The Truth About Forever (12 page)

"I was warned, too," I told him, as he stood up. "I just saw that sculpture, and I got distracted."

"The sculpture?" He looked at it, then at me. "Oh, right. Because you know it."

"What?" I said.

He blinked, seeming confused, then shook his head. "Nothing. I just thought maybe, um, you'd seen it before, or something. There are a few around town."

"No, I haven't," I said. The breeze had stopped blowing now, and in the stillness the heart was just there in the center of the hand, suspended. "It's amazing, though."

I heard a door slam off to my right and glanced over to see Delia standing on the front porch of a white house, her arms crossed over her chest. "Macy?" she called out. "Is that you? Oh, God, I forgot to tell you about the hole. Hold on, we'll get you out. I'm such an idiot. Just let me call Wes."

"I'm on it," Wes yelled back, and she put a hand on her chest, relieved, then sat down on the steps. Then, to me, he added, "Hold tight. I'll be back in a second."

I sat there, watching as he jogged down the street, disappearing into the yard of the house at the very end. A minute later an engine started up, and a Ford pickup truck pulled out to face me, then drove down the side of the road, bumping over the occasional tree root. Wes drove past me, then backed up until his back bumper was about a foot from mine. I heard a few clanks and clunks as he attached something to my car. Then I watched in my side mirror as he walked back up to me, his white T-shirt bright in the dark.

"The trick," he said, leaning into my window, "is to get the angle just right." He reached over, putting his hands on my steering wheel, and twisted it slightly. "Like that," he said. "Okay?"

"Okay," I said, putting my hands where his had been.

"Have you out in a sec," he said. He walked back to the truck, got in, and put it in gear. I sat there, hands locked where he'd said to keep them, and waited.

The trucked revved, then moved forward, and for a second, nothing happened. But then, suddenly, I was moving. Rising. Up and out, bit by bit, until, in my headlights, I could see the hole emerging in front of me, now empty. And it was huge. More like a crater, like something you'd see on the moon. A doozy, indeed.

Once I was back on level ground, Wes hopped out of the truck, undoing the tow rope. "You're fine now," he called from somewhere near my bumper. "Just keep to the left.
Way
left."

I stuck my head out the window. "Thank you," I said. "Really."

He shrugged. "No problem. I do it all the time. Just pulled out the FedEx guy yesterday." He tossed the tow rope into the truck bed, where it landed with a thunk. "He was not happy."

"It's a big hole," I said, taking another look at it.

"It's a monster." He ran a hand through his hair, and I saw the tattoo on his arm again, but he was too far away for me to make it out. "We need to fill it, but we never will."

"Why not?"

He glanced over to Delia's house. I could now see her coming down the walk. She had on a long skirt and a red T-shirt, her feet bare. "It's a family thing," he said. "Some people believe everything happens for a reason. Even massive holes."

"But you don't," I said.

"Nope," he said. He looked over my car at the hole, studying it for a second. I was watching him, not even aware of it until he glanced at me. "Anyway," he said, as I focused back on my steering wheel, "I'll see you around."

"Thanks again," I said, shifting into first.

"No problem. Just remember: left."

"Way left," I told him, and he nodded, then knocked the side of my bumper,
rap-rap
, and started back to the truck. As he climbed in, I turned my wheel and eased around the hole, then drove the fifty feet or so to Delia's driveway, where she was waiting for me. Right as I reached to open my door, Wes's truck blurred past in my rearview mirror: I could see him in silhouette, his face illuminated by the dashboard lights. Then he disappeared behind a row of trees, gravel crunching, and was gone.

"The thing about Wes," Delia said to me, unwrapping another package of turkey, "is that he thinks he can fix anything. And if he can't fix it, he can at least do something with the pieces of what's broken."

"That's bad?" I asked, dipping my spreader back into the huge, industrial-size jar of mayonnaise on the table in front of me.

"Not bad," she said. "Just—different."

We were in Delia's garage, which served as Wish Catering central. It was outfitted with two industrial-size ovens, a large fridge, and several stainless-steel tables, all of which were piled with cutting boards and various utensils. We were sitting on opposite sides of one of the tables, assembling sandwiches. The garage door was open, and outside I could hear crickets chirping.

"The way I see it," she continued, "is that some things are just meant to be the way they are."

"Like the hole," I said, remembering how he'd glanced at her, saying this.

She put down the turkey she was holding and looked at me. "I know what he told you," she said. "He said that I was the reason the hole was still there, and that if I'd just let him fill it we wouldn't have the postman pissed off to the point of sabotaging our mail, and I wouldn't be facing yet another bill from Lakeview Tire for some poor client who busted their Goodyear out there."

"No," I said slowly, spreading the mayonnaise in a thin layer on the bread in front of me, "he said that some people believe everything happens for a reason. And some people, well, don't."

She thought for a second. "It's not that I believe everything happens for a reason," she said. "It's just that… I just think that some things are meant to be broken. Imperfect. Chaotic. It's the universe's way of providing contrast, you know? There have to be a few holes in the road. It's how life
is
."

We were quiet for a second. Outside, the very last of the sunset, fading pink, was disappearing behind the trees.

"Still," I said, putting another slice of bread on the one in front of me, "it is a big hole."

"It's a huge hole," she conceded, reaching for the mayonnaise. "But that's kind of the point. I mean, I don't want to fix it because to me, it's not broken. It's just here, and I work around it. It's the same reason I refuse to trade in my car, even though, for some reason, the A/C won't work when I have the radio on. I just choose: music, or cold air. It's not that big of a deal."

"The A/C won't work when the radio is on?" I asked. "That's so weird."

"I know." She pulled out three more slices of bread, putting mayonnaise, then lettuce, on them assembly-line style. "On a bigger scale, it's the reason that I won't hire a partner to help me with the catering, even though it's been chaos on wheels with Wish gone. Yes, things are sort of disorganized. And sure, it would be nice to not feel like we're close to disaster every second."

I started another sandwich, listening.

"But if everything was always smooth and perfect," she continued, "you'd get too used to that, you know? You have to have a little bit of disorganization now and then. Otherwise, you'll never really enjoy it when things go right. I know you think I'm a flake. Everyone does."

"I don't," I assured her, but she shook her head, not believing me.

"It's okay. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've caught Wes out there with someone from the gravel place, secretly trying to fill that hole." She put another row of bread down. "And Pete, my husband, he's tried twice to lure me to the car dealership to trade in my old thing for a new car. And as far as the business, well… I don't know. They leave me alone on that. Because of Wish. Which is so funny, because if she was here, and saw how things are… she'd flip out. She was the most organized person in the
world
."

"Wish," I said, reaching for the mayonnaise. "That's such a cool name."

She looked up at me, smiling. "It is, isn't it? Her real name was Melissa. But when I was little, I mispronounced it all the time, you know, Ma-wish-a. Eventually, it just got shortened to Wish, and everyone started calling her that. She never minded. I mean, it fit her." She picked up the knife at her elbow, then carefully sliced the sandwiches into halves, then fourths, before stacking them onto the tray beside us. "This was her baby, this business. After she and the boys' dad divorced, and he moved up North, it was like her new start, and she ran it like a well-oiled machine. But then she got sick…breast cancer. She was only thirty-nine when she died."

It felt so weird, to be on the other side, where you were the one expected to offer condolences, not receive them. I wanted my "sorry" to sound genuine, because it was. That was the hard thing about grief, and the grieving. They spoke another language, and the words we knew always fell short of what we wanted them to say.

"I'm so sorry, Delia," I told her. "Really."

She looked up at me, a piece of bread in one hand. "Thank you," she said, then placed it on the table in front of her. "I am, too." Then she smiled at me sadly, and started to assemble another sandwich. I did the same, and neither of us said anything for a few minutes. The silence wasn't like the ones I'd known lately, though: it wasn't empty as much as chosen. There's a entirely different feel to quiet when you're with some-one else, and at any moment it could be broken. Like the difference between a pause and an ending.

"You know what happens when someone dies?" Delia said suddenly, startling me a bit. I kept putting together my sandwich, though, not answering: I knew there was more. "It's like, everything and everyone refracts, each person having a different reaction. Like me and Wes. After the divorce, he fell in with this bad crowd, got arrested, she hardly knew what to do with him. But then, when she got sick, he changed. Now he's totally different, how he's so protective of Bert and focused on his welding and the pieces he makes. It's his way of handling it."

"Wes does welding?" I asked, and then, suddenly, I thought of the sculpture. "Did he do—"

"The heart in hand," she finished for me. "Yeah. He did. Pretty incredible, huh?"

"It is," I said. "I had no idea. I was talking about it with him and he didn't even tell me."

"Well, he'll never brag on it," she said, pulling the mayonnaise over to her. "That's how he is. His mom was the same way. Quiet and incredible. I really envy that."

I watched her as she cut another two sandwiches down, the knife clapping against the cutting board. "I don't know," I said. "You seem to be pretty incredible. Running this business with a baby, and another on the way."

"Nah." She smiled. "I'm not. When Wish died, it just knocked the wind out of me. Truly. It's like that stupid thing Bert and Wes do, the leaping out thing, trying to scare each other: it was the biggest gotcha in the world." She looked down at the sandwiches. "I'd just assumed she'd be okay. It had never occurred to me she might actually just be… gone. You know?"

I nodded, just barely. I felt bad that I didn't tell her about my dad, chime in with what I knew, how well I knew it. With Delia, though, I wasn't that girl, the one whose dad had died. I wasn't anybody. And I liked that. It was selfish but true.

"And then she was," Delia said, her hand on the bread bag. "Gone. Gotcha. And suddenly I had these two boys to take care of, plus a newborn of my own. It was just this huge loss, this huge
gap
, you know."

"I know," I said softly.

"Some people," she said, and I wasn't even sure she'd heard me, "they can just move on, you know, mourn and cry and be done with it. Or at least seem to be. But for me… I don't know. I didn't want to fix it, to forget. It wasn't something that was broken. It's just… something that happened. And like that hole, I'm just finding ways, every day, of working around it. Respecting and remembering and getting on at the same time. You know?"

I nodded, but I didn't know. I'd chosen instead to just change my route, go miles out of the way, as if avoiding it would make it go away once and for all. I envied Delia. At least she knew what she was up against. Maybe that's what you got when you stood over your grief, facing it finally. A sense of its depths, its area, the distance across, and the way over or around it, whichever you chose in the end.