For Good (11 page)

Sierra snatched the briefcase, calling out to her friend, “Frog, do you have Meatball's jacket? Moss, grab my bag, would you?”

Frog and Moss were a couple, but the whole trio moved like one organism, handing bags back and forth and steadying each other on the ice. Sierra had known the men since her first days at Portland Community College, which seemed strange to Kristen since the only friend she had carried over from childhood, college, or law school was Donna Li, and sometimes she wondered if that even counted as a friendship.

Frog came around the side of the Range Rover with Meatball in his arms like a large, plush bowling ball. Someone had put a green vest on the dog. There was a plastic tag clipped to the vest with a bar code and Kristen's name written in black Sharpie with a date.

Realization dawned on Kristen as she read the word
SERVICE
on Meatball's vest.

“They don't take dogs,” she said.

She wondered how long it would take to get a cab home.

“Of course they do,” Sierra said. “They have to. It's the law. Moss made the vest today out of a recycled army duffel bag. Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. Re-peace! It fits perfectly.”

“No,” Kristen said. “No. You can't do that.”

Frog placed Meatball in Kristen's arms and attached an official-looking green lead in place of Meatball's usual blue rhinestone leash.

“All you have to do is walk him into the hotel and put him in your room,” Sierra said. “He might as well be a service dog.”

 “He eats underwear, and he has a brain the size of a walnut. He would walk off a cliff if there were Cheetos at the bottom. What is he protecting me from?” Kristen checked the tag. “What does this even say?”

“He's for anxiety.”

“I don't have anxiety. Do you know what will happen if I get cited for forging a service-dog license? For bringing an unauthorized pet into an eating establishment?”

“His mouth is cleaner that yours,” Sierra said.

“It's fraud,” Kristen protested.

Frog draped his arm around Sierra's shoulder and leaned his head against her blond dreadlocks. “Namaste. It's all good. We're all in service to each other.”

“This is supposed to be fun,” Sierra said quietly. “Come on, Kristi. Please. Don't make me feel like I dragged you here.”

Kristen sighed inwardly, remembering her resolve to be nicer to Sierra. She was going to invite her to coffee and have sister-to-sister chats about men or face cream or, God help her, the latest issue of the
HumAnarchist.
She was going to say things like,
I'm so proud of how you've accomplished the goals you set for yourself,
but when it came down to the end of a busy week, Kristen just wanted to sit on her sofa and watch the sunset reflecting off the mirrored surface of the U.S. Bancorp building.

She glanced back toward the highway, just visible on the horizon. A single semitruck crawled across the ice.

“Okay,” Kristen managed.

Despite everything, the Deerfield complex was beautiful. The main hotel glittered from behind a screen of trees. Behind it, outbuildings, now converted to tiny bars, added their pinpricks of light. Inside, the halls were hung with eerie American-primitive paintings: ghostly women in pillbox hats, carnivals of skeletons dancing on barroom tables. In the hallways, the red carpet swerved back and forth across the floor like a vision in a fun house mirror.

Sierra handed out keycards. She held Kristen's for a moment.

“Half an hour,” Sierra said. “If you're not at the bar, I'm coming to get you.”

In her room, Kristen sat down on the bed, staring at a mural of cavorting watermelons with little fangs and human eyes. Meatball planted himself on the bed. She tossed him one of the soy curls as she left.

An hour later, Kristen was crowded into a subterranean bar, feeling overdressed in her suit. She pulled up the last vacant seat by a teetering bistro table.

“I'll just sit here,” she told Sierra and her friends.

Moss handed her a foldout map with several business logos printed on it.

“They're doing a whiskey tasting,” Moss said. “If you try all twelve, you get a free T-shirt.”

It seemed like a bad idea. Why invite guests to have one drink in one bar, when they could stumble around fifty acres of hipster-inspired landscaping, in the dark, collecting booze stamps?

“This one is Sadfire whiskey.” Sierra read, “‘Portland's newest distillery, Sadfire, has been selling commercially for only two years, but in that time has won several distinguished prizes, including the Multnomah Whiskey Exposition's Best Whiskey Under Ten Years and the Portland Better Business Bureau's Community-Engaged Small-Business Award.' Look. They employ felons to give them
a second chance through productive employment
.”

“Because that's a good idea,” Kristen said. “Put felons in a factory with a thousand gallons of whiskey.”

She was thinking about Marydale.

“It's important to give people a chance to rehabilitate,” Moss said.

“I know,” Kristen said quietly.

But Marydale hadn't rehabilitated. Maybe she hadn't had the chance. After Kristen left Tristess, she had looked Marydale up on the statewide database that tracked parolees. Marydale had been released a month after Kristen left Tristess, then arrested again a month after that. She had been jailed, released, and jailed again and again.

Kristen told herself she was lucky to have left when she did, to have put enough time and distance between their affair and her office at the Falcon Law Group. But every time she had seen Marydale's name next to a new parole sanction, she had felt a cold ache in her stomach, until one day she exited the database and promised never to look again.

Sierra threw her arm around Kristen, snapped a selfie, and then shoved the camera at Kristen so she could see the picture. A diet of protein bars and a five-day schedule of running had defined Kristen's cheekbones like a sculptor's chisel.
Pretty or lucky?
she wondered.

A trio of musicians in the corner struck up a little accompaniment.

Sierra eased up to the back of the crowd, rising on tiptoes. “She's eating fire!” she said. “Come on. Get over here and check this out.”

Kristen couldn't see much more than polar fleece and the occasional Portland Timbers sweatshirt. The crowd hushed.

Kristen heard a man at the front of the crowd say, “Now I'm going to let my colleague tell you about what you're going to taste.” A few people clapped.

A melodic woman's voice chimed in. “Thank you. We both come from a farming-ranching background, so we understand the importance of raw ingredients. We have our own twelve-acre farm north of St. John's.”

The room was hot.

Sierra said, “It's really crowded. Do you want to try the next one?”

“We put our heart and soul into this production.” The woman's voice floated over the crowd.

Kristen couldn't see her, but the cadence was familiar. It was the same slight twang that had infused Marydale's voice when she told stories about Tristess.

The man interrupted. “My friend here actually waters the ground with her tears.”

The crowd chuckled.

“No, I'm serious,” the man said. “The first night after planting she goes out to the fields—”

“And you're going to taste all of that,” the woman cut in, “when I pour the first round.”

Kristen edged forward, listening.

“What is it?” Sierra asked.

The couple in front of Kristen stepped to the side, and Kristen stepped into the space they had vacated. Behind a folding table covered in a black cloth, a banner read
SADFIRE DISTILLERS
. On either side of the table, a bronze contraption, like some steampunk creation from the Alberta Arts Walk, released a blaze of flame. But Kristen wasn't admiring the craftsmanship or thinking about the liability of open flames in a low-ceilinged room almost certainly over the 148-person capacity listed by the door. She wasn't thinking about anything now, because she wasn't breathing, because it
was
Marydale behind the table, like a vision in a dream. Her blond hair was pulled up in an aggressive bouffant ponytail, and her arms were tattooed in a swirl of oxblood and black, the bodies of women intertwining in the ink. She looked older and tougher and gorgeous.

“So what are we going to taste, Mary?” It was Aldean beside her.

Marydale took a skewer from the table, wrapped a piece of cotton around the end and dipped it into a snifter.

“We're going to start with the Consummation Rye,” Marydale said. She flicked the end of the skewer through the flame at her side, tilted her head back, opened her mouth, and, accompanied by the “ooh” of the crowd, she lowered the torch into her mouth. The flame disappeared. She set the skewer down and lifted the snifter to her lips and, in flagrant violation of Oregon Liquor Control Commission server regulations, took a long sip.

“Well played,” her friend said. “What do you taste, Mary?”

Marydale turned to Aldean. “You're going to find this surprisingly smooth for such a young whiskey, although it does still have a bite, and I think that's part of its charm. It's going to mellow, but you're going to miss its youth.”

Kristen felt the stiff, gray fabric of her suit holding her in place. Marydale was there, only feet away, real, breathing, her hair glistening. Kristen had practiced this moment in her imagination a thousand times, this exact moment when their eyes met and Marydale recognized her.

For just a second, Marydale seemed to lose her train of thought. Then she resumed. “Large commercial distilleries produce consistent quality, but they sacrifice character.”

Kristen had dreamed about this reunion. She had seen Marydale in the crowds around Pioneer Square and in the quick flash of a TriMet window, her face forever disappearing into another person's image. A rational voice in the back of her mind told Kristen she was overreacting. The strange longing that filled her when she thought of Marydale was just the first pangs of middle age creeping into her thirties. It was the kind of nostalgia Sierra and Donna would never feel because Sierra lived in a semi-platonic, semi-polyamorous partnership with Frog and Moss, and Donna dated a never-ending roster of assholes.

Marydale held the glass up to the flame. Someone lowered the lights, making dark shadows of Marydale's eyes.

“First,” she said, “you'll smell the earth. Now, don't let those wine connoisseurs get away with telling you it smells
earthy
, like that's a thing. Earth is specific. Farmers know that. This is our parcel.” She smelled the whiskey. “If you're very careful—and please don't drink to excess because you'll miss everything—you can smell the roots of our heritage oak. Yes. Aldean is right. They're there, too.” She put the glass to her lips and took another sip. “It's frost on a really clear day in December when you're lonely despite all the Christmas going on around you. You can also taste summer's wildfires. This batch was aged in barrels made out of ten percent reclaimed wood from the Firesteed burn. And if you haven't seen one of those fires up close, you haven't looked into the eye of God.”

The crowd hushed.

“Now, here I've got a little bit of water,” Marydale went on. “It's from Multnomah Falls, and, friends, even if you don't take your whiskey with water, you need to at least
taste
it with water. Water opens the whiskey up.” She poured a little bit of water from a silver pitcher and smelled it again. “There it is.” She paused and looked directly at Kristen. “Your old lover's perfume woken from the leather seat of your pickup the day you take it to the scrap yard. The body. Lovemaking. Loan. Madrone bark in sunlight. The pencil you once used to write love letters.” Her voice grew louder. She raised the glass to the crowd. “A woman's hair slick with sweat. That first taste, so strange and so familiar.” She took a sip of the whiskey, set it down, and beamed at the crowd. Her teeth were perfect.

The crowd applauded.

“That, friends, is how you taste a whiskey,” Aldean said.

The lights brightened. The crowd moved toward the table or away, depending on their desire to taste oak tree and Marydale's tears. Kristen stood frozen, staring at Marydale, because the reasonable voice in the back of her head had gone silent. All she heard was the beat of blood in her ears.

“Are you going to taste?” Sierra asked.

Frog and Moss appeared beside them, smelling of marijuana. Frog draped his long arms around Sierra's shoulders. She took his hands.

“Fishbowl Pocket Moon is playing in the Tiny Barn Bar,” he said.

“I can't,” Kristen hissed to Sierra.

“You are not going to go back to your room to work,” Sierra said.

“Just go,” Kristen said.

Kristen glanced at Marydale and looked away.

“What is it?” Sierra touched Kristen's arm.

“Nothing.”

When Sierra had left and the crowd had thinned, Kristen made her way to the front of the room. Behind the table, Marydale and Aldean moved in perfect coordination, pouring samples, opening bottles, and clearing away the little plastic tasting cups without ever bumping into each other.

Marydale smiled as Kristen approached the table, but it was the same smile she had just offered a trio of college girls ahead of Kristen.

“What can I pour for you? Tonight we're tasting the Wildfire Barrel Aged, the Consummation Rye, and the Solstice Vanilla Infusion.”

Her gaze barely touched the surface of Kristen's face

“Marydale, it's me. Kristen.”

“Kristen Brock. I know.”

Aldean tossed a bottle in Marydale's direction, and she caught it behind her back.

“Thanks, man.” To Kristen she added, “What'll it be? Are you doing the whiskey passport? Can I stamp your card?”