba. Because everything was about Cuba for Heberto.
“The true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.” Che said that. Che was full of shit. Heberto would clip the word short, tongue to palate. Sheet. Fool of it.
The Revolution put my brother up against a wall and shot him on television. You think the man who pulled the trigger had his heart full of love?
Roman had heard a dozen variants of the speech. Heberto took it out, polished it. It always had the same moral.
It’s dog eat dog in this world.
Roman looked at his shoe. Somehow, it was on the step. He’d weighted his front foot, ready to push upward.
The thing was, he wasn’t sure he believed Heberto.
He wasn’t sure Cuba had anything much to do with him and Ashley.
So he climbed the next step, crowding her. With a sigh, she stepped back to let him inside.
The trailer looked like a bomb had gone off. He picked up a foam hat in the shape of a Viking helmet, complete with horns, and accidentally dislodged some Mardi Gras beads into the sink.
“There’s crap everywhere.”
“Aren’t you observant?”
“You don’t have to be snippy.”
“I do, actually. It’s my best hope of getting you to go away.”
“You think I’m afraid of a snippy woman?”
He’d have to introduce her to Carmen sometime. Wouldn’t that be a hoot.
“What are you afraid of?” she asked.
I’m afraid of the way it felt to bring that fire to life. This intense, percolating pressure that must have been hiding behind my heart, beneath my lungs—and suddenly the fire started, and it wanted out. It felt so fucking good to let it out. I think it might have been hope, and it was bigger than anything I’ve let myself feel in a long, long time.
I’m afraid of the fact that I made the fire because you asked me to, and of how badly I needed to see your face as soon as I’d made it happen.
