They’d lived at Seven Oaks for more than thirty years, so they had plenty of friends. Or at least at one time they had, until most of them relocated closer to grown children, moved to assisted living, or had sudden chest pains on the golf course. It seemed all the same: when people exited the gates and crossed the bridge to the mainland, in a moving truck or an ambulance, they were gone forever.
Fred climbed the stairs one at a time to the second-floor landing. At seventy-five, his knees felt brittle and his hips achy, and he cursed gravity, which, of course, was only doing its job.
“Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,” Fred said to Sequoia, who had followed him to the base of the steps.
The eight-year-old Great Dane dragged her back right leg slightly, looked at him with plaintive eyes, then let out a little moan, a gentle directive that said, Be careful.
He opened the door and the heat hit him. Even though it was November and only seventy degrees outside, the temperature in the attic was at least eighty.
Hot enough for a chicken to lay a fried egg! Though Lissa had faded over the months, she still came in loud and clear whenever she felt like it.
He stepped into the cavernous attic that he and Lissa had never gotten around to weatherproofing or organizing. There they’d stored all the things they were going to review one day when they had time—report cards, old letters, his law school textbooks, photos of long-dead relatives. He hadn’t been inside the attic in months, maybe years. Lissa’s sickness had overwhelmed their lives, as if her cancer had been a handicapped child that took their total focus and energy.
Fred started in the center of the room, opening boxes, trying to prioritize. The first box held Lissa’s travel diaries. She’d vowed to reread them someday, to give them the attention they deserved. Inside another was a shoe box filled with dusty memorabilia from their early years in Savannah. Maybe his daughter, Danielle, would want a photo of them crouching by a gassy bulldog named Uga or at a crowded book signing with John Berendt. He liked to think Danielle would do a scrapbook one day, but she had priorities of her own. For the funeral, she had flown in from Maine on a bereavement fare, leaving her nine-year-old son, Tommy, in Maine with a case of tonsillitis and a babysitter.
Just like Lissa, Danielle had meant to start clearing the attic, had threatened to several times during her trip, but they’d been busy with other things. Exactly what, he couldn’t remember. It had been a blur of phone calls, shopping, meals, bill paying, and housekeeping. He’d sat through what seemed like an eternity of watching video clips of his grandson running across a playing field. “That’s Tommy,” Danielle would say, pointing to a red-shirted blur on her computer screen. “Isn’t he amazing?”
Fred, coming from a proud clan of agnostics, was never good at death. His family didn’t hold wakes or have large, formal funerals. They didn’t celebrate the lives of the deceased with extravagant religious ceremonies, complicated send-offs, or an endless assortment of finger sandwiches on extended buffet tables. “When I’m gone, just flush me down the crapper,” his father had told him for years.
And so he had expected Lissa’s memorial to be small—a few old friends, his daughter, and some hospice personnel. But waves of women, young and old, arrived to offer condolences. She’d made friends while shelving books at the village library, collecting worn housewares for charity tag sales, and holding court at lively canasta tables. Though it didn’t necessarily surprise him, he had no idea how many lives she’d touched.
The contingent from the dog park paid respects as well. Even Ernie had shown up, with a wrinkled tie and his beard combed ceremoniously. Thoughtfully, Ernie’d remembered to leave Lulu at home. Fred couldn’t recall whether Lissa had met Ernie, unless it was in passing at the grocery store.
Maybe between the Kal Kan and the calzone, he heard his wife say.
Fred pulled a cardboard box from the pile. It wasn’t large, but was heavy and old enough that it sagged at the base. The equivalent of a box having bad knees, he thought. He held the bottom with both hands and carried it down to the living room, carefully taking the stairs one at a time. Sequoia clattered behind him and lay at his feet.
He pulled out a packet of letters neatly tied with a plaid ribbon. On the front, he could see Lissa’s smooth penmanship, her elongated words and looping letters. He picked up the first one and brought it to his nose, hoping he’d be able to smell his wife, or the essence of her, on the paper. He’d done that for weeks after she’d died—entered their walk-in closet and pushed his face into her sundresses and scarves and button-down shirts. But the truth of the matter was that though there were many ways to remember Lissa, smell wasn’t one. She didn’t douse herself in perfume like some women, and her shampoo was plain, usually whatever was on sale.
He opened an envelope and took out a pair of reading glasses from his front pocket:
Dear Dani: We are so glad to hear you are enjoying Camp Kehonka. Daddy and I are very proud of you for making the swim team. We have lots of fun adventures planned for when you get back home. Be a good girl. Love, Mommy
Fred had a vague memory of Danielle partaking in music lessons and field hockey, but didn’t recall her swimming competitively. Come to think of it, it was only the bills for the overpriced violin and hockey stick that he remembered—not even a concert or a game. The fact that he had to write checks for objects that he knew wouldn’t get used had stuck in his craw.
Your craw? He heard Lissa. Where is that—somewhere between your cranium and your jaw?
Maybe Lissa had dragged him to some swim meets years ago, but he just couldn’t pull the image into focus. It was the type of thing he’d like to ask his wife, if only to fill in the blanks of his life.
He placed Lissa’s letter back into the thin envelope and saw an old brochure for Seven Oaks. The cover featured the community’s original logo, before a new marketing team chopped off the roots of the tree silhouette and colored its leaves bright green.
They’d first visited Seven Oaks as a lark. They’d been in Savannah on vacation from their home in Mount Kisco, a leafy suburb north of New York City, and had done Bonaventure Cemetery, Fort Pulaski, and Tybee Island. They’d ridden a horse-drawn carriage, eaten beneath the low rafters of the Pirates’ House, and bought Danielle a rag doll on Broughton. And then they saw an ad in the Savannah Morning News to tour a new development. “What the heck. It’ll be an adventure,” Lissa had said. That was the phrase she always used, whether they were going to the dentist or the drive-in.
Once they’d followed the signs out of the city and over the rickety drawbridge, it seemed that they’d been dropped onto another planet. Phase One of Seven Oaks was just being completed. There were no sidewalks, no tennis courts, no clubhouse, no marinas. A slick trailer housed the real estate center, and the salesman who showed them orange-flagged lots drove a four-wheel-drive Jeep and wore a revolver, in case of errant foxes or wild boars.
The only finished project was the gatehouse, a two-story shingled building with spotlights and security cameras. Even then, safety was the development’s priority. Not that downtown Savannah was so dangerous, but the marketing department knew Northern folks thought the South was populated with rattlesnakes, white supremacists, and warring clans like the Hatfields and McCoys.
The real estate trailer, covered in wall-to-wall carpeting, overlooked a narrow lawn and embankment that bordered a large kidney-shaped lagoon with a center island. At one time there’d been talk of setting up a paddleboat concierge there, but then several alligators had been spotted in the muck and those plans had been scrapped. In the trailer’s front room, an architectural model rested, consisting of green foam marsh, tiny plastic palms, and a mock-up of the golf course with green felt representing lush fairways to come. Miniature golf carts and mailboxes, the size of toothpicks, dotted the roads.
The decision to move south had been easy. They’d had enough of northeastern winters, and Fred was readily hired as in-house counsel at Gulfstream, headquartered near Sa
vannah’s small airport. Even Danielle, only in grade school, adjusted without a hitch.
Fred and Lissa didn’t know it then, but that was the time of their lives. They weren’t that young, but they still felt young. They could walk eighteen holes in the morning and play three sets in the afternoon. They hadn’t started to take Lipitor or calcium supplements. With their lives seeming like a game of golf in which they could control their own rate of play, they made a pact to grow old gradually and together. They’d expected they’d live well into their nineties, since both sets of parents had.
So decades later, when Lissa’s pain came, it took them both by surprise. Lissa thought she had a kidney stone. She’d had one once before and knew the feeling—an intermittent blaring sharpness in her side—and had been forced to wait three uncomfortable nights in the hospital for it to pass. She said she’d rather be home this time, so she sat on the living room couch for days, as if expecting a pizza delivery. By the time Fred made arrangements to see their family doctor, and then got an appointment to see a specialist, it was too late. “Don’t beat yourself up,” the oncology nurse had told Fred, trying to make him feel better. “It probably had been growing inside her for years.”
ON THE OTHER side of the sliding glass doors, a squirrel skittered across the deck. Sequoia lifted her head, but didn’t move.
Fred flipped through other papers in the box and pulled out a playbill, torn in one corner. On the front was a headline—The Magic Show—and a line drawing of a giant eye. It had starred Doug Henning. Fred couldn’t remember going to his daughter’s swim meets or what he had for breakfast, but knew the name of the magician who had starred in a show he’d seen decades before. Oh, how his mind played tricks with him.
He had taken Lissa for a big birthday, maybe her thirtieth or thirty-fifth. He’d wanted to surprise her, and he had. He couldn’t remember the details of the evening, only the specifics of her retelling their friends: He hired a limousine and had chilled champagne! It was just a town car and sparkling wine, but he never thought to correct her.
It had rained that night, because he remembered the Saw Mill Parkway had been closed and they had to reroute along the Bronx River. The storm had descended on them Hollywood-style, as if they’d been cast in a revival of Singin’ in the Rain. He as Gene Kelly; she as Ginger Rogers.
Debbie Reynolds. Not Ginger Rogers!
They’d gone to Sardi’s after the show; it was the place to see and be seen. The walls were lined with caricatures of famous actors, people who had accomplished something. It was the seventies, when celebrities didn’t make a living out of being famous. When empires weren’t built on just showing up and snapping photos of each other and posting them to an iCloud over Shanghai.
Really, Fred? Shanghai?
They’d shared a corner table, sat knee to knee, and a famous actor came in. Fred could picture him—rugged star of stage and screen—and he’d sat alone (He’s alone!) and at the bar.
Even now, Fred couldn’t come up with his name. Karl? John? Jim?
Let’s talk to him. It’ll be an adventure!
Jack Klugman. That was it.
Fred hadn’t discouraged her from going over alone to say hello, because she was so excited. Fred wasn’t much interested and, really, didn’t want a fist in his nose. He’d read somewhere that Klugman could be a prickly drunk. And so Lissa had approached him. In a few minutes she was sitting with him and clinking glasses, laughing comfortably like they had gone to their high school prom together.
An hour later, as Fred and Lissa were leaving the restaurant and Klugman was on his third martini, the actor grabbed Fred’s arm and pulled him close. “Don’t ever let this woman go,” he slurred. For years afterward, Lissa would joke: But Jack would take me on that cruise or But Jack wouldn’t be such a party pooper.
Now, decades later, Fred opened the playbill: Lissa: Happy Birthday! Your (new) friend, Jack Klugman. And that was it. A faded autograph. A glossy brochure. A distant memory.
But then as Fred put the playbill away, he thought he heard a whisper: But Jack would’ve gotten me to a doctor sooner.
chapter 6
The day after finding Amity in the closet, Catherine and Ralph were in real estate mode again. This time, they were seated at a conference table across from Audrey.
“So while we are on the topic of different neighborhoods, let’s talk decision making. Let’s talk narrowing choices. Let’s talk taking the next step.” Audrey spread out five listing sheets before them.
“You’re right.” Ralph nodded enthusiastically. “We need a future here.”
Catherine was finding it hard to focus on anything other than Audrey’s low-cut blouse and the whisper of a lacy bra. A push-up kind with built-in continental shelf, Catherine assumed, from the way their agent’s breasts jiggled when she spoke. Catherine had tried that sort of bra once, but by the end of the night a raised rash spread across her torso as if she’d been stung by jellyfish.
“Okay. So it seems to me, and I can’t sway you one way or another due to my fiduciary duty, but the property on Laughing Heron Lane is out.” Audrey picked up one of the sheets, scrunched it into a ball, and tossed it into the trash basket.
“Wait,” Catherine said, “which one was that?” She’d gotten the houses confused again, couldn’t keep the crown moldings, screened-in porches, and Sub-Zero appliances straight.
Ralph and Audrey both blinked, as if annoyed she couldn’t keep up with them.
“You know,” Ralph said gently, “the one near the community center.”
Audrey added, “With the white columns out front. Looked like a funeral parlor.” She turned abruptly to make sure the door to the welcome center was closed and looked relieved. “Okay, moving along.” She held up a photo of a stucco house with a front porch swing. Catherine could have sworn the chair swing belonged to the colonial, but Audrey threw her a life ring. “You might recall the two thousand square feet. Square dining room. Square bonus room.”
“Where we could have square dancing across the square lawn,” Ralph chimed in.
Catherine remembered the yard. “With square roots on the trees?” she added, but their comedy routine had ended.
“You didn’t like the electric cooktop,” Audrey advised. “Kitchen needs a makeover.”
“A gas stove is pretty important. Do you cook?” Catherine imagined a burner’s flame searing Audrey’s lacy bra.
“Cook? No, I work too hard. I’ve got a career.” She smiled. “But I’m sure over the years you’ve become the hostess with the mostess.”
There it was again. Yesterday, when Ralph had wandered off to pretend he knew something about a circuit breaker and left her and Audrey alone, Audrey had made an offhand remark about stay-at-home wives. But what did she know? Catherine hadn’t had the need to have a job. She had found fulfillment in taking care of Ralph and their house. She’d been in charge of the social calendar, the general household repair, and the travel plans. She was responsible for remembering birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays. She did the shopping, cleaning, and cooking—the thousand working parts of a marriage that came together to put ironed shirts in his closet and a nice roast on the dinner table.
Audrey turned back to the listings. There were three left. “You remember One Happy Rabbit Lane, don’t you?” she asked Catherine, her tone implying that Catherine was a familiar but fading great aunt who came for Sunday dinners, someone to draw into conversation every now and again just so she didn’t drown in her soup. “Remember? Ralph and I wandered outside while you found a bathroom.”
Catherine didn’t recall much of the house, only the woman in the closet. Amity. Of course she remembered every detail of that moment. Her long brown hair and ponytail. Her athletic body. Her fanny pack and dog leash. Her delicate laugh. Her saying, “I like to live other people’s lives.” Catherine decided that Amity must have entered the house after walking her dog. “Yes, of course. I liked the feel of that property.”
“Great.” Au
drey nodded and then spoke to Ralph: “And you told me the marsh view reminded you of the windswept views on that course in Oregon. Abandoned Dunes.”
“Bandon Dunes,” Ralph said. “You really don’t miss a beat, do you?”
“But alligators,” Catherine chimed in. “What about the lagoon? What about the marsh? I’m worried about Karma.”
“After they reach six feet they are relocated,” Audrey replied, as if they were discussing misplaced refugees. “And smaller gators are around, but it’s not like they are great white sharks or anything. Do you think some guy would retrieve his ball from a lagoon if he thought he could lose a hand?”
Audrey did have a point. Ralph had shown Catherine highlights on the Golf Channel of professional golfers chipping muddy balls from lagoon edges while their caddies stood by, protecting them with sand trap rakes.
“In fact, as proof, just look at old Mr. Peabody.”
“Mr. Peabody?” Catherine and Ralph asked simultaneously.
“We like to think of him as our office mascot,” Audrey said, standing and moving to the wide picture window where Catherine and Ralph joined her. She pointed a manicured finger past the grassy lawn and steep bank of the lagoon. On an island an Olympic-size-pool-length away, Catherine saw an elongated gray shape. He was halfway in the water, sunning himself on the bank. She might have mistaken him for a burled log if she hadn’t been told otherwise.
“Completely harmless. He’s been there going on twenty years I’m told.”
Ralph’s attention, predictably, focused on the fairway behind the lagoon. “And which hole is that?”
“Eighteenth of Greenleaf Park. Long par four. There’s a dogleg right with a big trap just before the turn.”
Ralph licked his lips stupidly, as if they’d been discussing steak on the menu. “If you hit it more than two-ten off the blue tees you’ll be fine,” Audrey continued. “What do you shoot, Ralph? Two-thirty? Two-forty?”
Good Karma Page 3