Sue is fine until the lime. She lifts it to her mouth but the smell of it triggers something in her that makes her stand up. She puts her hands on the bar. “Not again,” she says, turning, pushing away the hand you offer.
“Let her go,” Cassini says, anticipating your urge to follow. “She asked about you, you know. She’ll be back.”
“When?”
She passes you the salt. “Just a bit ago. Out back by the lake. I told her you were dead in the water.”
“Great. Thanks.”
“Stuck in a rut. Afraid to move on. Staring at your feet.”
“Okay, I get it.”
“It’s true,” she says and fumbles for a cigarette in her cocktail purse.
The bartender has the Weather Channel on now, and you glance at the bottle-necked shape of Idaho, seen from space. You are somewhere on that screen, you think. Idaho is blue, and Mrs. Cassini is in that blue next to you. So is your mother, somewhere. Your dad is watching this, you’re sure, but what he sees is clear skies.
Mrs. Cassini lights a smoke, and you do another shot together.
“I also told her you were looking to get laid.”
You lick the tequila off your teeth and shake your head. It’s all you can do. “You’re killing me, Mrs. Cassini.”
“Who gets the pretty one’s other shot?”
“Go ahead,” you say.
“See, that’s what I’m talking about. A rut. No zest. Your mom and I were pretty close. You know what she asked me? I mean at the end. She didn’t say look out for my baby or any crap like that. She said, ‘keep things interesting for Ben.’”
“Life doesn’t seem that thrilling right now.”
“Trust me. The excitement never stops,” she says, with a touch of bitterness.
Your mom’s picture is surrounded by shot glasses. “That’s easy for you to say.”
“Oh, you can be a little bastard.”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
Mrs. Cassini puffs on her cigarette and looks at you. “You want a thrill?”
You meet her eyes.
“I’m serious. I’ll give you a grade-A thrill, right here.”
It’s like you’re standing in your backyard, and you can feel that spot where that hole is, feel all those fears and desires hot through your feet.
“Okay,” you tell her.
Mrs. Cassini stamps out her cigarette on the bar. Then she takes your hand, wet with lime and alcohol, and places it under her dress. For a moment, nothing registers. The old man in the brown jumpsuit stands at the end of the bar, talking into a telephone. The Weather Channel now shows the whole northern hemisphere, all of Idaho lost under its curve, and then your fingers start to feel the inside of her hipbone, the moist heat from below. She guides your hand to the edge of a vinyl-smooth scar and traces it with your fingers downward to the edge of her pubic hair. You can’t help it, you close your eyes.
It’s not a dance your hands are in, but a mechanical tracing. You are guided to the other side of her navel, where there, soft and flat, is skin you feel as blue.
“It’s on the other side now,” she says and you open your eyes to meet a face without anger or sadness, and that holds you all the more for it. The strong bones of her fingers push yours hard against her skin, deep into the wall of her abdomen until you know it must hurt. “There,” she says, rolling the tips of your fingers. “Do you feel it?”
There’s nothing there you can make out, nothing but heat and resistance, a yellow, oily pressure. You pull your hand away.
“That’s the new baby.”
Your fingers are red and you rub them under the bar, wanting another taste of lime for the brass in your mouth.
“That sounded pretty bitter, didn’t it? I don’t know why I called it that.”
There is nothing you can say to her.
You do the shot on the bar and order two more.
“That’s my Benny.”
The bartender pours the tequila without limes or salt and when he changes the TV to the late news, Mrs. Cassini yells, “What time is it?” She turns to you, excited, and runs her hand though your hair, shaking your head with your earlobe at the end. “Come on, young captain. It’s time.”
Waving her hand to the bar, she yells, “To the satellite!”
With that great pull of Mrs. Cassini, you let yourself be swept. Reaching for the bar, you barely manage to grab a portrait of your mother and down that shot.
Outside, the patrons empty onto an oil-planked T-pier, and drinks in hand, stroll above black water lightly pushed from a breeze farther out. The clatter and footsteps of those moving ahead seem to echo from landings across the lake a pitch higher, like the tin of old wire or metal that’s been spun, and it feels good to be part of a group moving together to see a sight.
Mrs. Cassini is only a strong voice over the others, Sue, a glimpse through the shoulders ahead, and you follow at the edge, skeptical about what you’ll find ahead, even though you get that feeling like you’re safe behind the BlueLiner’s wheel, like nothing bad can come within fifty-six feet.
At the end of the pier everybody looks up. You hear the soft thunk of a wrecker driver’s Zippo, his eyes scanning the night above the hands that cup his smoke. Mrs. Boyden and the older man are together again, each with a hand to the brow as if the stars were too bright to consider straight on. Even the boy who might be Tony squints into the night, and the way he absently wipes his hands on his apron makes you see him as of an earlier version of your father, thinking of policies and premiums as he looks to the future, though covered each way for whatever comes.
“I told my husband I wanted to see the new satellite. Then this morning, over breakfast, he changes the sweep of its orbit with his laptop,” Mrs. Cassini says, and guides us across the sky with her hand. “It’ll be coming from Seattle and heading toward Vegas, with enough plutonium to make a glass ashtray of Texas.”
Judge Helen coughs.
You look at everyone’s faces and you know this is stupid. You can’t put a restraining order on a satellite the same way you can’t change the path of a tumor. It’s stupid to think you can just wave your hand and summons up something that doesn’t care about any of us.
“There,” Judge Helen says and points back and away from where everyone was looking. They all turn in unison but you.
“Yes,” says Sue.
“Of course,” says the kid in the apron, with all the battle-battle-win optimism of a near-champion, and you look just to prove him wrong, because deep down you want to believe.
Twenty fingers guide you to it. At first it’s too much to take in, all those stars. You wish your mother had thrown herself into something the last year of her life, like writing a cookbook or sketching cloudscapes, so that you could make some of those recipes and see how they tasted to her, so you could look up and see what she saw. Overhead, though, is a sky splattered as laughed-up milk, about as shaped as the mass in Mrs. Cassini’s belly. Until suddenly you say of course. It’s that simple. You see it: the green light of the Cassini satellite ticking its chronometer path toward Vegas. You remember the earth-shot on the Weather Channel and the thought that a satellite couldn’t see you but you can see it feels pretty damn good. It makes you want to write of course on a ten-dollar bill in red ink.
Mrs. Cassini dives into the ice-cold lake and begins backstroking.
At the end of the pier, you hear Judge Helen whistling the Blue Danube and look up to see her balanced on a tall shoring post. She launches, extending, and executes a thunderous jackknife, the crowd throwing up whoops as people begin diving in.