wondering this all day. In the gift shop, had Blondie’s hands had the shakes when she picked up her wallet? He was worn down, that’s all. So fucking tired he couldn’t think right. Tomorrow, he’ll make his plan. They’ll all be sorry.
“What are you doing?” Jason asks his brother.
“Enh,” Lisle says, winking at the waitress as they leave, “Brandi wants to go to this club. Probably blow a couple hundred bucks on cristy and drinks, and when we get home, she’ll ride me like a pony.” Lisle grins. “For a change.”
That sounds about perfect to Jason. Instead, he and his brother part ways, and Jason walks down NW 22nd to the brick building. Jason squints up at it, swaying from the beers. Five stories up, his son entered a world where he was not unwanted. It was just a matter of timing.
16
Paperwork
CHLOE
Chloe has been home for one hour—enough time to shower, change, and get into a door-slamming fight with Dan—before she is called into the agency office in Troutdale to sign the paperwork with John McAdoo before he leaves for Singapore. Driving east, away from the city, late afternoon on a Friday is woefully slow, but the Cherokee’s wheels find the grooves in the highway, and Chloe can almost rest her eyes as her car shimmies, the setting sun a sparkle in her rearview mirror.
“They either need to pay you more or quit acting like they own you!” Dan had huffed when Chloe, wrapped in a towel, took the call to come in to work.
“It’s flextime. It’s supposed to work better for everyone involved. Babies don’t always come during the workweek.”
“Maybe you should take one of the desk jobs, like that chick Casey. She sounded pretty nine-to-five, and we’d at least get to travel. I miss that.”
“Casey runs the China program. She has to go there twice a year to escort families. I like this better.”
“Oh, me too! I love seeing my girlfriend for five minutes every week.”
The slam of their heavy front door was the perfect reply. Sometimes, she thinks, they don’t need to worry about setting a wedding date.
Dan’s ring, the fake ring, lists to the side on her left finger, catching the late-afternoon light. It wasn’t really an engagement, more a promise of a promise, an understanding that when he can get it together, he wants her to be the woman by his side.
And he will, Chloe thinks. Dan has already grown so much in the years they have been together, morphing from a going-nowhere Euro sports bum back to the States, to the trappings, the vestiges of a life that is more familiar to Chloe: a house in a fabulous neighborhood (albeit a rental), a Smith & Hawken doormat, dinners and wine together, a shared existence, an adult existence. It was not, Chloe thought, that she and Dan had to sit down to eat, as Chloe and Dr. Pinter had done every night, but really, he’s nearly thirty. It’s certainly time that they act like the grown-ups they are becoming, that Dan swears he wants to be.
She has replayed a conversation they have had so many times that if it were on cassette, it would have worn out by now. It was Spain, the first year they met. Chloe and Dan, his surf buddies Kurt and Paolo, sitting down to a steaming cauldron of paella at the Intercontinental Café in Tarifa on American Thanksgiving. In the copper pan, the shrimp were still intact, beady eyes staring, legs dangling. Chloe, Dan, and Kurt all American expats, celebrating their holiday without the traditional turkey and trimmings; local Paolo a fascinated observer, trying to understand the holiday.
“So what do you do now? If this were Thanksgiving in America, the meal is on the table, your giant turkey and your what? What else?”
Kurt and Dan and Chloe debated for several minutes the absolute essentials of Thanksgiving dinner. Did you have to have green bean casserole with the crispy onions? Were roasted pureed chestnuts really worth the effort? Sweet potatoes with or without Marshmallow Fluff? Didn’t everyone have some sort of a Jell-O salad?
“Well, obviously there are variations,” Chloe had said. She was wearing a baby-doll sundress and her red Hot Stick sweatshirt with black hiking boots. Her hair was wild with the wind that blew up through the narrow streets. Dan tucked a strand back out of her eyes, his gaze warm on her face, mixing with the Chianti flush as she talked. “But then you go around and say