The Mist of Quarry Harbor Page 6

  “I had some traveling to do. Job-related.”

  “And what is your job?” Cassie asked, looking up expectantly.

  “Pharmaceuticals. I travel.”

  “Oh? Tell me about it.”

  “Nothing to tell. It’s not my life. It’s what allows me to live my life the way I want to.”

  Cassie wrinkled her brow. “You don’t like what you do?”

  “I don’t mind it. I’m willing to spend the couple of weeks a month away from . . . away from people I’d rather be around so that I can have the freedom to do what I want the other two weeks.”

  She smiled. “Things like rock climbing?”

  “Or following a dream to Scottsdale.”

  “Oh . . .” Cassie concentrated on the long strands of cheese stringing out from her dish to the pan. Pinching them off, she licked her fingers. Only then did she meet Chan’s eyes, her own crinkling at the corners. “You embarrass me when you talk like that. Let’s talk about something else. Tell me where you’re from. Tell me about your family.”

  “I can’t. I didn’t exist until I met you. Tell me about your family, instead.”

  Flattered by his interest, Cassie obliged, and as they ate she drew an affectionate and amusing portrait of her studious, unfamilial parents and her odd upbringing.

  The shadows deepened and the mercury vapor lights came on in the complex, casting a dim light over the oleanders. A soft breeze tempered the warmth of the evening, and a cricket started sawing somewhere close by.

  “Are your parents still alive?” Chan asked.

  She shook her head. “No. It’s been eight years now.”

  “Then you’re an orphan.”

  She cocked her head and regarded her glass, running her finger around its edge as she thought. “I guess I am. I never would have classified myself as such, but I guess I am.”

  “I’m an orphan, too, only it happened a long time ago.” He reached across the table and drew her hand away from the tumbler, holding it lightly and smoothing the fingers with his thumb. “Someday I’ll tell you about it, but not now.”

  They sat in silence for a moment. He didn’t release her hand.

  “You were going to tell me about that song you sang this morning,” she reminded him.

  He stood and pulled her to her feet. “Come sit in the glider.”

  They walked to the corner of the patio where the porch swing occupied the shadows under the oleanders. Chan seated her and then sat beside her with his left arm around behind on the back of the seat and his body turned to slightly face her. Taking her right hand in his, he said, “This is a very rough translation:”

  Dearest, you are my heart,

  You are my breath

  You are my . . . life, or my being.

  Tonight you are my love,

  Your body is warm beside mine.

  But dearest, what will tomorrow hold?

  My sadness will stretch out forever

  And though I live, I will be cold and alone

  If I lose my heart, my breath, my life.

  He began to sing softly. Not in the pulsing rhythm of the morning, but as a ballad, slow and intimate. As he sang the word corazon, he placed her hand over his heart, covering it with his own. Cassie had taken enough pulses to know that his heart was beating more rapidly than normal. But so is mine, she thought to herself. So is mine.

  Cassie couldn’t take her eyes off Chan. She was bordering on sensory overload. The sound of his voice and the musky smell of his aftershave combined with the way the shadows played over the planes of his face and the feel of his beating heart, and it all washed over her like a floodtide. When the last sweet-sad note had quavered into the night, he bent toward her, and she, like a leaf being pulled down into the dark undertow, leaned forward with parted lips.

  * * *

  Punky came by early the next morning to bring Cassie her hair dryer. “Thought you might need this,” she said. “It ended up in my suitcase. You’re up bright and early. I figured I’d be getting you out of bed.”

  “Why is that? You know I always get up early.”

  “I was going to bring this by last night, but I saw Chan was here, so I didn’t want to bother you. I figured you’d be up late.”

  “Um. No.” Cassie looked away.

  “You’re blushing,” observed Punky. “What’s going on? You haven’t been doing anything you shouldn’t, have you?”

  Cassie covered her scarlet cheeks with her hands and closed her eyes. “No. Oh, Punky, he kissed me! I’m thirty-two, and that’s the first time I’ve ever been kissed.”

  “Holy Crow, Cassie! You can’t be serious! No, I’ve seen you kiss Ben. You’ve been kissed.”

  “That was just a sisterly kiss. I mean, I’ve never been kissed by a man who made it perfectly clear that the kiss was just the beginning—of something more intimate.”

  “He didn’t . . .”

  “No. He was a gentleman. But, Punky, it just . . .” She closed her eyes again and shook her head. “I remembered what you taught your Mia Maids, when you said that there was nothing wrong with a kiss, but that when the breathing started to get heavy, that was when you went home.”

  “Did I say that?”

  “Yes. So I made him go home. Hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.” She put the hair dryer in a drawer. “Oh, Punky. I’m in love. What if he doesn’t love me back?”

  “He loves you. I can tell you that.”

  “But what about marriage? I’d never be able to wait six months until I can marry in the temple.”

  “Don’t wait. You marry now and go to the temple later.”

  “But your Mia Maids! You wouldn’t tell them that!”

  “No. They’re not mature women. Talk to the bishop. I’ll bet he’ll say the same thing. He’ll quote Paul about ‘better that they marry than burn.’”

  Cassie sighed. “I don’t know that it’s an issue. I haven’t been asked yet.”

  “He’ll ask you. Bet you five dollars he’ll ask before October.”

  “October!” Cassie wailed. “That’s almost a month away!”

  “Holy Crow, Cassie! You don’t even know him! You’ve seen him how many times? You don’t know anything about his family. Nothing.”

  “He’s an orphan. I think he had a real hard childhood.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “He’s a returned missionary.”

  “Okay. That’s good. Anything else?”

  “He has a good job—something in pharmaceuticals. He works two weeks a month and is off two. He travels. Oh, Punky, wouldn’t it be fun to get my seminars coordinated with his trips? Then we could travel together. We wouldn’t have to spend that time apart.”

  “Whoa, Nellie,” Punky cautioned. “Rein ’er in! Wait until you know a bit more about him.”

  “I know all I need to.”

  “Which is?”

  “He’s the man I want to spend eternity with.”

  “Oh, Cassie! Eternity is such a long time.”

  “Well, how about, he’s the man I’m going to spend every extra minute with for the next four days. He leaves Saturday night and will be gone a week. I’m rearranging my schedule so I only have to work half days this week.” Cassie looked at her watch. “And I’ve got to get whistling if I’m going to get done what I need to do. Thanks for bringing the hair dryer by.” Gathering her briefcase and computer, she shooed her best friend out the door in front of her.

  8

  “I’ve never been to Casa Grande,” Cassie said. “I thought it was just a town.” Shading her eyes, she examined the huge, hulking, two-story ruin. “That roof looks like a pagoda.”

  “It was built to shelter the ruins, keep them from deteriorating,” Chan said. “I wish we could go inside.” He took her hand and led her around to another side and pointed. “See, the plaster is off the wall. You can see it’s built out of blocks of caliche.”

  “Caliche. That sounds positively oriental. What is it?”

  “I
t’s a mixture of sand, clay, and limestone. Kind of a natural-occurring concrete. Those walls must be three feet thick.”

  Cassie felt the rough plaster. “What do you suppose this building was used for?”

  “It says in the brochure that it was probably an observatory. The sides are lined up to the four points of the compass—”

  Cassie interrupted: “That’s something that has always puzzled me. Who decided on north, south, east, and west? I mean, here you’ve got people who didn’t have any ties to Europe—who’s to say that their directions were the same as the other people’s?”

  “Well, you have the sun traveling from east to west, which pretty much determines two of the points. I guess the other two just follow.” He pointed. “Let’s go over there.”

  They wandered along a low adobe wall to where the remains of a smaller building stood.

  “I didn’t know you had such an interest in archeology,” Cassie said teasingly.

  “I’m interested in people who disappear.”

  “Everybody disappears sooner or later,” Cassie observed.

  “I mean civilizations. People with a capital P.”

  “The people who built this—who were they?”

  “Nobody knows. They disappeared. They were called Hohokam.”

  “If nobody knows about them, who called them Hohokam?”

  “The people who came upon this ruin. Native Americans who moved in after they left.”

  “So this wasn’t built by the Pima?”

  “No. And no one has been able to say why they suddenly disappeared.”

  Cassie shivered. “That’s kind of eerie. I wonder if it was like the Book of Mormon, where there was a great battle and they killed each other off.”

  “More probably there was a famine, and they left for greener pastures, although I can’t find that they’ve discovered a similar culture elsewhere. Maybe some disease killed them off.”

  As they walked back to the car, Cassie looked around at the sparse and thorny vegetation, at the cloudless sky overhead, and at the late-afternoon sun beating down. “It’s not a very friendly place to be making it on your own.”

  As they were driving away, Cassie suddenly said, “They didn’t disappear.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They left that.” She pointed in the direction of Casa Grande. “If you disappear, you disappear. You don’t leave something behind.”

  Chan stared very hard at her for a moment and then smiled. “That’s very deep. You’re right.”

  Instead of turning back toward Scottsdale, Chan took a state highway that angled south and east, rising to rocky hills and scrubby cedars, where he turned off on a narrow secondary road that hair-pinned steeply for two more miles, leveling out on a saddle where the air was cooler and laden with the scent of pine. There, in a tiny rock and adobe hamlet, he took her to Felix’s, a Mexican restaurant where the owner and his wife served enchiladas made with homemade blue corn tortillas.

  It was a magical day, full of strange and exotic places in her own backyard. When Cassie reached home she called Punky, eager to share her experiences. Frowning as the answering machine picked up, she complained, “Hey, Punky. You’re not home! I was just going to report in. I learned two more things today about Chan: He’s a scholar. He likes to learn about different things. He taught me all about the people who used to live here. And, he’s a gentleman. We were connected all day, you know, holding hands or . . . just connected. But even his goodnight kiss was just, you know, a connection. It was . . . it was . . . Oh, let’s face it. I’m in love.”

  Smiling, Cassie hung up the phone and got ready for bed. After the lights were out she continued to relive the ride home: the top had been down and the night air grew warmer as they dropped down into the valley. The black velvet sky had been sequined with stars, and Chan drove with his left hand and held hers with his right. Impulsively, Cassie got up and opened the drapes so she could see the stars from her pillow. With streetlights nearby, they were sparse and dim, a shadow of what they had been only an hour before. Disappointed, she went back to bed and, finally, to sleep.

  She was up early the next day, arriving at the office before anyone else to answer emails and cover necessary bases, putting off what she could until the next week. Chan picked her up at midday and they drove out to Tonto National Monument.

  “More ruins?” Cassie asked.

  “They let you go inside these.”

  Understanding now how her mother must have been drawn into her father’s research, she said no more, simply enjoying the scenery as they drove along the winding, narrow Apache Trail through the lush Sonora Desert landscape with towering saguaros, spiky ocotilla, and lacy palo verde trees.

  After visiting the site, Chan stopped at a down-at-the-heels marina on Apache Lake and rented a boat. Producing a small soft-covered cooler out of the trunk, he rowed out to the middle and let the boat drift while they ate kippers and crackers and drank icy root beer. They lingered until evening, exploring narrow, winding lagoons, and after another starry ride home, Cassie called Punky to report.

  “He can row a boat straight as a string. You may not think that’s very good, but I was a counselor at Camp Yawana, and I know how hard that is to do. I wonder what I’ll learn tomorrow.”

  The next day when he picked her up, Chan handed Cassie an address and a city map and said, “You’re the navigator.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To see Mrs. Mefflin.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “She’s a widow lady. She’s just become wheelchair bound and needs a ramp built. The materials are there. We’re going to build it.”

  “We? I wouldn’t know one end of a hammer from the other.”

  “Stick with me, Baby,” Chan said out of the side of his mouth. “You got lots ta loin.”

  Mrs. Mefflin turned out to be seventy-eight years old. She lived in a tiny cinderblock house in an older section of town. Small and bony with knobby protrusions on her knuckles, she sat in the doorway and kept up a steady stream of anecdotes as Chan fashioned a ramp from the threshold to the sidewalk, making sure the slope was gradual enough that she could navigate it easily.

  Cassie’s report to Punky that night was full of warmth: “He’s such a caring person,” she said. “As my mother used to say, Mrs. Mefflin would talk your ear off and whisper in the hole. But he listened and responded so sweetly. And all the while he was doing such a good job of building.”

  “Where’d he learn to be a carpenter?”

  “I don’t know. He said he’s done some building. That’s all.”

  “Where’d he get the tools?”

  “The people who sent him out—the Opportunity Council—supplied him with tools.”

  “So, what’re you doing tomorrow?”

  “I don’t know. He said dress casual.”

  “Well, whatever you’re doing, it needs to be something you can do with a two-year-old.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I promised Ben I’d keep Ricky for him tomorrow. His mom is sick. But so is my boss, and I’ve got to manage a banquet for her. You get Ricky.”

  “Oh, Punky! You can’t do this to me!”

  “What do you mean? This is your chance to see how Chan does with kids.”

  “What if he’s planned something you can’t . . . oh, well. I know we need to support Ben. That’s fine. We’ll manage.”

  Ben arrived the next morning with Ricky and a car seat. Dressed in a pair of crisply creased gray slacks and his brother’s hand-me-down jacket, he looked professionally handsome. Setting the seat down, he said, “Thanks, Cassie. I appreciate this.”

  “No problem. Um, diapers?”

  “He’s potty trained,” Ben said, smiling proudly. “Just ask periodically if he needs to make bubbles. And, if you don’t mind, after he manages it, you need to cheer and do jumping jacks.”

  “Bubbles?”

  Ben looked at his watch. “I’ve left extra clothes an
d training pants. They’re there in the car seat. I gotta go. You have my cell phone number in case of emergency?”

  “Yes. I know it by heart.”

  “All right then. I’ll be by to pick him up at six.”

  As Ben was leaving Chan drove in. The two men saluted each other as their cars passed, and Cassie wandered down the sidewalk to greet Chan as he parked. “We’ve got an appendage today.”

  “An appendage?”

  “Ricky Torres. We need to help Ben out.” Cassie waited anxiously for Chan’s reaction.

  “Super! We’re going to the zoo. You can’t enjoy a zoo without a kid, anyway. I was thinking about renting one.”

  Cassie watched as Chan expertly put the car seat in the back and buckled Ricky in. On the way he stopped to get sunblock and a hat for the little boy and rented a stroller at the gate. He even took the toddler to make bubbles and reported that he had done the obligatory jumping jacks in the restroom. Cassie’s heart was singing.

  At noon they got lunch from a vendor with a pushcart and sat in the shade outside the elephant pen to eat. When Ricky dozed off, clutching the last vestige of his hotdog, Chan caught Cassie’s eye and nodded toward him. Smiling, she disengaged the wiener stub from his grasp and threw it away with the rest of the lunch mess.

  “Want to stroll?” Chan invited. “There’s an arboretum attached. Should be shady and cool there.”

  “Yes. Let’s.”

  Cassie pushed the stroller and Chan walked beside her, the tips of his fingers gently touching the small of her back. Meandering slowly, they wandered through the green foliage, reading the cards posted by each plant. A bougainvillea vine formed a flaming scarlet bower over a bench, and they sat under it with the sleeping boy. “I saw a snack bar near the entrance,” Chan said. “Want something cool to drink?”

  “Lemonade? That would be nice.”

  Chan was gone only a moment and returned with two lemonades and two boxes of Cracker Jack popcorn. “You can’t do the zoo without having Cracker Jacks,” he said, handing her one.

  “I haven’t had Cracker Jacks in years,” Cassie laughed. “I remember my first box. I was at the movies. It was the Muppet Movie, and the prize I got was one of those little clicker things in the shape of a frog. The prizes aren’t nearly as good anymore. I think that’s why I stopped eating them.”