by Lisa Sorbe
“And I thought you’d fly into Duluth.” Ben slides his eyes my way, the dull gray light filtering in through the dirty windshield shadowing his gaze. “Would have made more sense. Especially this time of year.” As if to illustrate his point, the snow that was merely sprinkling when we left the airport just over an hour ago begins to fall with a vengeance.
“It was cheaper to fly into Minneapolis,” I defend, bracing myself as the truck bounces over some unseen bump in the road.
God, I hope that wasn’t an animal.
Although, I somehow doubt that Mr. Surly over there gives a rat’s ass about the world’s four-legged critters.
Ben doesn’t respond. Just keeps his eyes trained to the road, brows narrowed, as if the entire world has somehow affronted him and he’s hellbent on giving it the stink eye.
In fact, he’s been quiet since we started this trip, and the few attempts I’ve made at conversation were reciprocated with reluctant nods and stiff, one-word answers.
Fine. If that’s how he wants to be, then fine.
I open up my text messages and type out a quick one to my mother, thanking her for the mess I’m now in. Apparently, when Ben couldn’t reach me, he reached out to her. And while I’m well aware that I’m not my mother’s favorite child, she didn’t have to go so far as to prove it by giving out my flight info and photo to a complete stranger who could easily turn out to be a deranged serial killer.
I know you didn’t think I could drive in the snow, I write as the truck jolts and my body ricochets off the passenger door, but this guy’s a BRUTE. If you don’t hear from me again, it’s because he’s turned me into a lampshade.
Of course, I don’t expect an answer from her. But just hitting send succeeds in lessening the tension squeezing the area just above my shoulders. I’m strung tight, and releasing some of my frustration—even if it’s merely sending a text to a woman who could care less—makes me feel a tiny bit better.
A hollow moan suddenly fills the cab’s interior, and I glance up as a rush of wind quickens, threatening to blow us right off the road. Reaching up, I search desperately for the grab handle, my fingernails scraping against the rough felt of the truck’s ceiling until I find it. Ahead of us, great swaths of snow sweep across the pavement, making it difficult to tell where one lane ends and the other begins. I fumble with my phone as another blustery gust smacks into the truck, and the damn thing flies right out of my hand.
“Damn it!” I bend over and slide my hands along the floor, feeling around like a blind woman and grimacing when I make contact with the grit coating the rubber floor mat. Just as my fingertips brush the case, the wind smacks into the truck again, and the phone shoots out of my grasp, skidding even further under the seat.
I curse, bump my head on the glovebox on the way up, and curse again as I sheepishly rub the tender spot. Through the windshield, the weather is continuing to rage, railing against the open Midwest landscape like it has a bone to pick with it. Anxiety rises along with my annoyance, and the two emotions merge to put me even more on edge. “Is this something to be concerned about?”
“Nah,” Ben says, the corners of his lips turning up slightly when he hears the unease in my voice. He leans forward in his seat, craning his neck so he can peer up at the sky. “I’ve driven in worse.”
I arch a brow. “Really? Like, how much worse?”
Ben shrugs, the shoulders of his coat straining slightly as he does. “Worse.”
I roll my eyes. It’s like talking to a wall, for crying out loud.
Ten minutes pass, and then thirty. The barren landscape begins to give way to a grove of pine trees, their limbs heavy with winter’s dressing. As we pass a sign for Duluth, the amount of snow falling from the sky seems to triple. Ben retaliates by turning on his headlights, and as we drive further into the wall of white, I stare out into their glow, tracking the flurries before they slam into the truck’s grill.
It’s mesmerizing. It’s wild. It’s utter and complete nonsense that we’re still on the road, but I can’t look away because if I do, we’ll surely end up in a ditch.
And no, it’s not completely crazy to think that the only thing keeping us from flying off the highway and into one of the pines hugging the shoulder of the road is my sheer force of will.
“Fucking shit!” I shriek, bracing myself as the tires skid over a patch of ice. The truck jerks, sliding a few inches to the right before reconnecting with the pavement with a sharp jolt. My heart is in my throat, along with my lungs and my stomach and my goddamn ovaries, for that matter. “I…I think we should pull over.”
“Relax,” Ben says. “It was just a patch of black ice.”
“Black ice?” My voice is higher than it normally is, but it’s hard to speak at an acceptable decibel when, you know, your life is in danger. “How is black ice different than normal ice?”
“Black ice is transparent. Hard if not damn near impossible to see until you’re right on it.”
“Oh, great,” I mutter, gripping the dash and scouring the road for signs of it. “That makes me feel so much better.”
Ben snorts. “I take it you haven’t been through a lot of winters, eh?”
“Eh?” Now I snort. “What are you? Canadian?”
Ben flips a switch on his steering column, triggering the wipers and blasting the windshield with fluid. Almost instantly, the ice accumulating along the bottom starts to melt. “Nope. Minnesotan. Born and raised.”
“Lucky you.”
He takes his eyes off the road long enough to shoot a glance my way, noting the way my fingertips are practically glued to the dashboard. “You didn’t visit Lenora during the winter.”
It’s not a question, so my only response is a shrug while I continue to scan the road.
Thankfully, the snow begins to dissipate when we hit Duluth, and the flakes striking the windshield go from blinding to a lattice work of lace that I can actually see through. To my right, an unobstructed view of Lake Superior opens, the water dark and choppy with ice. No freighters cut through the waves this morning, but the lift bridge is just visible through the dying blizzard. Just a bit farther, so far off in the distance and enshrouded by fog it appears to be floating, adrift in sky rather than sea, is the lighthouse at Canal Park. Lenora brought me here for ice cream malts several times over the course of my visits, and I suddenly remember that she used to refer to the fog coming in off the lake as sea smoke. It’s a term I haven’t heard spoken in well over a decade, not since those long-ago trips to Lost Bay, and my stomach twists at the memory.
“Lenora and I used to come here,” I say, the words popping out of my mouth before I can stop them. “We used to get these amazing malts and sit down by the water. I can’t remember the name of the place, but God, they were delicious.”
Ben doesn’t say anything, which is fine because I’m not really talking to him. I’m just reminiscing out loud, rambling, the memory bursting forth like a yawn I can’t contain, like blowing grime from a dusty relic.
But everything looks different in the light. Sounds different when given a voice.
And now that I’ve spoken out loud, given voice to thoughts that sprang up unannounced, I feel foolish. I’m not a sentimental nitwit, someone who swoons so much over her past that she can’t forge a future.
I fall back into my seat with a sigh, crossing my arms and wishing I had my phone to keep my hands, my mind busy. After a few minutes, Duluth is in the rearview mirror and then there’s nothing to look at but road and the moody gray skyline of Lake Superior. But before long, even that view is gone, eaten up by pine trees as we move further inland.
“The Portland Malt Shoppe.”
After so much quiet, nearly thirty minutes of it, Ben’s deep voice now makes me startle. I look at him. “Huh?”
He nods, lifting one hand from the wheel and gesturing in a come-on-you-know sort of way. “That place you were talking about.” He glances at me and lifts his brows. “Portland Malt Shoppe.”
“Oh.”
Okay.
His brows dip as he reverts his attention back to the road, giving the world the stink eye again, and I turn my attention to him, studying his profile, the way the white winter sky brightens the truck’s cab, casting a muted glow over his features. He’s handsome, though in a different way than Daniel. My boyfriend is perfection, polished and nipped and tucked in all the right places, thanks to his time at the gym and, let’s face it, growing up with more money than he knew what to do with. The Rodriguez family has kept a personal chef on staff for years, filling their bellies with grass-fed beef and fresh organic produce splashed with just the right dose of healthy oils. Daniel has green smoothies made fresh each morning and delivered to him daily, something he sips on while resting his muscles in his jetted tub following his seven AM run.
I don’t know what Ben’s story is, how privileged his life has or hasn’t been, but there is a ruggedness to his features, a roughness that one doesn’t get without going through some sort of hardship. The stubble dotting his jaw is well past the five o’clock shadow mark, and something tells me he rarely shows up anywhere freshly scrubbed and barefaced. His brows are thick and arched, making his angry face (as I’m beginning to call it) seem even more fierce. The guy has a perpetual glower, a kind of brooding countenance that even I have to admit is kind of hot…if, that is, he wasn’t constantly directing it at me.
Like right now.
I’d been so lost in thought, I hadn’t realized he’d turned my way. Caught me staring.
He presses his lips together and frowns. “You drink coffee?”
Yes. Absolutely-hell-yes.
But Ben’s expression is so startling, and the intensity rolling off of him is so thick, that I don’t let my enthusiasm fly. I’m not sure if this is his way of asking if I want coffee but, if it is, I don’t want to pass up the opportunity. “Yeah,” I finally manage, determined not to let this moody man get the best of me. “I usually have a cup or two every morning.” Minus this morning, however, thanks to the drama at the car rental place and the subsequent road trip with Oscar the Grouch.
“Good,” he says, though he hardly looks happy about it. He lifts a finger, guiding the steering wheel with his wrist while he points at some far-off place in the distance, indicating something I can’t see. “There’s a place up the road a piece. We can stop there.”
“Sounds good.” Then, because it feels like a door of sorts has (finally) been opened between us, I ask, “How did you know my grandmother?” Now that I’ve gotten him to speak in full sentences, I plan to use the opportunity to find out more about this mystery man. The man who was so hellbent on tracking me down and getting me to Lost Bay, to Lenora’s funeral, when most people wouldn’t make the effort.
Ben swallows before he speaks, as if wondering either how much to tell me or where to begin. But, in the end, all he says is, “We lived close to each other.”
I huff. A mere neighbor wouldn’t go through the trouble of seeing an old woman’s granddaughter safely to her funeral. Not with everything he had to go through to do it: contacting me, going around me to contact my mother, driving four hours down to the airport before the sun was even up and then hauling me back the same way, all without a break. During January…in Minnesota.
No, there’s something more going on here.
People don’t just do things like that for one another. Not without a motive.
And this thing Ben is doing in honor of Lenora’s memory? If that is in fact what he’s doing? Well, it’s huge. Which means he has to have a pretty big one.
Like maybe…her money.
The thought flashes through my mind so fast I feel a ping spike up my spine. Like my bones are metal and the thought I just had was the striking force that’s making them hum. I’m vibrating with indignation—my blood is thrumming with it—even though I have no idea whether or not it’s true. I mean, she’s gone, right? As sad as this sounds, Lenora has already kicked the bucket, so why would Ben think that any action he takes after the fact will result in a reward?
So, okay. Maybe I’m being paranoid. I’m throwing mental daggers at a man who very well may be, to the best of his ability, just trying to do me a solid. Or Lenora a solid. Or…whatever.
Totally and completely free of charge. And for no apparent reason…at all.
Yeah, right.
Lenora didn’t come from money. She grew up a middle child in a middle-class family in the middle of the Midwest, a product of the Kansas City public school system and graduate of an all-girls college, a degree she paid for with the money she earned as a receptionist-slash-secretary at her family’s accounting firm. After cutting her ties and hopping a boat that, according to her, looked very much like a pirate ship, she sailed off to countries unknown, spending the next two decades working on-site, heading digs in the Middle East and southern Europe before returning to the states.
It wasn’t until she became pregnant with my father at forty that she left the field entirely, accepting an offer for a teaching job at the University of Minnesota after an old colleague put her up for the position. My father’s father was never in the picture as far as I know, though Lenora always spoke freely about him whenever I asked, relaying what little she knew about him. He was a fisherman from Norway, spoke very little English, but had (in her words) “exquisite thighs”. She said she met him while on-site in Santorini, and in the few short weeks they spent together, he gave her the one thing she never knew she wanted…a son. Along with (again, in her words) “some damn fine memories”.
Lenora never held anything back from me. Never minced her words or sugar-coated explanations that, as a child, most thought I was too young to hear. Back before I started forming my own opinions on the world and the people in it, I’d turn to Lenora, knowing she’d give it to me straight. And while some may think that’s a harsh way for a child to learn the ropes of life, I’m not so sure it is. I was never coddled or deluded like most of my classmates. I knew about death before I could read or write, listened intently as Lenora explained sex and reproduction to me when I was seven and my mom was suddenly ripe with a baby in her belly. I smoked my first cigarette with her when she was visiting me in L.A. the summer before my sophomore year of high school, something I’m quite sure she only let me do because she knew how sick one of her Virginia Slims would make me. (And it did. Man, did it ever. In fact, to this day, my stomach still grumbles whenever I smell cigarette smoke.) I also had my first taste of champagne in her company the night I graduated high school, which also happened to be the last time I saw Lenora alive. She showed up at the ceremony in lieu of my mother who, per usual, was otherwise engaged with more important matters. By then, however, I was used to her missing things, so it didn’t bother me all that much when she sent me on my way to graduation without even taking an obligatory cap and gown shot. I had Lenora there, and though I pretended to be embarrassed when she stuck her fingers in her mouth and whistled loud enough to wake the dead as I crossed the stage, I wasn’t. I secretly loved it, though I never would have admitted it to her at the time.
All of this is fresh in my mind as I stand here, on the rocky shore of Lake Superior, braced against air so cold it hurts my face. My black jeans and flimsy fleece jacket are no match for the wind coming in off the water, and the gusts are whipping my hair into a wild rat’s nest. I shiver and try to tuck as much of my face beneath the collar of my jacket as I can while the woman giving the eulogy—who’s dressed in what looks like two coats, ear muffs and a hat, and a scarf so long it’s wrapped around her neck at least three times—drones on and on.
In the five minutes since the memorial started, I’ve garnered more than a few odd looks from the huddled crowd. Some appear subtly curious while a few gawk outright, positively bug-eyed by my attire. Compared to these local yokels, my outfit is damn near tropical. Though, in my defense, I’m from southern California and the warmest jacket I own is this Lululemon fleece that I’m currently trying my best to disappear into. Also
in my defense, I had no idea that the ceremony was going to be held outside. Next to a lake. The absolute coldest place in this crackerjack town.
I mean, really. Are these people insane?
Another wave pounds against the shore, peppering the wind with spray and sending a mist through the air that pricks my cheeks like icy little needles. There’s about forty people here, and we’re all clustered around a gigantic boulder that, with its relatively flat service, is serving as a stand for Lenora’s urn.
I’m in the middle of wondering if we’re actually going to release her ashes here—the wind is whipping so hard they’d probably fly back in our faces, yuck—when the woman facing us suddenly stops speaking and looks at me expectantly.
And that’s when I realize that everyone is looking at me expectantly.
“Lenora?” she says for what has to be the second time, though I didn’t even hear the first. “Would you like to say anything?”
I half turn, almost expecting my grandmother to be hovering near my shoulder, holding herself in that familiar way that always made her look taller than she really was. But then I realize she’s speaking to me, and that, like Ben, she knows me as Lenora, not Lenny.
“No,” I say, my voice breathy and tight, something I’m going to pretend has more to do with the cold than emotion. I take a step back and shake my head, holding up a hand that’s wrapped in the sleeve of my fleece, like I need to physically ward off her offer. As if saying no simply isn’t good enough.
All eyes are on me, and I really should say something, I know I should say something. I am, after all, her granddaughter. Her one living relative. But I haven’t been a good granddaughter. Hell, I didn’t even know she had passed away until yesterday, and by that time Lenora had already been gone close to a week.
Pebbles crunch under my boots as I continue to back away, the sound louder than it should be, echoing in my ears along with the wind…until I run smack dab into someone’s chest.
