Torch (40 page)

When they married, all of that changed in a day. Teresa was no longer his wife, Kathy was. “Kathy Tyson-Gunther,” she decided to be called. And even Claire and Joshua seemed to belong to him less than they had the day before. Kathy referred to them as his “late wife’s kids,” a shadowy dejection coming over her each time Claire or Joshua came up in their conversations, though she would not admit her mood had anything to do with them. All through the summer and early autumn, they had talked in an abstract way about having Joshua and Claire over for dinner, though nothing ever came of it. Finally, in November, he and Kathy extended a tentative invitation to them for Thanksgiving dinner, but then they learned that Joshua was going to be a father and their plans dissolved.

“It isn’t that I’m not happy for them. I
am
,” Kathy said to him sincerely, after having wept over the news. “It’s …” she struggled to think of what, exactly, it was. “It’s that seeing Lisa’s belly will bring it all to the forefront. How we’ve failed.”

“We haven’t failed,” he told her.

“How about they all come over for Christmas?” she suggested.

“Josh could be in jail by then,” Bruce said, and he could. His court date had been scheduled at last. Joshua had been arrested in August and charged with possession of marijuana, though Bruce had sighed a breath of relief when he heard the charge. All summer long, he had been hearing things around town, rumors that Joshua was dealing for Rich Bender and Vivian Plebo, and not just marijuana, though he had allowed himself to ignore the talk until he got the call from Claire. She had been distraught when she called, almost begging him to come to Blue River, where she was. She had driven up from Minneapolis the night before and spent half the day going from the bank to the courthouse and back to the bank again, getting money and notarized statements and filling out forms so she could bail Joshua out of jail. But Bruce hadn’t gone to Blue River. He couldn’t, he explained to Claire, especially since she already had it covered. He had a job to finish and then, that evening, a softball game to play. It was the regional semifinals and the Jake’s Tavern team had made it all that way.

A few weeks later, he and Joshua were going in opposite directions
on Big Pile Road. They stopped and talked to each other through the open windows of their trucks with their engines idling, the way they had taken to doing since Bruce had married Kathy and Joshua stopped coming home.

“What you doing with yourself these days?” asked Bruce, not wanting to mention his arrest directly.

“Pulling out docks for Jack Haines,” Joshua answered.

“That’s good work.”

“It’s just till the lakes freeze up,” said Joshua, and then they looked away, out their windshields, both of them thinking that by the time the lakes froze up Joshua might not need a job anyway, because very likely he would be in jail. He had been busted with a fair amount of marijuana, Claire had told Bruce. She kept him up to date on the tug of war between Joshua’s court-appointed attorney and the county prosecutor. He saw her about once a week, when he stopped in at Len’s Lookout. She worked there now, picking up her mother’s old shifts, living in the apartment above the bar, the way she had when Bruce had met her as a child. She had moved to Midden when Joshua got arrested, wanting to be nearby to assist in his defense. There was some debate as to whether the marijuana that Joshua had in his possession was for his personal use or for sale. On the eleventh of December, the judge would decide and sentence him accordingly.

“Bruce!” Claire called to him now on the evening of the ice storm, a moment after Leonard handed him the Coke that Bruce wished were a beer, though she didn’t stop to talk. Instead, she glided past him with several plates in her hands and went to a table of customers he didn’t recognize. Bruce followed her with his eyes, nodding to the few people he knew and glancing briefly at the people he didn’t—city people up to hunt. He took his wool hat off and set it on the bar. “You’re busy, for the roads being what they are,” he told Leonard.

“It’s these dumb Finlanders,” Leonard said, and laughed because he was a Finn himself. “They think they know how to drive. Them and the city apes. The Finlanders got the balls and the apes got their big fancy trucks.”

Claire approached and thumped Bruce on the shoulder. Something caught inside of him and kept him from hugging her. It caught every time he saw her. “What’s new?” she asked.

“Not much.” He took a sip of his Coke. “How about yourself?”

To his surprise, she sat down on the stool beside him. “Did you get your hair cut?”

He shook his head truthfully. He hadn’t cut it recently, though months before, he had cut his ponytail off.

“It looks like you did,” she said. “Or that you’re doing something different to it.”

He combed his hair with his fingers, feeling self-conscious. Kathy had bought him a special conditioner and, after being repeatedly encouraged by her to try it, he’d started using it the week before. It made his hair softer, fuller than it had ever been. He wasn’t going to admit this to Claire. He took his hat from the bar and put it on, remotely regretting that he had stopped by. Since he married Kathy, whenever he saw Claire he got a little nervous, like she was watching his every move, analyzing his every word, like nothing he could do or say would be right. He felt the same way around Joshua. They were a committee, a club, an injured gang of two. He knew without needing to be told that they reported back to each other about him. That they’d look at each other with skeptical smiles and say,
So guess who I saw
.

“Are you ready for tomorrow?” she asked, referring to Joshua’s court date.

“I thought we couldn’t go in with him.”

“I
told
you!” she said vehemently. “We can’t go in to the judge’s chambers, but we can go to the courthouse and sit outside in the hall.” She looked at him fervently. “Don’t tell me you’re not going to be there.”

“I
hope
to,” he said. “But I got to finish up at Doug Reed’s place and if we can’t go in anyway, I don’t see why—”

“For moral support, Bruce,” she interrupted, and then a bell rang back in the kitchen, Mardell signaling that an order was ready. Without another word, Claire bolted away from him, through the swinging doors.

Bruce was relieved when she left. He was almost always relieved when she left, though it was her he came into the Lookout to see. He preferred to talk to her in fits and starts, in the pleasant exchanges they could manage as she strode past him bearing food or dirty dishes or stood waiting for Leonard to make her drinks at the bar. In this manner, he talked to Claire about once a week, though seldom did they actually
talk. Kathy didn’t know that he saw Claire as often as he did, didn’t know that when he stopped off after work, he was stopping off at the Lookout. Sometimes, without directly lying, he let her believe that he had gone to Jake’s Tavern. It was their place.

“I told Lisa we’d meet her and Josh at the courthouse at noon,” Claire said a few minutes later, returning to stand next to him with an empty tray, as if his presence the next day had been agreed on. “Can I get three bourbons on the rocks?” she asked Leonard. Together they watched as he lined up the glasses and poured the drinks. Bruce had the feeling that Claire was waiting for him to speak, silently daring him to dispute her or praying he would agree to go, one or the other, so she could respond.

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said as she placed the drinks on her tray.

“Did she tell you what came in the mail today?” Leonard asked Bruce before she left again, and then turned to Claire, “Why don’t you tell your dad?”

“Oh,” she waved her hand in front of her face, as if she were embarrassed to even think about it. She looked tired and pretty, like her mother, only darker, now that she’d dyed her hair brown to cover the bleach blond she’d done last summer. “I finished those classes I had to take. I did them online. So now I have my degree.”

“It came in the mail today,” repeated Leonard. “A fancy piece of paper with calligraphy and a big golden seal.”

Claire stared at the bourbons on her tray. “It’s a little behind schedule, but at least I can say I finished up.” She looked at Bruce with the eyes she looked at him with lately, private and tentative, as if she were peering out at him from behind a curtain.

“That’s right,” he said. “Better late then never.”

Her eyes flickered away. “True.”

“Your mom would be proud,” said Leonard, more to Bruce, it seemed, than to Claire. She took her tray and walked away from them and he was glad again, in a remorseful way. “I’m proud too,” he said to nobody, though Leonard heard him and nodded. He went to the till and began to count the day’s money, stacking the bills into neat piles and binding them in rubber bands.

“How’s Mardell doing?” Bruce asked.

Leonard paused in his counting and glanced up. “Her sister’s coming for Christmas. The one from Butte. How’s Kathy?”

“She’s good.” He took the last sip of his Coke and shook the ice in the glass. Since he’d married Kathy, he detected the slightest disapproval from Leonard and Mardell, the slightest lowering in their esteem. “Well, what about the kids?” Mardell had huffed back in June, when Bruce had told her the news, as if they were still in diapers. And then, before he could reply she said, “I can take them, if need be.”

“Take them
where?
” he’d asked sharply, not caring whether he hurt her feelings, though she’d always been something of an aunt to him and Teresa.

“Take them
in
,” she exclaimed, and then looked at him with undisguised shock and disdain. Her hair was sheer white and styled into a dense yet airy bush, like cotton candy spun around a cone. “They need a mother, you know. Or at least a mother figure.”

“Well, I’m not going anywhere,” he said, softening. “I got married, that’s all.”

“Oh, Bruce, I know,” she said apologetically, and began to cry. She took her glasses off so she could wipe her eyes. He put his hand on her arm. “I didn’t mean anything. It’s just that …”

“It’s that you miss Teresa,” he said.

“I guess that’s it,” she said, with a tone that told Bruce that that wasn’t it at all—or rather, that was only part of it. That behind her longing for Teresa, there was judgment for what he had done so soon. He’d heard it already, all around town, without actually having to hear the words.
So soon, so soon
, like an inane bird swooping over his head, calling to him everywhere he went. It made him love Kathy more, or at least to feel more protective of her, like it was the two of them against the world.

Leonard hadn’t been there when he’d told Mardell about marrying Kathy and he made no mention of it the next several times Bruce came into the bar, until one day he asked Bruce how Kathy was in a voice as plain as day, as if he’d asked that same question for a thousand years.

“Hey, Len,” Bruce said now, standing and pulling his coat on. He opened his wallet and set two dollars on the bar. “I better get home before the roads get worse.”

“You’d better,” he agreed.

“Tell Claire I said bye,” he called as he walked to the door.

Leonard waved him off, signaling he would. It’s what he did all the time.

• • •

“There you are,” said Kathy when he got home. “I hope you’re not too hungry,” she said and smiled, sly and flirtatious. “Or I should say, not hungry for
food
.” She pulled him to her and kissed his ear. “I got a positive on my ovulation stick, which means we have to do it
now
.”

“Now?” he asked, running his hands up her sides. She laughed and pulled him into their room. Despite their troubles with conceiving, they always had fun in bed.

“What do you think?” he asked, when they were finished.

“About what?” She was lying the wrong way on the bed, her feet propped up on the headboard in an attempt to assist his sperm in their mad journey to her egg.

“About being pregnant. Do you think this was the one?”

She inhaled deeply and closed her eyes, pondering the question. A few months before, Gerry had told her that she would know when it happened. That she would feel a bolt of energy or a shot of light: the spirit of their future child, taking root.

“I feel
something
,” she said, and opened her eyes. “A kind of intensity in my womb, but I don’t know if I can say for sure.” She turned her head to face him, keeping the rest of her body perfectly still. “What about you? What do you feel?”

He felt sleepy and hungry and he yearned for a cigarette, but he thought it unwise to mention any of those things.

“I feel like maybe this was it,” he said, and she smiled and big tears blossomed in her eyes. He hovered close but didn’t touch her, afraid that to jostle her would ruin their chances of conception, but then she began to cry harder and he placed his hand on her arm ever so delicately, as if her flesh were wet paint, waiting to dry.

“I’m sorry,” she said, wiping her face with her hands. “It’s that sometimes I just … I mean, how ironic can it be that I inseminate cows for a living and I can’t even get myself knocked up?” She looked suddenly at him, her eyes bright with offense, as if he’d contradicted what she said. “It’s my
job
, Bruce. And I can’t manage to get it right when it comes to myself.”

“It’ll happen,” he soothed.

“
It will,
” she said emphatically, her mood shifting suddenly. “It’s that I’ve gotten all off-kilter. That’s why it’s not happening.” She sat up even though thirty minutes hadn’t passed since they had finished making love. “I need to find my center. I need to do a reading. Would you mind, honey, if I went over and spent the night at my cabin?”

“Your cabin?”

“Just for the night.” She stood and began to dress. “Kind of like a retreat, so I can get centered.”

“You could do it here,” he offered. “I could sleep out on the couch.” He went to her and tried to hug her so as to prevent her from putting her pants on, but she only patted his arms and continued on with what she was doing.

“I need to get centered, Bruce. This baby stuff has put me off balance. It’s taken over my entire psyche with negativity.” She pulled a sweatshirt over her head.