“I surely would,” Arthur says. “Thank you.”
“Six o’clock,” Lucille says. And then she shows Arthur her left hand. At first he thinks she’s showing him that it’s shaking and he’s all set to reassure her and tell her that sometimes his hand shakes, too, but it’s not that. What she’s showing him is a ring on her pinkie. Tiny little diamond winking in the light.
“Engagement ring?” Arthur asks.
Lucille nods.
“Well, congratulations!” He wonders if she’s the oldest bride ever. But no, he’s read about matches made in nursing homes between people so old they look like apple dolls. But happy apple dolls. No, love is never foolish. Or unnecessary.
“Beautiful ring,” Arthur says. Nola taught him that. Always say an engagement ring is beautiful. Because it always is.
“Thank you. Do you know, he bought this for me when we were seniors in high school? He took all his money from his summer jobs to buy it and he was going to propose on graduation day. But then…Well, he ended up marrying someone else. He had to. But he kept this ring all these years—imagine!—and last night he gave it to me.” She looks down upon it with a blushing tenderness. “We’ll have to get it sized, of course, my finger is way bigger than it used to be. But I’m wearing it anyway!”
“ ’Course you are!”
She stands. “Well, I’ve got to go in, Arthur. I’m making a fancy dessert that requires some refrigeration time.” She unlocks the door, says over her shoulder, “I’ll see you for dinner.”
He hesitates. “Should I…dress?”
She laughs. “Well, don’t come naked!”
“I just meant—”
“I know. Just be comfortable, Arthur. I’ll see you at six.”
Arthur climbs the stairs to his house. He’s moving awfully slowly. He’ll take a nap, then maybe work on the roses. He pulls out the mail and finds a note folded over. Maddy?
He opens it and reads:
I am the father of Madeline Harris. I found your address written on one of her notebooks. Please call me at 555-3376 as soon as possible.
Steven Harris
Now Arthur moves quickly into the house and to the phone.
—
After Lucille gets the white chocolate pudding with blackberry curd into the refrigerator, she takes off her shoes and her glasses and lies down on the sofa for a rest. The dessert looks so pretty in the wineglasses. She can hardly wait for dinner to be over so that she can serve it. Dinner is just pork roast and mashed potatoes and peas. Anyone can do that. Though she does have a way of making the outside of the roast awfully crisp and the inside awfully tender. But the pudding! People like dessert served in a wineglass. It’s festive. It makes a big impression. “Well, look at this!” she thinks Frank and Arthur will say. And she will wave their admiration away. It was nothing, she’ll say, though that’s not true. No. It’s a pain in the ass to make that dessert, the way you have to stir and stir until just the right point, the way you have to strain both the pudding and the curd to eliminate any lumps. But it’s worth it. The dessert is lovely to look at and absolutely delicious. She made six servings, because they’ll all want seconds.
She has drifted off when the phone rings, waking her up. She thinks about ignoring it, but now that she has Frank, she isn’t about to ignore a phone call.
And it is Frank on the phone, telling her he’s going into the emergency room. St. Vincent’s. Some chest pain, probably nothing, but he might be late for dinner. Don’t worry.
“I’m on the way,” she says. She’s begun to cry. Stop it, she tells herself.
“You don’t have to come,” he says. “I’ve had this happen a few times before. My nitro might be expired. They’ll give me a little medication and I’ll be good as new. Anyway, I’m off. I’ll call you when I’m on the way over to your place.”
“I’m coming,” she says, but the line has gone dead.
Very calmly, she puts on her shoes and her glasses. Gets her purse. Puts down her purse to go into the bathroom to brush her teeth and put on lipstick. Comes out and grabs an AARP magazine so they’ll have something to read together in the waiting room. Or the treatment room. Later, from the hospital, she’ll call Arthur to let him know that dinner’s off. Although maybe it won’t be. Maybe they’ll get Frank right in and right out. Maybe he shouldn’t have that second dessert, though. She won’t offer it as an option.
By the time Lucille gets into the ER, forty-five minutes have passed. She inquires at the desk and is told that he was taken right in. Thank goodness. There are so many people here! And how sick can some of them be, anyway, she wonders, sitting there playing with their phones, sleeping under their jackets, or yakking away at top volume to the people who came in with them. Laughing even louder.
“Can I go in with him?” she asks the receptionist at the desk.
“Only relatives,” the receptionist says.
“I’m his fiancée,” Lucille says, and the receptionist smiles what Lucille thinks is a very condescending smile. But then Lucille shows her the ring and she says, “Treatment room four. Down the hall and it will be on the right-hand side.”
When Lucille is almost there, she hears “Code Blue, Emergency Room.” They say it three times. It’s not Frank. It can’t be. But then she sees a red light flashing above room number four. People start flying by, someone pushing a big cart, and the door to the room is shut in her face. Absurdly—she knows it—she knocks. No one answers. She can hear some doctor inside—a woman, it sounds like—barking orders for medications.
She knocks again. “Frank?” she says, into the crack of the door. “Frank?”
Someone comes up behind her and pulls her gently by the arm, the receptionist who told her she could go in. “But I’m his fiancée,” she says, and the receptionist says, “I know, but you can’t go in there now. Let them stabilize him.”
“I won’t get in the way,” Lucille says.
“You can’t go in!” the woman says. “Please go back to the waiting room!”
So Lucille goes back to the waiting room and sits down. Her fingers are moving like they’re knitting. This just can’t be. No.
“Want some gum?” the woman next to her asks. Lucille takes a stick and says thank you. Shoves it in her mouth. Chews. Chews. Chews.
And now down the hall comes a middle-aged woman, panic in her face. “Frank Pearson?” she asks loudly at the desk. A low-voiced conference, and then that woman is told to take a seat, they’ll call her.
The woman sits down by the vending machine, her purse balanced on her knees, staring into space. Then she starts to cry.
Lucille goes over to her. “Are you Frank Pearson’s daughter? Are you Sandy?”
“Yes. Who are you?”
“I’m Lucille Howard.”
Nothing.
“Frank’s friend? The woman he’s been seeing? His old friend? From high school?”
Again, nothing.
Lucille shows Sandy her hand. “I’m his fiancée. We just decided.”
Sandy’s face hardens. “You’re not his fiancée!”
“I…But I am!”
Sandy leaps up and brushes past Lucille. At the desk, she asks what’s happening with her father. Another bit of a conference, and then she goes to sit back down and Lucille knows not to approach her again. Both women sit still, waiting. After a long time, a doctor comes out of Frank’s room, confers with the receptionist, and then calls out, “Mrs. Kaye?” in a very pleasant voice, as though calling her in for her massage.
“Here!” Sandy says, and strides rapidly forward.
Lucille stands. “Excuse me,” she says. “I’m his fiancée?”
Then, louder, “I’m his fiancée!” She runs down the hall after them but they’re way ahead of her, and they disappear around the corner. Lucille goes back to treatment room number four and pushes open the door. The room is empty but for debris on the floor: wrappings from dressings, a syringe case, a terrible little circle of blood. Even the be
d is gone. Where is he? Did they put him in the ICU? Where is he?
She sees Sandy coming down the hall and rushes up to her. “Is he all right? Where is he?”
Sandy says nothing. She walks out of the building, weeping.
Frantic, Lucille goes up to the receptionist again. “Where is Frank Pearson?”
The receptionist shakes her head sadly. Lucille drops her purse and screams.
—
“Thank you for this,” Steven Harris tells Arthur. They are at a nearly empty Denny’s close to Arthur’s house, sitting at a corner booth.
“Perfectly all right,” Arthur says. “How can I help?”
On the phone, Steven told Arthur that Maddy had run away. Now he says, “She calls me every day but she says she will never come home again.”
“But…Is she here?” Arthur asks. “I mean, in town?”
“I know she’s been going to school,” Steven says. “She’s here until school is out, couple more days, and then she says she’s moving.”
“Where to?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I guess I don’t understand. Why don’t you just go to her school and get her?”
He stares into his coffee. “I said some things to her I never should have said. And I just feel…”
His face takes on the kind of desperate and frozen quality so many men’s faces take on when they don’t want to cry. It’s a fragile fierceness, heartbreaking to behold.
He looks up, and now his face is empty of any real feeling at all; he could be a store mannequin. “I haven’t been the best father. And it’s too late now to try to change things. She’s better off without me.”
“Oh, I’m sure that’s not so,” Arthur says. “I’ll bet if you just—”
“I was trying to find someone else who knows her,” Steven says. “She never brings friends home. When I saw your address written on her notebook, I thought you might be one of the boys she…one of her boyfriends. But you’re not, obviously.” He laughs. “Unless…Are you?”
“No,” Arthur says. “I’m just a friend. We met at the cemetery.”
“The cemetery!”
The waitress comes over, a sleepy blonde who refills their cups without asking if they’d like a refill. “Anything else?” she asks, and both men say no. She slaps the check facedown on the table, as though the total is a big secret.
“Why was Maddy at the cemetery?” Steven asks. “Do you know?”
“It’s near her school. She goes there on her lunch hour. Or used to. I don’t see her there anymore.”
Steven shakes his head. “The cemetery. She’s always been an odd one. Even as a little girl. So…melancholy. But a cemetery!”
Arthur is a bit offended, on Maddy’s behalf and his own. “It’s actually very nice there,” he says. “Peaceful. I go to visit my wife there every day. Well, I visit her grave.”
“Is that right?”
“Only missed one day so far and it’s been seven months.”
Steven sits back in the booth, crosses his arms. “My wife was cremated.”
“Your wife…?”
“She died when Maddy was two weeks old.”
“Oh, my. My goodness. That’s a hard one. Boy, oh, boy. That must have been hard.”
“It never goes away. Never does.”
Arthur leans forward. “The pain, you mean?”
“Yeah. But I don’t like to talk about it. Or her. I never talk about her, really.”
“But doesn’t your daughter—”
“I don’t talk about her.”
Arthur nods, slowly. “I guess each person deals with death in their own way. Me, I can’t stop talking about Nola. I guess it keeps her alive for me.”
“Well, my wife is not alive for me anymore.” Steven picks up the check, and Arthur reaches into his pocket for his wallet.
“Please,” Steven says, holding up a hand. He lays a fiver on the table. “I guess I just want to ask you, if you see her…”
Arthur waits, wondering if he should write anything down.
“If you see her, tell her…Well, tell her I want to help if she needs more money. She’s got some cash and a credit card, but there’s a five-hundred-dollar limit. When I try to talk to her about money, she cuts me off. Or hangs up.”
“You can’t call her back?”
“She won’t answer if she sees it’s me. Has to be her calling me. She’s got to run the show. She’s always been that way. She’s going to do what she wants to do.”
She’s a child, Arthur wants to say, but instead he says, “I’ll tell her.”
Arthur finds it strange that Steven didn’t ask Arthur to urge Maddy to come home. He is a man who is aching and frightened and lost, that’s obvious. And he may not say it, but of course he wants her to come home. If he sees Maddy, Arthur will tell her that. Although she probably knows. She sees things, Maddy. Of course her father wants her to come home! Unless…he doesn’t?
He wonders where Maddy’s staying, pictures her at some cheap motel, doing homework at the little desk. Waiting to go away. Far away. Maybe Seattle, a lot of young people go there. Or San Francisco. He hopes she’ll be okay. He hopes she won’t end up on the street, sitting on some worn blanket with a cardboard sign. He always wonders how that happens. Now he sees one way that happens.
—
At six o’clock, Arthur grabs the wildflower bouquet he’s put into a Mason jar and goes over to Lucille’s. He knocks, but no one answers. He peers through the glass: no lights on. No movement. No sound.
He knocks again. Well, she probably went out for a last-minute pickup of something or another. The few times he and Nola had people over for dinner, that always happened, Nola would be practically hysterical, telling him she forgot candles or she forgot whipped cream, he had to go to the store right away, she had to have them, and hurry up before the company came!
He decides to go home and watch for Lucille to come back. He’ll toss a tinfoil ball for Gordon; he’s been neglecting the cat lately. He has been neglecting him so much that Gordon has suddenly become affectionate, rubbing against Arthur’s leg and so on. It doesn’t suit him. It is beneath him, Arthur thinks. He can hardly wait for Gordon to normalize and become supremely indifferent again.
Arthur’s not home for more than ten minutes when he sees Lucille’s car come careening up her driveway. She parks crookedly, right out at the end of the driveway, doesn’t pull into the garage or even close to it. The right front tire is on the lawn. Is she drunk?
He watches as the car door opens. She doesn’t come out. She just sits there, her legs stuck out.
He opens his door and calls over to her. “Hey! You okay? You need any help?”
She looks at him blankly, says nothing. Is she drunk?
He walks slowly over to her. “Lucille?” He offers her a hand, and she takes it, stands. “Thank you, Arthur.” And then, “Oh. You think there’s a dinner.”
“It’s okay if you’ve changed your mind.”
“Yes, I’ve changed my mind.”
“That’s fine, Lucille. But are you…Are you all right?”
“Well, they gave me something to calm me down. I guess I’m still a little loopy.”
“Who gave you something?”
“The people at the hospital. They gave me something and they told me not to drive, but I had to come home. I had to come home.”
Arthur nods. “Where’s Frank?”
She begins to wring her hands. “Well, you see, that’s just it. Frank died. He had a heart attack, after he told me it was nothing he was going in for! He said he’d see me later!”
Oh, Lord, Arthur thinks. Oh, Lord.
Lucille collapses in a slow-motion way onto her driveway. Arthur tries to pull her up, but she pushes him away. “No. I’m not ready to go in yet. I’m not going anywhere. I don’t know where to go. I can’t go in my house, where…And where the table is all set! I don’t know where to go.” She begins to cry hard. Boo-hoo-hoo, that’s exactly w
hat it sounds like. He guesses that’s where they got it.
What to do. He asks gently, “Would you like to come to my house, Lucille?”
“No! I just want to stay right here until I decide what to do. I’m fine. You just go on home, Arthur.”
Arthur goes home and gets the flowers and a blanket and some Slim Jims. He goes back outside, spreads the blanket on Lucille’s driveway, puts the flowers and the Slim Jims on it. Then he lowers himself with infinite care: down on one knee, then the other, then a soft plop onto the blanket. “There,” he says. “Now people will think we’re just having an odd sort of picnic. You don’t want the neighbors getting all alarmed and coming over.”
“No, I don’t.”
“If someone starts to come over, why, I’ll just wave to them. I’ll say ‘Good evening’ and that we’re just having a picnic. And I’ll stay with you until you decide where you want to go.”
“I want to go and be with Frank. That’s where I want to go.” She begins to weep again, though very quietly this time, and Arthur pats her shoulder.
“I’ll be right here,” he says. “You go right ahead and cry.”
Lucille looks over at her car. “Arthur? Can you shut the door?”
“ ’Course I can,” he says, and somehow gets up again to do it. Then he sits back down with her, a little more gingerly than before, and it hurts more this time, too. It occurs to him that it’s been years since he sat on the ground. He’s forgotten how things down here look, close up: the mica in the sidewalk, the ants in the grass.
He starts talking to Lucille. He tells her many things. He tells her they can sit there all night, if they want to. He tells her that she’s a kind and generous woman with an optimist’s heart and it’s a pleasure to know her. He tells her that, when Nola first died, he thought he’d die himself, of the sorrow. He says he’d read that grief has a catabolic effect and he thought for sure it would take him right out, this immense and gnawing pain, that it would eat him alive from the inside out. But it didn’t. It took a long time for him to shift things around so that he could still love and honor Nola but also love and honor life, but it happened. And it will happen to her.