“It turned out to be nothing at all. It was like getting paper towels or something at Never Pay. There I was, getting my first gun at this county store, and it was like getting my first pair of heels or my first formal or learning to use my first Tampax. A rite of passage.”
“Well,” I said. “Do I say congratulations or be careful?” I was wondering if there was more to the story, if she had, as usual, saved the real news for last.
“He kept showing me these .38s, this pasty skinhead at the gun shop, and telling me, ‘That’s mostly what we sell to the ladies taking the Handgun Safety Course.’ It was insulting, the way he said it, and besides, I didn’t want a .38. I don’t plan to be crouching in the middle of the road holding it out in front of me in two hands, shooting out the tires of the next creep who calls me skinny legs, tempting as that is. I just wanted something I can shoot right through my purse at his groin if I’m in the mall, or pull out from under my pillow if he’s in my room looking for the jewels I can never wear out in public anymore.”
“I didn’t know it was that easy.” Although I should have, after listening to all the call-in gun nuts. I should have known that almost anyone who wants to can carry a weapon.
“I told him, ‘I think this will do for a starter gun,’ ” Harriet went on, sounding as excited as she had in the days of the cadet balls. “I had to laugh. ‘Starter gun!’ It sounds like getting a starter bike with training wheels or a starter bra before you’ve even budded out. What is the world coming to? I can’t believe I told him that.”
“I have some news, too,” I said. “I’m taking a drive tomorrow with Nolan’s seventy-year-old doctor.” I was giving her an opening to mention young David if she wanted to, or laugh at me for my staid choice.
“Speaking of doctors,” she said, her tone bright, almost brittle, “I went to one myself.”
“Are you all right?” I couldn’t tell from her tone. Harriet had a way of presenting worrisome matters as affairs of no consequence, of presenting trouble as a lark. Her way, I used to think, of whistling in the dark.
“I guess. I wish I’d had my .22 with me when I went. I went because I couldn’t get rid of this cough, and when he said he heard a wheeze, I could believe that. But then he said something about my fingernails, and got all serious, the way these young types do. He wants me to go in for a—I wrote it down—bronchoscopy. Just a precaution, he said, to look around. He asked me if I hurt. I guess he was thinking pleurisy, which Mom has had, and he made me spit. His eyes got wide when I did, but I bet he’ll find he’s got Estée Lauder’s new summer shade on his slide when he looks under the microscope.” She laughed and it did turn into a cough, just briefly. “I guess the good news is, he didn’t tell me that since Knox was dead he wasn’t going to be my doctor anymore.”
“Should I worry? When do you go in? Is it overnight?” I was trying to sort out all she’d said, making notes to show to Will on the notepad by the phone. I’d been braiding my hair into a loose plait while I talked, and stopped to get a pen.
“No and tomorrow and no. How’s that?”
“I may worry anyway,” I said, “just because that’s my nature.”
“I’ll let you know. Have fun with your old man. Seventy, really.”
“Harriet—”
“Bye. Don’t fret. I just wanted you to know.” And she was gone.
Leaving me troubled on more than one account.
I HAD NEVER BEEN Will’s patient, not even in the beginning. He’d taken over—the young doctor then, hard to believe—from Mother’s family doctor. When Nolan and I married and settled here in the county, we’d gone to get checkups, in order to get our names on some doctor’s records. At that age, so young, the only medical matter on our minds was that I intended to get pregnant one of these days. But it was a routine practice for newlyweds then; you got a doctor, you got a lawyer.
Will had seen Nolan first, given him a workup and sent him off to the lab. Then I’d gone in. He’d sat me down in his office and declared, “I’m not going to be your internist, Mrs. Rankin. I believe it works best if a couple has separate physicians.”
I’d been surprised and disbelieving. I looked at him. What was he then, in his late thirties? He had assumed a gruff air, in order to look older, and stared at me through hornrimmed spectacles (window glass, I learned later).
“Don’t call me that,” I said, not used to being called “Mrs. Rankin” and not liking it for any number of reasons. “My name has been Cooper all my life. I’m not used to the new one. You can call me Sarah if you like.”
“Okay, Coop,” he said. “I’m going to send you to my new partner.”
“I don’t believe what you just said.” I had my handbag in my lap, was wearing heels and hose, as you did in those days. My long dark hair was held back with combs. I was trying to get used to my recent change of status into wife.
“That I’ve got a partner?”
“That you don’t take couples. You’re not telling me the truth. Besides, you could have seen me first and not taken Nolan, but you didn’t.”
Will stood up, a broad-chested man with a big rib cage, and a short, trim haircut on his big head which looked as if the haircut were a size too small. The kind of man who looked as if he should be a coach, but never was. He fiddled with his stethoscope, just like the doctors in the movies. I didn’t know it then, but he was trying to get used to his recent change of status into full-fledged physician.
I stood, too. “You’re trying to intimidate me,” I said. “I get an honest reason.”
“I don’t want to put my hands on your naked body.”
I smiled, grinned in fact. I sat back down and gestured to him to do the same. “Okay,” I told him. “But, you know, Will Perry, you can’t just take male patients; you’re bound to inherit a lot of women like my mother.”
“You’re that Cooper? Edith’s girl? I should have figured—that’s where you get your tongue. I have inherited them, including her—a pleasure, although I understand she’s leaving us. Most of them, women her age—are you interested in this?—have respiratory problems, I suspect from holding their breath for too many decades.”
“You can’t just take ugly women.” I was teasing him.
“I don’t have to go looking for trouble.”
“What does Spouse Perry think of all this?” I was deciding that she was a lucky woman indeed and that he would be a fine man to be around on a regular basis.
“If it’s your business, Spouse Perry decided I had a wandering eye, although she didn’t stick around long enough to confirm the hypothesis.” He stuck the stethoscope to his own chest and listened. “There might have been a murmur of truth in the idea.”
“You could take widows.”
“I probably will.” He’d grinned back at me.
“Is Nolan Rankin safe in your hands? Should I worry?” In my memory I gathered up my bag and gloves and stood at the door, although surely I hadn’t worn gloves. The feel of putting on my proper role was the same.
He’d laughed, taken off his glasses and stuck them in his pocket. “You have my word,” he promised.
Once, years later, I’d found him standing in my bedroom looking around, ostensibly putting his coat on the bed at one of our Christmas parties. Nolan and I always had a Christmas party—spruce and mistletoe and wonderful fragrant cherry-wood fires—for bankers, clients, friends. Nolan’s physician and attorney were both included. At that time, Will was being paired regularly with a handsome federal judge from Greenville; they were considered a couple. That must have been seven years ago, just after Nolan and I had started sleeping apart. I would have been in my late forties, Will in his early sixties.
“Nice room,” he said. “No wallpaper, though. How come?”
“For the same reason you don’t give yourself annual checkups.”
“This used to be your boy’s room.”
“George’s, yes.”
“Last year it was.”
“Do you always sn
oop around?”
“The number of times I’ve been in your house, Coop, it’s not snooping. I noticed, is all.”
I’d moved into George’s old room because I liked it, I liked the way it looked out at the orchard, the way it angled, forming an L. I’d painted the walls peach, hung Vermeer prints over the high twin beds, covered them with white pillows, taken up the carpet and put a rug with peach cabbage roses on the floor. I’d left the high narrow beds; it felt more like a single girl’s room that way.
“You haven’t strayed once, have you?” Will asked.
“No.” I shrugged, my fidelity a complex matter, not something I intended to discuss. “Why be beholden twice instead of once?” I said.
“No wandering eye?”
I smiled. “That’s you.”
“I may get married again,” he told me.
“Good.”
“I thought you didn’t like marriage, Coop.”
I’d said that to him on one of the twilights we’d found ourselves walking our dogs along the same county road. I’d pointed out, thinking aloud, how glad dogs were to meet up with friends, how different from spouses they were. “You don’t care for married life, do you?” he’d asked. “Not a little bit,” I’d told him, looking off at the ruddy sunset.
“Married men live longer,” I told him that evening in my bedroom. “You know the statistics.”
“I wanted to keep you advised.”
“Thanks, Will.”
But he hadn’t married his federal judge after all.
WILL OPENED THE car on Ben’s side at one-twenty, gave the lab a nuzzle, and shoved him into the backseat. “Not bad,” he said, checking his watch.
“Not bad,” I agreed.
I made a U-turn and headed toward Mineral Springs to pick up his dog. I’d asked him, when we were both choosing our pups from the same Sandyland lab litter, why he always named his dogs Missoula. “Because most of the time I’d rather be there than here,” he’d said, fresh from a bad case at the hospital. That had been eight years ago, a long spell in canine time.
Will at seventy was still broad through the shoulders, deep-chested, his hair now nearly gone, as if his once too-tight haircut had simply slipped off his head. His skin had age spots, and his teeth were worn and coffee-stained. A most attractive man, and a good friend. It was a bit scarey, moving us into something more. He’d brought a denim shirt to change into, in the color I considered Sarah blue. I had on a T-shirt of the same shade with a white blouse over it, and my dog-walking pants. Not very fancy for a first date.
“Married men,” I said, trying to set us both at ease, “get in the car and the first thing they do is look at the gas gauge to see if there’s enough gas for the trip. You must be a bachelor.”
He reached a broad hand over and patted my leg. “Lucky is what.”
Missoula, his lab, was waiting inside the picket fence near the rose garden at the back of his house. She seemed delighted to see him and Ben at the same time, and climbed happily into the car. Dogs were ready to go with anyone anytime; they were game for a trip to any destination. Dog people never failed to appreciate such an agreeable approach to life.
“Where’re we going?” Will asked, when we were settled and on the road.
“To Oconee.”
“You get a cabin?”
“I did.” I was glad he’d asked; that made it clear what we were doing. I was too old for a pile of coats on a practice-room floor, but not for a bad mattress in a rented park cabin.
“I skipped lunch,” he said. “Is there someplace we can get a sandwich later?”
“Rae’s Cafe has pear-sweetened pork.”
“That’s on my diet.” He patted his generous middle.
I gestured to the Rooms thermos, which I had filled with coffee for us.
“I could use that,” he said, pouring half a mugful and taking a gulp. “When I called your shop, it was to see how you were making it.”
“I know.”
“I wouldn’t have called to ask you out.”
“I know. And it would have been all right if you hadn’t wanted to go today. I’d have waited. There’s no hurry. I’m still getting my bearings; remembering the basics. TGIF.”
“Toe Goes In First.” He refilled the mug and handed it carefully to me. “Coop’s rules for coping.” He reached around, putting his hands, familiar and calming, on the labs, talking to them, promising them a romp.
I asked him, “What about the man naked on your table yesterday when I called. What was the good news?”
“That it looked as if the malignancy was contained and could be resected.”
“Ouch.” I didn’t know how he survived his job. Watching close at hand while one man died had been almost more than I could bear—to see it in his eyes, to read it on his face, to watch his body grind to a halt.
“It goes with my line of work,” he said. “I was standing there holding the stethoscope, wondering how to broach the news to him, when you called. It caught me unaware, hearing from you. Without thinking, I put the stethoscope to my chest while I was talking. When I hung up, the old man laughed. ‘What’s the diagnosis, Doc?’ he asked. I said, ‘Premature excitement.’ ”
“Did you read about the guy who got his black-and-tan hound back after losing it three years ago?”
“Some patient told me. Lost him on a bear hunt in Canada, went back later and found him near Sudbury. Something like that. They always tell these tales: man puts his hunting jacket down, comes back ten years later, Old Blue is waiting on the jacket.” He turned to the backseat. “You hear that, pups? You get lost today, we expect you not to take up with the first passing redneck who throws you a chicken-fried steak.”
“My mother always had dogs,” I said, after a bit. “Scotties mostly.”
“A woman alone could get around better in those days with a dog. My grandmother kept bulldogs. The big ones with the drooping jowls.”
We hadn’t talked about Nolan’s dying, even after Will gave me and then my husband the bad news. Will had talked to me about what I could do to make things easier, when to call him, when to worry. But we’d kept our friendship out of it. I knew Will would try everything to save Nolan; I knew he hated death.
I remembered a party at his place. He always paid his married friends back with an annual midsummer party, because he had the beautiful rose garden, plus a lot of air-conditioned rooms, glassed in, that had been added on the back of the house when it was his grandmother’s.
He’d brought me an orange juice and vodka. I didn’t drink much, even then, and I didn’t like vodka; it was greasy and I could taste the potato. “Pretend it’s castor oil,” he told me.
“You look under the weather,” I said.
“Nobody is getting well.” He looked as if he hadn’t slept in a week. “I’ve given up serious reading. You’re sailing along on this ship, meeting these people, learning a tad of history, getting a tot of manners and morals, and then—wham—you find out it’s the Titanic. That’s too much like life. I’m sticking to detective novels,” he said. “The private eyes who work in some crummy office up a flight of creaking stairs. The man or woman gets beat up or hog-tied, her place is burned down or his car blown up, but they whup the bad guys in the end. I like to read those because you know the PI is going to walk away. They’re a series. Real life is not a series.”
“You can’t think of them collectively,” I told him. “You have to take them singly. You have to handle trouble OLAT.”
“How’s that?”
“One Leg At a Time.”
That was when—two pups ago.
When Nolan had died—after such a brief time if you were outside it, such a dreadfully long time if you were in it—we hadn’t talked about him then, either. After, we’d sat together a spell in the hospital room.
“I’m sorry, Coop,” Will said.
“There’s no easy way, is there?” I’d asked. I felt shredded and more angry than tearful, angry at the whole bad idea of m
ortality. I’d thought of Harriet and Knox, him being there one minute and gone the next, her not able to see him at the last. Was it better or worse, or just a part of the same dreadful scheme?
“That was it,” Will said. “That was the easy way.”
“I have to let them all know—” I’d got my handbag and put on my shoes. I’d been—it seemed confusing, out of place—in my Rooms jumper. The children, who had visited on the weekend, had gone back. Mother was somewhere in Tanzania. Bess would come when I needed her.
“You want I should make any calls?” Will had asked.
“They’re paging you already.”
“I can handle that.” He had on doctor whites, and looked worn to the bone.
In the end, he’d delivered me to Katie, who took me by the funeral home and then to my house, where I stood for a long time in Nolan’s room before making my calls.
But Will and I were not starting there, with someone’s death. Rather, we were starting over from that first time in his office when he was the new young doctor and I was a new young wife, from the Christmas party when he stood in my separate bedroom, from the summer party at his house when he talked about his private eyes. We were warming up a friendship of four-dog duration.
I RESISTED THE URGE to swing west off Long Creek Road, to show Will the Wild and Scenic River overlook, with its view of the faraway blue mountains and a four-year-old in shorts and canvas shoes, gathering pine needles with her mother—such a young woman, her center of gravity shifted with her pregnancy—and listening to her daddy, young, too, slim and tanned, call out, “Where’s my Sarah?”
Instead, I drove us straight to Oconee’s fragrant and near-deserted park and the cabin I’d reserved. Stopping at the lodge, I picked up the key to number 22 and left a check. It was a one-bedroom log cabin, near the picnic table where I’d sat a scant six weeks ago. We let the dogs run a bit, track down smells, mark the bark of a few tall pines, and then we brought them in.
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