“Twenty-four years. By the time the divorce came through, it was almost twenty-five.”
Liza shook her head as she topped off my glass. “Wow,” she deadpanned. “That’s longer than I’ve been alive!”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Don’t rub it in.”
“No, I mean, that’s just a really long time. And then it was over.” She moved her head slowly from side to side, as if she couldn’t believe that so long a union had broken apart. Well, that was a fair enough response. At the time, I hadn’t been able to believe it, either. “So, was it worth it? If you had it to do all over again, would you?”
It was a good question, one I’d pondered myself from time to time. And over time, my answer had changed.
“Right after Rob left, I’d have said no. But now…” I paused to take a sip from my wineglass and give myself time to think.
“Garrett was a product of our marriage. There is nothing on earth, not even the quilt shop, that I value more than my son, or that has brought as much joy and meaning into my life. If I’d never married Rob, then I wouldn’t have had Garrett.”
“But if you’d wanted, you could have had a son without being married,” Liza said. “Lots of women do now.”
Margot, who was ripping apart the seams of a star block whose points hadn’t met tightly enough to satisfy her, looked up and said, “If I could, I’d adopt a baby and raise it by myself, but I don’t think that’s the ideal situation. It’s really best to raise a child in a two-parent home.”
“Wait a minute!” Ivy put down the rotary cutter she’d been using and raised her hand. “I think that really depends on what two parents you’re talking about. Bethany and Bobby are way better off living with me alone than they ever were living with me and Hodge.”
Ivy’s ex-husband, Hodge, an abuser as well as an embezzler, was in prison for his crimes and would likely remain there for many years to come.
Abigail, who was nodding her agreement, started to say something else, but Liza held up both hands and interrupted her.
“Okay, okay. We’re getting off track. I want to talk about marriage. Children can be an important part of marriage, I know, but I want to get back to the original question.” She turned and looked at me. “Knowing what you know now, would you have married Rob?”
“Hold on. That’s not what you asked the first time. Knowing what I know now? You mean, knowing that we’d end up divorced, would I do it again? That’s a silly question. When you’re making that decision, you don’t get to know how it will turn out. You make that decision because you’re sure that it will work, that you and your groom will go through life together from that day forward ‘until death do us part.’ If you don’t believe that, why get married in the first place?”
Liza frowned, a little crease of doubt indenting the space between her eyebrows. “So when you got married, you truly believed that you were going to stay married to Rob forever?”
“Yes.”
“But it didn’t happen that way.”
“No”—I shrugged—“it didn’t. Lots of things in life don’t turn out the way we plan. If it had been up to me alone, I’m sure I’d still be married to Rob. When I walked down the aisle and said, ‘I do,’ I had every intention of spending the rest of my life married to Rob Dixon. The possibility of divorce never crossed my mind. Maybe that seems naïve, but that’s the way I was brought up. My mother married my dad when he was twenty-two and she was eighteen, and they were very happy for the entire fifty-one years of their marriage. It never occurred to me that it wouldn’t be exactly the same for Rob and me.”
“So, maybe you didn’t really think your marriage through as much as you should have?”
“Maybe not,” I said. “I was nineteen and in love and, in my mind, love was enough. I didn’t realize that it takes more than love to make a marriage work. A lot more. And I never figured on Rob becoming, well, someone so drastically different from the person I married.
“If you’d asked me about Rob, even up until the day before he said he wanted a divorce, I’d have said he was solid, steady, a good husband, and the last guy in the world to run off with the receptionist at his gym. I mean, he hadn’t dyed his hair, bought a sports car, nothing. I had no idea he’d fallen face first into a midlife crisis until he was going down for the third time.”
Abigail, who had long since finished pressing her seam, was standing at the ironing board, listening intently. “Is that why you won’t marry Charlie? Because you’re afraid he’ll change and end up breaking your heart? That’s the only reason I can think of for you putting him off for so long. Charlie is a wonderful man. You’re perfect for each other. When are you going to say yes to that poor, lovesick Irishman?”
“Abbie,” I said pointedly, which is really the only way to deal with Abigail, “butt out. I am not going to discuss my love life with you tonight. We’re supposed to be talking about Liza’s painting, aren’t we? If this whole discussion was cooked up with some ulterior motive…”
“Oh, no. Nothing like that,” Liza answered immediately, and that made me suspicious. When she wasn’t being truthful, Liza had a tendency to respond to questions rapidly, as if she’d prepared her answers in advance.
“Charlie didn’t have anything to do with this. I’m really just interested in knowing more about people’s opinions on marriage.”
“Mmm,” I murmured, not entirely convinced.
Liza wasn’t acting like herself this evening. She was working on a third glass of cabernet, but the wine hadn’t mellowed her in the least. She seemed nervous. We’d been working for nearly an hour, but she had yet to stitch a single “scale” onto the tail of her quilted mermaid. Instead she just kept sorting and re-sorting the pile of pearl-colored paillettes, moving them around like a picky toddler pushing peas around a dinner plate. Something was bothering her. On a night when I was less preoccupied with my own concerns, I might have tried to dig deeper.
“This isn’t the kind of thing I can give a simple yes or no answer to, Liza. It’s not that easy. I spent more than half my life with Rob. We were happy. Not all of the time, but much of it. Even now, I wouldn’t want to give back a single one of those happy memories.
“But yes, when Rob told me he didn’t love me anymore, that our marriage was over, I felt like my world had come to an end. In a way, it had. The end of our marriage marked the end of my life as a couple. What I didn’t know at the time was that it also marked the beginning of my new life as an individual.
“It’s been hard. But in many ways, I find life richer and more satisfying now than it’s ever been. I’ve only been in New Bern a couple of years, but I actually feel more at home here than I did after twenty years in Texas. This is my home. Where I’ve got wonderful friends,” I said and lifted my glass a hair to acknowledge them, “the best ever. And, if it doesn’t sound too conceited to say so, I’m really proud of this shop. When I stumbled down the alley, spotted this awful, broken-down building, and decided to open a quilt shop in it, maybe one person in a hundred would have given odds on it surviving the first year.”
“Oh, I don’t think the odds were nearly that good,” Abigail said with a smile. “More like one in a thousand.”
“You’re probably right. But,” I said, “they were wrong! All of them. I did survive that first year and the next and the next one after that. I didn’t do it alone, of course. Without all of you, I’d have closed in six months. But I did have all of you, and Cobbled Court Quilts became what I always hoped it could be: a real community, a place where people make friends, and are friends, and slog their way through life arm in arm.
“Look at it now,” I said, spreading my hands out to encompass every foot of this wonderful, formerly ramshackle old ruin of a building, the embodiment of my dream come true. “The oddsmakers were betting against us a thousand to one, but here we all are. Maybe that’s my point. When it comes to making the big choices, the ones that really matter—falling in love, following your dreams, taking a chance�
�you can’t just sit down and tally up the odds. If you try to make important choices based on the odds of winning and losing, you’ll never make any choices at all.
“A person can think this out all they want, and they should. Carefully. If I ever decide to marry again,” I said, giving Abigail a pointed glance, “you can bet I’ll sit down and give it a lot of serious, practical thought beforehand. Much more than I did the first time. But even so, even after calculating all the pros and cons, compatibilities and differences, in the end it would involve a huge leap of faith on my part. It does for everybody. Liza, there’s not a marriage in the world that comes with a gilt-edged guarantee. There never has been.”
8
Liza Burgess
Garrett and I had breakfast at the Blue Bean on Saturday morning.
We drank coffee and ate bagels spread thick with cream cheese and raspberry jam, talked about how my research for Professor Williams was coming along, and the classes I would be taking next semester, and the website design business Garrett was starting on the side.
We talked about everything under the sun except the elephant in the room: Garrett’s proposal and my answer.
After breakfast, we walked down Commerce Street, looking into the shop windows with the signs offering twenty percent off merchandise that hadn’t sold over the holidays. This time of year the temperature in New Bern rarely rises much above twenty, but when the sun is shining, glinting a mirage of diamond dust off the snow, it feels warmer, especially if you’re walking next to someone you love with his arm around your shoulders and your hand tucked into his jacket pocket because you lost one of your gloves.
For a little while, I forgot all about the elephant, the unanswered questions of life, everything except the fact that when Garrett looks at me with his huge brown eyes, I feel beautiful, and when he laughs, my heart laughs along with him. Sweet.
We strolled toward Hidden Treasures, a shop that sells old silver, china, and estate jewelry. The display window was filled with a dazzling array of diamond, emerald, ruby, and sapphire jewelry. But it was a less ostentatious piece that caught Garrett’s eye, an art deco bracelet with alternating rectangles of green chalcedony and black onyx in a simple silver setting. Exactly the piece I’d have chosen if Garrett had asked me which I liked best. But he didn’t have to ask. He knew me.
“I’ll get it for you,” he said. “Let’s go in.”
“Oh. No, you don’t have to do that. You already got me a Christmas present and—” I stopped, suddenly aware of the silver chain around my neck and the weight of the ring that hung from it, hidden beneath the bulk of my wool sweater. “Anyway, it’s probably too expensive.”
“It can’t hurt to ask. Besides, I can afford it. I never spend any money. New jeans twice a year, a couple of sweaters, and I’m all set. My paychecks just sit in the bank and collect dust. I should be doing more to support the local economy.”
“Oh, yeah? What about your addiction to all things technogeek? Your obsessive need to own the absolutely newest model of every electronic and computer gadget on the face of the earth? Not to mention your ever-growing collection of jazz recordings from the twenties and thirties, three-dimensional puzzles, and antique baseball cards. You’re a man of many hobbies. All of them expensive. Didn’t you just tell me that you started storing your towels in the oven because you needed more room in the linen closet to store the puzzles?”
Garrett grinned and shrugged. “Okay. So your boyfriend’s a big nerd. So what? But fortunately I’m a computer nerd, and that’s the best kind—very profitable. Didn’t I just tell you? I’ve got three new web design clients. I’m rolling in dough. Come on. Let’s go inside.” He lowered his arm from my shoulder to my waist and urged me toward the door of the shop.
“No, Garrett. Really. I don’t need it.”
“I know you don’t need it, but you want it, don’t you? It’s perfect for you.”
“No! I don’t want anything else. Not right now.”
My voice was emphatic, maybe a little more emphatic than I’d intended. I pulled my arm out of his grasp. The light went out of his eyes. Standing so far apart, I could suddenly feel how cold the day was.
Garrett looked at me. He didn’t say anything else about the bracelet. “Do you want to have dinner tonight?”
“Can’t. I really should get back to the city. I’ve got to finish cataloging those articles for Professor Williams. I really just came up for the quilt circle meeting. If I catch the one forty-five train out of Waterbury, I’ll be back in New York by four.”
Garrett nodded. “You need a ride to the station?”
“Thanks. That’d be great.” My feet were cold, the chill of the snow coming up through the soles of my boots. I looked at my watch. “I’d better go back and get my stuff, say good-bye to Abigail.”
“Yeah. Okay.”
We turned away from the store window, crossed the street and then the Green, leaving two trails of footprints in the snow, walking side by side with a shaft of sunlight beaming through the space between us, my hands in my pockets, balled up into fists, trying to generate their own warmth.
Back in New York, I continued my survey.
I posed my questions on marriage to a woman I sat next to on the train, my landlady, the lady who runs the cash register at the mini-mart on the corner, and two reference librarians. They all said pretty much the same thing that Evelyn had said, but less eloquently: It’s a big decision, love is crucial, but love isn’t always enough, and, no matter what, there are no guarantees.
But I want a guarantee. I need a guarantee.
I lost my father before I knew I had one. And I lost my mother, the only person I was ever sure I could count on, before I was even out of high school. Unless it’s happened to you, too, you can’t know what it was like. I sat by her bed in that white, sterile hospital, surrounded by monitors blinking green, numbers descending as the minutes passed, watching my mother’s chest rise and fall, rise and fall, rise and fall, until it didn’t anymore and she was gone.
And I was still here. Abandoned, orphaned, alone, and in pain, the kind of pain that rings in your ears and seeps out your eyelids and rakes your throat and heart and insides raw. The kind of pain I never want to feel again.
I want a guarantee. Please, someone give me a guarantee.
If I ask enough people, surely I will find someone, just one person who will tell me the secret to love that never ends. I want more time. And no matter how unrealistic it may be, I want a guarantee.
But reality is Monday night and a knock on my door and Garrett standing in the hallway with his eyes that see inside me, asking if he can come in. Reality is that you can question a million people and never find the answer you want to hear.
Reality is that I love Garrett and he loves me and he doesn’t want to wait any longer for an answer. Reality is that I’m afraid to put him off again, afraid that I’ll lose him now because I am so afraid of losing him someday. Reality is Professor Williams’s words echoing in my mind.
Of course I’m lonely. Aren’t you? Isn’t everybody?
And so I push down my fears, take a step back, open the door a little wider, and tell him to come inside.
9
Evelyn Dixon
“Mom, why do you keep tapping the brakes?”
“Because I want to make sure the other cars see me,” she answered indignantly. “I took a defensive driving class at the community center, and the instructor said you should tap your brakes every now and then to make sure you’re visible to other drivers.”
“Oh,” I said.
I wondered if Mom and the instructor had the same definition of “every now and then.” To Mom, it seemed to mean about every twenty feet, which meant a fifteen-minute drive to the grocery store took about twice as long as it should. She’s cautious. So cautious that she’s a little bit dangerous.
Other drivers were impatient with her pace and following too close, probably thinking this would urge her to increase her speed, b
ut it only made her nervous, and that made her drive even slower. A teenager following us in a green Mustang honked his horn. It rattled her so much that she didn’t see the stop sign and went straight through the intersection. Fortunately, there were no other cars waiting at the four-way stop.
“Mom,” I said, trying to sound casual. “Do you want me to drive?”
“No!” she snapped. “I do not. I’m perfectly capable of doing it myself. I’ve been driving for sixty years and I’ve never had an accident….”
Not yet.
She shouldn’t be driving, not anymore, but living alone with her only daughter hundreds of miles away, what other choice does she have?
I only arrived yesterday, so it’s hard for me to know for sure exactly how things are with Mom, but I was relieved to see that she looks about the same as she did last time I came home. A little thinner, though. Her gait seemed as steady as ever. Perhaps her fall on the ice was exactly what she said, just one of those things, the hazards of living in a cold climate. It could happen to anyone at any age, right?
To celebrate my arrival, Mom made my favorite meal from childhood: T-bone steaks, a layered salad with iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, peas, bacon bits, cheddar cheese, and a thick layer of mayonnaise, plus her famous twice-baked potatoes stuffed with sour cream, more cheddar cheese, and a sprinkling of chives to make them look pretty. Dessert was homemade caramel pecan bars and vanilla ice cream.
The total cholesterol count for that meal was enough to make a cardiologist break into a cold sweat, but these were the dinners I, and everyone I knew, grew up eating. How it is possible that we ate this stuff and didn’t grow up to be as fat and round as a flock of Butterball turkeys, I can’t tell you, but we did. I suppose only getting three TV channels—the fuzzy picture beamed in via a set of rabbit-ear antennae—may have had something to do with it. Lacking the endless choice of electronic enticements that kids have today, my friends and I spent a good part of our time playing outside—red light, green light and kick the can in the summer, snowball fights and ice skating in the winter.
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