One Last Thing

by Rebecca St. James

  Paul put his hand on Randi’s shoulder. Thirty-five years of marriage must equip you with the signals that your spouse is about to project herself at somebody. “Okay, we’re all upset. I think we need to postpone this discussion until we’ve had a chance to calm down.”

  I looked straight at him. “I may never calm down again. Just so you know.”

  “I understand where you’re coming from.” Paul pressed his palms together. “But until we can figure this out, can we count on you to continue to keep this to yourself?”

  I wasn’t sure about that. At all.

  “I know you must have been about to break. That’s a heavy burden to carry alone.” He was in pastor mode. “Now that I know, you can come to me if you need to talk—”

  “Fine,” I said, because if he’d gone any further I might have snatched the nutcracker off the mantel and hurled it at him. “I won’t tell anyone. But I still want to see him.”

  “When he comes home,” Randi said. “The doctor says the visitors there are distracting him.”

  “What visitors?” I said.

  “Just us,” Paul said. “And Kellen.”

  I clamped my teeth together and stood up.

  “This has been hard for you I know,” Paul said. “We appreciate that you’ve kept quiet about this. That shows that you still love Seth.”

  “Yes, I do,” I said.

  And as I stomped just as hard to the front door as Evelyn had, I wondered if they did.

  TWELVE

  I was grateful to go back to work the next day, Friday, and not only to avoid my parents’ questions so I didn’t have to lie. I had yet another memory I wanted to get away from.

  The day after Christmas, it was tradition for the Faulkners and the Grissoms to have lunch together at Mrs. Wilkes’ Dining Room on Jones and Whitaker. They served the best real Southern cuisine in Savannah—fried chicken, Brunswick stew, Tybee shrimp, pecan pie, and, of course, the “house wine”: sweet tea. It was put on the table family style, and every December twenty-sixth for twenty years we had eaten there as one.

  Until today.

  So I was extra chatty with the customers at the Piebald that day, asking the residents what they did and whether they liked their work, and the visitors what they were loving about their stay in Savannah. I could spot the upscale tourists, women with white bobs and carefully tied scarves, their husbands, thin and tanned in loose sweaters, looking mildly disinterested. Only once did I think of Seth, to wonder if that was what we had been destined for.

  “You’re acing the friendliness,” Ike told me when there was a break, “but could you work a little faster when we have a line down the ramp? You get through Christmas okay?”

  I was once again caught off guard by the shift. “Yeah,” I said. “And sorry about being slow. I’ll try to pick it up.”

  “Attagirl.” Ike pulled down the brim of the fedora and went off to the kitchen calling, “I need a refill on that broccoli cheese.”

  Wendy grabbed a rag and made circles on the counter. “If you say you’re sorry one more time, I really am going to empty a dishpan over your head.”

  I picked up the tip box so she could wipe under it. “What do you want me to say when I make a mistake?”

  “Nothing. Just fix it and move on. That’s just, like, life.” Wendy tossed the rag in the bucket under the sink and dried her hands on her apron. “Or haven’t you made any mistakes yet?”

  There was a hint of disdain in those violet eyes. Alyssa would have told her where to go, in detail. Jacqueline would have had a decent comeback. Lexi would have cried. Three weeks ago, I probably would have enumerated all of my wrongdoings and still said I was sorry. But I wasn’t any of my friends. I wasn’t even sure I was me.

  “I’m just messing with you,” Wendy said. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

  “You didn’t,” I said. “I’ve made my share of mistakes.”

  Wendy’s eyes rolled. “Probably nothing like my grand faux pas. That’s how you say it, right?”

  I laughed. “Yeah. But how could you even be old enough to do anything that bad?”

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “Me too. And I bet I’ve made twice the mistakes you have in the same amount of time. And bigger ones.”

  “Are we having a contest?” I said.

  I thought I saw a flicker of respect go through her eyes. “All I’m saying is that I don’t waste a lot of time saying I’m sorry. I’m working my butt off with two jobs—and I’m trying to pay off a bunch of debt so I can phase out of one of them. And in the meantime, I’m fixing my stuff instead of just apologizing for it.”

  I nodded. This girl with the slightly top-heavy hourglass body and the National Velvet gaze wasn’t a ditz queen by any means. I couldn’t imagine her ever getting herself into the situation I was in.

  “And one more thing,” she said. “I am so not waiting for some guy to come rescue me.”

  I didn’t think she needed to be rescued. Any man who tried was probably going to get knocked off his horse, armor and all.

  Wendy was staring at me. “Why did I just tell you all that?”

  “Um—”

  “You’re a really good listener.”

  I didn’t have to respond, because a bald guy and his plump wife stepped up to the counter, heads tilted back so they could look at the chalkboard.

  “You’re looking for a nice bowl of soup, aren’t you?” I said.

  “You read my mind,” the woman said.

  I was happy to see both Ms. Helen and Gray, the ponytail lady who was in need of emergency baked goods on Christmas Eve, come in about an hour before my shift was over. What surprised me was that they sat together. What surprised me even more: when I hung up my apron they both beckoned for me to join them.

  “It’s a watch of women,” Ms. Helen said when I slid into a chair at her usual table. The shim was in place again.

  “A watch?” Gray said. “Is that like we’re a group of security guards?” She arched a brow at Ms. Helen. “No offense, but I don’t think you’d be that effective. Not unless you’re packin’ in your bag there.”

  “Oh, honey, no,” Ms. Helen said, patting Gray’s hand. Who patted people’s hands anymore? I loved it. “Watch is the name for a group of nightingales.”

  “That’s me all over.”

  “Would you rather I called us a drove?”

  “I’m afraid to ask.”

  “That’s a gathering of pigs.”

  “You’re scarin’ me, Ms. Helen.” Gray looked at me. “Do you need a watch of women?”

  Something echoed from a not-so-long-ago conversation—faint but sure. I couldn’t grasp it but I said, “If it means do I need somebody to keep me from putting my cell phone in the freezer or something, probably so.”

  Gray grinned a wonderful grin that made her look like nothing if not a hobbit. “You’ve done that too? For me it’s either that or I drop it down the toilet.” The grin widened. “All right, the Watch it is. Although I’m still not clear on why we actually need a name—”

  Ms. Helen patted my hand this time. “Have you eaten anything today, honey? You look like you’d drop over if I blew on you.”

  “I’m good,” I said.

  “Well, I beg to differ. Now, I got you this sandwich and I want you to eat at least half of it.” She wrinkled her nose in a smile. “It’s ham and Swiss. And I brought you some good mustard from home.” She reached into her quilted bag and pulled out not a handgun but a jar. “I already spread some on there.”

  I smiled back and broke off a piece of the sandwich, which meant having to catch a warm string of cheese before it stretched across the table. Ms. Helen’s eyes stayed on my every move. I was going to have to eat the thing.

  “Now, Gray,” she said. “Is that a family name?”

  “No,” Gray said. “I substituted it for Grainne, which nobody can pronounce. My mother read too much Gaelic fiction.”

 
“I like it,” I said, mouth full.

  “Call me that at your peril. Seriously, do I look like a pagan princess to you?”

  Since my only idea of what one looked like came from some TV miniseries, I shook my head.

  “Are you from here?” Ms. Helen said to her.

  “Originally. Then I went away and now I’m back.”

  I was right about the accent.

  “Where’d you go?” Ms. Helen said, and to me she added, “Keep eating.”

  Gray tightened her ponytail. “You really want to hear this?”

  “I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t.”

  I believed that about Ms. Helen.

  “I got married young—really young—like parents-having-to-sign-for-you young—and went away with the ‘love of my life’ ”—she pinched quotations marks into the air—“to Montana.”

  “Oh, honey, now it’s cold up there, isn’t it?”

  “You have to keep your mouth closed when you go out in the winter or your spit freezes.” Gray grinned again. “Obviously I didn’t do too well in that climate.”

  “Is that why you’ve come home?” I said. “Too cold?”

  “Too cold outside and too cold inside. My husband turned out to be the most unfeeling human being on the planet. But what do you expect? He’s an equine dentist.”

  “A what?” Ms. Helen said.

  I pulled the last of the half sandwich away from my mouth. “He works on horses’ teeth?”

  “Yeah, there’s not much need for empathy or chitchat in his line of work, and he brought that same attitude home with him. Only took me eighteen years to figure out he would rather look at a mare’s molars than talk to me. I’m a slow learner.”

  “Well, now, we all want to make a marriage work,” Ms. Helen said. “You can’t beat yourself up for trying.”

  Gray looked at her soberly. “Then I will absolutely stop. Right now.”

  I couldn’t tell if she was kidding or not. It didn’t seem to matter to Ms. Helen. And it sure didn’t matter to me. I was laughing. Really laughing.

  I knew my parents, especially Mama, would like to see me come home still yukking it up, but my gaiety didn’t last a block after I left the Piebald, and besides that, I was headed for the Mellow Mushroom, where Evelyn worked. If I could catch her on break, I had some things to say to her.

  The Mellow Mushroom was across from the Soho South where Mama and I’d had lunch, and although it was hippie inspired it was more a roosting place for hipsters. They offered gourmet pizza, calzones, hoagies. Since Evelyn wasn’t on break yet when I got there, I thought I should order something. I asked for an “Enlightened Spinach Salad” and motioned for Evelyn to meet me when she had a chance.

  I sat in a booth under a mural depicting, of course, mushrooms and, inexplicably, a large cow and a steer that looked like they’d been painted by someone who did some serious ’shrooms in the sixties. For the holidays, LED stars were strung over the area where the pizzas were made, and on the counter was a small Christmas tree topped with a black top hat. The wreath behind the bar had a sparkly peace sign on it among the bows and berries. Jamaican music played and my server—who had multiple, painful-looking piercings and wore the hipster habit of vintage clothes that looked like they’d been slept in—swayed to it as she deftly maneuvered around a tall mushroom sculpture in the middle of the dining room.

  “Here’s your salad,” she said. “Anything else?”

  It was a good thing I didn’t have anything in mind because she danced off before I had a chance to answer. I was okay with that. I picked at the spinach and watched Evelyn dodge the dough-tossers in the pizza area. She was in her element here.

  Not so much anywhere else. She’d always been kind of an odd little girl, although at about age twelve, when I was seventeen, she started looking up to me. I’d stopped being girly at that point, though I was still a romantic in a literary sense, and she related to that somehow. She always wanted to know what I was reading, and I’d tell her and within two days I’d see her reading it too. She had Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and most of Jane Austen’s novels under her belt before she was halfway through middle school.

  I remembered the day when I’d come home from Duke on spring break to meet up with Seth and go off to the Gulf with him. Evelyn was eighteen then, and she came to me as I was hoisting a suitcase onto the roof of the Audi and told me—how did she put it?—she respected me as an intellectual. She said she saw both herself and me as being “individuals” and in her mind that bonded us. Then she said, “Okay, tell me—I’ve been dying—what are you doing your thesis on?”

  “Flannery O’Connor and Robert Lowell,” I said. “I’m delving into how their relationship might have influenced their respective work.”

  “You are a goddess,” she said. “I love Flannery O’Connor. I think I am her.”

  I only barely succeeded in not laughing. “Then we totally need to talk,” I told her.

  “Please,” she said.

  We never got to, at least not about Flannery and Robert. Evelyn started college that summer at Stetson University, down in Florida, and I thought she would probably be head of the English department before September. But she came home in December and announced she wasn’t going back. That was two years ago now, and she was showing no signs of ever doing anything but waiting tables at the Mellow Mushroom. And raising her parents’ blood pressure.

  Interesting. She was always the problem child. Not Seth.

  “Where the heck are you?”

  I shook myself out of my reverie as Evelyn inserted herself into the booth across from me. She was wearing a lumberjack-plaid shirt over a faded green T, a grubby long denim skirt Mama wouldn’t have allowed in her kitchen, and clunky boots. Like everybody else who worked in there, she adhered to the bathe-once-a-week philosophy and wore a knit cap over the rope of hair that was washed even less frequently.

  “I’m glad you came in,” she said. “I’m sure nobody’s told you Seth got out of the hospital this morning.”

  I shook my head.

  “I heard my dad tell him not to contact you because you’re overreacting.”

  My teeth came together so hard I felt my jaw muscles seize.

  “Why aren’t you, like, totally swearing your head off?” Evelyn said. “Oh, wait, that would be me.”

  “So they still don’t believe you,” I said.

  “No. But whatever you told them, they believed that, even if you did overreact. There have been long, clandestine meetings. First with Mother. Then with Father.”

  Her sarcasm went past ironic, straight to caustic.

  “I, of course, have been completely excluded from all of that, even though I’m the one who told them what was going on. If it wasn’t for me, they’d still think he was the golden child. But like I told them, I did it for you.”

  “And that’s why I came,” I said. “I wanted to thank you.”

  “I told you my brother isn’t what he pretends to be. And now you don’t have to be the bad guy anymore.”

  “I appreciate it—”

  “I know what it feels like,” she said. “And it bites.”

  Her voice threatened tears. She tapped the table and escaped from the booth. Before I knew it, she was dodging pizza dough again.

  I was off Saturday but I got up early after another restless night, the skin under my eyes beginning to resemble elephant hide. I showered immediately and while I was in there I scripted how I was going to get past Randi and Paul to see Seth. I should have saved myself the effort because before I was even dried off I heard my cell tell me I had a text message.

  It was Randi with another subpoena. Come over ASAP.

  I might have flushed the phone down the toilet if I hadn’t been so anxious to see Seth, to find out if Evelyn was right . . . to make sure he was still in there someplace even if she was.

  The wreath was already off the front door when I arrived—my hair still wet, no makeup—and this time it was Randi who greeted me
. She didn’t say hello and neither did I. What I did say was, “I want to see Seth.”

  “He’s in the great room. But Tara . . .”

  She grabbed my forearm with fingers hardened by years of holding a tennis racket. I stared at them until she removed them.

  “Don’t upset him,” she said. “He’s still vulnerable.”

  I got around her and made my way past the disapproving ancestors. Paul and Seth sat in two of the three Queen Anne chairs by the fireplace, both of them with their hands hanging between their knees as they sat forward. I was clearly interrupting a deep conversation, and I would have backed out of the room . . . except they had summoned me. It was as if every effort were being made to assure that I would feel like the outsider in whatever was to follow.

  Seth looked up and at first he didn’t move, which gave me a chance to take him in. The last week had left him thin and removed some of the tone from his muscles, making him seem like a miniature version of himself. I could see the tendons in his face and the tremor in the hand that went to his knee and the fingernails bitten to the quick. What I didn’t see was the trace of a twinkle in his eyes. They were glassy, as if he were medicated to just this side of consciousness.

  Well, yeah. He probably was.

  He stood up and his arms fell awkwardly to his sides. I’d never seen him do that before. In fact, I’d never seen him exhibit any body language that wasn’t completely confident and coordinated. He looked like an ungainly adolescent who hadn’t yet grown into his skin.

  I couldn’t let him stand there feeling as undefended as I did. I rounded the small table that had been placed between them, cluttered with coffee mugs, and cupped my hand to his cheek.

  “Are you okay?” I said.

  His face collapsed on itself and he broke into soundless tears.

  “Didn’t I tell you not to upset him?” Randi’s heels tapped the hardwood and then muffled on the rug. “I’m not going to let you do this.”