Page 73 of Pro Bono

“Probably not, but I appreciate your willingness. Sometime when it’s in the natural course of things you and Vesper can come to the club for lunch. I don’t think I’m ready to have a dinner party for you two and them and their husbands, but I may get around to it. We’re leaving Tuesday, so there’s not really time anyway.”

“Can you give me a call after you get up there and let me know you made it?”

“Okay,” she said. “I do have to ask, though. You know I went to all sorts of places while I was living in other parts of the country, right? Europe, Asia, Australia, and so on?”

“Yes. But since then, you can get signal bars almost anywhere, and it’s easier to catch me when I can talk.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll try to make up for all the calls I owe you.”

“Thanks,” he said.

“You can call me too, you know,” she said.

“That’s true,” he said. “I just may.”

The Mercedes arrived at Linda Warren’s house at sixA.M.on Tuesday, and Linda came out with her bag as Mary opened the trunk. Linda had looked up the distance and time from Los Angeles to Lake Tahoe, which seemed to her to be the general vicinity of their destination, and found it was 441 miles. That meant they would be on the road for eight hours and likely arrive around twoP.M.

As she reached the car, she said, “Maybe I should take the first turn as driver. It’s all freeway for the first few hours, right? You don’t have to actually know the way until the end.”

“You’re a great addition to the crew,” Mary said. “Take the wheel. If you can find your way to the Golden State Freeway—the Five—you will have us pointed in the right direction.” She got into the passenger seat.

Wendy was in the back. As she lay down on the seat she said, “Thanks. That means I can get a couple more hours of sleep so I can wake up charming and companionable.”

Linda hadn’t spent much time driving in any of the places where she had lived in recent years, particularly on Maui, but she was still a good driver because of her years as a commuter in Los Angeles. She got them onto the northbound entrance and then onto the right strand of the tangled freeway as it passed through the narrow spacebetween hills and gradually spread out and took several directions. She guided the Mercedes out on the right one and continued northward toward Santa Clarita and Castaic and Gorman, heading up the long state with the eighteen-wheeler trucks for Merced and Modesto and Sacramento. For four hours Mary dosed off beside her, so Linda’s companions were both unconscious. She was comfortable with the silence. The Mercedes smothered the road sounds and the wind, and it left her time to think.

The solitude was preferable to the bright, mostly cynical chatter that the other two had learned in whatever their normal lives were. They seemed to have spent the past fifteen years in cocktail parties or the sort of dinners where the guests were expected to demonstrate whether they should be judged among the quick or the dead. She didn’t blame them, but she wasn’t surprised that they needed to rest in nature. The big thing that she had noticed about all the places out there in big nature—forests, oceans, mountains—was that they held long periods of deep silence. She had grown comfortable with that, partly because, once she had thought about it, she realized that it was a reassertion of the normal proportions. The world, at least in the vast spaces between cities, didn’t need words, and simply swallowed them.

Linda had not transcended the human need to be accepted, liked, and admired, so she spent some of this free time thinking about ways to accomplish and preserve this effect. Often it was simply not talking too much or too little, appearing to like everything, and smiling frequently, so she reminded herself to do those things.

Wendy woke up first. “Hi, Linda. Where are we?”

“Just past Merced,” Linda said.

“Wow. You’ve taken us so far.”

“It’s a start, anyway.” Linda said.

“If you see a coffee shop or gas station, make a stop and I’ll take the next shift.”

The rest of the drive was harder for Linda, because the others were both wide awake and talkative. It occurred to her that she had probably made a mistake by taking the first driving shift, because it created a difference in their bodies’ schedules. She had driven for four hours, about half the trip. When they reached their destination, it would only be midafternoon. They would be alert and she would be tired.

They stopped for lunch at a Denny’s near Sacramento. In a way it made Linda feel more comfortable. They were two middle-aged women who didn’t need to worry about money, but at least in this instance they weren’t going to be pretentious and hold out for an expensive restaurant in the state capital, where politicians and lobbyists ate. They were more interested in the practical and efficient. They were well-fed and back on the road in forty minutes.

The rest of the trip was increasingly interesting to Linda, partly because as they were moving out of the long stretch of farmland in the middle of the state and into the zone of mountains and forests, there was more for her to see. It was also partly because her companions were talking about their lives. Wendy was a couple years older than Mary. They were both very attractive and vain, but they were in a lighter mood today, and willing to laugh at themselves. Wendy said she was having a hard time getting to know the controls on her new fitness watch. She couldn’t make the watch give her credit for the exercise she got during sex with her husband. The watch seemed only to recognize footsteps and the motion on an elliptical trainer. Mary said maybe she should get her husband to chase her. Linda learned that she had been right about them. They had met in an acting class about twenty years ago, had gotten a few minor roles, most of them in commercials, and had stayed friendsduring the years when their careers didn’t get better, when they’d married, divorced, and remarried, when they had been busy raising young children, and now, when they didn’t seem to know what they should be doing, but knew whatever it was, it wasn’t going to be work.

When they reached the turnoff onto the road to the lake, Mary was driving. Linda was attentive and curious, craning her neck to look out the windows on both sides and then leaning back to look up through the rear window to see the tops of the trees, and then, when they’d gone farther in, to see the first flashes of blue water through the spaces between the pines. The place was as beautiful as her two companions had promised.

The house was much as they had described. The part facing the road was a two-story rectangle, but the part that faced the lake rose into a tall A-frame. It was built on a grassy bank right above the lake, with a garage on one side and a boathouse on pilings over a dock jutting out above the water on the other.

The biggest surprise was the man who came out the front door to greet them as Mary glided to a stop. He was about six feet two with blond hair that was just beginning to shade off into silver at the temples. His straight posture made him seem taller, and his face had a sculpted look and a tan that made his blue eyes stand out.

Wendy got out of the car on that side and hugged the man, which was a profound shock to Linda until she saw it was quick and perfunctory, and said, “Linda, this is Paul, our landlord for the trip. Paul, Linda is a stray person we found at our club in LA and recognized as a kindred spirit, so here she is.”

Paul nodded and smiled and said to Linda, “I hope your trip up here was pleasant.”

“Yes, it was, thanks.”

“Go ahead and hug her, Paul,” Mary said. “Otherwise, she’ll feel left out.”

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