All Our Yesterdays

by Robert B. Parker

  “Been a while,” Gus said.

  “Yes,” Laura said.

  She glanced around the bar. “People recognize you.”

  Gus nodded.

  “How are you?” he said.

  Laura nodded.

  “I’m all right,” she said. “You?”

  Gus smiled.

  “Divorced, out of work, publicly disgraced,” he said.

  Laura nodded again slowly.

  “And our children are still estranged,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  It was late afternoon, the bar was beginning to fill with people having a drink after work. The waiter came and took drink orders. Gus asked for beer. Laura, white wine.

  “I’m sorry about everything,” Gus said.

  “I know.”

  “Is there anything you don’t know, anything you’d like to ask?”

  Laura shook her head.

  “I know too much already,” she said.

  The waiter brought drinks. He put them carefully in front of Gus and Laura, each neatly on its little paper doily. He poured beer into Gus’s pilsner glass until it was half full.

  When he left Laura said, “Did you know you were going to drag the whole department into it?”

  Gus shook his head.

  “That was Butchie, he plea-bargained a sentence reduction.” Gus picked up his beer bottle and carefully filled the glass, measuring the foam. “And, he took a lot of people with him. Evened it up, so to speak.”

  “But you got off,” Laura said.

  “I had a good lawyer,” Gus said.

  “Chris.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you plea-bargained.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And my husband is dead.”

  Gus’s voice was soft. “Yeah.”

  “It would have been worse, had he lived and stood trial,” Laura said. “For him, for us.”

  Gus was quiet. Outside the window the bright yellow taxis came and went, bringing well-dressed people and taking them away.

  “I sometimes think you might have had something to do with it.”

  Gus shrugged.

  “You were there.”

  Gus nodded.

  Laura waited.

  Gus didn’t speak.

  Laura shrugged.

  “It has hit Cabot hard,” she said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t know what it means to Grace … and Chris.”

  “If they’re going to have a chance it had to happen,” he said.

  “You truly think so?”

  “Chris will be the first Sheridan I know anything about got a chance to live a genuine life. I hope that includes Grace. But if it doesn’t, it doesn’t.” Gus sipped his beer. “Still a genuine life.”

  “And you’ve never lived a ‘genuine life’?”

  “Not till now.”

  “Not even when you were with me?”

  Gus folded his thick hands together, and rested his chin on them. He looked at her and she could feel the weight of his gaze, as she always had, tired and cynical, yet full of power and passion and seriousness. It seemed to fill her up as it always did. It made her feel as if there were more of her.

  “Probably the only happiness I’ve ever had has been the time with you,” he said. “In terms of men and women, it’s the only love I ever had.”

  “What other terms would there be?” she said.

  “I love my son.”

  “Yes,” Laura said. “Of course.”

  She twirled the stem of her wineglass slowly without lifting it from the table. She hadn’t drunk any.

  “I guess that’s almost exactly true for me,” she said. “In fact for me it was genuine.”

  “Yes,” Gus said.

  “But it couldn’t be for you, could it,” Laura said. “You knew what my husband was. You knew, at least toward the end, what was coming.”

  “It was like a train bearing down,” Gus said.

  Laura smiled. “And we were doing it on the tracks.”

  Gus’s beer glass was still half full. There was a wisp of foam along the inside of the rim. Laura twirled her wineglass some more.

  “So where are we?” Gus said.

  Laura stared into her slowly turning wineglass.

  “I think what you did was right, Gus.”

  She turned the glass slowly.

  “But I don’t think I can get past it.”

  Gus nodded.

  “I didn’t love Tom, and, God, what I’ve learned makes me glad that I didn’t. But he was what I settled for and he was my husband and the father of my children.”

  “Lot of history,” Gus said.

  “Yes.”

  “Be kind of hard to move right over from him to the guy who may have caused his death.”

  “And who, even if he didn’t, exploited his life.”

  Gus nodded slowly.

  “Too hard,” he said.

  The tears began to form in Laura’s eyes.

  “I have loved you, Gus. And I know you have loved me.”

  “Still do,” Gus said.

  “Yes.” She patted her eyes with her napkin, but they filled again. “I’ll ruin my makeup,” she said.

  “We can go,” Gus said.

  “I want to go alone,” she said.

  “You going to be all right?”

  She paused for a moment and seemed to think about the question.

  “Yes,” she said finally. “I think the time with you may have made me all right.”

  Gus nodded. Laura stood and bent over and kissed him on the mouth and turned and left the bar. From where he sat by the window, Gus could see her as she went out the Arlington Street door of the hotel and spoke to the doorman. He watched as the doorman got her a yellow cab and held the door, and took her tip, folding it smoothly into his pocket as he closed the door behind her. The cab pulled away down Arlington Street and turned left onto Boylston Street, and went along that side of the Public Garden, past the Four Seasons Hotel, mingling with the rest of the late afternoon traffic, and out of sight behind the still thick foliage of the early fall trees.

  Gus

  The house was in Concord, a three-hundred-year-old farmhouse on twelve acres of land that sloped gently down toward the Assabet River. He was ripping out lath and plaster in the kitchen when Chris arrived. The back door was open and the radio was on. A music-of-your-life station was playing loudly. Gus wore tan shorts and work boots and a gray sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off. He put down the pry bar and slid the hammer into a holster on his belt. He went to the refrigerator and got out two cans of Budweiser Dry and opened them and handed one to Chris.

  “What’s that song?” Chris said. He drank some beer.

  “Tommy Dorsey,” his father said, “‘Song of India.’” He pointed out the back kitchen window.

  “Look,” Gus said.

  Through the window Chris saw three pointer puppies scrambling up the slope from the water toward the house. They were so young they didn’t run well and bumped into each other and fell down often. The shape and movement clear against the yellow-green, nearly April meadow.

  “Jesus Christ,” Chris said.

  “Coming to meet brother,” Gus said.

  “Pointers?” Chris said.

  “Yeah. German shorthairs.”

  The dogs moiled into the house through the open back door and banged into Chris’s legs and rolled around on his feet and between his legs and licked his face as he squatted to pat them, and nipped with their pointed puppy teeth at his fingers and wrists.

  “Guy I know in Canton raises them,” Gus said. “I bought all the females from his litter.”

  “No males?”

  “Males are trouble,” Gus said.

  Chris smiled. “So are females.”

  “I’m talking about dogs,” Gus said.

  “They got names?”

  “Patty, Maxine, and LaVerne.”

  Chris straightened and looked around at the house.
One of the puppies began to chew on his shoelace.

  “Ill-gotten gain?” Chris said.

  “All those years on the pad,” Gus said, “I managed to put a little something aside.”

  “Needs some work,” Chris said. The puppy had his shoelace loose and was tugging on it. He reached down and picked her up. She lapped frantically at anything she could reach.

  “I’m going to peel it back to the studs first, see what I’ve got. Then I’ll start the rehab.”

  Chris nodded.

  “Want some help?”

  “Sure.”

  The puppy began to chew on Chris’s wrist.

  “What’s this one’s name?” he said.

  “The brown one’s Patty,” Gus said. “The other two I can’t tell apart yet.”

  They took their beer and went out and sat on a couple of folding chairs in the yard and watched the dogs dash around. The land was overgrown with wild grass and evergreens; only a small area around the house was mowed. The generational additions on the house made it ramble idiosyncratically. The foundation plantings needed pruning. At one corner some desolate roses clung tiredly to a sagging trellis.

  “Lot of work,” Chris said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Be nice when it’s done,” he said.

  “Nice to do,” Gus said. “Even if I don’t finish.”

  “I was thinking that,” Chris said.

  There was a little wind. It brought the smell of the river up to them. Gus got up and went to the kitchen, stepping over the lath and plaster that littered the floor. He got two more beers and brought them back and handed one to Chris. The puppies were out of sight in the tall grass, which moved as they rummaged through it.

  “Whole place is fenced,” Gus said. “So I don’t have to worry about them.”

  The road that curved by Gus’s house was empty of traffic. Where they sat they could see no other houses, only the overgrown fields, and the ragged evergreens, and the narrow gleam of the river at the foot of the hill.

  “I can help you with this on weekends if you’d like,” Chris said.

  Gus nodded. Across the sloping meadow, beyond the river, the sky was dark.

  “That’d be good,” Gus said.

  “I won’t have as much time as I used to,” Chris said. “I’m going to be police commissioner.”

  Gus stopped with the beer can nearly to his lips.

  “Boston?”

  “Boston.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Gus said.

  Far to the east, lightning flickered against the sullen sky, so far away that they couldn’t hear the thunder. Where they sat the pale spring sunshine was still on them. Light, but not much warmth. Gus put his left hand out and took Chris’s right hand and held it for a moment. It wasn’t a handshake. Then he let go and leaned back in his chair.

  “That’s the balls,” Gus said.

  Chris grinned at him. “A touch of the poet,” he said, “in every word you speak.”

  Gus smiled and drank some more beer.

  “Well, it may be inelegant, but it is, in fact, the fucking balls,” Gus said.

  The lightning flickered again and one of the puppies picked it up, or picked up the sound of thunder still inaudible to Chris and Gus. She scuttled under Gus’s chair. The other two ignored her and continued to snuffle through the grass, bumping frequently into each other. Two were ticked chocolate-white, one was nearly all chocolate.

  “Piper wants to be mayor on his own.”

  “So he hires Flaherty’s heroic prosecutor,” Gus said.

  “Yeah. He figures I appeal to the Micks, being Irish, and to the Goo Goos, being Harvard.”

  “Piper’s too stupid to have thought that up.”

  “I think Mary Alice put it together.”

  “Probably,” Gus said.

  “She’s a hell of a woman,” Chris said.

  “I know.”

  “I gave her your address.”

  “Yeah. She’s been out here.”

  Chris waited. Gus said nothing more. Chris didn’t press.

  “I’m seeing Grace tonight,” Chris said.

  “I hope it’s all right,” Gus said.

  “Either way, I’ll be all right,” Chris said.

  “Good,” Gus said. He stood and walked with Chris to the car.

  “I’ll be over this weekend, if you want, to help.”

  Gus nodded.

  “Good luck tonight,” he said.

  “Thanks,” Chris said.

  The lightning flickered again, and now for the first time they could hear, faintly and long after the flash, the sound of the thunder. All the puppies heard it and scrambled trying to get under Gus’s feet.

  He bent and scooped them up in his arms, and held them, squirming and scared.

  “We’ll be fine,” Gus said.

  “Yes, we will,” Chris said.

  He and his father stood silently for a moment, then his father put a free arm around Chris’s shoulder and hugged him. Chris hugged him back for a moment and pressed his cheek against his father’s face, feeling the day-old stubble of his father’s beard. Then he got in the car and drove away.

  After he was gone Gus took the puppies inside and fed them and, when they had eaten, followed them outside. The thunder had stopped for the moment, and so, no longer hearing thunder, they forgot that there had been thunder. He stood on the porch watching them as they made their final run of the day across the meadow. It was evening and he could no longer see the river. All he could see were the three dogs, against the now darkening grass, running, sniffing the ground, tracking, jostling one another, occasionally stopping to roll in the grass, and jumping up again to run free across his land, where his house stood that he was building with his son. There were a few wide slow flakes of snow beginning to spiral down. The thunder sounded louder, and the dogs turned and started back, away from the river, like horses for the barn, picking up speed as they came, running full out their still uncoordinated, ambling puppy run, only white showing now, in the grassscented darkness, running toward home, toward him. He could see them so brightly and then they blurred and he realized he was crying…. And though he tried as hard as he was able, he couldn’t remember when he’d done it last.

  1994 Voice-Over

  The snow had stopped and there was a faint milky hint of dawn outside Grace’s window.

  “Two sleepy people,” I said. “By dawn’s early light …”

  “I’m not sleepy,” Grace said.

  “I was sort of implying the next lines of the song.”

  “I know,” Grace said.

  I stood and went to the window and looked out. The cars in the parking lot were shapeless with snow. We’d have to dig to get out of here. A big plow came slowly down Grace’s street, the thick, wet snow peeling off the canted blade. There was no thunder anymore, no lightning. The mercury streetlights were still on, looking yellow in the encroaching morning. I turned back toward Grace.

  “I’m done,” I said. “I don’t have anything else to say.”

  “How do you feel about this police-commissioner thing?” Grace said.

  “Scared.”

  “Of?”

  “Of the responsibility. Of facing the men, when I’ve never even been a cop. Scared I’m not tough enough.”

  “Why’d you take the job?” Grace said.

  “All the reasons I took the special prosecutor job.”

  “And?”

  I took my hands from my pockets and locked them behind my head and pressed my neck back against them.

  “There’s more?” I said.

  “I think so.”

  “Yeah. There is.”

  “Gus,” Grace said.

  “Yeah. When I saw him this afternoon, actually I guess it’s yesterday afternoon, now, I … there was a point where he picked up all three of the puppies—they were scared of the thunder—and held them in one arm. And they sort of squirmed in against him. It haunts me. That image of him … he has an arm like a tree lim
b, you know? and these three little brown heads peering out. It’s my father. I wanted to sit in his lap.”

  “You did it for Gus?”

  “No, not quite. I did it because of Gus. Because of who he is and was and what he is and did, and because Gus never got it straight with his father, and who the hell knows what my grandfather had going with his father. And because … I don’t know. Just because.”

  “This is my beloved son,” Grace said, “in whom I am well pleased.”

  Grace’s face was tired. It was almost shocking to see. She never got tired. She never looked tired. The strain of the night had been for her one of restraint, of listening, of containing herself while I ran free.

  “And what about us?” Grace said.

  “Ah,” I said, “the overwhelming question.”

  “The other man is gone,” Grace said.

  I held on. Don’t spill it now.

  “That’s a start,” I said.

  I could hear the clatter of the plow, softened by snow, as it forced its way along Grace’s street.

  “You’re alone now.”

  “Yes.”

  “I would like to marry you,” I said.

  Grace was quiet.

  “Or I want to say good-bye.”

  Grace stayed quiet. I was quiet with her.

  “You can do that?” Grace said.

  “Yes. I told you when I came in. I’ll miss you for a while. I’ll be sad for a while. And I’ll find someone else in a while and be happy with her.”

  “There’s Gus,” Grace said.

  “Gus?”

  “In your eyes, in your voice,” Grace said. “I don’t know the word for it. A benign craziness, maybe. ‘Here I come and the hell with you.’”

  “Remember the puppies,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  There was no sun, the clouds were still too thick. But the faint luminosity of the morning became a little pinkish as the sun came up behind them.

  “When you said you would like to marry me,” Grace said, “what were the conditions?”

  “Monogamy,” I said.

  “No others?”

  “None.”

  “Seems a reasonable condition.”

  I waited. The morning was entirely quiet. The street outside Grace’s place was cleared and the plow had moved on.

  “When you said you wanted to marry me,” Grace said, “was that a formal proposal?”

  “You may consider it such,” I said.