“Hey,” she calls out when she sees him, “shouldn’t you be at Good Sam?”
Paul’s stomach flips—he has been gone too long; there is news!
“What?”
“This isn’t our usual venue—we’re supposed to be running into each other at the hospital. Or Strohecker’s, but you’re standing me up these days.” Chloe drops the recycling bin to the curb with a clatter, walks over to his open window. “Where were you yesterday?” She is smiling at him in a way that lets him know she hasn’t seen the news, and it is nice, for a moment, not to be the man whose wife lost their baby.
“Busy. Hey, how’s the wedding plans?” he asks, blows on his hands against the cold air.
Chloe grips her own elbows; she’s wearing a thin, long-sleeved T-shirt and striped pajama pants. In the streetlamp light, a wisp of disappointment passes over her face, like wind on water.
“No plans, really. Dan moved to Maui.”
“What?” So she’s here, alone? How come she never told him, all those mornings at the coffee shop? “You’re moving?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t know. The job, I’m busy, babies due. It’s complicated.”
“Doesn’t sound that complicated to me. Your boyfriend moves to paradise, and you’re going to stay here because of work obligations?” As if on cue, a wind blows up from the valley below, he can hear it in the trees before its icy breath reaches them. Chloe ducks beside the van, closer to him so their upper arms brush on either side of the open window, and she doesn’t move away.
“Do you want to come in?” she asks at the same time he says, “You should go.”
“What?” Did he hear her right?
“Where?” she asks, “Go inside, or to Maui?”
It has been a nice respite, these few moments, but he remembers again, an ache in his throat like the beginning of the flu: Wyeth.
“Maui.” Paul takes his hand off the door handle. “I didn’t. I got married young, took on the business at twenty. Struggled. Had a kid. Look where I am now.”
“Where you are now?” Chloe stands beside the driver’s door as Paul clicks his seat belt into place. Her fingers curl over the open window; she is still wearing the ring. “You’re everywhere I want to be. The marriage, the house, the baby, the life.”
“You should go,” he says, and closes the door, puts the van in gear.
40
Disneyland
CHLOE
Chloe has arrived at La Carreta Restaurant before her lunch appointment, carrying her canary yellow folder, the medical forms, and the stack of portfolios.
“You’ll recognize me by my fat gut,” Debra, the potential birth-mother client, had said on the phone the day before. In turn, Chloe told her she would be wearing a lavender button-down under a black suit, but this morning her suit pants had felt too tight, a casualty of too many meals out on the agency’s credit card. Judith had warned her that when it was just Judith and her husband, she did all the birth-mother meetings at restaurants, “and look at me now!” she had har-har-hared, gesturing to her barrel-shaped body under a billowing black silk overshirt.
But Chloe is starving, so she orders herself a large plate of nachos, going to the toppings bar for a towering pile of jalapeños; she picks at them while she waits. She looks out the window, and for once it isn’t raining, a day that hints of spring, which will lead to summer, where the weather couldn’t be more sparkling and perfect than in the Pacific Northwest. Even Dan had said it their first year here; summer in Portland pays for all those gray months. Now it is bright out, but she can see by the snapping flags at the car dealership across the parking lot that it is still windy, icy cold. This feels like the first time she has even noticed the world outside in days; all she does anymore is work and fall into bed, too tired to even turn on the TV.
Chloe half hopes this Debra won’t show, like so many of them. She would be happy to eat her lunch on the agency card, killing time before she is back at her desk and clicking on her empty e-mail folder. It is hard for Dan to get to the Internet café with no car, he has told her; he has to either bum a ride into town or wait for one of the guys to be heading in that direction. She offered to ship him his laptop,