Chuck Logan - The Big Law

Harmless. A Minnesota Normal.

Through the screen of pine, his eyes swung back and caught the corner of her glance. He smiled self-consciously.

“Can’t make up my mind. Every year I do this. And then somebody else gets the best trees.”

Polite, crisp, she replied, “It’s early. There’s still a good selection.”

He nodded. “Last few years I went with balsams. But now they strike me as cramped and uptight.”

“Scotch pine is a nice tree,” said Caren. “Problem is they drop their needles in three weeks.” Her saw made a pile of damp white dust as she efficiently cut through the base of the tree. Resin dripped in the minty air. A smell like turpen-tine.

Tom took a step closer and cast a sentence calculated to hook a raw nerve. “You seem to know what you want.”

The tree fell over. There was more room between them.

And for the first time she had a clear view of his face, and Tom saw she recognized him.

For a spilt second her eyes shot pain. Tom was encour aged, thankful that Christmas was a vulnerable time for troubled people.

But she recovered smoothly. “Now what?” she mused in a calm resigned voice. “Tom James, isn’t it?” She glanced around. “Are there more of you?”

“Just me.” He took off his gloves, pulled out his wallet and handed her his card. As she took it he saw that she had skinned her knuckle cutting down the tree. A bluish patch of torn skin the size of a dime stood out on her cold-chafed right hand. Blood started to well up. She ignored it, and a red trickle curled between her fingers and crept down her palm.

She studied him. “You’re not interested in house renova-tions today, are you?”

“I’m sorry to be asking you this, Mrs. Angland, but is the FBI investigating your husband?”

“Fishing, Mr. James?” She raised an eyebrow.

“Tom. And the FBI’s doing the fishing, wouldn’t you say?”

“I didn’t say.”

“So you’re not denying it?”

She sighed: “Have you considered getting a real job?” She bent to get a grip on her tree. Tom stepped forward.

“Let me help you,” he offered, reaching. They tugged at the branches, and he lurched. His shoe shot sideways on a patch of ice beneath the pine needles and he slipped. She thrust out both hands and gripped him above the elbows and steadied him.

“Careful, Tom,” she said tartly.

He nodded. “Look, I don’t like this any more than you do.” He went in his pocket, took out a handkerchief and dabbed at the blood.

The small succor of concern seemed to affect her all out of proportion. “I didn’t mean to be rude,” she said, her eyes darting. For a second Tom thought he saw an opening. A centipede of adrenaline scurried up his spine.

He glanced around. People and kids shuffled in and out of the trees. No one looked threatening. The Christmas trees stirred. The wind whipped up. For the first time in a long time he noticed the loud silence of the racing winter sky and was thrilled.

A drop of blood seeped between her fingers below the handkerchief and dotted the coarse green feathers of pine boughs at her feet.

Her contradictory energy struck him. So competent and hardy, so heedless. No hat. Bare-handed. But little stabs of dread.

Ten years ago he would have desired her. Ten years ago he thought anything would have been possible. Now, he quietly resented her. There had always been a net beneath her. She’d never known what it was like to be a paycheck away from disaster. She had never had to work for idiots.

She was attractive. She was connected. She was fair game in open season.

And she was good, and she was hiding something.

But his face remained full of patient, plodding sympathy and understanding. She kicked the Christmas tree, laughed, looked up at the clouds. But she kept her thoughts to herself.

Tom’s hands hovered, trying to time her mood swing and step in. Then she withdrew again. Businesslike, she took hold of her tree and dragged it toward the parking lot.

Tom called after her. “You can reach me anytime. All the numbers are on the card. Work, home, pager…”

She ignored him and plodded on, exertion showing in a flame of white breath.

Tom, shivering with cold and excitement, noticed the left sleeve of his jacket and removed his glove to touch a dot of her freezing blood.

Caren’s world was as shrill as the bottom of a pie tin. Road, traffic, sky-the colors ran together like water over metal.

She had been warned. Don’t go abruptly off the medication. Last night, numb after watching the news, she’d found herself staring at a documentary on the Discovery Channel about African lions hunting. Lionesses, really. She had watched them cull an impaired zebra from the herd and drag it down. She’d thought, aha-that striped pony quit taking her meds.

Therefore vulnerable. And the guilt made you slow. But it was being bad that made you stick out from the herd so the lion noticed you. Like a smell.

Tom James, the reporter, was an unlikely lion, but he’d been hunting and he’d noticed something . Keith had started to stink, and the jackals were gathering out there. She hadn’t expected them so soon.

She wasn’t ready. Talking to him at Hansen’s, Caren had thought: This is what a drunk feels like, trying to act sober, attempting to walk a straight line.

The drive home exhausted her.

Keith’s car was skewed, blocking the garage. She braked so hard she stalled the Blazer. Her breathing problems, which her doctor called anxiety attacks, but she knew to be mortal fear, now formed a hard crust around her throat and chest. The pressure suggested apt images from old movies; gangsters from Chicago used to take you for a boat ride. Stick your feet in a washtub and mix it full of cement. Tell jokes while it hardened and then they’d heave you overboard.

Just grin it down. Your normal everyday, “Hi, honey, I’m home, how was your day?” smile. Just download a smile from the old smile server.

She forced herself out of the truck. The tree had to be dealt with. A habit of normalcy she refused to part with. As she untied the tree from the top of the Blazer she saw Keith’s shadow shimmer in the living room window. Her usually firm grasp went butterfingers. The eight-foot pine rolled to the cobbles. She left it where it fell. Last year at this time lights were strung on the eaves, around the windows.

Keith, smiling, had tossed strings of purple lights in the oaks. They’d walked on the road in the crunching snow and looked back and seen the trees float under the stars like Pi-cassos dashed out with a child’s sparkler.

This year there were no lights. The tree lay abandoned near the freeze-burned lawn, and it looked like the week after Christmas. The edges of Caren’s lips curved down, but she had to force a smile.

It turned out she didn’t because, when she entered the house, she heard Keith’s footsteps going down the stairs to the basement, then she heard the pop of the TV come on.

She spied a beer bottle cap and the torn carton of a microwave burrito dinner on the counter. The microwave door was ajar.

She scooped the mess and deposited it in the trash. Carefully, she closed the microwave. Touched up with a damp dishcloth. Clean up. Make nice. Hide his empty whiskey bottles in the recycling bin.

Denial and avoidance. Passive aggressive. Words you volleyed in counseling. Like throwing Ping-Pong balls against those hungry lions.

They wore the house like a Victorian straitjacket and always kept at least one room between them. On the inside, all the snaps and buckles were accurate. This was the second big house she had remodeled. She ran her hand along the purple wallpaper she’d chosen for the hallway, just to see if Keith would notice the morbid pattern.