Tender Grace (17 page)

And she will give of herself. At least she’ll try.

When I opened the front door, Andrew was standing in profile across the room, and I was shocked that I could easily recognize him. Tom would have called him a “flat belly,” the term his golfer friends over fifty used for the thirty-something men who sometimes joined them. I’ve lost weight since Tom died because of a disinterest in food, but Andrew, appearing to have zero body fat, is ridiculously trim for a man his age. One does not look like that at fifty-five. He wore a cotton print shirt, stonewashed slacks, and loafers without socks. His brown hair had only a trace of gray, just enough to testify he does not color his hair. He most definitely looks like a man who would choose Clairol for Men should the need arise.

The door clicked as I shut it behind me, and he turned to look at me. The eyes are always recognizable, are they not? His were full of recognition and energy and delight. If I could have moved, I might have walked right back out the door.

He didn’t come closer, and I admired the intuition that kept him across the room, saying simply, “Hello, Audrey.”

Words out of his mouth, natural and pleasant, allowed me to move.

I walked into the room and smiled at two of my oldest friends standing there together, Willa and Andrew.

“You look beautiful,” he said.

“You always say that.”

“It’s always true.”

Willa had dinner on the table, except for the salmon Ed was bringing in from the grill, and we sat at the informal table in the room open to the kitchen and ate well and talked easily. The three of them seemed to sense I did not want to discuss anything personal. But when Willa insisted I repeat and elaborate on details of my trip for Ed and Andrew, I was willing, even glad, to contribute at least that much.

“I still can’t believe I am taking such a trip,” I said, concluding the major events that had transpired in the last month.

“You never did anything halfway,” Andrew said, admiration in his eyes.

He picked up the conversation then, providing answers to all our questions. He was married to Susan only five years. They divorced two years after the reunion. At that point, thirty years old, he had decided he had no desire to be governor of Oklahoma or any other state and joined a prestigious Phoenix firm.

“Prestigious, huh?” I asked. But the question was not a reprimand, and he seemed to know it when I flashed him a genuine smile. He actually laughed, acknowledging his pretentious tendencies.

Two years later he met and married Marlene, and they had a daughter, his only child, who is a junior in college. When he mentioned his daughter, Allie, I was strangely pleased that he pulled out his billfold to show me her graduation picture, and it seemed to make him happy when I touched the face in the picture and said, “Now,
that’s
beautiful.”

“Her mother and I divorced after she graduated and left for college, something we had planned for some time.”

“I’m sure your daughter hated that,” I said.

“She did. But she seems fine with it now. She’s very busy. She gets home every month or two and manages a night with each of us, a week on long breaks. It’s working out.”

When I asked him about work, he said he was a corporate lawyer, ready not to work so hard. He had been thinking of semi-retiring to a lake in Oklahoma and working from there when something interesting came along.

“That sounds like something people only dream about,” I said.

“Do I look like a dreamer to you?” he asked.

“Well, let’s put it this way—I can’t quite see you retiring to a lake in Oklahoma. But what do I know about it, really?”

I got up then to help Willa bring over dessert, and Ed and Andrew talked real estate investments. Andrew and his best friend, Dan, a realtor who sold him his first house when he moved to the valley, have invested in a variety of properties together. I placed Andrew’s carrot cake in front of him, thinking he could probably buy an Oklahoma lake, even if he didn’t build a house on it and settle down there.

“Thanks,” he said.

“You’re welcome.”

The ordinary and civil exchange seemed bizarre.

We talked a while longer, cleaned up the kitchen together, and considered playing a game of cards, but then by some sort of mutual consent, we decided to make it an early evening. The four of us stood in the living area near the entry, and he thanked Willa and Ed for dinner and said he had had a great time. “I can’t imagine a better one, in fact.”

Then he turned to me as though no one else were in the room. “I don’t think you could know how good it is to see you,” he said.

“It’s good to see you too, Andrew.”

If there was more to say, we did not say it.

seventeen

September 10

I enjoyed attending church with people I know and going out to eat with Willa and Ed afterward at a nice restaurant. I ate most of a small loaf of bread before my entrée was placed in front of me. Since my appetite has returned, I have enjoyed nothing more than carbs. If dieting becomes a necessity someday, I’ll have to find a diet that does not eliminate them. (It’s probably called a balanced diet.)

Willa and Ed dropped me off at the house and left to do a service project with their small group, organizing a food pantry, I think she said. Later, the group was going to gather for dinner at the home of one of the couples. Willa said that I could join them, but she had agreed to the project because it would give me the space she had promised. I thanked her for the invitation and also for her expectation of my preference for privacy.

“I’ll let you work,” I said, “while I lie out by your pool like a hedonistic bum.”

“Good plan,” Willa said as they backed out of the driveway.

I had been lying on the lounger an hour or so when I heard the door to the patio open and wondered what brought Willa back so soon. I put my sunglasses on top of my head, a crude but effective headband, and turned to see not Willa but Andrew standing in the afternoon sun.

“I took a chance you’d be here,” he said. “Do you mind?”

I grabbed the sarong lying on the concrete beside my lounger and covered as much of the fifty-five-year-old me as possible, while Andrew, dressed in long khaki shorts, a blue polo shirt, and another pair of loafers without socks, dragged a twin lounger over, saying he’d rung the doorbell and had come on in thinking we might be out here.

I told him there was no “we” this afternoon.

He seemed happy to hear that.

“Do you think Willa would mind if I got us something to drink?” he asked, halfway to the door before I could say anything.

He made the trip into the kitchen and back out and handed me a soda. “Thanks,” I said. “I really am thirsty. I shouldn’t have come out until later, I imagine. Do you have swimming trunks on under those shorts?”

“No,” he said, “but if it gets too hot, I can skinny-dip.”

“Willa has an assortment of bathing suits inside.”

“How provincial,” he said, smiling like the boy who had looked back at me in our junior language arts class. “But I didn’t come to swim. I came to see you. I should have risked calling, I guess.”

I wasn’t sure how I felt about this unscheduled visit. But if I’m honest, I’d have to say I wasn’t completely sorry to look up and see Andrew there. We sat beside each other and talked about our children, summarizing in an hour or so a lifetime with them. After he went inside to refill our drinks and sat back down again, I volunteered stories about the grandkids, which he encouraged with rapt attention and laughter in all the right places. The rude zoo bear story started the collection of anecdotes. It had been prompted by his asking what I am going to do while I’m here and my answering I know only what I’m
not
going to do.

At one point we needed to cool off, and we chose to do it in the pool rather than the air-conditioned house. He took off his shoes and sat on the edge of the pool, swirling his legs in the water, and I got in close to where he sat and rested my arms on the edge of the pool, elbows out, hands clasped, chin resting on top of them. He asked me about teaching, amazed that my career had come and gone, and I asked him about being a lawyer. It sounded like his devotion to each and every Phoenix ball team and his love of skiing and golf consumed as much of his life as his continued interest in the arts or job and family.

Back in the loungers, drip-drying in the sun, we sat for a while without saying anything. I closed my eyes, relaxing, even though my day alone had been interrupted.

“Are you awake?” Andrew asked.

“Almost,” I said without opening my eyes.

“Will you let me say I’m sorry?”

I opened my eyes to see Andrew facing me, sitting on the edge of his lounger, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped in front of him.

I closed my eyes again.

Then, with an involuntary sigh, I sat up on the edge of my lounger facing Andrew, our knees only inches apart.

“For what?” I took my sunglasses off the top of my head and put them on, though the sun was behind me.

“You might think this is crazy, but I’m not just sorry for breaking up with you, though God knows I’m sorry for that. I’m also sorry for ruining that night. It comes back to me, all the things you did to make it special, how you looked, how innocent and happy you were, and it makes me sick. I wish the memory weren’t so vivid. And so unrelenting.”

He took my glasses off my face, put them on the table between us, and looked into my eyes, searching not for the girl, but for me. Or so it seemed.

“I’ve made a good many mistakes in my life, but that was the worst.”

“You were practically a child, Andrew. I don’t mean that unkindly. It’s a fact I acknowledged only recently actually, and you should too. You were twenty years old!”

“So were you,” he said, “but
you
didn’t leave me.”

“Ah yes, well, I still think you should give yourself a break. Please. I already said I’ve forgiven you, but if saying you’re sorry helps, then fine. I accept your apology.”

“But it doesn’t change anything, does it? We still lost a lifetime together.”

I shrugged. “I’ve had a good life, Andrew, a life I wouldn’t trade for anything. Don’t waste a minute worrying about what you imagine we lost.”

He flinched.

Once again I had been presumptuous, or at least insensitive, and I tried to soften my last words. “I know about wasting minutes.”

“I doubt that.”

“You said yourself I don’t do anything halfway. When Tom died, I wanted to die. Or more precisely, I wanted our life back or nothing at all. I dwelled for fifteen months in Tennyson’s ‘The tender grace of a day that is dead will never come back to me,’ and I began to think I might stay there forever. This trip is an attempt to leave there. It is an attempt to live. Even live well. I hope you never choose to regret ‘a day that is dead.’ Suddenly, I want very much for you to live well too.”

“People would say I live very well,” he said.

“So, the angst implied in ‘losing a lifetime together’ was mere drama? I hope it was.”

He smiled. “You’re being impossibly direct.”

I smiled back. “I guess I am. What’s the matter with me? And you’re right. You do seem to have a great life.”

“Overall.” He looked at his watch. “You’ll be glad to know I’m leaving,” he said, standing up, taking my hands, and pulling me up too. “But I have tickets for the opera tomorrow night, and I hope you don’t have plans and will want to go. If you don’t say yes, I’ll cancel my plans for this evening and stay until Willa and Ed come home and find me skinny-dipping in their pool, singing ‘Tonight’ at the top of my lungs.”

“Don’t mention that song,” I said, though the context made me laugh.

Even without the threat, I found the opera appealing.

Later when I told Willa I was going, she said, “You’re kidding!”

I read what Tom had highlighted in the ninth chapter of John after Andrew left. Jesus has healed the blind man, and now he speaks of figurative blindness, which has spiritual and eternal consequences: “I have come into this world, so that the blind will see.”

I left home desperately needing to see. I have begun to feel like one who has been led out of the mouth of a cave into the mist of a coming dawn.

September 11

Eating a late breakfast in front of the television with Willa, I used the remote like a man, channel-surfing all the morning shows to watch the most interesting clips or interviews connected with the anniversary of our most recent national tragedy.

“Okay,” Willa said, finally turning off the television and collecting my dishes, “go get ready. I’m treating you to a spa day!”

“What?”

“It’s true. I called this morning, and miracle of miracles, we’re in. Facial, manicure, pedicure. I’m sure you haven’t done that on this little trip of yours. It’ll be great, and you’ll be oh so lovely and relaxed when you go to the opera tonight.”

“No massage?”

“You want a massage?”

I laughed.

It was four by the time Willa and I finished at the salon and ate a late lunch. When we got back to the house, she said she had a book to finish and that I should go to the casita and have some time to myself until Andrew arrived. I don’t know why I hesitated to come to Phoenix. Willa is fun and considerate, and the best friend anyone could have.