Never Too Late

by Jo Barney

  Chapter Two

  At first I hand over the reins to Kathleen who would have taken them from me anyway, and she holds a firm grip on the days that follow. She manages the social decisions, the memorial, the reservation for a reception room. In his usual quiet, competent way, Brian manages the details at the mortuary, details I’m not willing to deal with, except to show him Art’s and my written directions to be cremated and buried on the one burial site we bought years ago, big enough for both of us if we were in small containers, calling lists of friends, talking to Herbert Smith, Art’s attorney about the legal aspects of death. Every once in a while, my son walks by as I lie in Art’s lounger with my feet up and my eyes closed. I feel him touch my shoulder, and I shake my head. I am thinking. Not about Christmas morning. Art’s gray, staring face doesn’t need to be thought about. On its own, it slides across my eyes, lids open or shut, like a floater.

  No, I am remembering other Arts, bubbling up from a dank well somewhere near my belly, ancient moments as painful in the replay as they were in reality, and I’m back on the shadowy path that leads me to a young girl with bobbed dark hair and the third-highest grades in her graduating class. She didn’t get to give a speech like the other two, but she received a scholarship to Minnetanka Normal School. That girl believed she’d be a teacher.

  Then she got pregnant.

  “It’s your own fault,” my mother hissed, the furrow in her forehead narrowing her eyes into angry slits. My lack of monthly cotton rags on the clothesline had forced the truth out of me. “You should have said no.” She grabbed my wrist and yanked.

  But who could have resisted the beer-fueled pleas of the best-looking tenor in the church choir? Almost the only one, unlike his friends, saved from going into the service by his flat feet. Two years older. Employed. Any day now going to buy the gas station where he worked the three-to-ten shift. “War’s over. Everyone will be getting cars, needing gas,” he assured me as we squirmed in the backseat of his father’s Plymouth sedan and found each other’s parts, the midnight sky eventually lightening with dawn.

  The night I told him we had to get married, Art, looking for something important just over my head, ran a hand across his oiled pompadour and said, “I guess that’s it.” On our wedding day, my mother-in-law stepped close to me, offering not a hug but a nudge, and murmured into my ear, “He will be a difficult man to live with. He’s just like his father.”

  Soon Art’s father died, and his mother went off to a daughter’s house to be cared for. The daughter got the furniture. We got the old mattress. Art said we should, so we carried it to our little rental house, stuffed it with the hay left over from the cow that had also moved on and gave the ugly bag a try. But after a few days, and cringing at what those circles and blobs of stains would reveal if they could talk, I spent an hour spreading the straw over the winter garden out in back. That evening we bought a new mattress, and our living room was heated by flames licking at ancient striped ticking. Art didn’t like to waste anything.

  Other shards of broken dreams poke at me as I give myself over to the fragments of my life. The first time he grunted, “Go to hell,” through clenched teeth at me, slammed the door, didn’t come back until morning. The screeching of a shoved-back chair and a shout, “Fuck! Didn’t I tell you to stop crying?” to an unhappy two-year-old. The Formica kitchen table overturning, our hamburgers skidding across the linoleum, as he swung a fist at a sneering, teenaged Brian. The night, nights, he rocked the bed as he worked his penis after I’d said no.

  Art had become a disappointed, angry man.

  I search, empty-handed, for the times I loved him. I doubt he ever loved me. He accepted, as his due for taking me and a child on, the folded clean clothes waiting in the chest of drawers; the meat-and-potato dinners on the table each night at six; the waxed floors and, later, the vacuumed wall-to-wall carpet. I accepted, in those early years, his walking out of our lives every morning; his stoic returns; his weekly dispersals in the tan budget envelope marked Household, the same envelope for years, the folds growing thin and fuzzy and finally splitting open; his plans for our occasional vacations in whatever Plymouth he was driving. And, at first, I accepted my loneliness, and then later, my own anger that festered under the surface of my days.

  His gaze did not wander from the TV screen the night I gathered the words, asked him if he loved me. “Every day I go to work, come home, pay for our food and house. Isn’t that enough?”

  No, it hadn’t been enough. I push against the back of Art’s lounger, and my feet rise up a few more inches. Not then, not now.

  Sometimes, though, it had seemed almost enough. The few summers when we had saved money and could take a couple of weeks off and escape our life, if not each other. Times we looked over the edge of a crater, a crack in the earth, at an orange sun sinking into blue water, mesmerized by beauty so foreign to our own narrow vista at home. I can still feel the moment at Estes Park when his arm wrapped my shoulders, his warm hand brushing my breast. “Beautiful,” I whispered. Then the word, the look, the touch, like rising mists, dissipated in the cold air between us. He reached for his camera and pointed to the spot I should stand. The photo was later pasted onto a black page in a fake-leather–bound album, date noted, and the book was shut and stored on a closet shelf.

  I pulled out a couple of those old photo albums this week, massaging the painful memories they contain with the soothing pictures of a grinning boy wearing a broad band of Scout badges, later grinning again under a square black cap, diploma held in front of his chest, Brian working hard to please me, to ease the bitter marriage he had been born into. But I ran out of good times and the bad times slinked in as I turned the pages, moments that hadn’t been caught on Kodak film, moments filed in an overflowing folder marked Guilt, a folder tucked between a couple of my brain cells that still flicker at irregular intervals. Like the moment Art called me a slut.

  I don’t want to think anymore.

  Someone is running the vacuum in the hall. The grandgirl, I suppose. Meg. Of the two children, she pleases me to the most, probably because she reminds me of myself, a busy, tidy girl whose attempt to please others is already carving permanent creases in her forehead.

  “Sorry. Did I wake you up, Grandma?”

  Kathleen, her hands wet from whatever she’s been doing in the kitchen, wheels the vacuum away. “Meg, I told you to not vacuum where Grandma is resting.” Meg’s frown deepens.

  “I was dreaming, Meg. Not good dreams. I’m glad you woke me up.”

  “I have bad dreams.” Meg leans on the arm of my chair. “Dreams I have to wake myself up from. Mom says it’s because I ate something I shouldn’t have.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe it’s because you’ve done something you shouldn’t have.” I suspect this isn’t an idea anyone, especially a grandmother, should suggest to a child.

  But Meg understands. “Or maybe both? Like yesterday when I found where Winston had hidden the rest of his chocolate Santa and I ate it?”

  “Yes, sometimes it’s both.” I crank the chair upright and reach for the Good Housekeeping on the end table. Meg stands by my side, waiting perhaps to be invited to squeeze in, to share the pages with me as she used to when she was little. She pretends she doesn’t notice that my eyes are focused on an Olay ad, and after a moment, she turns, calls, “Where’s Winston, Mom? He still has to do his chores.”

  I listen as the girl’s footsteps recede; the back door bangs. I don’t know why I can’t do them, the grandmotherly things that should come without thought. I have lost my ability to feel unconditional love. I probably never did have it, just acted the roles handed to me over the years. I flip through the magazine until I reach the essay at the last page. I’ve always enjoyed these short snapshots of other women’s lives. Today’s piece describes the pain of losing a faithful dog to old age, the author’s tears most likely staining the page as she wrote.

  I am envious of those tears, the fact that someone can put a loss like that into
words, salving the wound, finding solace. I can’t do that, can’t even imagine myself picking up a pen. How does one describe an empty vessel?

  Chapter Three

  I find a handkerchief, the one my mother gave me on my wedding day, its old lace yellowed, in the top drawer of my dresser. I won’t need it probably, but perhaps someone else will. I tuck it in my purse. I glance at the mirror over the sink, and I see an old lady patting down her wild, gray hair. I will put on a little lipstick. The black pantsuit makes my skin sallow, but I won’t add any other color, no jewelry; a widow is expected to be bereaved, at least until her husband is safely in the ground, the mourners fed, the house cleared.

  Ten minutes later, Brian, standing at the black limousine’s open door, waits for me to slide in. “Did we have to do this?” I am not sure to whom he’s talking.

  “Yes,” Kathleen answers from a far corner in the back seat. The children are patting the leather, working at opening a cabinet door. “It’s expected, even when the service is at the gravesite. So the family does not have to be concerned with driving, parking, all that.”

  Art has been dead almost two weeks, and something has held up his burial. I’m not sure what, but I am glad that it is happening now rather than during those first days I hadn’t been able to raise myself from the lounger. I slide in next to my daughter-in-law, who is tucking a Kleenex into her sleeve.

  “In case you need it,” she says, and I realize the tissue is intended for me. “I hope all this is okay with you. We all talked about a family-only graveside ceremony because Art wasn’t the religious type, and you seemed all right with the idea. I’ve arranged for the reception in the mortuary’s Garden Room for friends. The caterer is very good, but I’m not sure whether I should have ordered the wine—”

  “We need wine,” I interrupt. “I’m assuming a few bottles, at least.” For me, I want to add, but I know that most of the attendees will also be drinkers, just as Art was. Red. I prefer white. “You did order white, of course?” I say, and then I shut up. This isn’t my show. I just need a little white wine to get through it.

  “Of course, Edith. And the shrimp Art loved.”

  Art didn’t love shrimp, did he? I lean back against the seat and try to remember. No. Art loved meat and potatoes. I love shrimp. I consider how, in Kathleen’s mind, Art and Edith have apparently melded together, both shrimp lovers, both also dead or close to it.

  “That’s nice,” I say.

  “Hey, Mom,” Winston calls. “This limo is brand new! 1996, this says.” He waves a brochure in front of his mother’s eyes and she tells him to put whatever he has found back or the driver will be angry. The boy watches the steady black cap in front of him as he folds the paper. His sister rubs her index fingers at him. Shame, she signals and giggles. They open another cabinet, find the little bottles of liquor possibly left over from the last voyagers in this land-ship. A wedding, perhaps, or a high school prom. They hold them up, demanding a taste. Kathleen gives her husband her do-something frown, Brian in return answering, “What?” in his recent Brian-is-out-of-it way.

  Kathleen takes the bottles from the children, replaces them in the cabinet, and says, “No,” in a voice I know they’ll remember. I have often admired that trait in other women, the ability to say no so that others hear and know that they mean it.

  We arrive at a green hill pockmarked with flat markers. I remember the Memorial Day visits to my grandmother’s grave, when my duty as the youngest child was to clip the grass at the edges of her gravestone before I poked the metal container holding the peonies into the grass beneath her name. The cemetery would be filled with children and parents who, once they said another hello or goodbye to their dead relatives, chatted and ran among the red and pink and green spots of color.

  We five are almost alone on this burial ground. No peonies, no sprouts of grass to be taken care of. A cold mist fills the air. The small white tent on a rise at the side of a winding path must be our destination, and Brian takes my arm and leads me toward it. A woman in a flowing dress, a stranger, meets us on the path and asks, “Aren’t we glad it’s stopped raining?” Not waiting for an answer, she continues, “The children have a poem? No? A song?” They grin yes, and the woman hurries ahead of us.

  Meg and Winston have decided on “You Are My Sunshine,” the only song anyone has ever heard Art sing, perhaps the only one he learned from his mother as she soothed a difficult child. He used to mouth the words, whisper them, actually, walking to the grocery store or working in the garden. The song probably accompanied him those nights he escaped our house. “Got to get some air!” he’d say, as the front door closed.

  Until that last morning. Don’t, I tell myself, and the children’s willowy humming saves me from going over that ground yet another time as we approach the gravesite. At the entrance of the tent, the woman waits, and when Brian comes closer, she steps out and pulls him aside. I can’t hear what she is saying, but the look on Brian’s face tells me something is not right.

  The two of them turn, and with a sweep of her hand, she welcomes us into the tent and suggests that a few words from Brian might precede the children’s song. He looks at me and then at Kathleen, who is shaking her head at the skirmishing at her side. “Let’s do it,” he says, a flash of his father’s grim determination darkening his face. He steps to the edge of a straight-edged rectangle cut into the grass, and as we reach for each other’s hands, he begins to speak. His gentle goodbye fills the air with a vision of a father, husband, grandfather seen through a haze of regret, anger, and love of the sort that lurks unfelt until moments like this one. Brian proves himself up to this difficult task, his eyes filling with his last sentence. A perfect son at a not-so-perfect father’s funeral.

  The attendants use ribbons to lower a small granite urn into its burial place. I locate the shovel that Kathleen has instructed me to use, step to the waiting pile of soil, and I pour a small scoop into the grass-edged opening. It is only when two childish voices rise above the crunch of small rocks striking the stone lid that I feel my eyes dim. I hand the shovel to one of the helpers and take out the hankie I thought I wouldn’t need. “You make me happy when skies are gray…” The irony of the song’s words brings me to my knees, where the black gabardine of my pants captures the muddy moment.

  Kathleen moans, “Oh God,” places an arm under my elbow and lifts me upright. I want to shake her off, but I don’t have the strength.

  People have gathered in the Garden Room. Brian greets them, thanks them for helping the family move through this sad day, and he comments about his father’s serious work ethic, his long marriage, and his lifelong avoidance of large gatherings. He raises his glass to the twenty or so faces watching him, a few hoping perhaps for the necessary little funereal joke, and says, “He’d like this gathering just fine. I can hear him say, ‘That’s just what I wanted, a few friends waving goodbye, a glass of wine in the other hand. ’” His small audience does chuckle, responds the toast, turns to voices nearby, perhaps not as impressed as I am with my son’s Art voice.

  I don’t know most of these people: some are from the post office whom I met perhaps once at some employees’ gathering, a cluster of my son’s friends, unknown to me but solicitous in that half-smile, funeral way as eyes meet, ask, behind my back, How long do we have to stay? I hear myself assuring the concerned faces looming too close to mine that I am all right, that yes, he was a good man, that my husband is at peace as I bring the glass of white wine to my lips. After the second glass, I even manage to offer my cheek for a consoling kiss from several of the guests. Lynne hugs me, nearly tipping me off my feet, as she whispers, “I’ll call soon.” I had thought that one or two of my other friends would come, but perhaps they don’t read the obituaries as carefully as I do. I probably should have called them. Who knows what the rules for this occasion are?

  Then the reception is over, and we are back in the limo. Silent and only kicking each other a little until their mother waves her hand at them, t
he children lie back against the soft cushions. I look out at the passing cars. Brian’s eyes are closed, still probably coming to terms with his several goodbyes.

  Kathleen leans across Meg’s lap and asks, “Who was that that man in the tweed jacket standing on the terrace? I didn’t get to meet him. A friend?”

  I shake my head. “I didn’t notice him. Maybe someone from the mortuary. Do you know, Brian?”

  His eyes still closed, he shrugs. “I’m not sure.”

  Chapter Four

  A woman-sized lounger, in light blue, arrives the next morning, and the deliveryman takes the old one away. He has decided it is too worn for resale. “Maybe Goodwill,” he suggests.

  “Whatever,” I tell him. “I’m glad to have a chair that fits me, finally.” I’ve done some rearranging in the past several days. Bags of Art’s clothes line the hallway on their way to a homeless shelter. This morning I cleared the bathroom cabinet of the many plastic bottles and tubes and lozenges that Art had accumulated over the years, and the containers fill the wastebasket at the bathroom door. I read somewhere that one should not flush medicines down the toilet, but I can’t remember how the Oregonian recommended to dispose of them. Bury them in coffee grounds? Someplace you could take them? Do homeless men need them? I don’t have to decide right now. Instead, Brian will be picking me up soon to go see a financial advisor, and I need to collect a few of the papers that Art piled in his desk drawers.

  The doorbell rings, and I have my coat and the folder in my hands, but when I open the door, I see that Brian has someone with him. “You came here? I thought we’d be going to your office,” I say to the man I assume is the advisor. Why does he look familiar?