There was a moment, as I unlocked the door, when I hesitated, waiting for some awkwardness. But then Will filled the water pans and unwrapped the Gainesburgers while I found the bathroom, and then, while he did, I got them settled and closed the door. Leaving the dogs by the fireplace that on some later winter day would welcome a blazing cherry-wood fire. Next time, I thought, I’d bring them a blanket to snooze on.
In a practiced motion, Will loosened his tie, unbuttoned his shirt halfway, and slipped them together over his head, the tie still around his collar. I had to smile; there was no chance that this time I was the more experienced lover. Remembering the bold girl I’d been—“We’ll do it upstairs on the practice-room floor,” “Do it to me here, now”—I decided I could surely take my own clothes off without constraint, and stripped down to my underpants. Then, feeling a bit undressed, added back my white shirt, unbuttoned.
“You’re not my first older man,” I said.
“First old man, I bet.” Will took off his trousers and shorts, seeming to have no embarrassment standing there naked while I pulled back the covers of the sagging bed. His chest hair was white, his broad shoulders covered in age spots. He stood studying me, apparently not self-conscious about his belly or his erection, which hung down heavy as a hammer.
“The last, young or old,” I told him, moving to make room for him on the side of the double bed.
“Don’t be hasty,” he said. “OLAT.”
“ABTE.” I smiled at him.
“Aim Between The Eyes.” He leaned over to kiss me, and that was my only moment of terror. It could go so wrong, kissing someone you knew well. It could inhibit you both, turn out to be the same as kissing your kin. But it was all right. Will took off my white shirt, ran his wide palms over my shoulders, then kissed me again, but not in any urgent way. “The thing about old men,” he said, “is we take a long time, but we always get there.”
He crossed to the other side of the bed, got in, and for a time held me against him. Doing nothing but holding me, getting us used to touching without our clothes. After a while, when I was almost drowsy, he began to rub my back, saying, “Put your hand on me.”
Then, when he was hard again, he bent down and began to kiss my thighs, my stomach, my collarbones; then he turned me over and kissed along my shoulder blades, my neck, my ears. By the time we made love, we were familiar to one another, and I was as aroused as I hadn’t been since I was a schoolgirl making love to Mr. Brown. When we’d rested a bit, with me lying on top of him, my wide hips below his belly, a comfortable fit, he got up, opened the door and whistled the dogs in.
Ben and Missoula piled on the bed, turned around, thumped their tails, getting settled. “Nap time,” Will said to the lot of us.
We rested maybe fifteen minutes, and then, as if he’d set himself like a clock—which he must have trained himself to do at the hospital—Will brought shirts for himself and me, and we lay against the lumpy pillows and talked.
“What was the trouble?” he asked. “With Nolan.”
“You told me that your wife decided in advance you had a wandering eye—”
“She figured it was just a matter of time. She might have been right.”
“That was the trouble. He was jealous.”
“What for? You gave him no cause.”
“Does that ever matter?”
“It should have. It should have meant the world to him,” he said with some obvious feeling.
“World enough and time.” I looked away. I didn’t want to go into all that, go back over trouble I had not been able to remedy. “It didn’t,” I said. “Let’s don’t bring him here, Will.”
“We’re not. We’re just clearing the decks, solving the crime after the private eye who’s coming back in sequel after sequel gets the good-looking woman in bed.”
I slipped a foot from under the cover and rubbed Gentle Ben’s head. He was a larger dog than Rogers, my first black lab, but he had the same trustworthy nature. He fit his name.
“Your sidekick get the business if you die?” Will asked. I nodded. “And I do if Katie does.”
“She’s got a Huguenot name.”
“Pegues? Is that right? I know her people have been around a long time.”
“I suppose families don’t make trouble with inheritance like that these days. Kin can’t make trouble the way they used to.”
“My mother’s grandmother,” I told him, “left her house and furniture to a black woman, here in Carolina, plus the right for her and all present and future children to hire out their own time. Before Emancipation.”
“A wonder she got away with it. Her folks must all have been dead.”
“Mother says they were probably sisters, the women, and that enough people knew it. She says white men used black women for birth control.”
“I’m surprised,” Will said, “that a naturalist would take notice of that. Seems like she’d find it hard to shift her sights up to the human level.”
I told him, “Any woman who’s made it in the field knows exactly which women made what gains and when and which got held up and by whom, back to when we first stood upright on two legs.”
“That figures.” Will slid us both down until our heads touched.
I put out a hand and began to rub slowly on his chest, careful not to snarl the hair. Much in the same way I was moving my foot back and forth on Ben. Dog people were used to touch. They knew how to hold out a hand for a strange dog to sniff; how not to move too fast. I need not have worried about how Will and I would do. We were dog people after all.
He moved his hand up and down on my leg as if he were stroking Missoula. It was strange how intimate it was, putting our hands on each other, without being erotic. I tried to recall if Will and I had ever touched at parties, had exchanged hugs or cheek kisses, but I knew we had not. That we had always been careful not to.
“Did you have a father?” he asked me.
“I did. For ten years. MacDonald Cooper.”
“What did he think of your mother’s spiders?”
I had often wondered about that myself. How my daddy—so eager as I remember him, such an outdoors person himself, leading us through the pine forests—would have felt about her becoming a noted naturalist. Who he might have been, older; how that might have affected her, now.
“She was only thirty-three,” I answered him. “She’d just begun to study. Who knows? He died editing a collection of records on the WPA in Washington. I sometimes think that’s why she’s glad to be based back there.”
Will moved his hand to my face, then turned me toward him. The dogs began to thump their tails; in a minute we’d have to put them out again. “The good ones don’t all make it to the last chapter,” he said.
• • •
WE STOPPED OFF at Rae’s Cafe on the Long Creek Road on the way back. A truck stop as well as a local hangout, it didn’t matter the time of day—there was always a crowd filling the high wooden booths and a lot full of truckers’ trucks outside.
We’d driven down the red hills from the state park, past the signs for HOT BOILED PEANUTS, SALMON EGGS, HONEY, CIDER, CHAIRS CANED. Later, in the summer, there would be cars parked bumper to bumper at U-PICK APPLES and U-PICK PEACHES.
The pups, left in the car, were promised a greasy pork-filled doggy bag.
Inside, a young man, who couldn’t be over eighteen, was talking to his pregnant wife and her mother (his mother?), explaining his training methods. “I whup that dog with a bullwhip but it don’t hurt him. It’s not supposed to hurt him; it just scares him, makes him mind. I know for sure he’ll be waiting in the road for me next time I get home.”
I leaned over and murmured to Will, “I hope that kid’s dog gnaws his leg off.”
“The mother-in-law’s going to,” he whispered back.
Across the dining room, an old black man in streaked khakis and heavy boots talked food to his white liver-spotted buddy. Their hair still showed the smooth flattened bands where their hats ha
d been. “I’m going home and fix me up a steak. I like to fry my steak medium well, put it in the skillet with no grease, just flour, till the flour scorches. That makes it brown. Then I drown it in milk, that’s the way to make gravy. Not the custardy business they serve in here.”
“I understand their sausage isn’t all meat, neither,” his companion chimed in. The two of them had six beer bottles on the table and no food in sight.
The heavyset waiter with the tower of hair didn’t appear to take offense. Her role seemed to be that of a call-in show deejay: don’t pay too much mind to what the customers have to say. Keep them on the line; keep them coming back for more.
She’d seen me in Rae’s before, and raised her arched brows at seeing me with a man, then winked. I ordered for both of us: pear-sweetened chopped pork barbeque sandwiches, sugar-sweetened tea and molasses-sweetened apple crisp. “Give up here,” I said to Will. “Everything has sugar. This is deep-country food.”
“Beer and sweets.” Will looked around. He’d ordered himself a Budweiser. “I get a lot of patients been living on this combination. Most of them, I have to say, don’t look anywhere near this lively.”
At a table in the center of the room, a pair of women with bright yellow curls and a mountain of makeup which did not hide their age smoked and waved long scarlet fingernails. Both wore beige turtlenecks.
Widows, I thought, and then, of Harriet. I took a bite of the sweet-tart-greasy pork, and a swallow of the frosty iced tea to wash it down. “My Texas friend—” I said.
“This the one who goes way back?”
“Harriet. She was here last fall, when Nolan was first sick. Before her husband died.”
He shook his bald head. “My mind was on getting him out of that tight spot.”
“I got a troublesome call from her, yesterday. Do you mind?”
“Mind what?” He downed a swallow of his cold Bud.
“I don’t want to use you—as a doctor.”
“Use any and all I’ve got, Coop.” He made a gesture with his hands, as if he were holding a stethoscope to his chest.
Looking at him, I thought it was possible to love someone forever and yet never have to have that awful interlude called “being in love,” which made you dumb and sick and foolish.
“She had a cough when I was there, a nasty crouping sound. I said she ought to have someone check it. She’s just been and she reported he’d heard a—wheeze. And that, just as a precaution, he was going to do a bronchoscopy.”
“Hmm.” He knit his hands together, thinking. “She mention anything else?”
“Something odd, I don’t remember.”
“Fingernails?”
I put my sandwich down. Something in his tone got my attention. “Yes, that was it. Is that important?”
“There’s a thickening, called clubbing. Not good.”
I felt the pork grease on my tongue and in my throat. “What is not good?” I remembered the man on the table in Will’s office about to get the “good news” that his malignancy was operable. Not good from Will was a terrifying idea.
“Growth in the lung, possibly.”
“Is that—what does that mean—?”
“Can’t tell. That’s why he’s doing the test.”
I tugged at my plait, leaning back in the booth. “I had you on my mind and forgot—”
“Having your friend on your mind and losing sleep over it, I hate to tell you, won’t make any noticeable difference in what he finds.” He nudged my foot under the table. “Drink your tea.”
“I should have called her back—”
“Let her call you.”
The waiter brought us spicy deep-dish apple crisp, with big scoops of vanilla ice cream on top. “On the house,” she said, winking again.
“Sugar diabetes is in our future,” I told Will, trying to get a grip on my panic.
“Your children coming to see you Sunday?” He moved us to another subject, tackling his dessert.
“For Mother’s Day? Not my daughter. She’s going to my sister’s.” I hesitated; did Will want to get involved with my people? He himself had no family; his parents were dead, his only brother had died in WWII. Naturally, he already knew a great deal about my children, having been around their entire lives. In recent years, he’d followed Fannin’s pregnancies, one by one, and the boys’ naming. I’d liked talking to him about the babies as they arrived, since he had a way of reassuring me that a woman’s having the children she wanted was not a catastrophe. I sometimes wondered if he wished he were stockpiling grandchildren himself. “She’s pregnant again,” I said.
“This is number five?”
“It is. I’m unglued.”
“What’s it to be this time? Second Timothy? First Corinthians?”
“Of course everyone is making jokes. Serious Matthew went to school and told his teacher they were going to have a new baby named Revelations.” Every time I thought of that, I wanted to wrap my arms around my grandson’s small stiff shoulders, and undo the bafflement, the laughter. “How to explain to a kid the joke, without making him, all the boys, feel their names are a joke? Impossible.”
“You worried they’re coming too fast?”
“She’s still worn out from the last one—little Jonathan.”
“I’ve met the husband, right? OB, Johnny McAlester. A bit overdetermined.”
“And you’ve only seen him relaxed at our Christmas parties.” I bit my lip. Nothing was gained by blaming my son-in-law, a most likeable, somewhat cowed young man.
“A big family his idea? Or doesn’t he know where they come from?”
“He wants six, she says. But she’s the one having them. The doctor—a Japanese woman—says this is the last.”
“A healthy woman having healthy babies is not the worst case I’ve ever seen,” Will said gently. He studied my face, his ruddy, lined, kind. “How about your boy, George. He coming?”
“Yes, amazingly. To take me to lunch at the Depot. Eat homestyle food he doesn’t even like.” I’d been touched when my son called to tell me. I thought perhaps he’d decided to drive over from Charleston when he heard his sister was going to be at Bess’s. That perhaps he worried that I’d be here by myself the first year without Nolan. Then I wondered if he was coming because his dad wasn’t here. “Why don’t you go with us?” I asked Will, thinking that a grand idea. “I’d like that. George is comfortable with you. He knows you. His dad’s doctor.”
“Thanks but no.” He pushed away his dessert, as I had already done. “A boy has a hard enough time watching his mother climb into bed with his father for a couple of dozen years. He doesn’t need to be hit in the face with the idea that once Dad’s dead he could have somebody else to worry about. Wait until I’m eighty, then we’ll tell him. Then he’ll think we’re getting together to rock on the porch and pick ticks off the dogs.”
“I hope we are,” I told him.
“You can’t carry them all,” Will said. “You got to remember: they’re ambulatory. They walked in; they can walk out.”
I nodded, hearing him, finding a smile. “Of their messes, you mean.”
“Of their lives.” He took my hand in his huge one.
“So.” I bent and kissed his fingers. “We’re having lunch. At Rae’s Cafe.” I drew in my breath and let it out. Looking at him, I remembered that when he’d been dating the attractive judge he’d had a mustache. Maybe he hadn’t married her because he’d decided to shave it off. “Why didn’t you make it legal with that federal judge with the prodigious chest?”
“That wasn’t why.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“We were better lovers than friends.” He looked down at his melting ice cream, finished his beer. “Does that bother you?”
“No.” I spread my hands. If you’d lived with jealousy, as I had. “It wouldn’t have bothered me,” I said, “if you’d married her. Do you understand?”
“I do. I did at the time.”
“Are people goin
g to talk, our being together so soon after—”
“Not a chance. Age, you’ll find out all in good time, is a great alibi. Not to mention that most people spend less time having sex than they do flossing their teeth. Most of them think of sex the way they think of car chases, as something that happens in films, or among kids who ought to know better.” He grinned at me. “I imagine they’ll consider us quaint.”
“Will you mind my twin beds?” I asked. “I’ve left Nolan’s room the way it was until the little boys are older, their granddaddy’s room; until George and Fannin don’t need it anymore. I remember Mother did that, left Daddy’s small home office untouched. I used to go in and look at his old typewriter. I don’t know when she packed his things away; when it didn’t matter. When I was gone.”
“We’ll be crowded in one.…” Will patted his middle. “But we’ll manage. Will you mind that my bed has had a fair number of visitors over the years?”
“No. It’s going to be lovely to stay over. I waited thirty-three years for you to take off my clothes.”
GEORGE PICKED ME up Sunday and drove me to the Mineral Springs Depot for our Mother’s Day lunch.
Looking at him behind the wheel of his fancy imported car, I was pleased he’d cooked up the idea. He didn’t look like his father, my son, that broad North Carolina mountain look; rather, he looked more like my father, MacDonald Cooper, the elegant South Carolina bones, the cleft chin and prominent brow. Sometimes, now that he was grown, I could get a glimpse of my daddy as I remembered him. It came as a shock, thinking of that on Mother’s Day, to realize that George was now the age Daddy had been when I was born. Somewhere I had a faded photo of a young man holding a baby, or at least holding a bundle in a christening gown and beribboned cap.
The last time I’d seen my son, at the funeral, he’d been heavier, puffy, and I’d worried he was drinking too much. That could happen to an affluent bachelor in lush Charleston; it could also happen to a young man who’d lost his father too soon.
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