The Last Time I Saw You (2 page)

TWO

L
ESTER
H
ESSENPFEFFER AWAKENS ON A BATH RUG STUFFED
into the corner of a gigantic cage and stares into the open eyes of the bull mastiff. The dog wags his tail once, twice, and Lester feels his chest tighten with joy. Just before he fell asleep, he’d been preparing a speech for the dog’s owners about how he’d done his best, how he’d tried everything, but…Samson had ingested a few Legos the day before, which the owners’ great-grandchildren had left lying about. One had perforated his intestine. By the time he was brought to Lester’s clinic, the dog was in shock and the prospects for saving him were almost nil. Lester had slept in the cage with him to provide comfort not so much to the dog as to himself. He’d known Samson since he was a puppy, and he was very fond of the owners, an elderly couple who thought Samson hung the moon. They’d wanted to spend the night at the clinic, but after Lester told them he’d be literally right beside the dog, they reluctantly went home. Lester had hoped they’d get some sleep, so that they could more easily bear the news he was pretty certain he’d have to deliver in the morning. This is always the worst part of his job, telling people their pet has died. Sometimes they know it, at least empirically; on more than one occasion someone has brought a dead animal into the office hoping against hope that Lester can revive it. And when he can’t, he must say those awful words:
I’m so sorry.
He’s noticed a certain posture many people assume on hearing those words. They step back and cross their arms, as though guarding themselves against any more pain, or as though holding one more time the animal they loved as truly as any other family member, if not more. Oftentimes, they nod, too, their heads saying yes to what their hearts cannot yet accept.

But here Samson is, alive and well enough to give Lester’s face a good washing with a tongue the size of a giant oven mitt. “Hey, pal,” Lester says. “You made it! Let’s have a look at that dressing.” He rises to his knees and very gently turns the dog slightly onto his side. Samson whimpers and holds overly still, in the way that dogs often do when they’re frightened. There’s a lot of drainage, but nothing leaking through. He’ll give Samson something for pain and then call Stan and Betty. By the time he’s done talking to them—he can anticipate at least a few of the questions they’ll have—he’ll be able to change the dressing without causing the dog undue distress. He thinks Samson will be able to stand and move about a little this afternoon, and imagines him lifting his leg with great dignity against the portable fireplug his staff uses for cage-bound male dogs (the girls get Astroturf). The portable bathrooms had been Jeanine’s idea; she was always coming up with good ideas. She had the idea for Pet Airways before they came up with Pet Airways, although her suggestion was that pets and owners fly together—cages would be installed next to seats so that an owner could reach down and scratch behind an ear, or speak reassuringly, or offer a snack. This was a much better idea for alleviating the stress caused to animals when they fly, and Lester advised Jeanine to write to Pet Airways suggesting it. She said she’d rather keep the idea for herself because she wanted to start Dog Airways, as it is her belief that only dogs
really
care when their owners are gone. She is by her own admission a dog chauvinist, but she’s good to all the animals who come to the clinic, even the hamster whose hysterical owner brought her in because she was gobbling up her babies as soon as she gave birth to them.

Jeanine also had the idea that Lester should attend his high school reunion. When the invitation had come to the clinic, Jeanine had opened it, and then immediately begun a campaign to get her boss to go. Lester knew what she had in mind—she wanted him to find a woman.

When he was twenty-nine years old and had been married for only a year, Lester’s four-months-pregnant wife, Kathleen, had been killed in a car accident. Since that time, not only has he not remarried but he has not dated. Oh, he has some women friends, and he’s pretty sure some of them have had little crushes on him. But despite the charms of this woman or that, there’s never been anyone who moved him the way his wife did. He had just opened the clinic when she was killed; Kathleen had worked as the receptionist for the grand total of four days before he lost her. It doesn’t hurt the way it did at first—how could anyone survive such a thing?—but there is a place for Kathleen in his heart that leaves no room for anyone else. He is at peace with the idea of living the rest of his life alone, even if Jeanine isn’t.

But he did finally agree to go to the reunion. It might be interesting to see all those people again, even though he’d never really been close to any of them. He’d pretty much kept to himself, for many reasons. He wonders if any of his classmates look anything like they used to, or if at the reunion they’ll all walk around squinting at name tags, then looking up with ill-disguised disbelief into a person’s face. He feels
he
still somewhat resembles the boy he used to be, but then he guesses that everyone does that, sees in the mirror a mercifully edited version of themselves different from what everyone else sees.

Lester was very pleased to see that, on check-in at the reunion, he would be given a box lunch. He feels about the words “box lunch” the way Henry James felt about the words “summer afternoon”—that they are the most beautiful words in the English language.

But mostly Lester agreed to go to the reunion so that he could get Jeanine off his back. He’d even asked her if she’d like to accompany him. Jeanine is married, seemingly happily so, but Lester thought she might get a kick out of going. He’d told her her husband could come, too; they’d find a way to sneak him in. Or maybe they wouldn’t have to sneak him at all—anyone who looked to be in their late fifties would probably be able to walk right in, once people deserted their posts at the registration table. “That’s true,” Jeanine had said. “I used to think sometimes about crashing high school reunions, walking around asking people, ‘Do you remember me? You remember
me
, don’t you?’ just to see what they’d say. But no, you need to go alone or you’ll never meet someone. Not a wife, just someone to go to the movies with. It’s your
last reunion
!” What she had not said, but what Lester heard, is, “You’re getting old, now. It’s not funny. You’re going to
need
someone.”

“All
right
,” he’d finally said. “I’ll
go.
” And Jeanine had clapped her hands together and asked if she could pick out what he should wear and he’d said no, thank you. She’d asked if she could refer him to a good hairstylist, and he’d said all right because he actually did need to find someone new to cut his hair—his barber’s cataracts had gotten so bad, Lester always came out of the shop looking a little electrocuted.

As soon as Lester agreed to go to the reunion, he’d actually started looking forward to it. Not because he was thinking of meeting someone he could go to the movies with, no. He doesn’t need anyone to go to the movies with, he likes going alone, in fact. He likes sitting there with his popcorn and small Coke (“small” being roughly the size of a silo) and watching movies and thinking about them on his walk home. He likes putting in a garden every spring, nourishing it every summer, and putting it to bed every fall. He likes traveling to Europe every October. He loves reading, mostly history or biography, but classics, too; he never tires of rereading Proust or Dickens or Tolstoy or Flaubert. He also likes sitting in the living room of his small, well-tended two-bedroom house, listening to jazz while he enjoys a little scotch. He likes the way Rosaria changes his sheets every Thursday, the way the bed always smells so good then. He’d asked her once what she did to make the sheets smell so good and she’d put her hand up over her mouth, over her gold-filled teeth, and giggled. “Nothing especial; is detergent only, Doctor,” she’d said. And he’d said no, it was something more, it must be that she had magical powers, yes, that must be it, and she had giggled again.

Rosaria had worked for him for many years, and occasionally he accepted one of her frequent invitations to have dinner at her house—both she and her husband, Ernesto, were inspired cooks, and Lester also enjoyed the company of their ever-expanding family, especially the black-eyed grandchildren who crawled all over him and brought him their stuffed animals to examine and treat. Rosaria had tried for a while to fix him up with various single women she knew—she would invite women to dinner on the nights he came, all kinds of women—but he never felt drawn to pursuing a relationship.

Over and over, it seems, he has to explain that his life is fine. He has his work and his friends and the beauty of the rotating earth. He does not feel he lacks anything, and he certainly does not think going to a high school reunion will put him on the path for finding a replacement for Kathleen. No, he’s going to the reunion because there is something about it being the last one; and he also wants to go because, after he spoke to Pam Pottsman, he learned that Don Summers had become a vet, too. He wants to talk shop in a way he feels he couldn’t do otherwise—surely a high school reunion permits a kind of honesty one does not often encounter in one’s adult life. A high school classmate might be the equivalent of family in terms of offering an intimate access, as well as a lowering of the usual defenses. Lester imagines leaning against a makeshift bar and talking to Don about a lot of things: The ethics of chemo for extending the lives of suffering animals. The increase in aggressive behavior in dogs—is it from them being put in cages and left alone for so long? How many immunizations are now proven to be carcinogenic? Lester also wants to ask Don if he doesn’t feel a little like a bullshit artist when he advocates brushing pets’ teeth. Especially under anesthesia. Lester himself can’t recommend it. Give a dog a marrow bone, give a cat a break.

If he were going to be completely truthful, Lester would have to admit that there is one other person he is interested in seeing at the reunion, one he’s not thought about since he left high school, but now that he has been reminded of her, he wants very much to see what kind of woman she became. He hopes she shows up, but he’ll keep it to himself, that kind of hope.

In his office, Lester dials the number for Stan and Betty Kruger. It rings several times and then Betty answers in an uncharacteristically soft voice.

“Betty?”

“Oh, God,” she says.

“No, it’s
good
news,” Lester says, and Betty begins to cry.

“STAN!” she yells. “He MADE it! Samson’s OKAY!” To Lester, she says, “We’re coming right now. I’m in my robe and pajamas. Don’t look.”

After Lester hangs up, he sits back in his chair, his hands clasped behind his head. He thinks about a man he met on a train in France last year. The man, Hugo, asked him what the saddest experience he ever had as a vet was, and Lester said it was the day he had to tell someone whose son had died of cancer that the son’s dog, whom the father had adopted, had developed the exact same disease. It happened more often than people knew, that dogs developed the same illnesses as their owners: diabetes, adrenal diseases, cancers. It was one of those mysterious things.

“And the happiest experience?” Hugo asked, and Lester said the happiest came after one of the saddest: he’d made a house call to put down a fourteen-year-old tricolor collie named Mike whom Lester had often seen standing with the family’s kids at the end of the driveway while they waited for the school bus. Their mother had told Lester that Mike would go to the same spot and wait for the kids to come home in the afternoon, always at precisely the right time. “We never tell him the kids are coming,” she’d said. “He just knows. He’ll go to the door and bark to be let out, and the kids will arrive right afterward, without fail.” One Easter, the family had gotten a duckling, and he and the dog had become best friends—they’d slept together every night until the duck died, and Mike often visited the duck’s grave, his tail wagging on the way there, hanging low on the way back. On the day Lester came to put the dog down, the family had Mike lying on a quilt and had just offered him beef tips, which the dog had refused. Four months later, the owners had returned to Lester’s clinic with a new puppy, a beautiful female tricolor.

“So. This is life, eh?” Hugo said. “We lose something here, we get something there. The trick is to stop looking in the old place to find the new thing.”

Lester nodded, and then he stared out the window of the train at the countryside as they traveled through it. Sometimes it was hilly; sometimes it was flat; always, in one way or another, it was beautiful.

THREE

M
ARY
A
LICE
M
AYHEW PUTS THE SOFT-BOILED EGG INTO
the bright blue porcelain holder she bought at the thrift shop yesterday. Presentation is all. If Einer Olson finds his breakfast good-looking, maybe he’ll eat it. She adds a bud vase with a half-opened yellow rose, though this is more for her benefit than for his. Einer is indifferent to flowers. He says all they do is die.

She carries the breakfast tray into his fusty-smelling bedroom. He insists on eating in his bedroom, sitting in an armchair next to the window where he can look out onto the street below. She places his meal on the TV tray before him, and cracks open the window. “It’s beautiful out there today,” she says.

“Is it?”

“Seventy-six degrees, no humidity. None. Perfect September day.”

“Huh.” He picks up his spoon, taps it against the egg. “I don’t think I can eat this. Why don’t you have it?”

“I already had an egg for breakfast. It was delicious. That one’s for you.” She moves over to his bed to make it. It appears he had a restless night: the sheets are twisted, the pillows flung onto the floor.

“I can’t get it out of the shell.”

She smiles over at him. “Sure you can.”

He sits staring at the egg. Then, after a few tries, he slices off the top, dips the spoon in, and takes a bite. “That’s enough.” He pushes the tray away.

Mary Alice comes over to stand before him. “One more bite, and a half slice of the toast. It’s Swedish rye, from Uppman’s Bakery. You love their bread.”

He looks up at her, his eyes magnified hugely by his glasses. It seems hard for him to breathe today: through the thin fabric of his shirt, she can see the muscles in his shoulders moving to help him. And has he gotten paler overnight? She feels a rush of anxiety, and it comes to her that Einer is her best friend. She doesn’t want to think about what life will be like without him. She pushes his tray closer to him and speaks gently. “Eat just a little more. Then we can go out on the porch and read the newspaper and you can gripe.”

He looks out the window, considering. “No more egg. A bite of toast. One bite.”

“Two bites of toast, and a big drink of orange juice.”

“You drive a hard bargain,” he says. But then he mutters, “Deal.”

Einer is ninety-two years old and Mary Alice’s next-door neighbor. Two years ago, when Mary Alice moved back to town and into her parents’ vacant house, he’d hired her for caregiving services, though he claimed he didn’t really need help with anything except weeding the garden. She’d worked for him for a few weeks, then moved on to another job. Einer has a full-time caregiver named Rita Essinger now, but Mary Alice still comes over at least once a week to help out. While she takes care of Einer, Rita runs errands or just takes some time for herself. She always thanks Mary Alice profusely, but the truth is, Mary Alice offers relief for a selfish reason. She doesn’t want Rita to burn out and quit. It’s important that Einer have the right kind of person caring for him, and Mary Alice doesn’t want to have to go through another round of seemingly endless interviews on his behalf anytime soon.

Mary Alice had been working as a research assistant in a laboratory in Cincinnati when the economy went bonkers in 2008. After a few months of trying unsuccessfully to find another job in that city, she had moved back to Clear Springs. It only made sense—she could live in her parents’ house rent free, and besides, someone needed to take care of the place. Mary Alice’s mother had died only a few weeks after Einer’s wife had—Einer said it was because the two of them just
had
to have their coffee klatch every day, and if it meant Mary Alice’s mother dying in order to continue that, well, so be it. “They’re up there in heaven, sitting with their mugs and stollen and not letting God get a word in edgewise,” he’d told her.

After Mary Alice’s mother’s death, the house had sat empty for months. It was only partly because of the real estate crisis that had accompanied the country’s economic collapse. The house had problems. Not structural ones—it was a beautiful American foursquare, built at a time when there was a lot of integrity in both materials and contractors, and it had been well maintained. But it was reportedly haunted, and in a small town like this, word had spread; even the realtor had said she had a legal obligation to disclose this odd fact to potential buyers who hadn’t already heard the rumor. In addition to that, the interior had not been remodeled since it was built in the thirties; the one bathroom had a chain used for flushing the toilet, its tank up high against the wall. The kitchen had no dishwasher, no fancy stove and refrigerator, no granite counters. Mary Alice liked it that way. She especially liked the large walk-in pantry with the cabbage-rose-flowered drape that she and her sister used to make into a theater curtain when they put on shows. And she liked the ghost. All it did was occasionally make walking sounds on the creaky floors—it was like a roommate who kept you company but didn’t run up the grocery bill. So she came back to live in this house she’d grown up in, a place full of memories.

Sometimes when Mary Alice lies in bed in what used to be her parents’ bedroom, she thinks about the day her father died. It happened on a cold winter day, when she was a junior in high school. She’d gone to the auditorium for band practice after school. The sky had been dark and menacing all day, and she’d been watching through the high, dirty windows for the predicted snow to start falling. She’d been worrying about her mother having to come to school to pick her up—her mother was a terrible driver under the best of circumstances. But then the office secretary had come and spoken quietly to the music teacher, who told Mary Alice she needed to go to the principal’s office for a message. She remembers the other kids in the band falling silent to watch her walk off the stage and then across the polished floor, her footsteps echoing, her clarinet case bumping into her knee. Someone had whispered, “
What’s
her name?” and she had felt a shameful blip of hope that now she might finally be known for something.

She had suspected that the principal was going to deliver bad news, but she’d never anticipated how bad. Mr. Spurry told her there’d been an emergency involving her father and he’d been asked to give her a ride home. “Okay,” she’d said immediately, and then immediately regretted it, as though her easy acceptance of the fact made it more true than she wanted it to be.

Mr. Spurry had accompanied Mary Alice to her locker to get her coat and her books. Then he’d walked with her out to the teachers’ parking lot. He’d opened his car’s passenger door for her, which had embarrassed her. She’d sat stiffly upright in the front seat, her hands folded on her knees, her knees pressed tightly together, afraid that anything more casual might be seen as rude, or inappropriate; or that it might bring bad luck. She’d kept silent, and so had he. She’d listened to the music that played low on the radio, thinking that she didn’t want to know this much about Mr. Spurry: what he drove, what station he listened to, how his car smelled slightly of something like hamburger grease.

When she’d come into the house, her older sister, Sarah Jane, and her mother had been sitting at the kitchen table. Her sister wouldn’t stop crying and her mother was starkly dry-eyed, and each had seemed to Mary Alice to be equally bad. After Mary Alice found out what had happened to her father—an aortic aneurysm had burst; he’d never had a chance—she’d gone into her parents’ bedroom and sat for a while on her father’s side of the bed. She’d held his pillow and sat looking out the window as the sky abruptly lightened—the storm had never come. Later, she’d made fried egg sandwiches for the three of them for dinner. It was when her mother was washing the dishes from that dinner that she’d finally started to cry. She’d stood in her apron, her head bowed over the sink, her hands dripping at her sides, and she’d said, “Oh,
Ger
ald,” as though her husband had grievously disappointed her, and then she’d cried and cried. Mary Alice had put her arms around her mother and rocked her in place. Her sister had sat bent over in her kitchen chair watching them, her hands shoved between her knees, and she was rocking, too, moving in that same universal rhythm. Mary Alice had looked at the bent heads of her mother and her sister and a thought had come to her:
You’ll have to be the father, now.
So she had not cried. Not then, not that night, and not for many days afterward. The day after the funeral, her mother had gotten a job at the dime store, and the girls had helped out with babysitting and paper route money, so they were able to keep the house.

And here Mary Alice was again. The first day she worked for Einer, she’d told him she was glad to be back, she’d always liked Clear Springs.

Einer hadn’t quite believed her. He said it had seemed to him that she’d led an awfully lonely life, sitting out there on the porch steps with her book and her glass of red Kool-Aid almost every summer afternoon when all the other kids, including her sister, were at the pool, or the movies, or hanging around downtown. And later, when she grew older, spending most Saturday nights at home with her mom instead of going out with some fellow.

“You know what, Einer?” she told him. “I had a very happy childhood.” And when he frowned, deepening his already deep wrinkles, she said, “I did!”

Oh, it’s true that Mary Alice had had her moments, growing up; sometimes she sat outside Sarah Jane’s bedroom door listening to her gab on the phone and wondering if anyone would ever call her and inspire her to talk in that excited, girlfriendy way, full of gasps and exclamations; or in that low, seductive voice Sarah Jane used when she talked to boys.

As it happened, no one did call her. “Well, why don’t
you
call someone?” her mother used to ask, and Mary Alice couldn’t explain why not. It was…It was that something had to happen
before
you called, and that something had simply never happened to Mary Alice. So she learned—and came to like, really—a certain self-reliance. The world engaged and excited her; she looked forward to each day despite the injustices she endured in high school. She had been lucky to have a friend in her ninth-grade English teacher, a gay man, she realizes now, who’d told her that high school was good for getting a ticket into college, and that was all. Unless you counted the macaroni and cheese this school’s cafeteria served twice a month. That was good, too. Otherwise, put everything in perspective, he’d told her. Life is long; you’ll be fine, he’d said, and she was.

Mary Alice now works at a day-care center, in the toddler room. Her specialty is kids who bite—she somehow gets them not to. If a child bites someone, she takes them into the corner and talks to them in a very quiet voice and they almost never bite again. The other workers call her the Toddler Whisperer.

She has a way with children in general, she’s discovered; she, more than anyone else at the center, can make them laugh, and there is no tonic like the sound of children laughing. No pleasure quite so pure. She doesn’t make much money, but she’s happy surrounded by children and glue and blunt-nosed scissors and fat crayons and Play-Doh. She likes the stuffed animals, the colorful balls, the blocks. In the reading corner are an oversize rocking chair and kids’ books galore—the illustrations are marvelous, and the stories more intriguing than one might suspect. She likes watching children press their small hands against the sides of the day care’s gigantic aquarium and talk earnestly to the fish; and she likes watching them play in the housekeeping corner, roughly dressing and undressing dolls and adorning themselves with costume jewelry and making dinners of plastic peas and pork chops. And if you smack your lips and tell them you like their cooking, oh, how
pleased
they are!

She is heartened by the way the children care for one another: the bending down of one toddler to stare solicitously into the face of another, the outright expessions of concern:
Do you feel sad? Are you going to cry? Do you want a hug?
She likes the art projects, the finger paintings and Popsicle stick sculptures, the Mother’s and Father’s Day cards so loaded with glue and glitter they flop over in the hand. She likes when the children use cotton balls to make Santa’s beard and it looks instead like an odd kind of acne—invariably, the children are as sparing with cotton balls as they are generous with glitter.

She likes taking children for a walk on any kind of day: even a dreary, rainy day offers distinct pleasures, if only in displaying rainbows in oily puddles. She never would have considered working in day care if she hadn’t been let go from her job in Cincinnati; now she’s glad she did get fired. She has learned from the inside out the meaning of small pleasures, and she keeps her needs small, too.

Mary Alice used to long for a husband; she used to date a little bit and dream, dream a little bit and date; she had a list of names she would have bestowed upon her children, had she been lucky enough to have them, and had her husband agreed with her choices. Moselle had been her favorite for a girl, after the river. For a boy, she had liked Amos best; she thought it was an awfully friendly name. But the longing for a family of her own has stopped. In the gentlest and most good-natured of ways, she has given up on the prospect of being married or even living with a man. She did get one proposal, on her thirty-ninth birthday, but it was from a widower with four children under six. She felt bad for him, but they didn’t love each other, not by a long shot. In fact, the night he proposed, they were at the Wagon Wheel Steakhouse, and he couldn’t keep his eyes off their waitress, a buxom blonde with a sexy cigarette voice who had no interest in him other than knowing what kind of salad dressing he preferred.

Mary Alice has a body pillow named David. Her sister, Sarah Jane, gave it to her for Christmas many years ago as a kind of jokey imperative, but now she says she’s jealous of Mary Alice for getting to sleep with a body pillow rather than a real live man like her husband, who is guilty of every bed-partner crime known to man. Forever encroaching on her side. Farting. Drooling on the lacy pillowcases. Snoring so loudly Sarah Jane can sometimes hear him from the guest room, where she retreats at least two nights a week so that she can get some rest. She says her husband has violent dreams that sometimes have him kicking her. And eating crackers in bed, he actually does that. He eats crackers with cheese and red onion and horseradish mustard.