The Goodbye Summer

by Patricia Gaffney

  Her mother wore jeans, too—everybody in this picture wore jeans—and a cardinal-red poncho down to her knees. No shoes, and feathers in her hair. She and Bobby stood together, close but not touching, with the other band members behind or off to the side. Think if they had stayed together—and lived, saved each other somehow. Think if they’d never stopped being in love.

  Would Dinah lend her this tape? She couldn’t get enough of it. She wanted to play it until it was a part of her, till the music entered her bloodstream and beat in her arteries and veins. How else could she get her parents back? She listened to them sing together over and over, and dreamed.

  When she went back in the kitchen, Dinah was setting the dinette table for six. Magill and Cornel were still at the counter. They turned when they heard her and looked at her with interest, the way you look at someone who’s come back from a long journey or an illness. To see how they’ve changed. A burly, thick-necked bald man, completely bald, who was sitting between them, also turned around and lumbered off the stool to his feet.

  “Caddie, this is Earl,” Dinah said with a wide smile, holding a stack of plates to her stomach.

  “Caddie.” He put his enormous hands on her shoulders and gave her a gentle, ardent shake. “Welcome to the family.”

  “Thank you.”

  He had a long, olive-skinned, bullet-shaped head and a pug nose, thick lips, and crinkly, penetrating blue eyes. His belly sloped over the top of his pants, but the rest of him was built like a furniture mover. “I knew Bobby since he was born,” he said, keeping hold of her shoulders, “same as I knew Dinah. He was like my little brother, too, almost. I wish I’d known he had a kid when he died. He was so young, and it just broke everybody’s heart.” Suddenly his eyes welled with tears that spilled over and ran down his smooth cheeks. He finished in a high voice, “If we’d’ve known about you, I just believe it would’ve made it a little bit easier.”

  “Earl, now, don’t go getting everybody all blubbery. You should hear him say grace when the whole family’s over. We tell him he ought to’ve been a preacher.” She made a face at Earl, as if to warn him not to embarrass Caddie.

  He paid no attention. He grabbed her again and hugged her against his flannel shirt, which smelled of chemicals or mothballs, and she didn’t mind at all.

  They were staying for dinner, Dinah announced, there was no point in arguing. Could everybody eat pork chops? Caddie mashed the potatoes and wondered why the odor of frying meat didn’t send her running for the bathroom—maybe pregnancy was a state of mind—while she filled Dinah and Earl in on her unadventurous life, where she lived, how she’d grown up, what she was doing these days. “My, my,” and “Mmm, mmm,” they said after every revelation, as if they were proud of her. As if she belonged to them already.

  Have I found it? she thought. The family she’d always wanted, with La-Z-Boy recliners in the den and a quiz show on television, and a “Home Sweet Home” sampler in the kitchen shaped like a rooster? A family the neighbors could rely on, who went to church but didn’t make a big deal of it, who had normal troubles and ate in the kitchen and went to the movies and the library and high school football games? Had she found them?

  “Earl, what do you do for a living?” she felt comfortable enough to ask over dinner, a feast of juicy pork, mashed potatoes and gravy, corn, fresh kale, a Jell-O salad with pineapple chunks and Redi-Whip. Dinah sat beside Mother Haywood, cutting her meal into tiny bites, and the old lady picked at it in contented silence.

  “Well, now.” Earl stopped eating and put his elbows on the table, knife in one hand, fork in the other. The question pleased him, she could tell. “I’m in business for myself these days. I used to work for the chicken plant and do some taxidermy on the side, but now I’m pretty busy full-time with my own little company.”

  “Not so little anymore,” Dinah put in.

  “What do you do?”

  “Well, I freeze-dry people’s pets.”

  Caddie stalled, a forkful of potatoes halfway to her mouth. “Really.” If she were at home, she’d have put her head down on the table. So much for her dream.

  She made the mistake of looking at Magill, whose eyes were dancing. He’d read her mind. She felt a rush of tenderness wash over her like a wave, so strong it made her dizzy. She liked it that he was laughing at her. God help her, she liked it that his job was making feet.

  Cornel was thrilled, he wanted to know everything about freeze-drying pets. Was there a special machine? Did the animals still have their innards? How much money could a fellow make in that line of work? He peppered Earl with a million questions, all except the one Caddie wanted to ask, which was, Why would anyone want to freeze-dry their pet?

  “The thing most people don’t get,” Earl wanted them to know, “is how much of an art there is to it. Sure, your customer sends pictures and writes a letter about how their cat used to sit, how she cocked her head or what-not, but posing an animal you never knew in life is not something just anybody can do. You’ve got to have a feel for it. Now, most taxidermists won’t touch a pet, it’s too personal. A hawk, marlin, deer head, turkey head, no problem, but Fluffy the cat? They can’t take it.”

  A turkey head?

  “Now here, I just finished up a golden retriever, the prettiest dog you ever saw, and I did a darn good job.”

  “Oh, is she out?” Dinah asked. “Does she look good?”

  “Come down and see.” He looked around at all of them. “I mean if you want,” he added, suddenly delicate. “Some people don’t, and that’s fine. But now these folks’ll get Honey back, see, and they’ll set her by the front door, and every time they go by they’ll pat her on the head and say, ‘Hey, Honey girl,’ and they’ll feel good.”

  “Can they just keep on patting her on the head,” Cornel asked, “or eventually does her hair start to fall out?”

  “Nope, nope, just give her a fluff and a little spritz of cedar residue to keep her shiny, she’s good to go for eternity. Or as near as any of us’ll ever get to it.” He winked.

  Dinah shook her head with fond tolerance, as if that were a line and a wink she’d heard and seen a million times, but the guy they were coming from was still a winner in her book, a sweetheart, so she wouldn’t complain.

  Across from Caddie, Magill had his elbows on the table and his chin in his hands, gazing at her steadily, looking drowsy but fascinated. He had the longest eyelashes she’d ever seen on a man. More like a little boy’s eyelashes. She felt so tired, so wonderfully tired. It looked to her as if all her people were tired and all the Krausses were wide awake.

  But she roused herself to help Dinah do the dishes, and Magill and Cornel found the energy to go down and take a look at Earl’s workshop with him, check out Honey, as well as a freshly freeze-dried bird, a cock-atiel named Floyd.

  “I hate to go, but we have to,” Caddie said when the men returned.

  “I wish you’d stay here,” Dinah protested, “there’s room if Cornel and Magill don’t mind sharing.”

  No, Caddie explained, they’d left Finney back at the cottage, he’d been cooped up for—she looked at her watch—four and a half hours, and that was about his limit.

  She kissed her new grandmother goodbye. The old lady was back in her recliner. She reached up and patted Caddie’s cheek, smiling familiarly. “Bye,” Caddie said, and Mother pressed her lips together twice, as if she might be saying bye-bye. “I’ll come back,” Caddie promised, and Mother nodded as if she knew that.

  Outside in the yard, Dinah put her strong arm around Caddie’s waist. “I feel like I’ve got another child.”

  The men were already by the car; Earl was explaining how the freeze-drying process preserved the animal’s size and shape but eliminated eighty percent of its body weight.

  “I’m pregnant.” She’d wanted to tell Dinah that, Caddie realized, almost from the moment they’d met.

  “You are? Well, child. Is it his?”

  “Whose? No.” Dinah was looking at Magill
. “No, somebody else, and he’s not in the picture now.”

  “Well,” Dinah said, shaking her head in sympathy. “Well, bless your heart. Anything I can do, you let me know, hear?”

  “I’m all right—I just wanted to tell you.” She put her arms around her aunt’s solid body and held on.

  Earl held the car door for her. She rolled down her window as soon as she was in. “Thank you. For everything. It’s been…” She couldn’t think of a big enough word.

  “Come back soon,” Dinah said, shiny-eyed, holding on to Earl’s arm. “Now that you know where we are.”

  “I’ll call you,” Caddie said.

  “We can e-mail,” Dinah realized. “I love e-mail.”

  They kissed. Caddie backed out of the driveway, waving, savoring the smell of cinnamon.

  26

  Finney found the perfect tuft of grass and peed on it long and blissfully in the field behind Goose Creek Guest Cottages.

  Magill, on the other end of the leash, said, “Good work,” in a proud voice, man-to-man. Ignoring him, Finney pulled him over to a different tuft and went again.

  The moon was full but hiding in a crowd of fast, serious-looking clouds, and the wind felt cool and damp, as if rain were on the way. If this was Goose Creek, this smallish body of water the moon picked out at coy, irregular intervals, it was really more of a pond because the murky silver water didn’t appear to be flowing anywhere. Finney wanted to explore it more fully by jumping in, but Magill held steady on the leash and dissuaded him.

  “I like it better where we live.” Caddie’s voice silenced a cricket somewhere nearby in the meadowy underbrush. What was it doing here so late in the year? “It’s beautiful, but I like hills and mountains.”

  Magill nodded. “Impediments. I want to feel there’s more to what I’m looking at than I can see.”

  “Obstacles in the way.”

  “Like life.”

  “Not necessarily mountains, but there have to be hills,” she said.

  “Otherwise, your inner and outer geography don’t reflect each other.”

  They nodded wisely.

  “It’s getting colder,” Magill said.

  “It is getting chilly,” she agreed.

  He put his arm around her shoulders.

  “Well,” he said after a nice, quiet pause. “Looks like you’ve got a new family.”

  “Looks like.”

  “Aunt Dinah and Uncle Earl.”

  “And two cousins and a grandmother.”

  “How does it feel?”

  She shook her head. Indescribable.

  “I’ve got cousins,” he said thoughtfully. “I ought to go see them.”

  “Or your mother. You could go see her.”

  He looked up at the sky. “Does it feel like things are changing? It feels like a big wheel is turning, just enough to make everything different.”

  “I’m ready for that,” she said.

  “Me, too.”

  Finney stopped prowling and sat down in front of them, sniffing the air, drinking in the night.

  “Once my grandmother, I mean Nana”—how funny to have to distinguish between grandmothers—“organized something called the Frame Project. Well, she called it that, and ‘organized’—I think she got one other woman to do it with her. The idea was to go around framing anything they saw that struck them as art. So, you know, people would see it with new eyes, whatever it was, a fire hydrant, the bus stop bench, a sleeping dog, a child’s toy. And realize that art is everywhere.”

  “A sleeping dog,” Magill said appreciatively. “What did they make the frames out of?”

  “Anything, wood, PVC pipe, whatever was around.”

  “Big frames.”

  “Some were. I remember they tried to frame the garbage man. He wouldn’t stand still, I think he felt patronized. But anyway—you asked me how it feels. The Frame Project didn’t last long, but it’s always stayed with me. I still do it in my head sometimes, frame things. Tonight—I put a frame around a hundred things.”

  The moon came out long enough to glitter, delta-shaped, on the surface of the pond. Then it disappeared, and the stars caught in the intervals between the racing clouds seemed to wink more brightly to compensate. An owl hooted somewhere across the water, hoo hoo-hoo hoo. The wind picked up, smelling of rain and earth. It blew a lock of Caddie’s hair in her face; she swept it away, and in the same smooth move she slipped her arm around Magill’s waist.

  “I told Dinah about the baby,” she said.

  “I heard.”

  “You did?” He’d been so far away.

  “I’m glad you’re keeping it, Caddie. I mean her. You’ll make a great mom.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “Oh, yeah. But I was wondering.”

  “What?”

  “Does this mean we’re getting married after all?”

  She laughed a little too loudly. Magill watched her from the corner of his eye. She thought of what Cornel had said—it seemed much longer ago than just this afternoon. A lifetime. “I think what I was thinking, before, is that abandonment is something you catch, like a bacteria. Or a gene you pass down, mother to daughter, father to son. But it’s not, it can stop wherever you want it to. I’ve figured out that the only person I have to worry about as far as this baby is concerned is me, and I won’t be leaving. It stops with me. I’m steady.”

  “You’re steady.”

  “I am.”

  They agreed. A puff of breeze blew her hair in her eyes again, and this time Magill stroked it away with his fingers. “Getting late.”

  “We should go in, I guess.”

  They dropped their arms and stepped away from each other.

  “Come on, Fin.” The dog wouldn’t budge. Typical; he probably wanted to go in, but now that he knew they did, he was against it. “Rotten dog,” Magill said amiably. “You are this close to being freeze-dried.”

  “Well,” Caddie said in front of her cottage door. Magill handed her Finney’s leash. “Would you like to come in?”

  He said yes and followed her and Finney into the room. Things could be so easy sometimes.

  Back when it was a cabin, it was probably rustic, but in making it a cottage they’d covered the log walls with drywall and painted them green. So now it was just a regular motel room with too much furniture—two double beds, a bureau, desk and chair, TV set, closet, miniature bathroom. Finney, ignoring his dog bed, had staked out the double bed nearer the bathroom. You could tell, because he’d scratched one of the pillows out of the way and burrowed under the spread, making a jumble of the covers. Caddie and Magill sat on the other bed.

  “Are you tired?”

  “Yes.” She was exhausted.

  “Me, too.”

  “But don’t go yet.”

  “All right.”

  They smiled at each other. She traced her finger around the faded shape of a flower on the quilted bedspread. “Does Cornel snore?”

  He cupped his ear. “Can’t you hear him?”

  She laughed, standing up. “Move.” She pulled the spread back, folding it into thirds at the bottom. She took off her shoes. “We could turn on the TV.”

  He sat down and untied his hiking boots. They got in bed, bunching the pillows behind their heads. “Uh-oh. The remote’s over there.”

  “Rats.”

  They looked at it, sitting on top of the TV, but neither one moved. Caddie could see herself in the section of mirror over the bureau the television set wasn’t blocking. Her back hurt. She had to pee. She looked happy, though. “ ’Scuse me,” she said, got up, and went to the bathroom.

  When she came back, Finney was on their bed, making himself comfortable between Magill’s long legs. “Hey.” She did have some rules. Finney even knew this one. He dropped off that bed and jumped back on his, careful not to look at her. Pretending it was his idea.

  “It seems a lot longer than just this morning when we were home, doesn’t it?” she said, continuing her t
rain of thought from the bathroom. “So much has happened. Do you miss Thea?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought of her so many times tonight, how much she’d have loved this. Dinah and Earl, Mother. Everything.”

  “She’d have loved Earl’s job.”

  Caddie watched herself smiling in the mirror.

  Magill said, “Thea told me I can never be forgiven. She said I can only forgive myself.”

  Was that what she’d whispered to him, that night at Caddie’s house? “That’s true, I guess. Except I forgive you,” she said softly. “For what that’s worth.”

  “She did say I’d need a little help from my friends.”

  She rested her head on his shoulder. She couldn’t see her face in the mirror anymore, just the white of her bent neck. “You need to eat more. Your shoulder’s bony.”

  “Holly’s parents can’t see me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They can’t look at me. They say it wasn’t my fault, but they can’t be around me. I don’t hold it against them.”

  “Oh, I do.” She put her hand on his chest. “I wish I could heal you,” she said on a sigh. If she could just change his heart with the palm of her hand. If she could just fix him. “Henry.” She said it just to hear how it would sound. “I saw your factory, where you make feet. Thea and I drove by.” Their faces were very close; she could see specks of her own reflection in the blue of his eyes. “You should go back. You can’t be a scarecrow man forever.”

  His lashes came down; her image disappeared. Without opening his eyes, he leaned toward her and put his lips right where hers were. A soft, light press. She was surprised and not surprised. She moved her hand in a circle on his shirt and kissed him back, made it a real kiss.

  They pulled away to look at each other. Had he just wanted her to stop talking? If so, it worked. She smiled, worried about his serious, searching face. He had a big nose, it was his most prominent feature. But a nice nose. Like the prow of a ship, very sharp and determined. Nice whiskers, too, not too spiky, coming out of his smooth skin, shiny-brown and distinct.