Say Goodbye for Now

by Hyde, Catherine Ryan

  Pete grabbed a paper napkin from the holder on the kitchen counter, then laid it down flat and set his drumstick on it.

  “I’m not sure what the word ‘vague’ means,” he said.

  He began to wash his hands in the sink, which conveniently turned his back to her.

  “Hazy. Not definite. Shouldn’t you wash your hands before you start to eat?”

  “Yes, ma’am. And I did. But then when we were talking I looked down at my fingernails and decided I could do better.”

  She walked to his side, leaned over the sink, and purposely stared directly into his face, which involved quite a bit of looking up. He cut his eyes away.

  “If you know something, I’d appreciate hearing about it, Pete. I’m worried about them.”

  “Oh, you shouldn’t worry,” he said, sounding far too definite.

  “Aha! So you do know something!”

  “No, ma’am,” he said, drying his hands on a dish towel. Still avoiding her eyes. “I don’t know anything. You ought to know that about me by now. I’m always the last to know. Just . . . don’t worry.”

  “I’m about to get a crowbar and pry this out of you, kid.”

  “Oh, please don’t, ma’am. You know how hard stuff like this is for me.”

  He grabbed up his chicken and hurried out of the room.

  A moment later he stuck just his head back in. His hair was shaggy and long, so different from the way he’d worn it in the ’50s under his father’s thumb. Everything about him seemed to have naturally relaxed.

  “Here’s what I was thinking, though,” he said. “If you’re worried, you know what might help? Fix yourself up a little. You know. Do your hair up nice and make up your face. Just . . . you know. To feel better.”

  Then he disappeared again. And Dr. Lucy smiled, alone in the kitchen. And stopped worrying.

  Mostly.

  It was about a quarter after seven that evening when she heard the knock on the door, and knew.

  Pete ran breathless down the stairs.

  “I wonder who that could be?” he asked. Unconvincingly. Comically so.

  “Give it up, kid,” she said. “You’ll never be an actor.”

  She walked to the door, painfully managing her expectations. If she was wrong in what she was thinking, it would be a long fall.

  She opened the door.

  “I wasn’t wrong,” she said out loud.

  He was almost eight years older. Well, of course he was. So was she. But on him it came as more of a surprise, because she saw herself every day. His closely cropped hair had gone to gray at the temples, and she couldn’t decide if it was premature or not. Probably not. She had to remind herself that he was getting on closer to fifty than to forty and so was she.

  The line of scar was gone from his lip. The skin around his eyes showed additional creases, a reflection of how much more he had seen.

  One step behind him stood Justin as a young man. He was as tall as his father, and broomstick thin, with a calm, knowing face.

  She was unable to contain her smile. Then again, she didn’t try.

  “Loving won,” Calvin said.

  “So I heard.”

  “Did we manage to pull off the surprise?”

  She glanced over her shoulder at Pete, who looked noticeably relieved. Even more relieved than thrilled.

  “I knew he was holding on to something. But I never quite got it out of him.”

  She stepped back from the doorway, and Calvin came in. She instinctively stepped forward to embrace him. But before she could, he dropped to one knee.

  Tears sprang to her eyes immediately.

  “Oh my.” The two simple words came out a hoarse whisper.

  She looked past him to Justin, who was still standing on her welcome mat, smiling. When she looked down again, Calvin had opened a small black-velvet ring box and was holding it up for her to see. But the tears blurred her vision.

  “Lucille Armstrong,” he said, “I’ve come here to ask you to accept this simple ring and enter into an engagement to marry me. I know that may sound like a strange way to phrase a question, but here’s my thinking: Under normal circumstances two people spend a great deal of time together and then decide they’re each the right person for the other to marry. But we had that time stolen from us. So I’m asking you to begin an engagement in which we’ll take that time back. And the end goal, of course, will be to marry. Which, by the way, is legal in this state!”

  She laughed out loud, and her reaction cracked his demeanor into a smile.

  “And all the others,” she added.

  “I don’t know where we’ll marry or where we’ll live, because it’s not the sort of thing I’d even begin to work out without hearing your thoughts. In fact, I don’t know much more than I did all along, except that it’s time to ask this. But before you answer, before you say anything, I just have to say one thing. You know it, but I have to say it all the same. Changing the laws of a country is not the same as changing its hearts and minds. This might not be much easier than it would have been all along. It might even be danger—”

  He never managed to finish the word. Before he could add the final syllable, she placed her hand firmly across his mouth.

  “Calvin,” she said, pressing tightly. “Dear, sweet Calvin. Will you please stop talking for a split second so I can say yes?”

  She wandered downstairs around bedtime and sat next to Calvin’s legs on the couch. She did not turn on the light. She half expected to have to gently wake him. Either that or settle in and wait.

  But apparently he hadn’t fallen asleep yet, either.

  “Everything all right?” he asked quietly.

  He reached a hand out and she took it and held it.

  “I need to tell you something,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  “It’s something of a confession.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I have to tell you this, and then you’ll tell me if you still want to marry me.”

  He braced his other hand behind his head to prop himself up slightly. As if to better see her face. But it was dark. She was glad of that.

  “I’d bet money there’s nothing you can tell me that will make me not want to marry you, but if you think you’ve got something that bad, then go ahead and give it a try.”

  “Before I knew you . . . I needed money to take care of all these animals. There were more of them back then. Some of the wild ones had been able to go back into the wild before you met me, and some of the domestic ones I found homes for. At the height of the thing it was much more than my alimony would cover.”

  “Right. I remember you said you had to get creative to cover those costs.”

  “Yes, that. So . . . what I used to do was . . . I’d get these referrals. The desperate kind. I’d put guys back together without asking any questions about how they’d ended up apart in the first place. In other words, I knew they’d done something against the law. But I didn’t say anything. It was partly for the money. Well. Mostly. Ninety percent. But also I was mad at this town and all the people in it for being so closed-minded about a lady doctor. I guess I felt like I didn’t owe them much. And I was still furious at the world for taking my son away.”

  A brief silence. But she wasn’t afraid. Because she was holding his hand. Nothing had changed. She could feel that it hadn’t.

  “I can relate to being mad at this town,” he said. “And being furious at the world. Why did you stop?”

  “I was more or less forced to stop. It really wasn’t because I came to my senses or anything. Well, I did. I did come to my senses. But with help.”

  “And how did you feel when you were forced to stop?”

  “A little scared about money. And also incredibly relieved.”

  “There,” he said. “See? That’s a nice healthy conscience at work. Is that really all you’ve got?”

  “That’s the worst of me, yes.”

  “Well, then I’m sorry. You’ll need t
o do better than that if you want to get out of marrying me. Now try to get some sleep.”

  “There’s another thing,” she said. “But it’s not a confession. More of a worry.”

  “I’m open to hear whatever you’ve got.”

  “When I first took Pete in, he asked how long I’d take care of him. I said until he was old enough to take care of himself. At the time I was thinking along the lines of eighteen. But eighteen came and went, and I still don’t really think of him as old enough to take care of himself. I’m not slighting his abilities. If he wanted to be on his own I’d support him a hundred percent. But he’s making no move to leave. And I never pushed, because I’d miss his company. He works a full-time job, so I’m not suggesting he’s refused to step up to the responsibilities of adulthood. Then again, you know Pete. He never met a responsibility he didn’t like. But living alone is another matter. I never told you this, because it’s the kind of thing you keep to yourself until you know how it’s going to play out, but I had a plan that when Pete was eighteen I’d ask him to live alone here and care for the animals so I could come to Philadelphia. That is, assuming you still wanted me there. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I just can’t picture Pete living alone out here in the middle of nowhere. I think he’d be miserable. I planned it again for nineteen, but long before the birthday came around I knew I didn’t have the heart to do it.”

  She paused. Stalled, really. Waited to see what he had on his mind.

  “Then we’ll stay here,” he said.

  “It’ll be hard here.”

  “It’ll be hard everywhere. We’ll work it out.”

  “Yes,” she said. Followed by a little smile that felt sad. “I suppose we will.”

  She didn’t move. Or speak, at least for a time. Then she said, “I’m not sure why you’re down here and I’m up there.”

  “Because we have plenty of time. The rest of our lives.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I suppose that’s true.”

  She walked to the stairs. Stopped. Looked back at Calvin.

  Then she walked back upstairs and did not sleep.

  Chapter Thirty-One: Pete

  Pete sat on the edge of the bed, staring out the window at the woods, and the moon over the trees, and the horses sleeping peacefully on their feet in the pasture. He listened to Justin rattling around in the bathroom getting ready for bed.

  A moment later the light went dark in the bathroom, and Justin came in and sat on the edge of the bed with Pete, and bumped him with his shoulder.

  “Nothing ever changes,” Justin said.

  “You mean like you brushing your teeth for six minutes?”

  “No, I mean that.” He pointed out at the moon hovering over the backyard and its calm herd. “That plant got huge,” he said.

  Pete knew Justin was referring to the plant in the living room. The one Mr. Bell had brought Dr. Lucy as a cutting before he’d gone back up north. It had more than filled a corner of the living room in eight years, and Dr. Lucy never seemed to have the heart to prune it back.

  “Yeah. She fusses over it a lot. Waters it just so. Gives it plant food. Lately I’ve been saying, ‘Hey, Dr. Lucy, you sure that plant needs food? Seems like it wants to take over the house as it is.’ She just says the bigger it gets the happier she’ll be.”

  They sat in silence a moment, staring out at the yard. Not needing to speak.

  Then Justin said, suddenly, “Oh. Wait. Where’s Smokey?”

  Pete squeezed his eyes closed, and his mind filled with a clear image of the gray Thoroughbred gelding. The one they had ridden most often.

  “I was afraid you were going to ask that. He died a couple months back.”

  “Oh no. Of what?”

  “Old age. He was twenty-six when we used to ride him. Thirty-four when he died. Turns out that’s why he was the best one to ride. He was already old. I should have told you. I thought about it every time I wrote you a letter since then. But I was kind of broken up about it and I didn’t want to be the one to have to tell you.”

  A long silence fell. Pete felt compelled to break it.

  “Your voice got really deep. Somehow I wasn’t expecting that. I knew you got bigger and taller and grew your hair out because I saw pictures. But I forgot your voice would change. I hope you know why I never tried to talk to you on the phone when Dr. Lucy called your dad or he called her. I hope you know it’s not that I wouldn’t have liked to talk to you.”

  “I figured you wanted to save the time for them.”

  “Right. It was really important to her. Anyway, I guess I’m talking a lot, probably because I have this thing on my mind and I’m halfway trying to avoid it. But I can’t avoid it forever. They shouldn’t get married here, and they shouldn’t try to live here. They should go back up north.”

  “Probably so,” Justin said, clearly not knowing where Pete was heading with this.

  “So I have to stay here alone and take care of the animals so they can be happy. So they can go where they need to go. I don’t want to. It’s scary to think of living here all alone. But she deserves this. So I’m just going to do it anyway.”

  “That’s a nice thing,” Justin said.

  “It’s just what has to be. After all she’s done for me.”

  Justin patted him on the shoulder and then got up and walked around to his own bed. His bed for the night was a twin-sized mattress on the floor, which Pete had hauled up from the garage. As soon as the guest room had become Pete’s room, nearly eight years earlier, the second bed had only gotten in the way.

  “Oh,” Justin said. “That’s interesting.”

  Pete looked around to see that Prince had settled his old bones on one corner of Justin’s mattress while they were looking the other way.

  “Prince,” Pete said. “You have to go back to your own bed, boy.”

  “No, not really,” Justin said. “I mean, not if he’s willing to share.”

  Pete watched as Justin arranged himself into bed without disturbing the wolf-dog, who had one eye half open, watching to see if he was about to be ejected. When it was clear he could stay, he closed the eye again and sighed.

  “It’ll be like a wedding present for them,” Justin said.

  “What will?”

  “What you just said you would do.”

  “Oh. That. Right.”

  It hurt a spot in Pete’s stomach to think about it again. But he couldn’t put it out of his head. In fact, it made it impossible to sleep for what felt like most of the night.

  He lay awake thinking of all the times he’d heard Dr. Lucy say her time with Calvin had been stolen from her, and absorbing that he felt a little bit the same way about Justin. Here Justin was grown, and—other than a couple hundred letters, which hadn’t felt good enough—Pete had missed eight years of his brother/friend’s life.

  And in a couple of days Justin would go away again.

  Everybody would.

  “Pete,” Justin whispered. “Are you awake?”

  Pete was pretty sure he hadn’t been. But he was unused to sleeping with anyone in the room with him, so the quiet voice startled him awake.

  “Um. Yeah. I think so. What?”

  “What if you weren’t alone here?”

  “Who else would be here with me?”

  “Maybe . . . me?”

  Pete sat up in bed. The moon was down, the room dark, and it took his eyes a moment to adjust. When they did, he could see that Prince was still curled tightly in one corner of Justin’s mattress.

  “You?”

  “Yeah. Why not? I’m nineteen. I can go off on my own. I’ve been looking for work. Why not look for work here?”

  “But you’re afraid of it here.”

  “Yeah. I was just lying here thinking about that. About how when I was a kid if something scared me I wanted to stay as far away from it as possible. But now I’m not a kid. And I want to be braver.”

  “So you’d live here? And help me take care of the animals?”r />
  “Yeah. What do you think? Is it a stupid idea?”

  “No, it’s a great idea!”

  “Good. We’ll tell them in the morning. It’ll be like a wedding present from both of us at once. But you have to tell Dr. Lucy you were going to do it anyway, even if you were going to be here all by yourself. If you don’t tell her, I will. Because that’s the best present of all right there.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two: Dr. Lucy

  Before getting on the train, Dr. Lucy hugged Pete twice, then Justin for an extra-long time while Calvin hugged Pete, then Pete again while Calvin hugged his son a second time.

  “You better get on the train, ma’am,” Pete said. “It’s about to go.”

  “Call me if you have trouble with anything.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like anything you find yourself trying to do.”

  “Everything I’m about to do I’ve been doing since I was twelve, ma’am.”

  “I was thinking about things like paying the light bill or turning off the gas in a storm or maintaining the car or . . .”

  But then she couldn’t think what else.

  “Fine,” he said. “I’ll call. Now you need to get on the train and stop worrying and go be happy.”

  “We won’t be away forever,” Calvin said. “Give it some time. We’ll see.”

  Pete kissed Dr. Lucy on the cheek.

  Then she felt a slight tug at her hand as Calvin gently pulled her toward the boarding stairs.

  They stepped up onto the train still holding hands. It was a radical act, and she knew it. But she didn’t feel cowed and she didn’t consider letting go. They moved along the aisle to the next, less crowded, car, Calvin slightly behind her to accommodate the narrow space.

  She watched the faces of the people they passed. Each person looked first at Calvin and then at her, or the other way around, then at their linked hands, then away.

  One older man with an angry face and a buzz cut did not finish by looking away. Instead he looked back into Calvin’s face, his emotions forming a brick wall that he seemed to challenge them to break through.

  They quietly cut around him and kept walking, and no further challenge was issued.