Reprisal

THREE

Will glanced at his watch. Almost quitting time, but he wanted to get this tractor-mower running before he knocked off for the weekend. That way it would be ready to roll first thing Monday morning.

He looked across the gently rolling field of the lower campus where the soccer and football teams were practicing on the freshly mown grass. Keeping the campus pruned and trimmed was an endless task, but Will loved it. Never thought he'd end up a groundskeeper—not with his background and education—but he had to admit it had its rewards. He found a very real satisfaction in doing simple labor with his hands. Weeding, edging, pruning, doing motor maintenance, it didn't matter. While his hands were busy, his mind was left free to roam. And roam it did. It occurred to him that he had done more heavy-duty thinking in the last few years than he had done in his entire life, and that was pushing half a century.

But still he hadn't found any answers. Only more questions.

Back to the tractor. The old John Deere was one of the crew's workhorses and it had been kicking up all week, coughing, sputtering, stalling. He thought he'd heard something that sounded like a bad wire. He'd replaced it. Now came the test.

The engine started on the first turn of the key. Will listened carefully. He could tell a lot about an engine just from the way it sounded. It was a knack he'd discovered back when he began fooling around with cars as a teenager.

"Hey, Willie! Sounds great!"

Will looked up and saw Joe Bob Hawkins, the foreman of the grounds crew, standing over him. He was younger than Will—about forty or so—but his receding red hair and big, burly barrel-chested physique made him seem older.

"Bad wire," Will told him.

"You got that magic touch, I tell ya. Ain't never seen a body could fix an engine the way you do. Y'all got a degree in motor medicine or something?"

"You got it, Joe Bob. I'm an M.D.—a motor doctor."

"That you are, guy," he said with a laugh, "that you are. Tell you what. You stow that thing in the garage and then join me in my office. I'll buy you a TGIF snort of sour mash."

Will thought about that. A drink would be good about now, although he'd have preferred a cold beer to a shooter. And some simple conversation with an affable good oF boy like Joe Bob would be good, too. But he couldn't risk it.

"Aw, I'd love to, J.B., but I've got to hit the road as soon as I'm off. My ma's been kinda sick and so I'm heading north for the weekend."

"That's too bad. She's not bad sick, is she?"

"Yes and no. It's her heart. Sometimes it acts up and sometimes it don't. Lately it is."

Will hated the easy way the lies tripped off his tongue, but this story was so well practiced he almost believed it himself.

"Well, okay," Joe Bob said. "I reckon y'all better get hustlin'. I hope she's all right. If there's anything I can do, you know, if you need some extra time off to stay with her or anything like that, you just let me know."

"I hope it won't come to that, but thanks for offering."

Will was touched by Joe Bob's genuine concern, which made him feel worse than usual for lying. But there was no way he could go kill a halfrhour or more sitting and sipping in the foreman's office.

There was a telephone there.

Will drove the tractor over to the garage and stowed it away for the weekend, then headed for the parking lot.

On the ride home, Will cruised Conway Street and thought about the day. He hadn't connected with Lisl today, so at least he hadn't had to lie to her again about rereading The Stranger. Couldn't let her know what he really was reading. She'd ask too many questions. Questions he couldn't answer.

Pretty foolish stunt, bringing it to work with him. Almost as if he wanted her to see it, wanted her to ask those questions. Was that it? Was his subconscious deliberately nudging him into exposing his past, pushing him to get off the dime and into motion instead of marking time here year after year?

Maybe. But no matter what his subconscious wanted, Will knew he wasn't ready to surface again. He still had a ways to go before he could even consider going back.

Maybe he'd never go back. He liked it here in N.C.; he was fitting in, and Lisl was a big part of that comfortable feeling. She made him feel good. Yet she had her share of hang-ups, the most glaring being her lack of self-esteem. She was bright, warm, real, so free of pretense, a refreshing trait these days on the campus of "the new Harvard of the South." She'd had no trouble convincing Will of her brilliance, her sweetness. Why couldn't she see it?

Somebody had done a real number on Lisl. The most obvious culprit was her ex-husband, but Will sensed that it went deeper than that. What were her parents like? How had they raised her? Stuck her in front of a TV? Like so many people he met these days, Lisl seemed to have been raised with no values. She was brilliant, but she lacked focus. She was incomplete, vulnerable, and lacking a vital piece: someone to love. The right someone could make it all come together for her. The wrong someone—again—could unravel her. Will knew he was one of the wrong someones.

He wished he could help her, but didn't know exactly what to do with her—pulling her closer, pushing her away, wanting to open up to her the way she had opened up to him, yet knowing he couldn't really open up to anyone ever again.

Lisl parked her car in her assigned space and got out. The sun was well on its way down the sky, but the early September air was still warm and slightly hazy with the humidity. Hazy enough to mute and blend the various shades of green on the trees and the wild splotches of color from the bunches of mums blossoming all over the grounds. Only the aging garden apartments kept the scene from being an Impressionist's dream.

Brookside Gardens was a set of two-story brick apartments, occupied for the most part by young marrieds, many with kids. It could get noisy here on Saturday afternoons. But Brookside adequately suited Lisl's needs. Her one-bedroom unit offered security and comfort, was the perfect size, and didn't strain her bank account. What more could she ask?

Right now? Maybe a little company. She wished Will lived nearby instead of out in the country. She had this urge to drop in on someone and plop into a chair and talk about nothing over a glass of wine. But there was no one here she knew well enough for that.

That was one problem with Brookside. She had no real friends here. She didn't fit in with the young marrieds surrounding her. Sure, they welcomed her to their parties and cookouts on holiday weekends, and she'd drink and talk and laugh with them, but she never felt at ease with them, never really felt she belonged.

Well, it wasn't really relevant tonight. She had to get herself spruced up for Dr. Rogers's Welcome Back party.

In the old days, it might have been called a faculty tea. Nowadays it was a cocktail party. Lisl really didn't want to go. She wouldn't know anyone there. After all it was the psych department, not math. She and Ev had only helped them with a few snags over the summer. No big thing. No reason to invite them to the party. Of course it would have been a little easier to take if Ev were going. At least she'd have someone to talk to. But Ev never went to parties.

Lisl wasn't a party person either. She saw herself as the dullest of people. A rotten conversationalist who could think of nothing to say once she'd covered the weather and general comments about the incoming student body. Then there'd be these long uncomfortable silences and she and whoever she was with would slowly drift to different rooms.

Funny, she never seemed to run out of things to say to Will.

But Will wasn't going to be there, so forget that. If tonight followed the usual pattern, she'd wind up alone, standing by the bookshelves, nursing a plastic tumbler of too-tart chablis as she sneaked looks at her watch and pretended to be interested in what titles and authors were stacked on the shelf. Usually the selection was as uninteresting as she felt.

But this.past summer had proved an unusually solitary one. She'd shuttled between her apartment and her office six days a week with little or no deviation in pattern. Over a long, lonely Labor Day weekend she had decided it was time to force herself into some sort of social… what? Whirl? Her social life would never whirl. And she wasn't sure she wanted it to. A social crawl was more her speed. She'd settle for that. Gladly.

And so the old Lisl was determined to become a different

Lisl, a new, improved, socializing Lisl. She would turn down no invitation to a social gathering, no matter how dreadful she thought it might be.

Which was why she was determined to show up at Cal Rogers's party tonight.

But the most immediate problem was what to wear. These things were casual but Lisl didn't want to be too casual. Most of her comfortable clothes fell into the too-casual category; and her good stuff really didn't fit her anymore. She'd gained more poundage over the summer and was now weighing in at one-sixty-five.

You're a cow, she thought, looking in the mirror.

She rarely looked in the mirror. What for? To check how she looked? She wasn't all that interested. Since the divorce she hadn't been able to dredge up much interest in anything besides her work. Certainly not much interest in men. Not after what Brian had put her through. Six years later it still hurt.

Brian… they'd met as freshman in calculus class at U.N.C., both of them aiming toward a B.S., Brian a premed in biology, Lisl a math major. A tentative courtship, a growing affection blossoming into love, at least on Lisl's part, and then sexual intimacy, the first time for Lisl. They were married immediately after graduation and moved to Pendleton where Lisl went to work teaching high school math while Brian started his stint at Darnell University medical school. Lisl supported him through most of those four years, taking occasional night courses toward her masters in math. During Brian's fourth year in medical school she discovered that he was having an affair with one of the nurses at the hospital. That would have been bad enough, but she learned from one of the other nurses that since he had begun his in-hospital clinical training, Brian had been bedding any female employee who would have him.

Lisl felt her throat constrict at the memory. God, it still hurt. After all this time, it still hurt.

Lisl filed for divorce. This seemed to infuriate Brian. Apparently he had wanted to be the one to do the dumping. Lisl's lawyer told her that he was probably terrified, too, because of a recent legal precedent in which a wife who had supported her husband through medical school could demand a share of the future proceeds he reaped from that diploma.

Lisl wanted no part of that. She only wanted out. And she had gotten out.

But Brian made sure he had the last word.

When all was said and done, when all the papers had been signed and notarized, Brian had caught up to her as she'd fled the attorney's office.

"I never loved you," he said, then walked away.

No amount of physical abuse, no tirade of vituperation, no stream of curses, no matter how long, how loud, how vile could have hurt Lisl nearly as much as those four whispered words. Although she had said nothing and had walked coolly and calmly to her car, inside she'd been shattered, completely, utterly.

I never loved you.

The words had been echoing down the empty hallways of her life ever since.

Even now she felt her knees wobble with the hurt. And the worst part was that he was still around. He lived on the other side of town and was now on staff as an orthopedist at the county medical center.

Shaking off the memory, Lisl searched deep in her closet for something to wear, but stopped when she came across a familiar-looking shoe box. She lifted the lid and found her old shell collection from childhood. She smiled at the memory of how she'd once wanted to be a marine biologist.

Shells. All through her life she'd assigned shells to the people in her life. She picked up a beautiful brown-striped chambered nautilus. This was Will—big, mysterious, hiding who-knew-what in all those inner chambers; and secretive, withdrawing and snapping his lid shut whenever anyone got too close. The razor clam was Ev, thin, sharp-edged, smooth-surfaced, unadorned, what you saw was what you got. And here was Brian, a starfish, gentle and appealing on the surface, but it survived by trapping a mollusk with its arms, boring through its shell, and sucking out the soft parts inside, leaving an empty husk.

Like me, Lisl thought, picking up a chowder clam shell—common, uncollectible, its pale, dull surface windowed by a starfish burr hole. Me.

She lidded the box and continued her search for something to wear. She wound up squeezed into a pair of cream-colored slacks topped with an oversize lightweight sweater. She felt like a sausage from the waist down but it would have to do. A little makeup, five minutes with the curling iron, and she was set. All she had to do was get through the evening without splitting a seam.

Someday soon she was going to do something about these extra pounds.