“The organ.”
“Ah.”
“Makes me wish for Bert Kane Presbyterian,” she said. (Bert Kane Presbyterian had just an upright piano.)
“Well, we could have held it there,” her father said dubiously.
“Be a little hard to explain why all these Californians should have to fly to Pennsylvania, though.”
“Yes, well, and then there’s the matter of my not belonging to Bert Kane anymore.”
“You don’t belong?” she asked, turning to look at him.
“I haven’t for quite some time,” he said. “I wrote to Reverend Sands and told him I was resigning on grounds of disbelief.”
“Disbelief! What made you stop believing?” Willa asked.
“Well, I’ve never believed, actually.”
“You haven’t?”
“Reverend Sands came to call at the house and asked if I would reconsider. Not reconsider my disbelief, he said, but reconsider my resignation. He said, ‘Many of your fellow members probably don’t believe, either, but at least in church you put yourself in position for belief. Otherwise you reduce the possibility.’ ”
“Good point,” Willa said thoughtfully.
“Yes, it was a good point. But I’d given it sixty-some years by then and I figured any further developments were unlikely.”
Willa laughed, and then she laid her hand on his, but only for an instant. She was so grateful to have him there that she almost felt she should hold her breath so as not to scare him away.
Sean’s speech was just what it should have been—affectionate and regretful, but not in the least mawkish. He welcomed the guests and thanked them for coming, and he offered up a memory of Derek’s willingness to play catch with his sons whenever they requested. While Sean was talking, Ian looked at his knees. Maybe he was wishing now that he had agreed to speak too, although he had flatly declined when he was invited. (Not for the first time, Willa reflected that in some ways the relationship between her two sons echoed her own relationship with her sister. “Sean : Ian :: Me : Elaine” was how she envisioned it. But why was it that at this moment, Ian was the one she sympathized with?)
The owner of Sports Infinity spoke, resurrecting the image of the “bright young go-getter” whom he had hired right out of college. And one of Derek’s brothers said a few words about what a good brother Derek had been. Then there were a couple of testimonies from old friends of his, mostly describing boyish misdeeds and practical jokes. Willa especially appreciated those; they were the only references that presented him as something other than the Saintly Late Departed. At the end the minister supplied by the funeral home delivered a short, generic prayer, and then everyone rose to sing “Abide with Me,” and that was that.
* * *
—
Elaine’s flight left at seven that evening, which was so close on the heels of the funeral reception that Willa arranged for a taxi to take her to the airport. This gave her another twinge of guilt. Back home, people drove their guests to the airport themselves and the whole family tagged along. But anyhow, she reasoned, their only car now was her little Toyota, which Willa (a nervous driver) never drove more than she had to. They’d have had trouble fitting everyone into it, even.
It would be something of a relief to send her sister packing, she was sorry to say. She had begun to feel the strain of Elaine’s silent criticisms—or not so silent, on occasion. She’d asked Willa if there were some decree that women in California had to wear white slacks. She’d referred, supposedly teasing, to Willa’s “cloned hairdo.” And she was so distant with their father. Willa had asked her outright, finally, “Lainey, are you mad at Pop?”
“Mad at Mr. Good Guy? Me?” Elaine had asked sardonically, which Willa found mystifying, because he certainly was a good guy, and what was wrong with that?
So when the taxi honked out front, Willa was almost glad. She gave her sister a brief hug and said, “Bye, Elaine. Thanks for coming.”
Although the instant the door closed behind her, Willa had a sense of missed chances.
But then she changed into her oldest, softest bathrobe, and her father took off his coat and tie and put his slippers on, and she reheated a few of her friends’ casseroles and set them out on the kitchen table. First Ian and then Sean reappeared, wearing jeans now, to announce that they wouldn’t be eating here themselves, but she didn’t mind as much as she might have. She was so tired of talking, reacting, looking lively and appreciative. She and her father ate without speaking at all, in fact, until her father asked, at the end, “How about I fix us some cocoa?,” and she said, “Okay.” She didn’t lift a finger to help, just sat passively while he hunted down the ingredients and a saucepan.
He had told her he would be here a few days, and almost superstitiously she had refrained from asking exactly how many. She indulged in a daydream that he might stay forever. They could mosey along together very comfortably, she figured. She knew enough not to crowd him, to let him go his own quiet way. And he was so good with her boys.
When she was a child she used to imagine that her mother might painlessly die somehow and her father would marry a lovely, serene woman who would sit at Willa’s bedside when she had a bad dream and lay a cool palm on her forehead. Willa had pictured this woman in layers of flowing white chiffon, for some reason. Her name would be something like Clara, or Claire. Something calm.
Well, okay, that had not happened. But now here was this alternate plan.
Her father set a mug of cocoa in front of her and then sat down across from her with his own mug. “It’s going to be hard for a while,” he told her.
“It’s going to be unbearable,” she said. Meaning “So can’t you stay and help me through it?”
“When I lost your mother, I didn’t see how I could even get up in the morning. One morning after another: I didn’t see how I could manage it.”
Willa watched him. She knew how devastated he’d been by her mother’s death. (It had been totally unexpected—a catastrophic stroke.) Willa had flown home to find him mute and gray-faced, barely able to go through the motions. But then the next time she saw him, a few months later, he seemed to have recovered. She had not been especially surprised. He was a very self-reliant man.
But now he said, “I’d pick up my toothbrush and I’d think, Oh, what’s the point? I’d open the fridge and think, Why bother?”
Willa knew that feeling. Applying her lipstick before the service today, she had stopped to gaze at her face in the mirror and realized that she had no earthly reason to care what she looked like anymore. But she couldn’t quite tamp down the notion that her father’s loss had been easier. Why, her mother had been such a handful! Her father, though, seemed unaware of that. Even now his eyes grew watery, and he looked down into his mug a while before he resumed speaking.
“I’ll just tell you what I’ve learned that has helped me,” he said. “Shall I?”
“Yes, tell me,” she said, growing still.
“I broke my days into separate moments,” he said. “See, it’s true I didn’t have any more to look forward to. But on the other hand, there were these individual moments that I could still appreciate. Like drinking that first cup of coffee in the morning. Working on something fine in my workshop. Watching a baseball game on TV.”
She thought that over.
“But…” she said.
He waited.
“But…is that enough?” she asked him.
“Well, yes, it turns out that it is,” he said.
* * *
—
He didn’t stay forever, after all. He left the following Wednesday. She and the boys took him to the airport—Sean driving—but he wouldn’t let them come in with him. So on the sidewalk in front of the terminal Willa hugged him goodbye and the boys shook his hand, and then he picked up his suitcase and went in alone.
Now she settled into the dailiness of grief—not that first piercing stab but the steady, persistent ache of it, the absence that feels like a presence. Sean graduated from high school, but Derek was not there to clap and cheer. Ian dropped all talk of taking a year off, but Derek would never know about it.
Out on a walk one afternoon, she came across a young woman kicking a soccer ball across a lawn with her three little boys. As Willa approached, a car pulled into the driveway and the woman turned toward it and her face lit up and she called, “Look who’s here, guys!” Then a man got out of the car and the little boys ran toward him.
Willa could remember how that used to feel, that lifting of the spirits when your husband comes home from work.
She was asked to lunch by her friends, and to movies and dinner parties, and she did her best to hold up her end of the conversation. Some of her friends were uncomfortable with death and pretended it hadn’t happened, which filled her with a perverse desire to mention Derek’s name at every opportunity: “Derek always claimed…” and “Derek used to say…” Some were oversolicitous, telephoning too often and treating her like an invalid who needed dutiful tending. But she knew it was important to maintain her social connections. Or so she had been told.
Over the summer Sean worked as a lifeguard at the local pool, and Ian got a busboy job, and Willa took two courses at the college near her house. She was thinking she might finish her degree, which had been sidelined by her first pregnancy. Then maybe she could find a job teaching French or Spanish at some local school. Not that money was an issue, what with the trust fund Derek’s grandfather had left him, but she was concerned about how she would fill her time once Ian, too, had graduated and moved out.
She wondered if her sons would keep in touch with her after they were gone. Would they remember their childhoods fondly, or were they storing up grudges against her? She had tried her best to be a good mother—which to her meant a predictable mother. She had promised herself that her children would never have to worry what sort of mood she was in; they would never peek into her bedroom in the morning to see how their day was going to go. She was the only woman she knew whose prime objective was to be taken for granted.
Sean had a serious girlfriend that summer and Ian joined a garage band, so they were almost never around in the evenings. When she went to bed she left a light on for them downstairs, and later she would wake to find the whole house dark and she would know they must have come home. Returning to sleep after that was the hard part. The word “insomnia” didn’t do her condition justice, she felt; she was awake all the rest of the night. Where once she had despaired if she woke to find it was four a.m., and therefore too early to get up (five being her idea of the earliest possible hour to begin her day), now she was awake at two, and then at one, and sometimes even at midnight, when the boys hadn’t yet returned. Maybe this was because for the first time in her life, she was sleeping alone. She’d gone straight from the room she shared with her sister to the room she shared with her college roommate to the room she shared with her husband. With a husband you could turn and fling an arm across him, set your cheek against his back, and nestle into sleep again. Alone she could only reflect, and worry, and wince at something she had said yesterday and dread something she had to do tomorrow.
She often thought back to the moment she and Derek had met. It was at a party known as the Numbers Racket, which the sophomore boys threw every year to welcome the freshman girls. A boy drew a number from a fishbowl, and whichever girl held the matching number would be his date for the evening. Willa’s number was 45. When Derek called it out, she was dismayed; he was so good-looking and so comfortable in his own skin that she felt sure he would find her a disappointment. But she held up her number, timidly, and he crossed the room at once. “It’s you!” he said.
What he meant, it turned out, was that he had seen her before, studying in the library, and had asked someone who she was. This person had shrugged and said, “Haven’t a clue.” And then the very next evening there she stood, holding up number 45. But Willa, of course, didn’t know any of this at the time. To her it sounded like “It’s you, whom I have been looking for all my life!” And it might as well have been that, really, because from then on they were a couple.
Those things don’t happen twice. She knew that. A well-meaning friend had told her that even if she couldn’t imagine it right now, someday some man would love her again and she would love him back. Willa just gave her a blank look. She had trouble even processing the words.
Her father’s suggestion about breaking her life into moments didn’t work for her, it turned out. Although she did keep trying. But what helped more was to walk down a crowded sidewalk sometimes, or through a busy shopping mall, and reflect that almost everyone there had suffered some terrible loss. Sometimes more than one loss. Many had lost their dearest loves, but look at them: they were managing. They were putting one foot in front of the other. Some were even smiling.
It could be done.
* * *
—
One day when she was studying for a quiz her doorbell rang, and she answered to find a stranger in his early fifties or so, tall and dark-haired, with a sharp-boned face. “Mrs. MacIntyre?” he said.
“Yes?”
She could tell he wasn’t a salesman because he was dressed too casually for that, in well-cut khakis and a polo shirt such as the men in her neighborhood wore. Still, there was something suspiciously hopeful about him, something he wanted of her.
“I’m Carl Dexter,” he said.
“Yes?”
“The…I’m the driver of the…”
He was searching for words, but he didn’t have to; she knew him now. Whole scenes came back to her out of some closed-off room in her mind: he was taking hold of her shoulder and saying, “Are you all right? Are you hurt? You have to come away from the car.” He was standing on the grassy embankment talking to two policemen, and a bright thread of blood was trickling down the side of his face.
“Oh,” she said.
“I got your address from your husband’s firm. I hope you don’t mind.”
“No,” she said, “I don’t mind.”
“I don’t want to disturb you.”
“You’re not disturbing me,” she said. “Won’t you come in?”
Something about the way he stepped over the threshold gave her the impression that he was holding a hat in his hands, although of course he wasn’t; it was just that he was so hesitant. She was about to take him to the living room, but on second thought she asked, “Could I offer you some coffee? Or tea?”
“Water,” he said urgently. This surprised her, until she saw that his lips were noticeably dry and he seemed to be speaking with difficulty. It must have been due to nerves. “Please,” he added, and then he cleared his throat and said, “If it isn’t too much trouble.”
“Not at all,” she said, and she led him into the kitchen. “Have a seat, why don’t you?” she asked, because it occurred to her that he might be more comfortable here. “Would you like ice in that?”
“Just straight is fine.”
He pulled out a chair and sat down at the table. His bearing was so tense that his back didn’t touch the chair back.
She poured him a glass of water from the bottle in the fridge and handed it to him, and then she drew out a chair herself and settled across from him. He drank till the glass was almost empty before he put it down.
“I never asked about your injuries,” she said. “Or I don’t think I asked. I can’t remember much.”
He merely turned one hand over on the table, dismissing the subject. “I needed to tell you I’m sorry,” he said. “I mean, sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you,” she said.
In the early days she’d had to fight down the impulse to say “Oh, that’s okay.” But now she was more adept.
&n
bsp; “I can’t stop thinking about it,” he told her. “Did I cause it, in some way? Was I responsible for it? It’s true he cut me off, but did I play some part in it?”
He didn’t seem to expect her to answer. He was gazing at some point to one side of her, as if replaying the scene in his mind.
“I knew I’d become a bad driver,” he said. “Or a less good driver, at least. Distracted. I’d noticed that. I’d be traveling along and all at once I’d think, Whoa, look at how close that other car is! I’d pull into my garage and thank God I’d made it home without an accident.”
“I do that every time I get behind the wheel,” Willa said. She wasn’t joking, but he must have imagined she was, because he lifted one corner of his mouth in a brief, unamused smile.
“Before then I’d been a fairly decent driver,” he said. “I wasn’t always distracted. But then I…see, this is not an excuse or anything, that’s not how I mean it, but this past winter my wife left me.”
“Oh, dear,” Willa said.
“I’m not saying that to make you feel sorry for me or anything.”
“No, of course not,” Willa said.
“We’d been married twenty-eight years. I thought we were doing fine. No children, but…it always seemed to me we had a perfectly okay marriage. Then one day she says, ‘I have to tell you something: I’m in love with somebody else.’ ”
Willa tilted her head and looked sympathetic.
“I wanted to argue with her, at first. ‘Look,’ I wanted to say, ‘we all get crushes, for God’s sake.’ But I didn’t, because, I don’t know, I guess I thought I’d be giving myself away, right? But I did say, ‘Maybe it will pass.’ And she said, ‘No, I want to marry him. I’ve already talked to a lawyer.’ ”
“Well, that is really, really hard,” Willa said.
“Oh, God,” he said. “I come here to say I feel bad about your husband, and listen to me, yakking about my own little troubles.”