by Terese Ramin
He dropped his hands, suddenly, surrendering to Gabriel’s presence, and rubbed a hand across his eyes. The face he presented to Gabriel was once again young, bewildered and
vulnerable. “Everything seemed fine yesterday,” he said. “We’re trying to save up some money, so I worked a double shift last night. She kissed me goodbye, happy as could be. I got home this morning and she was gone, and there’s this note: “Mike, it won’t work, I’m sorry, I’m going home. I hope you have a good life. Love, Becky.”” Michael sat down on the couch and dropped his hands between his knees in defeat. “What the hell kind of Dear John is that?” he asked. ““I hope you have a good life. Love, Becky”? I don’t even know what it means, how can I fight it?”
“Do you want to?” Gabriel asked.
“Hell, yeah!” Michael was on his feet, jabbing the air with his hands for emphasis. “I was going to ask her to marry me after graduation no matter what happened. I didn’t want her to get pregnant yet—I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m real happy about the baby and everything, but it’d probably be easier for her if we’d waited. I mean I meant to, but—” he ducked his head apologetically “—things kinda got away from me. You know?”
“Yeah, I do.” Gabriel nodded. “I feel kind of the same way about her mother—like things are getting away from me before I want ‘em to.” He jerked a thumb toward the kitchen. “You want a cup of coffee?”
“No, you got any juice?”
“Dunno. Take a look.” Gabriel headed for the kitchen. Mike followed him. “Say, Gabriel—man, that’s a mouthful of a name your parents stuck on you, isn’t it?”
“Biblical. Named me for an angel. Should’ve saved themselves the trouble.”
“Yeah, man, parents do things for weird reasons, don’t they?” Mike agreed from the refrigerator. “I’m not doin’ that to my kid. He’s going to have a regular name—John, Pete, Tom—something nobody’s going to tease him about on the ball field.”
Gabriel poured himself the last of the coffee. “Yeah, if I ever have a kid, I think that’s what I’d do, too.”
“You think you might?”
“What?”
“Have a kid?”
“I don’t know.” Gabriel viewed him with surprise. “I never thought about it.”
“Well, you know you should,” Michael-the-expert said. “I mean if you’re gonna have one, you oughtta do it soon, right? Before you get too old to do it any good. I mean, you gotta play with it, teach it things, keep up with it. I’ll tell ya—” he took a long pull straight from the apple juice bottle “—it’s not just women got clocks ticking. Men got ‘em, too, only they’re in their knees. Which reminds me. You really feel the way you say ‘bout Becky’s mom, maybe you and I could do each other some good....”
Thirty minutes later, Alice pulled the station wagon halfway into the driveway, pausing to take a good look at the red Mustang parked in front of the house. Beside her, Becky shrank in her seat.
“Mike’s here,” she whispered, half-pleased, half-anxious.
“What are you going to do?” her mother asked.
“I don’t know. Talk to him, I guess?”
“Sounds like a plan,” Alice said with a nod. She finished pulling the car up the drive and opened the door.
“Mom?”
Alice paused. “Hmm?”
“You-you’ll stay around while I talk to him, won’t you? In case I need you...”
Alice glanced at the porch where Michael stood poised in the doorway. Then she leaned across the car and gave her daughter a hug. “Of course I will,” she murmured. “Whoever else you become, you’ll always be my daughter, and I’ll always be here for you. Now go on, there’s Mike. He’s waiting for you.”
*
The early afternoon breeze blew hot across the backyard. Alice sat on the lower platform on the play structure. She linked her arms around a corner post and lifted her face into the wind and the heat, closed her eyes to the cool mist the wind tossed across the fence from a neighbor’s sprinkler. Beside her, ice cubes tinkled against glass like wind chimes when Gabriel swirled his tea.
“Do you think they’ll be all right?” she asked.
Gabriel shifted his weight off his legs, dangled them over the edge of the platform. “If Mike has anything to say about it they will.”
“They’re so young to think they know what will last forever.”
Gabriel nodded. “I envy them.”
Alice’s arms slipped from the post. “So do I.”
They were silent a minute.
“She’s not pregnant,” Alice said.
Gabriel’s hands tightened around the edge of the platform. “Are you glad?”
“I guess maybe. I dunno.” She fitted her hands down beside her thighs and stiffened her arms, making her shoulders rise. “If I’d had a minute to think about it, I might actually have gotten used to the idea of someone calling me Grandma by now. But lately I keep feeling like I’m running from one crisis to the next all the time. Seems like I never have time to stop and collect my thoughts. There’s a part of me that keeps wondering what would have happened if I’d thought about it before I let Michael drive us—”
“Matt,” Gabriel corrected.
“What?”
“Didn’t you mean “before Matt” drove you?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Uh-uh.” Gabriel shook his head. “You said Michael.” He watched Alice swallow. “He’s not Matt, Alice.”
“I know.”
“I think he’s afraid that’s why Becky ran home, because she suddenly got scared that he’d leave her the way Matt left you.”
Alice pressed herself up on the heels of her hands again, staring at the back of the yard and this year’s garden. “He came back,” she said softly.
“Mike?”
Alice shook her head. “No. Matt. Twice. Once the day the girls were born, once when he graduated from college. He asked me to marry him again both times. I didn’t love him anymore and I didn’t think I’d ever trust him, so I said no. When he started earning money, he tried to get me to take child support from him, but I was too proud and stubburn, so he set up a trust fund for them that I couldn’t do anything about. They’ll get it when they’re twenty-one.” She paused. “He’s married now, but he still calls about once a year to find out how they’re doing. I never call him. He’s never tried to contact them, but I think he used to pull by the grade school sometimes on his lunch hour, watch them playing at recess. He couldn’t miss them, I suppose. Except for the hair they both look like him. I was always glad about that.” She laughed wryly. “Funny. The one thing we ever did well together was make pretty babies.”
She looked at Gabriel. “I never told anyone that before. Not even the girls.”
“Maybe it’s time you did.”
Alice looked at her hands. “Maybe.”
Gabriel leaned toward her and drew a line down her jaw. “Alice...”
Alice turned to him and her mouth curved to meet his.
His kiss was chaste and lingering. Seductive. Alice closed her eyes, savoring it.
“Why,” she sighed when he drew away, “does everything always seem like it’s going to be all right when I’m with you?”
“I don’t know.” Gabriel took her hand and drew her off the play structure to stand between his thighs. His gaze held hers captive, conscious, while his thumbs sketched her cheekbones, smoothed her lips. “Why do I,” he asked quietly, “feel like I belong to you?”
Chapter Eleven
Alice pulled her bottom lip in over her teeth and bit it, trying to steady herself. Every square inch and nerve of her quaked like shaken jelly. She didn’t ask him to repeat what he’d said. She’d heard him perfectly well. She didn’t ask him what he meant. She understood exactly. She didn’t ask herself what she wanted to do about it because she didn’t know. Or rather, she did know, but the very idea terrified her.
She rocked back on her heels thinking about trying to r
un away from him, but he was everywhere. His hands held hers; his legs surrounded hers; his mouth tipped upward at the comers, inviting hers to play; and his eyes...
His eyes saw clear to the bottom of her soul and weren’t afraid of what they found there. She’d never felt so naked. Or been so impressed. It took an unusual man to ask a question that made such a statement, despite the fact that he’d been cast full tilt into the jaws of her family during a family wedding. Despite the impediments time and occupation put between him and Alice.
I wish—Alice thought.
“I wish…” Gabriel whispered, thinking aloud.
But I need time to figure out who I am—
“It’s going to take time to really clear up this case—”
—to get used to being on my own—
“—and there’ll be countless court dates and publicity and traveling back and forth—I’m not even from around here. I’m just an undercover on loan. I’ve got an apartment—” With nothing in it, he thought mutely “—and a job and most of a life—” Well, part of a life, he amended silently, but no dog, no girlfriend and no family, “—in New Jersey—”
—I’ve got to find another job and get back on my feet, see where I’m going…
“—and I can’t ask you to pack up and travel with me because this being an internal affairs case, there’ll be threatening phone calls and maybe other kinds of threats…”
And I have to do this on my own. I can’t just let you take up the slack for me, because letting you come in like the cavalry to rescue me from loneliness and financial insecurity is too tempting…
“I can’t expose you to that and I want to walk away from this job, but I can’t walk away until I can do it with a clean slate.”
—and after only a week I can’t ask you to just hang around waiting for me to feel comfortable with my pride and... And everything else. I mean, if I met you two years from now, maybe it’d be different, but I guess I’ve never done anything in my life at the right time before—
“And, based on three days, I can’t ask you to wait around for what might take me two years or more to do—”
—but now I’ve got to. And this is just not the right time for you in my life.
“—so, you understand, it’s the wrong time for me to ask you into my life.”
“What?” Alice shook herself, all at once aware that he’d been speaking to her.
“Nothing,” Gabriel said, unaware that he’d said anything out loud at all.
They studied one another uncomfortably for an instant.
Then Gabriel squeezed her hands and rubbed her wrists once with his thumbs and let her go. Alice touched his mouth with two fingers in an equally wordless goodbye and stepped away. Becky and Michael came around the side of the house hand in hand, glowing.
“Mom!” Becky dropped Michael’s hand and darted across the grass to throw her arms around her mother. “It’s all right. Mike doesn’t care that I’m not pregnant. He wants me, not just a baby.”
Alice glanced at her son-in-law with amused approbation.
“That’s wonderful, darling, I’m so glad.”
“But, Mom.” Becky danced excitedly out of Alice’s arms to catch her husband’s hand again. “That’s not all. Mike thought that maybe, if you think it’d be all right, since Grace and Phil might just not show up at the church Saturday, that maybe we...” She took a deep breath and looked up at Michael, starry-eyed. He squeezed her hand.
“What she’s trying to say, Ms. Meyers,” Michael said, “is that I’d like permission to marry your daughter again in front of the whole family on Saturday. That way she’ll never have to be sorry we ran away, and it’d save the show for the guests, too.”
“What about your family, Mike?” Alice asked, trying not to let her consternation show too much. “Won’t they be hurt if they’re not included?”
“Most of my family lives in the area, anyway. It might be short notice, but they could get here if they want. No, Ms. Meyers, I just want to be with Becky and have her be happy. If my family can’t understand that, well, that’s everybody’s loss, but it won’t change what I do or how I feel. No, you give the word and I’ll call my folks, let them take it from there.”
“Well...” Alice glanced at Gabriel, then from Michael to Becky, not sure how she felt about the whole thing, but already making a mental checklist. “We’ll have to talk to Grace, call Grandma, notify the church, plead with the caterer to add a few more places…” she looked at Becky “—get a dress, figure out how we’re going to work the attendants.” She turned to Michael. “You’ll have to go back to Lansing and pick up your marriage license, and—” she offered a hand to Michael, palm up “I guess you’d better start calling me Mom.”
Feeling alone once more, Gabriel slipped off the play structure and followed them into the house.
*
The house was still, silent.
The mother of the additional new bride had made her phone calls and put the wheels in motion for Saturday. She and Becky had made a date to go shopping for a dress Friday, after Thursday night’s rehearsal dinner madness. Then Michael and Becky had left to find some clothes for Michael and a motel where he could get some sleep before they put in an appearance at the family “do” tonight.
Aunt Kate and company had returned from Detroit sunburned and loaded down with shopping bags and souvenirs—following which, George had made a single phone call. Then they’d all gathered their belongings meekly together at his direction and departed for the hotel that had allegedly messed up their reservations. On their way out the door, Mamie chucked Alice’s chin and gave her a conspiratorial wink, and Aunt Kate fixed Gabriel with a baleful stare.
Then they were gone as noisily as they’d come.
And now the house was quiet; blissfully, blessedly, awkwardly without sound. The time, space and privacy Alice and Gabriel had wanted last night hung between them now. They shared an instant’s elation at the possibilities, then an immediate denial. They hadn’t touched, they hadn’t spoken, but they’d said goodbye. Gabriel looked at Alice with regret. Alice picked up the last forty-five seed pearls and the veil that Grace might never wear and looked at Gabriel with a sigh. Her family’s timing had never been more off.
The afternoon wore slowly on. Alice sewed seed pearls; Gabriel found his case file and tried to read. Alice finished the veil and got up to wash this morning’s dishes; Gabriel followed her to the kitchen and silently dried them. When Alice decided to vacuum, Gabriel moved the furniture for her. In wistful silence they stripped the beds and changed the sheets together, eyeing one another with longing. Each shared look was like a guilty touch, an arousing self-conscious, frustrating stroke along the emotions and the skin they’d bared to one another the previous night.
Working blindly, trying not to get in one another’s way, they collided in the narrow space between Allyn and Rebecca’s beds. Gabriel caught Alice to keep her from falling. Alice caught Gabriel to prevent the same. As though they had a mind of their own, his hands slid up her arms. Her body seemed to reach unconsciously for his without even consulting her brain. He bent toward her; her wrists locked around his neck.
“We shouldn’t,” she whispered.
“I know,” he muttered in despair. “I can’t protect you.”
“Oh, Gabriel, what are we going to do?”
He set her away from him. “Nothing,” he said tightly. “Not one damn thing.” He strode out of the room.
Alice collected the stuffed animals she’d put on the floor and finished making the girls’ beds alone.
Gabriel went outside and struck the tent the boys had used, then cleaned the grill. Alice finished with the beds and consulted her list of things she had left to do before Saturday only to find that there was no more she could do until Friday except get dressed for tonight’s gathering—but it was even still too early to do that.
She stepped to the window of the girls’ room to watch Gabriel scrubbing the grill rack with steel wool,
then turned blindly to straighten up the twins’ dresser. It wouldn’t be long before they’d box up their clutter and move it to their own places. Alice looked around the room, at the bookshelves loaded with everything from Nietzsche to Harry Potter, at the shelves they’d used to store every stuffed animal they’d ever been given; at the cosmetics and brushes and hot rollers and curling irons. What she’d have after they left was a clean house and time on her hands.
Involuntarily she glanced out the window to see Gabriel again. He was still working on the grill, scrubbing it like a man who had a bone to pick with the world. Alice watched him with concern, wondering what his life would return to after Saturday, what he would go back to and where he would be assigned. Vaguely wondering exactly what Mamie’s boys had gotten all over the grill as she tried to stop thinking about Gabriel. If she were seventeen, she acknowledged dully, she’d have said she loved Gabriel—and known, even after such a short time, that it was true. In high school it had been possible to form a bond to last a lifetime, to fall in love forever during one long night spent laughing and talking and touching the stars. It had been so easy to trust the moment when she’d been seventeen. Too easy, maybe. Yet she missed the adolescent idealism that had allowed her to fling herself into the world with confidence and enthusiasm despite the fact she’d had no idea what she was doing.
Now experience demanded that she cautiously analyze everything, then weigh it against tomorrow before she did it. For the first time in her life she wished, not to be seventeen again, but to have back just a little of the trust-yourself know-it-all arrogance and innocence of youth. To believe, just for the moment, that the world was her oyster and that the future held no obstacles that optimism couldn’t climb.
Then she wouldn’t feel the least bit insane for wanting to spend the rest of her life with Gabriel after only three days.