Borrowed Horses (11 page)

“Two bucks?” Dawn said. “That’s fucking ridiculous.”

Russ was giving me that man-are-you-
wasted
look, but Dave was smiling. For him, I could make even avocados charming. The map of digressions stretched forth in my head, the possible trails leading us away from regret. That’s what going to New Jersey had been all about: all the little differences that made me realize that America there was not the same as America here, despite the McDonalds, the Walmarts, the Banks of America.

Jenny foiled my plan at a stroke. “O.K., Dave’s turn. What’s your biggest regret?”

You’re looking at her
, I wanted to say. The words itched like an infection wanting to be lanced. Dave looked at me from under his hair and gave a half-smirk, then pulled the beer mat from under his glass and turned it over and over in his hand, thinking. Margarita moved my foot forward, the heat of her desire burning in my mouth and enflaming my lungs. If he’d only reach, and he’d touch me; I offered my long, seductive limb. Margarita. If he had the balls to spill it all, I’d take him back. We could still have the life I’d once imagined for us.

His hair shone gold in the restaurant’s mellow lighting, a golden man: Tequila, triple sec, ice. And I, like all backward-looking women searching for life in remembered times, was salt. I didn’t know it then, didn’t feel its crystals threatening to grow in my heart, becoming more pillar the longer I looked at Dave. I merely stared, urging him to touch me, to take me away.

But the eye has no power after all. Dave spoke, “Mine is back from my first year in college.”

The quality of my stare shifted. I was not his biggest regret. I shoved a spoonful of rice down, hoping to stop the turn of my stomach. It should have been me. Instead, Jenny sat there at his side, not even looking at him now as she mindlessly picked at her food. My margaritas were finished. Beer filled my cup, and I drank deeply.

“My mom called one night early spring semester. Her sister, my aunt Ruby, was dying. Stomach cancer. Doctors gave her two months.” He paused. I shoveled in more food, barely tasting it. “My mom and she were always close. They were twins, and I guess what they say about twins is true, how they feel each others’ pain, because when I went home that weekend, Mom looked rough. It was like she was sick, too. She talked to me about when we’d fly up to Baltimore to see Ruby—that’s where she was living. Where she was dying.” He laid the mat flat and put his beer back on it, staring intently at the glass.

Jenny put her hand on his shoulder, rubbing it, and he darted a look at her, and a small smile. Within, Margarita slowed her dance. I pieced in what I knew: they’d still been dating when this was going on; he’d leave school for her at the end of that year.

“My mom wanted to fly out right away but I dug in my heels. It was stupid, but I had this job at a little junk shop downtown. The owner was cool—just a nice, nice man. Really easy-going about working around my school schedule and stuff. He even let me do my homework there in-between customers. I never had to worry about trying to fit my schedule around work, the way a lot of my friends did. I knew that he couldn’t spare me more than a couple weeks. It was simple economics. And I would have to drop all my classes for that semester. My teachers weren’t going to let me miss that much time—not if it ended up being a month or more. I kept thinking about the money I’d spent on tuition and books, the loan money I’d have to repay, the money I’d lose in that job. I figured I could take a week off, maybe two, but no more.

“I was so worried we’d end up in Baltimore for months. People are always saying that the doctor gave someone three months but they lived for another year or more. My mom was broke. She couldn’t go back and forth, couldn’t risk her own job. I made the practical, the stupid choice. I told her we’d wait a month. We’d go later, I said, those final days, when she’d really need us.” He stopped and looked at me, like he earnestly needed me to understand. “I don’t even think I realized she was dying, if that makes any sense. I didn’t realize how precious our moments together are, and how fleeting.” He held my gaze another long moment, and something deep in me seemed to reach for him, even then. For that brief instant, there were only the two of us.

He dropped his gaze and spoke again. “I loved Ruby. She was so enthusiastic about everything she did. She was an avid reader and every time she talked about a book, it made you want to run to the library so you could read it, too. She was like that about everything—the food she ate, the last show she’d seen on TV. She loved life so deeply, and she made you love it with her. She didn’t seem like someone who could die.”

We’re all dying
, I thought. His letter jacket at his back, Dave was another person here, not my young Hemingway but the high school football star Jenny fell in love with. So many selves fly around inside us; they were flying around in me. I felt the need of a shotgun or a pile of rocks. Some of those birds would die that night.

I grabbed the pitcher and refilled my cup.

“We called Ruby that Sunday. She sounded tired, but that’s how you expect a woman with cancer to sound. I told her that Mom and I would be with her in just a few weeks. I could tell she was disappointed because it took her a long time to say anything, but she didn’t ask us to come any sooner. She just made me tell her about college, what I was studying, what my professors were like, all that. I went back to school that night and it still hadn’t all sunk in. Then my mother called that Thursday and told me Ruby was dead.” Jenny reached her arm around him and squeezed his shoulders. The gesture strengthened him. “We were the last thing she was holding on for, but she couldn’t hold on that long. My mother was shattered. It was my fault. I’d been so worried about all that stupid shit that didn’t mean anything. Like there was some rush to get through school—I mean, Christ, I didn’t even end up getting a degree anyway.”

We were silent under the heavy pall of Dave’s regret. His story had us all beat; he’d won.
It’s not a competition
, I told myself, but everything is a competition.

Of course, I could still win. I could tell them about us, our two weeks together, him sleeping in my bed, his confessions of love. That’s the regret everyone would remember for the night, the only trump, the queen of spades. They’d never speak to me again—maybe even Dave wouldn’t speak to me—but it would be honest. I’d win. My tequila-thick tongue was fat with stories and alcohol, but my plate was empty.

Dawn looked at me. “Well? You’re up. Last regret of the night.” Her hair, intentionally sprayed on end, danced with lights reflected from her beaded shirt. Russ’s arm rested against hers. Jenny’s eyes were bright and encouraging. Each girl paired. Dave didn’t look at me now. His shaggy hair curled protectively around his ear while he traced images in the mist of his glass. I loved them all, in one way or another. I could devastate them.

I took a long, steadying sip of Jenny’s crap beer, letting bubbles rush cool against the back of my throat. “I regret nothing.” My voice was raspy but firm and unslurred, like some salty sea captain’s.

Dawn clapped the beer she’d been lifting back on the table. Jenny said, “You can’t regret nothing.” Dave’s eyes locked on mine and a blush came to his cheeks. I held his eyes briefly before he turned away, stunned, incredulous, trying to decipher the code I offered.

“I regret nothing,” I repeated, staring at each in turn and daring them to contradict me. “Everything I’ve ever done has led me to this moment, so I regret nothing.” Everyone was finished eating, and the pitcher was empty. I raised my glass. “To friendship,” I said, and in the chink of thick bar glass against glass, I was off the hook.

The drizzle had been short-lived and the air felt like something I could lie across and swim in. I concentrated on my feet, watching as they went fat, thin, fat, thin. Dawn and Jenny both offered rides, but I needed the walk. Their trucks rumbled off in the night leaving nothing more than the red glow of taillights. I wouldn’t sit in the middle of either happy couple this evening.
Joannie the lonely
, I thought, and now that I was away from Dave, that seemed right and good. Like Joan of Arc. Powerful and solitary.

Summer heat still radiated from the sidewalk, though the rain had made the air cooler. The sky was cloudless now, yet the glaring streetlights hid all but a few stars. How difficult it was to see things clearly.

My limbs floated and tingled but my feet were club-heavy at the ends of my legs. Adrift on
déjà vu
, I crossed another street. Nine months ago, I’d slept with Jenny’s husband. He was a good man—even his choice of regret spoke for him. Little kept me from him now. The eyes of the stars were on me, though I couldn’t see them. A sudden breeze seemed to bring forth a long-ago conversation with Dave, the morning he’d come to me and kissed me in his Hemingway sweater, back when there was no Jenny.

He’d asked if I believed in love at first sight. “I’m not sure I believe in love,” I’d said, “first sight or any.”

He weighed my words, his hand moving along my back against my skin. “Bad experience?” His ice-colored eyes warmed oceanic.

“No experience.” I shrugged. “A crush now and then, nothing more.”

He moved closer still, his breath moving the strand of hair that hung loose along the side of my face so that its ringlets kissed me with each of his exhalations. “And you don’t think it’s out there for you?”

I was dizzy. The carbon-dioxide, I thought, but it was more than that. My faith in solitude was slipping; I was drunk on his breath. “Honestly I don’t know.” My voice was husky and foreign. Disembodied by his nearness, I wanted him closer. His body could displace my body, inhabit my space. He could absorb me entirely. I wanted him to.

“You’ll find it,” he said. “A girl like you? I’m surprised you haven’t already.” He leaned in and kissed me and I was gone, replaced by the vision he had of me, a vision I preferred to the failure I was. He kissed the long, curving line of my clavicle, and it became a blade cutting into me, a surgeon’s scalpel reshaping my flawed self. He said, “You’re different from any girl I’ve ever met.”

“It’s not intentional,” I whispered, but what I wanted to say was that I was wrong about love. Erased by his presence, giving myself entirely over, this was love at last.

The Man with No Name

C
lint Eastwood is as beautiful a creature as God ever created: the lash-fringed flint of his cold-stare, the lean length of him. Who else could make a poncho look so damned
tough
? And the way he sat his small, grey horse, not so much balanced as melded. A perfect rider.

The new guy working the express lane at Rosauer’s was similarly beautiful, though there was little apparent likeness. Maybe it was his eyes, something Clint-ish about them. His were almond-shaped. Hazel, I guess you’d call them, though their lightness reminded me more of gold-littered creek beds, undisturbed and cool. They danced with audacity and intelligence. He looked to be, not so much predicting your next move, as knowing with absolute certainty what you would do.

Long, slender sideburns framed his face. His hair was dark in a way “brown” doesn’t describe. There was more luster, more darkness, more richness. There was a shine, a crow-feather quality to its shifting color. On his neck was a tattoo of a salmon in mid-jump, styled like a totemic figure. The guy was young, like me, but he seemed time-mellowed. His stare had none of Clint’s sneering calculation. Where Clint would scowl, this guy smiled.

Perhaps it was the tall-thinness, the bootcut jeans, the clean flannel shirt faded past the point of being any recognizable color. It would have been too hot outside for this shirt, but here in the over-air-conditioned store, it wasn’t out of place. The shoulder seams lined up perfectly with his own shoulders, as if it was custom made for him, or he was made for that shirt. The two belonged together, just like flannel seemed to belong exclusively to the Northwest. Its soul lived here, cotton-soft, multi-hued, and complicated. And yet this guy didn’t quite have Clint’s cowboy swagger. He wasn’t “cowboy” at all, but I couldn’t say why. It was something more than the absence of hat or horse.

His name tag read Jed, but I knew Jed and knew his tag, with its pink smiley face sticker partly obscuring the bottom curve of J. The new guy must have borrowed it. He chatted easily with the customers in front of me, with too much confidence for someone new to the job.

Not-Jed turned to me, and I looked quickly away, aware that I’d been caught in the act of staring, of trying to find a word for the color of his hair. His eyes were unreadable. “You finding everything all right?” he asked, his rogue smile all confidence and knowledge. He’d seen me looking at him, but I determined not to blush.

“You’re new here,” I raised my chin, trying to fake a calm I didn’t feel.

“Sure am.”

Around us, people talked, registers scanned and beeped, lights hummed, but when he spoke to me, those noises receded. I found myself wanting to become small, to curl myself up in the curve of his soft, warm lip, to rest there, like the child cradled in the moon in the old cross-stitch my mother hung over my childhood bed. “Got a name, ‘Jed’?”

“Yep.” He smiled again, that damned Clint Eastwood smile, so devilishly delighted with himself. It was the smile I watched over and over in all those films—the smile I waited for every time—the magical smile that required me and anyone else who saw it to smile in return.

I couldn’t help myself; I grinned. “Going to tell me what it is?”

He narrowed his eyes, sizing me up. “I’ll make you a deal. I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.” He typed in the number for lettuce without bothering to look it up, totally at ease. “You first,” he said.

“I’m not that curious.” I looked out toward the automatic doors, posing indifference.

“We’ll keep it anonymous for now, then.”

“Fair enough.”

“$7.09.”

I pulled exact change from my wallet and placed it in his cupped hand, smiling directly and defiantly into his eyes.