She looks at me with tears in her eyes, a look of somber and grave regret across her face. This sucks. Now I can’t even hate her.
“It’s awful to say, but I just . . . I wanted you as far away from me and as far away from Ben as possible. I think I thought if you’d just go away, then I could deal with the loss of my son and I wouldn’t have to face the fact that I lost a part of him a long time before he died.”
She looks down at her own knees and shakes her head. “That’s not . . . that’s not what I came here to talk about. Never mind. Anyway, I wanted you to have his wallet and this.”
She pulls his wedding ring out of her purse.
I was wrong.
I do have triggers.
I start crying. I put that wedding ring on him myself, my hand shaking while his was steady as a rock. I remember seeing it on him the next day thinking that I never knew how sexy a wedding ring was on a man until it was my ring, until I put it there.
She comes over to me on the couch and holds me. She takes my left hand and she puts the ring into it, balling my fingers up into a fist as she holds me.
“Shh,” she says. “It’s okay.” She puts her head on top of mine. My head is buried in her chest. She smells like a sweet, flowery, expensive perfume. She smells like she’s worn the same perfume for forty years, like it’s molded to her. Like it’s hers. She is warm and soft, her sweater absorbing my tears, whisking them away from my face and onto her. I can’t stop crying and I don’t know if I ever will. I feel the ring in my hand, my palm sweating around it. My fist is so tight that my fingers start to ache. I let my muscles go, falling into her. I can hear myself blubbering. I am wailing loudly; the noises coming out of me feel like blisters. Once I have calmed, once my eyes have gotten control of themselves again, I stay there. She doesn’t let go.
“He loved you, Elsie. I know that now. My son wasn’t a very romantic person, but I doubt you ever knew that. Because he was clearly very romantic with you.”
“I loved him, Susan,” I say, still stationary, inert. “I loved him so much.”
“I know you did,” she says. “He kept a copy of his proposal in his wallet. Did you know that?”
I perk up. She hands the paper to me, and I read it.
“Elsie, let’s spend our lives together. Let’s have children together and buy a house together. I want you there when I get the promotion I’ve been shooting for, when I get turned down for something I’ve always hoped for, when I fall and when I stand back up. I want to see every day of your life unfold. I want to be yours and to have you as my own. Will you marry me? Marry me.”
“Will you marry me?” is crossed out and replaced with the more forward statement. “Marry me.”
This isn’t how he proposed. I don’t even know what this is. But it feels good to know he struggled with how to ask me. This was one of his attempts. His handwriting was so very bad.
“I found it in his wallet when I went through it. That’s when I got it. You know? Like it or not, you are the truth about Ben. He loved you fiercely. And just because he didn’t tell me, doesn’t mean he didn’t love you. I just have to keep telling myself that. It’s a hard one to make sense of, but anyway, you should have these things. He would want that.” She smiles at me, grabbing my chin like I am a child. “I am so proud of my son for loving you this way, Elsie. I didn’t know he had it in him.”
It feels nice to think that maybe Susan could like me. I am actually overwhelmed by how nice that thought feels. But this is not the Susan I know. And it makes me feel uneasy. If I’m being honest, part of me is worried she’s going to wait until my defenses are down and then sock me in the stomach.
“Anyway, I would love to get to know you,” she says. “If that is okay with you. I should have called before I came up here, but I thought”—she laughs—“I thought if I was you, I’d tell me to fuck off, so I didn’t want to give you the chance.”
I laugh with her, unsure of what exactly is going on and how to respond to it.
“Can I take you to lunch?” she asks.
I laugh again. “I don’t know,” I say, knowing my eyes are swollen and I haven’t showered.
“I wouldn’t blame you for asking me to leave,” she says. “I was awful, when I think about it from your point of view. And you don’t know me at all, but I can tell you that once I realize I’m wrong, I do everything to make it right. I’ve thought about this for weeks and I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t ready to do better. I really do want to get to know you and I’d love to just . . . start over.” She says “start over” like it’s a refreshing thought, like it’s something people can actually do. And because of that, I start to feel like maybe it is possible. Maybe it’s easier than it feels. We will just start over. Let’s try again.
“Yeah,” I say. “We can try again.”
Susan nods. “I’m so sorry, Elsie.”
“Me too,” I say, and it isn’t until I say it that I realize I mean it. We sit there for a minute, considering each other. Can we do this? Can we be good to each other? Susan seems convinced that we can, and she’s determined to take the lead.
“All right,” she says. “Let’s get composed and head out.”
“You are much better at composure than I am.”
“It’s a learned trait,” she says. “And it’s entirely superficial. Hop in the shower, I’ll wait here. I won’t poke through anything, I promise.” She puts her hands up in the air to signify swearing.
“Okay,” I say, getting up. “Thank you, Susan.”
She closes her eyes for just half a second and nods her head.
I head into the bathroom, and before I shut the door, I tell her she’s welcome to poke through anything she likes.
“Okay! You may regret this,” she says. I smile and get in the shower. While I’m washing my hair, I think of all the things I have been meaning to say to her for weeks. I think of how I’ve wanted to tell her the pain she caused me. I’ve wanted to tell her how wrong she was. How little she really knew her own son. How unkind she has been. But now that she’s here, and she’s different, it doesn’t seem worth it.
I get dressed and come out into the living room, and she’s sitting on the sofa, waiting. Somehow, she’s put me in a better mood.
Susan drives us to a random restaurant she found on Yelp. “They said it was private and had great desserts. Is that okay?”
“Sure,” I say. “I’m always up for someplace new.”
Our conversation, when not about Ben, doesn’t flow as freely. It is awkward at times, but I think both of us know that is to be expected.
I tell her that I am a librarian. She says that she loves reading. I tell her that I am not close with my parents; she says she is sorry to hear that. She tells me she’s been working on occupying her time with various projects but can’t seem to stick to something longer than a few months. “I realized I was too fixated on the house so I stopped renovating, but truthfully, renovating is the only thing that keeps me occupied!” Eventually, the conversation works its way back to the things we have in common: Ben, dead husbands, and loss.
Susan tells me stories about Ben as a child, about embarrassing things he did, tricks he tried to play. She tells me how he would always ask to wear her jewelry.
The visual of Ben in women’s jewelry immediately cracks me up.
She drinks her tea and smiles. “You have no idea! He used to always want to dress up as a witch for Halloween. I would explain to him that he could be a wizard, but he wanted to be a witch. I think he just wanted to paint his face green.”
We talk about Steven and how hard it was for her to lose him, how much of Steven she used to see in Ben, how she feels like maybe she suffocated Ben, trying too hard to hold on to him because Steven was gone.
“I don’t think so,” I say. “At least, from my point of view, Ben really loved you. He worried about you. He cared about you. We talked about you a lot. He . . . ” I don’t know how much I should tell her about Ben’s intentions a
nd worries, about why he never told her about me. But it feels so good to talk to someone that knew him as well as I did, that knew him better than I did. It feels good to have someone say, “I know how much it hurts,” and believe them. It all just rolls off my tongue and into the air faster than I can catch it.
“He was scared that if you knew that he was with someone, in a serious relationship, that you would feel left out, maybe. Not left out, but . . . like he was moving on and there wasn’t a place for you. Which wasn’t true. He would always have a place for you. But he thought that if you heard about me, that you’d feel that way and he didn’t want that. He kept putting it off. Waiting for the right time. And then the right time never came and things with us progressed to the point where it was weird he hadn’t told you already, which made him feel bad. And then it just became this big thing that he wasn’t sure how to handle. He loved you, Susan. He really, really did. And he didn’t tell you about me because he was thinking of you, however misguided. I’m not going to say I totally understood it. Or that I liked it. But he didn’t keep it from you because you didn’t matter. Or because I didn’t matter. He just, he was a guy, you know? He didn’t know how to handle the situation gracefully so he didn’t handle it at all.”
She thinks about it for a minute, looking down at her plate. “Thank you,” she says. “Thank you for telling me that. That’s not what I thought happened . . . It’s not necessarily good news, but it’s not entirely bad, right?” She is unsure of herself, and it’s clear that she is grappling with this. She’s trying very hard to be the Susan I’m seeing, but my guess is, she’s not quite there yet. “Are we at a place where I can make a gentle suggestion?” she says. “From one widow to another?”
“Oh. Uh . . . sure.”
“I poked,” she says. “In my defense, you did say it was okay, but really, I’m just nosy. I’ve always been nosy. I can’t stop myself. I tried to work on it for years, and then I just gave up around fifty. I just resigned myself to it: I am nosy. Anyway, I poked. Everything of Ben’s is still in its place. You haven’t moved a thing. I looked in the kitchen. You have food rotting in the fridge.”
I know where this is going and I wish I’d told her she could not make a gentle suggestion.
“I’d like to help you clear some things out. Make the place yours again.”
I shake my head. “I don’t want to make it mine, it’s ours. It was ours. He . . . ”
She puts her hand up. “Okay. I’m dropping it. It’s your place to do with what you want. I just know, for me, I waited too long to move Steven’s things into storage and I regret that. I was living in this . . . shrine to him. I didn’t want to move his little box of floss because I thought it meant I was giving up on him—which I realize sounds crazy.”
“No, that doesn’t sound crazy.”
She looks me in the eye, knowing that I am doing the same thing, knowing that I am just as lost as she was. I want to convey to her that I like where I am in this. I don’t want to move forward.
“It is crazy, Elsie,” she says. It is pointed but kind. “Steven is alive in my heart and nowhere else. And when I moved his things out of my eyesight, I could live my life for me again. But you do what you want. You’re on no one’s timetable but your own.”
“Thank you,” I say.
“Just remember that if you wade too long in the misery of it, you’ll wake up one day and find that your entire life is built around a ghost. That’s it. I’m off my soapbox. I’m in no place to tell you your business. I just feel like I know you. Although, I realize I don’t.”
“No.” I stop her. “I think you do.”
After lunch, Susan drops me off at my apartment and kisses me on the cheek. Before I jump out of her car and make my way up my own steps, she says to me, “If you ever need anything at all, please don’t hesitate.” She laughs in a sad way, as if it’s funny how pathetic what she is about to say truly is. “You’re the only person I have left to be there for,” she says.
I unlock my door and settle in, staring at Ben’s wedding ring on the counter. I think about what Susan said. We were or are, technically, family. What happens to the relationship you never had with your mother-in-law when your husband dies?
I sit down, holding Ben’s wallet in my hands, rubbing the worn edges. I take off my wedding ring, put his around my ring finger, and slide mine back on to hold it in place. His doesn’t fit. It’s a thick band many sizes too large, but it feels good on my finger.
I look around the house, now seeing it through Susan’s eyes. So many of Ben’s things are strewn about. I see myself twenty years from now, sitting in this very place, his things stuck, frozen in time. I see myself how I’m afraid others will see me. I am a Miss Havisham in the making. And for the first time, I don’t want to be that way. For a fleeting minute, I think that I should move Ben’s things. And then I reject the idea. Ben’s things are all I have left. Though it does occur to me that maybe Susan knows what she’s talking about. Susan seems at peace but hasn’t lost that sadness about her. As long as I have that sadness, I still have Ben. So if Susan can do it, maybe I can too.
I go to the refrigerator and pick up the hot dogs. The package is soft and full of liquid. Simply moving it from its place on the shelf has elicited some foul, rancid reaction. The entire kitchen starts to reek. I run to the garbage cans outside, the liquid from the bag dripping on my floor on the way out. As I put the lid on the garbage can and walk back in to clean up and wash my hands, I laugh at how ridiculous it is that I thought Ben lived on through rancid hot dogs. The hot dogs are gone and I don’t feel like I’ve lost him, yet. Score one for Susan.
When Monday comes, I feel the familiar relief of distraction. I go to work, eager to start research on the new display case for this month. Most months, Lyle tells me what to feature, but lately he’s been letting me choose. I think he’s still scared of me. Everyone here treats me with kid gloves. At certain times I find it charming or at least convenient; at other times I find it irritating and naïve.
I choose Cleopatra for this month, and start pulling together facts and figures that I can show easily with photos and replicas. I am hovering over a book containing images of what the currency looked like in her time, trying to decide how relevant that is, when I am stopped by Mr. Callahan.
“Hi, Mr. Callahan,” I say, turning toward him.
“Hello, young lady,” Mr. Callahan says.
“What can I help you with?”
“Oh, nothing. I find myself a bit bored today is all,” he says slowly and deliberately. I get the impression his mind moves faster than his body can at this point.
“Oh! Nothing striking your fancy?”
“Oh, it’s not that. I’ve just been stuck in the damn house for so long, walking back and forth to the library. I don’t have anywhere else to go! Nothing else to do. The days are all starting to fade away.”
“Oh,” I say. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Would you have lunch with me?” he asks. “I’m afraid if I don’t spend time with someone or do something interesting my brain is going to . . . decay. Atrophy. You know . . . just . . . wither away.” I pause before answering, and he fills the void. “There’s only so many goddamn sudoku puzzles a man can do, you know? Excuse my language.”
I laugh and put the book down. I look at my watch and see that his timing is almost perfect. It’s 12:49 p.m. “I would love to, Mr. Callahan,” I say.
“Great!” He clasps his hands together in a rather feminine way, as if I’ve given him a pair of pearl earrings. “If we are going to have lunch together, though, Elsie, you should call me George.”
“All right, George. Sounds like a plan.”
Mr. Callahan and I walk to a sandwich shop nearby, and he insists on buying my lunch. To tell the truth, I have leftover pizza waiting for me in the office refrigerator, but it didn’t seem appropriate to mention that. As Mr. Callahan and I sit down at the small café table, we open our sandwiches.
“So,
let’s hear it, miss. Tell me something interesting! Anything at all.”
I put down my sandwich and wipe the mayonnaise from my lips. “What do you want to know?” I ask.
“Oh, anything. Anything interesting that’s happened to you. I don’t care if it’s sad or funny, scary or stupid. Just something. Anything I can go home and recount to my wife. We’re starting to bore each other to tears.”
I laugh like I think Mr. Callahan is expecting, but to tell the truth, I want to cry. Ben never bored me. God, how I wish I’d had time to find him positively mind-numbing. When you love someone so much that you’ve stuck around through all the interesting things that have happened to them and you have nothing left to say, when you know the course of their day before they even tell you, when you lie next to them and hold their hand even though they haven’t said one interesting thing in days, that’s a love I want. It’s the love I was on target for.
“You look sad,” he says, interrupting my one-person pity party. “What’s the matter?”
“Oh, I’m fine,” I say. “I just . . . got a funny bit of mustard I think.”
“No.” He shakes his head. “You’ve looked sad for some time. You think I don’t see things because I’m an old fart, but I do.” He brings his finger to his temple and taps it. “What is it?”
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