She stirred, rolled to one side, and he clicked on the television, which faded in during the local forecast; the confluence of low-pressure systems was moving out into the Atlantic. Rising temperatures overnight had changed the precipitation to a steady rain. But on the heels of this system came another, pushing cold air down from the north. Temperatures were expected to dive later in the morning, leaving the city encased in a thick shell of blue-black ice. He had to get out now. This morning.
The weatherman began to narrate some footage of last night’s snow, and Richard recognized the intersection as the same one where he and Cadence had come to the rescue of the Metrobus driver, fended off the snowballing marauders. He tapped Cadence on the shoulder, and she rolled to see the television, pulled her down comforter up and tucked it beneath her chin.
“If I’m going to drive you to the airport—” she began, then stopped to point at the screen. “Hey. Hey! That’s us,” she said, hitting Richard on the shoulder for emphasis.
The camera zoomed in and followed Cadence as she packed a snowball, then unleashed it in the direction of the teenagers. “We look like we’re having fun,” Richard said. “Excellent form you’ve got there.”
Cadence shimmied out from under the covers and headed to the bathroom, then glanced back over her shoulder. “Turns out you knew how to have fun the whole time.”
Just a few hours ago, Richard had told someone he was a firm believer in happy endings, and now he couldn’t see any reason for that to change. If that was naive, so be it, but he’d seen the possibilities of his happiness in that televised clip, the two of them frolicking in the snow. He’d stop thinking about whether or not he was going to be okay and start working toward a specific goal. Happiness. This was revolutionary thinking. Happiness meant a family and a home, and it was hard not to notice how those feelings had returned after only a few hours back in Cadence’s company. Even her apartment felt like a home, he thought, with all its telltales: a welcome mat in the hall, a place by the door to leave the keys, actual curtains on every window.
The pleasing chime of her shower rang out, the water echoing off the porcelain tile, the ancient tub. Richard heard the sound of the curtain being pulled back, the barely discernible change in pitch as Cadence moved her body under the water.
The sound of the running water jogged his memory. He hadn’t thought all that specifically about his sister in the intervening few hours. The intervening few years, he corrected himself. She’d made it clear that she wanted to handle the challenge of raising Gabriel as her own cross to bear, didn’t want Richard’s money or counsel, hadn’t brought the boy back east to visit what little family he had left. That meant that Richard had adopted a kind of defense mechanism; he waited for his sister to call, or to write, and often she did neither. It wasn’t unusual to hear from her only at the holidays, for the conversation even then to be all about how she wouldn’t see Richard at Christmas, the functional greetings of the emotionally distant.
Richard’s new life was going to require honesty, most of all honesty with himself. Still, he found it difficult at times to trust his memory. His memories usually behaved like a blue-and-white afterimage, as if someone had taken his picture with a flash too close to the eyes. But on this he was clear: he had helped his sister into a shower in the delivery room of the hospital where Gabriel was born. They wanted her to relax, stretch; she wasn’t dilating fast enough, and it had been eleven hours since her water had broken. Though Richard suspected the shower had little medical value, he was grateful for the memory. Mary Beth used his arm and shoulder for support as she slipped off her dressing gown and eased under the stream of water. She took his hand and put it on her belly near a spidery distension of red marks, and he felt an insistent and rhythmic tapping coming back at him. He was the second person to hold Gabriel; he had cut the cord.
The news was in that last dead thirty seconds before a station break, and the weatherman was riffing on about January blizzards when the anchorman stopped him midsentence. The anchor pressed his right hand to his earpiece, and Richard expected an update on the aftermath of the crash, maybe the discovery of the black boxes.
The anchor said, “We are getting word out of Chicago this morning of a train accident, on the city’s famous El, the Orange Line. Early indications are there are injuries, some serious, and for more details, we’re going to listen in to our local affiliate for live coverage on this breaking story.”
He turned the television off, moved to the kitchen, and took out a carton of orange juice and a honey-wheat English muffin from the refrigerator. On the top shelf of the fridge, there was a glass dish containing what he could identify only as a salad, with unrecognizable greens, cherry tomatoes, chunks of cucumber, crumbles of a moldy and odiferous cheese. Next to that, two Cornish hens, identical, golden-skinned. The door shelves held exotic mustards, prepared horseradish. Ketchup with no sugar added. A dozen brown eggs. Sweet creamery butter made on a mom-and-pop organic farm. Organic skim milk in a wide-mouthed glass bottle. A pitcher of filtered water. The shelves were filled too, a bowl with apples, lemons and limes, grapefruits. A jar of egg whites. Peach-mango salsa. The produce drawer held unlabeled plastic containers of four different kinds of herbs, and Richard opened one, six-inch stalks of green-black, and breathed deeply and thought, Tarragon. He hadn’t bought fresh herbs in years, could not remember when cooking had not meant something as mundane as heating spaghetti from a can. A bulb of fennel. Green beans. Almond butter. There was nothing in his refrigerator and everything in hers. It was the refrigerator of a mother, he thought hopefully.
He didn’t realize Cadence had come into the kitchen until she announced herself. “Why don’t you put on some coffee?” She wore a lush terry-cloth robe that looked as if it had been stolen from a resort, and her hair was turbaned in a towel.
Richard took out the coffee, the filters. “When are they expecting you back in the office?” He knew Cadence essentially made her own schedule; in a typical week, Tuesday through Thursday was reserved for client visits, checking on the machines she’d sold last year. When they were dating, they’d had standing dates for Thursday through Sunday nights.
“Not until next Friday. I’m headed to Houston on Tuesday to oversee the install of a new machine,” she said.
Richard found two navel oranges in the fruit bowl, began peeling them and breaking them into sections. It occurred to him that he could not remember the last time he’d eaten a piece of fresh fruit. “Tell me you aren’t tired of that life. Airplane, hotel, conference room, restaurant, airplane, repeat.”
Cadence puttered over to the cabinet and extracted a pair of coffee mugs. “Of course I’m tired of it. I’ve got platinum status on three airlines, and about the only thing it gets me is free drinks and upgrades to business class.” She threw some bread in the toaster, and Richard glanced at the bag, a ten-grain loaf, honey sweetened, unbleached and unbromated flour. He made a mental note to look up what unbromated meant.
Cadence took a seat at the kitchen table and blew across a too-hot mug of fresh coffee.
“I want you to come with me,” Richard said. “Come to Dallas, and then head back here for a few days to close up some loose ends, and then, eventually, Pennsylvania. I need to look for a house.”
“Pennsylvania?”
They both knew why he wanted her to come. She could call it whatever she liked, desperation, or even love, and she would be right.
The summary of what he was prepared to say: He could not inflict this city on a child. Not without giving Gabriel the extensive armature of a better neighborhood and $35,000-a-year private schools he could not afford. There was a certain intransigence to Richard that didn’t fit in the city. Unlike Lew, he’d never been comfortable in a culture that said things like You can wear any tie you want, as long as it’s red. In Pennsylvania, he could have acreage and dogs and, most of all, a homestead. If the kid voiced a desire for a horse, a horse could be provided. Moving meant no more apartments, no more fu
mbling for quarters just to have a clean T-shirt. No more hollering drunks in the alley, no curbside fistfights over a parking space. No flyers for 2-for-1 draft beers, no cover left on his windshield, and no bicycle messengers sliding Chinese menus underneath his apartment door at 4:00 a.m. The dreams that were available to him in Pennsylvania weren’t just speculative, they were achievable.
Richard hadn’t yet told Cadence about the job that was waiting for him. That was a conversation that could wait until the airplane, for whenever it was that the two of them would sit down and see if they could imagine themselves a future. Tomorrow. He checked his watch. It already was tomorrow.
“We never ate,” Richard said.
“Like the old days,” she answered, and he knew that she meant the first few evenings of their relationship, back when they had every intention of going out to dinner but never left Richard’s apartment. “Are you hungry?” she asked. “I could make something. Pancakes?”
“I could eat a double stack,” he said. “Like at Waffle House.”
Richard wanted to leave now, drive to Dallas with Cadence in the passenger seat, pretend there wasn’t any urgency in the situation. Pretend. There was no reason this had to be decided today. The road would give them cover, time to talk. They could take turns behind the wheel, four-hour shifts fueled by diet sodas, eat their meals at any place along the side of the road that served twenty-four-hour breakfast and good, strong coffee. It sounded equal parts pleasant and implausible. How much of his grown-up life had been like this, imagining what he wanted to do versus doing what he knew he must? He had to get to Gabriel; his only thought now was about the boy. The fact that he’d had to wait through the night ate at him. Already he was talking himself out of his fantasy drive with Cadence. He needed to be on a plane, and quickly. He was leaving in an hour. She could come with him or not.
Cadence pulled down a box from the cabinet, retrieved a mixing bowl. He was thinking about the restorative properties of a solid breakfast. His new house would need to have a spectacular kitchen, spacious, where each day would begin with a family breakfast. These meals would be the relaxed ceremonies that kicked off an era of good feeling. They could, Richard thought, lapse into a routine. When he heard Cadence’s blow-dryer click off, he’d pour the coffee, then the milk on Gabriel’s cereal right after that. For his new kitchen, he could buy an unobtrusive thirteen-inch television, and in the mornings they’d tune in to The Today Show for the weather. The forecast would always be for American sunlight, nostalgic and kind, the kind that dominated his memories. Cadence would come to the table and read the front-page headlines over Richard’s shoulder. When everything was normal in the world, the three of them would begin to eat.
Cadence ladled the batter into a frying pan and said, “I didn’t know what you were going to tell me last night. When you wanted to see me, I was expecting some sort of grand announcement. I thought maybe you were seeing someone.”
Richard laughed. “Who?”
“No one I know. Some woman who pushed her shopping cart into your car. Somebody like that.”
“There hasn’t been…,” Richard started to say. She brought him a plate with three pancakes, a side of fruit drizzled with vanilla yogurt and a touch of honey, then sat down across from him. The steam rose from his coffee cup in visible streaks. She watched as he doctored the food on his plate with thin-cut pats of butter, a generous dollop of real maple syrup. The pancakes tasted heavy in the way that a good rib-sticking breakfast should, dissolving into a sweetness he could taste on his lips after each bite.
“There’s no other girl. There is, however, plenty to talk about. We can figure all this out on the plane,” Richard started. “There’s never been any real reason for you to stay in DC. Your job is where the machines are.” Richard could see her figuring out the logistics, what the trip would entail in time and travel.
“What are you saying?” She took her mug in both hands, warming herself.
“I’m saying I need help. The guy from the airline”—he pulled Lemko’s card from his wrinkled shirt pocket—“he can put you on the 9:40 flight with me. I’m asking you to come to Texas.”
Cadence picked up her nearly untouched plate, scraped it into the sink, then ran the tap. “What makes you think I know anything that can help? I’ll be here for the phone calls and for advice. I can drive you to the airport. I can take care of stopping your mail and locking up your apartment, and I can pick you up when you get back. Beyond that, I can’t make any promises.”
Richard pushed his plate sideways across the table. “You can’t.” He regretted how much his inflection made it sound like a question.
She shook her head.
It was decided. Cadence would drive him to the airport, and he’d ride in the passenger seat with his father’s overcoat draped across his lap, and for the second time in twelve hours, he would sit by himself by an airport gate and wonder how on earth one talks to a child. At least in his dream, the child had been happy. The boy had Richard’s lanky frame and ran with a high leg kick, his heels nearly hitting his butt with each stride. Someone would bring him to the Dallas airport, and as Richard exited security, the boy would shake loose of his handler, run to be reunited with the uncle he did not really know. Or maybe the boy would be running toward the house, and Richard could recognize the house and remember the three dogs and the boy romping across the yard from his dream; only now did he realize that he’d never seen the face of the woman there. His vision had been faulty. The house and the dogs and the boy, those things were in his future. The woman, only that part, was fiction.
Downstairs, some of Cadence’s neighbors began to dig themselves out. The sound of snow shovels scraping against the asphalt echoed through the alley. He watched as she walked past him to the closet, extracted her small gym bag. For a moment, he thought she was packing to come to Dallas, but then he watched her fill the bag with cosmetics, a pair of close-fitting black pants, a blouse. Work wear. She stripped off her robe and began the process of sliding herself into the running tights that she wore to the gym, and he knew for certain she would not be coming. For her, today was just another day in a series of days, relatively indistinct. He would be the only variable in her routine.
Richard walked over to her.
Cadence looked up at him with one last question. “Why are you smiling like that?”
Now was the time to tell her. “Because I’ve figured out how it’s all supposed to end.”
The drive to the airport was slowed by road conditions; on the radio, the forecast warned again of falling temperatures, the prospects for ice, and, later in the day, the significant accumulation of more snow.
They did not speak. He consoled himself by fiddling with the car’s heater and by thinking about the coming hours. Cadence had complained about his inertia, and now here he was, springing into action. Except it wasn’t action, just momentum. He’d been asleep in his apartment, and this rogue wave had capsized everything, pushing him forward. Where he would stop was the only part of these events that he could control. Things at rest tended to stay at rest, things in motion stayed in motion. The plan for the days ahead meant DCA to Dallas, and then on to a Dallas County courthouse; he’d brought his passport, for some reason, and he tapped it lightly where it rested in the pocket of his oxford shirt; Dallas back to Washington and the prospects of packing up his apartment. A drive to Pennsylvania. He wasn’t going to be taking Gabriel north in a vintage Oldsmobile. Maybe he’d buy a new car, something sensible. Jesus, this was exactly how you became a guy who drove a Camry or an Accord. His mind flashed to his father in the distant past, sitting across a metal desk from some car salesman, the salesman writing numbers upside down on pieces of scrap paper, his father pushing them back across the desk uninterestedly, refusing to buy snow tires, floor mats, undercoating. Someone in this family had better be good in a crisis. Richard hoped to God that it was him.
Cadence had asked Richard what kind of father he might be, and now, like any good
Washington lawyer, he wanted to revise and extend his remarks. He would try. He would try to be the kind of father that Lew had always promised to be but never actually was. He was going to be present. What else could he give this child? Safe harbor. A bed. Three meals a day. That sounded more like prison. What could he manage beyond that? Everything he possessed seemed incomplete, not enough. No wife. No house with a room that could be reinvented as a space for a six-year-old boy. No quarter acre of grass to walk across with a push mower, no bright golden dog to greet him and the boy enthusiastically whenever the door pulled open, no spontaneous joy whenever the boy heard the recorded music from the ice cream truck that circled the neighborhood at twilight. Could he teach what needed to be taught, how to lose oneself in books and how to dream, how to throw a tight spiral or a curveball, how to know when a girl wanted to be kissed (he coughed out a brief laugh, thinking how often he’d been wrong in that area), how to learn the joys of discovering what you did not know, and the pleasure when you learned something you’d once thought impossible?
Then there was the practical stuff, how to take care of your body and your mind and even your teeth in the right way, how to keep your nails clean, how to sew a button on your white dress shirt, and how to give your shoes a shine until they glowed with a high parade gloss, how to make your bed, the sheets drawn so tightly as to pass military inspection. He wanted to give Gabriel all those things that came with a family, even the crazy parts, the morbidly obese aunt with her never-ending advice on diet and exercise, the distant cousins who’d squandered their inheritance on women and poker, the self-exiled brothers whose only appearances were at family funerals, the deceased relatives with their alluringly preposterous first names, Marmaduke and Cleveland. Somehow, Richard wanted to give Gabriel that which did not exist, the happy family he himself had never known in the real world but had always seen on television, the Bradys, the Van Pattens, the Waltons. He could teach Gabriel the right way to tie a tie, how to pull the skin taut around the angles of his chin when shaving. He could teach him how to know a burger on the grill was properly cooked and never to press out its fat into the fire.
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