Peter Heller - Celine

Baboo squeezed her hand and said that they would see him in just two months in the city.

And that marked the end of the Period of Tenderness and the Weeks of Wild Roses.

Not from Baboo’s standpoint. She recognized the beginning of a transition that would be very painful for the girls and she was determined not to scar them, or, at the least, to minimize the damage. She was as attentive as ever. She insisted on forays up island to the village for ice-cream cones at Diana’s and comic books at the drugstore; she organized picnics with just the four of them to Simmons Point and to her friend Ty Whitney’s where there was a swimming pool with a diving board and slide, which were objects of endless fascination for the girls. But the sisters were keenly aware of a dark cloud of catastrophe hanging over their displaced family, and they had nothing tangible on which to pin their dread, and they began to act out.

The Lander Grill did serve ribs. So there. Celine was starving. She had a full rack and Pa had a chopped salad that, curiously, was blanketed in well-done burger. The only flora on Celine’s enamel plate was coleslaw out of a can, which is the way she preferred it, but Pete dutifully picked a leaf of iceberg lettuce out of his bowl and garnished her pork, laying it down delicately like a proffered rose. “Geen,” he said.

“I don’t like geen.”

“Well I know.” It was their ritual. She would eat the single leaf last because she loved him.

It was a Sunday night and the grill was hopping. Most of the tables were full, and the mounted speakers played a mix of Mavis Staples and the Dixie Chicks, which was lively if not a little disconcerting. The crowd was burly oil-and-gas men—she could tell because their caps said stuff like McIntyre Drilling or Hansen Well Services —a few young cowboys, anachronistic in their Wranglers and hats; a large contingent of very athletic and outdoorsy-looking young people, men and women; two Native American couples in Goth black; and a single pleasant-looking young man in the far corner, head down, concentrating hard on his double cheeseburger. Celine noticed that his Black Watch flannel shirt was very green in the greens and black in the blacks and creased down the breast—brand new. And that he sported a week’s worth of whiskers but was otherwise clean-cut. She noticed these sorts of things.

She also noticed that the folks laughing the hardest and seeming to have the best time were the drillers. Maybe because they were drinking at twice the rate of anyone else. She noticed, too, that the sporty outdoorsy folks in their very expensive and colorful soft shells and fleece mostly ordered pitchers of beer—the cheapest option—and drank them at a judicious pace. Revealing perhaps a subconscious tallying of ounces-slash-dollars per minute per level of intoxication divided by the steadily decreasing time left in the evening. A couple of the kids were clearly wild and showed some promise, but mostly these young people were very smart and very controlled. There was one woman who was older than the rest, and more beautiful, very lean, her hands dark and weathered, and Celine studied her, the facial structure, the movements. Early fifties would be the age, just right. She felt the old swelling in her heart, but she shook herself—not a chance; just a habit, an old habit, that’s all—and continued scanning the room.

The oil-and-gas men drank longnecks, some accompanied by amber shots—that would be Jack Daniel’s, wouldn’t it?—and they were supremely comfortable in their own skins. They drank what they wanted and didn’t care what it cost. The Native Americans were in one of the far corners, at the dimmest table, and seemed insular and wary. They leaned toward each other when they laughed, as if trying to cover their humor. The single man in the new shirt in the other far corner was hard to read. He was eating with a purpose but not quite relish, and he seemed at the same time to be listening, the way a hunter would listen in a windy forest.

All of this was good information, probably. For context in a new territory if nothing else. One never knew. When Celine was on a case she observed many things closely, it was reflex—gathering everything up in the baleen of her intelligence. It both kept her in practice and sometimes gleaned useful and even crucial information. As for her and Pete, nobody seemed to notice them much, though they were clearly “from away” as Pete would say, and this was also good. One of the things that happens to people as they get older, and especially to women on the other side of middle age, is that people forget to notice. If Celine wanted to be virtually invisible she could be. She was also gorgeous and striking and if she wanted to make an impression she could do that, too. Also useful.

They finished their meals and Celine ordered a scoop of ice cream smothered in chocolate sauce for a nightcap. The warmth of the pub, the rich meal, the hiatus from the long day on the road—they suffused Celine with what these days was a rare fatigue that felt a little like contentment. She came around the table and slid a chair next to her husband. She’d been very patient with him all day.

“Okay, Pete,” she said. “You’ve been ‘arranging’ all day, I can tell. Now tell me the rest.”

Pete let his brown eyes fall gently on his wife. The wonderful thing about having a close and long marriage is that certain responses are as dependable as sunrise. He pursed his lips, which only meant he was covering another inscrutable expression, like maybe the beginnings of a laugh. He’d known this reckoning was coming.

“Well,” he said.

“You need coffee.”

Pete nodded. She managed to grab a waiter who brought two cups, one black, one with milk.

Celine nodded. “I can hear you, Pete. Even in the din. Any time.”

Pete sipped and set the mug on the scarred wood table. “Gabriela’s exile.” He huffed out a breath. “Paul Lamont let his new wife banish his daughter. Just downstairs, but still.”

Pete glanced at her. She tipped her head forward: Go on. Sometimes Pete was a bit slow to rev up.

“The calculus may have been something like this: I need this woman. Without this woman I will drown. She is keeping food in the cupboard, in Gabriela’s kitchen, she makes sure she gets off to school and back, she knows that is the bottom line, the bare minimum. That is the bargain. Without her my daughter may not eat and I may succumb. To oblivion. It was oblivion he was battling. A mortal battle. For him and his beloved daughter. Beloved, yes. May not seem like it at first glance, but if you look closely. Gabriela was his cherished daughter and also the living repository of his wife’s heart. And her doppelgänger in some sense. She looked just like her, you should see the photographs.”

“Well, I would have, if—”

“I know, I know. I’m catching you up now. There’s nothing else.”

“Yes, but—”

“I’m getting to that. He must have known right from the beginning that his bargain with the devil was a mistake. But he had no Plan B. Whenever he could—when Danette was working an afternoon or night shift—he would go downstairs and try to help Gabriela with her homework. He tried. But he was often too drunk. And it wasn’t often enough. When I called her the other day—you were having a fit trying to compress two suitcases into one—she told me that when he came to visit she pushed aside her homework and tried to engage him in a game of canasta. A fairly advanced game for an eight-year-old, my cousins and I played it for hours on rainy summer nights, on Aunt Debbie’s porch on North Haven—”