The Last Refuge

by Marcia Talley

  I’m not much into sports, so I missed the debut of the promo, but nobody else in the world did.

  ‘Mother, did you see … ?’

  ‘Grandma, you looked awesome!’

  ‘Hannah! I just saw …’

  I figured there’d been so much hype that when the show finally made its debut, maybe nobody’d even care.

  ‘I can’t watch,’ I said, shielding my eyes when I finally caught one of the ads on TV.

  Paul tugged at my hands. ‘Don’t be silly. Look at you!’ He pointed at the screen. ‘You look terrific.’

  ‘I look old.’

  ‘Not old, sweetheart. Vintage.’

  ‘Vintage, huh? Like my clothing.’

  They’d let me keep a gown, the blue one with ruffles and little pink ribbons that Melody liked, and all the accessories that went with it. When my daughter, Emily, saw it hanging in the hall closet, sheathed in plastic, she grinned and said, ‘So, what are you going to be for Hallowe’en next year?’

  ‘A witch,’ I replied.

  But I did watch the promo. They were my family, after all.

  Melody bent over her embroidery.

  Jack draining a pint with his pals.

  Amy and Alex, in happier times, playing a duet.

  Karen up to her elbows in dough, a dab of flour on her chin.

  Dex and Gabe, wrestling on the Paca House lawn with Flash.

  And me, with an impish grin, taking off my shoes and stockings so I could run barefoot through the grass.

  I wondered if I’d ever see any of them again.

  We’d exchanged email addresses, promised to stay in touch, but you know how it is. Melody let me know via Facebook when her mother passed away. I telephoned right away, of course, and we began to chat about once a month after that. I promised to take her on a tour of Eastern colleges when she started the application process the following year.

  Amy texts me from Kansas City, Missouri where she teaches music in a private school. I wondered if she moved there so she could be close to Drew, serving fifteen years for multiple violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice at the United States Disciplinary Barracks – better known as Ft Leavenworth – about thirty-five miles away. Wondered, that is, until an engraved card arrived in the mail announcing her marriage to Philip Henry Graham, III. Amy and I keep in touch playing Scrabble on our iPhones while she awaits the birth of their first child.

  When Karen visited Washington, D.C. for a meeting of the American Sociological Association, we finally managed to schedule that lunch that we had promised each other. Once a year at Christmas a card might arrive from Michael or French, but otherwise …

  I was in our basement office, going through the basket where I keep last year’s Christmas cards and updating our address file accordingly, when I came across a plain white business envelope with ‘Hannah’ written on it in a fancy hand. The envelope was sealed, but it was addressed to me, right? So I stuck my finger under the flap, opened it and looked inside.

  I gasped in surprise, as Paul had probably intended. But when I read a little further, I felt like a rat, a bum, the lowest of the low.

  Paul was upstairs fixing a broken hinge on a cabinet in the kitchen. He glanced up when I entered the room and smiled crookedly around a screw.

  ‘What’s this?’ I asked, showing him the envelope.

  He spit out the screw, and laid his screwdriver down on the countertop. ‘What does it look like, Hannah?’

  Tears filled my eyes. ‘It looks like tickets for a trans-Atlantic cruise on the Queen Mary Two, but they’re dated October the seventh. That was ages ago,’ I moaned.

  ‘It was for our anniversary,’ Paul explained, ‘but as you may recall, something came up.’

  ‘You bought tickets for a cruise? We were going to celebrate our anniversary on the Queen Mary Two?’

  Paul nodded.

  ‘So, you didn’t forget?’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘I feel like a selfish shit,’ I wailed. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  Paul snatched a tissue out of the box on the counter and dabbed at the tears on my cheeks. ‘Don’t worry, Hannah. I was able to reschedule the cruise. I was planning to give it to you for Christmas.’

  ‘A cruise? On the Queen Mary Two?’ I was beginning to sound like a broken record.

  He chuckled, kissed the top of my nose. ‘Can you be ready to sail by January the third?’

  ‘I can be ready tomorrow.’ I tossed the envelope into the air with a whoop and watched it spiral to the floor and scoot under the refrigerator. ‘But, wait a minute, Paul. Patriot House debuts on January the third!’

  ‘That’s why TiVos were invented, my dear.’

  He reached for me then, and I came into his arms, grateful that the places I yearned for him to caress were not swathed under yards of silks, laces, braids, whalebones, and furbelows.

  Was I flying like Kate Winslet in Titanic? Making pottery with Patrick Swayze in Ghost? Carried off into the sunset like Debra Winger in Officer and a Gentleman?

  I’ll never tell.

  But later, much later, as I lay back on my pillow with the afternoon sun slatting through the plantation shutters and his arm flung lightly over me, I said, ‘Do you know what I think?’

  ‘I gave up trying to read your mind a long time ago, Hannah. Is it good, or is it bad?’

  ‘Oh, it’s good, it’s very good.’

  ‘What, then?’ he said.

  ‘I think I’ve just been flourished.’