Dray approached fast, talking low so only Tim would hear her. “I’m so sorry. Mac took the liberty of inviting everyone back from the station. I didn’t know you were coming.”
He felt the impulse to peck her on the lips in greeting. Her aborted lean told him she’d resisted the pull of the same habit.
“He seems awfully at home here,” Tim said.
A shadow flicker of remorse crossed her eyes. “He knows this is our home.”
“Does he?” Tim looked away. “I’ll just sign the forms, then get out of here and leave you to your thing.”
“It’s not my thing.”
Mac threw a lit match on top of the charcoal briquettes, then studied them with disappointment. He added more lighter fluid.
“Where’s the paperwork?” Tim asked.
He followed her inside, nodding to the others. Bear stood and followed them inside, walking through the circle of deputies just to make them move out of his way.
“Could you grab another jar of pickles?” Mac called after them.
Dray grimaced and slid the door shut behind them. They turned and watched Mac leaning over the charcoal briquettes, examining them. A burst of orange flame leapt up, and he reared back, face flushed, then shot a handsome smile over at them to cover his embarrassment.
Dray headed into the kitchen, rubbing her bare ring finger uncomfortably. “The forms are in here.”
Tim turned to Bear. “Why don’t you give us a few minutes?”
“Oh, sure, great. I’ll be outside with Wile E. Coyote.” Bear closed the sliding door behind him a little harder than necessary, in case Tim had missed the point.
When Tim entered the kitchen, the forms were laid out neatly on the table. He sat and signed where they were marked. Dray was at the sink, straining against the pickle-jar lid, elbow pointing out. She gave the lid a good glare before subjecting it to hot water from the tap. “No update? On Ginny’s case? Kindell?”
“Nothing yet. I’m working on it.”
“I see you made the news again. You and your posse.”
“I don’t want to discuss that. Not unless we’re alone.”
“This time with a victim in the middle of it. Signs of a confrontation. Narrowly avoiding police. Aren’t you worried it’ll get out of hand?”
“It did get out of hand.”
Dray gave the jar a half turn under the faucet. Steam rose from the sink. “Why don’t you get out before it does again?”
“Because I made a commitment to this. I need to see it through.”
“They say men think logically, women emotionally. The way I see it, neither are very good at either.” She turned to face him. “Tim, you have to realize you’re off track here. Whatever it is you think you’re involved with, what you are involved with is crap.”
“We hit a snare, but we’re working it out.”
“Tell that to Milosevic and his pig-faced cronies when you’re sitting next to them at The Hague. I’m sure they’ll empathize.”
“Point taken, Dray. I’m very aware of where we don’t want to end up.”
“Bear’s dialed into the fact that you’re up to something dicey. Don’t think he’ll let you get in too deep before he pulls you out.”
“He’ll get tired of that routine,” Tim said. “Just like you’re getting tired of it.”
She turned back to the sink. “You’re still wearing our wedding band.” She threw off the question casually, but he could hear the hopefulness hiding in her voice.
He shifted uncomfortably, something prying at the cage of his ribs. That he was unable to put the ring aside as she was made him feel deeply vulnerable. “I can’t get it off over my knuckle.”
The lid still didn’t give, so she started banging it against the counter, angrily. Tim crossed and tried to take it from her, though she didn’t relinquish it immediately, not from stubbornness, Tim guessed, but because she wanted to keep banging something. She finally let go and stood with her head down and her arms loose at her sides.
Tim turned the lid, and it gave with a pop. He offered the jar back to her. The Great Deliverer of the Pickles.
She set the jar on the counter. “When Ginny died, we started talking different languages, you and I. And what if we never find our way back? What a fucked-up love story this makes. Happy couple, trauma, separation. I don’t know about you, Timmy, but I give it a thumbs-down for predictability.”
“Don’t call me Timmy.”
She was already walking out. She appeared in the backyard a minute later. Mac said something to her that Tim couldn’t make out through the window.
Dray said, “Get your own fucking pickles.”
Mac made a shrug at the guys and went back to the burgers. Tim would have left out the front door if Bear weren’t waiting for him out back, like a passive-aggressive dog.
When he stepped outside, the cardboard box was open on the patio, parts strewn about. Mac was now up on Tim’s ladder, struggling under the weight of a basketball backboard. With a shoulder he pinned it against the wood paneling where the wall peaked to meet the chimney. He smiled when he saw Tim, two fat nails protruding from his mouth like iron cigarettes. His eyebrows were slightly singed. “Bet you never thought of this, huh? The patio makes a perfect little court.”
Tim stared at the pristine strip of wood at the chimney’s edge; he’d painted it with a three-fourths angular liner brush so he wouldn’t stain the bricks.
Mac pounded the nail through the backboard, and the wood panel beneath split. Tim felt his teeth grind so hard his skull vibrated. Dray was sitting backward on the picnic table, feet on the bench, her head lowered into her hands, her face hidden by the drape of her bangs. Beside her, Bear watched the proceedings with the horrified absorption of a rubbernecker at a particularly grisly car wreck.
Another volley of bangs, and then Mac called out, “Is it straight?”
Fowler and Gutierez paused from dribbling on the patio to flash him thumbs-ups. “Good enough.”
The backboard was at a four o’clock tilt.
Tim walked over and stood before Bear and Dray, one foot up on the cooler.
Dray gestured limply to Mac but couldn’t muster words.
“I’m on my way,” Tim said.
“I’m following,” Bear said.
“You can’t leave me stuck here.”
“He’s your guest, Dray,” Tim said.
The other deputies were at the rear fence line, smoking and speaking in lowered voices.
Dray’s face was drawn and weary, and the dark pockets beneath her eyes looked like bruises. Tim remembered when they first met, at a fire-department fund-raiser. She’d been wearing a yellow dress dotted with tiny blue flowers. The straps crossed in the back, showing off a diamond patch of skin just below her nape. She’d walked past him, pursued by a fire chief-older guy, as all her exes were-and she’d sent a breeze of jasmine and lotion his way that had on him the kind of effect usually reserved for shitty romantic comedies and Pepe Le Pew. Later that evening he’d caught her out in the parking lot getting a sweater from her car, and they’d spoken for about forty-five minutes in the intimate space between vehicles. He’d kissed her, and she’d gone home with him, and for months afterward firefighters from Station 41 had fixed Tim with cold, aggressive glares every time their paths crossed, a reprisal he gladly endured.
Only in hindsight had he realized how noteworthy Dray’s feminine getup had been that night; she’d not worn the dress since, nor anything yellow, nor especially anything with little blue flowers. Now she looked tired and world-weary and unspecifically pissed off, like a stoic dust-bowl mother with a child hanging from her neck and three more behind her, around her, waiting to be fed.
“I lied to you, Dray,” Tim said. “I’m not wearing my wedding band because I can’t get it off over my knuckle. I’m still wearing it because I can’t not.”
Her lips parted slightly. Her chest rose beneath her tank top and stopped with a held breath. Her eyes were brilliant green in the sunlight and as large as he’d ever seen them.
Mac’s voice rose, disrupting them. “…so we called the Milpitas guys the Mil-penis guys,” he was saying, recounting his week at EOB SWAT training, his fifth time through the program and in all likelihood the fifth time he’d fail. “Good little rivalry. I shot a two sixty-two on the test.”