Souvenir

by Therese Fowler

  “Nope, I have to miss it. I’m doing a benefit concert next Wednesday in New Orleans.”

  Doreen shook her head. “So busy. How she is going to cook for you when you are not even in the same country, huh? I want to know hwat jou are thinking, to marry a woman who is not always there. Huh!” she snorted. He knew better than to answer; the last time, her rant had been about his going to the Oscars with an actress who had portrayed a character Doreen hated. She’d named half a dozen “better” actresses then—women who he was sure also weren’t home cooking dinner every night. She was capricious, but kind and honest and great with detail work. He liked her a lot.

  He had his back to the door when he heard the bell above it ring, announcing entry. He saw the customer in the mirror, though, saw her before her eyes had a chance to adjust from the bright midday sunshine to the much dimmer store interior.

  “Hola, Missus Hamilton!” Doreen called out. “Be right with jou,” she said, words that came out sounding like “bright weeju” to Carson’s ears, which were equally as stunned as his eyes.

  Nowhere to hide. His lungs felt suddenly shallow and inadequate, his mind incapable of forming something coherent to say. Should he announce himself or wait for her to see him?

  “Take your time,” Meg said, still unaware of his identity. He was, in this moment, an anonymous tallish man in dark shorts and a T-shirt with his back to her. He watched her walk over to the counter while she took her sunglasses, which had dangled from her left hand, and lodged them in her hair.

  “Done,” Doreen said, nudging him off the dais. He stepped to the left side, near the corner, and saw it, saw his escape if he wanted it: he could move quickly to the beaded doorway right now, just slide past the mirrors before she turned her attention away from the business cards displayed along the counter. His heart thundered with indecision.

  But Doreen had her own agenda, and before he could act, she took his arm and said to Meg, “Your husband’s suits are just done, and good thing! We will be so busy making wedding tuxes for Ocala’s big star—” She pulled him toward Meg as if she were showing off a prized stallion, and he watched Meg turn toward him. Doreen finished, “Jou know, Carson McKay!”

  Meg stared, and her lips parted as if to speak, but it took a beat for her to make any sound; her eyes locked on his for just that second and then slid away, to Doreen. “Well, good timing then,” she said. She glanced back at him and added, “Congratulations.” Her hazel eyes were wide and appeared sincere.

  He started to speak, had to clear his throat, then said, “Thanks, Meg.”

  “Oh, jou know each other?”

  Neither of them responded right away, both waiting for the other to delineate that answer. Then Meg laughed, a small, nervous laugh, and said, “Well, it was a long time ago.”

  Doreen, oblivious to the tension that felt, to him, as palpable as a cloudburst, beamed up at him. “His bride is a professional surfing champion.” She said the words slowly, stressing each syllable.

  “I’ve heard,” Meg said politely.

  “One minute. I get Mr. H’s suits, hokay?” Then Doreen disappeared through the beads, leaving him alone with Meg for the first time since he’d promised he would see her in hell.

  It was inevitable they would run into each other, sooner or later. He didn’t come back home to visit all that often, but every time, he carried the expectation in the back of his mind that she could turn up at the grocery store or a restaurant, next to him at a stoplight again, with her parents at the co-op—until she lost her mom and Spencer sold the farm. He’d never made a plan for what he’d do when they did meet up, and even if he had, he was sure, now, that he’d have botched it.

  The words he’d spoken with such passionate certainty the morning of her wedding had troubled him in recent years. Why had he been so ugly to her? Why couldn’t he have just taken her rejection like a man? So she didn’t love him enough to choose him; so she’d come over for a quick fuck, crass as it sounded; he should have just sent her off to Hamilton with good wishes instead of that moody proclamation. But then, he was young and stubborn and hurt…and he really had believed that seeing her again would be hellish.

  It wasn’t, though. Jesus, seeing her made his fingers tingle and his heart pound.

  She looked tired but luminous still, like the copper in her hair and the pale pink of her skin were lighted by something inside her, some energy that even a stressful day couldn’t eclipse entirely. He knew she was an obstetrician, that she had a practice across town—his mother mentioned these kinds of things over the years, as if to periodically test the waters. He knew she had a teenage daughter whose name he had known she would choose, if she ever had a girl. And he knew that she’d wasted no time getting pregnant, as if trying to cement herself to the Hamiltons as rapidly as possible—probably to secure an inheritance, in case something happened to Brian. He hadn’t ever thought of her as shrewd, but he hadn’t thought of her as any other man’s wife, either, and he’d been dead wrong about that. Well, whatever she was, she was still beautiful to him. Having her there, ten feet in front of him, was purely, unexpectedly, a pleasure.

  Twenty-one

  MEG COULD NOT HAVE BEEN MORE SURPRISED TO FIND CARSON AT THE tailor’s. He was the last thing on her mind this afternoon, while she squeezed in yet another errand for Brian before heading over to her one-fifteen appointment with an old med school colleague, neurologist Brianna Davidson—Manisha had insisted she call Brianna and ask to be seen right away. “Answers are always better than questions,” she’d said.

  The start of the day had been tense, Brian waking up hung over and unwilling to talk about the money and his coming home drunk. But then he’d called her at ten-fifteen and sweetly asked if she could get his suits and drop the gray one by his office; he was leaving for Boston right after work.

  She heard Doreen in the back room asking Pete, “I am getting Mr. Hamilton’s suits—where jou have put them?” and prayed they’d be found, fast. She knew she should say something more to Carson, but what? Where to even begin?

  “How do you know about this place?” Carson said, and she was hugely relieved that he was able to dredge up a casual remark, because she was tongue-tied, awkward in his presence in a way she’d never been before.

  “Oh. He—Brian—heard about it from somebody, God knows. Pete’s very good.”

  “Yeah, I’ve been coming to him for a long time.”

  “Oh, terrific.”

  “Yeah.”

  He looked so good in person. She’d seen his face on CD covers and magazine covers and, thanks to Kara, in the newspaper, and always he looked appealing—well, wasn’t that the job of those photographers and stylists? In person, though, he had a presence now, a kind of vibrant energy that resonated around him. His hair was longish and rumpled, much like it’d been when they were teens, and a flock of light brown whiskers grew from his chin, no fuller than when he was twenty. He rubbed them.

  “So…” she said, taking her turn, “is your mom well?”

  “She’s great! Yeah. She’s, um, keeping busy…”

  The beads swished. Meg looked over, expecting Doreen, but seeing James McKay instead. How funny she and Carson must look to him, her standing there clutching her purse to her like a life vest, Carson with one hand at his chin and the other jingling loose change in his pocket. Awkward kids, struggling for words.

  James came over to her. “How are you, Meg?” he said, leaning in to kiss her cheek.

  “All right, all things considered. Dad’s getting used to retirement over there at Horizon.” How much easier it was to talk to James!

  “Good, good,” James said. “Give him our best.”

  “I will, thanks. You look well.” She’d seen him several times since her split from Carson, most recently at her mother’s funeral. He and Carolyn both attended. James had been warm and sympathetic, Carolyn sympathetic but also aloof, as she always was when their paths crossed. Meg had never taken it personally; she understood Caroly
n’s protectiveness, understood what she must think of a woman who would just casually rip out her son’s heart and stomp on it, as Meg had seemed to do.

  Carson had sent her father a card, or so she’d heard.

  James moved to Carson and put his arm around his shoulders. “I’m plugging along,” he said. “Making sure Carson keeps the wedding plans on schedule.”

  She saw the sideways look Carson gave his dad, who she could tell was playing the protective parent himself just now. Did James see her as a threat? Some instincts died hard, clearly—her own included, because she hadn’t been able to help her first reaction to Carson, the sudden tightness in her chest, the immediate urge to press herself against him, her shoulders fitted into his armpits when he wrapped his arms around her. He had held her so many times, for comfort, for support, for protectiveness, for desire…she’d lived in his arms, grown up there.

  She made herself smile, her professional smile of assurance that everything was under control. “So when’s the big day?” she asked.

  Carson said, “Next month—Mother’s Day weekend, in St. Martin. Sounds weird, I know, but her mom—Val’s mom, she liked the idea of combining the two things.”

  “Sure,” Meg nodded, recalling too well how her own mother-in-law had steered so many of her wedding plans, taking the helm as if the fact of the Hamiltons paying for the wedding granted Shelly the right to plan it all. Her mother accepted the role-reversal gracefully—gratefully, in fact, which irritated Meg at the time. She wanted to tell her to have some pride; she, Meg, was also doing them a favor, by allowing Brian to marry the girl he wanted most. The money being thrown around, the Hamiltons’ wealth, that was a tool, not a scepter, and she wanted her mother to recognize this. But with her own limited ability to see the bigger picture at that age, she hadn’t understood the dynamics of the situation. Her parents were, in essence, selling her off, just as some families in other cultures sold their daughters, as a way to improve their own circumstances. The seller might be able to fetch a high price because of some desirable quality in the daughter, but it was the buyer who could afford that price who truly held the power.

  In the case of Carson and his bride-to-be, the situation surrounding their wedding was, of course, much more usual. Valerie Haas might not have quite the wealth Carson likely did, but there was no “sale” taking place. Envy prickled the back of Meg’s neck as she thought how it must feel to Valerie to be marrying a man for no other reason except that you loved him.

  Oh, she’d been fond of Brian when they got married—had told herself she would never have married him otherwise; that would be a fool’s bargain. She forgave his main defect: that he wasn’t Carson. She hadn’t loved him, though. Love, she’d told her mother, would come in due time—no different than with arranged marriages, she’d said. “Of course it will,” her mother agreed. “Why shouldn’t it?”

  Doreen reappeared, carrying Brian’s altered suits, and passed them to her.

  “On jour account?” Doreen asked.

  “Yes, thanks.” Meg nodded. She was just about to tell the men she had to run when the beads parted again and a trim, white-blond young woman appeared.

  “I think we got it!”

  Carson jerked around like a kid caught reaching for a cookie right before dinner. “Oh, good,” he said. He looked at the woman—Valerie, obviously, for not only did she look like the bride-to-be in their engagement photo, she had the lithe body of an athlete in her prime: smooth, long leg muscles bared by shorts like the ones Savannah slept in, curved biceps displayed under the same type of meager sleeves Savannah’s formfitting tees had. Carson looked at Valerie as if unsure of his next move.

  James saved him. “Val, this is Meg Hamilton, an old friend. Her folks used to own the farm next to ours.”

  “Hey,” Val said, raising her hand up in a quick wave. Her friendly look told Meg that Carson had spared her the details of his young adulthood—or one particular detail anyway.

  Meg said, “Glad to meet you,” as warmly as she could—which was lukewarm. Not bad.

  Val, obviously distracted by whatever it was they got, didn’t notice either way. She turned to Carson. “Pete and me, we’re simpatico on the tux design. You guys are going to look fab.” She held both hands out in a thumbs-up gesture for emphasis.

  Fab, Meg thought, watching Val snake her arm around Carson’s waist. The bride-to-be looked smaller next to him, no more than five feet three inches and two thirds his width; she was fab herself, with that gleaming hair and golden tanned skin. Well, what else would she be?

  Meg remembered suddenly to check the time, and saw she really did have to run if she was to make her appointment with Brianna. “Sorry, but I have to go. I’m on my lunch break.”

  “Of course,” Carson said.

  End it quick. “It was good to see you—and congrats again.” She shifted the suit hangers from her right arm, which was feeling very tired, to her left, then turned for the exit. James hurried ahead of her to hold the door.

  “Thanks,” she told him, stepping out into the blazing sunlight. She tried to raise her hand up for her sunglasses, but it had become leaden, just like before.

  James didn’t notice anything. “Take care,” he said, and let the door close as he returned inside.

  Meg squinted as she went to the curb, then waited for traffic before crossing to her car on the opposite side of the street. Something clicked in her mind: the wedding was set for Mother’s Day weekend, Carson said—not Mother’s Day itself, then, but the day before. Savannah’s birthday. That was a coincidence she didn’t want to think about.

  She tried making her right hand into a fist, and it cooperated, but only weakly. “Son of a bitch,” she said under her breath.

  When the road was clear, she crossed, making each step careful and deliberate; this thing with her arm spooked her, made her feel she needed to be doubly cautious not to stumble or get off balance in her low heels. She reached her car without incident and laid the plastic-draped suits across the hood, followed by her purse, which she slid off her left shoulder. With her left hand, she rummaged for the keys and found them, pressing the unlock button. Then she hoisted her purse, hoisted the suits, and tried to drape them over her right arm so that she could use her left hand to open the car door. But even that minor task was too much for the arm, which collapsed with the weight. Everything spilled onto the asphalt, landing at her feet.

  “God damn it!” It was all too much, just too much at once. The stupid errand for the stupid suits—why couldn’t Brian pick up his own damn clothes? And Carson, and his pert little fiancée and their wedding plans, and the heat, and this stupid, terrifying, weak arm…She stood there in the street, facing the car door, awash with tears.

  “Hey, Meg—” Carson’s voice came behind her, and, not knowing how long he’d been standing there, she quickly squatted down to pick up the mess.

  “Let me help you with those,” he said, bending down. She felt his gaze on her face, knew he would ask what was wrong—which he did. And what could she tell him?

  She moved aside so he could open the back door and hang the suits, letting the silence drag out, indecision gripping her. She couldn’t tell him the truth; she didn’t quite know what was true herself. How to explain the weakness in her arm and the emotions that had pushed her over the edge? What excuse would release him from his feelings of chivalrous, at best habitual, concern?

  Carson prompted her. “Meg?”

  “I—” she started. “Nothing. I’m okay. Just a dizzy spell—the heat, you know?” The lie sounded lame even to her.

  “Dizzy? Come on; you’re crying.”

  “Not on your account,” she said, wanting to dispell that suspicion right away.

  He said, “No, of course—I didn’t think—” He stopped and took an audible breath. Then he said, “From in there, you looked like you were having trouble with your arm.”

  “I was—I had a cramp. It’s happened a couple of times; I’ll be fine. It goes aw
ay.” She was in a hurry now to leave, not only to get to her appointment—which until a few moments ago she was sure would be medically pointless and instead a good excuse to see an old friend—but also because she couldn’t bear having him so close to her, acting so much like his old self that she was frightened by the comfort of his presence, the sensation of time having been erased.

  Twenty-two

  ONE BENEFIT OF BEING A DOCTOR WAS THE CONNECTIONS TO OTHER DOCTORS who would gladly work a friend or colleague into an already over-scheduled day. Brianna Davidson had no time for new patients on the kind of short notice Meg gave her, and still, she was working her in. Today’s visit was supposed to be a consultation—a chat, really, about what might be going on, and a determination about what tests, if any, might be needed.

  Meg carried her X-rays from the orthopedist in an enormous manila envelope, tucked beneath her left arm as she stood at the check-in desk of Central Florida Neurological Associates.

  “Dr. Meghan Powell,” she told the receptionist.

  The woman found her name on the computer monitor, then looked down at a note. “One moment—let me tell her you’re here.”

  The waiting room, austere but soothing in its grays and blues, held three other patients, all of whom studiously ignored one another and her. The scene differed dramatically from her clinic, where comparisons and commiserations about pregnancies and birth experiences always had to be interrupted when a patient was called. These three souls—two gray-haired women and a man of perhaps forty-five—looked as if the last thing they would do was compare notes on what had brought them in. Obstetrics was, usually, a business of hope and renewal, whereas neurology suggested lost ships chugging through dark, ice-laden seas.

  “All right, Dr. Hamilton, come on back.” A nurse in deep blue scrubs held the door to the exam hallway. She waited for Meg to come through, then said, “Dr. Davidson’s just down here.”