Goldilocks
Authors: Andrew Coburn
ANDREW COBURN
GOLDILOCKS
a division of F+W Media, Inc.
For my wife, Casey Coburn,
and our four daughters.
And to the city of Lawrence
—as it was and as it will be.
ONE
T
HEY MET
for a late lunch in a country restaurant noted for its gentility, New England charm, and chicken pot pies. Their window table, adorned with a slender vase of cut flowers, overlooked the springtime glitter of a pond and sparks from the flutter of redwing blackbirds. The man shifted his large feet. “I had a hard time finding this place,” he complained, and the woman smiled lightly.
“But you succeeded.”
She had ordered a garden salad. The man asked for the chicken pie and was visibly disappointed when served. He had anticipated a larger dish, which, the apologetic waiter explained, was available only with the evening fare.
“Don’t make a thing of it, Henry,” the woman said casually, endless patience and a certain wryness suggested in her cool manner. When the waiter moved off, she held her smile and went on in the same easy tone. “When you come to a place like this you should dress better.”
He had on a denim jacket, a gray T-shirt, tight jeans, and orange construction shoes. He was in his mid-thirties, with appealing features and hair still the striking yellow of his youth. His eyes were bruised-blue, the kind the woman associated with hillbillies, Maine men, Southern crackers, and clamdiggers from the coastal communities of New Hampshire. His shoulders were powerful and his arms muscular. He ate well. Too well. He had the faint beginning of a gut.
“I don’t see why we had to meet here,” he grumbled with a glance that swept the celibate surroundings. The only other patrons were three elderly ladies puffed up in their finery at a corner table and two rotund businessmen just leaving. The restaurant was in the foothills of the Berkshires, fifteen miles outside the sedate Massachusetts town of Mallard Junction, where the woman lived in a gracious century-old fieldstone house occasionally photographed for local magazines. “I could’ve come to your place,” he said with a full mouth.
“That’s no longer convenient,” she replied simply but in a tone that conveyed finality. She was at least five years older than he, a fact that would have surprised the two businessmen, who admired her in passing. She was gifted with exceptional looks and was marvelously put together, straight-backed and long-limbed. Her black hair, glossy and loose, fell to the fitted shoulders of her linen jacket. “I have something to tell you,” she said, watching his face turn wise. “I hope you’ll make it easy.”
“Maybe I don’t want to hear it.”
“You have no choice.”
“You’re dumping me, aren’t you?”
“I’m afraid it amounts to that,” she answered without hesitation, and received a look sharply belligerent and accusing.
“You’ve got somebody else,” he said, which faintly amused her. Digging into her salad, she harpooned a cherry tomato. He said, “What is it then? If I did something wrong, say so. I’ll apologize.”
“You’re larger than life, Henry. Much too visible. Let’s leave it at that.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” he protested.
“It’s not necessary that you do.” She continued to eat, her shapely jaw moving slowly, her dark lashes lowered. He plunked his fork down.
“Now I’m not hungry.”
“Come on,” she chided. “You’ve had a good time. You haven’t been hurt, have you? And you’re a big boy, war vet and all that.”
“You making fun of me?”
“No, I wouldn’t do that.” She stretched a slim arm past the flowers and briefly touched his hand, which was nearly twice the width of hers. Around his wrist was an identification bracelet acquired fourteen years ago at a sidewalk stall in Saigon,
Cpl Henry Witlo
engraved in the tarnished metal.
He said, “What if I told you I loved you?”
“I’d be touched. But it wouldn’t change anything.”
“You don’t give a damn about me.”
“If that were true, I wouldn’t be here.”
His voice tightened. “I don’t like a woman leaving me.”
Her expression sharpened in the instant. “I wouldn’t want any trouble from you,” she warned in an austere voice that chastened him. Gradually he relaxed, his face settling, as if everything in his brain were slowing down, clicking off. “Finish your lunch,” she said, and he did, every bit of it, soaking up juices with a hunk of homemade bread he had overly buttered. At one point he flinched, as if somebody were giving him the evil eye, but it was merely the elderly ladies glancing his way. When the time came for dessert, the woman said, “I recommend the apple pie.” He chose custard instead and had it with ice cream while she sipped coffee. One of the ladies inadvertently caught his eye. Her mouth, pursed and painted, looked like a ruby planted in her face. At once he treated her to a smile. “Are you flirting with them, Henry?”
“I guess I got the right now. You don’t want me.”
“Don’t make it sound tragic. We both know it isn’t.”
“You think you know me.”
“No, Henry. Too much about you I don’t know, and much I suspect I wouldn’t want to know.”
The check, delivered on a tray, was paid with her money but from his hand, a maneuver that did not embarrass him. He lived life as if back pay were owed and a bonus due. She put aside her cloth napkin. He said, “Two months, Lou. That’s all we had.”
“More than enough.”
“You’re being a bitch.”
“It goes with the territory.”
Outside the restaurant a warm breeze blew against them. Clouds of flowering azalea floated alongside the path to the car lot, where her shiny cream-colored Porsche rested beside his red Dodge Charger, in the grime of which someone had fingered graffiti, none of it original.
“It needs a wash, Henry.”
“I’m waiting for rain,” he said. The only hint of tension was in the straight set of his mouth. “What if I start wearing a shirt and tie, would that help?”
“No,” she said gently.
“What if I get my old job back?”
“Henry.”
“What?”
“It’s over.”
“Just like that?”
“Nothing lasts forever, does it?”
“Childhood,” he said. “I used to think that did. Then I thought Nam would.”
“Now you know otherwise,” she said, lifting a hand against the glare of the May sun, which seemed to detonate the stones encrusted in her wedding band. He stood leaden, a thumb hooked in the tight waist of his jeans, and for a stunning moment he looked at her with the shallow unfilled eyes of an infant.
“I won’t beg.”
“Good,” she said.
“But I’ll miss you.”
“Briefly.”
Suddenly his shoulders swung forward, the breadth of him shadowed her, and his voice gushed into her hair. He wanted a good-bye kiss and went for her mouth, but she averted her head and pecked his cheek as she might have done to a close friend or a cousin. Always her public behavior bore a sharp edge of correctness, which matched the tasteful cut of her clothes and the aloof smile on her lips.
“Good-bye, Henry.”
“That wasn’t a good kiss.”
“It’ll have to do.”
Harnessed inside the Porsche, she slipped on the dark glasses she had left on the dash, adjusted the rearview, and glanced over at him. He rendered a wave that was half a salute. They started their cars up in unison, but it was he who drove away first. And fast.
On the road she felt lifted, relieved of a weight, and she drove leisurely through countryside that seemed to stretch endlessly. The spring had been mostly warm and moist, and wildflowers flew up from the fields. Flooded with sunshine, the green of young pines appeared tender, more tentative than actual. Her window was open, and her alert ear picked up the scold of a jay and the anger of a squirrel but not the sound of the Dodge Charger until it was nearly upon her. Her lips parted in surprise, for he should have been not behind her but well in front of her and on the highway by now. In the rearview she glimpsed a snatch of his face, then her heart jumped because he gunned the Charger and abruptly appeared alongside her, his smile reckless. Sounding the horn, he mouthed words she could not hear and aimed a finger. Ahead was a meandering curve, a marsh on one side and opalescing foliage on the other. That was where he tried to run her off the road.
• • •
Her husband was in the garden when she returned home. He lifted himself from a surge of tulips, discarded his cotton gloves, and sauntered toward her with a smile wedded to his face. They met near the birdbath, where he gazed at her as if she touched his life at every point. “I missed you,” he said.
“I wasn’t gone that long, was I?”
“It seemed so,” he said in a tone verging on a sulk, but he quickly collected himself. He had flat gray hair parted sharply, a trim mustache, and soft facial features. In his element — dinner parties, charity luncheons, bird walks — he exuded a gentle noblesse oblige, but in his puttering-around clothes he tended to dwindle in stature.
“My first day home,” he said, brightening his smile. “It seems odd — and exhilarating.”
“You look wonderful,” she said. What she meant was that he seemed rested. He had spent the last two months in a private hospital just over the Connecticut line.
“But you look tired,” he said with concern. “You work too hard.”
“Nature of the business.”
“I wish I had your energy, Lou. I wish I could keep up with you.”
She slipped an arm around his slender waist. “Let’s go in, Ben.”
The rooms in the front of the house were of grand dimensions, the furniture a discriminating blend of the modern and the elegantly old. Many of the choice pieces had been in the family for generations. A forebear of his had served with Custer, luckily not at Little Big Horn, and another forebear, less lucky, had boarded the
Titanic.
Their ornately framed portraits, protected by blemished ovals of glass, hung over the marble fireplace in the sitting room.
He said, “I should take my medicine.”
“Yes,” she replied, glad that he did not need to be reminded and that Mrs. Mennick, their live-in housekeeper and cook and sometimes his nursemaid, arrived on cue with capsules and a tumbler of spring water. The capsules were of varying size and hue, and he washed down each with dedication and an uncontrolled and somewhat comical bob of his Adam’s apple.
“I want to stay well,” he said in a strong voice that restored his dignity. She took the tumbler from him and returned it to Mrs. Mennick, who stood heavily on skimpy legs. He looked at both women and announced cheerily, “I think I’ll take a nap. I get drowsy after swallowing those things.”
They watched him leave and then traded glances. Mrs. Mennick said, “He’ll sleep past dinner, that’s for sure. What can I get for you, Mrs. Baker?”
“Nothing now,” she said. “Maybe a sandwich later.”
“In your room?”
“That would be fine.”
There was a hesitation from Mrs. Mennick, who knew her place and when to step beyond it. “I hope you don’t mind my asking, but did you get rid of the young man?”
“Yes.”
“I’m so glad. I never trusted him.”
“Nor I, Mrs. Mennick.”
“I was always afraid he would cause trouble for you with Mr. Ben.”
“Now you can rest easier.”
The staircase was wide, with carved intricacies in the rungs of the banister. Her bedroom, which she did not share with her husband, was commodious and airy and at sunset commanded a fiery view of distant hills. A telephone was at her bedside, another on her writing table in the tall bow window where she conducted her business, and a third on the ledge of the tub of her private bathroom.