“So he said he didn’t feel the same way,” Margaret prompted Blake.
“He said he was sorry if he hadn’t been very attentive—he used some other word; Donny wouldn’t use ‘attentive’—but that was the idea of it. Then he said he had given it thought and he didn’t feel like we were a couple anymore. That was it. I asked him if he was sure, if it meant he wanted a divorce, and he stopped at that. He said he needed some time to figure things out, then he marched upstairs, packed a bag, and headed through the door. He tried to kiss me good-bye, you know, kind of on the cheek, but I turned away. Big dramatic me.”
“I’m so sorry, honey. I know it’s hard right now, but take it easy. Don’t jump to any conclusions. Just listen and take it in and hold off on doing anything rash.”
“You know what I was thinking as he left? That no guy has ever broken up with me. I’m not sure if that’s accurate, but I think I was always the one to break up with the guy. Donny’s a first that way.”
“That’s because you’re a beautiful, wonderful woman.”
“To everyone but Donny, I guess.”
“Don’t get down on yourself, sweetie.”
“I know. Okay, thanks for listening. You go back to your lover boy there. Everything you’ve said about him, he sounds terrific.”
“He’s a good guy. We click so far.”
“I’m happy for you, Margaret. I’m sorry to rain on your sunny day. I didn’t know who else to call.”
“Blake, call me anytime you need me. Now, why don’t you get out of the house? Maybe take Phillip out to a movie . . . something to take your mind off things.”
“Maybe I will.”
“I love you, Blake. I’m sorry this is happening.”
“Into every life a little rain must fall, right?”
“I guess that’s true.”
“Okay, thanks for listening. Say hello to Charlie for me. Tell him I hope to meet him someday.”
Margaret said good-bye and hung up. Out on the terrace, Charlie talked on his cell phone. Margaret sat for a moment, playing the conversation over in her head. Poor Blake. And poor Donny, too, who yearned for something he probably didn’t understand himself. Phillip, of course, would get trapped in the middle and he would carry anger at Donny for leaving. Maybe not, Margaret chided herself. Who knew?
She shook herself and then stood and dressed. Life was strange, she thought as she pulled on jeans and tucked a white blouse into them. Here she was deliberating about what a new man meant in her life, while Blake, married for years, suddenly found herself alone. You could never know what would happen, and she wondered, briefly, if making plans made any sense whatsoever. You only had the present; the past and future were illusory. Thomas had proven that, and so did Charlie’s miraculous appearance in her life, and now Donny had brought a dark note to everything, but the point was still the same. We lived in a small spotlight, and beyond the light, in the wings of the stage, people moved scenery and made costume changes, but we could not be aware of them. We had to play our part, as Shakespeare said, and the role was always fresh, always current, never past or future.
“How was Blake?” Charlie asked when she stepped out on the terrace.
“Donny left Blake and she’s all broken up.”
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Saying it aloud like that, it sounds clinical. Doesn’t it? You need to cheer me up.”
“Let’s go to dinner and you can tell me about it.”
“Same old story.”
“The fight for love and glory,” Charlie said, rising.
“Yes, all that. You don’t want to leave and drive off in your pickup like Donny, do you?”
“No,” Charlie said, drinking off the last of his scotch and taking her hand. “I don’t even have a pickup.”
“Blake thinks he might be seeing someone else.”
“Wouldn’t be the first man to do that.”
“I wish I could do something for her. Something nice.”
“It sounds like you’re a good friend to her, Margaret.”
“I try to be. She’s a good friend to me.”
Charlie closed the door to the terrace and then helped her on with her sweater. She turned in his arms for a moment and put her forehead against his chest. He put his arms around her and she didn’t move for a ten count.
* * *
Charlie watched the waitress—a thin, toned young woman who might have been a dancer, given the way she moved—slide a plate of chocolate cheesecake onto the table between them.
“Enjoy,” the waitress said. “I’ll be back to freshen your coffee in a minute.”
“I never eat desserts,” Margaret said, grimacing and smiling at once, if that was possible. “You’re going to turn me into the circus fat woman.”
“It’s supposed to be the best cheesecake in the universe. They’re famous for it.”
“Take the other fork,” Margaret said, handing him one. “Ready?”
He cut into the cheesecake and lifted the fork slowly to his mouth, watching her as she did the same. She nodded a little to tell him she was ready, then she put her mouth around the forkful of cake. She closed her eyes almost instantly. He mirrored her movement and in an instant confirmed that the reputation was deserved: the cheesecake was flawless. He let it roost for a moment near the top of his mouth.
“Oh, my,” she said.
“It’s ridiculously good.”
“It’s exquisite. It’s incredibly smooth, isn’t it?”
“I’m not sure. I think we need another bite to know for certain.”
“I’m not going to eat for a week when I get home.”
“You can spare the calories.”
“Pretty to think so, Charlie, but I can’t. I guess on the farm the cows give me a workout, but I’m being luxuriously lazy on this trip. Except for certain exercise.”
She smiled and let her eyes find his. Charlie smiled in return and took another forkful of cheesecake.
“Okay, we have to try the crust,” she said.
“I love crust. Are you a good baker, Margaret?”
“Not really. Basic stuff. I’m sort of a low-grade Betty Crocker.”
“I bet you’re not telling the whole truth.”
He took a bite and watched her match him. The crust was delicious. Graham cracker, he thought, but with a twist of some sort. The chocolate came across as dark and sweet.
“It’s marvelous,” she said.
“Mm-hmm.”
“Promise me we’ll go for a walk before we go to bed.”
“It’s on the schedule.”
“You know, Charlie, home feels so far away.”
“Maybe we’ve got it all wrong. Maybe this is all about vacation sex.”
She laughed. He liked making her laugh. The waitress came back with coffee and warmed their cups. Charlie asked her for the check and signed it to the room.
“So what will you do after you drop me at the airport?” Margaret asked.
She motioned for Charlie to join her in another bite of cheesecake.
“You mean after I finish gnashing my teeth and pulling out chunks of hair?”
“Yes, after that.”
“Terry asked me to come by. I’ll probably stop there for dinner.”
“Good. I’m glad.”
“Then the next day I should make some phone calls, catch up on a few things. I’m supposed to take Fritz birding. He wants to see the hawk migration. But we haven’t made any solid plans. How about you?”
“Cows. And I have to make Gordon shepherd’s pie. It’s his favorite.”
“Do you make it with beef or lamb?”
“Beef. Hamburger. It’s really like a glorified hamburger, but he doesn’t know that. Ben li
kes it, too.”
“You’re looking forward to seeing him, aren’t you? Gordon, I mean.”
“It’s not even conscious, really. It’s just a whole big thing in my gut. It’s hard to explain.”
“And will you go see Thomas?”
“Yes,” she said, “I’ll go see Thomas.”
“How often do you see him?”
“I try to do it every other day at least.”
“Is it a long drive?”
“Half hour, door to door.”
“Do you bring Gordon?”
“Not very often. He understands Thomas is his dad, but I don’t know. I’ve wrestled with it, the pros and cons of exposing him to it all. Ben goes over every now and then, more to give me a break, I think, than anything else. A few other family members drop in around the holidays. That kind of thing.”
“Gordon will remember it when he’s older.”
“I hope so. I hope he remembers it in a good way. I mean, there’s no good about it, really, but I don’t want it to be a guilty thing, either. Do you visit your brother very often?”
“Whenever I’m home I do. My mom and dad go pretty often to see him, but it’s hard, as you know. He doesn’t register that they’re there, so you start asking yourself what the point of it is. Mom’s a trouper about it. She does his birthday every year. Paper hats and cake. She does it mostly for the nurses and to remind them all that he’s her son.”
“It must be very touching.”
“It is, actually. My parents are good people.”
“They call Thomas’s wing the Greenhouse, because that’s where all the vegetables live. They don’t say it when we’re around, naturally, but I’ve overheard it a couple times. It hurts to hear it, especially the first time, but I suppose it’s a gallows humor for people who have to tend the . . . what do we call them these days?”
“I’m not even sure anymore.”
“It’s just day-to-day work for the nurses, so you can’t get in an uproar. Thomas receives good care and that’s all I can concern myself with. They do the best they can.”
Margaret broke the last small piece of cheesecake in two with the edge of her fork.
“Sorry,” she said, looking at him levelly, “how did we get off on this track? Gloomy topics. Eat that and then please take me for a walk. I’m so full it’s absurd.”
“It’s good cheesecake.”
“It’s a new benchmark in cheesecake,” she said, lifting the last little bit to her mouth. “It is the cheesecake by which all other cheesecakes will be judged hereafter.”
He reached out and clinked her fork with his. Then he took the tiny bite on his side of the plate and put it on his tongue. She nodded as she chewed her last taste, and he nodded with her.
* * *
Gordon woke and it was late. He knew it was late because the darkness grew at night like a balloon swelling, and then the sun came and drew it down again. But now, on his waking, the balloon was ready to burst, and he felt nervous and alone. He missed his mother. He ran his hands around the edge of the bed, looking for the saw-chuck guy. The saw-chuck guy protected him at night and even if he sometimes couldn’t find him, Gordon knew, at least, that the saw-chuck guy set perimeters and went on scouting missions, and that no one got through the line without taking fire.
After Gordon found the soldier beside the meerkat, he slipped out of his bed and went to the bathroom. He followed two night-lights in the hallway. He heard Grandpa Ben snoring, and it was a good sound after all. He wanted to talk to Grandpa Ben about the saw-chuck guy, and setting perimeters, and he would do that in the morning first thing. For now he let Grandpa Ben’s snore set a perimeter around the house. His snores sounded like ropes.
He peed into the toilet and felt cold and shivered as he finished. He ran back to bed, his feet dancing a little on the oxblood boards to keep his toes from freezing. He spotted the meerkat on the side of his bed and he grabbed him quickly and tucked him under one arm. In a flash he got under the covers again and he felt the bed’s warmth reach up to meet him. He put the meerkat beside him, cheek to cheek, and together they examined the night’s dark balloon. Soon, he knew, the sun would come up and it would be the day his mother came home, but what that meant, what demands the day would make on him, he couldn’t say. He pictured Charlie for just a second, a man living in a city that was somehow higher than his own house, a place where you needed a plane to bring you, and he thought that was odd, one of the oddest things he had ever thought about. Slowly he marched the saw-chuck guy up to rest on top of the meerkat. Maybe, he thought, his mind returning seamlessly to earlier propositions, he could ask for a dog, one like the dog in the movie, with white fur on its chest and a bark that sounded like cans falling. He would teach the dog to stay in bed with him, he decided. It could stay down by his feet and it would be another snore, a rope he could follow when he felt nervous at night. For now, he shivered farther down into the bed and found the phantom of his former spot, still warm, still waiting, and he clutched the meerkat to his chest, the creature’s beady eyes dancing with merriment in the spring moonlight.
* * *
A few miles away, Blake reached across her bed for Donny but he wasn’t there. She had already cried, so Donny’s absence did not jar her as it might have an hour before. It merely felt strange to have him absent. She wondered if her equilibrium had become so accustomed to the motion produced by another body on the mattress that it was like sleeping at sea. She had never been to sea, and did not particularly care to go, but the thought stuck in her head and she could not shake it.
She sat up slowly and grabbed a water bottle from her bedside stand. The water felt cool from sitting near the window. She drank a long time, feeling that the cells of her body required replenishing. Donny was gone, she told herself. Just like that. Gone to another woman, gone to his rattletrap pickup, gone to his lawn mowers and gas-covered truck upholstery. She wondered if he hadn’t been going their entire married life, his life orbiting around her own, ready to fling off like a slinging comet. She wondered, too, what she would tell Phillip. Daddy’s gone, she said inside her head. It sounded like a bad blues lyric and she promised herself never to utter it.
She replaced the water bottle on the bedside stand and slid down into the fold of covers again. Without Donny, the bed felt crisp and even. Maybe that was one advantage to having him gone. There would be other advantages, she imagined, but she could not think of them right now. Things about staying clean, being organized, the house in order. But she rested in the neat envelope of her bed like a letter unsent. Return to sender, she thought. Donny didn’t want her anymore.
She watched the wind move the tree branches beyond the window, the shadows from the branches dancing. Here I begin again, she thought. Here I return to myself. She rested in bed with her arms outside the blankets, her feet snug against the tightly tucked sheet at the bottom of the bed. A handkerchief folded and left in a man’s suit pocket, she thought. An arrow in a quiver, resting, not drawn out and nocked on a string, never sent on its way.
* * *
And in the last stroke before midnight, Margaret turned and felt Charlie follow her, his hand coming across her hip, then hanging like a counterweight of comfort and quiet. Awakened at that moment, she would not have been able to express exactly what the hand meant across her hip, could not have raised an answer to consciousness. But in the small hours with the crickets calling, the sheets crisp, the pillows luxurious, she settled beneath his arm with a deep animal contentment.
She did not dream. At least she had no memory of dreaming the next morning, though she pushed back into his arms, feeling safe and warm, his breath a steady metronome on her neck. For a time she ran in her sleep, her legs moving slightly. She did not move in panic, but in an attempt to arrive someplace. Then his hand tightened on her waist and pulled her closer—was he asleep?—an
d her legs settled and went slack.
Far away, in Maine, Sgt. Thomas Kennedy continued to breathe, his breath as steady as a broom sweep. He felt nothing, thought nothing. His body continued to function even as his brain, inactive, turned slowly softer. Night and day made no difference to him; only a full moon, with its pull on tides, affected him now. The interior of his body had become a sea, an ocean following the dictates of gravity. Whatever had been the essence of Thomas Kennedy had long since drifted away or ceased or become part of the gentle sway of liquid that washed with the light from the moon.
Chapter Twenty-four
Margaret called Blake. She sat on a bench by herself, her carry-on bag at her feet. Blake picked up on the third ring. They had talked twice that morning already, but it had been about details of traveling.
“Hi, honey,” Blake said, her voice raised and happy, “is this my southern girl?”
“It is indeed.”
“I can’t wait to see you, honey. Where are you now?”
“At the airport.”
“You sound a little off, darling. Are you okay?” Blake asked, then she said something to Phillip, her son, and added, “Sorry. They had a half day today so he’s home. A teachers’ service day, I guess.”
“Everything is okay,” Margaret said. “He’s parking the car.”
“Your fella?”
“He’s not my fella, Blake,” Margaret said, and she felt a sharp, grinding pain in her gut.
“Oh, sweetie, you’re sad,” Blake said, her voice moving with the phone away from somewhere—her kitchen, probably, Margaret guessed. “Oh, Margaret, what’s wrong?”
“I’m just an idiot,” Margaret said and began to cry.
“What, what, what is it?”
“I was crazy to let it get so out of hand,” Margaret said. “So stupid. He’s perfect, Blake. He’s a perfect man.”
“No one is perfect, Margaret.”
“You haven’t met him. No, of course not, of course no one is perfect,” Margaret conceded, feeling a deep, sad sob growing inside her. “But everything that was so sealed up and shut down . . .”
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