Hunter's Moon Read online

  He’s in one of his babbling moods, going on too much for too long, trying to show this blue-collar couple that he’s compassionate and responsible, not some careless rich guy who drives a car worth more than they earn in a year. His speechifying moves Ken to speak:

  “That little girl is all we’ve got,” he says, drawing a quick, surprised, puzzled look from Nancy. “Y’know, if she did jump on top of your car—and I can’t figure why she would, but if she did—that jump’s not more’n two feet. Don’t seem like she’d bust a knee, a jump that short.”

  Gaetan shakes his head in confusion, not denial. “She fell off the hood right onto the pavement. Could’ve happened then.”

  “She was layin’ in front of your car,” replies Ken, his tone embittered and ominous all at once.

  “People can break a leg stepping off a curb,” Lisa interjects.

  “Is that a fact?”

  “Yes, Mr. Parichy, it is,” she answers, flint in her voice because she’d noticed the look Nancy had given him—Kim isn’t all they’ve got, there is another child, maybe more than one. He’s trying to build a case, at least in his own mind.

  They sit in silence for a time, Lisa feeling waves of hostility rolling toward her from Ken Parichy. Then Nancy, attempting to change the tenor of the conversation, turns to Gaetan.

  “I could swear I’ve heard you before. Not too many men talk like you, and I could just swear it.”

  “Radio or TV maybe. I do radio and TV commercials.”

  “I knew it! Which—”

  “Is there much in that, money-wise?” Ken cuts in, his manner slightly more cordial, if also contemptuous. From his Carhartt jacket to his steel-toe boots, it’s obvious that he doesn’t consider doing radio TV commercials real work.

  “Now, honey, you ought to know better than to ask a man how much he makes,” Nancy chides.

  “No problem. It’s a living, pays the bills,” Gaetan replies, but in a manner so jocular and coy that he might as well have disclosed his income.

  Worried that he might say too much, Lisa intervenes, politely asking Ken what he does for a living.

  Wrong question.

  “What do I do? Not a goddamn thing is what I do,” he comes back savagely. “I haven’t done a goddamn thing since the plant shut down. Tate Automotive. Unless you count goin’ to cash my unemployment check, a big fat zero is what I do.”

  Gaetan attempts to ride to Lisa’s rescue. Shaking his head, he says, “It’s a damn shame, these companies going to Mexico or China or someplace.”

  The earnest display of solidarity with the working class earns a smirk.

  “Tate didn’t go nowheres but under,” Ken says.

  Just then the doctor enters the room. Identified as Dr. Gupta by the tag pinned to his lab coat, he smiles broadly as Nancy and Ken pop out of their seats. He delivers good news: yes, their daughter’s knee is broken, but it’s a non-displaced fracture, meaning a simple fracture. No other broken bones. No internal injuries.

  Nancy sighs relief and murmurs, “Thank the Lord.”

  “She will be in a cast for six to eight weeks; otherwise, she’ll be fine,” Gupta continues. “Very fortunate it happened where it did. The car must have been moving very, very slowly.”

  Ken crowds him. Though he’s not much taller, his hulking frame seems to trivialize the slender doctor.

  “Yeah, but it hit her and busted her knee.”

  Gupta draws back. His black eyes flit around the room, then rest quizzically on Lisa and Gaetan.

  “It was our car,” she says before Gaetan can speak a word. “The girl jumped on it, or she fell from a container box, and then fell off the hood.”

  “Oh, I see. The injury is consistent with a fall. In any case, a fortunate child.” He returns to the Parichys. “Come, I’ll take you to her and you can have a look at the MRIs.”

  “We’re really happy that she’ll be all right,” says Gaetan as the three people move toward a double door leading into the ER. “If there’s anything I can do to…”

  He withdraws his wallet from his pants pocket and from the wallet a business card. Lisa seizes his wrist before he can present it. Looking hard at Ken, she says, “You don’t need this. Anything you need to know, it’s in the accident report,” then adds, but without a dollop of warmth, “Glad things have come okay for you.”

  Still clasping Gaetan’s wrist, she all but tows him outside.

  * * *

  “What the fuck was that all about?” he snarls when they’re in the car.

  “You didn’t need to give him your card,” she answers.

  “Not like it’s got top secret info on it.”

  “It’s not necessary. You don’t have to give that guy your phone numbers, your address and email.” Lisa pauses, gathering her thoughts. “The whole time, you were practically…” She almost says “groveling” but checks her tongue. “You were showing him how kind and open you are, a real good guy—here, Kenny boy, here’s my card, reach out to me anytime. But he would see it as a sign of weakness. You telling him how sorry you are, and you’re sorry because you feel responsible, no matter what—that’s how he would see it and take advantage.”

  “By giving him a business card? You’re over the top.”

  He pulls out of the lot. Sitting stiff and straight, fingers threaded in her lap, Lisa gazes out at the street, a Norman Rockwell painting: large frame houses set back from lawns papered with yellow leaves.

  “I don’t understand how a guy who’s been around as much as you can be so … so … naïve. You couldn’t tell what he’s up to?”

  “Sure I could. I’m not naïve, all right? And if it comes down to it, I’ve got a good lawyer and top-of-the-line insurance.”

  “You acted like you were guilty, Gaetan. I could see it; so could he. When you pulled out your card, his eyes lit up. If he had three of them, he would have looked like a slot machine hitting jackpot.”

  “Holy Christ! You are out there. He’s a working stiff who’s had a run of bad luck and now his daughter’s in the hospital.”

  “Oh, yeah, salt of the earth,” she scoffs. “Stop romanticizing. I know people like him. I grew up around them. They can be dead flat broke, but they’ll always find a spare buck or two for a lotto ticket. That’s how he sees you, a lotto ticket.”

  “Thought I was a slot machine,” he grumbles, and at a road sign—JCT.: U.S. 31—turns onto the highway.

  “No, he’s the slot machine,” she says.

  “Right now I feel like I don’t know you. But we’ve got a ways to go. Maybe we’ll get reacquainted.”

  * * *

  What few words pass between them on the rest of the drive are informational—Still hungry? Yes. We’ll stop for lunch next exit. Okay. In the long intervals between these exchanges, Lisa grows reflective and self-critical. Maybe she’d been tough about Ken because he reminded her of the world and people she’d left behind long ago; maybe he did not have designs on exploiting his daughter’s misfortune; maybe she’d “gone over the top” because she did not want to see Gaetan’s generous nature taken advantage of, which might mean that she cares for him more deeply than she’s been willing to admit.

  Returning to Vieux Desert in the early evening, they eat a whitefish dinner at the brew pub—one of the rare times they permit themselves to be seen together in public. Gaetan has always been more concerned about gossip than she. He’s been coming to Vieux Desert for fourteen years, knows every bartender, waitress, and shopkeeper by name. Although the chance that a careless word from any of them would get back to his wife is less than the chance of an asteroid strike, he doesn’t want to take it. For that reason, Lisa is certain that he’s strayed before, gotten caught, and been given an ultimatum: once more and I’ll take you to the cleaner’s.

  They do not tumble into her bed that night; the image of Kim, sprawled on the pavement, is too fresh. And what love they do make throughout the next ten days is furtive and hurried, like the coupling of co-conspirators on the
run.

  Lisa entertains the possibility, the hope, that this is temporary, but she doubts that it is. For the first time in their relationship—if it can be called a relationship—she fakes an orgasm; for the first time, she is relieved when Gaetan’s stay ends and he drives away, back to Barrington. She cannot account for the change in her feelings. All she knows is that there has been a change and that an eleven-year-old girl tumbling off a shipping container in a McDonald’s parking lot in a dismal, dying town has been the cause of it. Somehow or other, Kim has torn her, Lisa, out of her fantasy. That may have happened regardless. Passion consumes itself, as every disillusioned romantic has learned for a thousand years; and if an incombustible nugget of love does not lie in its heart, cinder and ashes are all that remain.

  * * *

  Ice-out on the lake and rivers arrives in early April; the trees begin to bud and are slapped for their presumption by a sudden frost. A second thaw a month later encourages them to have another go; they seem tentative, as if wary of another deception. Taking advantage of the warm spell, Lisa goes on her first shoreline jog of the year. This winter, she’d begun snowshoeing with Aileen and Alex to trim the flab she always put on in cold weather. A segment on the nightly news about the obesity epidemic had provided additional motivation: fat people, it said, were twice as prone to cancer as slim people. She’d had a scare in January, after getting a mammogram at Marquette General. The doctor said he’d seen “something” in her left breast and set her up for an ultrasound-guided biopsy.

  “You tell that doctor to take that thing out,” her mother demanded during their weekly phone call. “No ifs, ands, or buts. Out it comes.”

  Lisa, careful not to betray her anxiety, explained why that couldn’t happen unless and until the biopsy found a malignancy.

  “Listen to the medical expert, will you?” said Gladys. “Are you ever going to get married again?”

  “What? What’s that have to do with anything?”

  “Do you want to die alone, like your aunt Meg?”

  Gladys seldom failed to inflate a mere concern into a certain catastrophe. Aunt Meg was her youngest sister. Metastatic breast cancer had claimed her, unmarried and childless, at forty-eight. The entire family, Lisa included, had gathered at her bedside the day before she passed, but no husband, no kids. That, to Gladys’s mind, was dying alone.

  Lisa pounds down the beach to the lighthouse and back. Four miles. Four hundred calories. She cools down with a walk around the campground. A week after the biopsy, the doctor reported happy news—the something turned out to be a cyst. Lisa’s life, on pause for an entire week, resumed playing. But she will turn forty-three this August, just five years younger than her aunt had been at the end. One day in the future, some growth somewhere will not be a cyst and the news will not be happy. The words “die alone” rattle in her brain as she walks, and they summon a picture of Aunt Meg, lying in her hospital bed, wasted and drugged. Probably the very image her mother had hoped to conjure up, both to prod her into remarrying and to remind her that disaster was only a diagnosis away.

  Her cellphone in her sweatshirt pocket vibrates.

  “Hey, Aileen. What’s up?”

  “I was about to ask you the same thing. Guess you haven’t checked the Journeys website this morning.”

  “Nope. Been jogging. Why?”

  “Better c’mon over. The house, not the diner.”

  Aileen and Alex live in a century-old three-story frame two blocks from Lake Superior in one direction, four blocks from the woods in the other. She leads Lisa up to the attic, which Alex, who is a skilled carpenter, has converted into a writing studio. Two shafts of sunlight, angling through the skylights, one on each side of the pitched roof, meet over a U-shaped desk. Aileen sits down and punches up the travel service’s site on her computer. A few keystrokes take her to the customer reviews for the North Coast Inn. She scrolls down to the most recent, a one-star posted late last night. Its author is cryptically identified as DCR2404. Level 2 reviewer. Leaning over Aileen’s shoulder, Lisa reads it in disbelief.

  “What the fuck!” she blurts out, and reads it again.

  I stayed at the North Coast Inn last October and was shocked at the unprofessional conduct of its owner. She—how to put this?—entertains one of her male guests on the premises. They weren’t quiet about it, either, keeping me awake half the night. I would have checked out the next day, but no other rooms were available in town. The previous night’s activities were not a freak occurrence, because the same thing happened the second night, causing me to wonder what sort of establishment I was in. The owner’s private life is her own business, of course, but not when it disturbs her guests. Others who have experienced this inexcusable, inappropriate behavior may have been too embarrassed to say anything about it. Indeed, I myself was for the past few months. No longer! I will never stay there again!

  “I came across it by accident this morning,” Aileen says. “I’m sorry to be the one to show it to you, but better me than somebody else.”

  Trolled. Slut-shamed. Lisa’s face is on fire, though from anger rather than shame.

  “This is bullshit! It’s a hoax! Somebody’s sick prank! Who the hell would do something like this?”

  “Some fat punk somewhere maybe, but it sounds like a woman to me.”

  “Yeah, to me, too.”

  “Who knows?” Aileen shrugs, and in the twin shafts of pallid light converging on her face, Lisa sees the same composed, candid expression it wore at the book festival last fall. “You told me you two were being super discreet, so maybe … I mean, an affair with a paying guest who happens to be married?”

  “Are you judging me?” Lisa snaps.

  Aileen gives her a long, searching look. “Not you. I’m judging your judgment. Better contact Journeys right away and tell them it’s defamatory and to take it down.”

  * * *

  In her office, still wearing her sweats, Lisa journeys through the Journeys website, landing at the “Management Center,” which lists a six-step protocol for reporting a complaint about a review. Following instructions, she selects DCR2404’s post and types in the “Comments” box: This person has never stayed at the North Coast Inn. His/her review is false, malicious, and slanderous. Apparently it slipped through the cracks in your system. I demand that it be removed immediately.

  A few moments later, a message flashes on her laptop screen: We have received your report and will delete the selected review if we confirm that it violates our guidelines. Please note that we cannot disclose the identities of our reviewers and are unable to fact-check customer reviews. We cannot remove one because there is a dispute about its contents.

  “In other words,” Lisa says out loud, “any asshole can post a total lie and you’re not responsible.”

  And why would this asshole, if she was so affronted, wait seven months before posting her commentary?

  The review lingers for several hours before it’s finally deleted. In cyber-time, several hours equal several eternities. The review is out there long enough to be picked up by Twitter trolls. Lewd and plain-stupid comments appear on Lisa’s website and Facebook page. She feels vulnerable, exposed, invaded.

  As mortifying are the whispers that fly through Vieux Desert. Like all small towns, it’s a cauldron bubbling with rumors and innuendo, which the gossipmongers revise, exaggerate, or otherwise mangle. Resolved to set the record straight, Lisa makes a brief speech at the next meeting of the chamber of commerce. She asks her fellow members to ignore everything they may have heard; the customer review was fraudulent, an attempt to defame her by an unknown person for unknown reasons. She runs her business according to the highest professional standards. Around twenty people are there, seated at a long table in the community hall next to the volunteer fire station. They nod in sympathy; Harry McSweeney declares that they never believed a word of it; they’ve got her back. His assurance brings on a twinge of guilt; not every word in the post was false. One small part was true, though L
isa would dispute the verb “entertains.”

  The mystery troll takes no further shots at her, and Lisa soon returns to running the machinery of her daily life. Food must be ordered to restock the pantry with non-perishables, menus planned; a new showerhead has to be installed in room three. Bookings for the Memorial Day weekend, coming up in two weeks, pump her morale: all five rooms are taken.

  * * *

  She is in the kitchen, emptying the dishwasher, when her phone warbles—the tone for an incoming text. She picks it up from the counter, reads:

  —Will be at meeting of HMC next week. Need to see you about something. G.

  Did she have an evil genie, the opposite of a guardian angel, its sole purpose to upset her equilibrium? She hesitates. Gaetan is breaking his own no-communication rule. She types:

  —When?

  —Next Wednesday. Midafternoon.

  —U can’t stay here. Full up. (A lie. The place won’t be full till the following week.)

  —No problem. Staying at the club.

  —What’s up?

  —Prefer face-to-face.

  Avoiding a paper trail, she thinks. Or an electronic one.

  —OK. C U then.

  She clicks off, feeling like a spy arranging a clandestine rendezvous. Not as far-fetched as it sounds. There is an element of espionage in most adulterous affairs. Among the things Lisa has learned about herself is that she has a capacity for compartmentalizing. When she’s been with Gaetan, she’s been with him totally; when apart, totally apart. Now, with this text, he has broken the pattern. She is curious about what he must tell her in person, yet she would as soon not see him. He isn’t good for her; he may even be dangerous.

  Today is Saturday. Four days to wait.

  * * *