The Summer of Good Intentions (5 page)

“Could you put a hold on our mail before we go?” She paused. “You can do it online.”

“Sure.” His eyes stayed on the television.

She regarded his bare feet on the table. They were a pasty white, even a few weeks into summer. And they were pudgy. Her husband had developed pudgy feet. Unlike her sister's husband, Mac, who seemed to grow more robust with each passing summer, Tim appeared to sink more deeply into himself, a mollusk without a shell.

“Thanks. I'm putting a check mark next to ‘hold mail' on my list,” she pronounced. She grabbed her felt pen and made an elaborate checking motion, as if willing Tim to get up and turn on the computer to accomplish this one simple task.

“Mind if I change the channel?” he asked instead.

It took every ounce of will not to shout,
Please just do this one thing so I don't have to think about it!
But she managed to get out, “Sure. Go ahead,” through clenched teeth. He would do it on his own time. She gathered up the rest of the laundry and hoisted the basket on her hip. With the other hand she picked up her wineglass, the amber liquid sloshing a touch over the rim, and indelicately licked the edge.

“Think I'll head up. Pack the kids' last things. Get myself packed.”

“Sounds good.” Tim didn't look up. If she quizzed him on what she'd just said, she doubted he would know.

How was it, she wondered, that she could be principal of a school, in control of her teachers, her students, her budget, and yet at a total loss when it came to her own marriage?

She knew neither Maggie nor Virgie was a huge fan of Tim. For years she had defended her husband's quiet ways, his seeming lack of enthusiasm for doing anything other than sitting on the couch and watching sports at the beach house. But not this year. She'd had enough. Of course, Virgie was a fly-by-your-skirt kind of girl, flitting from one relationship to another. She was hardly a paragon of good relationship advice. But Maggie and Mac were good together. Maggie, who could sometimes seem to read Jess's mind, would have sage words.

As Jess climbed the stairs, she heard the familiar jingle of her cell phone, which lay on the bed where she'd thrown it when she got home. She picked it up. It was a text. From Cole. Again.
Can I see you?
Jess sighed.

She deleted the text and tossed her phone back on the bed.

“Arthur, are you there? It's me, Gloria.”

Arthur paused and stared out the window. Of course, he was here. He was picking up the phone, wasn't he? What a silly thing to ask. The better question was,
Why was his ex-wife calling him at seven-thirty in the morning?

“I'm here, Gloria,” he said. “Good morning. Is everything all right?” He tried to recall the last time they'd spoken. Maybe two weeks ago?

“Well, I was having my morning coffee, and I thought I'd share the most astonishing thing that happened,” she said.

Arthur waited. Whenever his ex-wife called, he was torn between gratitude that she still wanted to talk to him and renewed surprise that she was now living in Boston, a bustling metropolis a hundred-plus miles away. He poured himself a cup of coffee and added the cream.

“So,” Gloria resumed. “I was sitting by my kitchen window, when a coyote appeared in my courtyard, and I thought,
How odd  !
You never see a coyote in the city, certainly not this close. Do you suppose it's rabid? It probably is, right? Do you think I should call the animal control folks? I'd hate for someone to get bitten. You see these things on the news, but you never think they're going to happen to you. What do you think I should do?”

In their forty-six years of marriage, Arthur had grown accustomed to Gloria's penchant for thinking matters through out loud, as if she were jotting down all the possibilities on a public whiteboard. He remembered finding it an endearing trait.

“Where is it now?” he asked. He heard a shuffle in the background—Gloria, he presumed, going to peek out the window again.

“Oh, I don't know. It's not there anymore. Do you suppose it ran off into someone else's yard?”

“It's probably rabid if it's out in daylight,” agreed Arthur. “You should call animal control to give them a heads-up. I wouldn't go outside till they get there.”

“Right, that's exactly what I was thinking.” He could hear Gloria's nails clicking on the kitchen countertop, as if she was right there in their, rather
his,
kitchen.

“All right then. I guess I better get going?” he said, though he regretted the way it came out sounding like a question, as if he were seeking Gloria's permission to hang up.

“Yes, I wouldn't want to keep you,” she said hurriedly. “Thank you, Arthur. Toodle-oo!” The phone went silent in his hands.

Arthur placed the receiver back on the hook and wondered if he shouldn't have been more assertive about the whole coyotes-can-be-dangerous idea. He didn't think Gloria would try to outfox the animal, but the woman could be bold, recklessly so. For a moment, he considered calling her back and telling her he was serious about staying inside until they'd caught the predator. But then he shook his head at his own foolishness. They were divorced, for Pete's sake! Gloria could handle things on her own now.

Wasn't that what she'd been trying to tell him when she first slid the divorce papers across the dinner table one night, one line signed, the other still awaiting a signature?
His.

He crossed the kitchen and pulled the eggs out of the fridge. The shuffle of his slippers on the floor rang in his ears. It was a discouragingly familiar sound. He could now admit to himself that his days and nights were lonely without Gloria. Five hundred and fifty days without her by his side. That she had up and left him still took him by surprise, as if someone had shaken him and hung him upside down, then righted him and demanded he walk a straight line that he couldn't quite discern. Some mornings he rolled over in bed to fold an arm around her warm body, only to remember that she was no longer his, no longer slept beside him. He didn't need to worry about his sour morning breath making her turn away.

Whenever she called, she sounded breathless, as if she couldn't possibly talk fast enough to cover all her exciting news. When she finally paused to ask how Arthur was, it felt only partly sincere. She might make the obligatory inquiry about his new book, but he surmised that she thought his life's work—writing—to be one big joke. It pained him to think she'd never expected him to amount to much in the first place. He had always thought—or was the right word
assumed
?—that Gloria was as content as he was in their small coastal town, that she loved Maine's rocky beaches and its small-town feel. That she anticipated spending their retirement years doing pleasant things together, such as reading, and gardening, and hiking.

All those years of being mistaken. It tired him just to contemplate it. He cracked the eggs in the pan, poured in the milk, and with his knife, speared the yellow, shiny yolks that reminded him of melting suns.

Gloria always filled him in on the girls and the grandkids—in that way, at least, she was good. The twins were busy with sports, a fact that made him proud, and Luke was always saying something funny to make him laugh. His ex-wife made a point of writing down the grandkids' little quotes so she could remember to tell Arthur. Things like Teddy saying “the trees are leaking” on a rainy day, or Grace wanting to know if God and Santa were friends.

Well, he would see his grandkids soon enough. On Saturday! He couldn't wait to get to the summer house and wrestle with them, maybe shoot some hoops with the boys. He enjoyed kicking back a few beers with Mac, who'd always struck Arthur as a stand-up guy, a good match for Maggie. Jess's husband, on the other hand, was a different story. If anyone asked Arthur, his middle daughter had married a bit of a nincompoop.

But, of course, no one ever did. Except for Virgie, his baby.

She
cared what her old man thought, and at the idea of her, Arthur's heart performed a little pirouette in his chest.
His girl
. Funny how he thought of only Virgie that way. She was so much like her mother in personality, all color and flash, but she'd followed in Arthur's footsteps by becoming a journalist, a writer, and that made him exceedingly proud. He wasn't supposed to have favorites, but damn it, Virginia was a good kid.

He pushed the runny scrambled eggs onto a plate and carried them out to the deck to cool, then returned to pour himself another cup of coffee. He leaned against the counter and sipped. It seemed he was forgetting something, but he couldn't recall what. Had he talked to Maggie last night? He thought that he had, a conversation skimming the edges of his memory. But it hadn't been about next week. What was it again? He searched his mind, turned back to the phone as if it might offer a clue. Then he saw it: the sketch of a window on the notepad sitting on the counter. The broken window. He was supposed to call Jay to get it fixed. Or was it Maggie? It didn't matter. He picked up the phone and dialed, waiting until the answering machine clicked on.

“Hullo, Jaybird. It's Arthur here.” He paused, cleared his throat. “Listen. Maggie and the kids are down at the house, and there's a broken window in the downstairs bathroom. It would be super if you could stop by and fix it. I'll be there on Saturday and will pay you back in beers.” The machine cut him off before “beers,” but he knew Jay would understand. It was their standard barter.

It irked him that he'd let such a thing go. As he walked back to the deck with his coffee and paper, he tried to remember what he'd been doing at the summer house. When he sat down, the fork suspended over his plate, he was struck with instant recall. A small scar snaked across his right hand, starting at the fleshy, soft indent below the index finger and traveling down around his thumb. The skin had caught on the glass when it cracked. Arthur had been trying to let in fresh air, but the next thing he knew, his hand was bleeding like crazy. No wonder he'd forgotten to call about the window! He'd cut the hell out of his hand and had to go search for bandages in the upstairs cabinet. He'd been so focused on cleaning up the blood in the upstairs sink that he'd completely forgotten about the window. At the time, he had worried he might need a stitch, but the wound healed up okay.

He took a bite of his eggs, soggy and lukewarm. It was hard to make good eggs, he reflected. Gloria must have had a secret recipe, where she got the ratio of eggs to milk just right. He swallowed, dissatisfied. The weather stain he'd applied a few years ago was wearing thin on the deck railings, light specks of wood poking through the varnish, as if the deck had a bad case of eczema. He was struck with a pang, almost physical in his side, by a single word:
ephemeral
.
Everything was so goddamned ephemeral.

He lifted his eyes above the railing and could see the morning light playing on the water, small waves lapping at the shore. Corpulent clouds tumbled across a radiant sky. He didn't understand how Gloria could abandon such beauty. Hadn't she looked forward to more mornings like this, discussing the day's headlines, going for walks on the beach to a breakfast shanty where they could enjoy egg sandwiches still warm in their tinfoil? He sipped his coffee and thought to himself with a hint of bitterness:
Apparently not
.

When he replayed it in his mind, though, he couldn't honestly say why his wife had left. Perhaps he could have been more attentive, but it was strange to think that this had become an issue after forty-some years, the kids grown. No, he thought that Gloria had become a different person in the last year and a half, that she was going through a belated midlife crisis at sixty-five. He'd read about such things in the paper, heard about them at the store or the library when he bumped into friends. Jack Connelly had bought himself a Mercedes convertible and gotten hair plugs. A few years back, Keith Jefferson sold his car dealership and moved his whole family to Arizona. These things happened. He just never expected they would happen to him, by proxy.

He glanced at the newspaper headlines, then looked out on the water again, where the morning light frolicked on the waves as if in an Impressionist painting, perhaps a Monet or a Renoir. If Gloria were here, he thought with a small smile, they could debate it together. A gull swooped down to grab a fish and sailed off, the thing squirming in its beak, and Arthur felt momentarily sorry for it. The thought
ephemeral
seized him again. He took a few more sips of coffee, got up, tucked his paper under his elbow, and carried his half-eaten eggs back to the kitchen as he followed a path through the maze of piles lining his living room. It was hell without Gloria to pick up after him. Carefully, he smoothed out his paper atop the large stack that already stood by the front door. Someday one of the stories would make good fodder for his writing, a plot line lurking in the headlines.