One More Summer

by Liz Flaherty

  “If you what?” Faith came in, carrying a bag of pastries and a cardboard tray of cups from the Cup and Cozy. “You can drink on the way,” she said, handing the cups to Dillon and Grace. “Promise and I will stay here and scarf down the pot you just made and snicker because we got the best part of the deal.”

  “You just think,” Dillon scoffed. “We’re taking the pastries with us.”

  She snatched the bag from his hand. “I left some on the seat of your car. Now, get going. Prom and I want to talk about you while you’re gone.”

  “Boring conversation,” Grace said.

  “Nah.” Promise reached for her hand and squeezed it. “We’ll make stuff up.”

  “She opened her eyes, told me I looked like shit, and went back to sleep.” Steven was as wilted as the last rose of summer, but he was grinning. He thumped Jonah on the back. “I’ve left orders that you’re to stay with her as much as you want. There’s a bed in her room for you to stretch out on. She’ll sleep for a long time and be cantankerous as hell when she wakes up, but she’s going to make it, Jonah, at least for a while.”

  “Son—” But Jonah was beyond words. He satisfied himself with giving Steven, Dillon and Grace a brief, hard group hug and followed the nurse to Maxie’s room.

  Grace pressed her face hard to Dillon’s shoulder for a moment before drawing away and linking an arm with her brother’s. “Well,” she said, “come on, Miracle Man and Dragon Slayer, let’s go home.”

  Chapter 24

  The attic was cool. Grace rolled down the sleeves of her flannel shirt and sat in Debbie’s chair. She rocked idly, giving a push with the bare toe of her right foot when the chair threatened to halt.

  How odd it was, to have nothing to do on a Friday evening. Mrs. Willard had left to spend the winter with her daughter in Florida, so there were no sheets to dry in the night air and no house to clean until it was time to do Mrs. Rountree’s again.

  Promise was in the best time between treatments, that ten days or so when she ate voraciously, didn’t throw up and never talked about dying. When Steven had left Sunday, he’d invited her to spend the week in Knoxville with him and she’d gone. She’d worn her best wig and carried a bag stuffed with underwear that was in no way related to the white cotton Grace equated with the word.

  Jonah and Maxie had gone to visit his sons’ families. “Grandchildren,” he told Grace when he kissed her goodbye, “are God’s reward for having been parents. Since we’ve been given this gift of extra time, we’re going to enjoy it.”

  Grace leaned forward in the chair, resting her arms on the narrow windowsill. The guesthouse was in full view, especially since most of the leaves were gone from the trees. Dillon’s lawn chairs still sat on his porch, and he’d added a small table between them because he and Steven kept spilling their beer when they set it on the floor.

  He’d spent long hours at the computer every day since Maxie’s return from the hospital three weeks before. He came, hollow-eyed, to eat breakfast with Grace, bringing his notebook with him. He always helped her with the dishes, kissed her as though she were his mother, and then returned to the guesthouse. Sometimes she saw him at dinner, sometimes not.

  The sky was gray, scattered with fast-moving clouds, and wind whipped angrily through the bare trees. There would be a storm before morning, or she missed her guess.

  Today was Friday. She had nothing to do.

  How odd it was, she thought again and leaned back in the chair to rock some more.

  She missed him when he wasn’t at dinner, missed him coming into the house at all hours of the day or night. She missed being draped over his arm while she stood at the kitchen sink and being kissed until she was as limp as the dishcloth in her hand.

  She missed Jonah and Maxie and Promise and Steven too. That’s why she was so melancholy today. So lonely. That’s why everything felt odd.

  She leaned forward again. The lights were on in the cottage now, and she could see Dillon at his computer. The glow from his desk lamp glinted off his glasses, shooting little starlets through the window. She lifted a hand involuntarily, as if catching the pieces of light would be like touching him.

  He’d paid rent through the first of the year, but he wouldn’t stay that long. He was receiving more and more mail from New York and Boston. When he sat at the computer, the cordless phone was often propped between his shoulder and ear.

  He hadn’t shown her any more of the chapters in his book, but she knew it was nearly done. He’d missed his deadline, was over two weeks past it, and he didn’t like that. He complained about it frequently enough that everyone knew it made him crazy. Sometimes when he looked at Grace, she knew it wasn’t her he was seeing but the schedule that life in Peacock kept him from adhering to.

  That she kept him from adhering to. Her with her dragons that needed slaying.

  Of course, he’d slain them now—all but one anyway—and she wasn’t going there, wasn’t going to sit here in the attic where it was safe and think of…that. The Other. Why, she could sit right in the backyard and not even see the gazebo.

  Sometimes.

  She sat back in the chair, pushing it away from the window with her bare feet. The peal of the grandfather clock in the hall on the second floor told her she should be in the kitchen preparing dinner, but she ignored it. She rocked.

  The phone rang, but she would let the machine pick it up rather than break her neck racing down the narrow stairs. It was probably a telemarketer anyway. They always called at dinnertime.

  She wondered for the hundredth time who Amy was. The woman in his supposedly non-autobiographical book who had died in a plane crash. The woman he’d loved and lost.

  He loved Grace too. She knew that. Maxie had told her there were some things you just knew, and that was how Grace knew Dillon loved her. He slew her dragons and made love to her in a way that was much more than the sex she read about in books. Much more than the nameless yearning that used to wake her in the night with its heat and urgency. She would miss it when he left, the love and sex that wrapped around them both until it was all one with no neat divider showing where the sex left off and the love began.

  Rain pattered against the small windows and lightning flashed, bringing all the contents of the attic into sudden, bright relief like the mountains on the maps that rolled down in front of the chalkboards in school.

  Thunder crashed on the lightning’s heels, and Grace jumped. She drew her knees up to her chest and huddled in the chair, trying to still her trembling limbs.

  “That’s your mama up there laughing,” Promise’s mother used to say when it thundered. It had stormed the spring day of Mrs. Delaney’s funeral, and Grace and Promise had clung together under an umbrella and rejoiced because their mothers were sharing a joke.

  Grace thought about shaking her fist toward the heavens, about laughing in the hope that Mama was laughing with her. But it wasn’t springtime and she didn’t feel like laughing.

  It was Friday and she didn’t have anything she had to do and it felt odd. She was alone. That’s all.

  He typed, “The End,” centered two line-spaces under the last words of the manuscript, and leaned back in his office chair to stare at the ceiling. The swirls of paint were indistinct, and he took off his glasses and laid them on the desk, rubbing his eyes.

  God, it was finally over. Heart of the Hero was as complete as he could make it. His hero had picked up the pieces of a life blown to hell and back and made the effort worthwhile. Although stitched together with threads of determination and pocked with the scars of pain, his heart was fully operational again.

  Dillon saved his work and started printing the hard copy he would read through one last time, wondering if he’d made things too simple, too clean. For the most part, he thought, you only got one shot at things. If you were lucky, like his mom and dad or Faith and Grant, once was enough. It might eventually be enough for Steven and Promise, if Dr. Pompous Cardiac Surgeon got his act together and if Promise—no, h
e couldn’t think about that.

  Lightning skittered and Dillon started. He hadn’t even realized it was raining. The ensuing clap of thunder made him hunch his shoulders and look toward the house. Grace—although wild animals couldn’t have made her admit it—was scared of storms.

  Grace. His heart did a slow flip-flop when he thought of her, and he acknowledged with another streak of lightning that he loved her. Steven’s sister. How in the hell had it happened? And what was he going to do about it?

  He’d had his shot at things. He’d loved Michelle, too, and Little John with his almond eyes and soft baby skin and short damaged legs. He hadn’t been able to keep them safe, hadn’t slain the terrorist dragon that resided under the hood of his rental car. When the car bomb exploded, it blew his heart to kingdom come.

  He couldn’t sew it back together. He was no hero.

  Lights, brighter than the one over the sink, came on in the kitchen at Elliot House. Grace was alone there, one little barefoot person in all those ghost-inhabited rooms. He thought about running through the rain just so she wouldn’t be by herself. They could have dinner, play Scrabble and make love in her room with the washstand beside the bed.

  He knew she loved him and probably had for a long time, whether he deserved it or not. He supposed he’d always known, somewhere in a pocket of his fractured heart. A pocket he’d once been careful not to open.

  This summer, the pocket had been ripped asunder, and her love made a mellow, syrup-smooth place inside him. Sometimes he thought that smoothness would cover over the scars and make him whole again, able to offer her what she deserved. Usually, though, he knew better. He couldn’t risk it again.

  It was time to head back to Boston. The book was done, Grace had enough money to make great strides in the renovation of Elliot House, and he needed to be with other people again. With neighbors whose doors didn’t go “braaang” when they opened. With women whose dragons he didn’t know or care about. With his agent who was a friend and an excellent representative of his interests but couldn’t have cared less whether he read his fan mail or not.

  He would still see Steven whenever they could get their schedules to coincide, would send Promise funny cards to make her laugh as she went through chemo and said that dying would be easier. He’d send flowers to Grace through the winter, when hers lay brown and fallow in the back yard. He’d invite Jonah and Maxie to Boston to attend Celtics games and the Boston Symphony. He’d maintain contact with Grant and Faith, having discovered depths within the couple he’d never even guessed at.

  He’d go to art galleries where the best work wasn’t done by high school seniors and restaurants where his dinner dates didn’t entertain the clientele with stories of a family called Magpie. His dates would wear shoes and designer clothes. If their eyelashes were short and sparse, they’d augment them. They’d shave their legs all the time, not just when they sat in a claw foot tub and happened to remember.

  The rain seemed to be slackening. He wiped his hands over his face and went to the door, opening it and peering into the cold grayness of early evening. Across the yard, past the stark shape of the gazebo, he saw Grace at the back porch screen door, silhouetted against the dark mesh. She stood still and alone, her arms folded in a defensive gesture.

  He almost stepped across his threshold. That mellow, smooth part of him wanted to run not walk to where she stood, and sweep her into his arms for all eternity. It wanted the deep but flawed love they shared to be enough to stamp out the shadows of the past and ward off the uncertainties of the future.

  But he stayed where he was, the hardwood floor cold and unforgiving under his bare feet. Because it was time for him to return to Boston and be with people he did not love.

  He would be alone.

  Chapter 25

  Dillon wasn’t going to come over.

  Grace almost pushed open the screen door and beckoned, but stopped herself with one hand on the latch.

  With a short half-wave, Dillon went back inside the guesthouse.

  Louisa May coiled around her legs, meowing plaintively.

  “You don’t want to go out,” said Grace, almost startled by the sound of her own voice. She’d listened to silence all day. “It’s cold and wet. Discriminating cats don’t like cold and wet.”

  She knelt to pet the agitated cat and did a sketchy search of the porch. “Where’s your friend, huh? Where’s Rosamunde? Is she at Dillon’s?”

  Louisa May went to the door and smacked it with a paw, looking back over her shoulder at Grace.

  “Okay, but you won’t like it.”

  The cat slipped through the door as soon as it opened, but instead of running toward the guesthouse, she veered toward the gazebo and stalked its perimeter, her tail a stiff ensign in the air above her back.

  With a shrug over feline vagaries, Grace returned to the kitchen. Thanksgiving would be here before she knew it. It wouldn’t hurt to bake things ahead and put them in the freezer. Steven and Promise would be here sometime tonight. She could get cinnamon rolls rising for breakfast.

  She hoped Dillon stayed through Thanksgiving, although maybe he’d go to Arizona to spend time with his parents. Actually, she acknowledged, sifting flour into a bowl, it would be better if he left right away. It wouldn’t do to get used to having him around for holidays.

  After a while, the silence grew too loud, punctuated only by Louisa May’s demands to come in or go out. Grace slipped her favorite Eagles CD into the player on the counter and poured a glass of wine. She grinned, thinking of all the times she and Promise had worked together in the kitchen, Promise dancing and Grace singing to whatever music played.

  “Desperado” began to play, and her hands went still. It was Promise and Steven’s song, the only one—as far as Grace knew—her brother could sing from start to finish without forgetting a single word.

  Grace mixed yeast dough and drank her wine. She listened to the Eagles, but she didn’t sing and she didn’t dance. She glanced toward the guesthouse when she let Louisa May in and told the cat crossly, “I feel as if this is the night the music died. Am I acting like the ballerina who always swoops over and dies or what?”

  The cat’s meow was no longer plaintive, but strident. She stood on her back feet, her front paws propped on Grace’s knees, and yowled directly into her face.

  “What is it, kitty? Has something happened to Rosie?”

  Louisa May ran to the door, looking back at her.

  “Okay,” Grace said, “we’ll go see.” This is what I’m going to be doing the rest of my life. Baking cinnamon rolls for other people and talking to cats.

  Wearing a hooded sweatshirt and carrying a flashlight with batteries that might or might not work, she followed Louisa May’s swinging tail through the backyard. The grass was cold and wet under her bare feet, the moisture soaking into the bottom of her gown.

  The cat went straight to the gazebo.

  Scowling, her stomach beginning to roil, Grace approached the entry to the structure. Louisa May leapt ahead of her, going inside the dark bower.

  “I’m not coming in there,” Grace said, then lapsed into silence when she heard a sound overhead. She fumbled to turn on the flashlight and shone its weak beam toward the upper reaches of the gazebo. “Oh, hell.”

  Rosamunde’s eyes glowed back at her from atop one of the beams that supported the octagonal roof. The rain, which had slowed to a drizzle, became a downpour. The little black cat meowed piteously and tried to evade the water that splattered through the roof.

  “Well, damn.”

  Grace went into the garage and came out with the six-foot stepladder. It was wobblier than the other one, but it should give her enough height to reach the stranded cat. The wind was picking up, and she struggled against it as she carried the ladder to the gazebo.

  And stood still, holding it.

  “Please, kitty,” she begged. “Please get yourself down. I can’t come in there.” Oh, Lord, she sounded more and more like a dying ballerina
looked.

  Rosamunde wailed.

  “Grace!”

  Dillon’s voice startled her into dropping the ladder. She yelled when it clipped the ends of her toes and swung angrily toward the guesthouse. “What?”

  He strode across the yard toward her. “What in the hell are you doing out here?” he demanded. “It’s raining six ways to half a dozen.”

  She pointed. “It’s Rosie. She’s stuck up there.”

  He squinted up at the rafters. “Idiot cat.”

  “Would you…” Her throat clogged and she felt tears behind her eyes. Don’t start bawling, for God’s sake. It’s a cat in the gazebo, not…

  “Yes.” The word came through his teeth in a hiss. He picked up the ladder. “Come on in here and hold this thing. It damn near threw me when Jonah and I fixed the screens on the back porch.”

  She stood at the entry to the gazebo, watching as he walked to its center and set up the wobbly ladder. She lifted a foot to the step.

  And set it back on the ground.

  “I can’t,” she said. “I can’t come in there.”

  “What do you mean, you can’t come in here?”

  His stance was undeniably irritated, but his face was the same as it always was. A half-smile quirked his lips and warmth darkened his eyes when they met hers. He loved her. Even if she was bad and he got angry, he wouldn’t hurt her or stop loving her.

  She chewed her bottom lip. “I…just can’t.”

  “Okay.”

  He turned and stepped onto the bottom rung of the ladder. It teetered like a seesaw. He set one foot on the floor to regain his balance before stepping up again. “Shut up, will you, cat? I’m on my way.”

  If the ladder fell and Dillon fell with it, Grace thought frantically, it would be her fault. Not only would the person she loved be injured, it would be her fault.

  “Not again,” she muttered, and strode across the floor of the gazebo. She didn’t feel the splintery wood beneath her feet, didn’t notice the cobwebs that gleamed macabre and eerie in the shallow illumination of the flashlight, didn’t think about The Other.