Grumbling, he threw on a robe and made it to the hallway, past the computer room; he saw that the pounding hadn’t roused his sleeping houseguest. Another benefit of the young, he noted. The easy sleep that comes from not having made any life choices that you’d regret for the rest of your days.
“Keep your pants on.” He grumpily undid the chain. “For Pete’s sake, it’s only eight o’clock in the . . .” When the door was fully open, he froze. Am I dreaming? he asked himself wildly. Or worse, have I died, and I get one last fool’s fancy before I go up or down?
“Hello,” Ava greeted him, somewhat formally; she looked almost as nervous as he suddenly felt. She held a thermos and a Tupperware in her arms that looked full to bursting; he was surprised the top didn’t pop right off. She wore a pale blue sundress and her most comfortable sneakers. She had made a firm compromise with Brandon. She would stick with the lipstick and eyeliner, but the heels were out, period.
“Brandon’s still asleep,” he said, cautiously. “I’ll pass these along. Shouldn’t be more than a couple more hours—he doesn’t usually sleep past noon.”
“I thought he might be still in bed.” Ava clucked her tongue and shook her head. “Young people these days are unbearably lazy in the morning. In my day, we were up at the crack of dawn, doing chores and getting ready for school and . . . I’d hate to tell you just how long ago.” She blushed then—he couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen Ava blush. “Well, you remember what those days were like, I suppose.”
“I sure do.” He’d been the second son in a family of nine kids, and his family ran what was, at that time, the largest dairy farm in the southern part of the state. “Up with the chickens, down with the sunset: that was my old man’s motto.”
She laughed politely; her own giggles sounded ridiculous to her own ears, and she cut them off.
This is Buddy, for God’s sake, she scolded herself. I’ve never been nervous in front of him a day in my life, not even when we were dating. But she had felt a deep connection, a level of instant comfort, like they’d grown up together, or at least known each other for much longer than they actually had. With Jimmy, there had been deep, exhilarating passion, and at nineteen, she supposed, it’s easy to confuse that with love . . . But while she had loved Jimmy fiercely, she could, for the first time in decades, finally admit to herself she’d always held on to just a thread of her feelings for Buddy.
Jimmy was the life of the party, the guy with a joke or three on hand at any time, everyone’s pal. Buddy was quieter, calmer, the guy who brought the snacks to the party while Jimmy was busy entertaining. And while she didn’t regret a moment of her marriage, there had been times—oh yes, there had been many times—when she had wondered what it might be like to wake up next to Buddy. She had felt so guilty about these feelings that she had hastily tried to erase them by fixing him up with every woman she could find that she deemed even close to appropriate. If Buddy knew what she was up to, he hadn’t let on; Jimmy had merely accused her of having a yenta complex.
But Jimmy had been gone a long time, and Buddy was right here, right now. And there were things to say that she could hold in no longer. If AA had taught her anything, it was that the truth set you free—corny as it was, it was also completely true.
Well, she thought, smiling again, after all this time, here you go, Miss Ava . . . don’t you dare shoot and miss.
Buddy just stood there, so surprised to see her that he opened and closed his mouth several times, not sure of what to say. In the end, it seemed best to stay quiet.
“Oh!” she suddenly remembered. “Here.” She thrust the Tupperware at him.
After a moment, he took them gingerly. “What’s inside?”
“Well, they’re muffins, you big dope.” A soft smile took the bite from the words. “What do they look like?”
“All right, what’s in them?” he asked suspiciously. “Did you coat the blueberries with arsenic? Mix powder laxative in with the flour?”
“They’re not blueberry. See?” She tapped the cakes beneath the plastic wrap. “They’re lemon poppy seed.”
“Lemon poppy seed?”
“Lemon poppy seed,” she repeated, amused at his expression. “I just, well . . . I remembered you always had a weakness for them.”
He put the muffins down on the railing and crossed his arms firmly. “Okay, out with it.”
“Out with it? I don’t know what you mean,” she said innocently.
“Am I dying?” he demanded. “Did Brandon take a message from my doctor, find out that I’m dying, and decide not to tell me? Is it your plan to be extra nice to me so I’ll put in a good word for you with the Big Guy? Or am I getting completely senile and not recalling some big makeup session that we had earlier?”
“They’re just muffins. You don’t have to read that much into it, Mr. Conceited.” She sniffed a little and primped her hair. The humidity always gave it a life of its own.
“It just seems,” he said, still flummoxed, “like a strange thing for you to do. Even stranger that you’d remember that lemon poppy seed are my favorite muffins, after all these years.”
“Yes,” Ava agreed. “I suppose it is.”
They stood there in the early morning light, Ava smiling so widely her face felt like it might break. She had to shake off this nervousness or she’d smile herself right into a stroke. Buddy, after years of being her whipping boy, stood there, waiting for the punch line.
“Well, we could do this awkward dance all day,” Ava said finally, “or I could tell you that, last night, my daughter and I had a long, illuminating talk.”
So that was it.
“I knew she couldn’t keep quiet,” he said, angrily. “Even when she was promising, I knew she’d . . . I knew it . . . I just knew it.”
“I just have one thing to say to you, Buddy McKinley,” Ava began primly.
“Ava, please.” He laid his hand on her arm, and a spark of electricity went through his whole body, just like it had on their first date, during their first dance. “Believe me, the muffins are enough—plenty, in fact. I know how hard it is for you to say you’re sorry. Or that you were wrong.”
Ava looked at him for a moment, considering. Then she aimed, wound up, and cracked him across the face.
“Jesus Christ!” he cried, nearly dropping the Tupperware container. “Jesus Christ!”
She slapped him again. “That one was for taking my higher power’s name in vain.” She raised her arm warningly. “Want to try for number three?”
“Three?” he gasped, rubbing his cheek. Her blows weren’t particularly hard, but getting hit in the face wasn’t pleasant, no matter how soft. “I’m still wondering what the heck number one was for!”
“Oh, as if you don’t know!” Ava daintily dusted off her hands. “Let me refresh your memory. Twenty-five years ago, my husband James was caught serving alcohol to kids—curvy ones only—who wore very short skirts and smelled really nice.”
“Yes, I seem to remember something about that,” he said drolly. “I seem to recall it disrupted my life for a bit of time as well.”
“And then!” she cried. “Just as the boom was about to fall, just as the moment I’d been waiting for my entire marriage was about to happen, and he was finally going to get his knuckles rapped good and hard for it, right in public just like he deserved, what did you go and do?”
He saw then that her eyes, when she looked at him, had lost that hard edge he’d grown used to seeing there. Now they were once again limpid pools of startling, kaleidoscopic color.
“For reasons known only to yourself,” she went on, “you stood up to the world, and you said you’d done it.”
“I sort of thought,” he was truly bewildered now, “that’s the thing you just might be thanking me for.”
“Thanking you?” she asked him incredulously. “Are you insane? You robbed me of perhaps the biggest and best upper hand in my entire marriage! Do you have any idea of the amount of nice vacations and
jewelry your little act of bravery cost me?”
He pondered this. “I have to tell you, Ava, I never thought if it that way. And I wish to Goshen—Goshen! I said Goshen!” he cried, when her hand went up again warningly. “I wish to Goshen that you’d start making some bloody sense and quit hitting me. I mean, immediately. Talk fast—I gotta go hunt down some ice for this cheek.”
“Fine, then.” She deigned to sit down on one of his lawn chairs, and crossing her legs, she placed her hands primly on her knee. That was his Ava, all right: going from white hot rage to ladylike grace in under ten seconds. “Listen. I know that you were his friend. Probably the best friend he ever had, in fact. But I lived with the man for over forty years. Day in, day out. There wasn’t anything about him I didn’t know. What he didn’t tell me, I learned from osmosis.” She smiled then, her mind’s eye seeing the comfort, the familiarity that all those years together had brought. “Let’s just say, after nearly a half-century together, there are damn few surprises left. And there’s something very . . . sustaining about that.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Buddy conceded. “My longest relationship didn’t break the six-month barrier.”
“What I’m trying to say is,” Ava looked down at her hands, “did you honestly, honestly and truly, think I didn’t know?”
Buddy looked at her warily. When in doubt, he thought, play dumb.
“Know what?”
She sighed heavily. “Okay, if you’re going to make me say it out loud. You honestly think I didn’t know that my husband’s eyes liked to feast on supple young flesh?”
“Ava!” It was true—every word of it—but it was also done and over with. The man was dead, for goodness’ sake, and had been for a long, long time. “I have to tell you, I’m really not comfortable with . . .”
“But I finally had proof.” She cut him off smoothly. “I finally had something I could put my hands on and hold over his head for the rest of his life, but then . . .” She pointed at him, and despite himself, he took a step backward. “You!” she cried. “You had to go and take the blame for it, you . . . you . . .” She groped around for an accurate phrase and triumphantly came up with, “You big thunder-thief, you!”
She sat back with satisfaction; her brand-new, made-up word said it all.
“Ava, I’m telling you, I . . .”
“You have no idea how many plans I’d made,” she interrupted. “How I was going to get him to apologize for all the glances down the shirts of waitresses or nurses. Hell, I was finally going to get a new dining room set. Not to mention a sizable upgrade on my engagement ring. And oh!” She clutched her hands to her bosom. “There was a gorgeous maple hutch in Boston I had my eye on for years! It was practically mine!” She dropped her hands with a doleful gaze. “But then you just had to go and be ‘noble.’” She shuddered distastefully, as if the act he’d performed was a deed too dirty to soil her tongue.
“I still can’t imagine what you’re talking about,” Buddy stalled, not ready to give up the ship just yet.
“You’re really going to draw this out, aren’t you?”
He shrugged. “My schedule this morning happens to be fairly open.”
“Well, fine.” She surrendered. “If you insist on playing as dumb as you look . . . As I told you before, I knew my Jimmy. There wasn’t a thought that ran across that man’s head I didn’t know before it got from one end to the other.” She cleared her throat then, surprised at how embarrassing this all was to admit. “And I know that Jimmy was a—what do you call it?” She tried to pluck the word out of the air with her new French tips. “A hot ticket, as my dad would have said. A ladies man. A player.” She gave him a ghost of a smile that wasn’t borne of amusement at all, and it tugged at his heartstrings in a way nothing had for a very long time.
“Are you sure?” he asked, wanting to defend Jimmy even now.
“Oh, please!” she cried. “There wasn’t a woman that he didn’t rubberneck. Discreetly, of course, but it was everywhere—on the street, in the movie theatre, at the mall. In the grocery aisle, for that matter. The rows at church . . .”
“He loved you, Ava.” Buddy struggled to his feet. “I know it couldn’t have been easy watching him eyeballing young girls the way he did, but no one—no one—ever meant anything to him besides you. You were his whole world. He used to say, ‘There are women in this world, and then there’s my Ava.’”
“And just what does that mean, exactly?”
“It means that, as far as Jimmy was concerned, there was the very highest class of woman,” he used his hand to mark an invisible line right at eye level, “and you were right about here.” He made another notch, just a few inches above it. “So don’t you ever doubt—not for one minute, not for a millisecond of a minute—that man loved you.”
“Oh, sweetie.” She laughed heartily, patting his hand firmly. “I know that. What we had was . . . It was a marriage in every sense of the word. We were partners, right down the line. Oh, it wasn’t all roses and violins, let me tell you . . . But we had our share of that. More than anything, we just fit well together. Even when we fought, we fit. So, don’t get me wrong, I know what I was to him. And to tell you the truth, he more than loved me: he liked me.” She smiled again, much more happily this time. “Do you have any idea how much more important that is? Liking, over loving?” she asked him wonderingly, tilting her head, looking out into the bright September morning at nothing in particular. “But, I’m a firm believer in being honest about your mate, and no matter how he felt about me, that simply doesn’t change the fact that he liked to look at—and maybe a little more—a well-rounded tushie or a sweater that was filled out particularly well.”
Suddenly Buddy felt sick to his stomach, just a little.
“You don’t think . . . I mean, he couldn’t have actually cheated on you, could he?”
He had expected her to deny it immediately, the way he would have done if she’d asked the question of him. Instead, she considered it for an awfully long time.
Oh, Ava, he thought with admiration. Anyone else in the world would have just stuck his or her head in the sand, but not you. When you love someone, it’s warts and all. You see everything, and you love that person anyway.
For perhaps the millionth time in his life, he wondered if Jimmy had known just how good the steak was in his refrigerator while he was out leering at fast-food burgers. He shifted from foot to foot, wanting to say the right thing, say anything, but nothing came to mind. So he shifted again, stopping himself before she asked him if he had to use the bathroom.
“I don’t know,” she said at last, bringing her eyes back to meet his squarely. Leaning against the doorjamb, he could smell her perfume. White Shoulders. In all the years that had passed, she still wore the same scent. Every time a stranger who wore it walked by, his heart would beat a little faster. But there was no need to get all mushy with her just yet. For all he knew, she was setting him up to step on him later. But the way she smiled at him said differently. “But . . . let’s just say that I didn’t push the subject too hard when he was around.”
Buddy raised an eyebrow; that didn’t seem at all like the Ava he knew.
“I know, I know.” She heard his unspoken words and waved them away. There were certain things in a marriage you just couldn’t explain; it was only understood between the two of you. Buddy hadn’t seen the loving, sweet Jimmy behind closed doors: the Jimmy that took care of her, that gently urged her to get help without making her feel like the burden she knew she’d become. How could she ask Jimmy if he’d cheated on her? And frankly, if he had, didn’t she have that coming? In his place, would she have wanted to spend some time with someone who didn’t suck the little energy out of her that her job didn’t? She wasn’t sure, but she knew enough to know she didn’t want to think about it, now or ever. “But I didn’t, because Jimmy was a proud, proud man. If he hadn’t, and I asked him . . .” Her eyes glazed over for just a second, imagining. “You can never take back a blow l
ike that. When you smack a man and question his unfaithfulness, that’s when he might start thinking, ‘If I’m already doing the time, I might as well go out and do the crime.’” She shrugged again; time had eased the wounds caused by these questions. “Plus, I figured if he ever had, there’d be, I don’t know, some kind of evidence.”
“No, he would’ve been too smart for evidence,” Buddy mused. “He’d have dry-cleaned every bit of him that ever came into contact with her before he came within a ten-foot radius of you.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Just what are you saying? That you think he . . .”
“No, no,” he cut her off. “Here’s the thing, here’s how I just know he never cheated: it was the way you guys always talked. He loved talking with you, just telling you everything. I don’t think he wouldn’t have been able to stand not talking to you about it.”
“You’re right. In fact,” she realized suddenly, “he probably could have resisted cheating more easily than he could resist telling me about it. But . . .” She hugged the thermos to her chest, her hands shaking ever so slightly; Buddy was again struck with how brutally honest she was with herself, even when it was so hard it made her hands shake. “If I’m going to be honest, I guess I’d have to say that I never knew because I didn’t want to know.”
“That’s the easiest way not to know, I guess,” Buddy conceded.
“There were times when I was sure of it, absolutely certain.” Then she shook her head. “But, like I said, the other shoe never dropped. And frankly, in hindsight . . . I doubt it. For one thing, when would he have had the time? He was a workaholic, and then he would come home and take care of his drunken wife—and yes, I was drinking long before we opened the pub. Jimmy and I pretended that no one knew yet. It wasn’t until after the pub . . . well, you know. As Molly would say, we’ve covered that.”
She looked down at her lap then, not proud of what she must have been like to deal with in those days. There had been a time when Jimmy would come home from work, and for the next hour or so play ‘Where’s Ava?’ It was a game without a bit of mirth, and it usually ended with him having to carry his unconscious wife home from the backyard, the playground across the street, the children’s room at the library. She shuddered, hating to think of those days, but if she didn’t . . . Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, she reminded herself. “And let me tell you, if he had jumped the fence, I wouldn’t have been exactly able to judge him on that one. No, frankly, I wouldn’t have blamed him.”
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