Jerry’s car wasn’t parked at the duplex when I turned onto Secret View Lane. I felt a fresh thunder of panic when I pulled into the double driveway between the two units.
What if no job and a financial crunch forced me out of my home? I loved my little place. I loved my green grass and daisy flower beds. I loved my patio out behind the house and the huge cedars and forsythia and more daisies along the back line, and the squirrels that stole seed from my bird feeder. I loved my cozy kitchen with the sunny yellow curtains I’d made myself.
Maybe it wasn’t much compared to the big house I’d had to give up after Richard pulled his wife-switcheroo act. No expansive lawn sweeping down to the tidewaters rushing through Hornsby Inlet, no expensive powerboat tied to a picturesque dock, no view of the shining waters of Vigland Bay in one direction and distant Mount Rainier shimmering in the other.
My only view here, in fact, was of the house across the street and the forested hillside above it. A house where, as usual, old Tom Bolton was parked in a lawn chair on his deck, keeping watch on the neighbors. I couldn’t see his binoculars at the moment, but I knew they were there. Once I’d seen him jot something in a little notebook when Moose, the Sheersons’ spotted dalmatian, was running down the street, and later the Sheersons had a stern visit from Animal Control.
But in spite of meddlesome old Tom, the potholes in the street, and the critters that kept mounding up piles of raw dirt on my lawn, I loved this quiet lane and my little duplex. But I repeat myself.
Inside, I changed to denim shorts, a pink shell top, and flip-flops. The late spring day was unusually warm, though I wasn’t in a mood to appreciate blue skies and sunshine.
I made lemonade while waiting for Jerry. From fresh lemons, of course. Jerry doesn’t like the frozen kind. I expected him any minute, but a half hour went by. An hour. Two.
I kept peering out the window, watching for him. Joella got home from work and waved as she struggled out of her old Subaru, looking tired after being on her feet all day.
Where could Jerry be? He runs a Web site–design business in addition to his position in the finance department at F&N—but if work was detaining him, he could have called. I bounced between annoyance and worry.
Finally, almost three hours after I’d gotten home, I heard his Trans Am pull into the driveway. He didn’t look the way I felt, down and discouraged, as he slid out of the car and headed for the front door. In fact, he looked quite jaunty. His combination of jeans and black T-shirt molded his muscles, and he looked sophisticated and a bit dangerous. A combination that can tingle even an almost-sixty heart—even though, now that I saw he was okay, I was exasperated with him for not calling. I let him ring the bell before I opened the door.
“Hi, babe. Hey, you’re looking good!” He grabbed my upper arms and gave me a quick kiss.
Jerry Norton is the guy I’ve been dating for almost four months now. Granddaughter Rachel shudders at the term. No one dates anymore, she says. But it still works for me. Anyway, Jerry is my first maybe-serious relationship in a long time. No spoken commitment here, but neither of us was dating anyone else. We like hiking together, and he has a little sailboat he keeps at a friend’s dock. We take it out on the bay or inlet, sometimes out into the rougher waters of Puget Sound. He cooks up a mean slab of salmon on my barbecue, he loves my fried chicken, and we both enjoy finding new places to eat out. He’s hardworking, ambitious, fun, and good-looking, with curly, dark hair and a smile and lean body that look especially good braced against the mast of the sailboat. I have that photo on the nightstand in my bedroom.
With the proper nudge, I think I could be in love with Jerry. Maybe I am anyway, but unwilling to admit it to myself just yet. Maybe just a wariness that comes with this time of life, combined with a bad marriage experience in my past. Plus the fact that Jerry is nine years and ten months younger than I am, and I’ve never been quite sure what he sees in me. Joella, bless her heart, says I sell myself short.
Now I said, “I thought you were coming right over.”
“Sorry. I got tied up on some e-mail stuff.”
“Sending out résumés already?”
He looked blank for a moment; then his expression sobered, as if the question reminded him this was a day of gloom. “Well, uh, like I said, we need to talk.”
“Lemonade?”
“Sure.”
I went on through to the kitchen, and he perched on one of the tall stools at the counter separating kitchen and dining room. I poured a glass of lemonade for him. The termination letter with the F&N letterhead lay on the counter. He didn’t pick it up, but he apparently knew what it said.
“Tough break. You’ve been with F&N a long time.”
“I guess everyone got the same letter.” I knew because in my department we’d compared. Only my friend Letty Bishop was being kept on for the final days, after the department supervisor turned down the job. “You too?”
“Well, uh, no.”
“No?”
“They’ve offered me a transfer to the San Diego office. Findley is going, and they’ve offered me a position as his assistant. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”
“A transfer?” What I really felt was a big flood of dismay, like the tide surging in over the mud flats of Vigland Bay, but I squelched my reaction. “Jerry, that’s wonderful! You must be one of a very select few.”
“Findley specifically asked for me, which is probably what did it.”
“Are you taking the transfer?”
“I’m not wild about working with ol’ Freaky Findley, that’s for sure. He’s lazy and self-important and . . . well, you know. But I don’t see how I can turn it down. It’s a promotion, actually, with more money. So it’s really an awesome opportunity.”
“Awesome,” I echoed. I wanted to feel glad for him. And one nice part of me did feel glad. A transfer and a promotion. The problem was that the self-centered what-about-me? question loomed like a skyscraper on a desert island. I cast around for nice things to say, but all I came up with was a lame, “The weather should be great down there.”
“Right. I’ve never been fond of western Washington’s rain.”
My world is falling apart, and we’re discussing the climate.
“How soon will you go?”
“Probably within the next couple weeks. I’ll be going down ahead of Findley to get things set up.”
I felt a peculiar hollowness inside. A strangely large hollow, which made me wonder if I wasn’t in love with him.
“But it makes for a problem, of course,” he added.
“The condo?”
Jerry’s condo was in one of the newer complexes in town, and he’d owned it less than a year. It had what the real estate people called a “forever view” out over Vigland Bay and Hornsby Inlet. He could even see the jagged Olympic Mountains to the north.
“No, not the condo. All the F&N people out of work may depress local prices for a while, but I can hang on a few months before putting the condo on the market if I have to.” He reached across the counter and pulled me around the end of it. “The problem isn’t the condo. The problem is us. ”
I nodded as I stood within the circle of his arms and echoed the word. “Us.”
“The thing is, I don’t think it’s practical to carry on a long-distance relationship, do you?”
I caught my breath. We’d talked around marriage in a generic way, but we’d never really discussed it on a you-and-me basis. Jerry had been married when he came to F&N five years ago, but they’d divorced, and his ex had taken the two kids and moved back east somewhere. I had the impression he wasn’t totally disillusioned with marriage, but wary, which was about how I felt. Was now the time to let the past go and look at a future together?
Sure, I’d had some doubts about Jerry. Sometimes I had the feeling there were parts of his life he wasn’t sharing with me. And sometimes that almost ten-year difference in our ages loomed higher than the Olympic Mountains. But did anyone, with our unhappy past experiences, go into marriage 100 percent sure?
“Yes,” I agreed with a catch in my voice at the looming possibilities. “Long-distance relationships can be a problem. How do you think we should handle it?”
Quick ceremony before he left for San Diego? Or a settling-in time for him there, and then a trip to a wedding chapel in Reno or Vegas? Or maybe even a little church somewhere? Yes, a church. I’d like that.
“I’m thinking you’ll agree that making a clean break would be best for both of us.”
A jaw can drop. It really can. “What? ”
“The thing is, I’ve been in contact on the Internet with a woman in the San Diego area for a while. In fact, she’s looking for a nice apartment for me down there right now. She’s a fitness instructor at a health club, and she loves sailing and surfing. And we just discovered we’re both interested in skydiving too. It seems like we really click.”
I was stunned. I’m thinking about the possibility of closing the long-distance gap between us with a wedding ring, and he’s thinking skydiving with a fitness instructor. No doubt with thighs of steel.
But in case I was jumping to some unwarranted conclusion here, I backtracked and put it as a blunt question. “So what you’re saying is, you and me, we’re over?”
“I’m saying we’ve had great times together, Andi. Lots of fun. But I’m going to be down in San Diego, and you’re going to be here. And I think we’ve both always recognized that our relationship has . . . certain limitations, and we both need to widen our horizons and pursue new interests.”
“But we can still be friends.”
He missed the sarcasm in that old line, because his face lit up in a relieved beam. “Exactly. Friends! I knew you’d under-stand. You’re such a good sport, Andi. The best.”
I didn’t feel like a good sport. I didn’t even want to be a good sport. What I wanted was to dump the glass of lemonade over Jerry’s head.
“What about your sailboat?” It was a dumb, irrelevant question, but it was all I could think of to fill space while I tried to keep my hand off that glass.
“I’ll sell it before I leave. I’ll get a bigger and better one down there. Hey, maybe you’d like to buy it? I can give you a deal on it.”
“I . . . I don’t think so. Thanks anyway.”
“If you hear of anyone who might be interested, let me know. We’ve had fun times in it, haven’t we? You’ve turned out to be very good sailor.” He leaned forward to give me an affectionate kiss on the nose. A good-sport kiss.
I backed out of his arms. Joella was right. The man had the sensitivity of a toadstool. Breaking up with me and telling me how wonderful this new woman was, trying to sell me his old sailboat. And then kissing me on the nose.
He kept on talking, telling me enthusiastically about how the company was going to pay his moving expenses, but I wasn’t really listening. I was standing there feeling like the time I’d been dumped overboard from his sailboat. In over my head and floundering in deep water.
Downsized.
Dumped.
Depressed.
And the week was only half over. What next?
As if in ominous answer to my unspoken question, the doorbell rang. Given the way things were going, it could be anyone. IRS agent, terrorist, serial killer . . .