The Last September: A Novel (16 page)

“I won’t let her talk to customers,” Charlie said.

“That will be great,” I said. “A silent hostess.”

We both laughed, but I pressed the issue. “Seriously. Wasn’t that a little creepy?”

Charlie shrugged. “She’s not so bad,” he said. “It’s mostly a put-on, I think. Trying to be shocking.”

Charlie had one more glass of wine, and we snuck away from the party without saying good-bye to the artist.

WHEN SARAH WAS BORN
a month later, Eli came to see us in the hospital. He was thickly medicated, the bloat just beginning to take its form. Still I let him hold her. Eli sat down in the chair next to my hospital bed, and Charlie lowered the swaddled, squirming miracle into his brother’s cradled arms. The room filled with Eli’s stale and acrid scent. His clothes looked disheveled, stained, and he hadn’t combed his hair. Staring into the baby’s face, his eyes were dull and glassy. He must have been registering some connection, though, peering close enough so that her newborn eyes could absorb his features. Sarah’s little pink skull cap slid off her head against his elbow, revealing the vulnerable bald head, the soft spot at the crown. Eli petted her, gentle, as if she were a kitten.

A nurse swept into the room to deliver my lunch. She looked at Eli and then at me—shocked that I would let this man hold my baby. But I just smiled and looked back at Eli. He held Sarah so carefully. In his arms, she started, clenched fists jerking up above her head, the Moro reflex. It made Eli start, too. Then his face broke open into something like a smile, but awkward and unsure. Muted. I remembered the way his face used to look, how easily and naturally it moved into happiness, and felt the usual pang of loss. Still. I not only believed that Eli would never hurt Sarah. I couldn’t imagine him hurting anybody.

Someone
must
have told us how much work a restaurant required. Not to mention a new baby. In that muggy, exhausted summer, I often wondered why we didn’t listen. The Sun Also Rises opened in the throes of my sleepless nights and bleary days. Charlie would disappear midmorning and not come home till almost midnight. Every afternoon before service started, I walked downtown to eat dinner. Charlie would bring two plates of his favorite special to the table and sit down to eat with us, ignoring whatever crises arose in the kitchen until someone came to get him. When Sarah woke up and squalled, I had to walk her around the room while irritated waitresses set tables and polished glasses. Usually I ended up back at the table, trying to nurse Sarah and eat at the same time. Which made it kind of odd that Deirdre liked to join us for her shift meal.

“It’s nice,” she told me, “that Charlie lets us eat off the menu.”

I nodded, but this was news to me, and I wondered how much it was costing. If I suggested to Charlie making a pot of pasta for his crew, he would just smile. Where would the fun be in that?

Deirdre picked at her food, usually wasting more than half. There was a gleam behind her pale eyes as if her thyroid function ran a little too high.

“He’s so generous,” she said. “Not like my boyfriend. You wouldn’t believe how stingy he is.”

“The same guy we met at the gallery? He seemed very nice.”

“Oh, he’s nice. Just don’t ever try to get him to pay for anything. He got mad at me for drinking his beer. So I said I’d put a jar on the counter and put a dollar in it every time I drank one. I thought that would embarrass him. But he thought it was a great idea. Now every time I have a beer at my boyfriend’s house, I have to put a dollar in the jar.”

There was a pause, her fork in the air, her pale eyes focused intently on me. Deirdre owned the kind of good looks I recognized but did not appreciate. To me, she looked hard, too sculpted. I didn’t know if I was supposed to exclaim over the awfulness of her boyfriend or offer a commiserating complaint about Charlie. Luckily he came out of the kitchen just then, a dishrag over his shoulder. He never wore an apron, so his T-shirt and jeans were splattered with food. Sarah had fallen asleep in my lap. When Charlie sat down, I transferred her to him very carefully and finished my dinner, wishing Deirdre would find something to do so that we could have this, just a little bit of family time out of the day.

“Can you say something to her?” I asked toward the end of August, with the beginning of school looming and me fully versed in the pitfalls of Deirdre’s relationship. Our downstairs neighbor, an undergrad named Maddie, had agreed to babysit for Sarah when I had class, but I wasn’t sure how we were going to pay her. Business at the restaurant wasn’t picking up the way we’d hoped, and we took out a new line of credit. Everything felt tinged with tension, and I wanted that time—one meal a day—to ourselves.

“Sure,” Charlie said. “I’ll mention it.”

For a few months, it was just me, Charlie, and Sarah. Deirdre didn’t eat at all, just moved around the restaurant getting things in order. Charlie must have phrased it in the most diplomatic way possible, because she never looked dejected, just coldly intent on her tasks. Watching her, I thought that a better plan would have been to hire an up-and-coming chef and put Charlie at the front of the house. I think I even smiled to myself as I thought it. All the hearts too soon made glad, returning time and time again just to see Charlie. It was a mistake to keep him hidden in the kitchen.

ONE NIGHT IN EARLY
December I came in after an evening class to find Charlie and Deirdre alone in the restaurant, eating dinner together. The plates of food in front of them—duck for Charlie, some kind of prime rib for Deirdre—looked rustic, not plated for fine dining. It was only nine thirty, and the restaurant should still have been open. But the sign in the door had been turned to closed, and judging from the swept and cleared state of the dining room, the absence of all other employees, they had stopped serving for at least an hour. The door jingled when I opened it, but neither of them looked up.

Deirdre saw me first. She waved, but the gesture seemed more frustrated than welcoming, as if I’d interrupted something. Charlie followed her gaze and stood, pushing back his chair. He looked so genuinely pleased to see me that suspicion settled before it could rise. I noticed that Deirdre’s eyes were red.

“Brett,” he said. “It was dead tonight. Do you want something to eat?”

I followed him back to the kitchen where he put together a plate of prime rib just like Deirdre’s, laying a sprig of rosemary and drizzling reduction sauce over the mashed potatoes. “Her boyfriend broke up with her,” Charlie said.

Back at the table, I took my seat between them. Charlie poured me a glass of red wine, though he knew I preferred white. Getting another bottle would have meant leaving me alone with Deirdre, but that didn’t occur to me until much later, combing through every possible detail.

She sat back in her chair a little, sipping her own glass of wine. Right then I felt bad for her, and a little guilty for banishing her from our table. Staring at me, her blue eyes glazed with tears.

“I’m really sorry about your boyfriend,” I said. She probably didn’t need reminding about all the times she’d complained about him. “How long were you together?”

“Three years,” she said. “Didn’t I tell you that?”

“You probably did. I’m sorry. That’s so hard.”

She turned away from me, looking down at her untouched plate of food. Charlie rested his arm on the back of my chair, not around me exactly. But still. Making a statement. I took a bite of the meal and a sip of the wine. Complimented the food.

“Thanks,” Charlie said. He lifted his arm from the back of my chair and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. I remember thinking that it was a little mean of him, to be solicitous toward me while Deirdre nursed a broken heart.

“He’s an idiot,” I told her. “You’re so beautiful.”

She nodded, her eyes filling with tears, too choked up to answer.

Deirdre’s face—strained and devastated—stayed with me all the next day. I thought about how she’d tried to be my friend and I’d shooed her away like a mere employee. After class, heading home, I passed the Amherst Day Spa. Out on the sidewalk they’d propped a green easel chalkboard, advertising a soothing peppermint pedicure for fifty dollars. The air felt crisp, a chill gathering. I had about a hundred dollars left on my last emergency credit card.

On my way to the restaurant, sun beat down on the back of my head, incongruously accompanied by a chilly wind. I felt lightheaded with my financially irresponsible good deed. It seemed like something Charlie would do. At home, I collected Sarah from Maddie and headed over to the restaurant early, around four thirty. Eventually Charlie planned on opening for lunch, but for now only did dinner service, which started at six. The dining room clanked peacefully with the sounds of silverware being laid, goblets being polished. Deirdre stood behind the hostess podium talking on the phone, wearing a black sheath dress, her long hair loose. She was one of those rare people made more beautiful by distress; clearly she’d been crying again, and it brought color to her cheeks, and darkened her eyes. I could see the sheet in front of her, empty, as she went ahead and penciled in the table for two. As she spoke, she glanced up at me and the sadness in her eyes became something blander, as if I were obstructing something she meant to look at, just behind me. I shifted slightly to the left, the gift certificate in my hand. Deirdre hung up and looked at me, waiting, as if she expected me to tell her how many people were in my party. I slipped the gift certificate onto the reservation book. She stared down at it, uncertain.

“It’s a pedicure,” I said. “I thought you could treat yourself.”

Deirdre’s brows knit together. She picked up the gift certificate, a pale mauve piece of cardboard wrapped in a beige piece of twine. “That’s so nice,” she said, not able to look me in the eye, just melting and breaking in front of me. She raised the gift certificate to her brow, as if shielding herself from too-bright light, and didn’t start to cry until she’d turned around and headed toward the back of the restaurant, the kitchen.

Even looking back, I like her better in that moment than I ever had or would. It was a very human reaction. Someone she’d done a terrible wrong to was doing her a kindness. I saw that, even as I realized exactly what it meant. My gift broke through whatever rationalization she’d worked out for her relationship with Charlie and made her feel guilty enough to break down—though not guilty enough to keep from turning away from me and heading straight for my husband.

From where I stood, I could just see him, showing a sous-chef how he wanted something chopped. And as he raised his head, noting Deirdre coming toward him, his face rearranged itself into an apologetic kind of sympathy, not seeing the wife, standing back and watching—absorbing—it all.

And then he did see me. It wasn’t so obviously visible, the fear that crossed over his face. Deirdre probably didn’t register it, not knowing him—whatever she might think—the way I did. But the way he blinked and paused, that was Charlie, crestfallen, and it was the last shred of proof I needed.

WALKING AWAY FROM THE
restaurant up Main Street, I couldn’t get out of the commercial district fast enough, the wide plate windows serving my reflection back to me—in my boxy wool coat and flyaway hair. Unlike my mother and me, my father had specialized in twentieth-century literature. He would have appreciated my thinking of Rosemary Hoyt the first time I saw Deirdre. And he was the one who chose my name. Hemingway had modeled Lady Brett Ashley on Mary Duff Stirling, a glamorous British socialite. Trying to make it home, I couldn’t have felt less like my namesake. Instead I felt like Hemingway’s wife must have, the first time she’d read the book, realizing the romantic lead had been based on Duff and not her.

At Maddie’s, Sarah lay asleep in her removable car seat. As I carried her down the hallway to our apartment, I could hear the phone ringing from inside. Sarah slept, a thin bubble on her lips, sparse blonde curls damp with sweat on her forehead. I waited till the ringing stopped before opening the door, then carefully lowered the carrier. Tab thumped off the couch and wound herself around my legs. I couldn’t bend to pet her. My hand found its way to my heart, fingers curving into my chest as if I could actually cup it, squeeze it, measure it. But the beating didn’t seem to be any faster than usual. Maybe it was a sign—that I hadn’t seen what I thought I had, that I was wrong, that it was all just some weirdness of Deirdre’s combined with some paranoia of mine.

Behind me, the door opened and in came Charlie, wearing an expression so similar to the one I’d seen—as Deirdre had walked toward him in the restaurant—that if I’d been holding something in my hands I would have thrown it at him. The door closed loudly behind him and Sarah woke, her infant’s wail filling the apartment almost before her eyes were open. I bent down to unbuckle her.

“Look,” Charlie said, his hands outstretched, his eyes unable to stop twinkling. Did I ever see Charlie without that light in his eyes, even when his mother was dying? No matter what was taking place, he always had that air, of being deeply amused by the world, even deeply moved by it. But never quite wholly, entirely, here.

Sometimes now I imagine him turning, with that expression, toward his killer. Whatever argument had arisen, Charlie would have been so certain he could soothe the other person—could elicit whatever response he wanted. Maybe he could. Maybe that’s why the killer needed to wait for him to turn his back, before bringing the hammer down.

I sat down on the couch and unbuttoned my shirt to nurse the baby. Charlie took a step closer to us.

“It’s over,” he said. “I swear,” he added, his tone supplicating enough that I understood he meant him and Deirdre rather than our marriage.

“Over,” I said. “
Ove
r
?” The worst word I’d ever heard. Absolute confirmation. There was something between Deirdre and Charlie, enough under way that now it could be declared
over.
While I had sunk all my inheritance into the restaurant that paid her salary. While I had, here in my arms, a baby, so that I couldn’t even yell.

“Brett,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

“Shut up.” If I hadn’t been holding Sarah, I would have put my hands over my ears. I would have screamed. As it was, my voice came out low and certain. “You need to leave.”

“Leave? Brett. Come on. I love you.”

“No,” I said. “You don’t. You never did.”

“You know that’s not true.”

“Go,” I said. “And don’t come back. You can stay with her. You can move in with her.”

“I can’t,” he said. “I don’t want to. Even if you never talk to me again, that wouldn’t happen.”

“That’s lovely,” I said. “That’s beautiful, Charlie.”

“I love you,” he said. “We’re a family.”

“How nice of you to remember.”

I looked down at Sarah, Charlie’s little replica. How could I even know which one of us he wanted to stay for? Charlie stood there, his face begging me to be reasonable. Reasonable! I could see the clock from where I sat. Dinner service would be starting. And what did it matter, anything he said? Despite every stupid thing I’d done since the day I’d met him, I was smart enough to know that someone who’d cheat on me would lie to me, too.

“Charlie,” I said. “Just go. Go cook. And don’t come back here. For once in your life, be a gentleman. Don’t make me leave my home with a baby. Find another place to stay.”

He paused for a moment, then shook his head. “No,” he said. “I’m leaving now, but I’m coming back. We’ll talk about this. It’ll be okay.”

I closed my eyes, felt his lips on my forehead. If I let myself cry he would stay, and I needed him to go. It didn’t escape me how soon he must have followed me out of the restaurant, prioritizing my meltdown over Deirdre’s, and I knew how pathetic it was to find comfort in that. Charlie would be coming back, and weak-minded, lovesick girl that I’d always been, I was in danger of listening to whatever he said.