by Jeffrey Lent
After a long moment she said, “You’ve been kind.”
He let go of her hand and said, “It pleases me you think so. I’m not so certain, myself. We do the best we can, mostly.”
“Isn’t that a grand thing?”
“It’s the best we can,” he said again.
Her gut twisted as she understood that he knew nothing more of how to live than she did, that perhaps no one did, ever, those ones honest with themselves. She turned then and quickly kissed him on the cheek and said, “You take care of yourself. And take care of those girls, they need you in all kinds of ways they don’t know yet. And thank you, thank you for not running from me. You could’ve so easy. And your wife, too. But you did not. Now, I’m going to go. It’s time. Any more of this would ruin it, isn’t that right? And thanks for giving me my dad back, even though he never went away. And finally, finally, I’m off to see a beach. Because that’s what I need. To walk at those edges of the world. Where the water meets the land and maybe does so in a different way than I ever saw before. Maybe a way I need to see. Okay?”
He smiled at her then, as if presented with a pure delight. Then he said, “Well, we need to get you back to your truck, don’t we? Before you say all your goodbyes and thank-yous.”
She felt herself warm with blush. “I’d forgotten about that.”
He said, “You’re going to be driving around looking at beaches and sunsets and all of that, you don’t want to be forgetting your truck.” As he spoke he’d stepped off toward his own truck and she followed. As she got in and pulled her door closed she said, “I was never absentminded.”
“I didn’t think so.”
They rode in silence some time but it was an easy silence, as if a space both knew from their own natures and inhabited now by shares. After a time he said, “You don’t want to go due east. You want to get a little farther south and then head for Morehead City, Beaufort, that area. You’d like it there. And the beaches are easy to get to, not like far on the Outer Banks. You got a North Carolina map yet?”
“I figure I can pick one up when I stop for gas.”
“Dig around in the glove box. There’s one there you can have.”
She did and found it and unfolded it onto her lap and found where he was speaking of.
He drummed his fingers on the wheel and kept his eyes squinted before him as if he was thinking something over and then finally he glanced at her and said, “I was you I’d run down to Durham, then head east. Come to think of it, Durham, Chapel Hill, those towns might be a good place to stop over, also. Young people. There’s Duke University in Durham, UNC in Chapel Hill.”
She looked at him but he was driving, not looking at her. Cautious with his message. She folded the map back up and said, “Thanks.”
Then, after a bit more driving, he said, “That beagle you were telling me about?”
“Tinker. I miss him terribly.”
“Of course you do. But don’t be getting yourself a dog now. Wait until you’re done with college, settled some place where you know you’ll be for a while. You’ll know it when the time’s right. Otherwise, it’s not fair to the dog.”
“That’s what my … that’s what my dad said after Tinker died. Said to recall I needed to commit for ten, fifteen years to the happiness of the dog, seeing what the dog was prepared to give to me.”
Brian nodded and said, “In a nutshell.” Then after a pause he said, “Those English pointers? Now, they like to hunt birds, it’s bred right into em. But they don’t have to. Long as they get plenty of exercise and have a good loving home, that’s what they really need. And smart? They most nearly train themselves, just by looking at what their person expects of em. They do, they figure things out. A person could look a long ways and not find a better dog.”
“Is that so,” she said.
He shot a glance at her. “What I’m saying. The time comes you feel you’re ready for a dog in your life, and if one of em would be of interest to you, you talk to me. We’d look em over close and get you just the right one. If you wanted.”
They then turned and went over the pond’s berm and the house and her truck came into view. She turned and said, “I couldn’t imagine a finer thing. And it gives me something to look forward to. Thank you.”
He nodded and said, “I believe it would be a good match.”
She drove back to South Hill and the land rolled along almost familiar and she felt within it, as if someway her blood knew the land, as if she’d been here before—more than just the morning’s drive out. She felt light and full of purpose and tilted up toward whatever lay in front of her. And what was just behind her. Once in town she circled around, was confused for a few minutes and then found the motor court where she’d spent the night. She parked midway down the lot and walked up to the office and let herself in. It was midafternoon and no one in sight. Beside the door was a cheap metal rack attached to the wall and from it she plucked a brochure, indeed noticed the afternoon before. Without disturbing a soul she went back to the truck and studied the brochure and it was as promised—the Outer Banks and other beaches of North Carolina. It was a grand moment and also caused her to reflect on what else in life was glimpsed and almost forgotten from the corner of an eye. She put the brochure up under the visor and looked again at the map. The map he’d given her. Now she saw it. Those beaches were a drive, but she could be in Durham by late afternoon. And she smiled even as a ripple ran her spine—how the two of them had come so close to argument and stepped away, how he’d given her more information than she knew she was getting at the moment. It had been a good day. It had been a better and different day than any she’d imagined.
She pulled out of the motel parking lot and drove down toward the highways that would take her to North Carolina, to Durham. Then she had to pee and looked at the dashboard and decided to gas up, maybe get a candy bar and a Coke—what had he said? A Co-Cola, a dope, to get her through the afternoon. She stopped at an Esso station where a banner alerted her to put a tiger in her tank and she filled the truck and bought the drink and a Snickers, used the bathroom, and then was back out and rolling along. She had the radio loud and was pounding the beat on the wheel when it came to her. She slowed and turned into the Piggly-Wiggly and circled the lot and came out and reversed direction, back to the gas station. Once there, she sat a moment, looking at the glass and metal booth in front of the station. It was time to call home. She got down out of the truck and walked across, pulled open the folding doors and snapped them shut. It really didn’t matter who answered. It was suddenly and deeply hot in the phone booth. She lifted the phone and cradled it between her ear and shoulder. She took a breath, happy to talk to either one of them. She dug a dime from her pocket and dropped it in the slot and dialed 0 for an operator and held the dial down a long moment before pulling her finger out and letting go. She knew she wanted to talk to her mother. There was a whir, then a dial tone. Then an operator came on the line and said, “Help you?”
She heard the dime chink down into the coin-return slot and said, “Yes, thank you. I need to make a collect call.”
Ten
Ruth
She’d heard her leave. The furtive steps down the hall and stairs, the soft slap of the screen door. The bedroom windows were open to the June night and there then came a pause and she thought perhaps the girl was reconsidering; then heard the truck door open and moments later the rolling tires’ quiet grind against the gravel drive. She rose from her bed and went to stand at the window and watched as the truck rolled silent down the hill and came into sharper view under the first streetlight as Katey popped the clutch and the engine fired and the taillights made small red beacons in the dark, receding. The lemon wash of headlights. At the bottom of the hill the truck turned left, northward and then shortly was lost from sight.
Ruth went back to the bed and sat on the edge for long moments, hearing the slow certain tick of the bedside clock’s second hand, and then knew she’d sleep no more this night. After
a time she rose and slipped into her light summer robe and also went down the hall in the dark. She passed the guest bedroom where, since the night in March when he’d stood at dinner and split their world open, Oliver had been sleeping. He hadn’t truly moved there, his clothes were still in the drawers and closets of their bedroom. She hadn’t asked why he’d made this move and he’d offered no reason; neither of them wished to speak of it. Neither of them trusted themselves or, as likely, the other, to not make the matter worse. Ruth held no blame for what he’d done. This was not the same as wishing he’d not done it but she understood, whatever his reasons, the blame always had and always would remain with her. She’d done her best not to repair the damage which she knew was impossible, but to mitigate it within her abilities, as she finally explained herself to Katey. She did so as honestly and thoroughly as she knew possible, with one result being that Katey never asked what had prompted the revelation from Oliver. Which, at the time at least, seemed a great blessing.
In the kitchen she plugged in the percolator by the light from the stove back, then realized she wanted tea and so filled the kettle and turned on the stove burner. She set out a cup and saucer, the teapot, and filled a metal strainer with loose leaves from the tin and waited. Like her mother, she did not use teabags. As her mother had, she ordered tea in bulk from an importer in Boston—the same importer, the same tea. A delicious dark and smoky tea called Hu-Kwa, a blend the company solely imported. It was the tea Ruth had first drank as a child, the tea Jo had made every afternoon of her life, fall, winter and spring. Hot summer afternoons she favored iced coffee, a drink Ruth had never taken to. The small differences between a mother and daughter. Jo took her tea at quarter past three; for Ruth, weekdays, it was forty-five minutes later and poured from a thermos at her desk at school, as she corrected papers or worked on study plans. Jo always had a saucer with a pair of cookies upon it with her tea, taken fireside in the library. She favored butter cookies, or those with a lace of molasses, a single half-pecan pressed into the middle. Ruth only ate with her tea when she was with her mother and then it was the same cookies. At Christmas time there would be a single dense slice of fruitcake for each of them. How it was, how it had been.
Katey had learned from both of them. Ruth filled the teapot and turned off the burner. She guessed that someday, perhaps, Katey would find her own way of having tea. It was a small thing but at the moment Ruth understood this was also continuation, how things moved down and along. Guessing that at the moment if the girl should prospect such a thing, she’d see her grandmother’s afternoon ritual as being superior, the one to be aimed for. Ruth wondered if it was possible the girl might build a life where afternoon tea could be taken at such leisure, then wondered if that would even be a good thing for her. She put the cup and teapot on a tray and carried them into the parlor and turned on a light behind her chair. She poured out a cup and sat down with it, the saucer balanced in both open palms as an offering. The air was cool enough so slender vapor rose from the hot tea and flooded her nostrils. She had no idea what small rituals would become part of Katey’s life, of how that life would accommodate rituals, beyond knowing that it would. As all lives do.
She settled the saucer on the reading table beside her chair and lifted the cup and brushed her lips against the hot thin porcelain of the cup and made a small sip from the surface of the tea. It was hot and dense and filled her mouth with morning life as she sat in the otherwise dark and empty house and waited for the early summer dawn.
Katey had the old packet of Christmas cards. Ruth had no idea how many years ago she’d discovered them but guessed it was likely a long time, that the child had prowled through the house more times than once, trying to learn herself as she tried to learn the secrets of her parents. She, herself, had done much the same as a girl up on West Hill, old photo albums holding the mysteries of those two much older and grown distant sisters, women with children as old as Ruth, the one cousin only months younger, but there then in the dusky maroon leather bindings, the black paper sleeves, the old almost brown-and-white photographs snapped into place of improbably young girls within settings at once familiar and strange, on laps also both familiar and strange. How young her father had been! How young they’d all been. And those found fragments of a vanished life had always left Ruth a bit lonesome, a little cast down, as she held the clear sense she’d missed something. The child unable to see what had also been gained. And now, drinking her tea, her own child off out into the world with a packet of cards saved for no good reason, cards that Ruth also knew she couldn’t guess the value Katey placed upon them. Only hoping that value wasn’t a brittle thing soon to pall to shards and dust in Katey’s hands. She drank her tea and knew she had no idea what to hope for.
She smiled, once. Because Ruth had never worn that pair of heels had Katey not thought or known her mother would detect the smears of fingertips along the dust of the box, the slightly canted lid, at the back of her closet? And guessed also Katey had thought she was taking great care, great stealth in her thirsty theft. Ruth’s smile was there and then gone and left a small ache in her jaw. Her breast.
There came the first pipe of birdsong, tentative as if the robin did not yet trust the day. Soon there came another robin. Then vireos, wrens. English sparrows. An ovenbird. Redwings from their nests in the apple trees. Ruth reached and snapped off the light and the windows showed a pearly oyster-shell light. Not dawn yet but nearly so. She sat silent and still and within moments the birds were in full call-and-response outside, no longer a solitary warble and return but a curtain of sound. The eastern windows showed a film of rose light through the morning fog risen off the river. She stood and went through the lightening house, silently back upstairs to the bedroom and dressed in old dungarees and a blouse, then went down to the kitchen. She fried bacon and set the strips on old newspaper to drain. Sliced bread and left the slices in the toaster and then set out his coffee cup and a jar of new tart rhubarb preserve next to the butter where he couldn’t miss it.
In the ell she stepped into her boots and took up a basket and placed a trowel and old bread knife in the basket and went out into the yard, not looking at the empty driveway. She went around to the north side of the house where a dense row of hostas grew close to the foundation. She knelt and began to dig them up and separate them with the knife, making many out of few. She planned to plant the new-made clusters along the shady side of his workshop and the garage also. Some few under the spread canopy of ancient apple trees that cast a heavy shade. It was a job long overdue.
She was still there when he came out some good time later. She heard him coming and didn’t cease her work. Bent down and digging, now new holes along the side of the shed. She waited and finally he said, “Where’s the truck?”
She sat back on her heels but held her tools, twisted about and looked up past him and said, “She’s gone.” Then turned back to her work.
There was a silence behind her and she knew he’d have to speak again. It was the way of him. She waited.
“Gone where?”
She kept on working. This morning, at least, she would not look at him. Finally, as she felt within her his tension, his rising uncertainty and fear and recrimination, all those things and even more that she couldn’t name, and just before she was sure he’d speak again she paused her hands at her work and leaned back and looked at him and said, “Gone where she felt she had to go. Is my guess.”
They remained looking at the other, in silence. She saw the wince over his face and he raised his hand and rubbed his eyes, as if to clear his vision. She saw he was about to speak and she turned back to her work. After precious few moments he walked away, back into the house. She was still planting when he again exited the house and went past her to the rear entrance of his shop. She wasn’t interested in talking with him just now. She was trying to determine her daughter’s mind, trying to determine her own failures with that girl.
All those years ago when she made clear it was best h
e go, Brian was no doubt grateful to drive off with his own guilt and self-loathing as his accompaniment, or, perhaps simple relief to be gone and knowing he’d never return there, and she’d finally sat alone in the house. Her husband still sleeping or passed out, some deep almost primal withdrawal from the world she now understood he inhabited. She bathed and then dressed simply and sat at the table and made her resolve to tell Oliver, best she could, what she’d learned and what had occurred between herself and Brian Potter. But Oliver remained in bed until late in the afternoon when he called for her in a voice of lurching distress and she raced up the stairs to find him in the bathroom with a pool of rank vomit one side of the toilet. She cleaned him up and helped him back to bed. Where he passed through the night. She’d remained downstairs and fixed a grilled cheese sandwich and then made herself a gin and tonic. And then as dusk came on she poured another and turned on the Philco and listened to a litany of sad songs while she drank. She slept on the couch and in the morning made coffee and carried it up to Oliver, yet again steeled for the truth. She had to urge him awake and he sat up in bed, clammy with rank sweat, his skin the color of an old candle dug from a drawer. He vomited the coffee and then begged her to drive downtown and bring him a vanilla milkshake. Which she did and he sipped that down and slept again and woke and asked for another. And only after that was consumed did his apologies begin. And she realized she could not tell him. This silence was not for herself, not for safety or hidden indiscretion but only because his own despair of himself was too great to burden further. And so, the third afternoon on, as finally she was poaching eggs and making dry toast did she realize she held a secret she would always be bound to. A silence that was the necessary kindness called for, for both of them. Much as he’d kept his secrets of damage from her, she owed him to hold her own damage close and silent. And it was only then that she understood how much greater such burdens can be, how the worm turns and chews from within, denied the light of confession. An ugliness of self, sliced into a permanent chamber of the heart. At the time, she felt this was also gaining maturity. Of the two of them, side by side with their secrets, their strangeness, both close and forever distant. Of this then, she thought, is the true business, burdens, joys, of love. They went along, both with their own secrets.