by Mary McNear
But Caroline only shook her head in exasperation.
“Look, I remember the morning I left, Caroline,” he said, resting his elbows on the table and leaning forward. “But I remember it a little differently than you do. I’d been up for most of the night before, drinking and playing poker with friends, and I’d just crawled into bed when the alarm went off. I could barely open my eyes; I mean, I felt like I’d been hit by a Mack truck. I know you’ve never had a hangover before Caroline—though that may change now—but, trust me, some of them are their own special form of torture. Anyway, I dragged myself out of bed and stumbled into the kitchen. You were there, already showered and dressed and headed downstairs, but you asked me to look in on Daisy.
“So I go into her room, and she’s climbing out of that new toddler bed you’d just bought her, and I pick her up. I can tell right away she’s sick. She has a fever, and her nose is running, and she’s miserable, poor kid. So I try to comfort her, and the next thing I know you come back upstairs and say the dishwasher’s broken, and it’s going to be a busy day, and we’re going to have to hand wash all the dishes. So I ask you to take Daisy for a second, because she’s really fussing by now, and I go into the bathroom to splash some cold water on my face, and, as I’m doing that, I look at myself in the mirror above the sink. It isn’t pretty. I look like hell. And I feel like hell. And I know I’m useless to you two—worse than useless, really. Because I’m holding you back; you’d both be better off without me.”
“Oh, I see, so you were actually doing us a favor by leaving, Jack?” she said bitterly. “You were actually being selfless. How convenient for you to remember it that way for all these years.”
“No.” He sighed. “No, I wasn’t being selfless. I know that now. I was being a bastard, and a cowardly one, to boot. If I’d been a better man, I would never have left. Or, if I had, I would have come right back.”
“And now, Jack?” she asked, her pretty mouth hardening. “Are you a better man now?”
“I sure as hell am trying to be,” he said honestly. “But as to whether I am or not, you’ll have to be the judge of that.”
Caroline looked at him, long and speculatively, and Jack could feel the coffee and the grilled cheese doing their work. She was sobering up, a little.
“I don’t know Jack,” she said finally. “I just don’t know. I can’t get past the fact that you never came back before now. Not once. In all those years.”
“Actually, I did come back once,” he said quietly. “I just didn’t tell you I’d come back.”
“What do you mean, ‘you didn’t tell me’?”
“I mean, I saw you and Daisy, but you didn’t see me,” he said reluctantly. He’d never talked about this—ever. Not even in his AA meetings.
“Are you saying . . . are you saying you spied on us?” Caroline asked, her blue eyes narrowing.
“I guess you could say that,” Jack said, studying the pattern on the Formica tabletop. “But I didn’t mean to spy on you. It just sort of happened that way.” He looked up at her and kept going before he lost his nerve. “It was about six months after I’d left. God, I missed you two. I missed you two like crazy. And I had this idea that maybe you missed me, too. Maybe you even needed me, crazy as that seemed. So I drove back here. It was the Fourth of July weekend. I was going to go to the fairgrounds for the fireworks and try to find both of you there. But I got to Butternut before all the festivities started, and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to just show up at your front door, but I couldn’t wait to see you either, you or Daisy. So I parked on Main Street, across the street from Pearl’s. And I just sat there, sweating bullets. I was so goddamned nervous. I was alone, and I wasn’t drinking. And I prided myself on not drinking alone. You know, it’s one of the lies I told myself then. ‘I can’t have a problem with alcohol if I never drink alone.’ But I remember thinking, as I sat there all afternoon, well, maybe I could have just one beer by myself.
“Finally, I saw you two. You came out of the building and turned down Main Street and walked right by my truck. By some miracle, you never saw me, even though you were close enough for me to reach out and touch you.”
“Why didn’t you, Jack?” Caroline asked suddenly. “Not reach out and touch us, I mean. Why didn’t you do something, or say something, if you’d missed us so much?”
He smiled, a little sadly. “Because you weren’t alone, Caroline. You had another man with you.”
“Another man?” she murmured softly, and he watched her face as she searched for and then retrieved a memory.
“Oh,” she breathed, understanding. “Todd? Todd Macomber?”
“Was that his name? Who was he?” he asked, still desperately curious, even after all these years.
Caroline sighed, a little sadly, he thought. “He was new in town. He was a shop teacher at the high school. Still is, actually. I’d met him when he came into Pearl’s. I wasn’t ready to date then, I really wasn’t. It was so soon after . . . But he was a nice enough guy. And Daisy liked him, I remember. She liked him a lot. So I thought, why not? You were never coming back. As far as I knew,” she added, with a little shake of her head.
“Well, I watched the three of you walk down the street together,” Jack said, when he realized Caroline was done talking. “I didn’t know anything about this guy, obviously. I didn’t recognize him. But he looked nice enough, as far as I could tell; you know, clean cut, neatly dressed, that kind of thing. And the three of you, you looked, you looked . . . so normal together, so happy. Daisy was between you two, and she was holding both of your hands, and you were both swinging her into the air. And she was laughing . . .” His voice trailed off, as he lost himself in the memory. But Caroline, he could see, was waiting for more, so he kept going.
“I can’t quite explain what it was like, seeing the three of you together. It was strange. I mean, on the one hand, it hurt like hell; it was like someone twisting a knife in my gut. Seeing you with someone who could replace me, who maybe already had replaced me. But on the other hand, I felt glad, in a way. I thought ‘Good for you, Caroline. Good for both of you. Because you both deserve someone better than me.’
“After that, I drove home. Straight through the night and into the next day. I was trying to be happy for you, Caroline. I really was. But all I could think about, for some reason, was the little dress Daisy had been wearing. It was a sundress, white with little red cherries on it. I don’t know why, but thinking about that dress just about killed me.”
“I remember that dress,” Caroline said suddenly. “She loved that dress. She wore it that whole summer. I was lucky if I could get it off her long enough to put it in the washing machine once in a while.” She smiled now, at the memory of that dress. But then something else occurred to her.
“Jack,” she said. “What you saw that day, parked in your car, it was a date. And not a very good one either, as I recall. Not that Todd wasn’t a nice guy. He was; is, I mean. He still comes in here sometimes. But it was too soon for me. I ended it a few weeks after that, I think.”
“That’s not what I thought, Caroline. I thought, when I got served with those divorce papers six months later, that it was because you wanted to marry him.”
“Marry him?” she said, with surprise. “Why would you think that?”
“Because never, in a million years, did it occur to me that you wouldn’t get remarried. That you two wouldn’t finally have the husband, and the father, you deserved. I was counting on it when I left. It was the only thing, really, that made me think I’d done the right thing by leaving.”
Caroline had been tentatively sipping her cup of what by now must have been cold coffee, but when Jack said this, she slammed the cup down on the table, hard enough to make him jump back a little bit in the booth.
“Stop it, Jack,” she said, her face flushing. “Stop doing that thing again. Stop pretending to be so noble. First you say you left because you thought we’d be better off without you. Now you say yo
u didn’t come back because you thought we’d be better off with someone besides you. I’m sorry, but it’s too easy. And it lets you off the hook completely. Your leaving was selfish—and a lot of other things, too. None of them good.”
“I agree,” he said, simply. “Because over the last couple of years, I’ve learned a lot about the lies we tell ourselves, the lies that get us through the night when nothing else can. Not even eighty-proof bourbon.” He was quiet for a moment, knowing what he needed to do and gathering his courage to do it.
“Caroline,” he said finally. “I’ve said a lot of things to you tonight, but I haven’t said the most important thing yet, which is that I’m sorry. I’m sorry for all the things I ever did to hurt you and Daisy.”
“That’s it? You’re sorry? And I’m supposed to forgive you?”
“Again, Caroline, that’s up to you.”
She said nothing for a long moment, but then her face softened a little, and some of the anger, he saw, ebbed out of her. It gave him the courage to ask her a question he’d wanted to ask her since he’d come back to town. “Caroline, why didn’t you get remarried?” he asked. “If not to that guy, then to someone else?”
“You think eligible bachelors grow on trees in Butternut, Jack?” she said, with a hint of amusement.
“No. But I don’t think the guy I saw you with that day was the only person who pursued you either.”
She considered that, then shrugged. “No. He wasn’t. There were one or two others over the years, but by then Daisy and I were getting the hang of it. Being on our own, I mean. It turns out, we were a good team; we are a good team. And when it came to the men . . .” She stopped.
“Yes?” he persisted.
“I wasn’t in love with any of them,” she said. “Not really. Not enough to rearrange my whole life for them.”
“What about Buster?” he said, knowing he was pressing his luck.
“Buster?”
“Were you in love with him?”
“Buster was . . . different,” she said thoughtfully. “I don’t know about love. But there was respect there. Tremendous respect on both sides, understanding, too. When I met him, I was old enough to know that what you feel for someone when you’re younger—that attraction, or infatuation, or whatever you call it—isn’t always as important as just liking someone, being comfortable with someone. I actually think I might have married Buster, if he’d wanted to get married.” She fiddled with her coffee cup.
“Buster didn’t . . . didn’t want to get married?” he asked, surprised.
“No,” she said, looking at him, her blue eyes still soft. “He didn’t. I understood, though. He’s widowed. His wife died many, many years ago, when their daughters were still young. His daughters are grown up now, of course, and have families of their own, families that Buster absolutely adores. But I think, like me, he got used to not being married. He liked his independence. The same way I liked mine,” she added, quickly. Jack nodded and said a silent thank you to Buster Caine for valuing his independence so much.
“All right, Jack, now I have a question,” Caroline said. “You agree your leaving was cowardly. But after you left, why didn’t you call, or even visit? After that first time, I mean.”
“That was another lie I told myself. That it would be easier for the two of you if our break was a clean break.”
“Well, that really was a lie,” Caroline said, her bitterness surfacing again. “Because you try telling a three-year-old child that the father she misses thought a clean break would be easier for her.”
He closed his eyes, just for a second. This part hurt, more than the rest—the part about Daisy, Daisy in that little dress with the cherries on it, missing him.
But when he opened his eyes again, he saw that Caroline was rubbing her own pretty blue eyes.
“It’s late,” he said, reaching for her dishes. “And you’re tired. Why don’t you let me clean up?”
But she held out a hand to stop him. “No, leave those for a minute,” she said. “I want to know how this works, Jack. The whole recovery thing.”
“Well, basically,” he said, shrugging, “I try not to drink.”
“No, seriously. Do you still go to meetings?”
“Absolutely. I’ll always go to them. Right now I go to a meeting here in Butternut, at the Redeemer Lutheran Church. I meet with a sponsor, too, Walt Dickerson. I think you know him.”
Caroline made a face. “Of course I know him. He’s so cranky, though. Whenever he comes in here, he complains about the coffee. Really, Jack, I don’t see how he could be helpful to anyone, let alone a recovering alcoholic.”
“Well, he’s not long on charm,” Jack agreed. “But he’s been clean and sober for twenty-five years, so that’s something.”
“I suppose,” she said distractedly. “But, Jack, can I . . . can I ask you something else about it? About your drinking?”
“All right.”
“Does your drinking . . . does it have anything to do with the scars on your back?”
“What?” he said, totally unprepared for that question. He felt it, then, the cold, prickly sensation he felt on his scars whenever he thought about how he’d gotten them. It was as if the hair on them were standing straight up. Of course, it wasn’t—hair doesn’t grow on scar tissue.
“Why are you bringing this up now?” he asked.
“Because it occurred to me that if you were . . .” She struggled a little here. “If you were abused, as a child, it might have something to do with why you became an alcoholic.”
“No,” he said, bluntly, wanting to put this subject to rest. “No, it’s not like that, Caroline. With alcoholism, you can’t connect the dots from one thing to another. I mean, a lot of people who have lousy childhoods don’t become alcoholics.”
“So you did have a lousy childhood?” she prompted gently.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said, trying to project a calm he didn’t feel. He was starting to get that clammy feeling all over his body that he got sometimes when he thought about it.
“Okay, but just tell me one thing. Did you drink to forget something, Jack? Something from your childhood?”
“I didn’t drink to forget.” Jack wiped his now-sweaty palms on his blue jeans. “I drank to not remember.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because some things . . . some things you can’t forget.”
Caroline was silent for a long moment. “I’m sorry, Jack,” she said finally. “I’m just trying to understand this. Trying to understand you.”
He nodded a little and felt some of the tension start to leave his body. The subject of his childhood, it seemed, was closed for now.
Something else, though, seemed to occur to Caroline. “What about Daisy?” she asked. “Does she know about your drinking, and your . . . not drinking?”
“She knows.”
“You told her before you told me?”
“Yes.”
“She never said anything about it,” Caroline said, with surprise.
“No. She thought I should be the one to tell you.”
Her shoulders sagged a little. “Daisy never used to keep secrets from me.”
“It’s not a secret, Caroline. And I would have told you before now, too, but the last two times I spoke to you, you didn’t seem to want to listen to anything I had to say.”
Her face softened again. “That’s true enough. But, Jack? All the things you’ve told me tonight . . . what, exactly, am I supposed to do with them?” And she looked so tired when she said that—so tired in her own, lovely way, her blue eyes shadowed with faint circles, her skin softly flushed, whether from alcohol or emotion, he didn’t know—that his heart went out to her.
“Do whatever you like with them, Caroline,” he said gently. “The rest is up to you.” What else could he say? He figured he’d argued his case. Maybe not argued it well, because, selfish bastar
d that he’d been, it was impossible to argue well. But he’d argued it honestly. It was out of his hands now.
She yawned then, a sweet, almost childish yawn, and Jack smiled and glanced at his watch. “It’s getting late,” he said. “I’ll clean up down here. You should be getting to bed.”
“I’ll help you,” Caroline said. And together they cleared the dishes off the table and took them over to the sink behind the counter.
Jack checked to see that he’d turned off the grill, and then he wiped it down carefully while Caroline washed the dishes.
He heard her giggle then, and he glanced over at her.
“What is it?” he asked.
She paused in what she was doing. “I was remembering another night here, Jack. A night when we were dating, and we came back here, late, and tried to make something to eat, but we were laughing so hard, we woke up my dad. He was not pleased, as I recall,” she added, with another giggle.
“I remember that night,” Jack said, smiling. “We’d been to a party at Joey’s cabin and . . .” His voice trailed off as he remembered the details of that night. During the party, he’d taken Caroline into one of the bedrooms and locked the door. He’d wanted to make love to her on the bed, where all the guests’ winter coats were piled up, but Caroline had objected. She’d said it wasn’t polite of them to lie down on the host’s bed. So instead he’d taken both of their coats off the bed and spread them out on the rug, and then he’d lowered her down onto them and made love to her, right then and there. She hadn’t objected to that. In fact, she’d returned his lovemaking with a fervor and an excitement that afterward had left him staring down at her in wonder.
He felt that wonder again now. But the wonder wasn’t over her lovemaking; it was over the fact that her lovemaking hadn’t been enough for him after they’d gotten married. Why, when he’d had her, he asked himself now, had he ever wanted, or needed, anyone else?
“You’d better be getting upstairs,” he said abruptly, turning away from the grill. Because the desire he felt for her now was the same desire he’d felt for her then, only stronger, if that was even possible. He skirted around her to the back door of the coffee shop, to the door that led to the stairwell to her apartment, and started to open it for her. But all of a sudden, she was beside him, leaning back against the door, and looking at him like she . . . well, like she wanted him. He felt his throat tighten.