The Significant Seven (8 page)

Chapter Fifteen

May 10, 2009

Doyle parked his Accord in the trailer park lot, noticing that his vehicle, a 2006 model, stood out amidst a generation of much older cars and pickup trucks. A couple of families sat under the two scraggly trees at the far end of the property. The men drank beer as they talked and and occasionally tended to the meat broiling on the battered Weber grill. The women sat at the scarred picnic table, watching their children chase each other around the dusty perimeter of the property.

The drive over from the track had taken longer than he’d expected. It was evening traffic time in the western suburbs. The previous year, Doyle had finally broken himself of his habit of reading every bumper sticker and vanity license plate that came into his view when he was behind the wheel. It was a ridiculous habit, and he knew it, but it had taken him time to change his compulsive ways. But he managed.

Unfortunately, he’d replaced those two addictions with a concentration on car names, the likes of which astounded him. At the intersection of Highway 53 and Keno Road, waiting for the very slow-to-appear left turn signal, he started saying to himself, “A car named the Equinox? There’s an Avalanche over there. Whoops, don’t drop onto the Canyon next to you, man.”

The light changed with Doyle muttering, “The Vibe? The Stanza? The Sonata? Enclave? What the hell does an Enclave have to do with a car?”

Doyle had bumped into Cindy that morning as she was leaving the Tenuta barn, having exercised four horses for Ralph. It was a literal bumping, Doyle turning right at a corner of the barn just as Cindy veered left coming from the opposite direction. There was a moment of surprise, shock, then laughter. Doyle, involuntarily reaching out to grab her, felt the work-created strength of her arms, smelled the combination of sweat and perfume that she emanated.

“My fault,” Doyle said.

“No, just as much mine,” Cindy replied. “I had my mind on a couple of things besides backstretch foot traffic.”

They chatted for a few minutes before Doyle said, “Hey, how about I buy you dinner some night?” He gave her what he believed was his most sincere, engaging look. For a change, it worked. “I’d like that,” Cindy said. “Tonight’d be great.”

Home from the track, Cindy played with Tyler, the two of them doing rudimentary puzzles at the kitchen table. Then she showered and walked into the trailer’s kitchen, wrapped in a towel, blond hair damp, and poured herself a shot of tequila from the bottle on the door of the refrigerator. She heard her mother say, “Now, just exactly what knight missing his armor will be calling for you here tonight?” The remark was followed by the combined laughter of Wilma and her best friend, Doris Bush, visiting from her nearby trailer.

“I wouldn’t be making fun of my date before you meet him,” Cindy shot back. “You two haven’t had anything to do with men for twenty years. Except the clerks you harass at Walmart. Or the old farts you bully at church bingo.” She heard them cackle at that, too.

“What’s he like?” Cindy said to herself. “Nice looking, good manners, good sense of humor. An interesting man.”
And single
, she said to herself. She decided she’d withhold that last bit of info from Wilma for the time being. Cindy frowned, remembering that she’d heard Jack was a university grad, University of Illinois she thought, compared to her total of five spread-out semesters at three community colleges.

Showered and dressed, Cindy checked herself in the small mirror over the old brown bureau in her tiny bedroom. It was one of the several pieces of third-hand furniture she and Wilma, Tyler in tow, had hauled into their leased home two years earlier. “As good as I can get now,” she murmured, tucking a still moist tendril behind her ear.

***

Cindy opened the door before Doyle had reached the top of the four trailer steps. “Hi, Jack. Welcome.” She motioned him forward. Doyle’s eyebrows lifted as he watched her proceed him. This evening Cindy was a startlingly feminine contrast to the woman he saw racetrack mornings.

She led him into the living room of the trailer, its largest room. The centerpiece was a large television set. Staring at it intently were two elderly women. They were watching
Wheel of Fortune.
Each had a half-finished highball in her hand. Both women had their feet up on a wooden table in front of the couch on which they sat. In front of the table was a floor fan, cleverly aimed to cool them up their skirts, which were pulled up knee high. They smiled merrily as Cindy introduced Doyle. “My mother, Wilma, and her friend, Doris. My friend, too.”

“Glad to meet you, ladies.”

Cindy went over to the left door leading to that side of the trailer. “Tyler, c’mon out here,” she said. A thumping of feet was followed by the arrival of a chunky, fair-haired youngster wearing Spiderman pajamas and a Chicago Cubs baseball cap turned sideways. There was a surprised expression on his round face. He took off his thick glasses and rubbed his eyes before looking directly at Doyle. “Tyler,” Cindy said, “this is Mr. Doyle. Jack, this is my son Tyler.”

It was then that Doyle recalled Ralph Tenuta saying Cindy was a single mother of a child with some disability. Doyle had assumed she was just single, one of the numerous independent feminine members of the backstretch work force who’d filled out their census forms that way. He held out his hand. “Tyler, how are you. Good to meet you.”

Tyler regarded the hand warily Then he responded with a quick grab and a gap-toothed grin. “Gotta finish…gotta finish…see cartoons,” he said. He rapidly reversed course back into his bedroom.

Minutes later, in the car, Doyle said, “I made a reservation at Tom’s Charhouse, over on Palatine Road. Is that okay with you?”

“I’ve never been there,” Cindy said. “I’ve heard it’s really good.”

“Ralph recommended it. He takes his wife there a lot.”

“Ralph Tenuta’s got money,” Cindy said softly, looking out her window into the advancing dusk.

Doyle shrugged. “I have, too,” he smiled, “at least for tonight.”

He turned north on Wilke Avenue. “How old is Tyler?” he said.

Cindy gave him a sharp look before saying, “He’s eight. He’s short for his age.”

“Nice-looking kid,” Doyle said.

They rode in silence for several blocks before Cindy said, “You must be aware that Tyler’s different, right?”

Doyle hesitated before saying, “A cousin of mine has a daughter who kind of reminds me of Tyler. About the same age. She’s a wonderful kid named Naomi. She has Down syndrome.” He banged his horn as a tiny, gray-haired woman driver attempted to enter his lane in her old Buick. She responded by angrily raising a middle finger.

Cindy said, “Tyler was unlucky to be born with Down. But I’m lucky to have him. He’s the light of my life. He’s what I live for, knowing that he lives for me.” She looked out her window, talking now with her head turned away from Jack. “And we were lucky he doesn’t have some of the worst things that Down kids can have, like congenital heart defects. Like severe mental retardation. My husband was killed when Tyler was four. But those four years we all had together, I thank God for them.”

Doyle zipped through the next intersection before saying, “Gotta be very, very tough.”

Cindy laughed an are-you-kidding laugh. “Sure it’s tough. How could it be any other way? Finding Tyler the right kind of schooling, near us, that I could afford. Watching him struggle with simple things. Watching people give him the strange looks that people do, for kids that look like he does. Or adults like him, for that matter. They stand out from a physical standpoint, no question.”

“But then, after awhile,” she said with a smile, “watching Tyler
get
stuff. That was so exciting for me. Way after most kids his age, but still making progress. The look on his face when that window opens in his mind, that makes my heart lift. And my Mom’s. She’s a character, had rough times of her own, but she is great with my Tyler. And she loves him like I do. We’re going to get him into a great school next year.”

She paused. Turning to Doyle, she said, “I’d really rather not talk about this anymore tonight, okay?”

Doyle turned on the Accord’s CD player. He advanced it from the vibrant sounds of New Orleans luminary Dr. John to the quieter work of another Crescent City legend, Wynton Marsalis, playing ballads.

Cindy sat back in her seat. “What are you smiling at?” Doyle said.

“Not anything very interesting,” she said. She relaxed her tired shoulder muscles, thinking how nice it was to have a rare night out with an apparently nice guy, no financial worries on her mind right now. Not another Friday night at the Pic-n-Save market, hoping her endangered credit card passed muster as the bagger packed up her modest collection of necessities. Those nights, the continual war between solvency and savings and debt that enveloped and defined her working life chafed her nerves. Not tonight. She glanced at Doyle. He looked good in profile, even with that slight bump in his boxer’s nose.

***

In its music room/lounge, Tom’s Charhouse this week was featuring a guitar player from a Chicago soft rock band that had been briefly famous two decades earlier. Doyle and Cindy stopped to read the poster with the man’s name and photo on it. A critical review quoted beneath the picture of the musician stated that his music as a soloist in recent years had become “meditative and earthy, luminous and pensive.” Peering into the sparsely populated lounge, they saw an overweight, gray-haired, pony-tailed man bearing not the slightest resemblance to the poster photo from his old band’s glory days. He rumbled into the beginning of a Joe Cocker hit that, Doyle immediately decided, he should have left to Joe Cocker.

“Good God,” Doyle said. “Let’s get a table on the far side of the dining room. Okay?”

The Charhouse host, a harried looking fellow, greeted them at his lectern. Doyle watched as the man carefully scrutinized the night’s roster before checking off Doyle’s reservation. To Doyle, the host looked a lot like Ralph Nader, but even more humorless. At Doyle’s request, and motivated by the double sawbuck Doyle slipped him, the Nader lookalike quickly led them to a table in the rear of the crowded dining room. It was next to a window overlooking the nearby street. Cindy asked their waiter for iced tea, Doyle ordered Bushmills on the rocks. They both opted for steak, the house specialty, a New York strip for Doyle, a twenty-four ounce porterhouse for Cindy. Doyle’s surprise was apparent. Cindy said, “No, Jack, I can’t polish off a piece of beef that big. But Tyler loves, I mean loves, cold steak. He doesn’t get it very often. So, I’ll bring him some home.” She smiled at him over the rim of her glass. “I’m taking advantage of you here tonight.”

“No, the advantage is surely mine.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I’m here with by far the most attractive woman in the place.” He raised his glass. “To you.” She clinked her glass carefully against his.

“This is a real treat for me, Jack. I don’t often get to go out to places as nice as this.”

Over the salad course, Doyle employed what he had discovered years ago was the most effective way to ingratiate himself with women he was dating, or even just dealing with on a business level. He asked Cindy about herself. She responded with a description of her upbringing as a miner’s daughter in a small West Virginia town, her marriage and husband’s tragic death, the avenue that had delivered her to Heartland Downs for the work, to the trailer park with her mother.

Taking a breath from her narrative, Cindy asked for a glass of merlot. After a couple of bolstering sips, she said, “I’m second generation trailer folk, Jack. Not trash. Just people, most of them hard-trying like mine. Where I grew up was close to a run-down old riding stable, Sheridan Acres, run by a guy named Glen. He was the manager and part owner. He gave me a job after school and on weekends starting when I was fourteen. I loved working with the horses, learning to ride them. I got to be pretty much enamored with Glen. And he knew it.” She put the wine glass down and sat back in her chair, arms crossed across her chest, eyes lowered.

“Couple of years after Glen gave me the job, he gave me something else. A baby. I was sixteen, clueless. My Mom convinced me to put the child, a girl, up for adoption. I did. I’ve regretted it ever since. I’ve often thought that, years later, when I had Tyler, I was being punished for not keeping that perfectly healthy little girl. But I wouldn’t trade my Tyler for anything. There isn’t a more innocent, sweeter-natured person in the world.”

Tears began to slide down Cindy’s face. Doyle handed her a napkin. He didn’t know what to say. He was getting more and sadder information than he was used to in such situations.

“Two years later,” Cindy continued, “ I met Lane Chesney, Tyler’s daddy. You probably heard of him, a good jock who died young on the racetrack.”

“I have,” Doyle said. “That was a very sad thing.”

“It was. It was. Anyway, before I met Lane, I met and married another rider, name of Herbie Echols. We were both nineteen. He was a pretty good rider at that time, when he was straight, which lasted about a year into our marriage. Then he got to coking and drinking and running around on me. I divorced him. I didn’t even try to get alimony. I was hating him so much I didn’t even want money from the little bastard. Herbie moved to California and went downhill in a hurry. Lost his rider’s license about three times because he failed drug tests. Last I heard, Herbie was up in northern California trying to be a jock’s agent. Hah! The man could hardly sort out the bills in his wallet, much less keep track of a bank account or a condition book.”

She picked up her wine glass. “So, Jack, you probably know more than you ever wanted to know about me. I’m sorry I started rambling like that. Sorry for the tears, too.”

Patting her hand, Doyle said, “Actually, the comforting of widows has become kind of a specialty of mine.” Responding to Cindy’s quizzical look, Doyle continued “Oh, there was a lovely woman in New Zealand. Another one I knew, ah, quite well somewhat recently at Monee Park.”

Cindy, intrigued, said, “What happened between you and these women?”