Purgatory Ridge

He’d meant to stay awake, waiting for her return, but the next thing he knew the room was bright with morning light and Jo was still not beside him in their bed. He glanced at the radio alarm: seven-fifteen.

“Have you seen your sister?” he asked Rose, who was in the kitchen in her robe.

Rose yawned and pointed to the refrigerator. “She left a note.”

Cork pulled the slip of paper off the refrigerator door.

Couldn’t sleep. Gone to the office. Jo

“Did you hear her leave?” he asked.

“No.” Rose held a white mug with THE WORLD’S BEST AUNT in red on the side, and she was watching closely the last few drips as the coffeemaker finished its business.

Cork heard the television come on in the living room. He glanced through the kitchen doorway and saw that Stevie was up and settling himself to watch cartoons. Cork stepped to the wall phone and dialed Jo’s office number. After four rings, her voice message system kicked in. He hung up.

“Coffee?” Rose sipped from her big mug and already looked more awake.

“Thanks, I’ll get it myself.”

She watched him a moment, then asked, “Are you okay?”

“Fine,” he said.

It was a lie. For he was remembering a time, not that long ago, when Jo had been restless and gone at odd hours and the reason for it was that she’d been in love with another man and had stolen time to slip into his bed. Cork looked out the kitchen window. Jo had left the garage door open. He stared at the empty place where her old Toyota usually sat, gripped his coffee cup tightly, and chided himself. He hadn’t been guiltless. He’d been in love with someone else, too, and regularly visited her bed. That was all in the past now. Surely they’d put the hurt and the distrust behind them. Hadn’t they?

He sipped his coffee and burned his lip. “Shit.”

Rose had opened a cupboard to get some Bisquick. She paused, the box halfway between cupboard and counter. “You seem upset, Cork.”

“I told you,” he replied, so harshly that he surprised even himself, “everything’s fine.”

He left the kitchen. In the living room, Stevie sat on the sofa. He had his thumb in his mouth, an old habit that, even at six, still sometimes surfaced when he was very tired or very scared.

“Hey, buddy.”

Cork had tried to put some lightness in his tone, but Stevie didn’t look up from the television. Cork didn’t push it. He headed upstairs to dress for his morning run.

He’d run his first marathon the previous fall in the Twin Cities and his second, the famous Grandma’s Marathon in Duluth, the following summer. He’d taken to running at the same time he gave up cigarettes, and he’d done both these things because of a promise he’d made to a woman he’d loved who was not Jo. In those days, he’d lived alone at Sam’s Place.

During the long months of separation from his family, what he’d wanted most was to bring them all back together somehow. He’d believed-foolishly, he thought now-that once he was back in the house on Gooseberry Lane, they could simply pick up where the good part of their lives had left off. But every day, life changed people, and when it hurt them, especially, it changed them a lot and forever. He and Jo never talked about that part of their past, when he’d loved a waitress and Jo had loved a rich man. Both lovers were dead now, yet it was as if their ghosts remained, haunting the silences that often slipped between Cork and Jo. He longed to talk about these things, but always in the back of his mind was the image of his marriage as a wounded, limping thing. What was the use of touching the old hurts? Wasn’t it better simply to let time heal them?

Normally on his morning run, he followed one of the roads that edged Iron Lake. That morning, however, his feet followed a different route, one that took him to the Aurora Professional Building where Jo had her law office. He went in, dripping sweat. Fran Cooper, Jo’s secretary, looked up from her desk. Cork had known Fran his whole life. She’d been secretary of his senior class, got pregnant (rumor had it) the night of senior prom, and married Andy Cooper the following summer. They were still married and, from all appearances, still happy. The child that had been born to them was a Valentine’s Day baby and was now in her second year of medical school at the University of Minnesota. Fran looked Cork over and smiled.

“I think you took a wrong turn in the home stretch, Cork.”

“Looking for Jo,” he replied, a little out of breath.

“Not here. She’d already come and gone when I got in this morning. She left a note asking me to reschedule her appointments for today. She’s out at the reservation.”

“Any idea why?”

“Her note didn’t say. But dollars to doughnuts it’s got something to do with Charlie Warren.” She glanced down where drops of Cork’s perspiration were turning the beige carpet gray. “You want some water or something?”

“No thanks.”

“I keep telling Jo to get a cell phone, Cork.” Fran shrugged as if she’d done her best.