Fiona Range Read online

  “I might,” Elizabeth said, an edge coming into her voice. “And I might not.”

  “But why? That seems so . . . unnecessary.” Unnatural, she had almost said.

  It was her mother and father, Elizabeth tried to explain. They needed her there. She couldn’t put her finger on it; they weren’t sick or anything, but they seemed tired, weary, older, sad. That was it. Yes, sad. “Sometimes they just seem so sad,” she said.

  Dreading the answer, Fiona refused to ask why. If she’d only be good. If she’d only just try. That’s all they wanted. This summer had been an important lesson. She had told them the absolute truth, but they had assumed the worst. And it would always be this way. They expected her to fail, and always would.

  Elizabeth was saying how much she loved being back, seeing old friends and familiar faces all the time. “Oh, and I ran into George last week,” she said. “He said he sees you in the coffee shop sometimes.”

  George. Fiona grinned.

  “He looked tired. Poor George, he always seems so alone.” Elizabeth sighed.

  “I wouldn’t worry too much about poor George.” She winked. “He does all right.”

  “I don’t know. He looked so sad, I thought,” Elizabeth said, and Fiona began to chew her lip. It would be her cousin’s only vanity to assume that with her absence everyone’s life had stopped. “Speaking of sad,” Elizabeth continued, “yesterday I ran into Ann Lewis, and she told me that Krissy Glidden’s moved back home with her parents.” She leaned across the table and whispered, “Apparently, the night after their baby was born Brad got drunk and slept with some woman.”

  “Who was she?” Fiona held her gaze as the reason both for this meeting and the fiancé’s delayed arrival became clear. Ann Lewis had been Elizabeth’s best friend in high school. So now everyone knew. The family had sent their kindest emissary to deal with her most vile transgression yet. She recognized the plea in her cousin’s anxious eyes. Why do you keep doing these terrible things? What’s wrong with you?

  “Ann wouldn’t tell me.” Elizabeth glanced at her watch. “But listen, before Rudy gets here, there’s something I want to ask you.” She took Fiona’s hands in hers. Elizabeth’s mouth quivered and her eyes glistened with tears.

  Fiona’s heart was racing. All right, she would tell the truth, not that it was any kind of excuse, but Glidden had taken advantage of her when she’d had too much to drink. No, better to just deny everything. It was her word against his.

  “Fiona, will you be my maid of honor?”

  “Oh Jesus!” she gasped. “Your maid of honor?”

  “I know. I know how you feel about all that kind of fussing, but you can pick out any style dress you want, I don’t care. Please?”

  “Of course! It’s just I’m so surprised. I can’t believe you’re asking me and not Ginny, your own sister. Or Ann even.”

  Elizabeth looked surprised. “Don’t you remember our promise when we were little?”

  “Yes, but . . .” Fiona’s eyes filled so suddenly with tears that she didn’t see Rudy Larkin until he’d pulled out the chair and was sitting down.

  “Well, this looks like fun. Dinner with two weeping women!” he said, making them laugh and cry more as they blew their noses and tried to explain how happy they both were.

  At first Rudy seemed bigger than Fiona remembered. After a while she realized it wasn’t height or bulk so much as inner animation, a centrifugal energy that was both magnetic and expansive, like a rising storm that made one’s hair stand on end as it gathered force. His rich, gutsy laugh immediately drew people’s smiling attention. When he spoke his hands were in constant motion, drawing circles, arcs of pleasure and astonishment, a sudden right angle now as he grimaced with Elizabeth’s plea to lower his voice. Gripping the table as if to contain himself, he apologized, genuinely concerned that he might have disturbed the other diners. In the wake of such exuberance Elizabeth seemed small and pale, though it was as clear here as it had been at their engagement dinner that she was very much in charge. She would let him get just so far, then with a sharp look or sigh could quickly subdue him. In a deft movement now she pushed back his hair and straightened his wrinkled tie.

  “She thinks I’m a mess,” he said, laughing.

  “I do not!” Elizabeth cried, her voice just a little shrill, almost brittle with her second daiquiri. Fiona was surprised to see Elizabeth eating more than either of them. “I think you’re just one of those geniuses who never spend any time on themselves.”

  “Well a smart mess, then,” Rudy said with a wink at Fiona, and as if for emphasis a last slurp of his ginger ale.

  “Then you’re perfect for one another. Elizabeth is a born nurturer,” Fiona said, and they both looked relieved. She had been quiet through most of dinner. The few times she had spoken, Rudy’s attention became so acutely focused that she almost felt as if she were being studied. It was unsettling the way he could click so much ebullience on and off. And yet Fiona had often enough had to work herself back into Elizabeth’s good graces to recognize the syndrome. For some reason the man was walking on eggshells. He seemed far more anxious not to displease his fiancée than he was to please her. But then again, she thought, it might be his clinical nature as well as the fact that they were drinking and he was not. She had assumed his sobriety was because he was on call tonight, until Elizabeth said he never touched alcohol. She watched him pop an ice cube into his mouth. Teetotalers made her uneasy, self-conscious about her own drinking.

  “See, I knew that the minute I saw her,” Rudy said. He began to tell Fiona about their first meeting. He’d been working nights at the City Hospital Clinic to pay off medical school loans. The clinic served the city’s poor, the elderly, some teenagers, but mostly street people. It was a late Saturday night, and he had just stitched up a drunken woman’s forehead when a volunteer from the Women’s Shelter stepped into the room to see if he was done. She had been waiting to drive the woman back.

  “‘There she is!’ the drunken woman bellowed.” Rudy laughed. “‘The one that did this to me! Call the police! I want her arrested and I’ll be down first thing in the morning to testify.’”

  “What did you say?” Fiona asked Elizabeth, against whose sincere and simple goodness irony usually collided with a dull little thud.

  “I didn’t know what to say!” Elizabeth said, shaking her head.

  “She froze!” Rudy laughed. “She just stood there.”

  “Well tell her why!” Elizabeth insisted, eyes wide with feigned exasperation.

  He shrugged. “All I did was ask the obvious question. I asked her why she’d hit this sweet old lady, and she just stood there, turning ten different shades of red, sputtering on about how it was all a mistake, and I didn’t understand.”

  It had happened last winter, but it still made him laugh so hard he could barely speak. Fiona looked between them and smiled. In their life together he would tell this story hundreds more times to friends and acquaintances, to children and grandchildren. It was the same with Uncle Charles and Aunt Arlene, the story of their meeting, legendary, the intersection of two lives from which a family had begun; the struggling young lawyer who had fallen in love with his accomplished secretary, but fearing rejection spoke to her only when necessary, until the day the serious young woman walked in and gave her notice. When asked why, she said she couldn’t work for someone who didn’t like her. “Don’t like you! I love you!” Uncle Charles had supposedly blurted to a startled and confused Aunt Arlene.

  Now came Elizabeth’s part of the tale. “And then he looked out into the hall and made believe he was talking to a policeman, calling him ‘officer’ in this loud voice, and he said he’d not only see to it that Wilma got safely back to the shelter, but he’d take her there himself!”

  “Oh God, what a pickup artist,” Fiona groaned, easily imagining Elizabeth’s consternation.

  “So I thought!” Rudy said. “But then all the way back to the shelter Wilma’s sitting as far as she can
away from Elizabeth, cringing and muttering how she better not touch her again, and it’s a good thing I’m there to protect her. In fact Wilma’s even starting to come on to me a little . . .”

  “Tell her why!” Elizabeth prompted.

  “Well, I was only telling her how she should just relax, that I wasn’t going to let anything happen to her.”

  “So in other words what you had going was a double pickup, right?” Fiona pointed out.

  “Well it would have been, except I finally got Wilma out of the car and into the shelter when Elizabeth here runs out to thank me and to tell me how she hadn’t wanted to say anything for fear of getting Wilma all riled up again, but she wanted me to know she absolutely hadn’t had anything to do with her injury. Can you believe it?” he said, laughing so hard that the people at the next table turned and smiled.

  Elizabeth grabbed his hand. “Shh,” she said. “Everyone’s listening.”

  “I believe it,” Fiona said, then recounted a similar tale of Elizabeth’s naïveté years back when they were children.

  “No! Oh no!” He laughed, and Elizabeth was laughing too, when she suddenly stood up and said she’d be right back. She hurried off to the ladies’ room.

  “She’s not sick, is she?” Fiona asked, sensing Rudy’s concern as he watched her go.

  He took a deep breath as if to say something, then thought better of it. He began to crimp an empty sugar packet, as preoccupied with the tiny folds as she was with the awkward silence.

  “So what do you think of dear old Dearborn?” she asked.

  He looked up now with that odd sudden intensity that in anyone else would have seemed overwrought. “It’s beautiful! I love it! I feel like I’ve lived here for years.”

  “Well, when you have, you probably won’t think it’s quite so beautiful.”

  “Why? Why do you say that?” he asked in great earnestness.

  “Well, nothing’s ever as beautiful as you first think. It’s all on the surface. You just haven’t noticed all the cracks and the mucky things yet.”

  “You’re probably right,” he said, chuckling. “But then don’t forget, after you live with the cracks and the mucky things long enough you stop seeing them.”

  “I still do.”

  “Maybe that’s because you’re looking for them.”

  “No, that’s because I’m a realist. I see things exactly the way they are,” she said, irritated by his smugness.

  “Well, don’t you think most people do?”

  “No! I know they don’t.”

  “But most people accept the fact that everything’s flawed one way or another. We all make mistakes.”

  So here it was. She glared at him. “And what the hell do you mean by that?”

  He burst out laughing. “Well not whatever the hell you’re thinking!”

  “I know what you mean,” she said in a low voice. “I know exactly what you mean. That day. That day of the dinner. In the field? I had handcuffs on? I think you remember, and that’s what you meant, isn’t it?”

  He frowned and rubbed his chin. “You know, you may be right.”

  “All right, good! Then let’s just get it right out on the table here and now. Have you told Elizabeth yet?”

  “No. I haven’t!”

  “Are you going to? Because the thing is, I don’t care if you do tell her, I really don’t, as long as I know, but I don’t want to spend the next ten years every time I see you thinking, okay, this is it, what’s he going to say?”

  He looked at her, shaking his head, eyes wide, and then he began to laugh so hard the candle on the table flickered and sputtered. The woman behind him turned to look.

  “Can I help you?” Fiona asked, and the woman spun around.

  He shook his head. “I’ll tell you the truth. No, I’m not going to say anything, but . . . ,” and now he was laughing again. “But I’m dying to know. Would you please tell me? Every time I think of it I crack up! I mean, one minute, there you are, cuffed to a cruiser, and then the next thing I know, we’re being introduced like I’ve never seen this woman in my life before, and we’re passing each other stuffing and gravy, and we both know what just happened.”

  “It’s a long story,” she said, laughing also, though not quite with the same relish. She told him about her stalled car and Todd offering to give her a ride in the car he said was his. “I guess the bottom line is I’ve always had too many jerks in my life.” She glanced toward the back of the restaurant. “She’s been in there an awful long time. Lizzie’s not much of a drinker. Maybe I should go see.” Just as she got up, Elizabeth appeared, walking quickly toward the table.

  “We were beginning to think you went home.” Rudy stared at her as she sat down.

  “Now why would you think that?” she said with a bright smile.

  After dinner they walked down Essex Street to Dusty’s Grill. When they were seated, Elizabeth asked her to run with them at sunrise, but Fiona couldn’t because she had to be at work so early. Rudy drank black coffee. Fiona and Elizabeth had both ordered Jack Daniel’s and Coke, but Elizabeth’s was almost gone. Elizabeth seemed to think she had to shout to be heard. She kept grinning up at Rudy and leaning her head on his shoulder.

  “When we were in high school Fiona was the fastest runner on the track team and then she quit,” Elizabeth told him, then peered across the table as if through mist. “Why’d you quit? I never understood that. You were so good.”

  “I don’t know, I probably got self-conscious or something,” she said. What she had gotten was thrown off the team for drinking on the bus after an out-of-town meet.

  “Self-conscious! You?” Elizabeth said, pointing. “You don’t have a self-conscious bone in your body, Fiona Range. She doesn’t,” she insisted to Rudy, who nodded pleasantly.

  Fiona smiled, but under the table her foot tapped irritably as her thoughts reeled with images of dancing with Goldie the dog, then with Larry Belleau, and now she could almost hear the ratcheting clamor of Patrick Grady’s ladder as he rushed to get away from her. She was tired. Soon everyone in town would know that she was the woman Brad Glidden had slept with. She took another sip. Screw it. He’d been the one married with the newborn baby. He was the one with vows to honor. Not her. He was the one who had done something wrong. Not her. Elizabeth asked how her class was going. Okay, she said. She wanted to go home. Now Elizabeth asked in a slurred voice if Lee Felderson was a good teacher. Fee Lelderson, she kept saying. She was all right, Fiona said. Elizabeth was trying to tell Rudy that Lee had been one of Ginny’s best friends. It was hot in here, the music was too loud, and it was painful to see Elizabeth laboring at this. Rudy had grown very quiet, a faint smile the only trace of his earlier animation. He was stirring an empty cup. A surge of protesting voices rose from the bar and he craned his neck to see what was going on.

  “Any of your friends in here?” Elizabeth asked, and the minute Fiona said no, she knew what was coming.

  “Fiona used to be in here all the time,” Elizabeth told Rudy loudly. “Once she got in this big fight with somebody and the bartender told her to leave, and she wouldn’t, so they called my father to come get her. He couldn’t believe it. She was only seventeen, but Fiona always had the best fake IDs, didn’t you, Fee?” she asked, though it was Rudy she was beaming at as she tried to impress him with Fiona’s misadventures.

  “Only the best,” Fiona said, looking down, as Elizabeth continued.

  “Anyway, while my father was trying to get her out, the bartender called her a bad name or something, and my father grabbed him and said if he said one more word to her he’d have him arrested for serving a minor. I still remember that night. He was so mad. And then the next morning it was the same as always. Like nothing had ever happened. I never understood how you did that. How’d you do that, Fiona?” Elizabeth’s heavy eyes were half closed.

  “Charm,” Fiona said softly.

  “The least little thing and we’d be in trouble,” Elizabeth went on. “Especially
Jack. Poor Jack, he was always being lectured, punished, grounded, but not Fiona.”

  “Ah, the strange convolutions of family dynamics,” Rudy said, with a quick gesture to the waiter for the bill.

  “Rudy was an only child,” Elizabeth told Fiona as she cocooned her arms around his. “It was just him and his mother. It’s an amazing story. Most of the time he had to take care of her, she was in and out of mental hospitals so much.”

  “Elizabeth, stop. That’s so personal,” Fiona said. The waiter stood by the table while Rudy got out his credit card.

  “But it’s so amazing,” Elizabeth continued. “I admire him so much. I think of it and I just want to cry. Can you imagine? A little boy and he had to go buy groceries and cook and just do everything, didn’t you?” she asked, as oblivious to the waiter’s leaving as she was now to his return.

  “Deprivation has its advantages,” Rudy said as he signed the slip. “We ate what I liked, and I could watch television all night.” He looked up and smiled. “Days on end if I wanted.”

  “You poor thing,” Elizabeth said, nuzzling her chin against his arm. “Poor Rudy.”

  “I came and went as I pleased,” he said to Fiona. “And I never had a curfew.”

  “Lucky you,” she said, annoyed to see Elizabeth as easily intoxicated by alcohol as by the sadness in his life. She wanted to go.

  “I was.” He laughed. “In my way. I still am.”

  “Wait!” Elizabeth said as Fiona started to get up. “What about Todd?” Elizabeth looked around as if he might be here. “Have you seen him lately?”

  “I try not to,” Fiona said as Rudy tried to tell Elizabeth they should go.

  “Todd’s father owns the classiest furniture store in Massachusetts,” Elizabeth said, ignoring him. “He and Fiona started going steady in junior high. My father had a fit. They were always together and he was just the wildest boy in town, but he had this big deal, important family, you know, so there wasn’t much my father could do.” She gave a little hiccup. “Was there, Fiona?” She giggled. “Nobody could tie Daddy up in knots the way Fiona could. None of us. No matter what she did. He’d get so mad, but he never seemed to know what to do, did he, Fee?” She laughed as if this were some remarkable achievement. “God, you always ran circles around my poor father.” She closed her eyes and rubbed her head against Rudy’s shoulder. “She still does, don’t you, Fee?” she purred.