Bygones (5 page)

“Well,” Michael said, expanding his chest and touching his stomach. “I've had enough coffee to keep me awake until three.”

“Me too.”

“You ready to go then?” She nodded and they hitched their chairs back from the table. While they were donning their coats, he inquired, “How's your mother?”

“Indefatigable as always. Makes me breathless just listening to her.”

He smiled and said, “Say hi to the old doll for me, will you? I've missed her.”

“I'll do that. But if this wedding comes off, you'll undoubtedly be able to say hello to her yourself.”

“And your sister, Joan. She still in Colorado?”

“Yes. Still married to that jerk and refusing to consider divorce because she's Catholic.”

“Do you ever see her?”

“Not very often. We just don't have anything in common anymore. By the way, Michael . . .” She paused, her coat on. For the first time her eyes softened as she looked at him. “I was very sorry about your mother.”

“And I was sorry about your dad.”

They had each lost a parent since the divorce but she still had one left. He now had none.

“I appreciated your coming to the funeral. She always liked you,” Michael told Bess. She had attended and had taken the children, of course, but had not spoken to Michael. Likewise, he had attended her father's funeral, but they had remained stubbornly aloof from one another, exchanging only the most perfunctory condolences. They had each liked the other's parents. It had been one of the connections hardest to sever.

“It was damned hard when Mother died,” Michael admitted. “I kept wishing I had some brothers and sisters, but . . . aw, hell, what good are wishes? I'm forty-three years old. You'd think I'd have gotten used to it by now.”

His whole life he'd hated being an only child and had talked about it often with her. She, too, had missed having a sister she was close to. There was a seven years' age difference between herself and Joan, which left them little in the way of childhood nostalgia regarding play, or friends, or even school. In her memory, Joan seemed more like a third parent than a sister. When she'd married and moved to Denver it had made little difference in Bess's life, and though they occasionally exchanged letters, these were merely duty missives.

It felt odd to both Bess and Michael, standing in the doorway of a restaurant, commiserating with each other about their loneliness and their loss of loved ones. They'd handled bitterness well, knew exactly how to handle it, but this empathy was an imposition. It made them eager to part.

“Well,” Bess said. “It's late. I'd better be going.”

She left the restaurant ahead of him and at the door felt the brief touch of his hand in the center of her back.

Memories.

In the parking lot at the point of parting, he said, “Chances are we aren't going to get through this whole wedding without having to contact each other. I've moved. . . .” He handed her a business card. “Here's my new address and phone number. If I'm not there, leave a message on the recorder, or call the office.”

“All right.” She put the card in her coat pocket.

They paused, groping for parting words while this present good-bye melded into a montage of a hundred others from their courting years—New Year's Eves, dances and parties, all followed by long passionate sessions on her doorstep. The flashback lasted only seconds before Michael spoke.

“You'll call Lisa, then?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe I'll call her, too, just to let her know we're in agreement.”

“All right . . . well, good night.”

“ 'Night, Bess.”

Again came that momentary void, with neither of them moving, then they turned and went to their separate cars.

Bess started her engine and waited while it warmed. He had taught her that long ago: in Minnesota a car lasts longer if you let it warm in winter. That was in their struggling days, when they'd kept cars for five or six years. Now she could afford a new one every two years. Presently she drove a Buick Park Avenue. She waited to see what kind of car he was driving—her curiosity some odd possessive holdover she could not control. She heard the muffled growl of his engine as he passed behind her, and caught a glimpse of a silver roofline in the rearview mirror, turning only as he eased into a pool of illumination from a tall pole light to identify a Cadillac Seville. So it was true—he was doing well. She sat awhile attempting to sort out her feelings about that. Six years ago she would gladly have stuck pins in a voodoo doll of Michael Curran. Tonight, however, she felt an inexplicable touch of pride that once, long ago, she'd chosen a winner, and that now, faced with an impromptu wedding, there would be no need to stint their daughter.

Remembering Michael's card, she snapped on the overhead light and fished it from her pocket.

5011 Lake Avenue, White Bear Lake.

He'd moved to White Bear Lake? Back within ten miles of her? Why, when he'd lived clear over in a western suburb of Minneapolis for the past five years? Too close for comfort, she decided, stuffing the card back into her coat pocket and putting her car in gear.

* * *

Twenty minutes later she pulled into the horseshoe-shaped driveway of the house she and Michael had shared in Stillwater, Minnesota. It was a two-story Georgian on Third Avenue, high above the St. Croix River, a beautifully balanced home with a center door and bow windows on either side. The entry was guarded by four fluted round columns supporting a semicircular railed roof. From behind the sturdy railing a great fanlight overlooked the front yard from the second story. The place had a look of permanence, of security, the kind of house pictured in children's readers, Bess had told Michael when they'd found it, the kind of house where only a happy family would live.

They had fallen in love with it on sight; then they'd gone inside and had seen the magnificent view, clear across the St. Croix River to Wisconsin, beyond, and the lot itself, cresting the bluff, with its great, grand maple tree dead center out back, and the sparkling river lying below. They had seen the place and had gasped in mutual delight.

Nothing that had happened since had changed Bess's opinion of the house. She still loved it; enough to be making payments on Michael's legal half of it since Randy had turned eighteen.

She pulled into the double attached garage, lowered the automatic door and entered the service door to the kitchen. She'd redone the room since her business had flourished, had installed matte white Formica cabinets with butcher-block tops, a new vinyl floor in shades of seafoam blue and plush, cream-colored carpeting in the attached family room. The new furniture was a blend of smoky blues and apricots, inspired by the view of the river and the spectacular sunrises that unfolded beyond the tall east windows of the house.

Bess bypassed the U-shaped kitchen and dropped her coat onto a sofa facing the wall of glass. She switched on a shoulder-high floor lamp with a thick, twisted ceramic base and a cymbal-shaped shade and went to the window to draw up the blinds. The window treatments were lavish above, simple below: great billowing valances in a busy blue-and-apricot floral, paired with pleated horizontal blinds of pale apricot. The pattern of the curtains was repeated in two deep, chubby chairs; a coordinating splash of waves appeared on the long sofa with its baker's dozen of loose cushions.

Bess drew up the blinds and stood looking out the window at the winter view—the smooth yard, swathed in snow, sloping down to the sheer bluff covered by scrub brush; the granddaddy maple standing sentinel at the yard's edge; the great pale path of the wide river and, on the Wisconsin side, a half mile away, dots of window light glimmering here and there on the dark, high, wooded bank.

She thought of Michael . . . of Lisa . . . of Michael again . . . and of their unborn grandchild. The word had not been mentioned but it had been there in that restaurant between them as surely as their cups of steaming coffee.

My God, we're going to have a grandchild.

The thought thundered through her, brought her hand to her mouth and a lump to her throat. It was difficult to hate a man with whom you were sharing this milestone.

The lights across the river became starbursts and she realized there were tears in her eyes. Grandparenthood had been something that happened to others. It was symbolized by television commercials with sixty-five-year-old gray-haired couples with round, rosy cheeks baking cookies with youngsters; calling their grandchildren long distance; opening their doors at Christmastime and welcoming two generations with open arms.

This child would have none of that. He would have a handsome young grandfather, recently divorced, living in White Bear Lake, and a businesswoman of a grandma too busy for cookie-making, living in Stillwater.

Many times since her divorce Bess had felt regret for the loss of tradition and an unbroken family line but never so powerfully as tonight, when facing the advent of the next generation. She herself had known grandparents, Molly and Ed LeClair, her mother's folks, who'd died when she was in high school. Recalling them brought a wistful expression to her face, for they'd lived right here in Stillwater through her younger years, in a house on North Hill to which she'd ridden her bike whenever she wanted, to raid Grandma Molly's cookie jar or her strawberry patch, or to watch Grandpa Ed paint his birdhouses in his little workshop out back. He'd known the tricks of attracting bluebirds—a house with a slanted roof, no perch and a removable bottom, he'd taught her—and always in the summer their backyard had bluebirds flitting above Grandma Molly's gardens and the open meadow beyond.

Times had changed. Lisa's child would have to visit his grandma in her interior design shop, and his grandfather only after he got old enough to drive a car.

Moreover, the bluebirds had disappeared from Stillwater.

Bess sighed and turned away from the window. She removed her suit and left it on the sofa. Dressed in her blouse, slip and nylons, she built a fire in the family-room fireplace and sat on the floor before it, staring, disconsolate. She wondered what Michael thought about becoming a grandfather, and where Randy was, and what kind of husband Mark Padgett would make, and if Lisa truly loved him, and how she herself was going to survive this charade Lisa was asking of her. Already, after only one night with Michael, she was bluer than she'd been in months.

The telephone rang and Bess glanced at her watch. It was going on eleven. She picked up the receiver from a glass-top table between the two tub chairs.

“Hello?”

“Hi. Just checking in.”

“Oh, hi, Keith.” Lifting her face to the ceiling, she scooped her hair back from one temple.

“You got home late.”

“Just a few minutes ago.”

“So, how was the dinner with Lisa?”

Bess flopped onto one of the chairs with her head caught on the rounded back. “Not so good, I'm afraid.”

“Why not?”

“Lisa invited me over for more than just dinner.”

“What else?”

“Oh, Keith, I've been sitting here getting a little weepy.”

“What is it?”

“Lisa is pregnant.”

At the other end of the line Keith released a swoosh of breath.

“She wants to get married in six weeks.”

“To the baby's father?”

“Yes, Mark Padgett.”

“I remember you mentioning him.”

“Mentioning him, that's all. Lord, she's known him less than a year.”

“And what about him? Does he want to marry her, too?”

“He says he does. They want a full wedding with all the trimmings.”

“Then I don't understand—what's the problem?”

That was one of the troubles with Keith. He often failed to understand her problems. She had been seeing him for three years, yet in all that time he'd never seemed sympathetic at the moments she needed him to. Particularly when it came to her children, he had an intolerant side that often irritated her. He had no children of his own, and sometimes that fact created a gulf between them that Bess wasn't sure could ever be bridged.

“The problem is that I'm her mother. I want her to marry for love, not for expediency.”

“Doesn't she love him?”

“She says she does but how—”

“Does he love her?”

“Yes, but—”

“Then what are you so upset about?”

“It's not that cut-and-dried, Keith!”

“What? Are you upset about becoming a grandmother? That's a lot of bunk. I've never been able to understand people getting all freaked out about these things—reaching thirty, or forty, or becoming a grandparent. It's all pretty ridiculous to me. What really matters is keeping busy and healthy and feeling young inside.”

“That's not what I'm upset about!”

“Well, what then?”

Reclining in the chair, with her chin on her chest, Bess picked up the soiled jabot and toyed with it.

“Michael was there.”