by Ann Hood
Tom called her sometimes late at night, each time his voice sounding sweeter and sweeter to Libby. The telephone had a way of making some things easier to say. On the phone, you didn’t have to look a person in the eye and watch the pain there. You didn’t have to let them see your own pain.
Libby did not want to hear details of her family’s life without her. Even when Tom called her on graduation night, his voice thick and sleepy from too much champagne.
“You missed everything,” he told her.
She knew he meant the ceremony, their children in caps and gowns, clutching their diplomas, the party afterwards with Sue and Caitlin and Great Western champagne. But she knew too that she had missed much more than that—Cub Scout meetings, weekend camping trips that Tom took the children on while she stayed home, Dana’s prom.
“I feel old, Harp,” Libby said.
He didn’t answer her.
“I’ve got kids all grown up and I can hardly remember them as babies,” she continued. She squeezed her eyes shut, pressed her fingers to her temples as if that could help her remember.
“Oh,” Tom told her, “they were beautiful babies, Libby.”
A picture flashed in her mind. In it, Libby was sitting on the grass at home, wearing navy blue and white polka dot Capri pants and a white halter top. It was summer and the air was full of summer smells—hot earth, sweet grass, flowers in bloom. And there, in front of her, in a tiny wading pool shaped like a water monster from an old cartoon, Beanie and Cecil, sat Troy and Dana. Both of them were young, with fine soft hair and chubby arms and legs. Dana wore a bonnet covered with white daisies, Troy had tossed off a Red Sox cap. They were laughing together, splashing in that pool, and behind them Libby saw Tom, filming the whole scene on a home movie camera, moving closer to them, all slow and steady.
She remembered how she turned toward him, toward that camera and flashed a big smile. A real one too, because at that very moment, she was happy. Remembering it now, Libby thought of it as the last day she had felt happy with what she had.
She told him that on the phone, but he started to laugh.
“That’s some memory,” he said. “But we never had a home movie camera.”
Libby frowned. She twisted the curly telephone cord around her finger, then let it spring free, all the time holding on to the image of that day. “But I remember it all so clearly,” she said. “That little pool. And Dana’s hat with those daisies. And you capturing it all. In fact, go up to the attic and find that camera. Maybe we never even had the film developed. Maybe it’s still sitting up there in a box somewhere.”
Tom laughed again. “I’m not going to look for something that doesn’t even exist.”
Libby felt like the room was starting to spin. She grabbed the edges of the end table and held on tight. “But I remember it,” she said again.
“That’s the nice thing about memories,” Tom told her. “No one can change them for you. Right or wrong.”
“Well,” Libby said, “I remember that you love me. There’s one you can’t dispute.”
Tom didn’t answer right away. In that awful silence, she saw all the miles that had come between them unfold before her. She felt her heart begin to beat hard.
She heard him sigh. “Yeah,” he said finally, “I love you.”
Something about the way he said it made her shiver. With all the homecomings she had imagined, there had never been one without Tom there, waiting for her, arms outstretched. “I’ve been thinking about coming home,” Libby said, her voice soft.
Upstairs, on her bed in Holly, was a quilt her grandmother had made a long time ago. The pattern was called Tumbling Blocks, because no matter how you turned it, everything seemed to be falling down. That was exactly how she’d felt when she left Massachusetts. When she got in her car, and drove down that road, that feeling had started to finally disappear. She’d felt hope again. She’d felt the tingle of promise, of possibility. Now she imagined wrapping them—Tom, Dana, Troy—in that quilt and holding them close. She imagined them understanding at last.
Tom cleared his throat. “You know,” he said, “I’ve been thinking too. I thought I’d sell the house and buy one of those new condominiums they built over on Knight’s Farm.”
Libby hesitated. “I would like that,” she said, still clutching the edge of the table. “I would like to live somewhere new.”
“Uh … you get to pick whatever color scheme you want,” he said. “Peach or something called aloe—”
“Aloe?” Libby said, wishing she could throw her arms around him. “Aloe would be green.”
“Green?” he said. “Really? How about that?”
Even though she felt sad, she laughed at the sound of his voice, at the idea that he was still someone who could be surprised by small things. “Don’t decide until I get there,” she said.
All he said then was that he wanted to get some sleep. “Too much champagne,” he said.
But Libby didn’t want to go, not yet. She said, “I just remembered something else. I remember how you came after me when I left for New York that time before we got married. How you swept me off my feet and the next thing I knew I wasn’t in New York at all, I was standing in front of a justice of the peace, shaking like crazy and marrying you.” As she said it, she realized she was shaking now too. “I don’t think I knew what happened until about the third inning of that game we went to at Fenway afterwards.”
“That was some day,” Tom said, and she knew by the way he sounded that he was remembering too, that it was something they still had together, something that could not be erased.
Acknowledgments
I WOULD LIKE TO give a very special thanks to my parents, Melissa Hood, Gail Hochman, Bob Reiss, Pete May, Rob Weisbach, Marianne Merola, and especially Deb Futter.
About the Author
Ann Hood was born in West Warwick, Rhode Island. She is the author of the bestselling novels The Knitting Circle, The Red Thread, and The Obituary Writer. Her memoir, Comfort: A Journey Through Grief, was named one of the top ten nonfiction books of 2008 by Entertainment Weekly and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her other novels include Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine, Waiting to Vanish, Three-Legged Horse, Something Blue, Places to Stay the Night, The Properties of Water, and Ruby. She has also written a memoir, Do Not Go Gentle: My Search for Miracles in a Cynical Time; a book on the craft of writing, Creating Character Emotions; and a collection of short stories, An Ornithologist’s Guide to Life.
Her essays and short stories have appeared in many publications, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic Monthly, Tin House, Ploughshares, and the Paris Review. Hood has won awards for the best American spiritual writing, travel writing, and food writing; the Paul Bowles Prize for Short Fiction; and two Pushcart Prizes. She now lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with her husband and their children.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1993 by Ann Hood
Cover design by Tracey Dunham
978-1-4804-6685-2
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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New York, NY 10014
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