voice quavering. “I mean, I don’t know how you expect me to act.”
He turned on the charm at once, a trick he’d been able to perform at will since childhood, forcing his mother to smile through her tears in spite of herself.
“Treat me like I just got back from Istanbul, Mama.”
“But I don’t know anything at all about Istanbul.”
He laughed. “Believe me. They probably don’t have over-easy eggs there, either.”
Diana brought a mug of coffee into the room and slammed it onto the coffee table in front of Brandon Walker. Davy, always attuned to his mother’s moods, looked at her guardedly.
“Are you mad, Mom?” he asked.
“I’m not mad at anybody, Davy,” she said, her tone contradicting the words. “Go get dressed. We’ll drive out to Sells and see how Rita is.”
Davy hurried away with the dog padding behind him.
“I’m sorry about last night, Diana,” Brandon began. “It’s just that, under the circumstances. .”
“Forget it,” she snapped, cutting him off in mid-apology. “It doesn’t matter.”
But it did matter, at least to him. It had been late at night, some time after they came back from getting Davy’s stitches. Davy was asleep in his bedroom, but the grown-ups were wide awake. They were sitting on the couch drinking lemonade and talking when the calm after the storm was suddenly too much. Diana dissolved into an unexpected squall of tears. It was natural for her to fall against Brandon Walker’s shoulder, natural for him to put a comforting arm around her. The electricity had been there for him from the first moment he laid eyes on the woman. Holding her that way brought it all back to him in a rush.
He wanted her. God, how he wanted her, just like he’d wanted her years earlier when he was still married and she was pregnant as hell. The sweet, clean, smell of her hair filled his nostrils. The touch of his fingertips on bare, smooth skin stirred his whole body and aroused a part of Brandon Walker that he kept on a very short leash.
He wasn’t sure when the comforting arm he’d draped around her shoulder evolved into a caress, or when exactly he began to kiss that soft, sweet-smelling hair, but he was painfully aware of her abruptly sitting up straight and pushing him away.
“No,” she said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. Go now, please. Just go away.”
He was almost glad she’d stopped it when she did, before things got out of hand. He wanted her, but not like this, not when she was at the end of her emotional rope. Brandon Walker wanted her, and he wanted Diana Ladd to want him back.
But in the aftermath of that one unexpected kiss, she was overtaken by a sudden fit of unaccountable fury. She accused him of taking unfair advantage and ordered him out of the house. Walker simply refused to leave. Telling her he wasn’t going to leave her alone with an injured child no matter what, he kicked off his shoes and stretched his long frame out full length on her living-room couch. Short of using a gun, that didn’t leave Diana many options. Still angry, she stalked off to bed.
During the night, they reached a truce of sorts. He insisted on getting up with her every time she went to check on Davy anyway. Finally, at five in the morning, she knuckled under and gave him an alarm clock. Now, though, awake and sipping coffee, she seemed angry again, and Brandon didn’t know what to do about it.
He looked around the room with its freshly stuccoed walls and open-beam ceilings, searching for a reasonable topic of discussion that would keep the conversation out of harm’s way.
Hanging on the wall behind the couch was a basket Brandon recognized as a Papago maze with I’itoi standing in the cleft at the top of the design. He had seen Papago baskets like that before, but this one was unusual in that the design work was done in red rather than the traditional black.
“Great basket,” he said.
Diana nodded. “It was a housewarming present from Rita when we first moved in here.”
“I’ve never seen a red one before.”
“They’re fairly rare,” she told him. “The color isn’t dyed; it comes from a yucca root. Killing live yuccas to make baskets doesn’t go over too well these days.”
“It suits the room,” he said stupidly, groping for something to say. “It goes with the rest of the house.”
Brandon Walker knew he must sound like a complete jackass, but talking about the basket seemed to have blunted the worst of Diana’s anger.
“You should have seen it when we first moved in,” Diana said. “It was awful. Rita was a huge help. Between the two of us, we managed to make the place habitable.”
Brandon changed the subject. “I heard Davy telling the doctor that you’re writing books. Is that true?”
Diana flushed. “I’m trying,” she said. “Nothing published yet, but I’m working at it.”
Brandon frowned as a trace of memory surfaced. “Isn’t that what your husband. .?”
He broke off the question as soon as he saw the pained expression on her face, but it was too late. The damage was done. He berated himself for blundering and making things infinitely worse rather than better.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s what Gary was studying before he died. Writing. As a matter of fact, he told me that on our very first date. That he was going to write the great American novel someday.”
Brandon Walker thought he already knew the answer, but he asked the question anyway, just to be polite. “Did he?”
Diana Ladd stood up abruptly and swept both coffee cups off the table.
“No. Gary never finished anything he started,” she said bitterly, heading toward the kitchen. “He had a very short attention span.”
They were still in the booth at the I-Hop, drinking their eighth or ninth cup of coffee. The waitress was growing surly.
“You’re shitting me!” Gary Ladd exclaimed in delight. “You’re going to be a writer, too?”
After hearing about Gary Ladd’s Pulitzer Prize ambitions, Diana Lee Cooper shyly mentioned her own interest in writing. “It’s what I’ve always wanted to do,” she added, surprised to find herself confiding in this semi- stranger.
Diana’s desire to write wasn’t something she confessed to others openly or often. People in Joseph, Oregon, laughed uproariously at the very idea. Here at the university, she always felt unworthy, underqualified. But Gary Ladd didn’t seem to share that opinion.
“Hey, that’s great,” he said, giving Diana’s shoulder an encouraging pat accompanied by one of his engaging grins. “What say we do it together-matching typewriters on a single table, right?”
She laughed and nodded. “Right.”
From near the cash register, the waitress glared at them pointedly. Garrison Ladd grabbed Diana’s hand. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go before they throw us out.”
On the way outside, Diana glanced down at her watch. “Oh, my God,” she said in dismay. “I’m late.” She started for her bike with Garrison Ladd right behind her.
“Late for what? Where are you going?”
“Ushering. I have to get home, change, and get back down here in less than an hour.”
“Ushering?” he asked. “What’s this about ushering?”
“At Robinson Hall. It’s my second part-time job,” she explained. “I make three dollars a night.”
November’s early darkness was settling over Eugene, bringing with it a chill winter rainstorm as she knelt on the wet ground and struggled with the stubborn lock on her bicycle chain.
“Wait a minute. Let me get this straight. You work in the English Department fifteen hours a week, and you usher in the auditorium as well. Do you have any other jobs I don’t know about?”
“Only the newspaper,” she told him.
“What newspaper?”
“
“When do you find time to eat and sleep?” he asked.
“When I can. I told you, I have to pay my own way. This is what it takes to stay in school.”
“That may be, but you sure as hell don’t have to ride that thing home in this downpour. Don’t be stubborn.
