Off Course (10 page)

“What's not to like?” said Quinn.

“He'd talk to Quinn for thirty, forty minutes at a stretch, Quinn working the whole time, nailing, sanding, whatever.”

“Basketball,” said Quinn. “He was obsessed.”

Don Dare sat down next to Quinn. “That woman who won's not going to have anything left if she doesn't hurry up,” he said. “Donna's on her way. We've been waiting for our first night of tenting in the snow. The world all muffled…”

“Let's hope it'll muffle the damn squirrels who use our trailer as a freeway,” said Quinn. “And bomb target. They wait till you're snoring—then
crack!
like a gunshot. A pinecone from thirty, fifty feet: now, that'll set you bug-eyed and bolt upright in a jiffy.”

Another round of bourbons, then Caleb and Quinn drove her home, the truck making the first tracks on blank white roads.

*   *   *

“I got a job!” Tillie said. With Edgar so busy, she'd needed something to do—that wasn't having a kid. Once you're married, she told Cress, everyone assumes a kid's next on the docket. The pressure is really on. But she met a man at the Wickers' house who worked at the
Arcadia Crier
—just a local throwaway paper, but still … This man was the art director, and he needed someone part-time to paste up ads. Tillie volunteered. How hard could it be? The art director mailed her copies of the paper, and your average chimp could do a better job than the guy they had. The art director told her to put together a few ads and send them with her résumé. “Maddie taught me paste-up in less than a day, but the résumé was harder. I had to stretch a bit. Those courses I took in textile design in Tehran? I changed them to graphic design classes. With all the purges at the universities, nobody will ever see a transcript. And I got it. I got the job!”

“Congratulations,” said Cress. “And long live the Ayatollah.”

*   *   *

“We're about knocking off,” Caleb said, taking the gallon of tung oil from Cress. “Seen the job here yet? Well, come on in.”

The Rodinger house sat on steep ground. The living room had a vaulting, twenty-foot cathedral ceiling and vast expanses of dual glazed glass. Matching half-ton boulders anchored the rock fireplace. Today the brothers were nailing planks diagonally on either side of the chimney. The boards ran pale yellow to rusty brown. “This British Columbia cedar will tone down and age real good,” said Quinn, switching boards around on the floor. “We want to avoid too much of a stripety, dark-light effect.”

They'd already clad the high beams in cedar and built a long window seat overlooking the forest. “Nice little perch,” said Caleb. “Try it out.”

Cress sat where custom-made linen cushions would someday stretch. Doors to the storage space inside the bench had sculpted, recessed handles that welcomed a hand. Outside, sparrows zinged between the spruce.

“Is it beer-thirty yet?” said Quinn.

Caleb rummaged in a cooler, handed Quinn and Cress cold longnecks, and opened a Coke for himself. Quinn sat near her on an unopened box of nails.

“Smells like a thousand pencils in here,” said Cress.

“Cedar,” said Quinn. “Working with it always reminds me of Lew.”

“I know,” said Caleb, then to Cress: “Our dad.”

“He's gone?” said Cress.

“A year,” said Caleb.

“Ten months,” said Quinn.

“I'm sorry,” Cress said, and because her mother had had a lobe of her lung removed three years ago, she felt sufficiently initiated into parental sickness to ask, “Was it a long illness? Sudden?”

The two men exchanged a look.

“Ah, Pop killed himself,” said Caleb.

“Oh God. I'm so sorry,” Cress said. “I didn't mean to pry.”

“You weren't prying,” said Caleb. “It's all right. No, Pop went out to the barn one afternoon and shot himself.”

“Jesus. That's terrible. So hard on you.”

Quinn set his beer on the floor between his feet and hung there, elbows on his knees. “It's the meanest thing one person can do to another,” he said.

A deep line creased his forehead. Cress reached over and grasped his forearm. So—it was sadness that had sealed his surface. Sadness and fury. Up close, his pain was a steady, low sounding. She held on right above his wrist.

When she let go, Quinn picked up his beer and drank the rest of the bottle in fast, long gulps.

 

Eight

Over the weekend, the snow vanished except in shadows and on the north sides of hills. She was hunting for clean hiking socks when a knock thudded on the sliding glass door: Quinn Morrow in a red-and-black wool shirt. “I was hoping you hadn't gone out yet.”

Coming in, he handed her a long, thin white package,
Bac
written on it in ballpoint scrawl. “From our hog,” he said. “Had it smoked out in Fountain Springs. It'll wreck you for that store-bought stuff.”

“So nice of you,” she said, and briefly considered inviting him and Caleb for dinner. But she had little to cook in the house.

“I was just heading out,” she said, pointing to her hiking boots by the door. “Or I'd offer you coffee.”

“That's okay. I'm heading out myself.”

He's too solitary and grumpy, Cress thought, to want company.

“You guys knock off early,” she said.

“We work six to two or three,” he said. “Sometimes we go back to it after dark. No point in being up here if you can't enjoy the country. I've been meaning to ask—I see you come down into the meadows. Is there a trail?”

*   *   *

They switchbacked down through young pines and snow patches to the top of the first meadow, green-gold in the pale fall sunlight. “This was my secret spot as a kid,” she said. “It looks like a place where fairies frolic, until you try to walk across and find out it's a stinky bog.”

Quinn, too, had come to the mountains constantly as a child. His grandparents and two uncles had cabins on Noah Mountain, along the North Fork of the Hapsaw. (“Maybe six, seven miles from here as the crow flies, but forty-some by car,” he said.) He'd run in a clutch of cousins and neighbor boys. The men took them hunting and fishing, and every weekend included a music night, when half the mountain was at the house picking and singing.

“You never wanted to stay home in Seal Beach?”

He turned with such a shocked, sharp look, Cress stopped in her tracks. “Who said I was from Seal Beach?”

“You did. At poker night.”

His face relaxed. “Oh, that's right.”

And no. He'd only wanted to be on Noah Mountain. His friends were all there, and also everything he loved to do—hunting, fishing, exploring. Intermittently, his family moved to the ten acres his father inherited. Today his whole family lived in the area. His mom and siblings. Quinn was the oldest. Nine years after him came Caleb, and nine years after
him
came their sister, Rosie, who lived in Sawyer with a husband and new baby.

“Big gaps,” said Cress.

“Same with my kids,” he said. “Annette's seventeen and Evan's eight.”

“Funny how those patterns come down through a family,” Cress said, and calculated. “Does this mean we'll be welcoming a new little Morrow next year?”

“Hope not,” he said. “I've changed enough diapers for one lifetime.”

“And Caleb's kids? Same gaps?”

“Two years apart. More like their mom's side.”

They had come around on the fire road to the far side of the first meadow and now passed through a small woodlot to the second. “I haven't officially met Caleb's wife,” said Cress.

“Candy?” Quinn's face went hard.

He'd spent a lot of time with Candy, he told Cress, when Caleb first brought her home. Noah Mountain was too quiet for her. She was a town girl, always afraid she was missing out on life. Whenever Quinn ran to Sawyer or Sparkville, she had to come along. He'd try to slip away undetected, and there she was,
Oh, Quinn, cain't I run down the hill with you?
People started saying, Who's Quinn's new girl? He didn't mind her at first, he told Cress. She liked to laugh.

“Not so crazy about her anymore?”

“Not so much, no.” Quinn gazed off into the woods.

“Well, maybe it won't last. The marriage, I mean.”

“Morrows mate for life.”

“And you? How long's it been?”

“Twenty-one years so far.”

“Your wife is very pretty.”

“Prom Queen,” he said. “
And
Homecoming.”

“You knew her then?”

“All through high school.”

In the second meadow, the old log cabin, shuttered as usual, sat in the thin, yellowing light. “Perfect, isn't it?” said Cress.

“I'd like to put something like that up on Noah Mountain,” said Quinn.

“I wish my parents were building something more like it for the new place. But Rick Garsh sold 'em his bill of goods, I guess.”

“Rick Garsh.” Quinn let the name hang there.

“Yeah, well, my dad's giving him a real run for his money.”

She told Quinn about her father picking up the nails and saying, “This represents real money. Just lying on the ground.”

“Hell, I'd hammer out nails for thirty bucks an hour,” said Quinn. “If that's what he wanted.”

The fire road crossed Spearmint Creek, then followed it. They walked in silence now, side by side. Quinn, in his distinctive way, placed one foot directly in front of the other: it was a hunter's walk, a silent, controlled prowl. When not talking, Quinn pulled into himself; she felt his withdrawal like a receding wave. She'd always been good with quiet men, she knew when and how to draw them out. “Tell me about your daughter,” she said. “What's she like?”

“Annette? She's a great girl,” he said. Captain of her water polo team, and not because she was such a good player—she wasn't. But she was bighearted, enthusiastic, and so encouraging, she really fired up the team. She was graduating in May and had her sights set on either Fresno or Davis for college. She already had lists of pros 'n' cons. Smiling, Quinn showed a discolored incisor. “Now, if I could just get Sylvia to go back to school, find something she wants to do…” He glanced at Cress. “I was thinking you could talk to her.”

“Me?” Cress said.

“Do her good to see what some people do with their lives.”

“Like loaf in the mountains when they should be writing?”

“Yes, but we've been living in these parts so long,” he said, “the place has had its way with us. We're turning into hicks.”

*   *   *

Cress had walked almost to the lodge for Family Night when Quinn's truck drew up alongside her. He rolled down his window, and she saw Sylvia in the cab, sitting flush up against him, the way couples did in high school. “Lift?”

“Need the exercise,” she said, not wanting to intrude in such a small space. “I'll meet you down there.”

They sat in a booth as they had in the cab, close, pressed together. Cute, Cress thought, given those twenty-one years. She slid in across from them.

“Quinn says you're writing a book.” Sylvia's voice was soft and childishly sweet. “What's it about?”

Cress checked the floor for DeeDee, or anyone else who could bring her a drink. “It's more like a long term paper,” she said. “On the economics of art. How artwork accrues value in the marketplace.”

“That sounds interesting.”

“Not so much as one might hope.”

Soft, dark curls framed Sylvia Morrow's face. Orange lace edged the neck of her peach-colored T-shirt. She was so petite and soft-spoken, Cress began to feel oversized and brash.

Don and Donna and Brian and Franny had their usual table by the fireplace. They waved to her, and Cress regretted having committed herself to this subdued marital pair, the twinge of resentment familiar: one more time, she couldn't be with her friends. She wished that Caleb and his loud, laughing wife would join them—they would have livened things up—but they were back at the trailer. Stayin' in, Quinn said.

“I hear you work downtown,” Cress said.

“Just at Harvey's.” Sylvia Morrow kept her movements close to her body, as if she were confined to a small area or trying to take up as little space as possible. Keeping her elbow by her ribs, she dipped her head to push her hair off her face. “And I really like it,” she said. “Despite what the grouch here thinks.” Her hand darted up then and gave Quinn's hat a playful downward tug.

Displeasure darkened his features. He turned away, corrected the tilt of the brim.

Cold, Cress thought, and a little mean. She spoke cheerfully to counter his moodiness. “I sent myself through grad school waitressing,” she said. “I was a waitress till I moved up here. And unless I finish this project lickety-split”—she couldn't bring herself to say “dissertation” to Sylvia—“I'll be one again. Nothing's wrong with restaurant work. Just the tedium. And the physical exhaustion. The customers. Oh, and all the idiots you have to work with.”

Quinn, still canted away, laughed low and grabbed the end of the table.

Sylvia said, “Oh, but the people I work with are really nice. And our customers are, too—”

Quinn stood. “You girls want anything?” he said, already moving toward the bar.

Sylvia spoke rapidly in his absence. “I don't know why he acts like my job's so awful. Have you been to Harvey's? It's not fancy, but the food's delish and everybody's friendly. Old Harvey was a grump, but he's been dead for years, and it's Mrs. Harvey who's made it a success. She's always there in a blue dress. She has a hundred blue dresses—she's famous for them.”

“Blue dresses?” What Cress really wanted to say was
Adult voice, please!

“Not like dressy ones. It's just a coffee shop. But we grind our own hamburger, and a woman comes in twice a week to make our pies.”