But his father had offered a cool look that meant the conversation was over and made another phone call, lighting a cigarette. Ransom didn’t get it at the time but he later decided that the reason he couldn’t teach him self-defense was that he was all bluster. A coward.
And just like with schooling, Ransom made sure he didn’t follow his father’s path in this area either; his training in the army saw to that.
“You all right?” Annie asked.
“Fine.” She’d be thinking he was tense about the real-life confrontation with the punk, not the remembered one with Stan.
She laughed. “I thought you were going to deck him.” She squeezed his arm. “With those muscles you could have.”
“We’ll let somebody else teach him a lesson…Forgive me for not defending your honor.”
“He called you a slut, too,” Annie reminded.
Ransom frowned broadly. “Hey, that’s right. And you didn’t defend mine. I guess we’re even.”
Another husky laugh.
They arrived at her apartment.
She unlocked the front gate. He turned to her.
“So, is it good night?” Annie asked. Confident, prepared for rejection, prepared for the opposite.
Ransom read the signs. “No, it’s not good night,” he said firmly.
He had learned over the years — and not, of course, from his father — that indecision was usually a bad idea.
At 2 A.M., Ransom Fells lay in Annie’s bed, staring at the ceiling.
Then at her curled body, hair hovering stiffly around her angelic, pretty face, marred only by lipstick he himself had skewed. Her breathing was low and, even as she slept, seemed sultry.
For his part, though, Ransom was anything but peaceful. His jaw was tight. He was awash in that feeling yet again: the darkness, the bad, the guilt.
Not remorse for sleeping with her, of course. The evening had been completely mutual. He’d enjoyed her company and she his, he could tell, and the sex was pretty damn good, too. No, Ransom’s heart was foundering because he knew very well it was going to end, and he knew how, too: thanks to him. Just like with Karen six months ago and Julia a few months before that.
Ransom still carried the glum residue of how those times — and plenty of others — ended, just as he would carry around the burden of his anticipated behavior with Annie.
Why couldn’t he just feel good about meeting her?
He couldn’t quite say why exactly, but, given his frame of mind, given this perverse sentimental journey, Ransom chose to blame his father. The man’s distance, the failure to give his son guidance, to be a role model…that led to the conundrum: desperation to connect with these women, guilt when it was over.
Sometimes you just can’t win.
A reluctant smile crossed his face. You come back to a place where for the first fourteen years of your life all you were aware of was your father’s absence even though you were living in his house. Now, the man is dead and gone and yet he’s everywhere.
Troubled thoughts finally gave way to sleep, though naturally it came packed with an anthology of troubled dreams.
In the morning, Ransom came out of Annie’s bathroom, dressed, and he found her sitting up, smiling at him, the sheets ganging around her like an entourage.
Her look was pleasant and casual. And she asked, with no apparent agenda, if he wanted coffee and something to eat or had to be going. There was none of the edginess or downright bizarre behavior of some women at this stage of the liaison (like the one who had him listen to her entire playlist of Deer Tick, or the woman who got up at five to make him biscuits from scratch because he’d casually mentioned the night before at dinner that his grandmother made her own).
He told Annie he had a meeting but afterward he didn’t necessarily have to scoot out of town too fast. Why didn’t they talk later?
Her eyes narrowed.
Had he done something wrong?
She asked, “Did you actually say ‘scoot’?”
His brow furrowed, too. “Can that just be our secret?”
“Deal.”
She eased forward, wrapping the sheet around her, and kissed him. He gave her his phone number and then he was heading back to the Shady Grove.
As it turned out, though, his plans altered. He got a message that John Hardwick would not be back into town until late that afternoon.
Irritated at the delay, Ransom Fells considered these unexpected free hours. And suddenly he decided on bald impulse to do something inconceivable.
He’d go visit his childhood home.
Population 14,000.
The color of the timid sign welcoming drivers to Marshall was green, not white, which it had been when the Fells were living here but Ransom believed the number on it was the same. Could this be true, the town had not shrunk or grown in twenty years? Or had the city elders not bothered to transpose census data?
Marshall was a town that tended to ask, Why bother?
While Chesterton lived in the shadows of U.S. Steel, Marshall didn’t even have the shabby grandeur of industry as a jewel in the crown. No looming cooling towers, no massive concrete blockhouses of refineries or smelters or assembly plants, no sweeping rusty vistas of marshaling yards (the name came from a minor nineteenth-century explorer, not railroad tracks), no faded, graffiti’d signs from the past century proclaiming its position in the economic spine of the nation.
Chesterton Makes, the Country Takes.
Even though the paraphrased words were stolen from Trenton, New Jersey, at least Chesterton could make the claim in honesty.
Not so, Marshall. Here were trash yards, smoldering tire dumps, service stations unspruced by national franchises, shopping centers surrounded by crumbling asphalt parking lots, anchored by small grocery stores not Targets or Walmarts. Pawn shops aplenty. The downtown featured mom-and-pop storefronts veiled with sun-blocking sheets of orange vinyl, shading products like office supplies, tube TVs and girdles. The movie theater, in which Ransom had spent a lot of his youth, usually alone, was closed. What was left of the poster on the front was nearly impossible to make out, but Ransom believed it depicted a young Warren Beatty.
The land was largely flat, both in geometry and color, and the billboards and roadside signs were bleached and crackled like Chinese pottery. The only bright hues came from death — the exiting leaves of maple and oak trees.
Ransom’s palms actually began to sweat when he turned the Camry off Center Street and approached his old neighborhood. Heart stuttering faster. He thought of his days in Iraq. He thought about the rifles, pistols, explosives he was comfortable with. I’m a fucking veteran of combat, Ransom reflected angrily, and my hands are shaking like a kid’s.
Then he was unexpectedly passing the two-story, pale green colonial and had to brake fast. The trees — and there were a lot of them — had grown significantly in the twenty years since he’d been away (no Dutch elm here), so he hadn’t recognized the place. Though he supposed the truth was that he simply had chained out so many memories of his birthplace that he couldn’t really recall what it looked like.
He backed up, pulled to the curb and parked. The house was set back about thirty feet from the street across a leaf-strewn grass yard. The residences in this block dated to the 1930s and though the neighborhood would qualify as a subdivision or development, the structures were not made from cookie cutters. Each was significantly different. The Fells family home had a number of distinctive elements, including one that Ransom now recalled very welclass="underline" a small round window, pied by perpendicular strips of wood — like a telescopic gun sight.
An unwanted memory from earlier returned: His father going hunting. Alone. Stan had told his son, “Pretty dangerous, guns. When you’re older.”