he asked. His eyes shone with determination and hope, and she had to look away. Her first loyalty was to her family; how could it be otherwise? She had to marry Brian for their sake, was resigned to it, would do it and would try to never second-guess herself afterward; this she had already vowed.
‘I know how it seems,’ she said, ‘but that’s exactly why it can never work. We’re too intense. That’s what this proves.’ The lie, same as she’d told him a year and a half before, tasted bitter. Love that had grown from childhood friendship and adolescent curiosity, that had now withstood so many long months of complete separation, could never be a damaging, undesirable thing – and yet that was the story she was selling.
He sat up and looked away. ‘I should’ve made you leave as soon as I heard you open the door.’
‘No,’ she said, touching his back. ‘We needed to do this, so we can put our past to rest.’ This much at least was true, she thought.
He looked over his shoulder at her, eyes narrowed. ‘You think this, one last quick fuck, is going to do it?’ he spat, making her flinch. ‘You thought you could come here and offer something you knew I couldn’t resist, and then marry Hamilton with a clear conscience? You are unbelievable.’ He lunged out of bed and pulled on his jeans, keeping his back to her.
The matter of her guilty conscience – and God knew it was guilty – was balanced by the good she was doing her sisters, her parents. What he said was exactly what she’d thought, and what she would do. She stood up and pulled on her shirt, absorbing his anger, deserving it. Then she reached up and unhooked her gold chain from her neck.
‘I never took this off,’ she told him as she draped it around his, hooked it, then smoothed his wavy brown hair, filing away yet another last sense of him.
‘Not even when he—’
‘Not even then.’
Carson turned and looked down at her. ‘Does he know I gave it to you?’
She nodded.
‘Then he’s as stupid as I am,’ he said, moving away from her to the window, to a view of endless rows of orange trees lit emerald by the early sun.
She loved that view, the way the Earth always looked newborn there in the rising mist. But by this evening, the view would be as lost to her as if she’d left the planet. Brian’s apartment windows did not look out on this, the kind of life she was born to. She would be a businessman’s wife. The man she would see on all her future mornings would not be this rangy one, whose long fingers were equally capable of picking fruit or strumming a guitar – or holding her hand or feeding her pizza or braiding her hair. Once she left here, she would never touch Carson again.
The thought was a gut punch. How, how could she have let this happen?
Her longing to take back her bargain with the Hamiltons surged, so strong it threatened to undo her. She could take it all back, reclaim her life as her own … If Carson would push her just a little, if he tried to persuade her, if he assured her that everything he didn’t even know was wrong would somehow turn out all right, she would come back to him.
But he stayed at the window, his heart already closing to her, and the moment passed.
She finished dressing, engulfed by regret but still daring to hope she would take a part of him with her, if God or fate allowed. Then she went to him and touched his arm.
He jerked away. ‘You better go,’ he said, turning. His face was closed now, too. This shouldn’t upset her – she had it coming, all his anger, all his venom, the chill of such a blank look – and yet she was cut through by it.
‘Okay.’ She would not let herself cry.
‘But here – let me give you this.’ He put his hand on her cheek and leaned in, kissed her with slow deliberation, kissed her with such passion and grace that she could no longer hold back her tears. Then he pushed her away and said, ‘Guess I’ll see you in hell.’
God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.
– James Barrie
Reminders. Meg didn’t need more of them, but that’s what she got when her father let her into his new apartment at the Horizon Center for Seniors Wednesday evening. He held out a plastic grocery bag.
‘What’s in there?’
‘Notebooks, from your mother’s desk,’ he said. ‘Take ’em now, before I forget.’
He did more and more of that lately, forgetting. Idiopathic short-term memory loss was his doctor’s name for his condition, which right now was more an irritation than an issue. Idiopathic, meaning there was no particular explanation. Idiopathic was an apt term for Spencer Powell, a man who lived entirely according to his whims.
Meg took the bag and set it on the dining table along with her purse. This would be a short visit, coming at the end of her twelve-hour day. Hospital rounds at seven AM, two morning deliveries, a candy-bar lunch, and then four hours of back-to-back patients at her practice – women stressing about episiotomies, C-section pain, stretch marks, unending fetal hiccups, heavy periods, lack of sex drive, fear of labor. And still four hours to go before she was likely to hit the sheets for five. An exhausting grind at times, but she loved her work. The ideal of it, at least.
‘So how was today?’ she asked, taking the clip out of her shoulder-length hair and shaking it loose. ‘Are you finding your way around all right?’
‘Colorful place,’ he said, leading her to the living room. He sat in his recliner – why did old men seem always to have one, fraying and squeaky, with which they wouldn’t part? ‘Pair o’ guys over in wing C got a great system for winning on the dogs.’
The greyhounds, he meant. ‘Is that right?’ she asked, looking him over. He looked spry as ever, and his eyes had regained the smile she’d never seen dimmed before last fall. His hair, once the brightest copper, had gone full silver, making him seem more distinguished somehow, silver being more valuable than copper. Distinguished, but no less wild than before – a man whose mind was always a step ahead of his sense. His diabetes was in check, but since her mother had died suddenly seven months earlier, Meg felt compelled to watch him closely. She was looking for signs of failing health, diabetic danger signals: swollen ankles, extra fluid in the face, unusual behaviors. All his behaviors were unusual, though, so that part was difficult.
The other difficult thing was how he kept confronting her with random pieces of her mother’s life. A pitted chrome teapot. Stiff and faded blue doilies from their old dining hutch. Rose-scented bath powder, in a round cardboard container with a round puff inside. Last week, a paper bag of pinecones dipped in glitter-thick wax. Trivia from a life forever altered by the sudden seizure of Anna Powell’s heart, like a car’s engine after driving too long without oil.
‘Yeah, those boys said they win more’n they lose, so what’s not to like about that? Hey – my left kidney’s acting
