Gun Lake, page 21
I need someone to talk to.
So far, there had been hardly anybody. The other waitresses at the Grill weren’t very accepting of her. She knew they might be jealous, but the joke would’ve been on them if they only knew how frightened and insecure she was. At the Joint, she was often the only waitress besides Kay, and even she could tell that the drunks who hung out there were not good prospects as friends or anything else. One thing was becoming clear to her—she had to get to know more people around here. It was either that or get lost in a black hole of oblivion.
And this man couldn’t be all that bad. He was friendly and courteous and a very nice tipper—though she knew that said little about his character. She knew the first time they met that he had been at a loss for words—something that occasionally happened when guys met her. Again, if only he knew. They saw the outward part of her, and that threw them. She sure didn’t feel beautiful, but sometimes men didn’t know any better. A shapely figure and long legs, no matter how well hidden, would do amazing things to them. And Kurt, instead of trying to make a pass at her, had just become politely flustered. She liked that about him. He seemed cute and a little shy.
What really did it, though, was seeing him exit the chapel. He had to be an okay guy. It wasn’t like she was picking him up at some seedy saloon in the middle of the night. It was almost noon on a sunny Sunday with families all around. And this guy had just walked out of church.
And I just want a friend.
“I’m, uh, David,” he said to her.
“Nice to meet you, David.”
“Not working today?”
“No. Not today.”
He nodded. She could tell by his body language and voice that he felt a little awkward, nervous about talking.
She felt the same.
“Where are you going?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“What?” she asked, not understanding his tone and answer.
“Oh, I mean—I’m not thinking. Sorry—I’m staying over close to the Yankee Springs area. We’re in a cabin over there.”
“I—I have no idea where that is.”
He smiled. “You not from around here?”
“Actually, I lived near here when I was a kid, but I’ve been gone for a long time. Just got here a few weeks ago.”
“Really?”
She nodded, wondering how much she’d tell him.
“Where are you from?”
She couldn’t remember the lies she had told earlier. She needed to get a story and stick with it.
What if you told the truth?
But she couldn’t. Not yet. Perhaps not ever.
She had told him her name. Why couldn’t she say a little more?
“I’m from up north.”
The vague reply, the body language in saying it, probably sent this man a message. He nodded, not saying any more.
“How was it?”
“What?” David asked.
“The service.”
“Oh. Fine, I guess.”
There was another awkward, silent moment. Norah wasn’t sure what to say. She kept her eyes on the road and pulled up at a stop sign.
“You can turn right here,” he said.
“Okay.”
As she did, she tried to figure out something to say, a subject she could talk about without giving anything away.
“Would you like some lunch?” the bearded man with the deep-set eyes asked her.
She looked at him and thought that underneath the beard he might be quite attractive.
What are you doing, Norah?
“I know it’s only a little after eleven, but I was thinking maybe we could—I don’t know—maybe go to Lakeside Grill.”
Again, she didn’t reply, so he avoided another awkward silence by quickly adding, “I know you work there and all, so we don’t have to—”
“I’ve never actually eaten there,” Norah said.
“You haven’t?”
She shook her head. “On breaks I’ll get a Diet Coke.”
“Seems like you need to sample the food, see if us patrons are getting our money’s worth.”
“I think I get a discount too.”
“That’s actually the reason I’m asking,” the man said, his lips curling in a friendly smile.
She suddenly pictured a giant juicy burger, the kind she often served for lunch and dinner. A burger with thirty or forty fat grams, at least, and who knows how many calories. The kind she would have never ordered and eaten in her former existence.
“I’d kinda like to get a hamburger,” Norah said.
“I’ve heard the hamburgers there are pretty good.”
Norah smiled at his comment.
“So, you’ll go to lunch with me?” David asked, sounding surprised, delighted, and nervous at the same time.
“Sure. Just don’t make me get you any coffee.”
“It’s a deal,” he said.
The longer they talked, the easier it became.
In a Twilight Zone episode, this would be a first date for Kurt. We’ve all heard of the last meal, Rod Serling would say, but for one escaped convict running for his life, this is a last date. There’d be some bizarre twist at the end. Perhaps Norah was really an undercover officer, wanting to get information from him. Perhaps she was FBI or CIA. Perhaps his mind wasn’t used to spending time around a woman, a beautiful woman at that, and was thus doing somersaults in his head.
The more he talked, the more truth he told her. He had to skip over the here-and-now facts about being an escaped convict and, of course, his name, but Kurt realized he could still tell her a few real things. Like when she asked him where he was from.
“I was born and raised in Kentucky,” he said. “You ever been to Corbin, Kentucky?”
Norah shook her head.
“You’re really missing something. It’s beautiful down there. Home of Cumberland Falls and Kentucky Fried Chicken.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah. The Colonel started out right there in Corbin. They’ve even got a museum and stuff.”
“So how’d you end up in Michigan?” Norah asked.
Kurt smiled, taking another bite of the barbequed chicken he’d ordered at Norah’s suggestion.
“That’s a good question. A little too difficult to easily answer.”
“Your folks still live in Kentucky?”
Kurt shook his head. “My father died when I was seventeen. My mother—she passed away not long ago from cancer.”
Norah stopped still and appeared to not believe his statement.
“I’m—sorry,” she said.
“Yeah, me too.”
A look washed over Norah, and Kurt couldn’t tell exactly what it was.
“What are the odds?” Norah said.
“For what?”
“My parents are both—they are both deceased as well.”
“Really?”
“My father—he was killed in a robbery. Shot several times. My mother died of cancer too, actually. While we were still living around here.
Kurt looked at her and smiled. “How’d we end up crossing paths? Someone decide we needed to meet?”
“Maybe that church service you went to helped.”
“No,” he told her. “That’s not it. I know that’s not it.”
“So, you’re from Kentucky?”
“In a roundabout way. I’ve been a lot of places since then.”
“Do these questions bother you?”
Kurt began to shake his head no, but she obviously could see otherwise.
“Yeah, I guess they do,” he admitted.
“That’s okay,” she said. “I haven’t been exactly—forthcoming.”
“You’ve said less than I have.”
“I know.”
“I don’t need to see your resume, Norah.”
“That’s probably good, since I don’t have one. I wouldn’t have much to put on it.”
He smiled. “So why don’t we just continue to enjoy our lunch? No pressure. No heavy personal questions.”
She smiled. “Sounds okay to me. Sounds good, in fact.”
“Yeah?”
She nodded.
“Can I tell you something?” Kurt asked her.
“Sure.”
“I was pretty stunned to see you come up to me that first morning. Do you remember that? It’s okay if you don’t.”
“I think so,” Norah said.
“I thought, how in the world could I get so lucky, having someone this—having someone like you wait on my table? I’ve not always had the best luck.”
“I don’t think either of us have. But thanks for the compliment. That’s nice.”
“You coming to take my order,” Kurt said, “and then asking me for a ride. For some reason, I think my luck has suddenly changed.”
Norah smiled at him. She had only been able to finish half her cheeseburger, and the fries had gone mostly untouched. She took a sip of her soda and appeared to be lost in thought for a minute.
“That’s why I came back here, you know,” Norah said. “I wanted to see if my luck could change.”
“Think it will?”
“It already has,” Norah said.
Kurt wondered what she meant by that but decided to ask more when the time was right.
56
GRACE HAD BEEN HIS CHANCE. Not a second chance. He’d had far too many second chances in his life. This had been a genuine chance to start over again, to start fresh, to try and change.
He’d blown them all before. But then Grace had come along.
She did not know the man and the history and the awful legacy he’d left behind. She told him she didn’t need to know, that the past remained in the past. He liked that about her. And Grace had surmised quickly that he had lots of baggage from the past. But traveling through life with her meant he only needed a backpack, a briefcase. Small enough to hold in his hand, hold out and let her see. The rest was all left behind.
The lake had comforted Paul after her death in a way he didn’t think anything could. The peace and tranquility, going out early morning to placid stillness, the sun and the open skies, the friendly people, the slow calm of vacationers and locals.
Since he had actually moved here, he had hoped to enjoy that peace all the time. Instead, the longer he remained around here, the more he felt like he was losing his mind.
Glimpses of the past haunted him. Things were suddenly showing up in his cottage, seemingly in his lap. Maybe he was really going batty.
The photo he found on the bedroom dresser—where had that come from? A family portrait, father and mother and child. It was an old, tattered print, in color but dull with age, bent in the middle so that the mother and the father were divided. He would have liked to say he didn’t recognize the people in the shot, but that would have been a lie. He could lie to the rest of the world, lie to everyone around, and even try to outrun the truth, but deep down he knew.
Where’d you go? Where have you been all this time?
Paul had wondered that years ago, but as the years piled up higher and higher like building blocks, he’d found himself forgetting even to ask the question. And for him, now, the question had changed. He used to ask where. But that was a question that assumed somebody could be found, so it didn’t really apply anymore. The question now was why—and why was a good question. Especially now that things had started showing up unannounced.
First, there was the USA Today in his living room—no big deal, but he knew, he swore, he didn’t buy it. A newspaper just showing up—that was sort of weird.
Then the photo—where had that come from? He supposed he could have brought it with him from the house in Illinois, but he didn’t remember packing it. He thought he would have remembered that.
And now this. Lying on his bed in plain sight.
His old forty-five.
He knew he hadn’t brought that with him. He hadn’t seen it in years.
I’m losing it because I’m alone here and someone’s playing tricks on me and I don’t know who, but I don’t care because it’s not funny anymore.
Loaded. Heavy. Ready. The forty-five felt odd in his hand.
I’m different, and this has no part in my life now.
He held the gun in the silence of his family room and felt guilty, like someone who had just shot innocent strangers and now was hiding out.
Paul had no idea where this gun had come from. The photo—that had been one thing. And the newspaper, well, who knew about that? Perhaps he had—perhaps he had brought all these items to the cottage some time ago and just didn’t remember doing so.
That’s a lie, and you know it.
Or maybe they had slipped out of his suitcase when he unpacked.
Another lie.
The gun, however, was not small and couldn’t fit in a book or in a box. It wasn’t something you’d forget about easily.
Was someone playing with him? Someone from the river-boat? Someone angry he was gone? Who could that have been? Nobody cared that he had filled up his last day there, his last hour. You had to care in order to start playing with someone’s mind, in order to start haunting them.
Nobody cared like that about him.
Or did they?
The knock on his door jolted him. He froze, holding the pistol and feeling guilty.
“Hey, Paulie, want to go fishing?”
It was Freddie, his neighbor.
Paul stashed the gun in the drawer underneath the television and went to get the door.
Maybe it was all a big joke and someone would fill him in on it. Maybe it would even be Freddie telling him about playing with his mind.
Freddie didn’t let on, and Paul knew better. Deep down, he considered another possibility. The real, rational part of his mind and soul mumbled that possibility to him. It whispered a name. A name from the distant past, but one that had been haunting him the last few weeks.
He just couldn’t believe—he refused to believe—so he ignored the voices.
Again.
57
SHE SAT ON THE EDGE of the bed and wept.
What would he do now if he could see her? Only minutes after dropping David off at the campgrounds and driving back to her apartment, Norah broke down into tears. There was no reason, really. She didn’t know why she was crying, either. It wasn’t PMS. It wasn’t because the lunch had been awful, because the truth was exactly the opposite. She hadn’t ever met a man as gentle and polite as David. At least she hadn’t met anybody like that in the past decade—and she couldn’t remember one before that, either. And she definitely had not gone out on—whatever their time together could be called—before. A get-to-know-you spontaneous lunch? Something like that. A cry for help, more like it. And if it was a cry for help, a desperate attempt for a kind of human contact—boy, had she picked the right person.
He was obviously running away from something and not wanting to talk about it. Was he married? He didn’t look like he was; he didn’t give off that married-man-cruising-for-chicks vibe. They hadn’t actually talked about relationships, but she thought a man like David must surely have someone else in his life. But maybe not now. Maybe that’s why he was running. Maybe his wife had left him like she had left Harlan. For different reasons, of course. She just knew that this man wouldn’t hurt anybody. He was different from Harlan and his friends. It was something she felt deep inside. She felt safe around him. And Norah hadn’t felt safe for a long time.
So why the tears? Were they tears of joy? When she dropped him off, he had thanked her for the ride and for being brave enough to go to lunch with him. And his last few words had stuck with her; she just couldn’t believe he’d said them. He could easily have said something awful like “Hey, hot stuff, we need to hook up again.” Kurt had made it obvious what sort of impression she made on him from the very start. But it was his last statement that sent her emotions into a tailspin.
“Look,” he’d said, “I don’t want to be too forward, and if I am being that way, just excuse me. But would you mind if maybe I saw you again? No pressure, nothing heavy. I just—I really feel good talking with you. That’s all. If you want to—if you have time or anything like that—we could maybe just—I don’t know—just hang out. Talk. That’s all.”
And she had nodded and told him that was fine. He’d said he would see her again at the Lakeside Grill. And then he had told her good-bye.
If you have time or anything like that.
Time was all she had. Days and nights passed not in a blink, but in a slow blur. Sometimes she actually looked forward to going to work, spending time with waiters she didn’t know and hardly talked to, just to have personal contact. Sometimes she had felt lonely up in Maine, but that had been a different kind of loneliness. Her friends, the people she’d called her friends, had been only a call or lunch away. She had known the names of people in her health club, in the salon where she worked, even the stores where she shopped. She’d known the friends she shared with Harlan, even if just on the surface. How could she have been so blind to such luxury? Now she was starving for simple conversation, a little friendly human contact. And somehow she had found this guy, this man, who seemed to be in the same boat.
What is he running from?
Maybe in time she’d learn. She probably needed to know. But the fact that he didn’t make any inappropriate comments, didn’t make any illicit suggestions, didn’t even look at her inappropriately when she got up and used the ladies’ room during dinner, helped her not to worry.
Norah was used to the way guys looked at her. Harlan had never even tried to hide it. Sometimes at home, when she walked past him, he would look her up and down and ask if she had gained weight or if the pants she had on were too tight or, when he approved of the way she looked, he might say something else. Something crude, or something that she knew meant something else. Norah had forgotten—had she ever really known?—what it was like to have a man sit across the table and listen to her. To be interested in her and talk with her—not at, or down to, but with. To look at her. The real her.
She guessed it wasn’t surprising that she was overcome with emotion. All of these realities hitting her—it was too much. But these weren’t bad feelings. She wasn’t upset. She wasn’t elated. This was just a different ground she was walking on, different from what she was used to. And unlike cold concrete or a rocky road, this one felt smooth and wonderful, like silky moss.
