The Realm of Last Chances

by Steve Yarbrough

  The deli stood at the intersection of East Border Road and Main Street. Waiting at the traffic light, she glanced through the plate glass, hoping to spot Matt, but too many customers were in line. He said you’d be surprised how many people opted for sliced turkey to avoid the trouble of roasting a whole bird. When she asked if he had plans for Thanksgiving, he told her he’d be spending it at his boss’s home. They invited him every year, he said, but until now he’d turned them down. When she wondered why, he said, “Because I had nothing to be thankful for. Just a lot to regret.”

  Both of them had begun talking about the future as if it didn’t preclude their present behavior. In her rational moments, she knew the affair couldn’t continue. Sooner or later, Vico or Dave would see her climbing out of Matt’s car and tell Cal. Or someone else—a caretaker, a policeman—would discover their sanctuary and, in the best scenario, change the locks on Penelope Hill’s house. In the worst case, they might find themselves in jail.

  Once Cal learned her secret, what he would do was anybody’s guess. She could imagine him leaving in the middle of the night, disappearing from her life forever, but she could also see him walking down the street, kicking in Matt’s door and beating him to a pulp. Even before he prevented the robbery at the convenience store, she’d known he was capable of violence if pushed far enough. You could just tell he had it in him, and over the years this had given her a sense of security that now seemed perverse.

  The traffic on Route 28 wasn’t bad yet, and she reached Andover in just under thirty minutes. The parking lot at Whole Foods was already crowded, but she found a spot near the rear of the store and went inside.

  She’d decided to bake a simple apple cake. She could still see the recipe, in Sarah Connulty’s surprisingly elegant script, on an index card; her mother’s best friend had collected these in a three-ring binder and presented them to her before she left for Case Western. What had happened to that little book Kristin no longer knew, but she’d cooked out of it for years, and no one loved the results more than Philip Harrington.

  Unlike the Whole Foods she’d shopped at in California, the Andover store was strangely configured. Upon entry, you stepped straight into the produce department, where tables set against one another at odd angles were bracketed by vegetable coolers. If the goal was to create a massive traffic jam, it was a great success, and it took her several minutes to get close enough to the apples to select four nice-sized organic Granny Smiths. After that she picked up a carton of eggs and, just to be on the safe side, five-pound bags of sugar and flour. Then she bagged eight ounces of chopped walnuts and an equal amount of raisins. Finally, she went to the butcher’s counter and ordered a duck and some grass-fed beef chuck, thinking that on Saturday she might make a pot roast.

  All six checkout stands were staffed today, but the line at each was eight or nine customers deep. The store had a café, so even though she didn’t really need another cup of coffee, she decided to have one. If the situation didn’t improve in a few minutes, she’d line up like everyone else. She ordered a latte, then pulled her cart over to the only unoccupied table, sat down and began to sip her drink.

  Cal once told her she was unobservant. He didn’t mean it as a criticism, though it sounded like one. He said it when they were driving by a neighbor’s house in California and she noted that the shake roofing had been replaced by tiles. “They did that about five years ago,” he said, then remarked that she often saw things without actually seeing them.

  The washed-out blonde had been standing in front of the espresso machine for some time, part of the background detail. But to toss her empty paper cup into the trash, Kristin had to walk past her, and that was when she realized it was Gwendolyn Conley.

  She paused at the exact instant the barista placed a drink on the counter in front of Conley, who wrapped her hand around the insulating sleeve and turned around, now facing her directly, giving Kristin no chance to get rid of her cup and walk away as fast as she could.

  After a few awkward seconds, Kristin asked, “Are your kids here with you?”

  Conley’s face was naturally pale. If she’d ever had a California tan, no trace remained. “My kids?” she said. “No. They’re with their father for the holiday. Why do you ask?”

  When Kristin dropped her cup into the bin, her hand was shaking. She realized she couldn’t conceal it, so she didn’t bother trying.

  erlend withdrew his arm. He said nothing, and so Kristin walked quietly away and climbed into bed. Her heart thudded hollowly and hard against her ribs. Now and then she cast a glance at her husband. He had turned his back to her, slowly taking off one garment after the other. Then he came over and lay down.

  Kristin waited for him to speak. She waited so long that her heart seemed to stop beating and just stood still, quivering in her breast.

  But Erlend didn’t say a word. And he didn’t take her into his arms.

  At last he hesitantly placed his hand on her breast and pressed his chin against her shoulder so that the stubble of his beard prickled her skin. When he still said nothing, Kristin turned over to face the wall.

  Matt laid the book on the floor next to his recliner. He’d just begun the second volume of Kristin Lavransdatter, which from the very start had made him edgy, possibly because of the character’s first name or maybe due to its problematic title, The Wife.

  He lifted his empty coffee cup and walked into the kitchen. Ten thirty on Thanksgiving morning, and he hadn’t seen her since Tuesday. Usually, all he had to do was get through a weekend, but now he’d embarked on a stretch of six days in which he couldn’t hope for anything more than a random sighting. If he’d gone to work, it might have been easier to pass the time, but Frankie always closed the deli on Thanksgiving and didn’t reopen until the following Monday. He needed those days off, he said, to lie on the couch and watch football.

  Matt stood the cup in the sink alongside dirty dishes from last night’s dinner. The deli had stayed open until eight to fill special orders, so it was almost ten when he finally got home and made pasta alla puttanesca, using a recipe Carla had taught him. Though it was something he loved having at least a couple times a month, by then his appetite had deserted him.

  He’d tried to read after giving up on dinner, but every few minutes he kept walking over to the window, pulling the curtain aside and peeking out. The lights in Kristin’s bedroom were still on at eleven thirty, but a little before midnight the room went dark. When that happened, he turned his own light off and pressed his face against the cold pane. Then he turned the light back on, whipped out his cell and wrote text messages to both of his daughters, wishing them a happy Thanksgiving and saying he looked forward to seeing them on Saturday. In reality, he all but wished they weren’t coming. After their previous visit they’d told their mom that he seemed a lot happier than he’d been in ages, that the house was clean and he’d fixed the shower faucet, and this prompted her to stun him with the first e-mail she’d sent him since marrying Nowicki. Sounds like your life has taken a turn for the better. I can only guess what that might mean. But I’m happy for you, Matt. Clue me in when the time comes? This weekend, he’d probably act so gloomy that Angie and Lexa would go home and tell Carla he was as miserable as ever.

  He had a hard time understanding what had happened to him. During those afternoons at the bar in North Reading, when he and Kristin drank their martinis and talked, he’d sometimes felt a tightness in his chest. It wasn’t pleasant, nor was it exactly unpleasant. He knew perfectly well what it meant: a new feeling existed where none had for a long time, and it needed a little space. When that opened up, and then got filled up, his chest could go back to feeling normal. If he’d been forced to bestow a name on this new sensation, it would not have been “love,” though that’s what he called it when he wrote Kristin that long e-mail.

  The first time they went to bed together at Penny Hill’s, he’d expected reticence from her, even embarrassment. Yet after drawing the curtains shut, she fel
t for the light switch and flipped it on. While he stood there shivering in his underwear, the sweats in a ball at his feet, she pulled her top off, reached around behind herself and unhooked her bra. It fell to the floor and then she stepped out of the pants, and to his amazement she wore nothing underneath. The whole time she held his gaze. “Well,” she said, her arms at her sides, her long, slim fingers grazing her thighs, “what do you think?”

  His voice failed. He knew he ought to say something, but he couldn’t find any words. She turned sideways, letting him study her profile. Her breasts were still firm and full, and she had only the trace of a belly. “I’m asking,” she said, “because I would guess this is the first time you’ve ever seen a fifty-year-old woman naked.”

  He stepped out of his underwear, then moved toward her and wrapped his arms around her from behind, his fingers locking just above her navel. He smelled a hint of fragrance. “I haven’t made love in a long time,” he said.

  “I haven’t either,” she told him. “All I’ve done is have sex. But very little of it.”

  He’d thought that was what they were going to do that night, that two people who liked each other would share pleasure in a bed belonging to the city of Montvale. Maybe it would happen once, even twice, maybe ten times or more. As long as it was nice and they didn’t get caught, what was the harm?

  He flicked off the light and held her hand as they stepped toward the canopied four-poster. The coverlet was dusty—when he pulled it back, she sneezed. She crawled in first, then he lay down beside her and tugged the sheet over their shoulders. “You might think I’ve done this before,” he said, “but I haven’t.”

  “It’s patently clear that you haven’t.”

  She said nothing else, leaving room for the obvious question, so even though he already knew the answer, he asked it. “What about you?”

  “This is the one thing I always promised myself I would never do.”

  “So we’re both rookies. We’ll probably botch it.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said, then reached between his legs and began to stroke him.

  That this had happened only six weeks ago now seemed impossible. Or that he’d make it through Thanksgiving at Frankie’s, then somehow survive tomorrow when almost everyone else would either be watching college football or using pepper spray on one another in the crush at Best Buy. And that on Saturday and Sunday he’d be playing father to his daughters, looking for a movie to take them to before ushering them into LA Fitness on guest passes, followed by dinner at Montvale Pizza—trying the whole time to convince them of his newfound contentment, so they wouldn’t have to worry about their dad. It felt like Monday was years away, not just four days.

  He washed his coffee cup and last night’s dishes and read for another couple hours before going upstairs to take a shower. When he got out and dried off, wrapping the towel around his waist, he stood beside the bedroom window, pulled the curtain back a few inches and peered out.

  She and her husband were on the sidewalk in front of Vico Cignetti’s. Cal had a grocery sack in one hand, a guitar case in the other. She held a domed cake plate. Just as they stepped into the driveway, she looked over her shoulder toward his bedroom window, as if she knew he’d be standing there, and for an instant they gazed at each other. Then Kristin bowed her head and followed her husband inside.

  vico was that rare man who looked at home in the kitchen. He wore his checkered apron with aplomb, and when she remarked on its unusual pattern—rectangles overlapping squares, eight or ten different colors bleeding into one another—he told her he owned an entire collection. “Wanna see?” he asked, then threw open a floor-to-ceiling cabinet stocked with mops and brooms, dustpans and brushes and an impressive array of cleaning solutions. Mounted at the back was an apron rack, displaying a colorful assortment: black and white, green-and-gold checks, even a frilly little thing with a blue heart sewn onto a pink-and-white-checked background. “My daughter made that one for me on my sixtieth birthday.”

  “Very nice,” she said, though the thought of him actually wearing it was incongruous at best. It belonged on a ten-year-old girl.

  She deposited her cake plate on the counter and asked if she could help.

  “Sure you can,” he said. “Pour yourself a glass of wine and provide scintillating company while the goons watch the Pats.”

  “All right, I’ll be happy to.”

  “Try that Barbera.” He gestured at an open bottle. “In the world at large, it’s got a less-than-stellar rep. In my house, it’s king. I started drinking it on my tenth birthday. I got up that morning, and my dad sat me down and handed me a glass. ‘Vico,’ he said, ‘you’re a man now.’ I’ve loved it ever since.”

  She poured herself a glassful and took a sip. It tasted awful. “This is wonderful,” she told him.

  He was busy trimming Brussels sprouts. “I’m going to roast these,” he told her. “See, most people don’t know it, but when you boil or steam them, you lose almost all their cancer-retarding properties.”

  “I didn’t know they had any.”

  “Well, most people don’t. At my age, though, you learn to pay attention to anything that might prolong your time here. I don’t know what comes next, but I’ve got a feeling finding good Barbera there might be tough.”

  While she sat at the kitchen table, watching him make deft slicing motions, he gave her the story of his life, all of which, he said, had been spent in Massachusetts. A graduate of North Shore State, he’d taken his first job in Gloucester, handling accounting for the Community Pier Association. “Did that till 1980 when my marriage broke up, at which point I decided I needed a change of scenery. So I moved down here and opened my own accounting firm, and it was still going strong when I retired. I sold it for a nice sum of money.”

  To keep up her end of the conversation, she remarked that her assistant lived in Gloucester.

  “Yeah? What’s her name?”

  “Donna Taff.”

  He laid his knife down, turned around and crossed his arms. “Jesus Christ. Hard Taffy works for you?”

  “Hard Taffy?”

  “That’s what … look, you probably don’t want to hear this. And I probably shouldn’t tell you.”

  “Of course you should.” She figured a story was forthcoming about Donna’s stern, take-charge manner.

  “Well, if you insist.” He refilled his wineglass and plopped down at the table, propping his chin in his hands and leaning forward conspiratorially. She saw the hearing aid stuck in his ear. “She and her husband, Charlie, used to be the biggest swingers in Gloucester.”

  “My Donna?”

  He winked. “She might be yours now, but she was a community asset back then. I bet she still is.”

  She’d heard quite a bit of strange news over the last few days, but this was the only piece that made her need a drink. She took a big swallow of the ghastly wine, then another. And then she took another. “Donna must be sixty now,” she protested, the Barbera burning her nostrils.

  “I’m sixty-five. And I imagine if I saw her this minute, a couple decades would melt right away.”

  “So you had … encounters with her?”

  “It was the seventies, and Gloucester’s a fishing town, and in that business it’s always boom or bust. You get busted, you want a little boom. Yeah, we all messed around.”

  “Is that why your marriage broke up?”

  “You can’t say why any marriage breaks up. It’s a bunch of things, and then one day they all turn into one thing and you’re at the end of your run. Kind of like a Broadway play.”

  This wasn’t an easy notion for her to buy into. In her first marriage, she’d seen no evidence that anything was wrong until Philip came home and told her he was leaving. They’d had a wonderful breakfast that very morning at the local farmers’ market, croissants with strawberry preserves, and her Southern gentleman stood behind her while she finished her coffee, resting his hands on her shoulders and kissing the top of her hea
d. “You’re a great lady,” he’d said.

  She pretended to examine the label on Vico’s wine bottle. “So what did you do,” she asked, “to reach the end of yours?”

  “I forgot to put the seat down on the toilet.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “It’s hard for me to be serious, but it’s not impossible. What happened was, it’s the middle of the night, I’d had a few beers, so I go to the bathroom and do my business, then stagger back to bed. About an hour later I hear a shriek. She fell into the toilet and couldn’t get out, and that was the end of that. We’re still friends, though, and talk every few days.”

  He lifted the bottle and topped off her glass, and she took another swallow. She’d heard enough about the end of his marriage. She was afraid he’d ask if she’d been married before, and she didn’t want to lie and wasn’t about to tell the truth. “Why did you call Donna Hard Taffy if she was so …”

  “Hot?”

  She nodded.

  Vico laughed. He had sparkling white teeth, large and well formed. “ ‘Hot,’ ” he said, “doesn’t mean soft. She could be pretty insistent.”

  “About what?”

  “Everything. She had no trouble telling you what she did or didn’t like. She wasn’t above critiquing your performance, either.” He drained his own glass, reached for the Barbera and poured himself another. “Isn’t this great?” he asked.

  “It is. I’m not sure I’ve ever had this variety before, but I like it.”

  “I’m not talking about the Barbera. I’m talking about talking. You and me sitting here gossiping about a woman who made guys do crazy things thirty years ago. Dave and Jimmy and Cal in there blissed out before the TV. Friends gathering to celebrate the holiday. That’s what I mean. This is great. It’s life. What else is there?”