The Secrets She Keeps (13 page)

Before Thomas, I’d dated Nathan Jarrison, and he once got so mad he left fingerprints on my arm. But that night, a waitress at the Little Red Hen brought French fries instead of onion rings, and Thomas just said,
I don’t mind. French fries sound good
. It was an easiness that spoke of maturity, I thought, utterly unaware of love-lesson number one: What draws you is what will make you craziest later. Nathan Jarrison would have refused to eat those fries. My mother would have sent them back and refused to pay the rest of the bill besides. Of course I said yes to Thomas when he asked me to marry him the next summer. He told me I was his best friend, and meant it.

“That bar, the night I met Thomas? Jed Nelson was playing, before he got famous.”

“Jed’s dog slept by the bass player. Tell me something I don’t know. Thomas was nice when they got his order wrong.”

Shaye concentrated on the road. I would have, too, if I were driving that thing. I glanced at her profile, which was still lovely and youthful-looking. She’d always had a lot of boyfriends and it was clear why, but what wasn’t so clear was why she chose the ones she did. They were dark storm clouds against her blue sky, and their jackets smelled like cigarettes. After Nathan Jarrison, Shaye’s and my relationship roads diverged in a yellow wood. Still, we’d both been in that yellow wood, looking for the same thing, likely.

“Thomas drove me home afterward,” I said. “And that was that.”

“Yeah, and he hit that raccoon, don’t forget that part. He wanted to put it in the
car
and take it to the vet. You thought that was so sweet.”

“Oh, my God, the raccoon!” I said. “That thing was so scary. His eyes were glowing green out there, and he was baring his teeth.”

“How could you have forgotten about the raccoon? That was the best part.”

I was so known, by Shaye, by Thomas, by my kids. No wonder Thomas had asked if this was
all
. It was an old story. Familiarity, the liar, convinced us that we already knew everything about each other. Familiarity, the cheat, stole our passion. We’d had it, too. Back then I once told him that I could never imagine lying next to him without wanting to touch him. We were in his bed in that cold house he rented, and it was all hands and skin and hands and skin. It made me ashamed to think of us back then. Not because of our passion, but because of how we were so sure of it.

—

The city of Reno had grown since Thomas and I were there last. It had sprawled. As the sun set and bold smears of pink and orange brushed the sky, tiny lights twinkled on all around us. In the dark, we passed bright gas stations and fluorescent-lit minimarts, the beacon of golden arches, and the afterglow of curtains in cheap hotels; then the red brake lights of the cars in front of us stacked up, too. Downtown became all busy intersections, with banks and drugstores and government buildings. After we drove under the curve of the red deco
Reno
sign, there was a greater explosion of lights and motion—casinos, hotels, the sci-fi rise of the Silver Legacy Hotel with its illuminated blue ball dome; garish greens and jolting fuschias, flashing marquees, and tourists making mad dashes across the street. There was a lot that hadn’t changed, though. The Riverside Hotel, the courthouse, the beautiful old Virginia Street Bridge, which arced over the river in which the women would throw their wedding bands. Salvage divers had actually found them in there, I remember reading once.

My head suddenly throbbed. There was that city smell of French fries and exhaust, and it was all too much after two days in the delicious sensory deprivation of the desert. My mind was full of Thomas, and of Nash’s illness; unraveling minds, and the way things were crumbling. This was all new energy and wrongness. This was life, life, life. The desert had two different selves, devil and saint, introvert and extrovert, the slow passage of time versus now and now. I was always more saint than devil, like it or not. Give me a good novel and a hammock by a lake, same as my failing aunt.

Shaye honked her horn at a couple of kids in a Camaro, who hung out their windows at a green light. “For God’s sake, idiots!”

“Watch the road rage, sis. You’re driving a lethal weapon.”

“I don’t know if I’m in the mood for this. I’m sorry, Cal. This is all just…”

“I know,” I said. “Me, too.”

“I feel old all of a sudden.”

I’d always been old. I knew that about myself. “Well, I’ve got five bucks burning a hole in my pocket. Do you think that place we used to go when we were kids is still there?”

“That was back by the ranch. In Carson City.”

“I thought it was in Reno.”

“Nope. Let’s get out of here.”

“Fast,” I said. “I’m suddenly in the mood for a Shirley Temple and a breaded veal cutlet.”

—

I recognized the big gold urn of the Carson Nugget the minute I saw it. Shaye and I hurried through the casino like a pair of nuns and headed to the restaurant bar for our preferred path of corruption. It was warm and friendly in there, with brick walls decorated with old photos of the place. The Carson Nugget had been here forever. The music was loud, but it was a we’re-all-friends-here loud and not a volume that expected things of you. People were smoking, which shocked me. You couldn’t smoke a cigarette in a public place in Seattle unless you didn’t mind being forcibly escorted out by tattooed vegans, and even outside, smokers risked social shaming and death penalty by glare. Cigarettes right out in the open—my God, we’d practically stumbled on an opium den. Shaye edged toward an open table and snagged it.

I eased to a sitting position. Damn. After that fence, every suburban muscle in my body was lecturing me on my arrogance.

“I’m so sore I can barely move,” I said. I peered at the photo above our table, a black-and-white image of two women and two cowboys at a roulette wheel in this very bar.

Shaye studied the plastic-covered menu. “Remember Mom and Nash and their Moscow mules?”

“I wonder what those even were,” I said.

“Booze, strong. Well, the breaded veal cutlets are gone.” Shaye set down her menu. We ordered margaritas and four different appetizers. The place was crowded, and you could hear the
bing-ching
of the slot machines in the next room. Shaye’s blond hair was shiny in the candlelight. Her shoulders had also gotten sunburned; I could see the pink of them yelling silently against the edge of her sleeveless top.

Our drinks arrived, and we clinked glasses, though to what we didn’t say. “Now that you mentioned it, I keep thinking about that raccoon,” I shouted over the music. “Can you imagine wanting to bring that thing in the car? It probably had rabies. I had to talk Thomas out of it!”

“I always thought that was a little nutty,” Shaye admitted. “Can you imagine it leaping over the seat and sticking its teeth in you? But, hey, Mathew had wild eyes and fangs, and I
married
him.” She laughed, now that she had a few sips of tequila in her.

“Eric’s nothing like Mathew,” I said. And he wasn’t. I actually liked Eric for the most part. He was good to Josh and Emma, for one thing. He was a big, friendly man, the kind who hugged you a little too hard without realizing it. He once gave me a fancy remote control for my birthday, which was supposed to operate every device in the house. One look at the directions, and my head exploded.

“He’s not. He’s not at all. He can be so amiable. Such a friend. But, I don’t know, Cal. I thought I was done being helpless at the hands of angry men, but now I’m just helpless at the hands of angry stepchildren. Yeah, there’s a theme.”

“Oh, Sham.” It was my childhood nickname for her, short for
Shamu.
I hadn’t called her that in years. It started after a trip to SeaWorld with Mom and Gene, and she used to punch me hard when I said it.

“Let me tell you, every stepfamily is an experiment. You’ve got their foreign country, with its own customs and history and boundaries, and you’ve got your foreign country. And you know what foreign countries do. They go to war.”

“It can’t go on forever, can it? Maybe it’s just an adjustment period. A very long adjustment period.”

“I think it
can
go on forever, Cal. That’s the thing. It can. This is who they are. This is who I am. They don’t go together. They draw the circle, and I’m outside of it. In my own house! I’m tired of being left out under my own
roof
. Why are stepmothers always the wicked ones, huh? There are two sides to every story. I understand the poison apple, I do. I know that sounds awful, but maybe Snow White sat on her father’s lap and stroked his hair and called him
Daddy.
”

“It all looked so different on
The Brady Bunch.
”

“Yeah, because the exes were
dead
. They weren’t behind the scenes, tweaking the little psyches of their offspring. We’ve been arguing so much, Eric’s been sleeping on the couch.”

Our food arrived. There was so much of it and it was all so large, I had the obligatory moment of concerned silence for unhealthy Americans and overweight youth, and then I dug in. “I kind of like it when Thomas sleeps on the couch.”

“Oh, I know. How can you want him to touch you when you’re that angry.”

I meant all the room to stretch out and actual, real sleep without the soundtrack of snoring, but it was true. The lack of expectations, the
clarity of intent
, that came with sofa sleeping—they were nice, too. Shaye dove into those potato skins. She folded one right in half and took a big bite. I didn’t know how she looked so good, the way she ate.

We weren’t the kind of sisters who talked about our sex lives. Maybe this was more my own doing, since even with Anne, who’d been my best friend since high school, there were no clichéd movie scenes of shopping and having lunch and spilling the details of orgasms. But the tequila was working on me, as well. I could feel its warm loosening, and that place, the Carson Nugget bar, with its encouraging music and curls of cigarette smoke, with those photos of men in fedoras and women in boas—it made me feel more generous and open than I had in a long while. It was possible I could be friends with every single person in there, and with the bartender, too. A round of drinks for all. Maybe this was just what happiness felt like.

“This is going to sound awful, but you know what bugs me?” I said. “How cheerful and positive Thomas gets after we have sex. The resentment, moodiness, whatever—gone. Poof. Bluebirds twitter around his head, just like that.”

“Oh, I know. I can be such a bitch, and then we have sex, and he thinks I’m amazing and we’re amazing and that life is beautiful. Cue the unicorns.”

“I wouldn’t want it any different, but still! It’s too easy. I don’t respect him for it.”

Shaye took a drink of her margarita, clutched her temple when the cold hit. “Damn. Headache.” And then, after the pain passed, “Why does sex become so
laden
?”

“All of the worst, naked insecurities, probably, literally and otherwise.”

“Why is it such a gauge?
The
gauge, for a lot of people.”

“Not a very fair gauge. You have kids, it starts getting complicated. Of course it does! How could it not? You’re so busy and exhausted and your body feels so depleted that if one more person wants something from you, you’ll scream. You don’t have sex, and then he’s mad because you don’t have sex, and then you’re mad at him for being mad that you don’t have sex.”

“That was eighteen years ago for you, Cal.”

“You’re making me regret opening my mouth. I’m just saying, it becomes laden because some understandable
no
turns into years of rejection-fueled assumptions.”

“You’re right; it’s a vicious circle.” She sighed, stabbed at an errant green onion with her fork. “I love being with Eric. I miss him when we’re not close. But when you’re
furious
? That’s my understandable
no,
except, one, we’re angry all the time, and, two, he couldn’t care less if he’s angry. Doesn’t everyone always want sex no matter what? That’s how he thinks. It becomes an ongoing nonverbal conversation. Every single night it’s
will we or won’t we
, without anyone saying a word. He’s touching my leg—he wants to have sex. I moved my leg, which means I don’t, so now he’s pissed. Okay, FINE! We’ll do it! And then he sulks for days and avoids me, and I’m like,
He doesn’t even find me attractive anymore.”

I laughed. The music, the drinks, being
away
—who knew a body held a hundred tiny knots, which could then be untied? What a relief it all was.

“
Laden
,” I said.

“Still, with Eric, at least it’s normal-people problems. One time Mathew told me I wasn’t
meeting his needs.
”

“You didn’t know he was the sultan of Brunei?”

“It wasn’t just that. He said it the day after he’d screamed in my face because dinner had taken too long.”

“Oh, honey.”

“Somewhere along the line, my appropriate-outrage dial got broken. I didn’t know how to be mad enough to protect myself. And now that it’s working again, well, how do you
stop
being furious, is what I want to know. Stepchildren, jeez. Does Eric even understand how badly I want to love them? But you can only live so long with people who hate you before you start hating them back.” Shaye did a double take. “Oh, my God.”

“What?”

“You’re not going to believe this. Look.”

I squinted. I really needed to get my eyes checked once Thomas left me for good. “I can’t see.”

“That forest-service guy.”

“Really?”

“By that sign for twenty-one.”

Yes. There was Kit Covey at the bar, wearing a black shirt this time, the heels of both boots hooked on the low brass rail of his stool. His hands gestured in storytelling mode, as a bald, handsome guy clapped once in appreciation at the punch line, threw his head back, and laughed.

“Cal, what are the odds? This is a movie moment! Two people, ending up at the same place at the same time, in some sort of amazing coincidence. You should buy him a drink.”