The Last Noel (41 page)

“Are you all right?”

“I'm all right.”

Hurriedly, Kaye walked out of the dining room and into the foyer. He was leaning against the wall and beside him on the floor were stacked framed pictures, fifty or more, collected over the last two hundred years by owners of Heaven's Hill: there was every kind of art work, from eighteenth-century British oil paintings of horses and dogs to nineteenth-century Asian watercolors of birds in trees to awful pastels of scenic vacation views to the folk portraits of Tatlock Fairley. Kaye tilted through the large stack of his grandfather's canvases, stopping at Tatlock's last painting, “Noni Plays Her Piano for Me” with the gold rays around her head that had the tiny word, “Love,” at each gold tip.

Johnny followed him into the hall and stood next to Kaye, studying the picture. “Mom had a great smile, didn't she?”

“Yes, she did.” Kaye took the portrait out of the stack and set it on the console. Beside the picture sat the old blue Chinese jar.

“It's early Ming Dynasty,” Johnny said.

“Yes, I know.” Kaye touched the cracks, followed the mending, all those pieces so laboriously put back together at the green pine table in the kitchen of Heaven's Hill. What had happened that night? The Christmas dance that Noni had gone to with Roland. Kaye had brought her home. Bud Tilden had broken the bowl and cut his feet. Kaye had bought the chain for the little silver heart. That had been the night he'd said, Reach out for me.

What if he had reached out for her then?

What if he had kissed Noni that night, leaning across the bowl, as he had wanted to do? Would it have made any difference?

“Mom loved that jar. She told me how you fixed it. ‘Kaye can fix anything,' she said.”

“Well, she was wrong.” Kaye turned to the teenager. “If I could fix anything, if I could fix one thing ever only in my life, she would be here right now. She would be standing here right now.” Kaye traced Noni's face on the canvas with his hand.

Johnny was frowning at him. Finally he said, “Actually this picture is sort of what Bunny asked for.”

Kaye put it back on the floor.

Johnny held it out to him. “No listen, Bunny already said, if you wanted it, that was okay with her. She said, give it to you.”

Kaye shook his head. “Let Bunny have it.”

The boy looked unhappy. “You don't want anything?”

Walking to the end of the foyer, Kaye opened the hall closet and pushed aside the coats. There against the back wall, behind some summer screens, he found the red wooden sled where he had left it the day Noni had died. He pulled it out and brushed off a cobweb.

“I'd like this sled,” he told Johnny. “Is that all right?”

Johnny came over and ran his hand along the rusted runner. “This is the one you took the sled ride on?”

Kaye sat down on the foot of the stairs, resting the child's sled on his knees. “It was your mother's first gift to me.” Kaye's head, close-cropped and graying, bent over the sled. “And she gave me so many.”

In the quiet hall, his hand on the carved round ball of the newel post, Johnny stood waiting for the man who sat on the old curving stairs of Heaven's Hill, holding the wooden sled, to retreat to that calm stillness he always had when something upset him. But instead Johnny saw tears of Kaye's fall upon the faint gold letters that curved like a wing over the sled's red bow.

Johnny wiped with his fist at his own tears. “I miss her so much. Don't you?”

“All my life, son.”

Kaye's tears fell on his name. And on her name, Noelle. And on the gift that had joined the names forever.

 

 

The End

 

 

 

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 

Michael Malone is the author of nine novels and two works of nonfiction. Educated at Carolina and at Harvard, he has taught at Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, and Swarth-more. Among his prizes are the Edgar, the O. Henry, the Writers Guild Award, and the Emmy. He lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina, with his wife, chair of the English department at Duke University.