“I’ve got the good brother this time.”
Maurey and I had been best friends since before puberty. I thought we would always be the way we had always been, with our romantic lives a hobby we take seriously, but nevertheless, still a hobby. The nuclear family would always be each other.
“You’ve lived with Pud for years. Why change what works?”
Maurey pulled the third stitch. “Why are you freaking out?”
“I think he’s taking advantage of your vulnerability over losing Pete.”
She tied the knot hard and snipped the loose end with her scissors in a crisp
“You’ve been married twice.”
“But that was different. Neither of those women was as vital to me as you are.”
“And they knew that. I don’t blame them for hating me. Did it ever occur to you that maybe—just maybe— putting me first over your wives had something to do with why your marriages failed?”
“They were both emotional cripples. It had nothing to do with you.”
Maurey’s eyes met mine fiercely. “Pud is my partner, Sam. My mate. You are my very good friend. You are important, yet secondary.”
“But we always said friends matter more than lovers.”
“You always said that. Pud is the number-one man in my life, Sam. You have to accept that.”
“Fat chance.”
I kicked on my cross-country skis and headed up the creek. Got to get away. Got to go. Movement eases turmoil. The warm days earlier in the week had softened the snow and today’s cold hardened it, so basically I was skiing on ice. I fell twice before the back fence. A single rail showed above the snow and it was easy to sidestep over. Once across, I made my way into the aspens, where the going was a bit easier.
How could she do this to me? When I got married I didn’t flaunt my true love in her face. I didn’t call her secondary. The first time I sent a postcard: “Got married. Wish you were here.” The second time, Shannon told her.
When Wanda ran off with the illiterate pool man I thought I had a rock-solid support system—mother, daughter, closest friend—stable as a three-legged stool. Okay, the mother wasn’t too supportive, but I knew where she was. If I felt like talking to her, all I had to do was hold on to a check for a couple of days. I never dreamed Shannon would leave so soon. Maybe if I’d stayed in Greensboro after the Katrina fiasco she wouldn’t have discovered how easy I am to live without.
What was I going to do? I couldn’t go back to North Carolina. The Manor House would be an empty tomb without Shannon. Besides, I’d had it with golf carts and serial sex. Gilia changed all that.
For sure, I couldn’t stay in my cell at the TM Ranch forever. Spring would come; Madame Bovary would eat arsenic and die; Maurey would marry Pud.
What I ought to do was move to a small Western town and find a log cabin within walking distance of a video store and a coffee shop, and do nothing for ten years but write novels. Not teenage sports fiction, but literature—
Or if that was too ambitious, I could bring Babs and Lynette to Wyoming and set them up with their own Dairy Queen. They’d like that.
The options were boundless. Almost too boundless, like the night I was left alone at the ranch and I tried to watch satellite TV. Four hundred channels gave me so many choices I spent the entire evening switching from satellite to satellite and didn’t watch anything for fear of missing something. When all choices are possible, realistic and unrealistic lose their edges. Here I was torn between writing a book that would make unhappy people happy and opening a Dairy Queen.
When had I been happy in life? When Maurey was pregnant. When Shannon was young and needed me. Looking back at the recent past, I realized helping Babs and Lynette had given me a gut-level satisfaction that had been missing lately from Young Adult novels and sex acts on lost women.
I was almost to the warm springs when I came through a gap in the aspens into a wide clearing covered by virgin snow, and I had a vision. Maybe not a vision in the Cheyenne sense, more like a waking dream—a visualization. It wasn’t something I could ever tell Maurey or Shannon about. They would laugh. Lydia would hoot.
What I saw was a log lodge with a rock chimney next to a white clinic. Individual cabins lay scattered around the clearing connected by smooth paths. Golf carts hummed quietly back and forth between the cabins and the main lodge, carrying my women. A long driveway lined by cottonwoods and red willows looped up from the ranch. At a quaint wooden bridge spanning the brook, a tastefully small sign read Callahan Home for Unwed Mothers.
Why not? I could hire nurses. We’d need a helicopter for hospital runs, but, hell, I had money. Nothing on Earth sounded nicer than to surround myself with pregnant teenagers.
A doughnut of green clover about three feet wide encircles the warm springs all winter. The north side of the doughnut is the actual spring, which steams from the earth like a scene from Shakespeare—one of those Scottish moors haunted by witches. The hot water gurgles into a moss-lined pool, thigh deep at its deepest point, then, already cooling, it empties west into Miner Creek. The Miner Creek approach involves skiing across a log high above the rocks and ice, so my rest and meditation spot was on the east side, the gentle bank.
I popped boots off bindings and planted my skis upright in the snow, then I sat on the clover and waited. I didn’t touch the water. When you first start visiting a warm springs on a regular basis, you check the temperature each time you return to see if the water really is as warm as you remember it. The TM spring was a tad cooler than I like bath water, warm enough to melt the surrounding snow but not so hot as to scald the tropical fish Maurey and other kids had released into it over the years. Back in early high school Maurey talked me into a full-moon skinny dip at twenty below zero. The water itself was cozy, warm and foggy as a Jacuzzi, but the seconds between leaving the water and drying off were among the most painful of my childhood. Seeing her naked was not worth hypothermia.
I came to the warm springs mainly for the dirt. Winter in Jackson Hole may be beautiful and spare beyond the Eastern Time Zone conception of beauty, but several months with no sight of dirt leaves me weird.
So I sat on the clover with my fingers in the dirt, watching tiny goldfish dart around the shallows’ muck, my energy at an all-time low. I was too exhausted to be depressed. The truth is I’m only good for one intense, spine- wrenching emotional blowout a year, and when the scenes come stacked up on one another some sort of morphine response kicks in. My brain goes numb; my muscles fill up with lactic acid.
The high whine of a snowmobile wafted in from back along the fenceline, and I realized I’d been holding my breath, waiting for it. Maurey arrived in a powder blue snowsuit, gold metal-flake helmet, and her father’s old Mickey Mouse boots. I averted my eyes as she dismounted. I heard her shake out her hair and wade down the snowbank, then felt her sit beside me. Neither of us spoke for a while. I underhand tossed a pebble into the water and we both took what life lessons we could from the concentric, spreading ripples.
“You knew I would come,” she said.
“Yes.”
Our shoulders were a half-inch apart. I sat cross-legged while Maurey stretched her legs in a V. She leaned back on her hands and said, “Remember the day I fell in the creek and went into labor?”
“I’ve never been that scared since.” Maurey broke her leg, Shannon was born, and I became a father three weeks before my fourteenth birthday.
Maurey exhaled a sigh. The fog from her breath looked like punctuation. “Sam, it’s time we got a divorce.”
