She heard the front door open. Eric must have been concerned about her. He was early. When he walked into the kitchen Senior stood up. “Who is this?” her father asked.
“Dad, this is Eric Gentry.”
Senior put out his hand. “Dr. Carrington,” he said.
“First names, Dad,” she insisted.
“Paxton Carrington,” he corrected. “How do you do?”
“Pleasure, sir,” Eric said.
“I brewed coffee, Eric.” Cell phone in her hand, Laine said, “Would you like to visit with my father for a minute? I need to be excused, but I won’t be long.”
Eric gave her a half smile and knowing look. He didn’t have to be a detective to figure this out—she had a death grip on her phone. Then he moved toward the coffeepot. “Take your time. We’ll be fine.”
Laine bolted for the stairs and closed herself into her bedroom. She hit the speed dial for Pax and for once he actually answered. “He’s here!” she blurted. “What the hell is Senior doing here?”
Pax wasn’t just surprised. He actually stuttered a little. “Huh? What? What are you talking about?”
“Senior is here! My doorbell rang, I opened the door and there he stood, filling up the frame with his confidence and stubbornness! You couldn’t warn me?”
“Laine, you can’t think I knew and didn’t call you! I thought he was in town. I talked to him last week. In fact, he was supposed to go to San Francisco for a conference—he was a presenter. He was a no-show and they were looking for him. He said he changed his mind about going, said he notified them and it was their screwup, but he never said a thing about Oregon.”
“He changed his mind and didn’t tell you? He planned a trip to Thunder Point without telling anyone? That isn’t like him. Did you talk to Mrs. Mulligrew like I suggested?”
“She said she hadn’t noticed anything other than him being preoccupied sometimes. If he’s home he stays in his office, but he’s not usually home when she’s there. He kept lots of drugs, mostly samples, in his office, but mostly for use in orthopedics. Sometimes he forgot to leave her a check, but if she reminded him or left him a note, it was there the next time. What’s he doing there?”
“He said he wants to put our problems to rest. But his next sentence was insulting! ‘You know some people are sensitive and some are just plain touchy’!” she said, mimicking him. “No wonder I want to smack him upside the head.”
“How long is he staying?” Pax asked.
“He’s not staying here! No way! He wasn’t invited. He must have a rental car, though I didn’t look outside. There’s a motel in town, far beneath his standards I’m sure, but he’s not staying here! He hasn’t done anything to put this situation to rest!”
“Oh, man,” Pax groaned. “I’m so glad I’m not there....”
“What am I supposed to do with him? I don’t want yet another big fight with him. I’m just not that person right now! I want peace! I’ve earned it.”
“Well, can you leave town?” Pax asked.
“What?”
“I don’t know, Laine. Tell him his timing was bad and you were just headed to Switzerland for a month at a spa and you’ll be in touch?”
“You’re funny. What would Genevieve do?”
“Hmm. She’d give him a cup of tea, listen to him without responding or find a benign topic, offer him food and nod politely. Escape to her mother’s or sister’s whenever she could, vent to them and take long baths until he left and then complain to me for weeks afterward about what an impossible load he is. She wouldn’t engage him. I don’t engage him. It’s like rams locking horns.”
“I can do that,” Laine said. “Yeah, I can do that. Maybe. But he has to go to a motel.”
Pax laughed at her. “You can’t do that. You’re too much like him. You like being right and you have to point it out to him when he insults you, which only causes him to talk down to you again. I mean, you are right, but you like it too much. You can’t not hear him, you can’t let it go when he offends you, you can’t go to a Zen place....”
“All right, all right...but I’m good at long baths.... I’d better get downstairs. I left him with Eric....”
“I can’t wait to meet this guy.”
“You might be meeting him soon, when you come out here to get your father!”
“Call me when he leaves tonight. If you let him live.”
When she got to the bottom of the stairs she heard laughter. Her father was laughing and talking. Eric was laughing with him.
“I guess you two found something to talk about?” she ventured.
“This fella here has worked on Packards. We had a ’41 Packard station wagon. You know the kind, with the wood paneling. We had one when I was a kid—it was red. My parents would load us into it and take us to the lake in New York in summer. That car was a beauty. Business was so good my dad got himself a Packard coupe convertible, a ’49—it was a slick shiny brown. A little cold inside in Boston winters but he didn’t care. He gave my mom the station wagon for the kids and he owned that convertible. What a car. What a car. I loved that convertible.”
Eric gave her a reassuring smile. Why can’t I do that? she asked herself. Why can’t I just let his snide comments go and talk about classic Packards? “How old were you?” she asked her dad. Trying. She was trying.“Oh, nine or ten or something. It was a big deal in my neighborhood, let me tell you. All the kids wanted a ride in it. My oldest brother borrowed it for a dance and dinged it up.” He laughed, shaking his head. “I never heard a bigger uproar in my house. Back then it took weeks to fix something like that.”
“Now we can do it in an afternoon if we have the right parts. Sometimes we need a second afternoon for paint unless it’s chrome,” Eric said. “You hungry, Paxton?” he asked.
Senior leaned back and rubbed his belly. “I could eat. Sorry, son, I missed the name....”
“Eric, sir. Why don’t I take you and Laine to dinner. There’s a nice little seafood place at the marina.”
“Son, I’m from Boston. I hope you don’t intend to try to impress me with seafood.”
“No, sir. I’m going to wow you with the company.”
Paxton laughed pleasantly. “Good for you! Good for you!”
“Give me a few minutes to change clothes and then we’ll go.”
“Sure. Absolutely. Don’t want to go out to dinner in your mechanic’s clothes....”
Laine frowned but Eric touched her arm gently and she relaxed.
“Janice, where did you find that delightful young man who knows all about classic cars?”
“Laine, Dad,” she corrected.
“Hmm?”
“You called me Janice.”
“Hmm? Did I? You do look so much like your mother sometimes. So where are we going to dinner?”
She hesitated for a moment, then said, “A seafood restaurant at the marina. It’s not real fancy but the nicest one in town and the food is wonderful.”
“Perfect,” he said. “That young man, he’s a friend of yours?”
Again she was speechless. “I live with him,” she said patiently. “Eric is my boyfriend. We’ve lived together for almost three months.”
“He seems a perfectly nice young man. Does he remind you of Pax at all?”
She shook her head. “Not at all,” she said. But she thought Eric was like Pax. Patient. Definitely not touchy. Loving and kind, yet very strong. And it seemed Eric, like Pax, could accept Senior as he was and find a way to get along with him. Maybe she’d leave Eric in charge and she could go to the motel!
* * *
Laine would long remember this particular dinner at Cliffhanger’s as one of the most pivotal evenings of her life. And not in a good way.
Senior kept talking about old cars, ones he idolized as a child and status cars like his first Mercedes. While he and Eric had a beer, Senior talked on and on about the route to the lake in New York, the price of milk and eggs, war rationing and gas coupons.
“My dad was a surgeon,” Senior said, “and he got more coupons so he could get back and forth to the hospitals whenever necessary, but between him and my mother, there was always a way to get to the lake. He didn’t serve in the Army because he was slightly disabled—one leg just a little shorter than the other from a childhood accident. He had a slight limp but it never slowed him down. He had more energy than ten men put together. I don’t remember him ever having a sick day in his life.”
Eric asked questions about rationing, Senior explained about “need certificates.” Everyone had to demonstrate a need for major items before they could be purchased. Even typewriters were rationed because the Army needed them for communication. And then he began telling the same story again.
All of this would have happened before Senior was ten years old, but Laine had heard it all before. Except she had heard it from her grandmother, roughly twenty years ago.
When their meals came, Senior started asking about weather conditions and if it was always so cold in Virginia. He called her Janice three times. She corrected him twice and he told her again that she looked so much like her mother. Then he told her he’d tried to call her but Ma Bell was very unreliable.... They hadn’t called AT&T “Ma Bell” for twenty years.
As Laine watched and listened to him, she grew more and more alarmed. Senior seemed to shrink, to grow smaller before her eyes. He became vulnerable and elderly, holding his elbows close to his sides while he ate. The same man who an hour ago filled the foyer with his confidence, size and bluster was becoming frail and needy as she watched. She stared into her bread bowl of clam chowder a lot, trying to keep her eyes from misting. She exchanged a few glances with Eric and it was apparent he knew what she was thinking.
They left the restaurant when it was dark. While Eric drove the car, Senior became anxious and kept asking if it was the right way. When they pulled into the garage Senior said, “Oh? This is it?”
“This is it,” Laine said. “Eric, would you do me a big favor? Would you find clean sheets for the bed in the guest room? And would you take Dad upstairs and let him help you with the linens? I have something to do.”
“Be glad to,” he said.
“And, Dad? Can you give me the keys to your rental car? I’ll get your bag for you.”
“Okay,” he said, his voice rather subdued. That was not her father’s voice but the voice of an old, tired and confused man. He dug in his pocket for the keys and came up empty. “I don’t have them.”
“Do you know where they might be?” she asked, knowing he wouldn’t have an answer.
“On the hook by the back door?”
“Okay,” she said. “Go upstairs with Eric. I’ll find them.” Since there was no hook by the back door, since there was no back door other than the one that led to the garage or the patio doors to the deck, she just went to his rental car, a midsize Ford Taurus. The doors were locked, the keys were lying on the passenger seat, there was no luggage in the backseat and his briefcase was on the floor of the car, passenger side. She went back into the opened garage, got herself a couple of tools from her toolbox and broke into the car in less than twenty seconds. The alarm sounded right away but she slid into the car, grabbed the keys and silenced it.
She popped the trunk in search of luggage, but there was none. Huh? She checked the backseat again. Nothing. She took the briefcase and keys and her tools inside. After storing her tools and lowering the garage door, she took the briefcase into the small study and her desk.