Dreams for Stones (28 page)

“Did you enjoy it? The teaching?”

She nodded, handing him a plate. “If you get
an enthusiastic group of students it can be a real high. Good
thing, because the pay is peanuts.”

“So, what did you get out of DSU for your
efforts? Reserved parking, an office?”

“Enough money for dinner and a movie if I
stuck to McDonalds and Blockbuster.” She was finally able to give
him a real smile.

“You didn’t happen to meet an Alan Francini
at DSU, did you?”

It was the last thing she expected him to
ask. She almost dropped the pan she’d started to rinse. She had to
swallow before she could speak. “You know Alan?”

Charles nodded, taking the pan from her.

She turned away and concentrated on
gathering together a handful of silverware. “Isn’t that a
coincidence.” She had to clear her throat, but she thought she’d
managed to sound casual, although she felt anything but. “How well
do you know him?”

When Charles didn’t answer, she glanced at
him. He was frowning at the wall over the sink, but she didn’t
think he was seeing it. Then he blinked and looked at her. “Yeah. I
know Alan.”

He hadn’t answered the question she’d asked,
but she wasn’t inclined to challenge him. And he looked too strange
for her to ask the other questions swirling in her head.
Have
you seen him recently? Do you know how he is? Did you know Meg? Do
you know how Meg died?

Later, when he took her home, he kissed her
lightly on the cheek. “I want to keep seeing you. But I think it’s
better if I don’t.” His look was strained. Meeting his eyes, she
felt a surge of sorrow. Before it could overwhelm her, she pulled
away and hurried into the house.

In the days that followed, she gradually
stopped expecting to see Charles running in Cheesman or to hear his
voice when she answered the phone.

She was surprised at how much she missed
him.

“I plan to get drunk,” Charles said, when Alan answered the phone.
“And I could use company. How about it? You in, or are you going to
consign me to crying on some stranger’s shoulder?” The tone was
much too flat to be a joke.

“Why don’t you come over here?”

“You got anything besides beer?”

“Nope.”

Charles sighed. “I’ll be there in an
hour.”

When Charles arrived, Alan got a bottle of
beer out of the refrigerator. “We drinking to anything
special?”

Charles opened the whiskey he’d brought and
poured a large amount over a small amount of ice. “Yeah. Sure. Why
not.” Charles tapped his glass against Alan’s bottle. “Let’s drink
to experience.” He took a gulp.

Alan frowned. “We talking any experience in
particular?”

“Believe I need to finish this before I’ll
be ready to get into particulars.” Charles saluted Alan, tipped up
his glass, drained it, then reached for the bottle and poured a
refill. He was obviously serious about getting drunk, even though
normally he wasn’t any more of a drinker than Alan was.

Halfway through the third drink, Alan could
tell the whiskey was taking effect. Charles set the glass down
carefully and blinked as if he were having trouble focusing.

“Particulars,” Charles said. “You asked what
particular experience prompted this evening’s visit. Believe I’m
almost ready to,” he stretched his neck, “tell you the whole
frigging story.”

Alan sipped his beer, ready to distract
Charles if he tried to drink any more. But Charles seemed to have
forgotten the whiskey.

“All started by chance, you know. I saw her
running in the park and asked her out. Turned me down. After I
promised I wouldn’t touch, finally went out with me. Should have
known something wasn’t right.”

Alan froze, barely breathing.

“Hard not touching. That hair. So. . .
silky.” Charles’s fingers moved, caressing the air. “Took it slow,
though. Seemed like that’s how she wanted it.” He wiped at his
mouth, then looked around as if trying to figure out where he was.
“Elusive. That’s the word. Didn’t want to go slow any more. Made a
move, she stopped me cold.”

The relief hit Alan like a fist. All these
last weeks he’d avoided Charles, because seeing him, all he could
think about was Charles and Kathy together, talking, laughing. . .
making love.

Charles’s head wobbled, and he shifted as if
to rebalance it. “Says she loves someone else, but he doesn’t love
her. Think I know who she meant, though.” Charles’s head nodded up
and down in a slow rhythm.

Alan’s relief turned to regret.
She loves
someone else
. It was still too late. Alan looked across at his
friend, whose eyes were now closed. Charles swayed gently as if he
were responding to a phantom breeze. Then he opened his eyes and
looked at Alan, although Alan wasn’t at all sure what he was
seeing. “’Magine that. Funny, huh? Waste, though. Don’t you think?
What good is pain if there’s no chance for. . . happiness?”

Charles stopped talking abruptly and sat
silently for a time, then his eyes drifted shut.

Alan lifted Charles’s legs onto the couch,
propped a pillow under his head, and draped a blanket over him.
Then he poured the rest of the whiskey down the drain, turned out
the light, and sat nearby.

As Charles slept, Alan, feeling a deep
sadness, kept watch.

In the morning, Charles sat up groaning and holding his head. Alan
handed him a glass of water and two acetaminophen.

“Just shoot me,” Charles said.

“Think you can handle a cup of coffee?”

“Absolutely not. Tea, maybe.”

After a cup of tea, Charles picked at a
piece of toast. “Really made an idiot of myself, huh?”

“Incoherent,” Alan agreed. “Although one
thing was clear.”

Charles touched his head and winced. “Yeah.
I’ll bet. Kathy.”

“I take it she broke up with you.”

Charles shook his head, then stopped moving
abruptly and rubbed his temples. “I broke up with her.”

“Why?”

“That incoherent, huh? Hmph. Figured it
would be a lot easier to tell you while I was drunk. Blew it.”

Alan waited impatiently while Charles poured
more hot water into his cup and re-dunked his teabag. Then Charles
closed his eyes. “Sorry. Bit nauseated.” He took a careful sip of
tea, then raised bloodshot eyes to Alan’s face. “I was slow, but I
finally put it all together. Did you think I wouldn’t?”

Alan froze, trying to meet Charles’s
look.

“One. She’s an editor. Two. She taught a
seminar at DSU last spring. Three. She says she met you, but you
acted like you didn’t know who she was. Four. Grace Garibaldi, the
dog lady, right? Although I can’t quite figure out how she fits in.
But you see where I’m going with this.” He stopped speaking, and
his hands went up to clench his arms, rubbing them as if he were
freezing. “You and Kathy. You lied about knowing her.” He narrowed
his eyes, frowning at Alan. “A witness lies, means he has something
to hide.”

Alan’s heart squeezed into a tight aching
lump. He tried to remember why he hadn’t told Charles he knew
Kathy. Partly it had been the shock. But that wasn’t the whole
truth. He’d like to believe he’d done it to allow Charles and Kathy
to discover what they might mean to each other, but he knew the
main reason he hadn’t said anything was because he simply couldn’t
bear to talk about what happened with Kathy.

“So I asked myself. Why didn’t Alan just
say, ‘Charles, old buddy, Kathy Jamison, huh? You’re talking about
that editor Hilstrom foisted on me last spring.’”

Alan found he was clenching a case knife in
one hand and a mangled piece of toast in the other with no memory
of how either got there.

“Only one answer to that,” Charles
continued. “Something happened between you two.” He nodded, his lip
sucked in. “Know you’ll find it hard to believe. Went the noble
route. Told her I’d better not see her again. But I got to
thinking. Didn’t solve a thing.”

Charles lifted his head and stared at Alan
with those awful eyes. “Bottom line. I’m only going to be noble so
long. You do something soon, or I’m back in the game, and this time
I’ll do everything I can to get her to forget you and fall in love
with me.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

Charles shook his head in irritation, then
winced. “Giving you a sporting chance. We’ve been friends too
long.” He stopped and lowered his head into his hands.

Then he looked at Alan again, his face
haggard from more than too much whiskey. “For God’s sake, man, how
could you let her go?”

He hadn’t let her go. He’d pushed her
away.

But now. The anguish he’d felt when Charles
said he planned to marry Kathy had been replaced with an agonized
hope.

Hope as fragile and tentative as a foal
trying to stand the first time.

In the wake of Charles’s visit and his revelations, Alan felt
restless and uncertain. To distract himself, he once again pulled
the box containing his writing out of the closet and sorted through
it, pulling his stories together in one pile, his novel in a
second. He returned the research materials and computer disks to
the box.

Charles had been wrong. Not a thousand
pages. Only five hundred. He split the pile into three parts,
tapping the stacks to straighten them, then he picked up his first
page, realizing he could no longer even recall the beginning.

He read the first two pages before coming to
a penciled comment from Meg, his most effective critic and
editor.

The sight of that familiar writing startled
him, but the pain of memory seemed less intense than in the past.
Seeing the note, he remembered that right before the trip to Alaska
he’d printed out the novel and given it to her to read.

He looked at the piles of pages, suddenly
curious to know how far she’d gotten. He flipped through the first
two piles to find notes scattered throughout. Then he picked up the
third stack and discovered she had written her usual note on the
last page.

It meant she had finished before they left
on the trip. Likely she planned to go over it with him when they
got back.

He put the pages down without reading any of
her notes. He wasn’t ready yet, but he thought that it was possible
that soon he might be able to take up all these pages and all these
words and begin to work with them again.

Alan walked in to find Angela had cleared off the small table that
held drinks, her notes, and the ever-present box of tissues. In the
middle sat a clear bowl of water. Floating in the water were
stones.
Getting over grief and guilt is as difficult as getting
stones to float
, Angela had said. He’d thought she was telling
him it was impossible.

He looked from the bowl to Angela, then
leaned forward, reaching out to touch the stones. They were real.
Hollowed out, maybe.

“Pumice,” Angela said.

He cleared his throat, trying to think what
to say, feeling his heart fill. Not with pain or sadness, but with
relief.

Angela was letting him know he was going to
be okay.

“I’ve read
Bobby and Brad
,” Grace said. “It’s a beautiful
story, Kathy. I loved it, and so did Delia. She thinks the goats
are
graciocos
, funny. But it made me cry.”

Kathy propped her chin in one hand, with the
phone in the other listening to Grace.

“I think you should show it to Columba and
Polly.”

“I’m not even sure it’s a children’s
story.”

“Whatever it is, it’s special. I think more
people need to see it. Children who are worried and scared about
being sick or different. And their sisters, brothers, parents.
Anybody who’s hurting. You need to share it.”

Kathy looked up from the galleys she had been checking to find Jade
standing by her desk.

“I finished reading
Bobby and Brad
,”
Jade said. “But I didn’t want to talk to you about it until I came
up with the right word to describe my reaction.”

Kathy winced. “Ouch.”

“No. That definitely isn’t it. More like
wonderful, delightful, touching.” She smiled at Kathy. “You should
show it to Columba and Polly.”

“They might hate it.”

“They might love it and want to publish it.
And if I didn’t expect that to be their reaction, I wouldn’t
suggest you show it to them.” Jade turned serious. “It’s a
wonderful story, Kathy, and you know it.” Jade pursed her lips and
took a breath. “And I know the perfect illustrator.”

Kathy felt slightly dizzy. “Maybe we better
see what Columba and Polly think before we get carried away.”

“Kathy, you busy?”

Columba and Polly were standing by her desk.
It couldn’t be about her story. She and Jade had talked only
yesterday afternoon.

“Let’s go over to my desk, shall we?”
Columba said.

There was no privacy at Calico Cat with all
their desks scattered around the single large room.

Walking over to Columba’s desk, Kathy looked
at Jade, who gave her a thumbs-up.

After sitting down, Columba spoke in her
usual slow, definite manner. “We’ve both read
Bobby and
Brad
.”

“And we absolutely adore it,” Polly chimed
in with a grin.

Columba frowned at Polly, “Never can keep
any decorum around here, can you, Poll.” Then she turned to Kathy
with a slow smile. “We want to get it into production as quickly as
possible.”

“Aren’t you jumping the gun, girlfriend? She
hasn’t told us we can have it,” Polly said.

“Well, sure we can.” Columba looked suddenly
unsure. “Can’t we?”

“I can’t imagine taking it anywhere else,”
Kathy said, happy laughter bubbling up and out.

Jade walked over to join them. “This a
private party, or is the illustrator welcome?”