Firebird (The Flint Hills Novels) (11 page)

They settled on a Sonic drive-in that took Annette's fancy as they drove by. She thought it would be fun to eat in the truck and have the waitress serve them on a window tray. "We had these drive-ins when I was a little girl. I thought they'd disappeared," she said, and he laughed and said she had indeed been gone for a long time. Ethan, who was always beset with moral indigestion when he ate anything but beef, was content. From the moment she'd leaned on his arm in the cathedral, the former awkwardness between them had been swept away. Their conversation flowed easily now, and Ethan found her an eager listener. She asked him questions about cattle ranching, and he talked at length about the soil of the Flint Hills and bluestem grass, its special properties that made it unique in the country, on par with the renowned pampas grass in Argentina that fed the beef she ate in France.

Ethan got a kick out of the way she handled the chili dog. She set it on her lap and used a knife and fork, cutting it up, bun and all, into bite-sized pieces.

"You've gone quiet on me," said Ethan.

"Hmm," she replied as she dangled a greasy onion ring from her fingers.

Ethan finished long ahead of her.

She was peering out the window at the menu. "I think I'll have a chocolate milk shake."

Ethan pressed the button and ordered it for her.

"So, tell me, how'd you learn Yiddish?"

"My husband was a Hungarian Jew, but he grew up in Antwerp."

"Is he still in Paris?"

"No. He conducts the Dallas Philharmonic now."

"Well, there you go. Another reason to stay around. Eliana's closer to her dad."

Annette's quick look told him he had stepped into forbidden waters. "Eliana doesn't ever see David." She paused, looking out the window, and said, "There's no need for her to."

She looked back quickly at him and her eyes held his in a gentle pleading look. "You mustn't judge me by that. It's not as it seems."

"I don't get to see my son much," he said after a moment.

Annette looked surprised. "You have a son?"

"Jeremy. He's fifteen. He lives in Los Angeles with his mom. She moved out there after we got divorced."

"That's a dreadful place to raise kids. Especially when they reach their teens."

The chocolate milk shake came. Ethan passed it to Annette and she took it and stirred it slowly with the straw. There was a long, hovering silence while Ethan stared at his steering wheel.

"He's run away from home," he said suddenly.

"Oh, Lord, no." She lifted her head and looked into his eyes, and Ethan blurted out all his misery. He was not accustomed to talking about himself, but Annette Zeldin's eyes were never more focused than when he spoke to her about his son.

"When Paula said she wanted to move out west, I didn't like the idea. But she wasn't happy here. And that wasn't good for Jeremy, so I agreed. It was hard for me to get away to see him and he didn't like coming here on his summer holiday. He complained that he was bored, so I'd try to get him outside with me, riding the herds, things most kids would like. But all he wanted to do was sit around on his computer playing games or talk on the phone to his friends in LA. We'd fight a lot, so he quit coming. Except at Christmas. Probably because I spoil him rotten with everything his heart desires. And it's too cold to work the land, so he can stay at home and play with his latest electronics. Now he feels like a stranger to me."

He went on to tell her about how the unsettled business with his father had come back to haunt him, and when Jeremy ran away all he could think of was his father.

She urged him to go to California.

"I wouldn't be able to do anything. I don't know who his friends are. I don't know where he hangs out... nothing. Anyway, Paula's already tried all that. She thinks he's with a friend but the friend's not talking."

"It doesn't make any difference. You're not a detective—you're his father. He needs to know you're out there looking for him. That's what's important."

"So you think I should go?"

"I think you should get yourself on the first flight available."

"Yeah, you're right."

"If anything bad should happen to him, you'll regret it the rest of your life."

Ethan studied her dark, luminous eyes, and saw in them all the intense emotion he had so assiduously trained himself to avoid. He noticed her milk shake. She hadn't touched it.

"Too much?"

She looked down at the shake, as though she'd forgotten it was there.

"Yes," she said softly, and passed it to him to leave on the tray.

Even the silence between them as he drove her to her car was free of the discomfort of their previous moments together; it was a different kind of silence, a suggestive silence, a fallow silence, preparing their hearts for the germination of thoughts and feelings to come. It was a silence that linked them in ways they didn't yet know, or even guess, with a bond that was not palpable, yet felt as strong and assured as a touch, a kiss.

Chapter 13

Every Friday after Matthew Winegarner's violin lesson, Annette Zeldin dropped in at Ethan Brown's office. Ostensibly she came to borrow his books, although she'd read many of them already. Initially, their friendship seemed to be rooted in this mutual love of literature, but the seed of trust that had been planted over a melting milk shake at the Sonic drive-in was buried much deeper than Tennyson and Yeats. Jeremy had returned home the day after their conversation and Ethan had immediately called Annette to share the good news. Ever since that day, he had begun to play with the idea of bringing Jeremy to live with him. He hadn't spoken about it to Paula or to Katie Anne; he wasn't eager to wage those wars quite yet. He did speak freely about it to Annette.

"I think it's a wonderful idea," she said, sitting in his office, flipping through the pages of Cather's
Great Short Works.
"Any place is better than LA. And you need to get to know each other." She laid the book next to her violin and looked up at him. "Do you think Paula would go for it?"

"Frankly, I think she'd jump at the chance. Jeremy's the problem. He'd have to give up his basketball. His friends."

Annette got up and poured herself another cup of coffee.

"Have you talked it over with Katie Anne?"

"Not yet. But it won't be a problem."

Annette shot him a look over her coffee cup. "You're a dreamer, Mr. Brown."

* * *

That night he brought up the subject with Katie Anne. Katie Anne, who never for a moment imagined that Ethan's mind was on anything except the wedding, stared at him in frozen horror for a long minute, then rose without a word and went into the bedroom. Ethan knew she wanted him to follow her but he loathed these histrionics, and since he stubbornly refused to follow the scenario, he was repaid in kind. After a few minutes of silence he heard her on the phone with Whitey making plans to go out dancing. Finally, reluctantly, Ethan went to find her. She was thrashing around in her closet.

"Damn, where's my red skirt?"

"We need to talk about this."

She rummaged through a pile of clothes at the foot of their bed. "I don't know what there is to talk about. I mean, how can anybody be so... so dense as to think I'd want to spend my honeymoon with a very difficult fifteen-year-old boy."

"We've been living together for almost two years. It's not as if we haven't had time alone," he replied. "And he wouldn't move here until school's out. So I don't know where you got this idea that he'd be coming along on our honeymoon."

She had a sudden urge to slap him, for his stubborn, bullish refusal to understand. "I'll try to say this tactfully: I honestly think it would be a very bad way to start out our marriage."

"Are you saying I have to choose between my son and you?"

"Ethan, the two of you fight all the time! And you've never seemed to care about getting on better with him, not until this incident. I just think it's so damn unfair to me!"

Damn it, I did care, but I just couldn't talk about it to you.
He couldn't say it before and couldn't now. So he stonewalled and stood there with his hands on his hips and his jaw clenched.

She turned her back to him, unzipped her jeans and slid them down her hips. Then she tugged her sweater over her head. Ethan was acutely aware of every curve of her back, the sharp angle of her shoulder blades, the ripple of her muscles as she wriggled out of the tightly knit clothing. Her thick dark hair caught in the sweater and he watched her struggle, momentarily trapped. Ethan approached and slipped a hand around her waist and up to her breast, and the struggling ceased. He could feel the tension that ran through her into him. She stood frozen, waiting, while he unfastened her bra, letting it hang from her shoulders. He touched his lips to the back of her neck and felt her shudder. With his eyes closed he cupped her breasts in his hands; he explored the delicate details of her body with his fingertips; he listened to her breath and the little whimpering sounds she made. And he smelled her, the feminine odor of her sweat mixed with a lingering trace of perfume. He moved closer and pressed her against the wall.

Moments later when she cried out his name he barely heard her; her voice seemed far away, remote, distanced from that dark, mysterious thing that gripped him so steadfastly.

He didn't bring up the subject of Jeremy's moving in again. He didn't really need to. Jeremy wrote him a stinging letter saying he didn't want to spend Christmas with them this year, and Ethan's hopes of growing closer to his son came tumbling down. The next Sunday, instead of rising and whipping up his traditional breakfast of scrambled eggs with sausage and homemade hash browns, Ethan quietly got dressed while Katie Anne was still sleeping and drove twenty-eight miles to Council Grove to attend mass. Annette Zeldin was there, as he had anticipated. When he walked in and kneeled behind her and her daughter and poked her in the back, she turned, and when she saw him she broke into a grin.

"Ah, my prayers are working."

"Don't tell me I'm in your prayers."

"Of course you are."

They didn't speak to each other throughout mass, except when Ethan whispered a comment about the soloist's resemblance to Kermit the Frog, which made Eliana giggle. Annette threw him a warning glance and he was quiet after that, but Annette was acutely aware of his presence.

What he had not anticipated was Katie Anne's reaction to this new habit of his.

"You're not goin' all religious on me, are you?" she said from the shower the next day. Ethan was shaving at the time and the question caught him at an awkward moment, while he was looking closely at his reflection in the mirror. It made him take the question a little more seriously than he might have had he been, say, making breakfast or cleaning his boots. He paused, inspecting his cheek for bristles.

"I mean, you're not gonna make me become Catholic or anything like that, are you?"

"'Course not," he mumbled. "But you're welcome to come with me."

There was a loud thud when she dropped the bar of soap, then a litany of curses as she chased it around the tub with her foot. "I take it you're not interested," he said.

"What?"

"Nothing."

* * *

Nonetheless, when she saw he intended to make a regular habit out of what she had thought was merely a seasonal twinge of conscience, she began to complain in earnest. Their Sunday mornings were now disrupted by Ethan who got up early; by Ethan who wasn't there to make Sunday-morning love; by Ethan who made his ritual breakfast closer to noon, by which time she wasn't hungry, having already eaten while he was out.

But for Ethan it was worth it. Dealing with Katie Anne's grumbling was a small price to pay for the inexpressible comfort he experienced every week sitting with Annette, Eliana between them, on a pew near the back of the little church in Council Grove. There was something undeniably familial about it, and at times he found himself wishing Jeremy were with them. Ethan, who generally noticed children only if they were behaving badly, found himself a victim, like many others before him, of Eliana's buoyant enthusiasm. She invariably drew him into a conversation about horses, and her face took on an ethereal quality, as though gravity were turned on end and some great joyous power were being exerted on her, charging her every look and gesture, lighting her eyes and tugging at her mouth in an all-out determined effort to lift her up.