The Winners Circle (26 page)

But he recalled Chelsea at the therapy center and her fragile confession. It’d been working the back of his mind for days, and the telegram stirred it up again. Could it be her? She’d never actually finished speaking, told her whole story. As a couple, they’d thrived by silent contracts and unspoken dialogues. Her apologies arose as earnest gestures and shrouded phrases, but at the therapy center, under the blinding sun, she was trying to explain herself for the first time, and he couldn’t wait to get away from her. He had cut her short.

He gripped the telegram in his hand and shook off the possibility of something more. No, he was going to let Chelsea apologize, and that was it. He was strong enough to stand for it, although he realized that he’d been avoiding this day too. It was easier to be angry, to stay ever-longing, than to kiss the dream good-bye for good.

The Porsche raced toward Battlefield Park. Jerry’s fists clenched the steering wheel. The closer he drove to Princeton, the more he was certain it was Chelsea’s telegram—so like her not to sign her name, so like her to hide in matters of the heart. She was scared—an emotion that reached all the way to the beginning, as if she was asking for shelter once again.

Red lights flashed in Jerry’s rearview mirror. He glanced at the speedometer.
Too fast for this town.

Jerry pulled into the road shoulder along Mercer Street and stopped near the edge of the park.

The officer rose out of his squad car and ambled toward Jerry’s window. It took a moment for Jerry to recognize him. It was the senior officer who’d arrested him on the afternoon that Mercer Oak split and tumbled.

Jerry sank in the seat. He caught a glimpse of the cop’s handcuffs reflecting in the sun.

“
Good day, Mr. Nearing.” A distinct sound of resignation echoed in the officer’s voice—part apathy, part surrender, as if every word offered a sigh.

“
Hello.” Jerry had his driver’s license and registration in his hand. He poked them out the window.

“
I know who you are,” the officer said but accepted the paperwork anyway.

“
Yes.”

“
It’s a little fast, don’t you think?”

“
I wasn’t paying attention.” He squinted into the park from far away. Kids played baseball. Someone flew a kite. The amputated hulk of Mercer Oak was surrounded by yellow police tape. He strained for a glimpse of Chelsea, to no avail.

“
In a hurry?”

“
Not particularly.”

The officer seemed to sense Jerry’s anxiety. He glanced down the road. “What is it with you and that tree?”

“
Excuse me?”

“
You seem like a decent man. I saw in the paper how you’re restoring that historic house, but I don’t get this.”

“
What don’t you get?”

“
You and that tree. What’s the attraction? It’s a stump.”

“
It’s not the tree exactly.”

“
Oh it’s the tree.”

“
Well …”

“
I’ve seen protests around it. Famous tree surgeons have tried to save it. They’ve even shot movies there.”

“
I know about all that.”

“
Then there’s you. I can’t figure you out.”

“
It’s a long story.” Jerry stared down the road.

“
I’m not sure I want to hear it.”

“
Then you better write me a ticket if you want to get home in time for dinner.”

The men didn’t speak. Jerry heard a small plane pass overhead.

The officer handed back Jerry’s license and registration. “Here’s what I’m going to do. I’ll give you a warning this time.”

“
Thank you.” Jerry hardly believed he was getting off.

“
You have to make me a promise.”

“
Anything you say?”

“
First, you’ll have to slow down.”

“
I can do that.” No doubt, relief washed across his face. One more violation, and he’d lose his driver’s license.

“
Second, something tells me that you’re headed toward that tree.”

“
You’re right.”

“
Promise me when you get there that I won’t have to arrest you again.”

“
You won’t.”

“
I hope not.”

Jerry grabbed the stick shift. “Thanks.”

The officer tilted his chin, leery of making a grave error. “Don’t make a fool out of me.”

“
Never.” Jerry dropped the car in gear and eased away like a ninety-year-old grandmother out for a drive.

He cruised another quarter mile and parked beside the Mercer Oak. It looked hideous up close, split, truncated, but somehow right for the occasion. An expert was supposedly replanting a section of the original tree, but there was nothing there that Jerry believed salvageable, only hopes gone awry.

The air was splendid, eighty degrees and unusually low humidity, a rare New Jersey summer afternoon without threatening rain. Jerry walked onto the grass, searching for a woman he’d recognize any place on Earth. He slid on a pair of sunglasses.

He rounded the tree, seeing the edge of a silver ice bucket and a pair of sandals cast shy of bare feet. He was lifted by his luck with the police officer and decided to sit with Chelsea and make peace with her again, at least try.

He saw her long legs and picked up the pace. A familiar body assembled from the legs to the thighs, and then hips. Chelsea Adams wore a short black dress and the string of pearls left behind by his mother. He stopped walking. This wasn’t a mistake. She’d done this on purpose. A woman presented herself like this before a man to either love him or kill him, perhaps a little of both.

“
I didn’t know if you’d come,” she said.

“
I guessed it was you.” He’d heard the uncertainty in her voice. It wasn’t all that different than the first time they’d made love. He gave her credit. She had guts to go through with a risky plan.

She stretched her legs and crossed her ankles, but she didn’t appear entirely comfortable. He recognized the tension in her feet—an exaggerated arch in her foot. He wondered if he’d caused it to appear. He’d frozen at the sight of her. What was his body language saying? His hands were jammed in his pockets. His knees felt shaky. He wanted to move, but in which direction?

“
I thought of writing a letter,” she said.

“
You sent a telegram.”

“
I’m serious.”

“
What would the letter say?”

“
I’m sorry.”

“
What are you sorry for?”

“
All of it. You knew better.” She looked down and batted her eyes. She was embarrassed, but it was real emotion, like the last time they’d met. It was wonderful to see. “When did you get so much smarter than me?”

“
From a lifetime of watching you.”

“
What did you see?”

“
You’re asking me now?”

“
I bet you saw a woman running from herself.”

“
Yeah, I saw that, but you wound up running from the parts I liked the best.” He heard himself fashion confessions when he’d come to only listen to hers, but another part of him knew that he wouldn’t have been able to speak so frankly just one year ago. “And did it work? Did you get away from yourself?”

“
Like you said, just the best parts.”

“
Not entirely.”

“
You said it. You tried to warn me, but I didn’t listen.”

Even now, he wasn’t comfortable with her speaking like this. In his old-fashioned sense of men and women, he wanted to be loved by the best, and if he held any chance of grabbing what he thought Chelsea was offering, he wasn’t going to knock the girl down further. “I wasn’t totally honest either. I’ve been angry with you for a while.”

She nodded. “How did we end up like this?”

“
I can give you a million, no, thirty-two million reasons.”

She pursed her lips. “But you’ve changed too.”

He took off his sunglasses and tucked them in his shirt pocket. “It’s still me.”

“
You’re different.”

“
How so?”

“
You’re everything I always thought you’d be.”

He read her apology in between the lines. She’d never be any good at it. She was the type who’d rather thrust herself into a solution to fix things, and she was doing this now.

The sky was filled with puffy white clouds, like the smoky remnants of fireworks blasts. Jerry watched them drift past. All he ever wanted to do was make her happy. “It’s amazing what a change of clothes will do for a man.”

The dimple pooled in her cheek. She smoothed her skirt with her hands. “I tried to explain myself over the phone.”

“
You didn’t explain much.”

“
See what I mean? I’ve wanted to call you for months, even before Haskell and I split up, but you made it hard.”

“
There you go mentioning Melvin’s name.” He hated that she’d slept with Cogdon. That was a hurdle to jump, but he squelched those feelings. He’d have to work them out. In truth, he’d slept with more strange women than she did men in their time apart, and whatever it was that she saw when she peered at him, she’d returned for more. She’d come home.

“
You’ve developed a sharp sense of humor,” she said.

“
You have to laugh at us millionaires.”

She looked away, verging on tears. “You must hate me.”

“
For some reason, you hated yourself even more.” He saw her ashamed. It never occurred to him that she understood she was wrong for a long time. Chelsea was always right. She never screwed up. At least, that’s how events usually passed between them.

Jerry saw the moment where he should stay or go. It was as if a line formed in the grass: step over it or retreat. The choice might be hard for some men weakened by vanity or pride, but he knew what he’d do. It was the easiest step he’d taken in the last two years. He sat beside her, confident he had nothing to lose. “Are you paying attention to me now?”

Her ice blue eyes came back to him. She was opened up, irresistible. The big decisions belonged to him. Things would never be the same. They’d be better, hopefully stronger. Some people went to therapy to reach this point. Hell, he’d done that and almost gotten killed.

He noticed a bottle of wine and two glasses in the ice bucket. “You were pretty sure of yourself.”

“
I didn’t know if … I wanted to be …” She swallowed a lump in her throat. “I don’t know what I want to say.”

He liked that she wasn’t so certain. He poured the wine and gazed at the sky. The clouds drifted slower than time.

She brought the glass to her sculpted lips. That was the hardest part of her to reconcile. “I hope we don’t get in trouble for this.”

“
Hey, I’ve been arrested here before. It’s no big deal.”

“
No, really.”

“
Don’t worry. I think we’ve been in enough trouble to last a lifetime.” He threw an arm over her waist and pulled her close, kissing her for all time in broad daylight. There was no way on this planet that he was letting her make the first move, and she was not a woman who was about to argue.

Jerry stabbed his pitchfork into a pile of horse manure behind Taddler’s main barn. Chelsea was at the farmhouse, nibbling on crackers and sipping Chamomile tea. She didn’t keep much down in the first trimester. Tom baked up old family specialties in the huge baker’s oven at the carriage house, but nothing settled her stomach.

The crisp fall weather was on Jerry like a fast whip cracking across his bare arms, and the manure stunk to high heaven. He savored the hard labor, even though the college kids he’d hired did most of it. He felt time slipping through his fingers, but in a good way. He’d learned to ride horseback. He helped one of the mare’s bare a foal at the first sight of dawn. It made him think of his own child in Chelsea’s belly. Dreams are brief and immediate. You better grab them before they vanish into thin air.

And the past—the past is nothing you can settle in the present. There are only hateful words for that, like spite, bitterness, and vengeance. Jerry wasn’t much for that sort of dirty work. He and Chelsea vowed to never discuss their time apart. They called it the lost years and folded it up on the shelf, like a photo album that never gets taken down to view.

Jerry released his pitchfork and turned his face to the sun. It burned through his eyelids, fiery yellow, then bright white. He didn’t have to dream about Chelsea any longer. That was the best part of making her real again, yet sometimes when he looked at her, he saw a wrinkle in her upper lip, so small no one else would notice. That was the nature of their relationship. You can’t make everything perfect. He knew, because together they were damn close to it.

Christopher Klim
worked on observation and exploration satellites for the space program, until departing for the private sector to develop leading-edge communications technologies. He now teaches and mentors emerging writers. He is the senior editor of
Writers Notes Magazine
and primary architect of the website www.WritersNotes.com. In his lectures, writings, and workshops, this award-winning storyteller entertains with contemporary tales that extend the American experience while transcending the ordi-nary. His novels
Jesus Lives in Trenton
and
Everything Burns
have won critical acclaim, and his manual on the writing craft,
Write to Publish: Essentials for the Modern Fiction & Memoir Market
is preferred among writers. He’s also written the praised children’s novel
Firecracker Jones Is On The Case
. He lives in New Jersey.