Beneath the Trees

by Laurel Saville

  Colden stalled. Every surface around her was packed with shiny, colorful, decorative, useless things. She ran her hand over a comforter and was shocked by its cold, shiny, slick surface. The item was completely misnamed, she thought—there was no comfort in that sort of bed covering. Everything she touched or picked up seemed both new and artificial. She couldn’t stop herself from making comparisons to her parents’ home, where almost everything she used had a backstory. They ate with silver that had attained a lovely, soft patina from a hundred years of use, starting with Dix’s grandmother. She read books and journals curled up on an oversize down sofa Dix’s father had bought and Sally had reupholstered with a muted-jade linen. The heavy, handmade pottery plates that Dix filled at mealtimes had been handmade by a friend of his mother’s. The Adirondack-style twig dining table and chairs had been made and gifted to Sally by a man who was once a kid she had helped through foster care. It occurred to her that almost everything at home was made or acquired by people she’d never met. The realization flooded her with sadness. She felt suddenly like the items that surrounded her in the store—new, callow, without substance or history.

  She walked up and down a few more aisles. Such a cacophony of colors, prints, patterns, choices. Who knew bath mats came in so many varieties? How was a window treatment different from a curtain? Trash cans with hands-free sensors? Really? Were placemats actually necessary? And the pillows! Where to begin with the options in shape, size, color, and promises for sound sleep, design sophistication, and delighted friends. She grabbed at one. It was small and plump, with a sunny starburst print. Colden tossed it in her cart. She plucked a set of towels in the same color and grabbed a matching shower curtain. She knew her cupboards were bare. Everything in this store came packed in sets of a minimum of four. She never had guests. But she could be clumsy in the domestic sphere, she reminded herself. She’d probably break a dish or two over time. She put a box of plain white dishes in her cart and headed for the checkout. This was enough. More than enough. Probably too much. Certainly, more than she really required.

  She left the mall feeling wrung out but made herself stop at a grocery store and pick up some fresh fruits and vegetables, a loaf of artisan bread, a wedge of expensive cheese. She thought she’d get some cereal, but when she got to the aisle, she was overwhelmed by the quantity and variety. There were seven kinds of raisin bran alone.

  Colden went back to the condo; put the groceries away; hung the stiff, creased shower curtain and the vaguely plastic-smelling towels; and then set the pillow on the sofa, where it did not make the cheerful statement she had hoped, but looked merely lost and insubstantial.

  “Why am I such a freak?” she wondered aloud.

  Well, because, she reminded herself, she got most of her clothes at a place that sold guns, ammo, and camping gear. She picked up sandwiches, frozen food, and granola bars at the same place she gassed up her truck. She didn’t cook or watch television or keep up on pop culture. She hadn’t been to a movie theater in more than a year. Most of her meals were prepared by her dad from things he had grown or killed himself. She’d spent more nights in a tent or lean-to than in the condo.

  I’m basically feral, she told herself.

  Colden stripped out of her clothes, went to the bathroom, and took a scalding shower. She dried herself off with her thick but strangely nonabsorptive towels. She wrapped up her hair and again stared at her face in the mirror. A smattering of freckles was permanently printed over her nose and cheekbones. Her eyes were the color of faded denim. There were chapped flakes of skin on her lips. Creases were beginning to assert themselves at the corner of her eyes. She wondered if she saw this exact face on someone else, would she think the woman was pretty? Liam had told her she was lovely, right before he gripped her face in his work-roughened hands and opened his mouth against hers. That compliment didn’t count for much, anymore. She saw herself as run-down and washed out, an oft-laundered shirt left out on the line in the sun and rain.

  The image of a snapshot rose before her. Miranda, her mother, the woman who birthed her, in the garden, dirt on her cheek, gloves, and knees, smiling at the camera. She couldn’t recall where she’d seen it. But looking at her own face now, she saw something from that photo asserting herself there. Her mother’s life had been cut so short. Yet, her mother had experienced so much before she died. Most of it tragedy, but also a huge love and a baby. Things that seemed exotic and unknowable to Colden.

  She shook off the uncomfortable feelings and found a pair of jeans she’d left in the apartment the last time she’d been here. She’d been wondering where this favorite, comfortable, full-of-memories pair had been. She stuffed her hands into the bunched-up pockets and found a wad of something. It was a business card. Printed on high-quality stock, she saw the name but didn’t recognize it. Andrew Accorsi, Esq. Ah yes, Drew. His face at the bar came back to her. He’d asked her to call him. That had been weeks ago. Actually, months. Months since that night with Liam, the night Drew had said he’d needed her help. She flushed with embarrassment. She’d been dismissive of him at the bar. She’d blown him off and forgotten him.

  I drank too much that night, she chastised herself. If I hadn’t had all those beers, I might not have been with Liam, I might not have been embarrassed by Larry, I might not have forgotten Drew.

  Liam had been the one pouring. Now, she had another reason to be mad at him.

  The card had no address, just the name, his credential, and a phone number with a New York City prefix. Maybe there was one thing about that night she could try to repair. She tapped the numbers into her phone.

  “This is Drew.”

  His voice was firm, deep, warm, and open. Colden was surprised into silence. She hadn’t remembered that. She’d also been sort of hoping for voice mail.

  “Hello?” he said, his tone encouraging and more bemused than irritated.

  “Drew. Sorry. It’s Colden. Colden McComb. We met . . .”

  “Colden!”

  His voice was a blast of blatant enthusiasm. She was caught off guard.

  “Um, yeah,” she stammered. “Hi. Sorry it took me so long to call. I lost your card. Just rediscovered it.”

  “Where are you?”

  Colden had forgotten how abrupt, how imperative, he was.

  “Where am I? You mean right now? I’m in Albany.”

  “Great. Me too. Let’s have dinner.”

  “Dinner?”

  “Yes, Colden. Dinner. Tonight. Eat. It’s what people do,” he said.

  Colden was silent. She didn’t know how to respond. How she wanted to respond. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had dinner with a man, just the two of them. She wondered if she’d remember how it was done.

  “Do you have other plans?” he asked.

  Drew seemed to always be teasing and nudging her. Which always illuminated the otherwise opaque defenses she had for keeping people at a distance. Defenses she almost never otherwise realized she had.

  “Just, you know, work,” she hedged.

  “Blow it off until tomorrow.”

  “I thought you were in the city. Don’t you live down there?” Colden asked, stalling.

  “Not anymore. I just bought a little row house in Albany. It’s a wreck. I must have been out of my mind. Starting to fix it up.”

  Colden tried to imagine Drew in work boots and a tool belt. It seemed implausible.

  “I’ve got no working kitchen,” he said. “So, come downtown and have dinner with me. There’s a great little Italian place just around the corner. Now that I have your number, I’ll text you the address.”

  He hung up. A moment later, her phone pinged. A restaurant name, an address, a time. And a silly smiley face. Colden wasn’t used to people being so definitive, so impossible to say “no” to. But there it was. She was going to dinner with Drew.

  The restaurant was tucked into a heavily treed historic district, on the ground floor of a residential building, a few blocks away from the coffe
e shop where they first met. Stepping through the front door felt like entering someone’s living room—because that is exactly what it once had been. She’d wanted to get there first, to get herself settled and watch Drew come in, but he was already there, waving at her from a small table in the far corner of the dining room. There were only seven or eight other, white-tableclothed tables, all full, crammed into a compact space, forcing Colden to thread her way awkwardly through the chairs, bumping and apologizing to people as she went, aware that Drew’s eyes were on her the whole time. Most of the men she passed wore button-down shirts, still stiff from dry cleaning, with crisp creases where their arms bent. The women were wearing dresses and pumps or boots with heels, or pantsuits, with lipstick and hair that had been styled and colored. Colden was wearing jeans and a button-down shirt with a light sweater. It wasn’t like she kept a dress-up outfit at the condo. She felt young and callow, underdressed and out of place. When she got to the table, Drew stood and pulled out a chair for her. There wasn’t enough room for what he was doing, but he managed the cramped spaces gracefully.

  Old-school manners, Colden thought.

  A tuxedoed waiter instantly appeared, asking if he could get her a beverage. Drew asked if she’d ever had a particular brand of Italian beer. She shook her head, and he ordered one for her. The waiter bowed and backed away as Drew thanked him by name.

  “Guess you’re a regular here,” Colden observed.

  “This place is one of the main reasons I bought a house nearby,” Drew said, smiling. “Best home-style, old-school Italian food there is. Other than my grandmother’s. Totally authentic.”

  “You’re Italian?” Colden asked, not bothering to hide her surprise.

  “Hunnert percent,” he said. “’Joisey Italian.”

  “Really?”

  “Dad was a handyman, Mom a lunch lady,” Drew said. “Grew up in Hoboken. Third generation. Grandparents came off the boat.”

  “Seriously?”

  Colden didn’t know at first why she was so surprised at these personal details. Then she did know. She’d assumed he came from privilege.

  “Nope, not joking, I promise,” Drew continued. “Parents scrimped and saved to help me get to law school. First in my family to go to college, much less grad school. Cliché, yes, but no joke. Of course, I am eternally grateful. And eternally guilty. I’m their pride and joy and also a disappointment because I’m not home enough and because I’m not married yet, for shame, in spite of every fix-up and all the meddling they’ve tried. My two younger sisters are hitched, living nearby, and giving them grandkids to fuss over already. Here I am, just turned thirty, didn’t buy a place in the old neighborhood and not yet working on rug rats. You know.”

  “Actually, I don’t know,” Colden said, smiling. She was going to say she was an only child but stopped herself.

  Drew started to say something else but was interrupted by the waiter’s appearance with her beverage. He poured her drink and stood at the ready with a small pad of paper and a stub of a pencil. She’d not had a chance to read the menu. Drew hadn’t even opened his.

  “Will you allow me?” he asked, placing his hand briefly over hers.

  Colden nodded, unsure what she was acquiescing to. Drew and the waiter conferred. Colden looked around at the small candles flickering on each table; the thick, cloth napkins; the reflections on the silverware. She was more accustomed to pubs, burger-and-beer-type places. She let herself be charmed by the setting and the courtly manner of her host and waiter. Something else she was unaccustomed to.

  When the waiter left, she and Drew spoke of the mild winter, the early spring. He told her about his home, how it had once been a “house of ill repute,” then a flophouse, and more recently, a duplex, which he was converting back to a single-family, two-story home. There was a tiny but sunny backyard, he said, where he hoped to grow tomatoes so that he could make fresh pasta sauce like his grandmother had.

  “You’ll have to talk to my dad about tomatoes,” Colden said. “He’s an expert at growing them in difficult conditions.”

  Drew raised his eyebrows at her. She was vaguely embarrassed by bringing up her father, suggesting they chat. It felt like a slip-up, as if she was being overly familiar.

  “How’s the beer?” he asked.

  It was light and refreshing. She asked him more about his house, and he regaled her with comical stories of home-repair efforts gone wrong. He pointed to scraped knuckles and blistered palms as proof of his labors.

  “Am I boring you?” Drew said suddenly, interrupting himself.

  “Not at all,” she said. “I actually grew up doing stuff like that with my father. He’s a carpenter and caretaker.”

  “Weird that our fathers do the same thing,” Drew said. “Both handymen.”

  They were not the same sort of handymen, Colden knew but didn’t say. The issues that came along with the million-dollar vacation homes her father cared for had to be quite different from those Drew’s father undoubtedly handled in the apartment complexes of Hoboken and Jersey City. Her father was also college educated. And wealthy. He held his wealth so quietly that few knew about it. Even Colden knew little beyond the fact that he had a lot of acreage, most of which he protected for conservation and recreation. There were many times in her youth that he’d taken her hiking in wild places, and when she’d asked where they were, he’d quietly said they were on their own land. Colden figured Drew pictured her dad as a rough-around-the-edges, backwoods sort of guy. Which he was and very much was not. The contradictions were too much to explain, and she didn’t know Drew well enough to try.

  “Well, I don’t imagine splitting wood is often on your dad’s to-do list,” was all she said.

  “No. But I bet they both deal with a lot of rats,” Drew replied.

  “Mice more than rats. But yes, plenty of rodents, nonetheless.”

  “So, you have the blue-collar-parent, high-expectations, overeducated-kid thing, too?” Drew asked.

  The waiter appeared with their plates, giving Colden a reprieve from answering his question. There were three thin cutlets, swathed with linen-colored sauce dotted with sliced mushrooms. Colden took a bite and chewed slowly, savoring the delicate, buttery flavors.

  “Wow,” she said, not exactly intending to change the subject.

  “Yeah, amazing, isn’t it?”

  “What is this?”

  “Veal. Best I’ve ever had.”

  “First I’ve ever had,” Colden admitted.

  Colden was a bit perplexed and also intrigued by the unexpected contrasts between the two of them. Her family was apparently more wealthy and educated but seemingly less sophisticated and worldly than his. She felt both beyond Drew and behind him in unfamiliar ways.

  “So, you were telling me about your family,” he said. “The challenges of being the first to get some letters and titles after your name.”

  “That’s not exactly my experience,” she said cautiously. “My dad is actually college educated. Similar field to mine. More forestry and conservation than wildlife. But there was little work in the field when he graduated. And he’s incredibly good at fixing things. All sorts of things. So, he fell into caretaking and kept at it.”

  “And your mom?”

  Colden wiped her mouth. Her mom. Whom should she talk about, Sally or Miranda? Discussing both was too much. She struggled with what to say. She was so unused to being asked direct questions about her family. Everyone she’d grown up around already knew her history. Knew more of it than she did, in fact.

  “That’s a much longer, more complicated story,” she said carefully.

  Drew held up his hands.

  “Say no more. Some other time.”

  Colden was both relieved and disappointed that he didn’t push the issue further.

  “You told me you needed help with something,” Colden said, taking advantage of the break in conversation to change the subject. “Still a problem?”

  She watched Drew and saw his ex
pression change from open and friendly to thoughtful and serious. He cleared his throat, then leaned forward and put his elbows on the table. He lowered his voice and spoke as if everything he said was in confidence. As he began to explain that his employer, a large forest products and paper company, was in negotiations for a land deal that would give thousands of acres back to the state in exchange for all kinds of easements and conservation, recreation, and continued logging rights, she realized why he was being cautious. These situations were complex and controversial, with many competing demands, all of which were difficult to balance. They were surrounded, at every close table, by other lawyers, lobbyists, politicians. Drew said the goal was to maintain access to raw materials while protecting land for recreation, tourism, and jobs.

  “Sounds like a win-win all around, right?” he said.

  “Seems so,” she replied. “But I can guess what the problem is.”

  Drew looked at her encouragingly.

  “Gossip. Misinformation. Lack of community support,” she ticked off.

  “Exactly. And a few other things besides.”

  The waiter came and removed their plates. He brushed crumbs off the white tablecloth with a small metal scraper. He said an unfamiliar word in question to Drew, who nodded.

  “What other things?” Colden asked.

  “Vandalism.”

  “Of land or equipment?”

  “Vehicles. Windows broken. Tires slashed. One of our guys was stranded for hours in a serious snowstorm with the weather blowing through the busted windshield.”

  “Expensive. Dangerous,” Colden said.

  She wondered how or if any of this was connected to the petty thefts she’d heard about. The moose-meat incident. The stuff taken from camps. The rustling around in Gene’s outbuilding. Such different behaviors. Unlikely the same person or persons. But still. She didn’t mention any of this to Drew.

  “My employers want to crack down hard on whoever is doing this.”

  “And you don’t?”

  “I’m afraid that sort of response will only make things worse. Cause more problems. Ruin any goodwill we might have. The problems are pretty localized. Near an area where we are trying to gain easements or buy land outright. Someone doesn’t want to give up. Can’t seem to find out who even really owns the land. All tied up in complex trusts. Makes it even harder to determine who might be responsible.”