Strays

The lot was nearly empty when Chase came round the bend. But the green Jag stood waiting, backed into the space this time, the lusty curves of her twin-beam front fenders beckoning as he pulled in. He parked the BMW down near the employee corner. As he crossed the gravel, Anita came out the side door in her customary black slacks and a black nylon jacket.

“Need anything before we go?” Anita said over the top of the sedan as Chase strode up to the shotgun side. “I’ll buy you a beer on the other end.”

“That’ll work,” Chase said, and they got in.

This all seemed so easy, he thought. In the months since Barbara left, Chase had felt a certain reticence—a general unease, the source of which he couldn’t identify—that hadn’t been there before when it came to his dealings with women. He’d found the freedom to guiltlessly bed whomever he chose far less liberating than he envisioned in the idle thoughts of years past. But with Anita he didn’t feel uneasy at all. He looked forward to a ride in a strange woman’s sedan to wherever she had in mind.

She took the road north along Bloomer Lake. He decided not to ask where they were going, and asked instead about her absence for a night from the tavern. They got along fine without her, Anita said, a situation that was essential in the restaurant business though not easily attained: It had taken years to find someone she could trust to treat the customers like their own, without treating the cash in the till the same way.

At Highway 84 she headed north. Traffic snaked slowly through the interchange at Danbury, lines of taillights coming up then going off like dominoes, as Thad used to say. Chase thought of the car trips they took as a young family, up the Takonic and along the Hudson, to the cottage in the Berkshires they bought when Chase ascended another rung of the partnership ladder. Trips that had a reliable rhythm and a comfortable way of replenishing Chase’s stores for the week ahead: Strolling through galleries and schlock shops in Lenox and Pittsfield, outfitting the cabin with eclectic and kitschy pieces Barbara said Chase wouldn’t tolerate in “Ridgefield Manor,” marking Thad’s progress on the bicycle or the ski slopes depending on the season. Outings in which they were safe among themselves, sheltered from the breezes that blow across a family’s bow.

He’d lost all that now. Some of it passed naturally enough, as Thad acquired his own agenda that kept them in Ridgefield on weekends. In the months since the rest of it passed, Chase had begun wondering how much of it would still be there, if he hadn’t brought on its demise or could somehow undo it.

“What’d you have before The Chieftain?” Chase asked, to clear his head.

“A grill on the West Side,” Anita said, eyes on the traffic, “and a husband.” She glanced over her left shoulder, then briefly at Chase once a lane-change was safely negotiated. “No partners this time.”

When she identified the “grill” in question, Chase recognized it as a trendy two-star on Amsterdam in the 100’s—the kind of place featured in any survey of Manhattan’s finest, complete with celebrity chef and coffee-table cookbook. Her kids, two girls, were fine in the city, she said. Whatever acrimony she and her ex might once have felt toward each other seemed somehow to have dissipated.

“Your partnership went, too,” Chase asked, “along with the divorce?” A business like they’d operated together would have been hard to give up, he thought. And his own separation from Barbara had been so quiet and free of rancor, he wondered whether they couldn’t have continued a successful business even while giving up on the marriage, if that’s what they were doing.

“Oh, yes. In some ways, the partnership went first I think.”

“How so?”

Anita peered ahead for a time, a wry grin eventually curling the corner of her mouth. “Well, you could say I got caught with my pants down,” she said finally, “and my legs up—wrapped around the waist of a certain sous chef at the height of the dinner crush.” She glanced briefly at Chase, who was not entertaining a reply, then back to her driving. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” She never set foot in the restaurant again. There followed a divorce in New York state court, where no-fault hadn’t yet taken hold and the “randy redhead”—as she called herself in the telling—got the “short share.” Which she promptly took into exile, buying a “run-down pub in Westchester County horse country” and “a quiet little place across the border” on Putnam Pond.

They drove on, covering hometowns and colleges, kids and their schools, life in suburban exile. An hour after they’d left the tavern, Anita pulled off in Hartford, where she wheeled the Jag down Main Street and turned left into the Civic Center. College students in UConn sweatshirts were filling the lot and filing into the arena.

“College basketball?” Chase said, pleased and showing it.

Anita smiled, lowered her window and flashed a parking pass she drew from a ticket envelope. As they set out across the lot, she took Chase’s arm in a way that discreetly conveyed the fullness of what he had theretofore taken for smallish breasts. She handed him a ticket at the turnstile then led the way to courtside seats. She showed him one that sat solo on the hardwood between seats occupied by two different groups. Chase checked his stub, which matched the number on the folding chair. Before approaching either party, he leaned over and asked Anita what seat number she had.

“None,” she said. “The beer’s on me if you want one, but I gotta run. Enjoy the game.”

With that she was off, jogging across the court to where two referees greeted her at the scorer’s table. The three stood jawing for a time with each other, and with the staff seated at the table. Anita peeled off her windbreaker; underneath, a black-and-white striped shirt was tucked into her black slacks. She pulled her hair into a ponytail, cinched it with a band she had in her pocket, and began touching her toes, twisting her torso, grabbing one foot behind her with the opposite hand, pulling the heel to her butt to stretch out the quads.

Then she turned and pointed her derringer at Chase, as the Holy Cross women burst out onto the floor.