“We missed you, Daddy,” Hope said.
“I missed you, too,” he would have liked to say, but Ransom, briefly, didn’t trust his voice. Sitting on the floor as the traffic veered like a stream around a rock, Ransom squeezed his children hard and smelled them like a stricken animal recovering the scent of its lost cubs, and then he opened his red eyes and looked at Claire.
Standing barefoot on the Astroturf, in defiance, probably, of several laws, she had on a pair of faded, cutoff OshKosh overalls he recognized far better than Hope’s dress and from much further back, the sort that date from those brief years when you’re as close to physical perfection as you’re ever going to get and later put away in the unlikely hope that you’ll fit into them again. They not only fit her, they were loose, and her tan was almost shocking—a fearless and unapologetic mahogany the likes of which no one who listened to All Things Considered and read the New York Times had dared in recent times, as though in coming here she’d thrown away whole levels of caution and regressed to a wild, natural state. After years of threats and promises, she’d finally cut her hair, the long bolt of heavy chestnut silk she’d both prized and half resented, having had to tend it dutifully like an aging parent or the grave of a lover who’d died young. It barely brushed her shoulders now, the ends chopped in different lengths that looked gamine and unconsidered in a way nobody had to tell him cost a lot of dough. The gray threads he’d begun to notice in New York had been replaced by red-gold highlights, and all this somehow contributed to, but did not explain, the peculiar, throbbing vividness she had, which Ransom wanted to attribute to her coming home, to starting a new job and being mistress of her own demesne again, any cause, any possibility but one: that his absence had been good for her, had allowed certain parts of her long eclipsed by certain parts of him to reemerge and shine.
“That’s some hat, Sheriff,” she said as the kids hauled him to his feet.
Ran held the crown and stared inside. “It’s white.”
“Duly noted.” She smiled at him from eyes that were the color of the glaze on good crème caramel, with that same burned, limpid sweetness. “You are skinny, bud.”
“The Tragedy Diet,” he said, making light. “Do I look bad?”
“Fuck you, Hill,” she whispered as she tiptoed up. “You look twenty-five.”
“Twenty-five?” His tone mingled incredulity and pleasure. Thinking “cheek,” Ran was happily surprised when Claire gave him her lips.
“Well, thirty-five.” Her eyes had now turned sly. “Forty, tops.”
“Hey, I’ll take forty,” said Ransom, who was forty-five. Never shy of taking chances, he glanced his fingers through her hair. “It’s great.”
“Thanks,” she said, and her expression sobered—not rejecting but taking his touch the way you might a friend who says We need to talk, when the matter is a serious one on which you know the two of you may not agree.
Her kisses were allowable, then; reciprocal privileges, if any, had yet to be determined.
Pondering the state of play, Ran let his hand drop to her shoulder, wanderingly. On one side of the flap, a replacement button had been sewn. Thumbing the suspender, he drew his hand away. “I remember these.”
Claire looked down, then up again. “You do? From where?” Her face was innocent and clueless.
Ransom pressed his lips and shook his head.
In the baggage area, he chatted with the kids and held their hands, trying not to look at her too much. His lovesickness for his wife of nineteen years was like a tumor in his chest, one he didn’t know if he could live with, but had proved beyond all shadow of a doubt he couldn’t live without.
And the carousel went round and round and spit out his black bag, and away they went, back to Wando Passo.
TWO
You wait here.”
With an ambiguous smile, Claire put on her Wayfarers and her Yankees cap and disappeared with the kids into the dark maw of the parking deck, leaving Ransom at the curb.
The heat was something. He took off his coat. Ransom had forgotten heat like this. Even in the second week of September, it hit you like a comforter hauled prematurely from the dryer, scalding and wringing wet.
Before long, they hove to around the curve. Amid the late-model Tauruses and minivans, they looked more carnival-like than ever in a torch red Thunderbird convertible, the old country-club-style ’56 with the Continental spare that had once belonged to Ransom’s dad, who had sewed seams on the line at the Dixie Bagging mill in Killdeer, North Carolina, Ran’s hometown. Mel had bought the car the one and only way a seamer could afford: from the salvage yard, with the shotgun side stove in and suspicious stains on the white Dial-A-Matic seats. Since his death, it had been parked beneath a tarp in Wando Passo’s crumbling stable. Claire wanted to trade it for something more kid-friendly and familial, but for Ran, the Bird represented something he could neither put his finger on nor quite let go.
As they drew abreast, loud music thumped the air like a damp rug, and the kids were syncing out a little Motor City dance routine:
We said, “It’s so tru-oo-ue,”
We said, “It’s so deep,”
But all it ever was, baby,
Was talking in our sleep, that’s all,
Just talking in my sleep….
Their little
