Gun Lake, page 10
The door opened to a dark room with bright light from outside dying to be let in. Michelle walked over piles of clothes and opened the blinds, making Jared squint and moan like a prisoner being let out of solitary confinement.
“Come on. Get on some clothes and come downstairs.”
It was the second day after she had picked Jared up from downtown, and they still had not addressed the issue. The various issues. Michelle had a laundry list that she could go down, but she knew she was still so angry and disappointed that all she would be able to do was yell and plead to no avail. That was why she had let a day pass—so Jared could sleep off the night before and Michelle could cool down and think of what to say. She had thought things through and talked with Ted last night, and they’d come up with a suggestion.
She sat at the table in the small kitchen of their house. It was unbelievable what the price of a three-bedroom house in Naperville had been when they bought this house seven years ago, and even more ridiculous what they went for now. If her husband’s job had been more stable, they would have sold this house and bought something bigger. But they had remained here, knowing this would probably be the last house Jared lived in with them. The last house he would be grounded in.
Jared came down to the table wearing long basketball shorts and a Nike tee-shirt. He slid into his chair and sat looking at the centerpiece without an ounce of emotion on his face.
“Your father and I talked last night,” Michelle began, her intense stare unacknowledged by her son.
She had opened the patio door so the screen separated them from the outside. A warm breeze blew into the kitchen. A napkin from the set on the counter drifted over to the table. Michelle picked it up, wadded it in a ball, and threw it in the wastebasket. She missed.
Jared continued staring at the silk floral arrangement in the center of the table.
“Since you haven’t gotten a job and have basically decided to be a bum all summer, we figured you could at least be a bum somewhere else. So this coming Monday, we’re going to Michigan to spend some time up there.”
The eyes moved and found her gaze. That was good. A sign of life. Of acknowledgment. Of something.
He heard me.
“I want you to pack enough clothes for a month.”
“What?” Jared said, suddenly alive, suddenly caring.
“You heard me.”
“For a month?”
“Yes.”
“Where am I going to go for a month?”
“You’re lucky you’re not being carted off to jail.”
Jared stopped looking at her and resumed his tortured, angst-filled teenage posture at the table. Michelle wished Ted were here. He had an amazing ability to scare the light and the love of Jesus into Jared, but she wasn’t able to. She was the mom, the one who had usually spoiled Jared and the others more than Ted. Was this her fault? she wondered again. She couldn’t help wondering that. It was a billboard she passed every time she traveled down this road with Jared. ATTENTION MICHELLE MEIER: YOU ARE AN UNFIT MOTHER, AND THIS IS ALL YOUR OWN DOING. She knew it wasn’t, knew that Jared was a young man and responsible for his own decisions. But he wasn’t grown yet. She was still responsible.
She tried to reel him back into the conversation.
“The Groens from church have a cottage up on a lake. They said we could feel free to use it anytime. They’re actually traveling, and Ted got ahold of Pat and got permission.”
Jared glared at her, then stared outside.
“It’s just going to be you and me going up there,” Michelle said.
“What about Dad?”
“He has something you might—might—understand one day. It’s called a job. It’s what pays for the food you eat so heartily every day. For the roof over your head. For the clothes you wear.”
“And Lance? Ashley?”
“They’ll be staying here with your father.”
Jared was about to say something; it was at the tip of his tongue and Michelle knew it. But he remained silent, indifferent, unfazed.
“Jared, I’m tired of this—this act. Of this attitude. And I swear, your father and I promise you, if it does not change, and change soon, you’ll be in a lot of trouble. You can’t go out into the world with an attitude like that. People won’t put up with it.”
“People won’t be grounding me for life. Or shipping me off to boarding school.”
“You knew exactly what we were going to do if you got in trouble. Sulking isn’t going to change things.”
“I’m not trying to change anything. I want to leave this dump.”
“You’ll have your chance very soon,” Michelle said.
“And what am I going to do in Michigan?” he asked.
“It’s what you’re not going to do. Your friends won’t be around. There won’t be any pot for you to buy and smoke. You won’t be able to sleep your days away and party through the night. It’ll just be you and me.”
“I can’t wait,” he said with heavy sarcasm.
After several minutes of silence, Michelle stood up and went to open the pantry that had the cereal in it.
“Want me to fix you something?” she asked him.
He shook his head and didn’t look at her.
“You sure?” she asked in a tone that tried to say, This is hard on both of us, but I still love you, and I’m still your mother.
Again Jared shook his head in disgust.
“Then you can go,” she said.
He stood and walked back to the stairs to go back to his room. Michelle stood in the kitchen watching him go, listening to the bedroom door shut—not slam, but simply shut. She wondered if they, if she, had made the right decision. She honestly didn’t know what else to do. A change of scenery and location might help. Or it might make things worse, make them both miserable.
God help me. Give me the right words.
She knew the words that came from her mouth were often spiteful and sarcastic. Sometimes she even cursed at Jared. She knew she shouldn’t do this. She just wanted to get his attention. Somehow. Dragging him to Michigan would probably do that. But what then? What next?
“Mom!” Michelle heard Ashley calling from the vicinity of the laundry room. She sighed and went to answer.
The hot day beckoned. She didn’t have the luxury of going to her bedroom and shutting the door and listening to rock and feeling full of angst. She had work to do. She had a life she needed to live. And Jared was only part of it.
26
THE MORNING HAD WAKENED with rain, and now the storm clouds contemplated drifting away. Don Hutchence drove his cruiser without urgency, knowing the drill, knowing what he’d find once he got there. The knowledge brought horrible thoughts, the kind he would never share with anyone, not even Collette years ago when they could actually talk with civility. He hated to admit it, but he knew the yearning deep down.
Just once, he’d like to go out on call and find something that would justify his existence. Something that, in the end, would be featured on World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. Something that was bad, sure, but that could’ve been far worse had it not been for the heroic actions on his part. Just once, he would like to use his three-fifty-seven magnum for more than simple apparel.
He needed just one thing to give this life he led more purpose, more meaning. One thing that could bring significance to everything. Just one thing. He’d settle on that and then be fine. Perhaps then he could show his true worth, his true colors. Perhaps even get Collette’s attention.
The car headed down Adams Drive toward Piedmont. He was northeast of the lake, about fifteen minutes from the nearest tip. The last time Don had made this trip to the Pattersons was last month—June 12, he believed. It was almost like a regular monthly visit. Perhaps the Pattersons were like him—needing something more, something bigger and better in their lives. Living together just didn’t cut it, so they felt the need to spice up things, so to speak.
Don turned left on a gravel road and coasted down it. No urgency. He didn’t really have to come here, to be honest. He had nothing else to do. And maybe someday Walt or Alice Patterson would buy a gun and really spice things up. But Don doubted it. They weren’t that kind of arguing couple. They’d been married since, what?—the Civil War? All right, that was stretching it, but they were up there in age.
The squad car approached the last house on the drive, a small, dilapidated cabin with a shedding roof and grimy windows. Walt Patterson was sitting on the porch, cell phone in hand. This was what made this couple so hilarious. They’d lived here most of their lives, in this little rundown shack that kept getting worse by the year. And yet each had a personal cell phone, something they had signed up for when a guy from Grand Rapids was at the local tavern trying to drum up some business. The Pattersons also had a nice boat down at the docks, probably worth three times what their house was worth. Sometimes things didn’t make sense, didn’t even need to, but simply stood as truth and as day-to-day reality.
Don got out and walked over to the porch where Walt sat. The man was eighty if he was a day, with wrinkly skin and no hair except a small ring the shape of a horseshoe. He shook his head at Don and looked at him with pleading eyes.
“This time she’s gone too far,” Walt said.
“How’s that?” Don asked, stepping onto the wooden porch and studying it to see if it would hold his ample weight.
“She locked me out of the house,” Walt said.
Don nodded, crossed over to the front door, tried to look inside but couldn’t see because of the dirt on the glass.
“You guys havin’ a little argument?”
“That woman is pure evil. She’s the antichrist, I tell you. Maybe they say the antichrist is a man, but not me, no way I know who it is, and I’ve been livin’ with her for sixty years.”
“Oh, come on now.”
“I swear it’s the truth, so help me God.”
Don knocked on the door. “Alice? You in there?”
Nothing.
“She’s not gonna let you in. You gotta call the fire department or something. We gotta break into the house.”
“Have you tried the back?”
Walt shrugged as if to say, Of course I did; I’d be an idiot to not have thought of that, but then the look on his face gave him away. He wasn’t too sure if he had. Don bet the odds were good that Walt had forgotten to check the back door, had simply used that good ol’ cell phone of his to call the authorities.
“Good thing you brought your phone out here,” Don said.
“I carry it with me everywhere. Get a pretty good signal too.”
“Talk a lot on it?”
“More than Alice does. She doesn’t even know how to turn it off. Uses the batteries up and then has to try and charge it, and she doesn’t know what she’s doing. Some people just shouldn’t be using technology, you know?”
Don suddenly had an awful thought. What if he went into the house and found Alice Patterson, a healthy eighty-something-year-old woman, stretched out on the couch after downing a bottle of aspirin or perhaps slumped over the kitchen table after doing something even worse?
There had only been one suicide during Don’s time on Gun Lake. It hadn’t been pretty, either. This wasn’t the sort of action he wanted. Not the excitement, the change of pace, that would have given him satisfaction.
Killing yourself was the wrong way out anyway. You had to be desperate, on the very last rung of a very low ladder to even think about it. Billy Stewart must’ve been on that rung, because he had decided to hang himself on a big oak tree behind his house. When Don arrived at the scene, Billy had still been swinging from side to side. The deputy who had found him was so sick he couldn’t bring himself to cut the poor guy down.
That had been seven years ago, and pretty much the extent of the bad happenings around these parts. Sometimes Don’s mind would wander, think awful thoughts, think about Billy Stewart and wonder what could’ve driven a man over the edge like that and wonder if everyone had an edge like that. Then he would think of a couple like the Pattersons and worry about them.
Don walked around the cabin and opened the back door. He glanced back at Walt, who looked as though Moses had just parted the Red Sea.
“Alice, you in there?” Don called, not wanting to just walk in. He kept seeing Billy, only twenty-five years old, dangling from that tree, his neck purple and—
“I don’t want him in here,” Alice Patterson said.
The round woman with curly gray hair sat at the kitchen table, looking like a child who’d been forced to sit there and sulk after not eating her broccoli.
“You doin’ okay, Alice?”
“No.”
“What’s going on?” Don asked as he stepped into the kitchen and saw the remains of eggs and bacon on a plate in the sink.
“I’m married to a fool, that’s what’s going on.”
“You hush,” Walt said, staying close by the door, feeling he might get struck by lightning or by a frying pan.
“Why’d you lock Walt out of the house?”
“I didn’t do such a thing. You came in on your own, didn’t you?”
“She unlocked it just so you could come in. I swear she did.” Walt had evidently followed him around back and was standing on the kitchen door landing, looking in.
“All right, hold on now,” Don said. “You guys’ve been doing okay. I mean, I haven’t been by to visit you for a while now.”
“Would you like some breakfast?” Alice asked. “I still got some stayin’ warm in the oven.”
“Uh, no, thank you.”
“You sure? You can stick around—I got some coffee.”
Don nodded. “Yeah, well, maybe a cup of coffee is fine—no, hold on, I’ll get it.”
“You don’t want to eat that bacon,” Walt said.
“I told you it was another brand and it wasn’t anything I done,” Alice said, her face turning red.
“Whoa, whoa—hold on. Walt, you just keep it quiet for a few minutes. What’s this—bacon?”
“I fixed him some bacon—well, some of it’s in the sink. It was a new brand I bought at Hampton’s that they said would be good and I fixed it—”
“Tasted raw—”
“Walt, come on,” Don said again.
“And I told him that it wasn’t my fault, and after makin’ him breakfast for something like sixty years—”
“I don’t ask for it—”
“Walt,” Don said, louder.
Walt flinched like a scared dog.
“I should make him eat in town. See how he likes their food.”
Don fixed himself a cup of coffee, then sat down at the table. He sighed and continued listening to Alice talk about making breakfast and cleaning up after her husband. Then he had to listen to Walt’s lame defense. Don sat there for the better part of an hour before he decided this morning visit to the Pattersons was finished.
Sometimes he wondered if this couple just got bored and decided to call somebody, anybody, to get more attention.
Maybe Don wasn’t the only one who needed a little excitement in his life. He thought of the soap commercial from years ago. Zest soap, he recalled. According to the commercial, just smelling it gave you this burst of energy. A shower left you feeling alive and gung ho for the day.
The Pattersons needed a case of Zest. So did Don. He sat in their kitchen, smelling bacon and eggs and drinking stale coffee, and wondered if this was what happened when you were married for sixty-something years. He couldn’t help thinking of Collette again and wondering if they would end up like this.
A thought ran through his mind. An awful one.
I’d be lucky if we ended up like this.
And as awful as it was, he knew it was also true.
27
“LOOKING BACK IS LIKE looking over your shoulder,” Grace once told him. “If you do it too often, you might trip over something.”
Paul Hedges had always been good at not looking back. But today, walking through the lush gardens of the nursery, he was taking a quick peek backward. Just for the moment. Just before he left.
It had been a couple of years now since she died, but he still thought about her every day. About the woman he’d gotten to know through rows of hydrangeas and daylilies, amidst flowering trees and ferns and shrubs. It had been on a whim, going out to the nursery to look for some trees that might bring more life to his little house and yard. Instead of finding adornments for his yard, he’d found one for his soul.
Paul met Grace Williams that day and had a simple conversation. He learned she was a widow, that she worked in the nursery part-time, that she liked perennials. And he kept coming back because of something about her. The friendly tone with which she spoke to him. The way she smiled. The way she made him feel like a real human, a real person. The way she actually noticed him.
That was almost seven years ago. They knew each other for five. Five years of first being a friend and then falling in love with Grace.
What a notion, to fall in love with Grace. The very fact that her name was Grace wasn’t lost on Paul. He didn’t deserve Grace, but she befriended him anyway. Could a fifty-four-year-old man find love again? Could he find a love that wasn’t physical, that wasn’t contractual, that was something more than simple words and feelings? He wasn’t sure at the time, but he did find it, became engulfed in it. And then he lost it. He lost Grace, lost his last chance.
A man like me can never hold on to Grace. Not after all my sins.
This wasn’t the only time he had come back to this nursery simply to walk around. Younger workers, usually high-school or college-aged girls, would come up and ask if he needed help. Just like today. An older man needing help—that’s what they saw. And always he’d shake his head and continue to walk the rows, remembering when he did the same with Grace.
He told her he loved her, told her all the time. And she never reciprocated, never said those words. She felt wary of using them flippantly. But Paul knew she loved him, at least the Paul she’d gotten to know at this late point in her life. The teenaged Paul or the twenty-something Paul would never have crossed paths with Grace. They’d lived in separate universes then. But somehow, for a short time, they found each other.
“Come on. Get on some clothes and come downstairs.”
It was the second day after she had picked Jared up from downtown, and they still had not addressed the issue. The various issues. Michelle had a laundry list that she could go down, but she knew she was still so angry and disappointed that all she would be able to do was yell and plead to no avail. That was why she had let a day pass—so Jared could sleep off the night before and Michelle could cool down and think of what to say. She had thought things through and talked with Ted last night, and they’d come up with a suggestion.
She sat at the table in the small kitchen of their house. It was unbelievable what the price of a three-bedroom house in Naperville had been when they bought this house seven years ago, and even more ridiculous what they went for now. If her husband’s job had been more stable, they would have sold this house and bought something bigger. But they had remained here, knowing this would probably be the last house Jared lived in with them. The last house he would be grounded in.
Jared came down to the table wearing long basketball shorts and a Nike tee-shirt. He slid into his chair and sat looking at the centerpiece without an ounce of emotion on his face.
“Your father and I talked last night,” Michelle began, her intense stare unacknowledged by her son.
She had opened the patio door so the screen separated them from the outside. A warm breeze blew into the kitchen. A napkin from the set on the counter drifted over to the table. Michelle picked it up, wadded it in a ball, and threw it in the wastebasket. She missed.
Jared continued staring at the silk floral arrangement in the center of the table.
“Since you haven’t gotten a job and have basically decided to be a bum all summer, we figured you could at least be a bum somewhere else. So this coming Monday, we’re going to Michigan to spend some time up there.”
The eyes moved and found her gaze. That was good. A sign of life. Of acknowledgment. Of something.
He heard me.
“I want you to pack enough clothes for a month.”
“What?” Jared said, suddenly alive, suddenly caring.
“You heard me.”
“For a month?”
“Yes.”
“Where am I going to go for a month?”
“You’re lucky you’re not being carted off to jail.”
Jared stopped looking at her and resumed his tortured, angst-filled teenage posture at the table. Michelle wished Ted were here. He had an amazing ability to scare the light and the love of Jesus into Jared, but she wasn’t able to. She was the mom, the one who had usually spoiled Jared and the others more than Ted. Was this her fault? she wondered again. She couldn’t help wondering that. It was a billboard she passed every time she traveled down this road with Jared. ATTENTION MICHELLE MEIER: YOU ARE AN UNFIT MOTHER, AND THIS IS ALL YOUR OWN DOING. She knew it wasn’t, knew that Jared was a young man and responsible for his own decisions. But he wasn’t grown yet. She was still responsible.
She tried to reel him back into the conversation.
“The Groens from church have a cottage up on a lake. They said we could feel free to use it anytime. They’re actually traveling, and Ted got ahold of Pat and got permission.”
Jared glared at her, then stared outside.
“It’s just going to be you and me going up there,” Michelle said.
“What about Dad?”
“He has something you might—might—understand one day. It’s called a job. It’s what pays for the food you eat so heartily every day. For the roof over your head. For the clothes you wear.”
“And Lance? Ashley?”
“They’ll be staying here with your father.”
Jared was about to say something; it was at the tip of his tongue and Michelle knew it. But he remained silent, indifferent, unfazed.
“Jared, I’m tired of this—this act. Of this attitude. And I swear, your father and I promise you, if it does not change, and change soon, you’ll be in a lot of trouble. You can’t go out into the world with an attitude like that. People won’t put up with it.”
“People won’t be grounding me for life. Or shipping me off to boarding school.”
“You knew exactly what we were going to do if you got in trouble. Sulking isn’t going to change things.”
“I’m not trying to change anything. I want to leave this dump.”
“You’ll have your chance very soon,” Michelle said.
“And what am I going to do in Michigan?” he asked.
“It’s what you’re not going to do. Your friends won’t be around. There won’t be any pot for you to buy and smoke. You won’t be able to sleep your days away and party through the night. It’ll just be you and me.”
“I can’t wait,” he said with heavy sarcasm.
After several minutes of silence, Michelle stood up and went to open the pantry that had the cereal in it.
“Want me to fix you something?” she asked him.
He shook his head and didn’t look at her.
“You sure?” she asked in a tone that tried to say, This is hard on both of us, but I still love you, and I’m still your mother.
Again Jared shook his head in disgust.
“Then you can go,” she said.
He stood and walked back to the stairs to go back to his room. Michelle stood in the kitchen watching him go, listening to the bedroom door shut—not slam, but simply shut. She wondered if they, if she, had made the right decision. She honestly didn’t know what else to do. A change of scenery and location might help. Or it might make things worse, make them both miserable.
God help me. Give me the right words.
She knew the words that came from her mouth were often spiteful and sarcastic. Sometimes she even cursed at Jared. She knew she shouldn’t do this. She just wanted to get his attention. Somehow. Dragging him to Michigan would probably do that. But what then? What next?
“Mom!” Michelle heard Ashley calling from the vicinity of the laundry room. She sighed and went to answer.
The hot day beckoned. She didn’t have the luxury of going to her bedroom and shutting the door and listening to rock and feeling full of angst. She had work to do. She had a life she needed to live. And Jared was only part of it.
26
THE MORNING HAD WAKENED with rain, and now the storm clouds contemplated drifting away. Don Hutchence drove his cruiser without urgency, knowing the drill, knowing what he’d find once he got there. The knowledge brought horrible thoughts, the kind he would never share with anyone, not even Collette years ago when they could actually talk with civility. He hated to admit it, but he knew the yearning deep down.
Just once, he’d like to go out on call and find something that would justify his existence. Something that, in the end, would be featured on World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. Something that was bad, sure, but that could’ve been far worse had it not been for the heroic actions on his part. Just once, he would like to use his three-fifty-seven magnum for more than simple apparel.
He needed just one thing to give this life he led more purpose, more meaning. One thing that could bring significance to everything. Just one thing. He’d settle on that and then be fine. Perhaps then he could show his true worth, his true colors. Perhaps even get Collette’s attention.
The car headed down Adams Drive toward Piedmont. He was northeast of the lake, about fifteen minutes from the nearest tip. The last time Don had made this trip to the Pattersons was last month—June 12, he believed. It was almost like a regular monthly visit. Perhaps the Pattersons were like him—needing something more, something bigger and better in their lives. Living together just didn’t cut it, so they felt the need to spice up things, so to speak.
Don turned left on a gravel road and coasted down it. No urgency. He didn’t really have to come here, to be honest. He had nothing else to do. And maybe someday Walt or Alice Patterson would buy a gun and really spice things up. But Don doubted it. They weren’t that kind of arguing couple. They’d been married since, what?—the Civil War? All right, that was stretching it, but they were up there in age.
The squad car approached the last house on the drive, a small, dilapidated cabin with a shedding roof and grimy windows. Walt Patterson was sitting on the porch, cell phone in hand. This was what made this couple so hilarious. They’d lived here most of their lives, in this little rundown shack that kept getting worse by the year. And yet each had a personal cell phone, something they had signed up for when a guy from Grand Rapids was at the local tavern trying to drum up some business. The Pattersons also had a nice boat down at the docks, probably worth three times what their house was worth. Sometimes things didn’t make sense, didn’t even need to, but simply stood as truth and as day-to-day reality.
Don got out and walked over to the porch where Walt sat. The man was eighty if he was a day, with wrinkly skin and no hair except a small ring the shape of a horseshoe. He shook his head at Don and looked at him with pleading eyes.
“This time she’s gone too far,” Walt said.
“How’s that?” Don asked, stepping onto the wooden porch and studying it to see if it would hold his ample weight.
“She locked me out of the house,” Walt said.
Don nodded, crossed over to the front door, tried to look inside but couldn’t see because of the dirt on the glass.
“You guys havin’ a little argument?”
“That woman is pure evil. She’s the antichrist, I tell you. Maybe they say the antichrist is a man, but not me, no way I know who it is, and I’ve been livin’ with her for sixty years.”
“Oh, come on now.”
“I swear it’s the truth, so help me God.”
Don knocked on the door. “Alice? You in there?”
Nothing.
“She’s not gonna let you in. You gotta call the fire department or something. We gotta break into the house.”
“Have you tried the back?”
Walt shrugged as if to say, Of course I did; I’d be an idiot to not have thought of that, but then the look on his face gave him away. He wasn’t too sure if he had. Don bet the odds were good that Walt had forgotten to check the back door, had simply used that good ol’ cell phone of his to call the authorities.
“Good thing you brought your phone out here,” Don said.
“I carry it with me everywhere. Get a pretty good signal too.”
“Talk a lot on it?”
“More than Alice does. She doesn’t even know how to turn it off. Uses the batteries up and then has to try and charge it, and she doesn’t know what she’s doing. Some people just shouldn’t be using technology, you know?”
Don suddenly had an awful thought. What if he went into the house and found Alice Patterson, a healthy eighty-something-year-old woman, stretched out on the couch after downing a bottle of aspirin or perhaps slumped over the kitchen table after doing something even worse?
There had only been one suicide during Don’s time on Gun Lake. It hadn’t been pretty, either. This wasn’t the sort of action he wanted. Not the excitement, the change of pace, that would have given him satisfaction.
Killing yourself was the wrong way out anyway. You had to be desperate, on the very last rung of a very low ladder to even think about it. Billy Stewart must’ve been on that rung, because he had decided to hang himself on a big oak tree behind his house. When Don arrived at the scene, Billy had still been swinging from side to side. The deputy who had found him was so sick he couldn’t bring himself to cut the poor guy down.
That had been seven years ago, and pretty much the extent of the bad happenings around these parts. Sometimes Don’s mind would wander, think awful thoughts, think about Billy Stewart and wonder what could’ve driven a man over the edge like that and wonder if everyone had an edge like that. Then he would think of a couple like the Pattersons and worry about them.
Don walked around the cabin and opened the back door. He glanced back at Walt, who looked as though Moses had just parted the Red Sea.
“Alice, you in there?” Don called, not wanting to just walk in. He kept seeing Billy, only twenty-five years old, dangling from that tree, his neck purple and—
“I don’t want him in here,” Alice Patterson said.
The round woman with curly gray hair sat at the kitchen table, looking like a child who’d been forced to sit there and sulk after not eating her broccoli.
“You doin’ okay, Alice?”
“No.”
“What’s going on?” Don asked as he stepped into the kitchen and saw the remains of eggs and bacon on a plate in the sink.
“I’m married to a fool, that’s what’s going on.”
“You hush,” Walt said, staying close by the door, feeling he might get struck by lightning or by a frying pan.
“Why’d you lock Walt out of the house?”
“I didn’t do such a thing. You came in on your own, didn’t you?”
“She unlocked it just so you could come in. I swear she did.” Walt had evidently followed him around back and was standing on the kitchen door landing, looking in.
“All right, hold on now,” Don said. “You guys’ve been doing okay. I mean, I haven’t been by to visit you for a while now.”
“Would you like some breakfast?” Alice asked. “I still got some stayin’ warm in the oven.”
“Uh, no, thank you.”
“You sure? You can stick around—I got some coffee.”
Don nodded. “Yeah, well, maybe a cup of coffee is fine—no, hold on, I’ll get it.”
“You don’t want to eat that bacon,” Walt said.
“I told you it was another brand and it wasn’t anything I done,” Alice said, her face turning red.
“Whoa, whoa—hold on. Walt, you just keep it quiet for a few minutes. What’s this—bacon?”
“I fixed him some bacon—well, some of it’s in the sink. It was a new brand I bought at Hampton’s that they said would be good and I fixed it—”
“Tasted raw—”
“Walt, come on,” Don said again.
“And I told him that it wasn’t my fault, and after makin’ him breakfast for something like sixty years—”
“I don’t ask for it—”
“Walt,” Don said, louder.
Walt flinched like a scared dog.
“I should make him eat in town. See how he likes their food.”
Don fixed himself a cup of coffee, then sat down at the table. He sighed and continued listening to Alice talk about making breakfast and cleaning up after her husband. Then he had to listen to Walt’s lame defense. Don sat there for the better part of an hour before he decided this morning visit to the Pattersons was finished.
Sometimes he wondered if this couple just got bored and decided to call somebody, anybody, to get more attention.
Maybe Don wasn’t the only one who needed a little excitement in his life. He thought of the soap commercial from years ago. Zest soap, he recalled. According to the commercial, just smelling it gave you this burst of energy. A shower left you feeling alive and gung ho for the day.
The Pattersons needed a case of Zest. So did Don. He sat in their kitchen, smelling bacon and eggs and drinking stale coffee, and wondered if this was what happened when you were married for sixty-something years. He couldn’t help thinking of Collette again and wondering if they would end up like this.
A thought ran through his mind. An awful one.
I’d be lucky if we ended up like this.
And as awful as it was, he knew it was also true.
27
“LOOKING BACK IS LIKE looking over your shoulder,” Grace once told him. “If you do it too often, you might trip over something.”
Paul Hedges had always been good at not looking back. But today, walking through the lush gardens of the nursery, he was taking a quick peek backward. Just for the moment. Just before he left.
It had been a couple of years now since she died, but he still thought about her every day. About the woman he’d gotten to know through rows of hydrangeas and daylilies, amidst flowering trees and ferns and shrubs. It had been on a whim, going out to the nursery to look for some trees that might bring more life to his little house and yard. Instead of finding adornments for his yard, he’d found one for his soul.
Paul met Grace Williams that day and had a simple conversation. He learned she was a widow, that she worked in the nursery part-time, that she liked perennials. And he kept coming back because of something about her. The friendly tone with which she spoke to him. The way she smiled. The way she made him feel like a real human, a real person. The way she actually noticed him.
That was almost seven years ago. They knew each other for five. Five years of first being a friend and then falling in love with Grace.
What a notion, to fall in love with Grace. The very fact that her name was Grace wasn’t lost on Paul. He didn’t deserve Grace, but she befriended him anyway. Could a fifty-four-year-old man find love again? Could he find a love that wasn’t physical, that wasn’t contractual, that was something more than simple words and feelings? He wasn’t sure at the time, but he did find it, became engulfed in it. And then he lost it. He lost Grace, lost his last chance.
A man like me can never hold on to Grace. Not after all my sins.
This wasn’t the only time he had come back to this nursery simply to walk around. Younger workers, usually high-school or college-aged girls, would come up and ask if he needed help. Just like today. An older man needing help—that’s what they saw. And always he’d shake his head and continue to walk the rows, remembering when he did the same with Grace.
He told her he loved her, told her all the time. And she never reciprocated, never said those words. She felt wary of using them flippantly. But Paul knew she loved him, at least the Paul she’d gotten to know at this late point in her life. The teenaged Paul or the twenty-something Paul would never have crossed paths with Grace. They’d lived in separate universes then. But somehow, for a short time, they found each other.
