Julia Spencer-Fleming - All Mortal Flesh

“Ah.” No smile now. “That’s the problem, isn’t it.”

He trudged up the steps. “I brought dinner.”

“You didn’t have to do that. I overcompensated and carried a ton of food up here with me.” She opened the door for him. “Trust me, we could be snowed in until spring and we wouldn’t run out.”

He paused in the doorway. Looked down at her. “And isn’t that a tempting thought?”

He could see her cheeks flush before she turned away. She pushed him into the cabin. “C’mon, don’t let all the heat out the door.”

He let her relieve him of the groceries as he took off his boots and parka. “This is nice,” he said. The cabin was one big room, with an assemblage of living room furniture to his left and a dining table to his right. A glowing wood-stove set on a platform of riverstones divided the front of the cabin from the kitchen. Russ followed the line of its broad stone chimney to where it vanished through the roof. “What’s upstairs in the loft?” he asked.

“The bedroom,” Clare said absently, pulling a box of soba noodles and a jar of natural peanut butter from one of the bags. “What were you thinking of?”

What was I thinking of? Bedrooms. Firelight. Skin. Teeth.

“Pad Thai?” she went on, lifting a clove of garlic.

“Oh,” he said. “Yeah. Pad Thai.” He shook himself like a dog emerging from a river. “Mom’s still on the high-protein, low-carbs diet. I need a pasta fix some bad.” He went around the woodstove, shucking his sweater over his head as he did so. There were a pair of spindle chairs pulled up to a small kitchen table, hard against the back of the chimney. He tossed it over the back of one and rolled his sleeves up.

“How is it going? Staying with your mom?”

He grabbed the tray of chicken breasts and ripped off the cling wrap. “It’s okay, I guess. It helps that she got that house after Janet and I had flown the nest. If I were back in the same room I had in high school, I think I’d feel like even more of a failure than I do now. As it is, it’s more like being a houseguest than like moving back home.”

Her hands stilled over the peppers. “Oh, God, Russ. I’m so sorry.”

He wiped his hands on a dishrag and took hold of her shoulders. “Listen. I know we have to talk. When you asked me up here, I knew it wasn’t a date or an invitation to a seduction. But, dammit, before we get to the part where we tear our guts out, I’d like to enjoy a nice meal with you. How many times have we ever had dinner together?”

“Three,” she said.

“Okay.” He shook her gently. “Can we put all that other stuff aside for an hour or two? Can we just put on the radio and talk about our jobs and the weather and the idiots in Washington like a real couple would do?”

She nodded. Slowly, she smiled. God, he loved seeing her smile. “So,” she said. “How ’bout them Patriots?”

She dug up candles in the pantry. Their light reflected in the glass-front bookcase behind the dining table. “I’m worried about Kevin,” he was saying. “He has the potential to be a good officer, but he’s still awfully immature. He needs to broaden his experience. I think the farthest away from Millers Kill he’s ever been was the senior class trip to New York.”

She speared a bite of sauce-soaked chicken. “Is there any way you could get him into a more urban police department for six months? Like a temporary detached duty?”

“Yeah. Except then I’d lose him. You can’t keep ’em down on the farm-”

“Once they’ve seen Paree.”

He poured himself another glass of cranberry juice. “As it is, I give Mark Durkee another year or two, tops, before he jumps ship. The talented ones, the ones with brains and energy, they all go off to bigger and better things. The ones who stay are the ones like Noble, who’d be dogmeat in a larger unit, or like me and Lyle, too old to change anymore.”

She snorted. “Yep, that’s you. Doddering off to the Infirmary. Don’t forget to give my office a call. We’ll put you on the visitation list.”

“Watch it, youngster. We’ll see what you say a few years from now, when your knees have given up the ghost.”

“Given it up for the Holy Ghost, more like.” She took a sip of her wine. “I think you may be wrong about Mark Durkee, though. His wife has family here, doesn’t she?”

“Bains. There are dozens of ’em between here and Cossayuharie.”

“And they’ve got a kindergartner, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Hard to just up and abandon grandparents and school and all.” Ignoring her manners, she propped an elbow on the table. “It’s Mark you should get a TDD for. He’s got something to come back to.”

“And Kevin?”

She picked up her wineglass again and looked at him over the rim. “He needs to broaden his experience, all right. I suspect that there’s nothing wrong with Kevin Flynn that getting laid wouldn’t cure.”

He nearly choked on his noodles laughing.

They washed the dishes together.

“My parents used to do this when I was a little girl,” Clare said, scrubbing at a sticky spot where the peanut sauce had scorched on. “Mama would wash and Daddy would dry.”

“That’s the natural order of things,” Russ said, putting a final gloss on a plate before replacing it in the cupboard. “Women wash. Men dry.” He picked a glass out of the drainer. He hadn’t done this in years. He and Linda ate a lot of prepared meals, or he would throw something together out of cans if he got home too late or she was working on an order. The dishes would go in the dishwasher, sometimes hours apart. “ ’Tain’t natural the other way round.”

“And why, pray tell, is that?”

“Women have a mystical affinity to water. It’s a tidal thing, you know, the pull of the moon.”

“Uh-huh. And men?”

“Oh, men just like the repetitive motion of rubbing something up and down.”

Fortunately, his glasses protected his eyes when she sprayed water in his face.

They got down to business in the chairs in front of the woodstove. She had blown out the candles and turned off the lights before they sat down. “Sometimes, it’s easier to talk in the dark,” she said.

Of course, it wasn’t dark. They were lit by the leaping red-orange of the fire. But she was right. There was something about the heat of the woodstove, and the shadows dancing off in the corners of the cabin, that unloosened the constraints of the soul. He wondered if there might not be something to the idea of racial memory, if a thousand generations of humans sitting before a fire were making him feel this way: open, balanced, neither dreading nor expecting what was to come. He looked into the face of the woman sitting opposite him.

Or maybe it was Clare.

“What does your marriage counselor say?” she asked.

“What everybody else does. That I need to make up my mind. Except she says ‘I need to discern my inner goals and bring them into congruence with my stated intentions.’ ” He leaned forward, elbows on knees. “What does your spiritual advisor say? Deacon Wigglesworth?”

“Aberforth. Willard Aberforth. He hasn’t been advising me so much as listening to me blather on. It helps to unload some of the garbage that’s been accumulating in my heart.”

“Garbage?”

She smiled humorlessly. “You think I’m so all-forbearing and even-tempered about this. You have no idea. How many times I’ve caught myself thinking, Well, maybe his wife will drop dead of a heart attack or Maybe her plane will go down on the next buying trip.”

He winced.

“I know. It’s awful stuff, and I hate myself for it. The times I literally sit on my hands to keep from calling you and inviting you over to my house and into my bed. The nasty, gut-churning jealousy when I think of the two of you doing the ordinary, stupid things couples get to do. Eating together every night. Watching a video.” Her voice dropped. “Sleeping together. God, when you two went off for the Christmas holidays, I was a wreck. A total wreck. That’s when I knew I had to take this time. I knew I needed to be alone to think and pray.”