Acts of Love

T
HE DRIED LEAVES
she had raked that morning rustled in the late-afternoon breeze. She turned to the door, thinking that perhaps it was footsteps she had heard, until the breeze died down and there was only silence, and Pete Conran's car driving up across the street, home from work at 5:45, home from work every night at exactly 5:45, some families were like that. Ann Waring walked to the base of the stairs and called up. “Come on, girls, get a move on. Your father will be here any minute. Julia? Ali?”

Ali came down first, her bright orange knapsack falling from her shoulder, Ann's younger daughter, still softly blurred, trying now to hide her excitement, unsure if it was quite appropriate. This tentativeness was new, one of the things that had happened this year.

“Did you remember to pack an extra sweater? It's going to be cold up there.”

“Yes, Mom.” Disdainful of her worry, but wanting it still, the maternal vigilance that she was not yet used to leaving.

Ann smiled at her and called back up the stairs. “Julia?”

Julia came clumping down, her narrow face, beneath a wedge of thick bobbed hair, planed by resentment. Ann remembered when she had been, if never a blithe child, at least somehow lighter. She suspected that the change could not simply be ascribed to the past year, or to Julia's nascent adolescence, when a shroud of sulkiness is to be expected, but that it had begun sometime when Ann's back was turned, her attention elsewhere. She had tried to ferret through the past to find the moment that she had so carelessly missed, but it remained elusive, scrupulously guarded by Julia's remoteness, and the only hard fact Ann was left with was her own discomfort with her elder daughter.

“I don't know why you're in such a hurry.” Julia's voice was low, sharp. “You know he's always late.”

“I keep thinking maybe he'll surprise us.”

“That's dumb.”

Ann knew that she was right, knew, too, that Julia blamed her for all the times she had waited, made them wait, for one thing or another, a sign, a change, sure that this time Ted would surprise them, just as Julia blamed her when she had stopped waiting, blamed her for that, too, in her intransigent thirteen-year-old heart.

Julia watched her mother closely, regretting it, as she always did, when she was aware of having hurt her, but repelled by how easy Ann made it. “Why do we have to go hunting anyway?”

“Because it's your weekend to spend with your father.”

“But why do we have to go hunting?”

“I don't know. Because his father took him.”

“So?”

Ann frowned, exasperated. Early on, Ted, resigned to what he referred to as the conspiracy of women beneath his roof, had decided that the best response was to raise his daughters not as sons, but as if they would be as naturally interested in the activities that he had previously presumed only sons, boys, would be. He brought them home model planes, he took them to his construction sites, he taught them how to throw a ball without pivoting their wrists, and they prospered. Only at times did Ann, who approved of the inclination as much as she disapproved of hunting, wonder how much of Ted's emphasis on his daughters' self-reliance was a subtle rebuke to herself.

“Just try it,” Ann snapped.

All three stopped when they heard Ted's car driving up, embarrassed suddenly to look at each other, to witness their own stopping, the orbit they still formed around him, the hole he had left. Ann tensed when she heard the key in the front door.

Ted strode in, oblivious, his muscular body and dark, febrile eyes radiating confidence for the weekend, for all the pleasures that would follow, for his own power to obliterate the past. “Hey guys, you ready to bag some deer?”

“I told you, I don't like you using your old set of keys.” Ann, hands on hips, unnatural, metallic. “You don't live here anymore.”

He smiled easily. “We can fix that.”

Julia took a step forward. “I don't want to go hunting. It's disgusting.”

Ted took his eyes slowly from Ann, her auburn hair, just washed, falling to the neck of a white sweater he didn't recognize. “It's not disgusting. There are way too many deer. Half of them will starve to death this winter.”

“But why do we have to kill them?”

“Because that's the way nature is. There aren't a lot of pacifists out in the wild.”

“Try not to pollute their minds too much up there, okay?”

Ted laughed.

“There are no bears, are there, Dad?” Ali asked nervously.

“And lions and tigers and…”

“Stop it, Ted. You're scaring them.”

“These girls don't scare quite so easily, do you? Listen, guys, why don't you go wait out in the car? I want to talk to your mother for a minute.”

They looked to Ann for affirmation, and Ted, noting this, always noting this, rolled up on the balls of his feet and then back, while she gave them the little nod they sought. Julia and Ali started for the door.

“Hold on there,” Ann called out. “Don't you have a hug for your old mom?”

They came back to embrace her while Ted watched this, too; it was, after all, how it should be. Ann held them too long, greedily inhaling the duskiness of their necks. She stood up reluctantly and watched them go, Julia turning to her just once before she went out the door, making sure. Ann and Ted waited until they left.

He took a step closer. “Well? Have you thought about it?”

“About what?”

He scowled impatiently. The other night, her lips, her mouth, her very soul resisting, and then not, taking him as he took her, body admitting what mind could not: need, belonging. “Didn't the other night mean anything to you?”

“Of course it did.” She looked away. “I'm just not sure what.”

“C'mon, Ann. You know as well as I do that the whole last year has been a mistake.”

“Maybe the other night was the mistake.”

“You don't mean to tell me you're happy like this?”

“I wasn't happy before, either.”

“Never?”

“Not for a long time.” The end overshadowed the beginning, she made sure of that, so when she thought of them now there was only the endless litany of daily petty crimes, predictable, insoluble, an ever-increasing spiral that left them finally with no ground underfoot, just the marshy quagmire of resentment. “I can't go back to how it was.”

“It doesn't have to be that way.”

“No?”

“I can change.”

“What do you want from me, Ted? You're the one who left.”

“Stupidest thing I ever did. What I want is to make it up.”

“What makes you think it would be any different?”

“We still have passion.”

“If you ask me, passion is a great excuse for a whole lot of crap.”

He smiled. “A whole lot of fun, too.”

She smiled partially, meeting him, and then shook her head. This was what was new, what was different, this shaking off, a muscle tic so slight and fragile.

“What about all the good times?” he pressed on. “You think you'll ever feel that way with anyone else? You won't.”

“I know that, Ted,” she said quietly. “But I'm not sure that's so terrible.”

“Goddamn it, Ann, what do you want from me?” His voice was harsh, edgy. “I'm doing everything I can to help you and the girls. What do you want?” He backed off, lowered his voice. “I'm sorry. All I'm asking is that you think about it before you sign the papers. For the girls' sake.”

“That's not playing fair.”

“I know.” He stepped so close that she became lost momentarily in the deep grooves that radiated from the corners of his eyes to his chin. They had been there since he was twenty, demarcations of experiences he had not yet had. “I love you.”

She swayed back suddenly. “You'd better go. The girls are waiting for you. Ted, promise me you'll be careful up there. All that stuff they watch on TV, I don't think they know that guns aren't toys.”

He laughed. “Your problem is you worry too much. Always have. The only thing that's gonna get shot is a bunch of Polaroids.” He headed for the door. When his hand was wrapped around the highly polished brass knob, he turned. “What are you doing this weekend?”

“Nothing much. I'm on duty at the hospital.”

His shoulders hunched. He dreaded her hospital stories, her obsessive recounting of the minute details, the shape and depth of wounds, the piecemeal erosion of the body by illness, how she swam in the specifics of the sick, the dying, until she was in danger of drowning in them, and taking him along. “Well, in between bedpans, I want you to think about us. That's all. Just think about us. Okay?”

She nodded slowly. He watched her long enough to be certain, and then he nodded, too.

“Good,” he said, smiling. “That's good.”

He didn't try to kiss her goodbye; he was much too smart for that.

 

E
MPTY HOUSES
, even the cleanest of them, have a particular odor, the scent of particles left behind, motes and dust swelling to fill the recesses. She stood motionless where he had left her. There were times when she truly hated his smile, the cockiness of it, hated herself most for answering it, first at seventeen: I've been watching you. She remembered the first drive they ever took together, in a kelly-green Oldsmobile convertible that he had spent four months working on, his hands on the oversized steering wheel, the dark hairs on his fingers, his smile as he turned to her, I've been watching you, there had never been anyone else, though she sometimes regretted that, regretted that she had gotten in that car, had never gotten out, not really, not until it was too late. She was watching him, too.

She looked at her watch and hurried up the stairs, stripping off her jeans and sweater as she went into the blue-tiled bathroom and ran herself a bath. Ted's weekends with the girls were the first time she had the spare hours for long soaks in the tub since they were born, and she had gotten into the habit of splurging on powders and mitts and creams she could ill afford. She took uneasily to luxury, though, and it retained the faint grimness of duty as much as pleasure, for she had constantly to remind herself, this is good, this is a step.

Ann was just putting on a three-year-old silk dress when the doorbell rang. She found her pumps and slid into them, making it downstairs by the fourth ring.

“Hello.”

Dr. Neal Frederickson stood before her, wearing a tweed jacket in place of the long white lab coat that was the only costume she had ever seen him in. The change, logical but somehow unexpected, was disconcerting, rendering the familiar unquantifiable, unsafe.

“Am I too early?” He registered the loss of equilibrium in her face.

“No. I'm sorry. Come in. Would you like, let's see, would you like a drink?” As soon as she turned to lead him into the house, she realized that her dress was unzipped. “Oh, God.”

He smiled easily and zipped it, his knuckles grazing her skin.

“I'm sorry.” Her round cheeks reddened; the predisposition to blushing was one of the things she had never managed to leave behind.

“For what?”

“I don't know.” She laughed, embarrassed. “I've never done this before.”

“You've never done what before?”

“Date. I've never gone on a date before. I mean, my husband, of course, but we were just kids. And that wasn't dating. I don't know what it was, but it was never quite dating. Jesus, listen to me.” She smiled. “You don't want to hear all of this.”

“Of course I do. You can tell me over dinner. I've made reservations at the Colonnade.” He handed her the bouquet of yellow roses that they had both been trying not to notice, hoping it would change hands in some unremarked act of grace.

“Let me just put these in water.” She was relieved to have an excuse to turn away for just a moment.

 

T
HE
C
OLONNADE
, on the ground level of a turreted Victorian pile on the west side of town, had opened in the 1950s during a flush cycle of Hardison's history, when the Jerret toy factory ten miles north was one of the most productive in the country. Families escaping Albany were moving to the wooded county, and there was even talk, though nothing came of it, of opening a new branch of the state university system within Hardison's borders. Since then, the Colonnade had managed to prosper through two recessions, owing to its reputation as the only true and proper place to suitably mark an occasion. For more than forty years, it had been the place where young men took their sweethearts to propose marriage, and later, if it had turned out well, for anniversary celebrations; the place where graduations and promotions were toasted by people who rarely ate out; and where those who had moved away often took their new spouses with their new money when they brought them home to visit. It remained much as it had been when it first opened, with crimson floral carpeting, teardrop chandeliers from France, and white-draped tables placed far enough apart to allow for at least the semblance of privacy in a town that did not put much stock in such frivolities. Ann glanced about the room surreptitiously, thankful that no one she recognized was there.