you’re just going to make it more horrible!”
“I am not!” I hollered. “I want to help you!”
“Sure!” he screamed before he banged out. “It really sounds like it!”
So much for adolescent psychiatry. I looked at my watch: 4:45. Too early for a drink. I slapped bratwurst on a platter, cooked spinach and previously frozen homemade noodles for the boys’ evening meal, wrote them a note on how to heat it all up, and wondered vaguely about the suicide statistics for parents of teenagers. But self- preservation as a single mother meant not dwelling on such notions. If things got worse, I promised myself, we would take the therapy route again. Arch had not, after all, thrown his own rock or strung up his own snake.
Being in a temper made me think I’d better keep busy. I cut butter into flour and swirled in buttermilk, caraway seeds, raisins, and eggs to make a thick speckled batter for Irish Soda Bread. This I poured into a round pan and set to bake while I nipped off to soak in a steaming bubble bath. Great-tasting bread and a great-smelling caterer. What else could Tom Schulz want?
Better not think about that, either.
Irish Soda Bread
2 ? cups all-purpose flour
? cup sugar
1 ? teaspoons baking powder
z teaspoon salt
? teaspoon baking soda
? cup (1 stick) unsalted butter
1 cup raisins
1 tablespoon caraway seeds
1 large egg
1 z cups buttermilk
z cup sour cream Preheat the oven to 350 . Butter 9-inch round cake pan. Sift together the dry ingredients. Using a food processor with the steel blade or pastry cutter, cut the butter into the flour mixture until it resembles small peas. Blend in the raisins and caraway seeds. Beat the egg, butter milk, and sour cream together until blended.
Stir the egg mixture into the dry mixture just until blended. Transfer the batter to the pan and bake for about 50 to 55 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.
Makes 1 round loaf.
When the bread was done, I began to wrap myself in a down coat, mittens, and earmuffs. After a two-day respite, thick, smoke-colored clouds had poured over the mountains. During the afternoon, the mercury had dropped fifteen degrees. The red sunrise was proving its warning. Flakes drifted down as I emerged from my front door. The icy wind made me hug the warm, fragrant round of Irish bread to my chest. I was thankful to see Julian chug up our street. Without telling him where I was going, I begged him for the four-wheel-drive Range Rover. I could just imagine myself facing a sudden blizzard and then saying to Schulz, “Oops, guess I’ll have to spend the night.”
Right.
Turning the Rover around sounded and felt like an advanced tank maneuver. But once I had managed it, I headed toward Main Street through the thickening snow and began to reflect on my relationship with the homicide investigator.
Being with Schulz was like… I smiled as I put the Rover into third and skittered through a channel of mud on the edge of the road. Like what, Mr. Perkins? Like an enigma, sir.
During the emotional stages of my divorce, numbness had been followed by hatred and then resentment. During that time I’d had neither the energy nor the desire for relationships. I had forsworn marriage, for ever and ever and ever. And since I was a good and faithful Sunday school teacher, swearing off marriage didn’t leave many options in the fulfilling physical relationship department. Which was okay with me. I thought.
A strange thing happened, though, after the cocoon of animosity had worn off and John Richard had become merely an annoyance to deal with on a weekly basis. Not so strange, Marla had insisted at our frequent meetings where we, his two ex-wives, discussed addiction to unhealthy relationships. Anyway, I began to have unexpected waves of Sexual Something. I’d met Schulz, but kept my distance. I’d had a short-lived, nonphysical (but disastrous nonetheless) crush on a local psychologist. Then when Arch gave up his swimming lessons at the athletic club, I was surprised to realize how much I would miss his coach’s easy smile. And there had been Arch’s art teacher at the elementary school, whom I had helped on occasion. I had unexpectedly found myself watching his trim backside as he walked slowly from student to student, correcting their drawings.
Shame! Marla had teased me. Of course, she suffered from no such compunctions. Marla insisted that after the Jerk, she was not only giving up on marriage forever, she was going to have a great time doing so. And she had, while I felt guilty thinking about the swimming coach and the art teacher.
And then I met Schulz. Schulz, who had a commanding presence and green eyes the color of seawater.
As the fat flakes of snow swirled, I eased the Rover into fourth and remembered a time during the summer when I had driven out of town alone to Tom Schulz’s cabin. “Cabin” was much too diminutive a word for Schulz’s stunning two-story home built of perfectly notched logs. He had bought it at an IRS auction after a locally famous sculptor had been caught for back taxes. Now, while the sculptor was carving license plates in a federal penitentiary, Schulz could leave the crises of the sheriff’s office behind to retreat to his remote haven with its rocks and aspens and pines, its panoramic view of the Continental Divide.
On that night four months before, Schulz had fixed me an absolutely spectacular dinner that had helped get my mind off the crises of the moment, which included that ill-fated trademark-infringement lawsuit instigated by Three Bears Catering in Denver. Having the last name Bear had never been more trying. The same evening, our conversation had turned serious when Schulz had told me about his one and only fiancee. Twenty years earlier, she had served as a nurse in Vietnam. She’d been killed during an artillery shelling. Arch made an unexpected appearance after Schulz revealed this aspect of his past, and personal conversation had ended abruptly when our dinner for two became a cookout for three.
It was not long after this that the homicide investigator had asked me if I’d like to get rid of a whole bunch of problems by changing my last name to Schulz. He’d taken my negative answer with a heartbreaking look.
No matter how much I enjoyed Schulz, the memory of the emotional black hole within my marriage to John Richard still remained. Many of my single women friends complained of loneliness, now that they were divorced. But my worst experience of loneliness, of lovelessness, of complete abandonment, had come when I was married. For that I blamed the institution, and not the man. Intellectually, I knew this was wrong. Still, emotionally, I never wanted to get into another situation where it was even possible to feel that low.
I put the Range Rover back into third and chugged my way through deep slush on the dirt road. I thought back, involuntarily, to John Richard and his showers of blows, to the punch to my ear that had sent me reeling across the kitchen, to the way I screamed and beat my hands against the floor. I started to tremble.
Pulling the Rover to the side of the road, I rolled down the window. Take it easy, girl. The snow made a soft, whooshing sound as it fell. Listening to it, feeling the chilled air and the occasional icy flake on my face, chased away the ugly memories. I looked out at the whitened landscape, breathing deeply. And then my eye caught something on the road, half covered with snow.
It was a dead deer. I turned away immediately. It was an unbearable sight, and yet something you saw all the time here, deer and elk smashed by cars going too fast to swerve away. Sometimes the cracked and bloodied carcasses lay by the side of the road for days, their open, huge brown eyes causing pain to any who cared to be caught in that sightless gaze.
Oh, God, why had I been the one to find Keith Andrews? Had he, too, had that experience of thinking he was loved and admired? The black hole of hatred had come over him so suddenly, so prematurely, and now his parents were en route back from Europe to bury him… . Involuntarily, I thought of my heart as I had imagined it after John Richard. It was an organ torn in half, a rent, ripped, and useless thing. My heart would never be healed, I had become convinced; it would just lie forever like an animal by the side of the road, smashed and dead.
Oh, get a grip! I revved the engine and recklessly gunned the Rover off the shoulder and onto the road. An evening with Schulz didn’t need to cause such emotive eruption. You’re just going there for dinner, Goldy. You can
