“Right,” Bonnie said.
“When I was twelve years old, my father got into serious money trouble. He sold fancy cars to people who had lots of money, but the economy got sour and even the rich people stopped buying things they didn’t have to. That’s the way it is in oil country. It’s either up or it’s down, with not much in between. If he’d borrowed from a bank they would have just repossessed the cars, or my parents could have filed for bankruptcy, but this was different. My dad got the money from a private lender who started making threats about wanting his money back. I knew my parents were scared, but they didn’t think they could tell the police about it. I heard my dad tell my mom that he’d been laundering money for the lender.”
In the distance, maybe a mile to the south, I could see Haystack Rock. A few beachcombers were out looking for shells, but none were as far north on the beach as Bonnie and I were.
“It was summertime and we lived in the outskirts of Oklahoma City. It was a kind of wilderness back then. A few homes here and there, but mostly just miles and miles of oak trees, red dirt roads, and oil wells.”
A shallow stream cut across the beach in front of us. The stream was a few feet deep where we were, but the closer it got to the ocean, the more it flared into a fan shape, flattening out as it reached the surf.
“I guess this is the turnaround point, Bonnie,” I said. “If you don’t want to get wet.”
We headed back the way that we’d come. The clouds were much closer now and looked like a dark wall rising from the horizon. The wind coming off the ocean picked up speed and carried a bitterly cold edge to it. In ten minutes the storm would be where we were. The surf seemed to boil, with muddy barrels of sand-infused water churning where the water returning to the ocean met the fierce waves coming on shore.
“Okay, Bonnie” I said. I had to raise my voice so she could hear me over the noise of the wind and the surf.
I tried to remember the landmarks that marked where the footpath led down to the beach.
“So someone came by the house when my parents were there alone. I was about a quarter mile away and I thought I heard gunshots. I ran home, and a man was coming out of the garage with a gun. I took off running. He shot at me and chased me until he had me cornered. I had my dad’s gun in my backpack, Bonnie, and I killed him with it. I was twelve years old and I killed somebody. There wasn’t any choice.”
“Oh my God,” Bonnie said.
“Thing is,” I said. “It was all my fault. If I was a different kind of person, my parents would still be alive, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now.”
“What are you talking about?” Bonnie asked. “You were just a kid.”
The first blast of sleet and snow cut across the beach.
“Let’s run,” I said. Bonnie jogged alongside me, shielding her eyes from the sleet with her hand. We’d gone about a hundred yards when the snow started coming down hard. We moved higher up on the beach in the hopes that we’d recognize the opening for the footpath in the vegetation that encroached on the beach. The snow wasn’t sticking on the sand, but there was more than enough of it falling to make it difficult to see where we were going. After a while, the cliffs rose on our right side and I knew we’d walked too far.
“Bonnie,” I said. I leaned in close and said it loudly so she could hear me over the drone of the wind and the hiss of the sleet hitting the beach. She had her face turned away from me. I took hold of her arm and turned her towards me.
“Hey,” I said. “We gotta turn around. The path is behind us.” She nodded, and I could see that she’d been crying. I put my arm around her and said “It’s not far.”
We walked slowly, both watching for the entrance to the footpath to appear on our left. I tried to shield her from the weather by standing between her and the water. The wind tugged at our coats and made Bonnie’s trench coat pop at her legs. Periodically a wave would crash against the sand with a sound like a thunderclap.
I noticed a cut in the vegetation that I took for the cabin footpath. We stepped off the beach with me in front and Bonnie behind, and we started up the trail. After several hundred yards of back and forth on the winding path we entered the opening behind Eric’s house.
Chapter 17
We went inside and stayed on the linoleum by the back door, trying to keep our wet shoes and coats off of the carpet. I helped Bonnie get her coat off and put it on one of the hooks by the door, then got a towel from the bathroom and used it to help her get the snow out of her hair. I started taking off my coat while Bonnie leaned against the wall, struggling to remove a riding boot.
I took one of her hands and said “Hey. Come on over here.” I led her to the kitchen table and told her to take a seat. She sat down, and I got on one knee, and then lifted one of her boots by the heel. I began to work the boot off by rocking the heel back and forth while cupping my palm against the leather around her calf and pulling the boot towards me.
“Point your toes, Bonnie,” I said. “It’ll make it easier.”
When she did that the boot began to move, and I pulled it towards me as the wet leather finally came free. I lowered her foot to the floor, then cupped the heel of her other boot in my palm. Then I lifted the leg and began rocking the heel back and forth. She pointed the toes of her foot, but the leather was so wet that it became a tug-of-war, and Bonnie gripped the chair with both hands to brace herself against my pull. I gripped her calf above the top of the boot with my left hand and felt a tremor under my hand. I pulled with my other hand, and finally the boot began to slide. After I got the boot off, I lowered her foot to the floor and let go of her calf. She was still gripping the chair with both hands.
The only sound in the cabin was the hissing noise of the sleet hitting the big window.
I stood up and looked down at her. Her pants were discolored by the sleet from mid-thigh down to the where the tops of the boots had been.
“I’m going to change my clothes,” she said. “My pants are soaked.”
“Sure,” I said.
I held out my hand and helped Bonnie get to her feet. Without the boots on she was half a foot shorter than me. We were close, then, maybe six inches apart. Her hair was still mussed from when I’d used the towel to get the snow out of her hair. A strand of wet hair fell across her cheek and I lifted it gently behind her ear. I could feel the blood moving through me, felt the specialness of her presence and of the moment. I was intensely aware of the green cashmere sweater, her raven black hair, the perfect skin and the red lipstick she wore. Her eyes were jade green, with a depth to the green I’d never noticed before.
She reached out and put her left hand on the side of my face. Her palm felt like silk against my skin. “That was really brave for you to tell me what you did, okay? I’ll never tell anybody. I promise. Anytime you want to talk about it, I’m here for you. All right?”
“All right.”
“I’m going to get out of these wet pants,” she said. “I’m cold.”
Then she went into her bedroom but left the door ajar. After a moment I heard the squeak of her bed springs.
I stood at the window and watched the feathery snow flatten itself against the glass, listened to the hiss of the sleet against the house, and heard the intermittent thunderclap of a wave slapping down against the sand. Then I got into the overstuffed chair by the big picture window and thought about that summer day in Oklahoma City.
Chapter 18
Bonnie woke me from my reverie by taking my hand in hers. I was still tipped back in the overstuffed reclining chair. The baseboard heaters made a ticking sound as they started another heating cycle.
“Are you doing okay?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said.
She gave my hand a squeeze. “It’s quit snowing,” she said.
And it had. The view through the window showed that all of the snow on the blackberry brambles had melted. The sky had reverted to a featureless blanket of grey clouds.
“That’
s a plus,” I said.
“I checked the refrigerator,” Bonnie said. “Do you think we could go to the grocery store? There’s not much here.”
“Of course. Let’s go,” I said.
Bonnie was wearing a pair of white jeans under the green cashmere sweater. She’d traded the riding boots in for black leather tennis shoes.
“You’re not wearing your boots?”
“Still a wee bit soggy from our beach outing.”
“But stylish,” I said. She’d combed her hair out and lipstick on.
“Sometimes a girl has to be pragmatic.”
“But still beautiful,” I said.
“Thank you, good sir,” she said.
We put on our winter coats and went out to the Camry. The wind was blowing off the coast, but not as hard as earlier that day. It felt like the temperature was in the low 40s. No snow or ice anywhere. Seagulls wheeled and circled overhead. The mountains that slumped down toward the beach still had a dusting of snow on them.
I used the wipers to clean the saltwater mist from the glass. Bonnie didn’t say anything, but I knew that she was thinking about how the interior of the car still smelled faintly of gunfire and of smoke.
Chapter 19
We backed out of the driveway and made our way along Highway 101 to the exit for Cannon beach and on into the small downtown area. We drove past the pizza restaurant where we’d left the Corvette the previous night. The Corvette was long gone.
I pulled into the parking lot of the small grocery store on South Hemlock Street. We went inside and I got a small shopping basket. I picked simple things that we could take with us if we were in a hurry: a big loaf of fresh bread, butter, sliced turkey, Swiss cheese, mustard, lettuce, and a six-pack of Coca-Cola. Bonnie followed me around as I shopped for a while, then shook her head and walked away. She came back later with her own basket containing whole wheat pasta, a baguette, mushrooms, smoked ham, bell peppers, salted butter, honey Dijon mustard, shredded jack cheese, ground turkey, a head of lettuce, vinegar salad dressing, and a bottle of cabernet.
“You’re a gourmet,” I said. “Does that mean I’ll be eating the turkey and Swiss sandwich on my own?”
“I like to have flavor in my food. You, good sir, have picked food suitable for a beach picnic. I have picked ingredients to prepare a dinner for the man of my dreams.”
I laughed out loud. It felt good to laugh after my confession earlier that day.
There were several people in line in front of us when we went to pay for our groceries. Bonnie got her wallet out of a maroon leather purse and pulled a credit card from it. I shook my head. “I’ll get it,” I said. “It’s my treat.”
“I can pay my own way.”
“I know that. Let me get it this time. You can get it next time, okay?”
I pulled four twenties out of my wallet. I’d gotten them from the stash that Fullmeyer had left in the Camry when he gave me the car. As I handed the bills to the cashier I noticed that the twenty dollar bill in the middle had a big blue cross drawn on it with chalk. I thought about asking for the bill back from the cashier, but by then the cashier was already making change.
“Did you two get trapped here by the weather last night?” the cashier asked. She was mid-sixties, grey hair pulled back tightly in a bun, weathered skin, reading glasses, a cinnamon-colored sweater under a dark green apron with the logo of the market sewn onto it.
“Not exactly. Why?”
“I guess they closed Highway 26 late last night when a truck jack knifed at the Quartz Creek Bridge. The roads were so bad they couldn’t get a tow truck up there until this morning. I thought maybe you’d come over from Portland and gotten stuck. We don’t get a lot of tourists here in the winter.”
Bonnie slid her arm through mine. “We’re on our honeymoon.” She gave me a peck on the cheek. “We’re not going anywhere for a while. Are we?”
I put my arm around her waist and pulled her close. “I don’t think so.”
“Well, congratulations,” the cashier said. “I hope you have a great honeymoon here. The beach is beautiful in the winter, and no crowds. If you haven’t been here before, the one piece of advice I always give is that when it’s stormy don’t ever turn your back on the ocean. You can get waves as tall as a house coming out of nowhere because of the wave action. When the surf’s really churning just stay back close to the houses if you walk on the beach. Okay?”
Bonnie pressed herself against my side and giggled a bit. “We promise,” she said.
“You two enjoy yourself,” the cashier said.
Bonnie gave me a squeeze on the butt before picking up her grocery bag. “Oh, we will, I’m sure.”
I picked up the other bag, in shock from Bonnie’s performance.
Chapter 20
“What was that all about?” I asked her once we’d gotten into the car.
“That lady in the store really noticed us, I could tell. She was sizing us up because it’s the slow season here. I wanted her to remember a young couple on their honeymoon, not a man and a woman who couldn’t agree on what to shop for.”
I nodded. “Well… Nicely done.”
Bonnie took a quick glance back at the store window before leaning in and kissing me hot and hard on the mouth. I put my hand behind her neck and returned the kiss. Then Bonnie leaned back in her seat, smiling that crooked smile of hers.
“What was that for?” I asked.
“She might have been watching us through the window.”
“You’re very thorough,” I said.
“By the way, you have a pretty nice ass,” she said.
“You squeezed it hard enough. I think you might have put a bruise on it.”
“Well, as a newlywed, I’ll be checking for damage about five minutes after we get back to the cabin, so no worries there.”
As we backed out of the parking place I said “Thanks.”
“For what?”
“For not freaking out. For keeping it together and making me laugh.”
“I just wanted to be someone else for a while,” Bonnie said. “It actually felt good.”
“I’m not complaining,” I said. “When you’re in character you’re a lot of fun.”
“You haven’t seen anything yet,” Bonnie said.
I made the turn onto Highway 101 back towards Eric’s cabin.
“I’m glad we met,” I said. “Honestly.”
“I am too. When I saw you in the bar you just seemed different than most of the guys who come in for a drink. Most of them are nice enough, but there was something special about you. Like I hoped we’d get the chance to talk to each other before you left. Is that silly?”
“No. Not at all.”
“Well... thanks for holding me last night. I felt like I was going crazy, and when you held me you were a gentleman about it and didn’t try to take advantage of the situation.”
“Sure.”
“So now I know I can trust you.”
“That’s good to hear.”
“Which is good since we’re on our honeymoon, and trust is an all-important part of any relationship.”
I laughed as I made the turn into Eric’s driveway. “Wait a minute, are you back in character, or is this really you I’m talking to?” I asked.
“And I know that you trust me, too,” Bonnie said.
“That’s a fact.”
I parked the Camry in the gravel driveway for Eric’s cabin, and Bonnie and I carried the groceries inside. After what had happened between us that day, we felt awkward in that confined space. We kept bumping into each other in the small kitchen, reaching around each other for things. Finally I just stood out of the way and let her put the food in the cabinets or refrigerator, watching her move about in her efficient way. When she was finished putting things away, Bonnie took one of the pans from the cabinet under the sink and filled it with water. She put a pinch of salt in, put the pan one of the electric burners, and turned the temperature to high.
I was
opening and closing drawers while Bonnie got the cutting board out and started slicing the lettuce.
“What are you looking for?” Bonnie asked me.
“Corkscrew for the wine.”
“Top drawer left of the sink,” she said.
Sure enough, the corkscrew was there. Then I started opening and closing cabinet doors.
“Wine glasses are in the cabinet above the dishwasher,” she said.
Sure enough, the wine glasses were there.
The water began to boil in the aluminum pan. Bonnie carefully poured the whole wheat pasta into the pan without splashing any of the water.
I poured a couple inches of cabernet into each of the glasses. Bonnie sliced off the end of the baguette with a deft flick of her wrist and then cut a pad of salted butter onto it.
“Try the sourdough,” she said. “Pretty good with salted butter.”
I took the piece of bread from her. “You seem to know your way around a kitchen,” I said.