The Forgotten Hours(33)







PART TWO





15

Next time, Katie was sure to be better prepared for going back up to the cabin. She scheduled a couple of days off work; the superintendent turned the water on and confirmed that the heat was still functioning. Verizon reconnected the cable, and the internet was up again. Her father was thrilled. She felt awful about avoiding his call on Sunday, so she plugged her home phone back in and hoped he’d call her spontaneously.

“I guess our routines are changing, huh,” he said when they spoke a few days later, “and that’s all good, right? A whole new paradigm.”

They agreed he’d start calling her on her cell, which would allow them to be in touch when she went to Eagle Lake. She told him about some websites she’d found that were geared toward helping released prisoners get acclimated to freedom. “So apparently, if you want a successful reentry, you have to be sure and go talk with your pastor,” she said. As far as she knew, her father had never attended church, not even when they all used to go with Grumpy and Gram. “Oh, and humility. You need that. I read on one blog that it’s the number one thing you have to have.”

“Oh dear,” John said, chuckling. “That doesn’t bode well for me, then, does it?”

Before Zev left for Spain, he and Katie grabbed lunch at a small Thai place around the corner from the Hamlin Group. He was excited; the deal for his paintings had already gone through, and two of them had been shipped off to San Francisco. He was giving a talk and teaching some workshops at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona on the intersection between politics and art, and he’d stayed up all night writing. With the US election coming up in November, everyone wanted to talk about the insanity of the nomination process, but Zev was less interested in the mechanics of politics and more interested in its cultural implications. A few recent paintings of his that made veiled references to celebrity influence were generating serious buzz.

As they talked, he sketched on his napkin with a pen, light lines she couldn’t decipher from upside down. They were so wrapped up in their conversation that it didn’t occur to her until it was time to get back to work that they hadn’t touched on the topic of moving in together.

“Hey, one thing,” she said after they’d paid the bill, rising. She only had a few minutes, but she at least had to tell him that she was also headed out of town. “Um, I’m leaving for a few days. Going up to my grandfather’s cabin.”

“Oh, your family has a cabin? That’s great,” Zev said, pocketing his change and standing up. He wore a white T-shirt and a navy blazer with black jeans. His face was drawn from lack of sleep but animated. “Somewhere in the country?”

Already this conversation was veering off into territory so banal she didn’t know how to bring it back. “Near Poughkeepsie, the Hudson River Valley area?” she said. She badly wanted to be more open, but she couldn’t think of how to start. It was part of a much longer conversation. As she looked at him, readying herself for the coming two weeks, she wondered what he thought about love. Did he believe in it? Was he the kind of guy who, once he said “I love you,” would say it all the time, or was he someone who thought the whole idea was outdated? He must have been in love before, but what about now—did he call what they had “love”? It was a first for her, this feeling, this strange combination of intensity and fear. She had always assumed that real love was about feeling no fear.

“That’s good. You’ll get some rest,” he said. “You can use my car, if you like; it’s still in that lot not far from you. I left you a set of keys, right?” He didn’t realize she’d already driven up to the cabin in his car once before, just the previous week.

Of course he suspected nothing; he was so kind. “I’ll miss you,” she said.

He reached out and touched her chin lightly with his calloused fingertips. “I’m excited about the trip, but I’m more interested in what happens when I get back.”

She nodded, rattled. She hated this dance of deception she was perpetuating: I’m heading out of town for the weekend. As though this were a spa break or a girls’ getaway weekend. It was astonishing how you could be telling the truth and lying at the very same time.

Blackbrooke’s main drag was a wide, stately avenue built for horse-drawn carriages in the early 1800s by two brothers who had been counting on the arrival of major roads and the railroad. A jumble of highways passed close to town, shaving off the southwest corner into a forlorn wasteland of gas stations, Qwik Stops, and discount liquor stores. But the men had been wrong about the railroad; engineers had picked Port Leicester instead, twenty-five miles to the north, and that slight miss had spelled a slow and certain death for the grand old town.

Katie stopped at the A&P on Main Street to buy some food and cleaning supplies. It was impossible to avoid sleeping at the cabin—theoretically, Motel 6 was an option, but she was afraid to stay there, with the Trans Ams in the parking lot, the broken windows, and the black-rimmed aboveground pool. She’d left work early and made it to Blackbrooke in record time so she could get settled in before nightfall. There was a lot to do. Tomorrow was Friday, and she’d convinced David to come by for a few hours before driving over to Bethel Woods to see the Goo Goo Dolls. She was going to need help trying to get the Falcon going again.

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