Love Overdue

by Pamela Morsi

  “Amazing, huh,” she heard him say.

  “Yeah. Why do I think this was some game you played as a kid?” she asked.

  “If you’re thinking hide-and-seek, I did do some of that, but not out here. The wheat fields were never as much a playground as a getaway. Someplace where I could be on my own.”

  D.J. nodded to herself. She understood that. “I used to fantasize about building a tree house.”

  He laughed lightly. “Not a lot of tree houses in this part of the world,” he pointed out. “In a landscape as open as Kansas, sometimes you need a place to hide.”

  As she sat there, D.J. began to appreciate her own bit of isolation even more. And having him far enough away that she was on her own, but close enough that he could talk to her, seemed just about perfect.

  “It’s about perspective, I think. This must be what it feels like to be a rabbit or a field mouse,” he said. “Safe in every direction, except one. And I comfort myself that it’s always good for the soul to look up.”

  “Yes,” D.J. agreed.

  They remained there. Separate but together as the light began to fade.

  “It was hard being at the Porters’,” he said.

  D.J. murmured an agreement.

  “I know that I’m there to be a comfort to them in their loss,” he said. “But my own grief keeps raring up at me. Most of the time, I’m okay. When something like this happens, it’s like all that hurt is fresh again.”

  “Yes,” D.J. agreed. “It was like that for me, too. At least you have the excuse of time. Your family is still in mourning. My parents died ten years ago.”

  “But to lose both. I can’t even imagine it. I don’t want to imagine it,” he said. “I worry so much about my mom. I don’t think that I expected that. I thought that when Dad died, our relationship would continue as it always had. But there is this urgency about protecting her. Keeping her healthy and safe.”

  “Maybe you’re trying to pick up where your father left off,” D.J. suggested.

  “Yeah, that could be it,” he said. “Or it could be the fearfulness of ‘who will I matter to’ once she’s gone. Mainly no one.”

  “You’ll always matter to people,” D.J. assured him. “To friends and the people of the community.”

  “But will what I do matter?” he asked. “So much of my life I’ve spent trying to make my parents proud of me. Wanting to prove to them that I learned the lessons they taught me. If they’re not here, then who do I do it for?”

  “For yourself,” she answered.

  “Yeah, I guess it has to be that way,” he said. “Was it like that for you? Did you protect your remaining parent when the first one was gone?”

  “No,” she said. “They died together. Car accident.”

  “God. That’s crap,” he said. “At least with my dad’s illness we could see what was happening. I had a chance to say goodbye.”

  “No goodbyes for me,” D.J. said.

  “And I’m the one whining,” Scott said. “Sorry. Nothing like getting all wimpy in the wheat field.”

  “No, I...I think you have a right to whine. I do, too, but not in the same way. You had a real relationship with your father, and you miss that. I had, well, basically no relationship with my parents and now I know that I never will,” she said.

  “So you didn’t get along?”

  “We got along fine,” she answered. “They didn’t get along with each other very well, but they both seemed okay with me. They just weren’t that interested.”

  “Maybe it seemed that way.”

  “No, it was that way,” she told him with complete certainty. “Neither of them bonded with me, somehow. I used to speculate about it a lot. They were both in their mid-forties when I was born and I thought, maybe they couldn’t make the transition between being a childless couple to being parents.”

  “I guess that could happen,” Scott said.

  “Other times I thought there was no room for me in the relationship that they had,” she said. “My parents argued all the time. Among other people they could be smart and witty and interesting, but together they were always in battle, always looking for a weakness to exploit, always raising the level of insult and one-upmanship just a little bit higher.”

  “That must have been terrible.”

  “For me,” D.J. said. “But for them? They must have loved it, because they stayed in it. I used to daydream about them getting a divorce. No such luck.”

  D.J. couldn’t believe that she was sharing this. She couldn’t believe that she was sharing it with him. She hadn’t spoken of it. Not to her friends at school, not to her priest, not to anyone. But somehow in the anonymity of this wheat field, she couldn’t stop.

  “I guess my favorite rationalization is that maybe they didn’t know how to be a family. Never once did I ever meet or even hear about any relatives. All those cousins and uncles and in-laws at the Porter house, at my parents’ funeral there was one family member. Me.” She sighed heavily, gazing up from within the safety and concealment of the wheat all around her.

  “That’s your favorite excuse?” Scott asked. “I hate to hear the one you like the least.”

  She hesitated only an instant before she replied, surprising them both with her candor.

  “That I am unlovable,” she answered. “That there is something lacking in me that kept them at arm’s length.”

  There was the sound of tramping through the wheat and then he was sitting there beside her. He wasn’t too close. He didn’t intrude upon her space. But he was there. Inches away. As if near enough to catch a fall. And far enough to allow standing on her own.

  The darkness of the field, the towering height of the wheat created a space with only the two of them. It was intimate. No longer solitary. But they had forgotten that they needed that.

  “I’m guessing your dad didn’t have a lot of great advice for you.”

  “No, beyond ‘do well in school,’ I don’t recall anything.”

  “Okay, so let me share what I think were the wisest words my father ever told me.”

  “Okay.”

  “Not every bad thing that happens to you is your fault.”

  “No, of course not,” she agreed easily.

  “Wait, don’t just accept that truth. Own it. I think that’s the key,” Scott said. “Once you own it, then you’re free to let the doubts go.”

  They sat staring at each other across the enclosed space for a long moment.

  “That’s pretty wise,” she said.

  “My father was a wise man,” he said. “I hope to be one someday, too.”

  “That’s an admirable goal. Do you think you’ll get there?”

  Scott shrugged. “Well, I wouldn’t say that I’m much of a prodigy.”

  D.J. found his easy self-deprecation to be charming. There was no sense of false humility. There was an honesty and uncritical acceptance that was somehow winning. He was as easy to laugh with as he was to confide in.

  “I’ve always been a bit of a late bloomer myself,” she admitted.

  “You’ve come to the right place for that,” he told her. “In Verdant we like to take our time.”

  “Yeah,” she replied. “It’s one of the things I like about the place.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” he said. “Very good. I...I’ve been hoping that you’ll stick around.”

  At that moment, D.J. couldn’t imagine anyplace she’d rather be.

  They sat together in silence watching the stars gather above them.

  He did not move one inch closer in the quiet solitude. There was a safety in his presence that was both welcome and familiar. D.J. knew that feeling, but couldn’t quite place it. It wasn’t sexual. It was something else. Something that she had yearned for, but didn’t quite understand. Secretly she was wishing this respite would never end. But as the world continued spinning, it did.

  “We should probably go,” he said, finally.

  �
�Yes, I guess so.”

  They stood up and the world was totally different. The wheat was an onyx sea, ever moving in shadow. Above it the heavens were illuminated with the wink of stars and planets, the Milky Way like a giant streak of glimmer slashing across the sky.

  She was standing right next to him, awed by the beauty of the night sky and their tiny, tiny place in it. It seemed perfectly natural that he leaned down to gently press his lips to her temple. It wasn’t a kiss really, it was a consolation.

  “Take my hand,” he said.

  D.J. could see nothing as he unerringly led her through the darkened grain to the edge of the field.

  Thirty

  398.5 Folklore

  It was late when Viv finally left the Porters’. As she walked to her car, Mr. Dewey took the opportunity to relieve himself in the grass.

  “You did really well,” she told the dog. “I don’t know how you know what people need. But you were exactly right for Cora today. What in the world was Dutch thinking? Did he tell himself that Cora would believe he’d gotten the pistol out to clean it? Ridiculous.” She sighed heavily. “Or maybe he didn’t care what Cora thought. That’s even worse, of course.”

  She opened the door to the Mini Cooper and Mr. Dewey scampered inside. He took his perch on the passenger seat, his front paws on the armrest so that his ears could blow in the wind.

  Viv got inside and started up the engine. She backed out into the street and turned toward town, but she didn’t want to go home. There was nothing at home but an empty house and a plethora of canned goods. She began driving aimlessly up one street and down another. At the intersection with the highway she paused to allow a succession of three eighteen-wheelers loaded with grain to pass.

  It occurred to her that a tired senior, unaccustomed to night driving and exhausted from a long day at the side of a grieving friend, might reasonably have forgotten to stop at an intersection and been run down by the trucks that were, after all, speeding along.

  But, no. While being T-boned by a semi could be very bad, it was not guaranteed to be fatal. And what of the truck driver? She didn’t know who it was or what might happen to them. And certainly Mr. Dewey would not fare well uncrated in a crash. D.J. would prove to be absolutely right about that.

  No, her current plan had been arrived at carefully. And it was the best solution.

  Once the road was clear, she crossed into the west side of town, where she wound her way without ever turning down the street toward her home. She finally pulled to a stop where her jaunts so often ended, the parking lot of the cemetery. When she turned off her headlights, the darkened landscape revealed nothing. She sat there, gazing out across the fenced area. She wanted to see something. Anything. A wisp of vapor. A translucent specter. An inhuman apparition. There was nothing. A deserted patch of ground where the bodies of people she knew and loved now lay lifeless.

  “Food for worms,” she quoted.

  Mr. Dewey suddenly jumped in her lap, grabbing attention.

  “So what are you up to?” she asked the dog. “Are you getting sick of coming to this place, too?”

  She laughed as the animal, who had to be at least as tired as she was, perked into animation. She scratched him lovingly behind the ears. “I wonder if your mama will bring you here to see me? Probably not. I won’t really be here, you see. I’ll be up in heaven with John. My life here, it doesn’t really work for me without him.”

  She looked down at the cheery, upbeat little dog face. “But I will miss you when I go.”

  She looked out the windshield one more time and sighed heavily. The phrase move along, nothing to see here, filtered through her brain, causing her to chuckle wryly.

  “All right, I suppose we can go home now,” she told Mr. Dewey. “I don’t guess there is much chance that we’ll catch your mama and my son in flagrante delicto. Should I speak plain English? I want them screwing each other’s brains out. That’s what young, healthy people who are obviously made for each other should do. But those two are slow to get the message.”

  Her tone changed to a whiney mimic.

  “They’ve been hurt. They don’t want to make a mistake.” Viv gave a huff of disgust. “Life is way too short to hesitate when reaching for happiness.”

  Thirty-One

  401.2 Language Theory

  Perspective. D.J. awakened early the next morning with the word in her head. It hung with her as she groggily sipped her first cup of coffee. She tried to push it back. She was sure it was all about the previous evening. It was about being in the wheat field. It was all about Scott. It was all about speaking unguarded and discovering that the earth didn’t shatter and neither did she. She’d simply gained a new perspective.

  Dew was as drowsy and bleary-eyed as she was herself. As his meal from the previous night remained untouched, D.J. highly suspected that Viv was overfeeding him on doggy treats. At least she knew that he wasn’t gorging on table scraps.

  In the shower with the hot water splashing down on her face, she allowed herself a little bit of nostalgic memory. Scott had been there for her and sympathized with her in a way that was not at all sexy. It had made her feel safe. It had made her feel whole. It had warmed her, satisfied her in a way that sex never did. Quickly, she was forced to correct herself. Sex almost never did. Sex with him. Sex with Scott. That had been different.

  “You were different,” she said to herself amidst the hot steam. “The difference wasn’t him. It was you.”

  Perspective. There it was again.

  Out of the shower, she dried off, smeared her face with moisturizer and began brushing her teeth. Deliberately she pushed Scott out of her mind. Forcing concentration to her workday ahead and the problems ahead. Still the word continued to reverberate in the back of her thoughts like a chorus to a jingle that gets stuck in your brain.

  She was staring at the blue-and-white bristles scrubbing across her lower molars when suddenly the image of the library’s long, skinny windows, spaced at three-foot intervals popped up.

  “Oh, my God! We’ve got the wrong perspective!”

  D.J. was dressed in fifteen minutes flat. Forsaking her business suit for jeans and a T-shirt, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail, she headed for the library.

  She was out so early, she expected deserted streets. But the small business district was alive with people. There was the bustle of getting breakfast out of the way and vehicles gassed up and a thousand chores done before the fields were ready. Added to that, for many, was the early-morning funeral service and respectful homage to the dead. The traffic crawled on Main Street, causing her to grit her teeth in impatience.

  When D.J. finally pulled her car into her parking space, she was grateful to see that the rusty old bicycle was securely chained to the railing.

  “Bless you, James,” she muttered.

  It was heartening to know that no matter how early she arrived, he would always be here first. She hurried inside, not even stopping to make the coffee.

  “James! James!”

  She walked around the stacks to the aisle in front of the windows.

  “What an idiot!” she said aloud.

  “Sorry.”

  The word was offered as apology and the timid, defeated voice came from the bookshelves.

  “What? No, not you, James. Me. I’m the idiot. Me, and every other librarian who’s ever looked at this place since the day that it opened. The shelving is going the wrong way.”

  She saw him peeking out at her from behind the books. Not quite ready to confront her in the open.

  “The windows were designed like this so that the shelves should run between them, not perpendicular. It’s so obvious. It’s like some Escher Figure-Ground thing. It looks like a fish until you see the face and then you can’t see anything else.”

  “I don’t see a fish,” James said quietly.

  She laughed as if his words were meant as a joke.

  “This is going to be so great,” she said. “It’s going to chang
e...it’s going to change everything about this place.”

  D.J. looked again at the windows and then at the long rows of shelving loaded with books. Everything was neat and tidy and in perfect order. But it was all in the wrong place. Every volume would have to be taken down and reshelved later.

  “Okay, James,” she said. “This is what we’re going to need to do. We’re going to have to empty the entire stack area and take up all the shelving ranges. They’re undoubtedly bolted to the floors, so there will likely be some holes to patch. And the patina on the floor will be a bit mismatched. But it will be worth it. We’ll turn the ranges 90 degrees, bolt them back to the floor and then put the books back on them.”

  His eyes were as wide as saucers. He looked as if she’d just suggested slitting him open and spreading his entrails around the room. Her suggestion was clearly encouraging panic.

  “Oh, no, we can’t do that,” he said. “We can’t do that. We... we can’t do that.”

  “Of course we can,” she assured him. “It’ll take a little time and some elbow grease, but we will do it.”

  “Uh-uh, no, no, no,” he replied. “Can’t do that. No, uh-uh, no, no.”

  Clearly the threat to his perfectly organized stack area loomed large to him.

  “It’s okay, James,” she told him. “It’s not like we’re going to start just piling books up and throwing things around. I’ll come up with a plan. We’ll... we’ll maintain order. I promise. The books will be fine. Moving will all be very orderly.”

  “Oh, no,” he said. “No, no, no, no.”

  D.J. was too excited about her plan. Too buoyed by her discovery to allow his negativity to dissuade her.

  She went up to her office and found the tape measure. She brought it back downstairs and with a cheery hum on her lips, she heard the slamming of a book. As she walked across the floor, she heard another. She ignored the noise and began taking the dimensions of everything.