“That’s not true,” I said.
“Yes, it is, Sarah. You can’t admit you’re not good enough to guard him.”
“No, about him not saying much of anything,” I’d said. “He does. He does to me.”
Her hazel eyes had widened, and a half-cooked tomato slid languidly, unnoticed, off the spatula she was holding. She believed me.
“I’ll be damned,” she said. “I would never in a hundred years have connected the two of you. You seem so different. Well, on the surface. I guess I don’t know Shiloh that well.” She paused, considering. “So what’s he really like?”
My first impulse was to make a joke of it, saying, You mean in bed? But I couldn’t, and instead I spoke without premeditation. “Shiloh is a deep river,” I’d said.
It hadn’t been an adequate summary. But what I couldn’t quite explain to Genevieve was that I needed and wanted Shiloh not in spite of the fact that we were so different but because of it. Shiloh wasn’t like me, and he wasn’t like the men I’d usually felt comfortable with.
He didn’t need to be holding my hand or touching me constantly when we were together. He didn’t need me to share all his interests or like the same things he did. And from early on I’d seen that I’d have to stretch myself to keep up with the things he knew and the way he thought.
If I’d met him even a year earlier in my life, those things probably would have been sufficient to scare me off. But instead, I saw in Shiloh the possibility for a kinship based on something much deeper than common interests, something that made those old criteria seem irrelevant, even trite. There were depths in him that unnerved and excited me, made me feel like someone raised on a prairie seeing the ocean for the first time. After I’d met him, the kind of man I’d previously gone out with, that guy with the sidewall haircut and 4WD vehicle, seemed a little less dimensional, a little less attractive, to me.
Now Shiloh stirred and slipped out from under the arm I’d thrown over his chest. I watched as he went to the chest of drawers and dug out a pair of nail clippers.
“You’re going to pare your fingernails? You already got your hair cut today, didn’t you?” I asked, a little accusingly. He knew I missed the longish hair he’d had when I’d first met him. When he kept it short, the sun didn’t have a chance to bring out the lighter russet tones in its dark-auburn color.
He ignored the gentle criticism. “No, I’m going to clip your nails,” he said, settling on the edge of the bed and picking up one of my hands.
I pulled it away. “Why?”
“Because,” he said, “you scratched me. I don’t know if they have group showers at Quantico, but I don’t want to turn up there with red marks on my back.” He reclaimed my hand.
“My nails aren’t that long.”
“No, but they’re ragged. Because you bite them.”
“I don’t anymore,” I lied. When I felt the sides of the clipper against the first fingernail, my hand twitched involuntarily.
Shiloh glanced at my face. “Do you trust me to do this?”
“Yes,” I said, not lying this time.
There was a metallic click as the clippers bit through my index fingernail; Shiloh released that finger and moved on to the next. A dissociative feeling ran through my body, a physical memory, and I closed my eyes to isolate it. Of course: In Shiloh’s hands I felt my mother’s touch. She’d been the only person ever to do this for me, back when I was a child. Even then ovarian cancer had been spreading through her insides like blackdamp through a mine.
Shiloh brushed parings from the Indian blanket of our bed onto the floor. I opened my eyes again. “All done,” he said mildly.
“Thanks,” I said. “I guess.” I got off the bed and went to hunt for clothes. “We should start thinking about dinner,” I said, pulling a T-shirt over my head.
Shiloh rolled onto his side and watched me get dressed. “Don’t get too hungry,” he said. “I don’t want to start a panic, but the kitchen shelves were looking very bare the last I checked.”
“No shit?” I said. “Well, this is bad.”
I went out into the kitchen. Outside the window, I saw, twilight was deepening. When Shiloh came out, I was sitting on my heels, checking out the contents of the refrigerator. He’d been right: they weren’t promising.
“I could walk over to Ibrahim’s,” I said.
“Ibrahim’s” was our name for a Conoco gas station and mini-mart in the neighborhood. Despite the fact that there were plenty of full-service grocery stores in Minneapolis that were open late, if not all night, Ibrahim’s seemed irresistibly convenient to us when we needed milk or wanted coffee at an odd hour. We went there often enough that Shiloh had once remarked that it was too bad we hadn’t had a traditional wedding; we could have had the reception catered by Conoco.
“Maybe,” Shiloh said. He sounded unenthusiastic about the kind of food available in the freezer section of a mini-mart.
“Or,” I said thoughtfully, “we’ve got those slivered almonds and olives and some rice. If we went out and got some tomatoes and lemon-”
“And chicken, I know. I see where this is going,” Shiloh interrupted.
Neither of us would ever put cooking very high on our list of skills, but Shiloh was better than I was. Of the several staple recipes that he made from memory, my favorite was a Basque-style chicken. Shiloh fixed it every second or third week, but he seemed to wait for me to ask him for it. I thought that he liked my prodding, liked it that I enjoyed his cooking so much, and that was why I suspected his current reluctance wasn’t genuine. I wheedled a little more.
“I know it’s kind of labor-intensive, with the prep work,” I said.
As I’d thought, Shiloh shook his head negligently. “No, I’ll do it. If you’re willing to drive to the store and pick up what we need.”
“I don’t mind,” I said, already heading back to the bedroom for my shoes. His words, though, reminded me of something. “Hey, where is your car, anyway?”
“Oh, yeah,” he said from the kitchen. I could hear him taking a can of Coke from the refrigerator, fixing himself a drink. “I sold it.”
“Really?” I was startled. “That was kind of sudden,” I said. Despite his threats to get rid of it, Shiloh had seen his car through so many mechanical ailments that the news of its sale took me by surprise. I picked up my running shoes and a pair of socks and walked back to the kitchen doorway, where I sat on the floor to put them on.
“I didn’t trust it to get me all the way to Virginia,” Shiloh explained. “I’m just going to fly instead. I’ll worry about a new car later, after I’m finished at Quantico.”
“You’ve got some time left before you leave,” I reminded him, lacing up my shoes. “You could buy a new car in that time.”
“I’ve got a week,” he said, peeling the papery husk off a clove of garlic. “I could buy a car in that time, but I can also live that long without one.”
“I’d go nuts,” I said, getting to my feet. “It’s not that I mind walking, but just knowing I didn’t have a car if I needed one, that’d bother me.”
“I know what you mean,” Shiloh said. “A car is a lot more than transportation. It’s an investment, an office, a locker, a weapon.”
“A weapon?” I said doubtfully.
“If people really thought about the physics of driving, the forces they control, some of them would be afraid to leave the driveway. You’ve seen the accident scenes,” he said, rounding up stray pieces of chopped garlic with the flat of the knife.
“Yeah,” I said. “Too many.” Then another thought hit me. “When you were downtown, were you looking for a ride home?”
“Yes,” he said. “I had to drive the car out to the guys who bought it, then I went to find you. But Vang said you were in court.”