Never Too Late

by Jo Barney

  He is one of the reasons I have never considered moving into the center of the city. “Never mind. I can do it,” I snap, fumbling with the knobs on the meter.

  “You just slide the coins into this place until you get enough time.” The man’s not going to quit with his helping. “Then you push this knob for the time to show. Try it. You can do it.” He pats my arm encouragingly.

  Helpless, I do what he tells me to do. A moment later, the paid time appears. “And?” I ask, hating myself for being so embarrassingly dependent on this smelly Samaritan.

  “You’re good. Make sure you lock the car door.”

  I do, and he is still standing at the meter. “Thank you,” I say as I hand him the three quarters resting in my palm.

  “Thank you, ma’am. Have a righteous day.” He tips his nonexistent hat and walks away. He seems to be looking for other meter-challenged old ladies. It’s probably a good business.

  Lynne has been watching from her sixth-floor balcony, and when she answers the door, she says, “Hey! Should have brought him up. Looked like a good candidate for Thursday/Sunday.”

  We settle on the sofa, and Lynne takes out a cold bottle of chardonnay and two glasses. “You look good, blond. Keep going. A tuck here and there,” and she pulls at the skin at her ear lobes, “and voila, fifty again.” As she pours the wine, she asks, “So what’s up?”

  I haven’t really looked at Lynne lately, too self-involved last time. I realize that Lynne’s face isn’t the same face she wore a few years ago. Something about the eyes. Where are the frown lines she’s had from maybe when she was a baby? She seems a little shiny.

  “I am shiny,” Lynne says, apparently reading the look I’ve just given her, “because I had a little tuck or two myself, and my skin is still tight. Stays that way for a while and then loosens up. I’m ready, if that’s why you are here, to offer advice on this sort of stuff.” She glances at me, blinking her new eyelids and adds, “But that’s not why you are here, is it?”

  Thirty years later we still can read each other’s minds. “No, but before I get into that…” I’m not quite ready to reveal it all, so I change the subject. “What ever happened to what’s-his-name, the snowmobile guy?”

  “Your snowmobile guy went into the Peace Corps after saving you from freezing to death with his hairy chest.”

  “Pardon me! As I recall, I saved him, with my fat boobs.”

  “And my snowmobile guy has been my Wednesday/Saturday guy ever since his divorce fifteen years ago. We kept in contact in the interim, even after he sold the snowmobile. He…” Lynne blushes. “He suits me, in the snow or not.”

  “No regrets?”

  “None. How about you?”

  I blink to clear up an unanticipated blurring of my left eye. “I need you to help me decide if I have regrets.”

  Lynne pours more chardonnay. “I have the time and the wine.”

  The telling takes an hour, words wandering, circling, capturing odd scenes, feelings, and the obsessive urgency of my search for truth in Art’s pockets. Finally, the biggest mystery of all: I describe a girl with interchangeable hair who has somehow inherited money to go to school and start her life. “You wonder if I have regrets, Lynne. I do. Lots of them. But my biggest regret is that I never knew my husband. Ever.” I put the napkin to work again.

  Lynne is quiet for a moment, then she laughs, Lynne-like, “I didn’t either. Of course, my husband was crazy. I just didn’t know why. Nowadays it’s said to be a matter of chemicals and genes. All I knew was that at times living with him was so exciting I didn’t ever want it to stop. But the godawful times would descend like black angels, and then I’d blame myself for disappointing him, not believing enough in his wondrous schemes and ideas.” She reaches for her glass. “Thank God that roller coaster has stopped.” She settles back into the sofa, tucks her legs under her. “So is your roller coaster slowing down at all?”

  “Brody helps keep me level, doing the day-to-day things one does when one looks out for someone else, including a dog. He understands me, my moods. The other night I was huddled in the corner of the sofa, eyes closed, deep into one of those funks fueled by self-pity, when I felt him jump up next to me. He edged in, sighed once or twice, and then leaned into my body.” I reach for my wadded napkin; this time the tears make it to my nostrils. “How did he know how sad I was?”

  “That’s what friends do. You’re lucky to have him. I have a turtle that I mostly keep in a box for my two grandkids. Not quite the same, although he does come for lettuce when I open the fridge door. Which reminds me, how about a frozen pizza?”

  “My parking? I only paid for two hours.”

  “Not to worry. The old guy you already met? He patrols the parked cars, and if he sees the meter reader coming on her bike, he plugs a quarter or two in any delinquent meters. If he’s leaning against your fender when you go out, you owe him a few bucks. He’s not a bad guy.”

  “He really smells.

  “Yeah, well, you can’t have everything.”

  So Lynne takes in the details of my recent life, offers pizza, and for some reason, I feel a lot better. It could be the wine, but it’s more like knowing someone else doesn’t believe I’m crazy, when I myself have doubts.

  “I’ll tell you what I think,” she says, poking a crust into her mouth and pausing to chew. “I have a different theory. I think that your former husband had an attack of conscience, maybe about the time his doctor told him to do something about his high blood pressure, and he went searching for his lady friend of twenty years ago and found instead an eighteen-year-old young woman who looks a little like him only browner. When he finds her, he gets to know her and decides to make up for whatever happened before she was born. And maybe after. Thus the college money when he died, the other money before. Your dead husband may be proving himself to be an honorable man, even if doing so leaves you in the dark.”

  Of course, as I guessed, his child. Another lover, yes, but years ago, maybe before the loan to Brian, the twelve-hour days. Makes more sense than imagining Art in bed with an eighteen year old. But this explanation seems faulty, too. I have trouble seeing Art as honorable, especially as an honorable father. I don’t feel any better.

  “Why do I feel so guilty?” I ask my friend who is looking very pleased because she’s cracked the nut and found the kernel of truth in my story.

  “Guilt is toxic. Get rid of it. The two of you married, had a great kid, kept a sane house, usually, and were a committed couple in the eyes of the world, if not in reality, except for maybe a brief time in the middle. Not your fault, damn it.” Lynne is getting worked up and she reaches into the freezer takes out our dessert, two frozen Dove bars. “Why do women always believe it’s our fault?”

  Lynne chomps down on her ice cream as if she believes that it is the bar’s fault, all this guilt, all this angst.

  “Because maybe Art killed himself.” That’s what I’m feeling guilty about, not the girl, not some fling that tossed a child into an unfair world. Maybe it’s the coroner’s report about barbiturates and Valium, or the vials labeled Lipitor, but the mystery that sticks in my craw is the detective’s interest in the missing atenolol. Somehow, could it have led to his death as I slept beside him? A death he organized?

  “So what?” Lynne stands up, makes her way to the shelf holding a bottle of Courvoisier, and comes back with two crystal liqueur glasses. “If he did himself in, it was his choice, wasn’t it?”

  She pours and hands a glass to me. “If I were you, knowing who you used to be and who you are now, I’d say it is time to celebrate. To your new you.”

  As I’m sipping the brandy, I understand one thing. I am responsible for Art’s death. He had a secret he couldn’t tell me, a lost love child, a secret that weighed on him for years until he went out to find her. He did, even though all he could do was meet her, give her money, continue to keep her a secret. He knew I would never accept the girl, forgive him his moments of escape from me, allow a black
sister to join our son. I had never forgiven him for anything, ever. I had never forgiven him for being who he was, a sad, hard-working man captured in a joyless marriage.

  I don’t say any of this to Lynne. She is celebrating the new me and doesn’t want to hear the old me’s truth.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  I am standing on one shaky foot, the other hanging out behind me as I lean into the top of the wooden ladder. I take a handful of drape, dust flying, and give it a yank. The fabric, rod, screws, fall at me. I am wrapped in faded philodendrons as I creep down the ladder, find the floor with a foot, then two, and relieve myself of the pile of cloth wound around my head and shoulders. It feels symbolic, this unburdening. Lighter physically and in spirit, I kick the mound of bad taste toward the bag heading for Goodwill.

  When I came in last night, I saw what was wrong with my living room, if not my life, why it has been irritating me for a long time.

  We bought this l930’s bungalow about the time Art became a secure government employee and the other dreams had settled down. Our son needed roots, a good school. I needed a front porch and a garden. Art, I’m not sure what he needed, but he knew a good bargain when he saw one: a house with a new furnace, storm windows, a forty-year roof and elderly owners eager to negotiate and move on. We got our loan and a womb of a home: warmed with dark woodwork, three-dimensional tiles depicting forest scenes at the corners of the wood-burning fireplace, and shiny maroon tile in the one-and-a-half bathrooms. The kitchen had been recently renovated. Its painted cabinets and olive green refrigerator glowed. The house was perfect—except for a constantly overflowing toilet in the small bathroom and the raccoons in the back wall. The stained glass windows on each side of the fireplace made up for these shortcomings. In my mind, at least.

  Over the years, in thrusts of decorating, I have hung photos, postured blown glass creatures, arranged silk flowers and carved birds, and poked ostrich feathers in tall vases which I stuck in corners when it became obvious that they were too flamboyant for the maple coffee table.

  After experiencing the pleasant calm of Kathleen’s house, I opened my front door, switched on the light, and I knew what I had to do.

  “Brody,” I say as I take out a box of garbage bags, “we’re going to get rid of The Stuff. You can help by not wandering around wondering what’s happening. Yes, you may lie on the sofa. For today.”

  At the moment, Brody is growling at the hump of drapes. “It’s okay, dog. Just get your body out of the way of my feet.” I remove the hooks, toss them in the box on the table, then shorten the rod, wipe off the plastery screws, capture the odds and ends falling to the floor, and put the whole mess in a big black bag.

  “Bag #l,” I announce to Brody, who by now has taken me up on the offer of the sofa and lies napping on it.

  Bags #1 through #5, and box A and B lean against the walls of the entry by lunchtime. I have had several moments of regret: the porcelain figurines, gifts from an aunt long dead and forgotten, the Japanese doll in the glass case, my mother’s crocheted doilies imprinted with years of lamps and stained by coffee cups. Each item makes me pause before I put it in a box. But only the things from my grandmother, handed on by my mother, the china cup and saucer, the three too-precious-to-use green and gold relish dishes, the one unchipped dessert plate from an ancient trousseau, remain after I have gone through the buffet and closets.

  The two rooms look as if they are waiting for what will come next: fresh flowers on the coffee table, new white lamps on the end tables, and a mirror instead of the orange and brown fall landscape print that has graced the fireplace for years. I rip up a corner of the wall-to-wall carpet, a once-tan now a mousey-gray mat, and see that under that carpet are old oak floors, once considered valuable and, if I’m guessing right, considering Brian’s lovely floors, valuable again. I find a tablet, begin to make a list, know I am in deep trouble when I get to “14: A new dining room set.”

  I call Lynne.

  “Sorry, sweetie. I’ll call you back tomorrow. Wednesday, you know.”

  I call Kathleen. We haven’t finished with the mystery of Brian and the woman with bad hair. Maybe neither of us wants to right now. The warmth of that last night still lingers. Maybe that’s why I’m allowing old drapes to distract me. She doesn’t answer. Perhaps she’s distracted too.

  I call Goodwill. They will pick up if there is enough stuff. So I throw in a bedstead, and the appointment person says they’ll come with their truck tomorrow. Then I call Brian at work.

  “I’m doing over a couple of rooms in the house. I don’t have a clue, but I know, after seeing what you’ve done in your house, that you might have a few ideas.” If we’re ever going to talk about what’s going on with him, we’ll have to have a less stressful talk, as if I don’t know a thing about anything. I must be patient about asking why he came home smelling like oranges just like his father.

  I hear him breathe a ha as if he’s relieved about something, the sound apparently a genetic tic. Maybe the orange scent is also. “Good. Kathleen said you two had been talking more lately. I’ll drop by.”

  “On your way home from the office tonight?”

  Winston has a basketball game at seven, so Brian is at my door at six. When he walks in, I see that he’s lost weight, has gained tiny lines at the corners of his eyes. He looks older. Maybe I just haven’t noticed before, but in this thinner state, he looks a lot like Art, when Art still seemed glad to be coming home.

  “Nothing grand,” I say. “Just a makeover for the life Brody and I’ll be having here. I don’t want always to be looking back.” I hesitate but keep going. “I want to look forward to a new me and a new…” I can’t come up with a word that will say what I mean. One that won’t negate the good years I spent with this son in this house with its doilies and porcelain ladies “…a new environment.” Then I understand. “You did the same thing, didn’t you, with your white, clean, straight-edged house?”

  “Only, if you ask Kathleen, and maybe you did, she’d say I went a few steps too far in my new environment. Did you notice the children’s drawings hanging in the dining room? Her idea, and they perfectly break up the perfection I thought I wanted.” Brian goes quiet for a moment. “Everyone seeks some kind of perfection, but perfection is always nudged into a different shape by contact with reality.” He has shrugged off his suit jacket and plunges onto the sofa just like he did thirty years earlier, one foot on the cushions beside him. “So where are the ostrich feathers?”

  We talk; he gives me the name of the designer he worked with. I won’t go that far, outside help, but I am glad that he understands my need to give the house a facelift. I try to go a little deeper. How does he feel about a lift of my face?

  My son’s smile is the one I remember from years ago, sweet, tentative. “You are beautiful to me, Mom. But if you feel that removing a few wrinkles and bags, along with a Japanese doll and a couple of porcelain dancers, will make life easier, do it. Not for me and not for anyone who knows who you really are and loves you for it. Or despite it,” he adds, teasing in his old way. “Just do what you want to do. You can do it now.”

  Brian, the witness to more than forty years of my marriage, is giving me permission to move on. Just as I am about to say more, to ask him to tell me what he looks forward to, to perhaps open up these past few secret months, he stands, pulls on his jacket, and heads for the door. “Winston is expecting me to show up at the game and yell myself red-faced in a few minutes.”

  He turns back, his eyes solemn, and he hugs me as I stand at the door. “It’s going to be okay, Mom.”

  Which “it’s” is he talking about? I wonder.

  Brody grins and licks my ankle. “I know, dog. You want out. How about taking your own plastic bag with you and pick up your own stuff, like I’m doing around here?”

  When we get back from our walk, and I’m frying an egg for a sandwich, I notice the message light flashing on the kitchen phone.

  “It’s Seth Benjamin. From Bo
o’s Soul. I said I’d call, and I am. I’d like to see you again.” He gives his number and I hit SAVE, since I have a spatula instead of a pencil in my hand.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “Your daughter-in-law came by again. Don’t believe we helped her much. But that’s not why I called.” Seth pauses, seems to be taking a breath. “I’d like to take you to dinner, at a quiet place where we could talk, get to know each other. If it isn’t too soon?”

  He means, I know, after Art’s death. Not soon enough, maybe, I’d like to answer. Instead I offer an “I’d like that.”

  “Is tomorrow okay? Maybe the Hilton?” What is it with the Hilton? Rendezvous Center? Maybe the rooms are cheaper than at the Heathman. Art must have known.

  “That’s fine,” I say. “I’ll meet you there at seven?” Seven seems like a sophisticated time, just beyond the happy hour. I can still get home by nine, in my own car. I read somewhere, probably in one of those magazines at the dentist’s, that on a first date it is important to have your own car.

  “Of course. Meet you in the bar.”

  We hang up. My fingers, reaching for a coffee cup, feel as if they’re made of silly putty. I choose a wine glass instead. Thank goddess for chardonnay.

  I have tomorrow to catch up with Kathleen. She answers when I call an hour later, and the soccer game must be over because she doesn’t say much, only to say she’ll come by in the morning if I want to go on a walk.

  Brody and I do.

  Kathleen strides briskly, talks briskly, and I find myself nearly strangling a meandering dog in order to keep up. “I’ve been very depressed,” she says. “My doctor gave me a month’s supply of Prozac, low dose, and after two days, I was nauseated, had a headache, and wanted to sleep all day. I knew I had to get off of it and face my problems head on.”

  “Sounds good,” I pant, tugging at the leash. “Difficult sometimes, though.”