After dinner Marquez opened the heavy iron damper in the old stone fireplace and built a fire, an old defense for him. Wind gusted hard over the mountain, rattling the windows, and it took a while to get the fire to draw. The quiet coming off of Katherine was like a weight dragged around. The kindling caught and then small oak branches he’d been drying for a couple of years. He pulled a chair up close to the fire.
“I’m thinking of starting to serve tea at the coffee bars,” she said, and he thought of Amy Stevens. “It may be too late since everyone knows them as coffee bars, but I’m playing with changing the store identity.”
She’d made another tea to try a different flavor and offered him a cup. He adjusted a log, and Katherine launched into it.
“She was more interested in shopping in New York than looking at schools.”
“I already got that part.”
“But you didn’t get it with attitude.”
Marquez adjusted the fire again, liked the pungency of the oak. He got up and found the bottle of a Cuban rum he’d been given last spring. He loved the taste and smell of the rum and poured an inch. The windows rattled in the wind. Another storm was forecast to hit a few days from now. If it stayed on track across the Pacific it would drop several inches of rain and maybe a couple feet of snow. The rivers would swell, and the runoff would churn the bottom. Sturgeon loved the brown muddy water.
Katherine’s cool fingers touched his right hand. She slid her chair over as Maria walked down the hallway.
“Dad, can I ask you something in my room? Mom, I’m going to bed.”
Marquez set the rum down gently on the hearth. He walked down to the room he’d added on and still hadn’t finished. It had been a year. The walls were sheetrocked and painted, but the trim work wasn’t complete, and he wasn’t a carpenter.
“What’s the question?” he asked.
“Is my bathroom door ever going to work?”
He’d hung the door himself after watching a rerun episode of This Old House on a cable channel. The door latch didn’t meet properly. He knew he was going to have to remove the casing and rehang the door, and he hadn’t gotten to it.
“I talked to Mom on the way home, and she’s afraid it’s going to offend you if we hire a carpenter to finish the room.”
Offend was not a word Maria would have used a year ago. Marquez tried the doorknob out of habit. It still didn’t work.
“Will it offend you?”
“I’d still like to fix it for you.”
“Dad, it’s not happening, and Mom has plenty of money.” She quickly added, “I don’t mean it like that.”
“Then don’t say it that way. Tell you what, if I don’t get it fixed in the next two weeks we’ll hire a carpenter.”
“The door swings open when I’m using the bathroom.”
They’d had this conversation a few times. “Shut your bedroom door when you use the bathroom.”
He thought of Raburn talking about the room he and his brother had rented in Isleton after they’d left home and moved to the delta. They were younger than Maria was now. Raburn had said the bathroom was downstairs and they didn’t need a window because the wall was open to the back of the lot. The shower was a garden hose with a nozzle set on the spray function and held pinned in place by two nails. He and Isaac had gotten to be great fishermen just so they could eat. It was why Isaac wouldn’t eat any fish anymore, or so Raburn said, and the more Marquez turned in his head the way Raburn talked about his brother, the more likely it seemed that Isaac knew absolutely everything going on.
Now as he got ready to leave her room, Maria said, “It’s not my fault we came home early. We got in a fight, and Mom said there was no reason to stay. I made her sad. I’m a big disappointment to her. She wishes she had a different daughter.”
That was a mix of childish and true and a way of getting it out.
“What were the schools you liked?”
“The University of Virginia and Boston College, but I won’t get in to either.”
“You won’t?”
She explained as though it was obvious. It was all demographics, and she had nothing going for her. She hadn’t excelled at a sport, didn’t have any extra-currics. She’d done some community service but not enough. She didn’t have legacy anywhere. You just about had to have better than a 4.0 GPA, and she didn’t have that. You needed top SAT scores, and she’d taken them twice and said her combined total still sucked.
“What’s your combined total again?” he asked.
“1305.”
He’d graduated from high school, gone to a state college for two years, then two in the National Guard and back to college. He’d met and married Julie, and they’d planned to travel the world for a year, finding work wherever they could. When Julie was murdered in Africa everything changed.
“I think what you’ve done is pretty amazing.” She’d turned her grades around completely in the past two years. Kath had driven her to better herself, and the effort had taken root, but only because she had it in her. “You’re too hard on yourself sometimes.”
“Mom pretty much thinks I’m wasting my life.”
“I’ve never heard her say anything like that. If you want to take a year off and work and earn money for college, go for it. But whether you go next year or the year after, you should get a degree and you should find something you really care about to learn.”
“I know I’m just the ungrateful kid, and I should listen to both of you, and I don’t know anything about the real world.”
“It’s got to be a conversation, Maria, not an argument, not a posit ion statement, and I don’t really need you to tell me how I think. I’ve got a pretty good idea already.” He repeated it. “You and your mom need to try to have a different conversation. You need to give each other a chance.”
“Tell that to her.”
Then he was out in front of the fire again with Katherine. He took a sip of rum.
“What did she say to you?” Katherine asked.
“She feels like she’s failed you and she’s lashing out, but I also hear something I haven’t before. She sounds afraid she’s going to be rejected everywhere she has applied.”
“Every kid has the same challenges and most don’t have the advantages. It’s time for her to grow up.”
“It is time, but it wouldn’t surprise me if that insecurity isn’t figuring into saying she doesn’t want to go to college.”
“There’s always another excuse.” After a pause, Kath added, “I’m going to go unpack.”
He stayed near the fire, drawing some comfort from it, his head not in the college issue. He heard Katherine unpacking in the bedroom and thought about the SOU ending, whether Baird would hold him to the Christmas deadline if they were putting together prosecutable cases. He added another small piece of wood, and the wind was a low moan blowing over the top of the chimney. Kath came back out, wearing only a robe now, sitting near him, the robe sliding off one leg, her skin golden in the firelight. He reached and touched her smooth thigh.
“How’s your team taking the shutdown?” she asked.
“They’re starting to make plans. Cairo is going to grow tomatoes.”
“What about you?”
“I’m going to shut these guys down before I make other plans.”
Her skin was very smooth. He closed his eyes a moment.
“It would sure be nice to see you more. Keep that in your plans, John.”
“I will.”
“My business really is growing. I know it sounds crazy, but you could think about it.”
“Sure.”
“I mean it.”
He slid his hand higher on her thigh, felt the warm heat there. The way her coffee bars had taken with some good press had caught even Kath completely by surprise. They took all of her time now. Growing the business had become her main thing and maybe a way of dealing with loneliness when he was gone. Undercover had taken its toll, and they’d never talked about the fact that she made so much more money than he did. When she’d opened the first Presto he’d written her a check for all his savings, twenty-two grand, not much, but all he’d had. She’d opened the store with it, and no one could have predicted how successful the coffee bar would become. He knew that to some of her new friends his job was detached from normal life, and hers was not a situation any of them would want to be married into. And in some insidious way the new money was working against them, as well as providing great opportunities, like this trip she’d just taken with Maria.