I stood up abruptly, “No, this isn’t going to happen.”
“Why not?”
I’d expected at least some attempt at persuasion, not this straightforward inquiry as he continued to sit calmly, packing away the remains of our lunch.
“Unfinished business,” I said, and turned away.
He stood up with a slight grunt of effort and followed me down the trail, and his hand on my shoulder a minute later was gentle, tracing the edges of bone. “How long?”
Good question. I shrugged into his palm, felt his fingers tighten reflexively, then loosen fast.
“Your call,” he said, and immediately turned the conversation back to flowers. We both got out our cameras when he pointed to a downy blue arashia that we’d missed on the way up.
Finishing the loop back to the dusty parking lot occupied over an hour, Frank taking the lead, which left me plenty of time between flower spotting to admire the way the muscles moved in his long back, and to wonder how many more times, as life sped me toward sixty and the invisibility that falls over most women like a shroud, a man this attractive would want me. No one had made any overtures in a long time, and I sure didn’t want Stephen to have been the last person I had sex with. But I also didn’t know how much anger toward him I’d lay onto the next man. I didn’t want that either, and that was part of the unfinished business I’d hoped the long winds of the desert would blow clean, leaving me open for someone new; and here he was, maybe before I felt ready. So much for planning. The upshot of all this overthinking was that by the time we were standing by my car, I was willing to at least keep my options open, and agreed to dinner at the less fancy of the restaurants at the park resort.
When Frank said, “See you this evening,” turned, and started walking out to the road, I called to him and asked where he was going. He said he didn’t have a car, liked to walk everywhere, so of course I said I’d give him a lift. It only made sense, as the heat had come up fast with the sun near overhead. “Rental?” he asked, waiting to get into my Camry as I tossed guidebooks and sunscreen and half-empty water bottles onto the backseat.
“Hardly,” I grinned. “Even I couldn’t make a rental look this lived-in in under a week, and I’ve only been on vacation for two days.”
On the few miles back to the campgrounds, he told me about the think tank where he worked, researching oil-policy issues. When I lifted my foot off the accelerator and slowed just a bit by the only gas station in miles, checking the gauge that was sitting much lower than I’d expected, he said, “Go ahead. I’m not in any hurry, are you? Of course, I’ll pay for the gas to thank you for the ride back. And then explain at tedious length over dinner why gasoline costs so much.” The smile that accompanied these offers was disarming, and while he was fiddling with the credit-card reader, I went inside to get a couple of chocolate bars. A migraine headache was starting to gnaw at the bones around my eyes, and chocolate works better for me than any of those drugs my neurologist has finally given up suggesting. I didn’t want the pain and disorientation to interfere with learning if there were any reasons besides the greed of corporations and culpability of politicians for the $43 total I saw on the pump when I came back out. I gave Frank one of the two Ghirardellis I’d been relieved to find in the racks. He took it with another smile and said, “A girl after my own heart. Knows her flowers and her roadside chocolate.” I let the girl comment slide. Same as I let the “young lady” comments slide from older male clerks in hardware and grocery stores. I hadn’t ever figured out what to say to such annoying ignorance.
When we got near the campground where he’d told me he was staying, he asked me to drop him off at the visitors’ center instead. When I lifted my eyebrows in mild inquiry, he smiled and said, “I’d been planning to leave tomorrow, but I’ve just decided to see if I can get them to rent me that hard piece of ground for a few more days. I think the... park... merits more attention from me.”
I hadn’t turned off the engine, and merely nodded at this bit of what even my well-defended sensibilities could recognize as flirtation, and waited while he got out and said he’d see me at seven.
By the time I got to the Wagonwheel, Frank was already there, and I appreciated not having to wait for him. He stood up when I got to the table, even pulled my chair out, though that was a bit awkward. I’ve never learned how to properly gauge when to sit down when someone else is moving the chair. I’d rather just thump the damn thing into position myself. But we got through the maneuver without knocking the table hard enough to slosh water out of the tumblers, or wine out of his glass.
“I hope you don’t mind my going ahead,” he said, holding up the glass, half-filled with red. “I had such a thirst for a good Cabernet.”
What was there to say to that? I smiled and conformed to the stereotype of my age and gender by ordering a salad, over his recommendations of steak or lobster, and insisted on a Sauvignon Blanc, refusing even a sip of his Cab, as red wines barely pass my lips before the migraines start burrowing in. We could agree at least on the bread, heavy-crusted sourdough with a tang that the sweet butter we slathered on it only enhanced. It turned out to be the best part of the evening.
He launched into the promised insights about gas prices, though they weren’t anything I hadn’t already read online, and then he started asking me first about my opinions about oil, and politics, and then about my work and my family — about my beautiful daughter Jenny and her husband Dan, abd the twin grandbabies on the way. I didn’t really notice right off how the questions kept coming, and when I did, for a while I enjoyed the interest, since it was something I wasn’t exactly used to. But by the time my oversize wineglass was almost empty, and the waitperson was clearing away the flowered plates, my answers were getting shorter and shorter, and Frank started leaning in too close. I moved back a bit, the legs of my chair catching in the thick pile of the carpet. He reached out, one finger on the back of my hand, his face inches from mine, the slow puffs of his breath breaking the wavering boundary of air around me that I could feel like surface tension on water. My ex, as our marriage went more and more wrong, had done too near to the same thing, looming just a few inches away during a “discussion,” bending over me as I sat in the kitchen, his hands planted on the table on either side of me, slowly smiling as I tried to stand up. I wasn’t going to wait around to see if that same kind of smile showed up on Frank’s face.
I begged off the desserts the waitress suggested. The heavy sweetness of chocolate syrup cake, caramelized bread pudding, and the rest, all sounded impossible to stomach. I told Frank I had some calls to make, leaving who they were to deliberately vague. Just like I left vague any plans for our getting together again. He squeezed my arm and said he hoped I’d sleep well, that he thought I was looking tired.
I did have trouble falling asleep that night. The pale green walls of my tent, that on other trips had seemed all the protection I ever needed, that kept out the wind and the small biting creatures, now seemed insubstantial and weak, serving only to blind me to what might be out there in the dark. I finally went to sleep with my arm resting across my eyes.
I don’t know what time it was when I woke up. The noise of the generators and lanterns had stopped, finally. No wind stroked the nylon panels around me. Maybe it was the background silence that woke me. Maybe it was the small crunch of gravel as something stepped or shifted its weight only a few inches away, but it had to be nothing. Darkness always magnified sounds and worries. Mice grew into marauding raccoons, raccoons into cougars. It was nothing. I was sure. And then I heard it breathing.