15 Tales of Love (13 page)

She walked up the stairs thinking,
if this doesn’t take too long, I can go back to that nice little diner.

With that as a cheering thought, she went to work.

The diner was nearly empty when she went in. It was a seat-yourself place and she picked a table by the window. While she studied the menu, a waitress brought her a cup of coffee. She was still undecided when she felt someone beside her. She looked up, expecting the waitress.

“Hi, Ainslie,” Blake said. “May I join you?’

Momentarily flustered, and more pleased than she wanted to admit, she said, “Oh, sure. Why not?”

He slid in opposite her, meeting her look with a shy sort of half smile. “I was going to lunch and saw you come in here, one of my favorite places.” He added after a moment, “You look lonely.”

That’s an old pick-up line
.
Can’t he do better than that?
She was surprised at the thought and said, “Well . . .” She was lonely, but had hoped it didn’t show. She didn’t want to advertise availability, especially to a stranger, even an attractive one. She said lamely, “I am alone.”

“Not now,” Blake said, and grinned at the waitress. “Can I have some coffee, too?”

Ainslie prolonged her lunch as subtly as possible. Blake proved to be entertaining company. He was still covered with plaster dust, but he had at least washed his hands. She asked, “So how long have you been plastering walls for a living?”

“A couple of years. It’s a kind of fun job.” Blake concentrated on his second cup of coffee. “Jobs aren’t easy to come by.”

She sighed. “I know. I’m certainly not doing what I planned to do when I got a degree in American history.”

He looked at her over the top of his mug. His look seemed serious, and he stopped bantering and talking lightly of current events and the foibles of national politics.

Ainslie held his gaze for a moment, then looked away. “But, like you said, a job is a job. And I do have to get back to mine.” She got up reluctantly and picked up her bill.

“Wait a sec, and I’ll walk back with you.” He put the mug down.

“No, I’m on my way back to the office. I finished the job at the Registry.”

He deftly twitched the bill out of her fingers. “But lunch is my treat.”

“I couldn’t . . .”

“Of course you can, for allowing me to rescue you from the dank dungeon.”

She laughed. “All right. Now we’re even.”

He followed her out of the diner and back to her car, a second hand Ford Focus. She glanced back once as she backed out of the parking space. Blake was still standing on the sidewalk, hands in his pockets, watching her. She went back to work in a much lighter mood, wondering if there was a way to pursue his acquaintance without being obvious
. But he didn’t ask me for my telephone number, or where I work. He didn’t even ask my last name. Forget it. He was just amusing himself. And he is just a laborer. Not my sort at all.

But she wondered about him. If he wasn’t interested, why had he followed her to the diner? And if simple conquest was his purpose, why hadn’t he been more aggressive? She had no answer, and put it into the back of her mind. She had a job to do, boring as it was.

Her working conditions didn’t exactly deteriorate, but her general outlook did. It was the same dull routine. She didn’t have anything more important or interesting to do, but there was no place else to go. She gave up trying to find any kind of position where she could use her degree. She didn’t have the energy. She stopped researching her book
. What’s the point? I couldn’t find a publisher anyway, and I don’t have time or money to do the research.

It was over two weeks before Ainslie returned to the Registry, but this time she had three deeds to look up. She would be there for a while so she went early, planning to again have lunch at the diner.

The front door was open again and she stepped into a newly plastered hallway that still needed to be painted
. I wonder what color they’ll choose. Anything would be better than that institutional green they once painted everything. What was the original color? Cream would be nice and light and more historically accurate.

There were no workmen in sight, and she heard none. She sighed
. Oh, well. It was too much to hope for anyway.

She admitted to herself she had been looking for Blake, hoping to see him again. Disappointed and a little sad, she went to work. One property turned out to be complicated by a foreclosure and then a town tax deed, so it was several hours before she emerged from the rows of shelves and went out into the fresh air, a little past her usual time for lunch. She took a deep lungful of the fresh air. She needed a cup of coffee.

Blake stepped out of the shelter of the porch pillars beside her. He said, “Hi, Ainslie. You worked overtime.”

She turned toward him, her day suddenly bright again and her tiredness gone.

“Are you going to lunch? With me, preferably?”

She laughed. “Same diner?”

“I don’t care where.” When she didn’t answer he said, “I need to apologize, I think.”

She waited, wondering.

“I wanted to call you, when you didn’t show up here again. We’re getting ready to move to another job. But I didn’t ask your name, or where you worked, so I couldn’t.”

Ainslie was curious as to why he hadn’t. “Why didn’t you? You have such a pat pick-up line and gift of gab.”

He flushed, visible even under the paint and plaster dust on his face. “You aren’t the kind of girl one just picks up.”

Flattered, she said, “Oh,” and turned to walk down the steps, Blake following a step behind.
That’s an even better pick-up line.

When they reached the sidewalk she asked, “Shall we walk, or take my car?”

“Walk, it takes longer.”

She laughed. “My name is Ainslie Connors and I work at William Forrest Real Estate, at least right now. The market isn’t very good so I don’t know how much longer the job will last. They might not need an assistant officer manager.”

“I know the feeling. At least the world isn’t full of experienced plasterers. Most projects just use dry wall, but I can do that, too.”

Ainslie thought about that while they found seats at the diner and looked at the menu. After ordering, she said, “Plastering wasn’t your first choice of job, was it? Or is it a family business?”

Blake shook his head. Then, reverting to his light tone after his short show of seriousness, said, “It’s a job. Keeps the wolf from the door. Like you and deed research. Although that might have some connection with history.”

Surprised that he remembered what she had told him, she wondered what college he had attended, and what degree he might have, but wasn’t sure how to ask. He might not have finished, and she didn’t want to embarrass him. “It’s so frustrating. All the ideas I had, all the things I wanted to do.”

“Such as?”

His interest seemed genuine and was warming. “Research, write a biography. Maybe a novel based on my research. Things like that.”

“Not teach?”

“Heavens no. I don’t want to teach my favorite subject to a bunch of kids who don’t care.”

Lunch arrived and he thoughtfully regarded his sandwich plate heaped high with French fries. “You still can, you know.” His voice was serious again. “All you have is a day job. Like me. It doesn’t prevent the other stuff. That’s what they tell all beginning writers–don’t quit your day job.”

She pondered that while she tasted her onion soup.
He could be right. I can still read, take notes, get organized. I do have time. I spend most evenings at home. I could go to the library.

“You know,” Blake said, “it isn’t what you have a degree in that matters. It’s what you’re actually doing for work. Me, for instance, I have a master’s degree in English literature and I’m plastering walls.”

“But,” Ainslie protested, “don’t you feel you wasted all that time? To say nothing about the money? I spent four years in college for what? The only place I’m using what I learned is doing crossword puzzles. Is my education just a useless collection of trivia?”

Blake looked at his hands, rather delicate hands for a man, but the nails were ragged and caked with plaster. “Well, no. No education is wasted. I enjoyed college. I had a great time.” He looked up at her from under the dark blond hair falling over his forehead. It, too, was dusted with plaster. He grinned engagingly. “I could teach, if I took the courses and get certified, but right now the idea of trying to get teenagers interested in Chaucer and Spenser doesn’t seem like fun. Like you teaching history.” He paused a moment, his face suddenly serious. “Plastering is fun. Messy, but fun. There is a great deal of satisfaction to be had in a properly plastered wall.”

She considered that, suddenly realizing she felt the same way when she had finally found the details she needed and completed the ownership history of an old house. It was indeed satisfying. “Oh. Like a properly prepared abstract of title?”

“Exactly. I have no more idea how to do that than you have repairing horsehair plaster.” He smiled at her, a genuine, warm smile and not a satirical grin. “So let’s talk of something else. Like dinner and a movie this evening. I won’t be at the Registry building after tomorrow so I can’t keep half an eye on the door instead doing of my job.”

“Have you been doing that?”

“Of course. But it sort of hampered the work.”

Ainslie scooped out the last of her soup and considered her chicken salad sandwich. “I’m flattered.”
He’s someone I can talk to. Maybe what I’ve been looking for. Maybe I can get myself back on track with my research. It would be a lot more fun with two. Who would have thought that a common plasterer . . .
She paused on that thought.
But that’s not what he is, any more than I’m an assistant office manager. We don’t have to be defined by the jobs we’re doing.

Still contemplating that, assessing this seeing the world from another angle, she asked, “What do you write in your spare time?”

“Short stories, some essays for a literary journal. I’ve been trying my hand at a detective novel. Couple of murders and all that.” He glanced at her. “Maybe you could read the beginning, tell me if it’s going on the right track.”

She liked the idea. Blake wasn’t pompous and so far was quite gentlemanly. “As long as it isn’t something gory. I don’t like all that blood and violence.”

His eyes were twinkling as he said, “But isn’t history full of it?”

She heard his challenge, encouraging, maybe daring, her to do something more with her life, perhaps with him, and responded to it. “That’s different,” she said.
And maybe this will be, too.

BY DUTY BOUND

Iris Fayhe was too distraught to notice, much less appreciate, an almost perfect October day. The flaming reds and golds along the road could not penetrate the enshrouding gray cloud that engulfed her, the gloom obscuring everything else. There seemed to be no good solution for her problems, no way in which they could all win, and she didn’t want anybody hurt. But what can you do when a promise given a dying father is forcing a choice between that old, secure love and a new and exciting one? How much did she owe herself, and did it have to be at the expense of her mother who still needed her?

Troy Davis had asked the same question yesterday, while she sat comfortably beside him on the grassy bank of the brook, watching him replicate the scene in front of them on his canvas. He had accurately captured the reflections in the wide pool of the overhanging red maple, the small ferns tinged with pale yellow, the almost black moss that covered the granite rocks, and the gentle eddies swirling around them. His artistic ability was one of the many things she loved about him.

“You know she’s been using you as a crutch,” he said, “ever since your father died. She relies on you to do too much, almost everything.”

“She needs me, and I promised my father.” Iris wondered if she was actually doing her mother a favor. Several friends had told her that she wasn’t. She needed to use some tough love, they said, and they were probably right, but her mother seemed so needy.

“Six years?” Troy asked, concentrating on creating a delicate shadow on the rippling water.

She had no answer for that. Six years was a long time to recover and her mother was basically healthy and capable of doing most things for herself.

“You know she has to get on with her life and accept that being a widow at fifty isn’t the end of the world. You need a life, too. You can’t support her forever.”

He had looked sideways at her then, his face somber. “I need to know about us, our future.” He didn’t say what Iris knew he was thinking
: I love you but I’m not taking her, too. We will not live with her.

Iris considered that as she drove toward town and her monthly session with Lila May, her wonderful massage therapist. She was badly in need of some personal attention.

Of course Mom needs a life of her own. She needs to get reconnected with her friends, play cribbage at the church hall, go to lunch with her cousins, get some new clothes. I can’t go on like this forever! But how do I convince her? Whenever I talk about leaving she just starts crying. And I can’t blame Troy for not wanting to be burdened. Help, yes, he said. Totally support, no.

But there was still the promise she had made to her father the day before the operation he had not survived. He had apparently known that he wouldn’t make it, that the cancer was too deeply embedded in too many places, but he had chosen to take the risk. “Look out for your mother,” he’d whispered. “She’s going to need your support.”

At eighteen Iris had, of course, promised. She had been flattered by his trust in her, but had wondered even then why he had chosen her, the youngest of his three children. But deep down, she knew. There was no one else. Ben, her older brother was married, with a new son. He was just starting out on his career and would have little time to console a clinging, grief-stricken mother. Her older sister, Robyn, was away in college, finishing her degree, and she didn’t have a temperament conducive to caring. Iris was finishing high school and had no commitments.

For six years I’ve kept that promise. Commuting to a local college instead of going where I had dreamed of going, living at home instead of finding my own space, always thinking of her and her needs first. Looking out for her as Daddy asked.

But that was all before she had met Troy Davis who had changed her life and given her a different vision of the future. He was leaving her torn between her old world and the promised new one, a need to make a choice.

When Iris was finishing her degree in accounting and working part-time in the office of an assembly plant (with a promise of full-time as soon as she graduated), her mother decided to hire a yard service to care for the extensive grounds and large flower beds around their suburban home. The dark haired, intense young man who showed up on the first day in June to learn the job had attracted Iris from the beginning. He was as nice looking a man as she had ever seen, and certainly seemed to be better educated—that is polite and courteous—than most such workers she had met.

“It’s a job and pays the bills,” Troy told her. “I like to be outdoors and I like working with plants.” He had looked around at the wide lawn, spreading maples, and beds of old-fashioned perennials interspersed with bright annuals. “Your mother has a nice place here.”

“My grandparents started it. It’s way too much for my mother to take care of, and I’ll soon be working full-time at the office. I won’t be able to take care of it properly, as much as I enjoy yard work.”

He had looked so closely at her she thought he was surveying her. That long appraisal made her conscious of her fair coloring and small-boned stature, the petit frame that hid her underlying strength. Many people had been surprised by her strength, nurtured by weekly trips to the gym in addition to the house and yard work. He said, “Looks like a bit too much for you, too.”

“I’ve been doing it for years, and I’ve always enjoyed it, but now I have a job.”

He laughed shortly, turned back to trimming a hedge. “Work does cut into the play time.”

She had wondered then what he did in his play time, but his hours and her work schedule did not allow for frequent conversation, and she had never met a person quite so reticent.

It wasn’t until Troy had moved from weeding and mowing lawns to repairing the back steps that she learned a little more about him. He was working on a Saturday morning, unusual for him.

“I’m taking a couple of weeks off to enjoy the foliage,” he told Iris’s mother. “But I’ll be back in time to do the fall cleanup.”

Her mother asked if Troy did any other work and mentioned the cracked step and loose railing.

“I’ll do most of what they call odd jobs,” Troy told Iris when she stopped to watch. “Anything to keep me from having to be inside and working a nine-to-five.”

“And you’re just going to sit and look at leaves for two weeks? Or ride around?”

“No.” He concentrated on the new step he was fitting into place. “I’m going to paint them.”

“Paint them?”

He glanced sideways at her. “I like to think of myself as an artist. Fall is my favorite season for that.”

Her estimation of him went up another notch. She had no artistic talent herself.

Iris learned slowly, through casual inquiry around town and talking with him whenever she happened to see him, that Troy’s paintings were well-known locally. He had won several prizes at large area wide art shows, and was taking courses at an art institute, working slowly toward his MFA.

“It’s hard to earn a living as an artist,” he told her over coffee and a Danish, when they had progressed to that intimacy. “As they keep telling us, ‘don’t give up the day job. Keep the art work as a hobby.’ I want it to be more than that.”

It was late winter by then, that dreary time of sleet and freezing rain before spring, and she asked what he did for work in the cold seasons.

“Anything people want done. I’m a rough carpenter, making fancy furniture and such isn’t my thing, but I can fix stuck doors, put on storm windows, fix a broken step, or cut and stack the fire wood, whatever somebody wants done.”

Iris knew he also shoveled snow and sanded walkways for a list of clients, cleaning up after the snow plow for elderly residents. She also learned, and was impressed, that he charged those old folks very little. “Where did you learn to do all of that?”

“I worked with my grandfather when I was in high school. He was a carpenter.” Troy sipped at his coffee, staring into space, obviously remembering and relishing the memory. “He was a real artist. He carved beautiful birds that my grandmother painted. He never had time to do much with it. It was just something he liked to do. I decided that I would be an artist, do what I liked to do, one way or another. Granddad’s talent was wasted.”

“What happened to all of his carvings?”

“I have a few, so do some of my cousins. There are a couple of them, the blue jays I think, at the Historical Society building.” He paused, his eyes on his coffee cup. “His work was never appreciated while he was alive. If he could have sold some of his work . . .”

“But you sell some of yours.”

“Occasionally. Every sale helps. With ego building.” He smiled a little. “And a little money, of course.”

Iris heard both sadness and optimism in his voice. While his pictures commanded a good price, he sold few of them. She knew by then that Troy had always liked to draw and started even before first grade. He told her that his parents and grandparents had encouraged him. “I had a great art teacher in high school. He helped me get a couple of scholarships.” He’d added, as an aside or maybe an afterthought, “I couldn’t have gone to college otherwise.”

Iris found no comment for that and her admiration for him grew, and, she suspected, her love for him.

But Iris’s mother didn’t like Troy. “He’s wasting your time,” Audrey Fayhe said, when she learned that Iris and Troy had settled into a steady relationship. “He’s just a handyman. He’ll never have any money. You can do better than that.”

“Troy is a good, sensitive person, a very talented artist. His job leaves him time for his art work.”

Audrey snorted. “Artists are as bad as part-time handymen. They don’t make any money, always off in a dream world somewhere. You need somebody like your father, a steady worker with a good income.”

Iris choked down her hot response. “Troy has so much going for him. He is getting some real recognition.” She paused but her mother only huffed. “Money isn’t everything, you know.”

“It is when the bills aren’t paid or you want that new dress.”

Iris knew her mother’s bills were paid, that she had an income that covered expenses even if it didn’t allow for a great deal more. Iris provided many of the little extras
. Is that what she’s afraid of? That I won’t keep up that monthly hairdressing appointment or providing trips for her to go see Ben and his kids? And why doesn’t Ben help with that? And a few other things around here?

She knew that with some thought, keeping to a regular budget, and with better management, her mother could have most of those things she liked, but she didn’t want to make the effort because it was simpler to let Iris take care of it. Iris was swept by a sudden resentment of the brother she usually liked, and tried to quash it.

Am I causing problems in the family? Am I being selfish? How much, really, did I promise to do?

She had no answers.

Now it was fall again, over a year since she had met Troy, a year of learning about each other and growing into love. Troy talked about the future, their future together. “I love you,” he’d said in mid-summer. “I want us to get married. I’m looking into something a little more permanent than this job, something that pays better.”

“You wouldn’t like that. You wouldn’t be happy at a regular job and I want you to be happy. Your contentment with life comes through in your pictures, your personal involvement in what you are painting, making others feel as you do. I love you for that and I don’t want you to lose that or be the cause of your losing it.”

She hadn’t said, and then there is Mom for me to look after, but Troy had said it for her.

“I want you to be happy, too, and your mother isn’t going to allow it. And it’s not just me. It would be any one you left her for. She is too dependent on you and she needs to change, and to take some responsibility for herself and her life.”

She hadn’t disputed it, and Troy hadn’t spoken again of their future. Until yesterday, a clear and crisp Sunday afternoon, the proverbial bright blue October weather. She walked with him to a secluded section of a small brook and sat down to watch him paint. It was one of her favorite pastimes, enjoying his pleasure with him, supporting him and trying to be a part of his other world, a world she could not fully enter but was learning to love.

She asked, “Are you asking me to choose between you and Mom?”

He turned toward her, his face solemn, and put his brush down on the little folding easel he used for such outings. “No. I can’t do that. She’s your mother and you can’t simply abandon her. I’m just asking you to think about yourself, about us. Do you want to spend the rest of her life caring for her with no life of your own? She can take some responsibility for herself, you know.”

Iris didn’t answer.

“I want us to get married and have a family of our own, but that requires a commitment to me. What do you want?”

She met his gaze, saw his love and concern in his eyes. She whispered, “I want that, too, Troy, more than anything, but I promised my father I would take care of her. What do I do about that?”

He closed his arms around her and held her close. “Only you can decide what it is he would want you to do. Did he really ask you to give up your future, your own life?”

She sniffled against his chest. “I don’t think so.”

But now she wondered. She had visions of a life with Troy, their own home somewhere not too far away, where she could still keep an eye on things. Only her mother’s needs stood in the way—and a promise made. She had loved her father deeply and still missed him, his warm arms, his calm and sensible advice. What exactly had he asked of her?

Look out for her and give her your support. Am I giving her more support than I should? And just what did he mean by support?

Lila May’s attractive and comfortable massage salon was in her old Victorian house on the edge of town, professionally set up in the former formal living room facing the quiet street, the view discreetly screened by lace curtains. Iris found Lila comforting, an ample woman in early middle age with graying brown hair and strong capable hands. The traces of a southern accent gave a gentle exotic flavor to her comments, a down-home feeling that Lila had brought from the Carolinas many years ago that put her clients at ease. Iris had been coming to her for more than a year. Deep massage had been recommended by her doctor when Iris had complained of occasional headaches and joint pain.

“You’re uptight, and massage can work wonders,” the doctor said, “and Lila May is as good as they come.”

Iris settled herself on her stomach on the massage table, her face in the padded support, breathed deeply a few times and tried to relax into the warming comfort, but found it was nearly impossible. The tension in her neck was radiating pain across the back of her shoulders.

Lila pressed her strong hands against Iris’ back. “Land sakes, child, what have you been up to? You’re all knotted up back here.”