by D. P. Hewitt
Her eyes widened like a child’s as she entered the room, an acolyte approaching a shrine. “Oh, Jim, it’s beautiful! It’s more than beautiful, it’s…it’s—wait a minute, I thought I couldn’t afford walnut.”
“I found a lumberyard selling off surplus,” I lied. “Canceled job.”
She looked at me suspiciously but soon returned to admiring her library. “It’s perfect, the shelves are all different heights—and you made one for the corner, I love that—and a narrow one to fit between the windows and all around the fireplace…what’s this?”
I tried not to grin too broadly. She’d just discovered one of the surprises I’d made for her during the weeks she was gone.
“Is this…a hamster?” she gasped, peering at the base of one of the bigger shelves, where one little walnut hamster sat, raisin grasped in his paws.
“It’s Louie,” I said. “Look around, there are more.”
A delighted smile on her face, she set about looking for all the wooden hamsters I’d carved after Christmas and attached to various areas around the library. One tiny Louie perched near the ceiling peering curiously at the volume of Shakespeare on the shelf below. Another Louie slept contentedly next to Moby Dick.
“I’m sorry I didn’t have time to make a wheel,” I said.
“No, no, this is wonderful!” she exclaimed. “Oh, look, this one’s peeking out of a paper towel roll. Never mind, I guess you’ve seen it already.”
I watched with pleasure as she wandered around the room looking for more, and finally she’d found them all. “I didn’t want you to be lonely, so I made you some Louies to keep you company.”
Then, to my horror, she burst into tears.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just made you feel sad all over again.”
“No, no…” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “I do miss Louie, but I’m crying because I’m happy. The library is more wonderful than I ever could have imagined, and I love the little Louies all over. It will be like he’s right here with me. This is the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me.” She wrapped her arms around me and kissed me. Only on the cheek, but I felt so overwhelmed, I had to remind myself not to take her in my arms.
She stood and surveyed her new refuge, smiling. Then she turned to me, suddenly solemn. “I have something to tell you, Jim.”
Having watched her write her bits and pieces on the computer in order to pay her bills, I knew what was coming. “It’s okay,” I assured her, waving my hand dismissively. “Pay me a bit here and there when you can, there’s no hurry.”
She stared at me a moment, and then started to laugh. “Oh, it’s not that. I saved the money to pay you a long time ago, that’s no problem. But Jan introduced me to someone she knows in publishing last week, and…I have job! A real job again, finally.”
“That’s great!” I exclaimed. “I always knew you were too good to be writing warranty information.”
“Thank you,” she smiled. “It will be nice to do some real writing again, but there’s a catch.”
I looked at her inquiringly.
“The job’s in Vienna.”
My heart dropped. “Vienna...as in Austria?”
She nodded happily. “Yes, one of my favorite cities in the world! One of the major travel magazine publishers is starting an offshoot focusing on the new destinations in Eastern Europe. Part online, part hard copy. I’ll be the editor-in-chief, based in Vienna! Isn’t it wonderful?”
“Wonderful,” I managed to say, hoping it didn’t sound too much like a groan. Even though the library was finished, I’d still had the hope I’d run into her at the supermarket, or the gas station, or the drugstore, or that she might even call me for help on minor repairs to her house. In Vienna, I’d never see her again. The sense of loss settled over me like a cloud of carbon monoxide, and she hadn’t even left yet.
“I start February fifteenth, so I have to get ready almost right away,” Jill went on. She cast a regretful look around her room. “All this work you did for me, and I won’t even have the chance to enjoy it.” She turned back to me. “If I give you power of attorney, could you sell the house for me? I won’t be able to come back for the closing.” I nodded stiffly, feeling like a marionette.
Jill sighed again. “The job doesn’t pay all that much, but if I make a profit on the house, I’ll have enough to live on. I’ll have to pinch pennies a bit, but it was just too good to pass up. An editor’s job! In Vienna!” She twirled around the room like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music, hands clasped, eyes dancing.
The next four weeks were the worst of my life. I helped Jill repack all the books I’d just shelved. I met with a lawyer so I could sell her house for her. I told her I’d take my payment out of the proceeds from the sale, so she could take her savings with her to get started on. I helped her supervise the movers as they packed her belongings. And I painstakingly removed all the Louies from the bookcases, because she said leaving the library behind was hard enough; she couldn’t bear to leave the Louies, too. And then she was gone.
I walked through her house the next day, remembering the lunches we’d eaten in her kitchen, the doors I’d rehung, the tiles I’d re-grouted. And, of course, the library. I’d made it perfect for her, and now someone else would use it. Someone who would probably use it as a “media room” and fill the shelves with computer games and DVDs. I hated the thought.
Jill hadn’t lived there long enough to make a lot of improvements, so except for the library, the house was still a fixer-upper. And none of the prospective buyers wanted to pay anything close to its appraised value. I held out, but Jill e-mailed me to sell it to whoever offered next, just so it would be done with. I reckoned she needed the money; I had no illusions that Vienna was a cheap city to live in. So I accepted the offer of a chain-smoking bleached blonde and her beer-belly furnished husband to buy the house so they could turn “that dark old library” into an up-to-date home theater.
Depressed and hating humanity, I went home and e-mailed Jill that the closing would be in about six weeks. As I logged off, Abby entered the room. “Jim, we have to talk.”
Wearily, I turned around. “What is it?”
“I want a divorce.”
****
While I was losing my heart to Jill, hampered by my mistaken, not to mention outdated, notions of chivalric behavior, Abby had lost hers to the new principal. Our children long fledged, she saw no reason for us to remain together when we had nothing in common. The memories we shared we could still share as friends, she insisted. She just didn’t want to be married any more, at least not to me. I could have the house; she didn’t want anything from me, no alimony, nothing. She just wanted to be free to go live with Victor Immanuel—Vic, as she called him. And so she was gone, and I found myself completely superfluous.
On a day for which “blustery” would have been too mild a term, I went to Jill’s house to make sure everything was in order. The rain gushed from the sky; I smiled a little, thinking that Jill would have been happy had her aged, clanking plumbing been able to produce such a torrent to fill the bathtub. The wind was blowing so hard, an umbrella was useless. I’d gotten drenched just dodging from my car to Jill’s back door in the nearly horizontal rainstorm. I started with the third floor tower room and worked my way down, avoiding the library. When I finally reached the basement, I saw one of the windows had blown open, next to the old knob and tube electrical panel. In her few months in the house, Jill had never gotten around to hiring an electrician. I moved to close the window, and paused. A faint mist coated the knobs from the rain blowing from outside. I held my hand in front of them and felt the heat, even though nothing was on in the house. I opened the window a little wider and went back upstairs.
Taking a deep breath, I looked around the library one last time. To my mind, the most beautiful room in the world, crafted with care as an expression of love for a woman I’d never have. All for nothing.
****
Faulty wiring, the fi
re department announced as its verdict, unsurprising in a house so old. Unfortunate for the family who’d planned to move in in a couple weeks, but thank God they hadn’t been living there already, and that the woman who was selling the house had already left. The buyers got their deposit back, and I sent the insurance payment to Jill, who, I knew, needed the money.
As for the house Abby and I had shared for forty years, I sold it. Happy as a virgin bride with Vic, and possibly feeling a little bit guilty, she told me to keep the money, she didn’t need or want it. “Take your King Arthur trip, Jim,” she said. “Now’s your chance to go.”
So I did. But somehow the bloom had faded for me from all the sites of ancient chivalry. Supposedly the indiscretions of Guinevere and Lancelot had set in motion the events that were to destroy Arthur’s realm, but I failed to see that if they’d only loved from afar, things would have turned out any differently.
So ran my thinking. But Jill was right: Tintagel was incredible.
And then I followed in her footsteps, in the sense that I read all her travel articles one after the other, and went everywhere she wrote about. The Trail of Tears was sad but informative; the Ho Chi Minh Trail was just plain sad. Following the Spice Route to Asia introduced me to foods I’d never imagined, and less diarrhea than I’d anticipated. Next I’m off to follow the route explorers took in their search for the Northwest Passage.
Last of all I’ll ride the Orient Express, one of Jill’s more conventional topics. But this time I’m not going to ride all the way. I’m only going as far as Vienna. And I’ll find Jill, and invite her to go to lunch and for a walk. Maybe dinner, too. Who knows? Maybe Lancelot and Guinevere will have a future after all.
A word from the author...
I was born in Indiana, grew up for the most part in Michigan, and have since lived in ten states and three countries on two continents. I will have been married for thirty years, and have spent my life occupied in such varied activities as serving in the U.S. Air Force and working as a linguist, a medical assistant, a bank teller, a travel guide, and a sales clerk in an office supply store (but not all at the same time). After several years spent rescuing and fostering abandoned and abused rabbits, I now share my home with only two, Buns and Lola.
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