Although we both knew that we had just done the equivalent of going into a fine steak house and ordering steamed broccoli and brown rice, the waitress took the order with casual aplomb, as though the entire town of Gold Hill were already on the Ornish diet and our order was par for the course that morning.
“Wait here,” Sam told me. “I have to go to the head. I won’t be long.” He stood and walked toward the bathrooms. Although I hadn’t been back that way for most of a decade, I was guessing that the odds were about fifty-fifty that the plumbing Sam would find was still the kind that didn’t involve copper pipes, or flushing.
I watched the choreography of turned heads that followed Sam’s departure from the dining room. Just as the faces returned to their plates and their stained stoneware mugs of coffee, the waitress who had taken our order-a pleasant-faced young woman with close-set eyes and stringy brown hair-took the short walk toward the back of the house, too. She glanced over her shoulder before she turned the final corner.
Sam returned to the dining room first. He had been gone no more than ninety seconds total. The waitress followed him about ten seconds later and resumed her tasks behind the counter.
“Had to pee,” he said as he sat down across from me. “Like to wash my hands before I eat.”
“Yeah. You met with our waitress, too.”
He nodded. “Wanted to remind her that the toast had to be dry. I’m off butter, you know.”
“Yeah, I know. You want to tell me-”
“Maybe later.”
Breakfast was bland, but then, we’d ordered it that way. Sam dug into his without complaint. I used the hot sauce on the table to add some zip to mine.
“Remember when we took the kids to Rocky Mountain National Park in September?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said. Elk mate in the early autumn, and the beautiful dance concerts they produce at dusk prior to copulating draw hordes of human observers. Rocky Mountain National Park, northwest of Boulder, is prime territory for Front Range elk voyeurs. Sam, Sherry, Lauren, and I had taken the two kids, Simon and Grace, up the previous September for a cold picnic dinner and a visit to the annual elk show.
The elk had done their courting thing that night with philharmonic aplomb. Although the dance steps of the majestic bulls and their harems of cows were difficult to discern during the prime dusk time period, the acoustics that night were perfect. The bugling bulls sent their baritone calls bouncing off the granite faces in the park, and the eerie echoes quieted even the most restlessHomo sapiensin the audience.
“That’s when it hit me that Sherry was kind of unhappy. That night.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
He had wiped his plate clean and held up his mug for a refill of decaf before I realized he’d said all he planned to say about that night in the park. Me? I had a feeling there was more to discuss.
The waitress hustled over and topped off Sam’s coffee mug. “There are a lot of rules after a heart attack. No caffeine for a while-that’s one of them,” he said. “As far as things I miss, it would be hard to choose between caffeine and nitrates.”
“Sex?”
“I hope that’s not an offer. If it is, you’re a dead man.”
I offered a grudging smile. Were I with a patient, clinical protocol would have had me waiting silently, feigning patience, for Sam to return to the topic of his troubled marriage. But with Sam I didn’t have to follow any protocol. I said, “So that’s it? That’s all you’re going to say about Sherry? That you knew she was unhappy?”
“She was showing me something. Maybe I wasn’t able to see it. What more is there to say?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking.”
“Did you notice anything?” he asked me.
“That night? No.”
Sam caught the waitress’s attention and pantomimed a request for the check. “Sherry said she was restless. That’s the word she used. She was thinking of selling the flower shop. Maybe going back to school.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“That’s because she said it to me, not to you. You and Lauren and the kids were running ahead of us.”
“ ‘Restless’ for Sherry meant unhappy with you?”
“You know, you go back and look for clues. That’s what I’ve been doing, anyway. I wonder what I missed. Whether I should have done something else.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Something different. Maybe I let stuff slide that I shouldn’t have let slide. Anyway, that’s one of the things I’m thinking I did wrong. Other times I think it’s all her shit. I go back and forth. I have a lot of time on my hands.”
“That night? What did you say to Sherry?”
“Probably not the right thing.”
I sipped some water. “Why? What did you say?”
The waitress brought our check, sliding it to an empty spot on the table pretty much exactly halfway between us. She stacked all the plates and mugs in a careful cascade up one forearm. I watched closely; not even a glint of recognition flashed between her and Sam.
He said, “I don’t remember exactly. I’m sure it wasn’t what she wanted me to say.”
I grabbed the check. Sam dropped a ten-dollar bill on the table.
“You’re paying. That’s the tip,” he said.
“What about you, Sam? Are you happy?”
Did I get an answer?
Did Gold Hill have a Starbucks?
Almost halfway back to Boulder I asked, “What’s the story with the waitress? Your meeting in the back of the café?”
A quarter of a mile of contemplation later he apparently decided that he was going to answer me.
“Four weeks ago last night she was with some girlfriends at a club downtown. One of those places on Walnut, not far from your office. I’m not going to say which one. You can probably guess. Maybe you read about it in theCamera. But she was on my turf. She got drunk-she admits that. She met some guys-she admits that-and she agreed to go to an after-party at some frat house by CU. She admits that. She decided to let them drive her over there in their car. She admits that. Crappy judgment after crappy judgment after crappy judgment, and she admits every bit of it.”
His left hand snaked from the steering wheel to his upper abdomen, his thumb pressing on his sternum.
“On the way over to the Hill for the after-party, she was sexually assaulted in the back of a Chevy van.”
“Raped?”
“Sexually assaulted.”
The distinction was obviously important. I was curious why. Prurient interest? No. Just enduring curiosity about the perverse imagination of assholes on alcohol. But I didn’t ask for any more details. Sam wouldn’t have wanted me to know any intimate details of the waitress’s horror. I liked that about him.
“And?”
“And it turns out that of all the people she’s had to deal with about what happened that night, she trusts me the most. Go figure.”
Sam paused. I think he was giving me the opportunity to make the mistake of saying something snide. I didn’t.
“I’ve been concerned that if I wasn’t around to hold her hand as this thing got closer to trial, she might get shy and drop the charges. The cops and the DA? We try real hard to make it okay, but the truth is that it’s a bitch to be a sexual assault victim in the system we have. So I wanted to tell this girl personally about the heart attack and let her know that I’d be gone for a while but that I’d be back on the job to, you know, help her before this thing went to court.”
I wasn’t surprised at Sam’s generosity, though his sensitivity sometimes snuck up on me.
That moment a sharp gust of wind exploded out of the west, which was behind us. The heavy car seemed to levitate like an amusement park ride about to careen down some ersatz mountainside. The sheer eighty-foot drop five feet from my window served as a reminder that this particular mountainside wasn’t exactly ersatz.