Good question. He should cut her off.
Cut her off from what? It wasn’t as if he had a relationship with her. One freak roadside encounter with a stranger and a phone call hardly made a relationship.
On the other hand, Lacy was no stranger. She stood there by her car in Kent’s mind, like a ghost stepping from the pages of his past.
Still, he had no desire for a relationship that could be characterized as anything but platonic. There was Gloria to think of—in the dirt nearly three months. That long? Goodness. And mistress ROOSTER.
Get a grip, Kent. You’re losing it.
He lifted the bottle, sipped at the burning liquid, and scratched his chin. Sweat wet the skin beneath two days of stubble. He looked at his shirt. It was the same Super Bowl T-shirt he’d slept in for a week. Not a problem. Now that he was doing his own laundry, changing clothes had lost its appeal. Except for underwear, of course. But he could just throw the underwear in the machine once every other week and stuff them in a drawer without all the folding and sorting mess. Which reminded him; he needed another dozen. The machine could easily hold a month’s worth. Once a month was clearly better than once every two weeks.
Kent looked at the tube. The game was nearing an end. Outside, the night was pitch black. He licked the bottle and thought about Pinhead again. A needle of anxiety pricked his skin. It was madness.
When you’re ready, just call me,
she’d said in the voice echoing from the past. Lacy.
He made the decision then, impulsively, with two minutes to play and the Broncos now leading twenty-one to nineteen.
He climbed out of the lounger and picked up the phone, his heart suddenly stomping through his chest. Which was absurd because he certainly had no emotions for Lacy that would set off its pounding. Except that he did want to see her. That much he could not deny. The realization only added energy to his heart’s antics as he dialed her number.
LACY HAD just slipped on her bathrobe when the phone began its ringing. The caller ID showed only that the call was “out of area,” and she decided to pick it up on the remote chance it was a call she actually wanted to take.
“Hello.”
“Hello. Lacy?”
Kent!
Her heart leapt. She would know that voice anywhere.
“Yes?”
“Hi, Lacy. Is it too late?”
“And you are . . . ?”
“Oh, I’m sorry. It’s Kent. Geez, I’m sorry. Pretty stupid, huh? Call up and ask if it’s too late without introducing myself. I didn’t mean to sound . . .”
“What do you want, Kent?”
The phone returned only silence for a few moments. Now why had she come off so curt? And why was her breathing tight?
God, help me.
“Maybe I should call back at a better time,” Kent said.
“No. No, I’m sorry. You just took me by surprise. It’s only ten. You’re fine.”
He chuckled on the phone, and she thought he sounded like a boy. “Actually, I was wondering if I could talk to you,” he said.
“Sure. Go ahead.” Lacy settled onto a chair by the dinette.
“I mean come up there and talk to you.”
Now her pulse spiked. “Up here? When?”
“Well . . . tonight.”
Lacy rose to her feet. “Tonight!? You want to come up here tonight?”
“I know it’s a bit late, but I really need someone to talk to right now.”
It was her turn to freeze in silence.
“Lacy?”
What was she to say to this?
Come on up, Lover Boy.
His voice came again, softer. “Okay, well, maybe it’s not such a good idea . . .”
“No, it’s okay.” It was? It was nothing of the kind.
“You sure? Maybe we could meet at the Village Inn.”
“Sure.”
“In an hour?”
The sum of this matter began to spread through Lacy’s mind like icy waters. Kent was coming to Boulder tonight. He wanted to talk to her.
“Sure,” she said.
“Good. I’ll see you in an hour, then.”
“Sure.”
Silence filled the receiver again, and Lacy suddenly felt like a high school girl being asked out by the captain of the football team. “So, what do you want to talk about?” she asked. It struck her that the question was at once both perfectly legitimate and absurd. On one hand, their relationship should remain strictly platonic, for obvious reasons. Reasons that droned through her head like World War II bombers threatening to unload at the first sign of flak. Reasons like, this man had dropped her once before and if it had hurt then, it might kill her now. Reasons like, he had just lost his wife. He was no doubt rebounding like the world’s tightest-wound super-ball.
On the other hand, since when did reasoning direct the heart?
“Nothing,” he said.
It was the wrong answer, she thought. Because in matters of the heart, “nothing” was much more than “something.”
“Okay, I’ll see you there,” she said and hung up the phone with a trembling hand.
IT TOOK Lacy forty-five of the sixty minutes to prepare herself, which was in itself nonsense because other than changing clothes she had not yet
unprepared
herself from the day’s preparedness, which had taken her less than fifteen minutes just this morning. Nevertheless, it took her forty-five, due in part to the fact that the blouse she thought would best suit the occasion needed ironing. Not that this was an occasion as such.
Kent was there, at the Village Inn, sitting in a corner booth nursing a cup of coffee when she arrived. He glanced up as she slid onto the bench opposite him. His eyes brightened, which was a good thing because they appeared a bit red and blurry, as if he’d been crying in the last hour. His breath smelled strongly of mints.
“Hi, Kent.”
He smiled wide and extended a hand. “Hi.”
She took it hesitantly. Goodness. What was he thinking? This was not a business deal that required a handshake.
Looking at him now under the lights Lacy saw that Kent had seen some abuse lately. Dark circles cupped his eyes, which were indeed rather lethargic looking. The lines defining his smile seemed to have deepened. His hair was as blond as it had been the day he’d told her to take a hike years ago, but now it was disheveled. It was Monday—surely he had not gone to work like this. Something had been pummeling him, she thought, but then she already knew that. He had walked through the valley of death. You always got pummeled in the valley of death.
They sipped at their coffees and talked small talk for half an hour—the weather, the new stadium, the Broncos—all in all, things that neither seemed to have any interest in. Without going into their past, they really didn’t have much to talk about. But it hardly mattered; just sitting there across from each other after so many years held its own power, however awkward or halting it might be.
The thought of revisiting their past brought an edginess to her heart. They could always talk about death, of course. It was their common bridge now. Death. But Kent was not thinking death. Something else was running around behind those eyes.
“I met a cop today,” he said out of the blue, staring at his coffee.
“A cop?”
“Yeah. I was just sitting there in the bookstore, and this cop sits down and starts giving me the third degree about Spencer. About my boy, Spencer.” His face drifted into a snarl as he talked. He looked up, and his eyes were flashing. “Can you believe the audacity of that? I mean—” He glanced out the window and lifted a hand helplessly. “I was just sitting there, minding my own business, and this pinhead cop starts accusing me.”
“Accusing you of what?”
“I don’t even know. That was just it. He goes on as if I had something to do with . . .” He stopped and swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing against the emotion boiling through his chest. “With Spencer’s death,” he finished.
“Come on, Kent! That’s absurd!”
“I know. It
is
absurd. Then he just went on, as if he knew things, you know.”
“What things?”
“I don’t know.” He was shaking his head. The poor man sat there like someone strung together by a few brittle strands of flesh. Surely he could not have had anything to do with his own son’s death! Could he? Of course not!
“It was like a scene out of
TheTwilight Zone.”
“Well, I’m sure you have nothing to worry about. The authorities do things like that as a matter of routine. It’s ridiculous. You’ll never hear from the man again.”
“And maybe you’re wrong,” he said. She blinked at his tone. “Maybe I have plenty to worry about. The last thing I need is some pinhead with a badge poking his greasy head into my life! I swear I could tear his head off !”
She stared at him, unsure how to respond. “Maybe you need to lighten up, Kent. You’ve got nothing to hide, right? Don’t let it get to you.”
“Yeah, easy for you to say. It’s not your neck he’s breathing down.”
Now she felt her face flush. “And it’s not yours, either. The police are just doing their job. They should be the least of your concerns. And just in case you’re confused here, I’m not one of them. I work at a bank, remember?”
Kent looked at the ceiling and sighed. “I’m sorry. You’re right.” He collected himself, nodding as if slowly coming to agreement. Then he closed his eyes and shook his head, gritting his teeth in frustration.
Yes indeed, he had been pummeled lately. She wondered what had really happened to bring him to this strange state.
He was smiling at her, his blue eyes suddenly soft and bright at once, like she remembered them from their previous life. “You’re right, Lacy. You see, that’s what I needed to hear. You always did have a way with the simple truth, you know.”
She gulped and hoped immediately that he had not noticed. It was not his words but the way he had said them that bothered her, as if at that moment he was dripping with admiration for her.
She chuckled nervously. “If I remember correctly, you were never too stupid yourself.”
“Well, we had our times, didn’t we?”
She had to look away this time. An image of Kent leaning over her as they lay under the great cottonwood behind her dormitory filled her mind. “I love you,” he was whispering, and then he touched her lips with his own. She wanted to shake the image from her head, force her heart back to its normal rhythm, but she could only sit there, pretending nothing at all was happening in her chest.
“Yes, we did,” she said.
Tension hung in the air as if someone had thrown a switch somewhere and filled the room with a thick cloud of charged particles. Lacy could feel his eyes on her cheek, and she finally turned to face him. She gave him a controlled grin. This was madness! He had lost his sensibilities! Two minutes ago he was ranting about some cop and how he would like to tear the poor fellow’s head off, and now he was staring at her like some honeymooner.
Death does that to people, Lacy,
she reasoned quickly.
It makes them lose their sensibilities. And you’re reading way too much into that look. It’s not as bad as it looks.
And then bad went to terrible. Because then Lacy felt heat swallow her face despite her best efforts to stop it. Yes indeed, she was blushing. As red as a cooked lobster. And he could see it all. She knew that because he too was suddenly blushing.
Panic flashed through her mind, and she impulsively considered fleeing. Of course that would be about as sensible as Kent’s tearing a cop’s head off. Instead, she did the only thing she
could
do. She smiled. And that just made it worse, she thought.
“It’s good to see you again, Lacy.” He shook his head, diverted his eyes. “I kept telling myself that the last thing I needed was a relationship so soon after Gloria’s death. It hasn’t even been three months, you know. But I realize now that I was wrong. I think I do need a relationship. A good friendship, without all the baggage that comes with romance. No strings, you know. And I see now that you can give me that friendship.”
He faced her. “Don’t you think?”
To be honest, she didn’t know what to think. Her head was still buzzing from that last heat wave. Was he saying he wanted nothing but a platonic relationship? Yes, and that was good. Wasn’t it?
“Yes. It took me six months to get over John. Not
over,
over, of course. I don’t think you ever get
over,
over. But to a point where I could see clearly. Some are faster healers. They’re back on their feet in three or four months; some take a year. But all of us need someone to stand by. I don’t think I could have made it if I hadn’t found God.”
If he had been eating a cherry tomato, he might have choked on it at the comment. He coughed.
She ignored him. “Ultimately his is the only relationship that brings peace. I guess sometimes it takes a death to understand that.” Kent’s eyes were following the rim of his coffee cup. “But, yes, Kent. You’re right. It is good to have a friendship that is completely unpretentious.”
He nodded.
They talked for another hour, telling for the first time their own stories of loss. Lacy’s mind kept wandering back to that heat wave that had fallen over them, but in the end she settled herself with the reasoning that these things happened to people who had walked through the valley. They lost their sensibilities at times.
By the time they shook hands and bid each other a good night, the clock’s fat hand was past the midnight hour. By the time Lacy finally fell asleep, it was nudging the second morning hour. Surely it was well after Kent had arrived home and fallen comfortably asleep in his big, empty house, she thought.
She was wrong.
HELEN JOVIC lived roughly eight miles from Kent’s Littleton suburban neighborhood. Depending on traffic the crosstown jaunt took anywhere between fifteen and twenty minutes in her old yellow Pinto. But today she wasn’t in the Pinto. Today she was on Reeboks, and the walk stretched into a three-hour ordeal.
It was the first time her walking actually took her anywhere. The minute she’d stepped off her porch, with the sun starting to splash against the Rockies, she’d felt an urge to walk west. Just west. So she’d walked west for over an hour before realizing that Kent’s house lay directly in her path.