How I Came to Sparkle Again (19 page)

“See, Jill, women take just one look at me and begin to peel their clothes off,” Tom said.

“Clearly it’s your alpha man smell,” Jill replied.

“Clearly,” Tom agreed.

“Tom’s been giving me his
Wild Kingdom
take on relationships,” Jill explained to Lisa.

“Is that right?” Lisa asked.

“Tell me about Lisa’s mating strategy,” Jill prompted. “Listen to this, Lisa.”

“I’ve given this a lot of thought,” Tom began, “because it could be one of two things. Okay, the females of many species show signs when they’re fertile, thereby letting the males know it’s their big chance, but human females hide their fertility. We never know when they’re in heat, so if a male wants to increase his odds of impregnating her, he needs to stick around for a few weeks. And how does he get her to tolerate him this long? He’s nice to her. Why? Because he really likes her and cares about her? No. Because he wants to have sex with her. That’s all. Simple as that. So if Lisa can make several men think there is even the slightest chance they might get lucky, she can get them to do all kinds of nice things for her. Sven will fix her roof. I will shovel her sidewalk. Cody will make her dinner, and so on.”

Lisa nodded. “That’s a fact. Men will do anything for women if they think they have even the slimmest shot.”

“That’s one possibility. The problem arises when we consider what would happen to Lisa if she actually got pregnant. She’d have no help because she hadn’t wanted to seal the deal before she let the father into her pants. In this culture, we men have done a truly remarkable job making our mating strategy—promiscuity—fashionable. A lot of women like Lisa aren’t even questioning what’s in their best interest anymore, and that bodes well for us alpha males.

“In many species, some females prefer to mate with an alpha male even though that male will be long gone by the time their baby is born. See, the female wants her offspring to have alpha male qualities—maybe good looks, athletic ability, maybe a good singing voice, a large stature—so that the next generation will be able to compete well for a good mate or lots of mates and pass on the genes. But you generally see that in scenarios where there is little hope and so little food that the female will send her offspring out on its own sooner than usual. The alpha female strategy is, of course, to lock in a partner to help her long term, so by adopting the alpha
male
mating strategy, the female forfeits her ability to be an alpha female. See, no male is going to invest long-term energy into a female if he thinks the likelihood of her child being his is not great. These things were hardwired long before paternity tests.” Tom looked quite pleased with himself and his display of brilliance.

Lisa got quiet. She scanned the room. “Excuse me,” she said, and walked over to talk to a group of ski school instructors.

“Uh-oh,” Tom said.

“Yeah,” Jill said. “That was some killer mating strategy you displayed just now. Good thing you gave it a lot of thought.”

“You’re going to help me fix it, right?”

“Repeat after me, Tom. Ready?” Jill said, “I, Tom…”

“I, Tom…”

“Do hereby renounce my brilliant alpha male theories as complete and utter crap,” Jill said.

“But they’re not crap,” he said.

“As long as you believe that, Lisa’s off-limits,” Jill said. “Really, Tom, what kind of friend would I be if I helped Lisa hook up with a man who sees her as a plan B? She’s no plan B. You know what? None of us are. We’re women, Tom—women. And we’re blessings, even if all of you are too stupid and blind to see it.”

Jill took her beer and left him there to think about it.

*   *   *

Cassie had taken her mother’s cookbooks off the shelf and was leafing through the pages, mostly looking at pictures, when Jill arrived.

“You look like you’re on a mission,” Jill said.

“I just got to thinking that there’s not a lot I can do, you know? There’s not a lot I can do to make things better now. But I could learn to make really good food, and that would make my life a little better. And it would make Dad’s life a little better, too.”

“Brilliant,” Jill said. “Hey, I had an idea for making things better today, too. I was thinking about how if I helped you win a season pass, it would almost be like my service paid for itself.”

“Talk to me,” Cassie said, which cracked Jill up.

“Does the mountain still have the Dummy Downhill, you know, where you make a dummy on skis and they launch it off the ski jump and whoever’s goes farthest wins a season pass for next year?”

“Why, yes, it does,” Cassie replied, again making Jill laugh. Then they looked at each other with their best cunning and sly expressions and nodded their unspoken pact: They would dominate the Dummy Downhill.

Later that night, after dinner was cleaned up and homework was done, Cassie excitedly sketched ideas for their dummy. It was the first time in a long time she actually felt excited about something, and that it was a project with Jill made it complicated. Cassie wondered whether Jill was replacing her mother so slowly that she didn’t even realize what was happening. And Cassie wondered whether she was letting her. Was it a betrayal to her mom to have fun with Jill? Would she slowly start to forget things about her mother as Jill became a bigger part of her life? She wondered whether she should take a couple steps back from Jill while she figured it out. Probably. But she couldn’t quite bring herself to do it.

chapter fourteen

SNOW REPORT FOR JANUARY 6

Current temperature: 23F, high of 24F at 2
P.M.
, low of 19F at 1
A.M.

Increasing clouds, winds out of the southwest at 30 mph with gusts of up to 45 mph.

61" mid-mountain, 69" at the summit. 0" in the last 24 hours. 0" of new in the last 48.

After Cassie went out the door for school, Jill continued to try to get the burned waffle out of the waffle iron without scratching the nonstick surface. She was deep in her own thoughts when Mike came in.

He took off his coat and boots, paused to look at Kate’s picture as he walked through the front room, and made his way to the kitchen. Something about him seemed different, something in his demeanor had changed.

As he walked into the kitchen, Jill handed him a glass of orange juice.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

He paused and leaned against the doorjamb. “Tough night,” he said.

“Yeah?” Jill asked.

He nodded. “Sometimes we see things—bad things. I had to go on a really bad call last night.”

She waited. After a long pause, she said, “I didn’t last one whole day on my shift after returning to work. They brought in this meth addict pregnant lady who gave birth way too early. She didn’t even want to see her baby, so I stayed with him while he died. It brought me to my knees, you know, seeing someone take something I wanted so much for granted and throw it away.”

He nodded. She understood. She understood perfectly. She understood how ugly this medical field could be and how it was even uglier after a loss. It was such a relief to be with someone who understood. He looked away for a moment and then said, “Cassie said you lost a baby. I’m so sorry.”

She nodded back. “Yeah, that may not have been an appropriate thing to share with her, but she was giving me attitude on my due date and I needed her to let up.”

“I don’t think it was a bad thing for her to realize that everyone has their heartbreaks, and that just because someone looks fine doesn’t mean that they are.”

They had never really had a conversation where it seemed appropriate to look into each other’s eyes for any length of time, and now that they were, Jill saw so many things: pain, of course, but also compassion, and nonjudgment, deep concern, and something like endurance or tolerance—something that would continue to withstand it. Continue to withstand all of humanity’s heartbreaks. Continue to withstand Cassie’s. And continue to withstand his own. And she saw something warm and she saw something that was searching, although she didn’t know exactly for what. Maybe answers. Maybe something to fill the empty places everyone had. Maybe someone to fill the empty places everyone had. She shrugged as though she didn’t know, and after a short pause she asked, “What happened last night?”

He took a deep breath and let it out. “Car wreck with two sixteen-year-old boys. Mangled. Just mangled. It took us a long time to get the driver’s body out. Meanwhile, some witness must have made some calls. I pulled this dead kid out and was holding him in my arms, and I turned around, and there were his folks, looking at us, devastated. Just devastated.”

Jill shook her head. Tears brimmed in her eyes. She wanted to take him in her arms and tell him everything would be all right, but she didn’t because it wouldn’t. Everything would not be all right. So instead, she just continued to listen.

He said, “Yeah, you know, death is a part of life. I get it, but it’s one thing when Grandma dies of heart disease. It’s another when it’s a kid, and the causes aren’t natural.”

Jill understood this. “I used to see birth defects from time to time that were so severe that the baby didn’t even look human. I think that was the thing that got to me the most. I’d watch these parents try to grasp that the child they had been dreaming of was not going to have any kind of quality of life, but thanks to us, they weren’t going to leave this world, either. They were just going to spend a lifetime in purgatory.” Memories of babies and parents flashed through her mind, and she wondered how they were doing now.

Mike rested his head in his hands. “Sometimes I come home, and I’m just so happy that Cassie survived another day. There are days that seems nothing short of incredible. I mean, in any given neighborhood in any part of the country, every twenty houses or so, someone is dealing with some big shit. I don’t mean natural stuff, but really bad stuff.”

Jill just nodded.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wreck your day,” he said, suddenly self-conscious.

“You didn’t wreck my day. I’ve been there. Usually it’s not the dead ones that get you, but their survivors.” She went back to cleaning the waffle iron.

“What do you remember about Kate?” Mike asked.

Jill didn’t know how much to divulge. He wanted to hear good things, she knew. “She gave me an apple once when I forgot my lunch, and it surprised me because I never had the feeling she liked me. Mostly, my memories of her are of her racing. She was fearless. She was a force.”

He smiled sadly. “Yeah. She was.” He poured himself a little more orange juice and then asked, “So you weren’t friends?”

“We weren’t enemies,” Jill replied. “I see her in Cassie sometimes. She’s a force in her own way.”

Mike raised his eyebrows as he nodded in agreement. “You should have seen her before Kate…”

Jill nodded.

“When we crossed paths on the sidewalk this morning, she handed me a grocery list for all the ingredients in the dinner she wants to make with you, and then asked if we could hit the hardware store for PVC pipe for the dummy project. I can’t tell you how nice it is to see her excited about things again. Thanks for that. You’ve been really good for her. She really likes you.” Jill noticed the dimples at the corners of his mouth when he smiled just a little.

“Well, it’s mutual,” she replied.

Then the dimples disappeared as he paused and then said, “I worry about her.”

“Time,” Jill said. “Or so they tell me.”

“Well, thanks for listening,” he said.

Jill could tell he was finished. “I’ll see you the day after tomorrow,” she said.

He followed her to the door. “See you.”

“Take care,” she replied, and let herself out.

*   *   *

After Jill left, Mike walked up the stairs to his bedroom. He lay down on his side of the bed and looked over at Kate’s side. What he remembered was the sense that she was always miles and miles away.

“How come you never tell me about your day?” she’d asked him once. There was nothing particularly soft about the way she’d asked, nothing that would lead him to think she could be any kind of comfort, even if she could understand, which she couldn’t. It was almost a challenge. “I can tell when you’ve had a bad day, you know. You’re distant.”

He had pulled a three-year-old out of a pond that day, and it just hit too close to home.

“I don’t want to talk about it. Talking about it with you doesn’t help. It doesn’t help to get it off my chest. You haven’t seen a whole bunch of dead kids,” he’d said.

Kate had rolled over, turning away from him. He had rolled over on his side and put an arm around her, but it did no good. Neither one could bridge the distance between them.

*   *   *

When Jill stepped out of the bathroom, the sheriff was waiting for her near the door of the FAR. “Jill Fritz?” he asked.

“Yes?” she answered, alarmed.

“I have something for you from the great state of Texas,” he said, and served her with papers. “Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.” He turned and left.

She was speechless. She examined the petition for divorce. David had filed for a no-fault divorce, stating the reason simply as “unsupportability.” The other document was a notice of a hearing for temporary orders in less than two weeks. She would need to find and hire a lawyer somehow, take time off from both of her jobs, and get back to Austin.

She hated the word
divorce,
and now here it was about to be stuck to her like a stain that couldn’t be removed. For the rest of her life, she’d check the divorced box on forms. It was going to be part of her identity. Divorced.

*   *   *

When Jill walked into the Kennel after work that night, Lisa was sitting with the guys on the couch, mesmerized by the TV.

“Lisa, you’re in the Kennel,” Jill said, shocked.

“We’re watching
The Bachelor,
” Tom said, poured Jill some wine, and handed it to her. “We take a generous sip every time someone says ‘amazing,’ ‘incredible,’ ‘like,’ ‘connection,’ ‘oh, my God,’ and whenever anyone toasts or someone cries.”