The Last Time I Saw You (20 page)

“I do,” he said. “I have many lilacs. Acres. A small state, if not a veritable
nation
of lilacs.”

“Well, that’s enough,” she said. “That and this here chicken-fried steak once a month.”

He swallowed, then put his hands around his coffee cup and gripped hard. “This is too soon, I know, but would you—”

“Yes,” she said. “A
small
wedding. Amid the nation of lilacs.”

Ah, who could come close to her? That’s what Jeanine didn’t understand. Besides, he was
busy
. He was perfectly content. He was a fifty-nine-year-old man who had grown at least a little set in his ways, and he didn’t mind, he
liked
it. Why set himself up for a life of compromise—and make no mistake about it, a relationship was all about compromise—when what he really wanted now was something he’d solemnly declared to his mother as a seven-year-old: “I want to do whatever I want whenever I want to, forever.” To which she’d responded, “Oh my. Good luck, honey.”

Still, that pretty much
was
his life, now: he did whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted. His work was his passion: there wasn’t a day he wasn’t eager to get to the clinic. His free time was spent in ways he wanted to spend it, whether it was mountain climbing in Peru or bass fishing in Montana or sitting on the front porch with a glass of raspberry lemonade and doing nothing but watching the liftoff and descent of butterflies on his front yard bushes. The relationship he’d had with his wife was one that poets dream about, and he did not ever expect to have such a partnership, such a love, again. How much is one supposed to ask from life, anyway? He knows his own luck. He knows he’s had more than his share.

When they reach his truck, Candy pets the dogs, especially Lady, especially after Lester tells Candy about the dog’s circumstances. “But she’s going to live with you now, right?” she says, and Lester says, “Yup. In
style
.”

Candy stands with her arms crossed, smiling at Lady. Then she sighs and says, “Well, I’ve got to go and get my own dog and then get a cab for the airport.”

“Want a lift?” Lester asks. “I’d be glad to take you. Of course, you’d get dog hair all over your suit. Nice suit, by the way.”

“I like dog hair,” Candy says. “I’m tired of this suit. And I’d love a ride with you.”

Lester walks the dogs while he waits for Candy to come back. After she does, he drives slowly, because he is enjoying her company.

When they arrive at the airport, Lester gets out of the truck to open Candy’s door. He pulls a card from his wallet and gives it to her. “Let me know how you’re doing, would you?”

She nods, and tears come to her eyes, but she is smiling. Her phone rings, and she ignores it. “I want to thank you,” she says.

“And I you.”

She wheels her suitcase toward the terminal as he watches. Several other men watch, too. Candy Sullivan. He sighs.

He goes to the back of the truck and unhooks Mason from his harness so that he can move the dog into the front seat with Lady. After Mason hops in, he sees Lady and freezes. “It’s going to be a little different around here,” Lester tells the dog. “You might think at first that you won’t like it, but you will.”

TWENTY-ONE

“W
ELL
, I
TOLD
YOU NOT TO GO
,” S
ARAH
J
ANE
, M
ARY
Alice’s sister, says. “Didn’t I? I told you. All it did is make you sad. I absolutely
knew
that would happen!” She shakes her head. “Why would you possibly want to go back to be among people who were nothing but cruel to you? What good could possibly come of it?”

“I’m not sad!” Mary Alice tells her sister. “And a lot of good came from it! I don’t know what you think you just heard, but what I
said
is that I had a really good time! Don’t forget your purse when you go,” she says, pointing to the little evening bag lying on the kitchen table.

“I
see
it. What, is this a hint? You want me to go now? Fine, I’ll go.”

“I don’t want you to go, Sarah Jane, but as it happens, I have an appointment to get to.”

“For what?”

“Just… a routine check. A Pap smear.”

Sarah Jane narrows her eyes at her sister.

“It’s true! I have an appointment in twenty minutes. Do you want to see the appointment card?”
Oh, please don’t say yes
.

Sarah Jane puts the evening bag inside her larger purse. “Well, call me later if you want. I hope you feel better.”

“I’m fine!” Mary Alice watches her sister pull out of the driveway, scraping against the bushes as she always does, then attempting to straighten the car and scraping against them even more. She can see her sister’s mouth moving, swearing, no doubt. And of course it is the bushes’ fault, which translates to Mary Alice’s fault.

She cleans up the lunch dishes and then goes up to her bedroom to lie down. It is Wednesday afternoon, chilly and gray, and she took off from work, a personal day. She never lies down in the middle of the day and so she admits at least to herself that perhaps her sister is a little bit right.

She puts her arms around David the pillow, closes her eyes, and reviews again the events of the reunion. She had enjoyed being around so many people, being so talkative for so long. She likes living alone, but the reunion sparked something inside her, brought forward a need she has long denied. Maybe she’ll ask Marion to take English classes and she’ll take Polish classes. Maybe that way they’ll be able to advance their relationship to a more satisfying level of intimacy. Maybe she’s ready for that. One needs, on occasion, to unpack one’s heart, to share observations riskier than those about the weather.

She wishes things hadn’t taken a nosedive with Lester. He saw her pulling out of the parking lot; he nearly crashed into her! He could have waved her over; they could have made some plans to get together. But he chose not to acknowledge her and instead drove on, intent, she supposed, on getting more time with Candy Sullivan. Clever of him to arrive just as everyone was leaving—that way, they could leave together. She wonders if they did leave together. Maybe she’ll call Candy later and ask; she and Candy had established a bit of a friendship that Mary Alice looks forward to deepening.

He drove a nice truck, Lester; it suited him. And had a glad-eyed dog in the back to boot. Mary Alice knows she shouldn’t, but she envisions herself riding in that truck beside Lester, on the way to… oh, anywhere. A ball game, the Cincinnati Reds against the St. Louis Cardinals. A picnic in the fall, the leaves drifting down onto the plaid blanket, cocoa and marshmallows in a thermos. A driving trip to Texas, to see the tumbleweed. She knows she shouldn’t do this, dip into such outlandish wishful thinking, but she does it anyway. She falls asleep holding David close up against her.

She is awakened by the phone ringing, and answers it like a teenage girl, hope in her throat. But it is not Lester. It is Marion, asking in his halting way if she would like to take a walk this evening. She turns onto her back and contemplates the ceiling. She thinks maybe she’ll find a church that has Evensong. A surprise about her is that she has a lovely voice: let someone hear it.

“Marion?” she says. “I was thinking. Would you like to go into the city with me tonight? Would you like to drive to Cincinnati and have dinner there?”

A moment, and then he laughs and “Ho! What would you think!”

She’ll wear her reunion dress. It wouldn’t be out of line. It might as well get used again, and even again.

She climbs out of bed and goes to look out the window.

“I’m not
sad
,” she says, but look at how she presses her hand flat against the glass.

TWENTY-TWO

E
INER LOOKS OUT THE WINDOW AT THE FINE MORNING, REMEMBERING
again the events of the reunion one week ago. To think that he might not have gone! Why, it took years off him, filled up his tank but good. When Rita comes up with his breakfast, he’ll tell her to take the night off. He’s going to invite Desiree over for dinner. He’ll order out Italian, and
he’ll
wait on
her
. She’ll come, he knows she will, she gets a kick out of him. She’s told him that:
You old buzzard, you’re a gas, do you know that?

What a day! Not a cloud in the sky, the humidity lifted, the birds singing. He knows he’s developed a reputation for being a cantankerous old man, but today his heart is light, and if he could, he would stand on the rooftop and shout out glad tidings. “Blessings on the world!” he would say. “Blessings to us all!”

No bodily aches and pains today, either, it’s a miracle! He breathes in deeply, and then, as he draws his head back in through the window, he bangs it hard.

He cries out and puts his hand to the back of his head. He can feel the goose egg starting to form already; it’s going to be the size of Toledo. Well, isn’t that the way? Isn’t that life? Right when you’re on top of the world, something happens to take you down a notch. And vice versa, thank God.

He shuffles over the few steps to his chair and sits down. He presses again on the sore spot at the back of his head. He’ll endure the pain a bit longer—enjoy it, even, in the odd way people do, before he calls down to Rita to bring him some ice.

He stares at his pill bottles. He supposes he should get busy on doling them out. He picks up the first bottle and suddenly feels a crushing sensation on the right side of his head, nowhere near the bump he just got.
Now
what? It feels like a terrible, terrible headache, and it keeps getting worse. “Wait,” he whispers. “Wait a minute.” He lets go of the pill bottle, pushes it away from himself, as though it were the cause of his pain. The pressure increases even more, and he opens his mouth to breathe. He leans back in the chair and regards the ceiling, notices for the first time a cobweb at one corner. He opens his mouth to call Rita, but cannot speak.

Desiree
, he thinks. Then, in his mind’s eye, he sees the yellow centers of the daisies he was just looking at, the ones that grow in his garden. His wife planted them there, she loved daisies, and he remembers her face now with a clarity he has not enjoyed for years.

His vision starts to fade, and then he is bombarded with memories: a dogfight in World War II, the ironed scent of his mother’s apron, a bakery screen door, the flash of tadpoles in a stream, sleeping on the porch in summer, a painting he once dared to straighten on a museum wall, the fedora he wore for so many years. Now the pain seems to lessen, but he remains powerless to move, to speak. He blinks, struggles to stay alert, aware.
My name is Einer Olson. I live on…
What street does he live on? He must remember!

He counts in his mind to five; then, less ably, to ten. He tries to recall one by one the people he saw at the reunion:
Think! Stay alive!
But it is unequivocally upon him, death; he knows it now, and suddenly he is not afraid. He relaxes; his hands loosen their grip on the arms of the chair, his face goes peaceful, and time seems to achieve a kind of elasticity that makes him feel he sees the future: someone over for Sunday dinner at his ex-wife’s house and shaking the hand of her new husband. A woman moving the last of her things into her new house, a place full of light and flowers. A couple seated on a blanket in a park. A woman bending over her granddaughter and guiding her along, helping her learn to walk. And now, look: here are his tomatoes, they have ripened to perfection and they are sliced and laid out on a green platter and ready to be eaten, every one.

There is one more thing, he’s got to do just one last thing, so important. He struggles to get up, then slumps to the side of the chair. Rita finds him there like that.

TWENTY-THREE

A
T EIGHT-THIRTY ON A
F
RIDAY MORNING IN
F
EBRUARY
, Candy Sullivan awakens in her condo and sees quarter-size flakes of snow drifting down. She moves to the window to look down at the Charles River, as she does every morning, to take comfort from its graceful progression forward. Today she has another checkup and she supposes it’s natural for her to be nervous, yet there is a calmness at her center that makes her believe she will once again test negative.

“It happens, this kind of cure,” Dr. Johnston told her. “It’s rare, but it happens.” And she knows it does; she knows she’s not the only one. Still.

She’ll shower and go to see her doctor, and then she’ll meet with a group of women who have been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She does this every Friday, goes to a small room the hospital has provided and that she, with permission, had repainted. Rather than a bile-yellow color, it is now a soothing blue; and there is an oil painting on the wall of a field of lavender in late afternoon sun—Candy decided it would be better here than in her bedroom. She sits in a circle of women holding Styrofoam cups of coffee, their purses on their laps, their coats over the backs of their chairs, everything that belongs to them kept close to them, because familiarity is comfort.

Usually, at first, the women are full of fear, or they display a false bravado. Sometimes they cry together; more often, they laugh. Candy’s favorite story is one that a woman named Carolyn told: “So about an hour after I get home from being diagnosed, my best friend calls and says, ‘Well, I am constipated as hell. I probably have cancer of the poop shoot, so I guess this is goodbye.’ We used to joke around like that all the time. I take in a big breath and I look at the clock—I have no idea why, but I look at the clock, it says four forty-three—and I say, ‘Ginny? I just found out I have ovarian cancer.’ My mouth feels like I’m a puppet and someone else is making me talk, and I laugh. She says, ‘That’s not funny,’ and I say, ‘You’re telling me?’ She gets real quiet and then she says, ‘For real?’ and I say yes. And she bursts out crying and says all jerky, ‘Boy. I guess that beats the hell out of c-c-constipation.’”

When a new person comes, Candy tells the story of how it was this disease that brought her to herself, that let her find the kind of peace and happiness she’d craved and despaired of ever finding. She says that the diagnosis let her recalculate the meaning of time and of relationships. Mostly, though, she listens. She understands the relief in being heard, the cure there is in that, at least.

After the group, she’ll go to work at her part-time job at Winston Flowers; and then she’ll join Don for dinner. She met Don Seaver a couple of months ago in the waiting room of Dr. Johnston’s office. He’s the exuberant Man Who Will Not Die, although he would be the first to admit he’s getting closer, now. But, as he says, so is everyone else.

They enjoy each other, she and Don. She’s so glad to be with someone so deeply appreciative of everything, such a cornball. He makes her laugh. He makes her cry, in the good way. They watch old movies together under his grandmother’s quilt, they have long, searching conversations about everything from politics to the various meanings of the color red in art. They go to the Children’s Museum to watch children; they go to flea markets and buy; they go to the Huntington Theatre to see plays or to the ballet or to the symphony and then to Rosie’s bakery for dessert. Don’s partner, Michael, died of AIDS many years ago, but Don loves him still, and so sometimes they go to Michael’s grave and Candy sits a fair distance away on a bench while Don kneels at the headstone, his hand pressed against it.

Candy pulls her gloves on and steps out into the hall of her building. It’s overly warm out there, as it always is, and she likes this. She likes almost everything, lately. The last time she talked to Mary Alice Mayhew, who has become a close friend, she remarked on her own optimism, and said it felt kind of silly admitting to it, almost embarrassing.

“It’s not silly,” Mary Alice said. “It feels great, doesn’t it?”

And Candy said, “Yes. Yes, it does. It feels like I was wearing a big belt that was way too tight, and it has finally loosened. Loosened and fallen off! And I’ve looked down and said, ‘Oh. I had a
belt
on.’” She laughed and said, “If
that
makes any sense.”

And Mary Alice said, “Of course it does.”

Candy asked how Lester was, and Mary Alice said, “Well, I moved in with him last week.”

“Oh, my God,” Candy said, and Mary Alice said, “I know.”

“Oh, my God!” Candy said, and Mary Alice said, “I
know
.”

“Will you come and visit soon?” Mary Alice asked, and Candy said, “Turn back the covers on the guest bed. I’ll be there before you know it.”

“Come for Valentine’s Day,” Mary Alice said. “And bring Don.” Candy hesitated for just the briefest moment before she said okay.

It’s cold outside, and a bit icy. Candy turns her collar up and walks slowly down the sidewalk. In every window she passes, there is so much to see.

Pete Decker hurries in the shower. He’s late for dinner at his ex-wife’s house. The whole family will be there, and it’s been a while since he saw his children. He chooses a blue sweater to bring out his eyes, a nice pair of gray woolen slacks, loafers. He wouldn’t be caught dead in galoshes. He applies some cologne Nora was always crazy about and races out the door.

When he arrives, he looks through the window and sees them all gathered at the dining room table: Nora, his sons and daughter, and Fred with his new wedding ring flashing like a semaphore. His chest starts to hurt in that familiar way and he reminds himself to do what his therapist, Suzanne Collins, always tells him to do: take a breath, then look to see if there isn’t another side. And so he looks at the table and sees the place that’s been left for him. She’s right, there is always another way to look at things. She’s good, Suzanne. Beautiful, too, a smoky brunette with legs from here to oh-my there. He told her that once, how beautiful she was, and she said, “Thank you. That’s not what we’re here for.”

“Would you like it to be?” he asked, and she said nothing, only looked at him. He hates it when she doesn’t say anything and just looks at him like that, and meanwhile the meter’s running. She does that when he should know the answer, but couldn’t she just
say
that?

Though he thinks this therapy finally might be working. Which it should be; he could have bought a small country for what he’s paying her.

He rings the doorbell, rocks back and forth on his feet. And when Nora answers the door, he embraces her quickly, warmly, and then lets go.

“Who loves you?” Dorothy asks her granddaughter.

The toddler points to the exact center of Dorothy’s chest.

“That’s right!” Dorothy says. She lifts Jill from her crib and carries her down to the kitchen. “Grandma made you a sandwich,” she says. “And after you eat it, guess who’s coming over to play in the snow with us?”

“Ehwer!” the girl says, and Dorothy says quickly, “No, not Edward. Edward is all gone. Allll gone! Remember, Grandma said, BYE BYE, Edward! Remember? BYE BYE! Edward is
all gone
!”

The child leans around Dorothy to look at the sandwich cut into fours on her Elmo plate.

“It’s
Ronnie
who’s coming over,” Dorothy says. “Remember Ronnie?”

A baleful glance.

“Well, you’ll remember when you see him,” Dorothy says. And then, more to herself than to her grandchild, she shrugs and says, almost happily, “Or not.”

What a wise daughter Hilly is. She was absolutely right about getting out of your own way. As soon as Dorothy decided not to be in charge of getting a man into her life, didn’t they start showing up like crazy! And at her age! She dated a man from her French conversation class. She dated one she met in the popcorn line at the movies and another one whom she met when she was having her car serviced, and he was, too. “Come here often?” he’d said, that was his pickup line. Oh, she’d liked that one, he was very witty and he had old-fashioned manners and knew things like how to help a woman out of her coat and back into it. But they sort of petered out after a couple of months. Nothing seems to last for very long, but who cares? It’s not really a man she’s looking for. Turns out it never was. When Jill was born, Dorothy was the first one to hold her. Well, the first one after Hilly. Her daughter looked up at her and said, “Here, Mom, you want to hold her?”
That’s
what she had been looking for, but she hadn’t known it until that moment. She looked into that baby’s eyes and made sure they had an understanding, and then she handed Jill to her grinning—and weeping—father.

“Diddle diddle dumpling!” Dorothy says to Jill, and her granddaughter slams down her sippy cup, says, “My son
John
!”

“Peas porridge hot!” Dorothy says, and Jill says, “My son
John
!”

Dorothy laughs and tucks one of Jill’s golden curls behind her ear. She thinks of the afternoon hours before them. They’ll read books. They’ll rock baby dolls. They’ll play grocery store. Also, Dorothy will offer Jill the new puzzle she bought for her the other day, she’ll spread it out on the floor and remember
not to put it together herself
. Hilly has pointedly reminded Dorothy of this more than once. “Mom,” she has said. “You have to let Jill do it. Let her make mistakes; let her get frustrated; that’s how she’ll learn.” So Dorothy will do that. When she puts the puzzle pieces out, she’ll remember to sit back and just watch, trusting that things will, in their own time and in their own way, come quite satisfactorily together.