again and Quinn is stunning in her black dress, but that isn’t her intention.
I had plans for the weekend that involved meeting Mike and Allan and fishing for hours and hours. Grant’s funeral has dashed them. They will have to be put on hold for a few months, at least until after the baby and winter has left us. I’m going to have little time for such pursuits from now, for quite some time.
The car park is full and I have to drop Quinn off at the entrance to the crematorium and find a space further afield. The service is underway when I get back. Quinn has a seat for me near the rear of the chapel and I slide down into it. The room is full to overflowing. Grant was well liked, well loved. The family sit at the front. There is no crying.
Standing behind the lectern is a man a little older that Grant. He’s African-American, greying, bespectacled. He’s in a crisp black suit, white shirt, dark blue tie. His voice is soft, deep, rich. He’s a story teller and he’s taking me along with him as he tells Grant’s story.
My mentor, my friend, he loved stories. He wanted to hear mine, he wanted to hear Quinn’s. He wanted our stories to merge again, and they did, with his help. I won’t hear my name in this tale, I’m a minor player here, joining the cast just as the show plays its final season, and I’m content with that. I’m content just to have been a small part of his life.
He has been building up marriages for the past twenty years, soon after marrying his second wife, Mary. He has four children from his first wife. They live all over the country, but they’re sitting with their mother and his wife in the first row. I’m a little startled to find that he’s been married before, but then I know that everyone is complicated and has complicated lives, has a rich history. That could have been me and Quinn – raising a child in different homes – both of us moving on. He’s passionate about people, his family, his friends, people in need. People in pain. He’s made mistakes, he was still making mistakes up till the day he died, but he’s spent a lifetime making up for them with forgiveness, love, faith and hope.
Quinn is crying quietly and I wrap my arm around her, draw her in. I want to cry too but the tears won’t come, not yet. People are laughing when they hear his story, some cry in other parts, when he went through difficulties. But it’s all there, everything he did, everything he went through. Life, in all its glory, all its colors.
And then they’re singing. Not funeral songs – songs of hope, songs of joy. Quinn joins them, she knows some from her upbringing. I know ‘Amazing Grace’, but I don’t join them. It’s not part of my heritage, but I haven’t lived under a rock for the past thirty years, I’ve heard it many times.
I think back to our wedding. We were young, easily swayed. Quinn’s family insisted that we include some part of her religious upbringing. My father, ever the atheist, had the opposite opinion. My mother weighed in and we had some kind of secular-Protestant- Jewish hybrid that satisfied no one and felt forced and disjointed. But that was us, trying to blend and mesh from two different worlds. And it worked. We worked. Love connected us as it should, but when grief pulled us apart, the legacy of our parents made the cracks between us bigger and bigger until we collapsed.
Winter has come late this year, and is struggling to catch up. There has been no snow yet, but its coming. In the hall behind the chapel we’re all milling about, talking, laughing, some of us shedding a tear. Quinn and I stand apart from them. We don’t know anyone. We’re strangers. She leaves me for the bathroom, which she does often these days, and I stand there with a cold instant coffee in one hand and a lettuce and cheese sandwich quarter in the other.
“Odd man out?” says another mourner. He’s a little younger than me, dressed in a stylish black suit. He smiles warmly. “One of Grant’s graduates?” he asks me.
“Sorry?”
“Well, you’re not family, and not a friend. I guessed that you and your wife were seeing Grant and Mary.”
“Oh. Yes. We were.”
“I didn’t mean to intrude. It’s just a hobby of mine, working out who people are.”
“Okay. Like stamp collecting.”
“Only much more interesting. What he said must have worked.”
“Worked?”
“You two are pregnant. So, you two have worked things out.”
“The pregnancy was... We have. What about you?”
He raises his brows, then shrugs. “Some things can’t be fixed, no matter how hard you try. But we can still talk without the whole conversation dissolving into screaming and name calling, so that’s something. We have a son. He’s three. I don’t see him as often as I’d like but that’s my fault. If I’d been able to keep my dick in my pants I wouldn’t be where I am.”
He leaves me when Quinn returns. She takes my sandwich and eats it, but not the coffee.
“What are we going to do?” she asks me.
“About what?”
“Us. We don’t have anyone to talk to.”
“You think we need to now?”
“I think we’ve still got a long way to go, this week has proved that.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
“Well, we’ll have to talk about this some more. Not now. Later.”
Quinn lays next to me, propped up on pillows, reading to herself. I’m doing the same. We’re still in New Haven, staying at a five star hotel. I can afford it now. Wade’s check has cleared. She is in a little night gown, thin and clinging to her growing pregnant body. I’ve turned the heat up just like she’s doing to me. She knows that it drives me crazy when she wears things like that, and she likes that I get that way. She does it deliberately.
“I’m a selfish person,” she says, putting down her book.
“No. You’re not.”
“I am.”
“Why do you say that?” I ask her.
“What I did to you - that was immensely selfish. I was thinking about myself, what I needed, what I wanted. I wasn’t thinking of you at all. And I should have. If I had then we wouldn’t have fallen apart like we did.”
“That was my fault just as well as yours.”
“But I should have thought about you. I should have realised what being with Wade would do to you, to us. That was my selfishness that caused that. And I did it over and over again because I got caught up in the way that I felt, and just didn’t consider you at all. And I’m sorry for that.”
“Well, I was selfish too.”
“Not like that.”
“No. But the way that I treated you – I kept thinking of myself all those years and that just drove you away. I guess we’ve both been selfish people.”
She puts down her book and leans over so that her head is on my shoulder. “I don’t want to be that way anymore.”
“Well,” I say, “I hate to break this to you, but you’re not going to have much chance to be selfish in a couple of months.”
She laughs. “True. I guess Rachel is going to be pretty demanding of my time.”
“And mine. But I want you to know that you won’t be doing it all alone.”
“I know. You’re here. Like you promised.”
“But even more than that. I’m going to take Wade up on his offer. I’m going to take six months off so I can be around full time. So that means you won’t get burnt out. You can be your own person for an hour or two when you need it.”
“You cashed Wade’s cheque?”
“I did. I don’t care why he gave it to me, not really. What I care about is what I can do with it. And I think he meant well when he gave it to me. When I think of what I wanted to do to him...”
“I’m glad you didn’t.”
“I am too.”
“And I’m glad you didn’t give up on me.”
“That was probably the least selfish thing I’ve ever done.”
“And it showed me that you’d changed.”
“I don’t think it was that easy.”
“I know. But it was a start.”
Later, after I had made love to her, we lay together on the h
otel bed, naked and tired. Rachel moves about, puts a foot up against her mother’s belly and pushes so that I can almost make it out. We laugh at her kicking and rolling. We can’t wait for her to come, but it’s way too early. We want this pregnancy to end properly, at the right time and with the right result.
I love Quinn more than I ever have. And I have loved her for such a long time. We have bonds that cannot be broken, even after what has come between us. I can barely remember what she has done now. It’s just a vague memory. If I think hard enough and can recall it, but I don’t want to do that anymore. I don’t want to remember my sins or hers. They are the past, forgiven and almost forgotten. I want to remember the wonderful things that we have done together, and I want to look forward to what is ahead.
Someone wise once said: I think that if you look backwards too much you may just miss the good things up ahead.
Sunday
On the way back to the city we meet Chloe and Wade for lunch and after we walk around a baby store, looking at furniture. The women are ahead of us, examining cots excitedly. Wade and I hold back.
“Remember how you offered to give me six months off after the baby is born?” I ask him.
“I did?”
“You did. It was lumped in with a whole lot of other options. I think I’ll take that one.”
“That’s great. So you’re taking my money then?”
“I sure am.”
“And it’s not too weird?”
“Not if I don’t think about it too much.”
He laughs. “It is a little weird, isn’t it?”
“Just a little.”
“I didn’t mean for any of this,