He kept his eyes on her face. It wasn’t easy.
She said, “It’s for your birthday, isn’t it? You said your birthday was in two days. Also, that’s the Super Bowl, if we’re talking about Sunday, which could affect travel. I imagine people will be traveling less, though, so you may be able to get last-minute tickets.”
“No,” he said. “Well, yeah, it’s my birthday, but that’s not the event. And you’re right. I should take somebody.” He grinned at her, feeling about three hundred times better. “Want to go to North Dakota?”
“What?” Dyma said the next morning, when Jennifer informed her of the plan. Sketchily, because they were headed down to breakfast.
“You’re always saying I’m not spontaneous,” Jennifer said. “Here I am, being spontaneous.”
“Flying to North Dakota for one day. And back. For some guy. All right, a super hot guy, but he doesn’t even live in Idaho!”
“That’s right. But notice that he’s taking you, too.” Jennifer would have explained, except that she couldn’t really explain. “It seemed like a good idea at the time” was a daughter-explanation, not a mother-explanation.
“What’s Blake going to say?” Dyma asked. “You’re not exactly fulfilling your employee responsibilities, which is more or less your life’s purpose. So what’s the deal?”
She needed to tell Dyma about the layoff. But not when she had about five minutes to do it.
Which was weaseling out. It seemed she was a weasel, though, because she pulled on another possibly-too-tight-for-public-consumption base layer, this one black and printed with snowflakes—which was long underwear, and in no way sexy, so never mind—and said, “It’s one day. And don’t say anything about my job, or Blake.”
“Why not? Because you want to impress Kris with your supposed wealth, that you can afford to stay here while they redecorate the beach house? He’s probably so confused by now.”
“Excuse me?” They needed to get to breakfast, but Jennifer was still stopping in the midst of wriggling into her ski pants. “I don’t seem like I could possibly be anyone who can afford to stay here? What, am I wearing the Stamp of Poverty on my forehead?”
“Mom. Your clothes? You’ve been wearing Levi’s and shirts from Boot Barn. Also, you can’t ski. Middle-class people can ski, and rich people are practically born with a lift ticket clipped to their jacket zippers.”
“Maybe I’m a middle-class person from Texas. Maybe I raise prize Arabians on my horse farm. Anyway, Levi’s are classic. They’re curvy fit! They cost forty dollars!”
“Except I already told Owen we’re from Idaho and that I’d never been on a ranch, remember? I’m just ignoring the part about the forty dollars. That’s not exactly designer fashion, Mom.”
“Well,” Jennifer said, “I’m not going to worry about it.”
“You worry about everything,” Dyma said.
“Except this.” She slipped into her moccasins, reflected on the fact that her makeup was confined to lip gloss, and abandoned the thought. She was going to be so covered up out there, she might as well be wearing a burka, and Dyma was right. She didn’t have glamorous regular clothes, and she didn’t have glamorous ski clothes, either. She wasn’t going to be fooling anybody, so she might as well be herself. “But don’t mention Blake,” she reminded Dyma again. “VIPs value their privacy, and he pays me to preserve it. Everybody wants to feel like they know him, and he’s just trying to live his life.”
Dyma, naturally, rolled her eyes. “Let’s see, how many times have you told me that? I believe this is number eighteen. Since the whole point of his being in Wild Horse was to build a resort that’s only making money because he’s a big star, that makes zero sense. He’s not exactly incognito. I tell you what. I’ll tell Owen you work for a Mafia boss, and that I can’t say any more or they’ll kill me. How’s that?”
“Unbelievable,” Jennifer answered. “I don’t think there’s a whole lot of Mafia activity in North Idaho.”
Six or seven or forty-five hours later, because she’d lost track of the endless slog of time, she had no idea what Dyma was telling Owen, and she didn’t care. Her daughter was getting an advanced ski lesson, presumably somewhere far, far ahead. She might have worried about that, but since the temperature had never topped about ten degrees, she didn’t imagine anybody was taking off any clothes.
As for her? She was (A) frozen, (B) bruised, and (C) frustrated. Oh, and probably (D) humiliated, too. Kris had asked, “Want to try a slightly hillier trail today, up in the trees? I hear we could see some elk up there.” The problem was that she’d imagined herself, for one reckless instant, as some other person, the kind of woman who did Zumba at the gym instead of the elliptical machine due to her immense coordination, natural athletic ability, and sorority-girl personality, and said, “Sure.”
Now, she was in one of those spots where you couldn’t go back, because it was too far, and you couldn’t go home, because that was what you were trying to do anyway, and also because they probably didn’t do helicopter rescues just because you’d had enough and were about to cry. She’d fallen on her butt at least six more times, some of them hard enough to rattle her teeth and do her bruises no good at all, she had a headache from all the teeth-rattling, Kris had had to help her get upright at least half of those times, after she’d flailed around like a walrus on an ice floe, or slid sideways down the hill with her skis in the air like some kind of dead bug, and she was long past the point of laughing gaily at her misadventures. Also, right now, she was looking at the steepest downhill yet, or rather, observing Kris doing a slalom thing down it, even though he’d said he was a beginner, too.
He did a sort of turn-in-place to stop, shoved his goggles up to look back up at her, and beckoned her down, and she thought, No. I can’t. I refuse.
Which was when he skied back to up to her, using some more skills, and said, “You can snowplow all the way down. Look. Bend your knees as far as you can, and turn your toes all the way in.” And demonstrated. Gracefully.
Her thighs ached. Her butt hurt. Her triceps and shoulders and forearms burned from her efforts with the ski poles. She’d spent too many hours tense and scared. At least, she assumed that was why her throat was closing up and she was saying, “I’m not sure I …” Her voice wobbled, and she steadied it with a major effort, felt the tears pricking behind her eyes, and said, “You’re right. I’m going to do that.”
Not because of impressing him. After tomorrow, when she’d help him through his event, she’d fly home and never see him again, and anyway, she was pretty sure that any shot she’d had of “impressing” had died somewhere around the dead-bug stage. This wasn’t going to be about impressing him. This was her proving to herself that she could try something new, and that fear didn’t have to stop her. If her legs were trembling with tension and exhaustion? They were nearly back to the lodge, she’d skied nine miles, they hadn’t all been flat, and that was a victory. She was going to make it a victory.