After dinner, while Sam and the girls cleaned up, Ronny showed her the den where he did his fly tying. As if in mid-surgery, some of the lures were clamped beneath magnifying glasses; others sat in tiny jewel boxes, each in its own compartment. Dusty thought they looked like miniature rings and broaches created by an aficionado of outsider art.
The mystery of her visit hid in plain sight. It wasn’t the right time, and they both knew it; so many questions would have to wait. The suspense was tolerable because Ronny took the lead — as always — and led well. He was a “true gentleman,” modest and even-keeled, a gracious antidote to her panic. He’d always been that way. Still, she found herself having the somewhat grandiose fantasy that his serenity was born of the delight in her being there, the fateful, miraculous culmination of all the years he’d spent dreaming of this very moment. Narcissism dies hard, she thought, half comically.
He said that he met his wife when he turned forty, coming off a rough divorce. But the kids were theirs. “Babies just never happened till Sam.”
She couldn’t even begin to wrap her head around unpacking that remark.
“How long are you in town?”
“Just a few days.”
“It’s really good to see you, Dusty.”
“It’s great to see you. Oh my God, it’s beyond.”
“Tell you what. We probably have a few things to talk about,” he said slyly. “Why don’t you come to the house tomorrow at six.”
“For dinner?”
“In the morning, kid,” he said. “I’m gonna take you fly-fishing. Ever been?”
“No! I’d like that very much.”
“I’ve got waders and everything you need. I have a feeling you’re going to be pretty good at it.”
—
He was in the driveway, loading equipment in the truck. She was glad. She’d been stressing about the earliness of the hour and wasn’t looking forward to knocking on the front door.
They rode for about forty minutes, mostly in silence, which felt fine. They drank coffee from a thermos and laughed about his kids, especially Aggie, the youngest. Ronny was easy to be with. Old times. When they got to the river, he helped her into the waders. They were Sam’s — she and Dusty were about the same size. He had all sorts of gear clipped to his vest — lures, feathers, delicate pliers — like some fly-fisherman action figure. Grinned like one too. They finished their coffees while Ronny decided where he wanted to cast. A few anglers were already on the water, one on the bank, the other standing in the middle of the wide stream.
“Our dad used to take us here in the summer. Taught me everything I know. He was kind of a legend. He doesn’t come out too much anymore, but when he does I still watch him. He’d get his eye on one — they don’t travel too far — and just stand, for hours. Total focus. He was a freak. My brother and I were pretty good but not like the old man. We’d catch half a dozen fair-sized ones and be all puffed up because Dad didn’t get any yet. Then just before we went home, blip, he’d land it. A fucking beast. The one that he wanted. That’s what I shoot for when I’m out here, that kind of focus and purpose. That stillness. The art of that. It’s what I aspire to.”
Then, like his father before him, he hooked the monster — at least that’s what it felt like to Dusty when he asked, “Did you ever want kids?”
She stared at the ground and gathered herself.
“I got pregnant once. With you.”
Smiling affably — disconnected, as if on tape-delay — he said, “Are you kidding?”
“That’s why I disappeared. I got pregnant and my mother took me to get an abortion.”
“An abortion?” he said, uncomprehending.
“But I never had it — the abortion. I had the baby. A little girl.”
Then, with only slight modulation, he said: “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“No, Ronny,” she said, still looking down and shaking her head. “I’m not.”
“Where is she?” he said, with hollow urgency — a desperation that hadn’t yet coalesced.
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“We think — I think maybe — there’s a chance that she’s dead.”
She knew she sounded like a mental patient but there was nothing else to do than lay it all out. Ronny fought through brain freeze.
“I’m not getting this! What are you fucking saying, Dusty?”
“I told you—”
“You told me?”
“I had a little girl—”
“And it’s mine? How do you even know—it’s mine? It’s mine?—”
“It was yours—is yours. But I think she — we think there’s a chance that…”
“You show up at my house, like, forty fucking years later to tell me we had a kid together? A little girl? And you don’t know where she is but you think that she’s dead?”
“I don’t know that for sure. I’m trying to find out.”
“You’re trying to find out?”
“Maybe I shouldn’t have come.”
She hated falling back on that, it was a dumb, cowardly, cliché thing to say. But just then, she wanted be someplace — anyplace — else.
“Damn straight you shouldn’t have! Who do you think you are, Dusty? Who am I to you, one of the fucking little people? The little people the celebrity deigns to drop in on? ‘Hi! Thought I’d walk into your shitty little life and give you some horrible, shitty fucking news before I go back to my fame and my money and my bullshit’—”
“Ronny, it’s not like that.”
“Oh, it isn’t? It’s not like that? Then what is it like? You know what, you don’t know me. You never knew me. And I sure the fuck don’t know you—I’ll tell you something else, I don’t want to. You’re sick, Dusty. You’re fucking sick to come here and tell me this shit.”
She was calm and emotionless. She’d left gaping holes in the story, it just spilled out that way, and his gears kept slipping. (Hers too.) Who could blame him…
“How long did you raise her? How could you have raised her and not told me about that?”
“I didn’t raise her. She was taken from me.”
“At what age?”
“Three months — when she was almost four months old.”
He let that sink in, then grew imperceptibly settled, because four months was “better” than whatever he’d been thinking. It was still insane but less insane.