Chapter 6 #2
Wearing a ridiculous white mustache over his dark stubble, he looked at me and said, “I never thought you were a threat. More like a pest. You butted in where you didn’t belong. Cooper was doin’ just fine with McHenry.”
“Wrong. McHenry is a local lawyer who does just fine when the charge is disturbing the peace or driving to endanger. Smuggling of stolen goods is a little over his head.” I paused. “But I thought you had confidence in Peter. You said before that he’d get him off.”
“Sure, he will. So would McHenry if you’d left him alone.” None too gently, he returned the milk to the fridge. “Cooper isn’t as helpless as you think. And he isn’t alone. He has people b’side you to take care of him.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” I said and pushed myself to my feet. Benjie wasn’t going to tell me anything new, and I’d had enough of him for one day. “Thanks for the warning, Benj.” I headed for the door. “I’ll make sure that I don’t set myself up for a fall where Cooper’s concerned.”
I was halfway out the door when Benjie’s voice followed. “You don’t have to be sarcastic—”
Gently but firmly, I closed the door.
That run-in with Benjie—and it could only be called that—bothered me.
I didn’t mention it to Swansy at first, because I thought maybe I was making something out of nothing.
Benjie had always been contrary. He wasn’t really behaving out of character—except for those references to Cooper and me.
He’d never made them before. I wondered why he did now.
Obviously it had to do with the case, but I wasn’t sure which part.
Was it the case itself, or Peter’s involvement in it, or something as simple as my presence in his kitchen when he wanted to be alone?
Fragments of his thoughts kept echoing in my mind, unsettling me enough so that by the time Friday rolled around, I was ready to talk.
“It’s infuriating,” I told Swansy soon after I arrived. “Cooper shouldn’t be going through this, and given the fact that he is, Benjie shouldn’t be adding to his grief. What’s the matter with that boy?”
“He’s a victim of circumstance.”
“I know that, and I try to be gentle, but it’s hard. He doesn’t like me.”
“You’re smarter ’n he is, so you make him nervous.”
I shook my head. “He thinks I’m going to come between Cooper and him. I told him I’d never do that.”
Swansy was silent. She gave me that gentle smile of hers that urged me on. I fell easy prey to it.
“He thinks I have designs on Cooper. Serious designs—like marriage. Isn’t that a hoot? Cooper and me and marriage? Forget the me part. Cooper and marriage? Somehow I don’t associate the two.”
She remained silent.
“Why is that?” I asked. “There’ve never been starbursts between Cooper and me, but why not with someone else? He’s a special guy. He doesn’t say much. He takes a little getting to know, but once you do he has so much to offer.”
“He doesn’t think so.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Sometimes people have reasons for bein’ crazy.”
“What are Cooper’s?”
She was quiet for such a long time that I was about to speak myself, when she said, “He had a sweetheart once. Maybe he still loves her.”
My eyes went wide. I sat forward. “Who?” But Swansy wasn’t about to tell, and I knew it.
She wasn’t a gossip. She dropped hints of secrets here and there only when she felt there was a need for it.
In this case, the need had to do with my understanding Cooper better.
The identity of the woman wasn’t important, simply that there’d been one once upon a time.
“Cooper and a sweetheart,” I murmured. “Interesting.” Many times I’d pictured Cooper’s women, the ones he went to for sex. I’d never pictured a sweetheart, though, one he went to for love. “Does Benjie know about her?” It would explain his utter conviction that Cooper would never marry me.
“It was a long time ago.”
“Where is she now?” I asked. Swansy didn’t answer. “Did she marry someone else?” Still no answer. “She must have. Otherwise she’d have been with Cooper.”
“If she loved him.”
Oh dear. Cooper had loved her, but she hadn’t loved him back. The hurt I felt for him quickly turned to anger. “She was a fool, then, a fool. Men like Cooper don’t come along every day.”
“T’hear you talk, you’d think you were in love with him yourself, girl.”
“I do love him, but not in that way. I respect him. I admire him. It’s not that he has great ambitions, or that he’s some kind of superstar, but in his everyday existence, he’s an eminently capable man.”
Swansy gave a slow, thoughtful nod but didn’t say a word.
“Adam wasn’t.” I remembered our lives together. “Poor Adam. He was a dreamer far more than a doer. We were both so excited about leaving home. I’d had it with my family, and he’d had it with his.”
“Real different, your families.”
“But just as stressful. In my case it was social pressure as in materialism, jealousy and spite. In his case, it was an obsession with upward mobility. His family was where mine was two generations ago. They kept pushing Adam, pushing him to do better in school, to earn more money each summer, to befriend this executive’s son or that politician’s daughter.
When he told them he was going to be a fisherman, they went nuts. ”
Swansy sat very still.
I hung my head. “Maybe they were right.” Dark thoughts filled my mind.
“Adam wasn’t an athlete. He wasn’t physically coordinated.
Aside from his height and weight, he was the most improbable of fishermen.
Without Cooper, he’d never have made it as long as he did.
” The darkness deepened. My voice came from a tortured spot deep inside.
“I kept telling him he could do it, that he could do anything he wanted. I thought I was doing the right thing.” The memory tormented me.
“If I hadn’t pushed, he’d have given up.
And if he’d done that, he’d be alive today. ”
“Stop that, girl! It’s not your fault he’s dead. He went on the boat of his own free will, and an accident happened. They do sometimes, y’know.”
“But fishing?” My eyes flew to her face. “He shouldn’t have been fishing in the first place. It was a misplaced dream, a romantic notion that just didn’t fit him. He hated fishing. In the end, he really hated it.”
“So why didn’t he stop?”
“Because I kept encouraging him to go on.”
“And he wasn’t man enough to stand up to you?”
The suggestion hit me like a slap in the face. I opened my mouth to deny it, then closed it again and swallowed hard.
Swansy started rocking. The gently creaking rhythm of the runners on the floor soothed my ruffled thoughts.
I took a deep, uneven breath. “I loved him.”
Swansy patted my knee. “Yes, you did, girl. You loved him a whole lot. He was lucky. Had more love in three years than some men have in a lifetime.”
That thought stuck with me for a long time after I left her house. Cooper was certainly one of those men who’d missed out, but as the weekend came and went, I found myself wondering where Peter stood on that score.
Then I wondered why I cared. He hadn’t called—at least, he hadn’t called me. He’d called Cooper several times to ask questions and update him on what was going on, but as far as I knew, he hadn’t bothered to ask how I was.
It was infuriating.
I vented that fury on my work, which meant that the pieces I produced as the days passed were darker and more dramatic than the rest of the collection.
That didn’t worry me. They were still good.
Actually they were better than good, I decided.
The more I looked at them the better they seemed.
And I spent hours doing that. They intrigued me.
Without doubt, they were more sensual than anything I’d done before.
Sensual, sexual, erotic. Absurd as it seemed to refer to pottery in those terms, they were the ones that consistently came to mind.
The joining of a handle to a pitcher, the curve of the neck of a decanter, the undulation of the sides of a decorative bowl—I stared long and hard.
And much of the time I wondered whether I was seeing something in them that no one else would see.
It wasn’t only in my work that I was seeing things sensual, sexual and erotic.
My nights were filled with them. I’d never had an X-rated dream in my life, yet suddenly they were coming in a steady procession.
At least once, sometimes twice a night I awoke flushed and damp, with a tingling in my breasts and belly and a throbbing between my legs.
Once, the experience would have been embarrassing. Over and over, it was mortifying. I could only thank my lucky stars that there was no one in my bed to witness the folly.
Then again, I supposed that the folly wouldn’t be at all, if there was someone in my bed.
I was hungry, and he’d done it. His face was the one atop the body that loomed over mine each night. His mouth was the one that muffled my fevered cries. His hands were the ones that brought me to sanity’s edge.
Still he didn’t call.
So I called my mother. It was on a Wednesday night, three weeks to the day since Peter had gone.
“Hi, Mom,” I breezed, as though my call were a regular thing. “How’s everything?”
“Jillian? Jillian? Is that you calling me, Jillian?”
There had never been, nor would there ever be anything wrong with my mother’s hearing. Nor was there anything wrong with mine. I could clearly hear the facetious tongue in her cheek. I let out a breath. “Yes, Mom. It’s me.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong.”
“Are you well?”
“Very well.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Then you must be calling about Peter.”
My mother had always been unusually perceptive.
Growing up with her, I’d appreciated it at times—when I first got my period and was too embarrassed to tell her, for example, or several years later, when I refused to visit family friends whose oldest son had all but raped me the last time we’d visited.