Things Worth Remembering (19 page)

At our annual Fourth-of-July picnic, there was the briefest moment when I felt as though I were alone with him in my classroom again. He happened, along with one of his sons, to be standing across from me at the end of the food line. Clay handed me silverware wrapped in a napkin, which I was about to pick up for myself. That simple gesture, hard as it is to understand, seemed more than a friendly courtesy, even more than warm familiarity. His hand grazed mine in the exchange, and he looked at me so intimately I almost gasped. I looked around, afraid that someone had noticed, but even the son standing beside him had his eyes
fixed on a platter of fried chicken, unaware of the mini-drama playing out beside him.

I distanced myself from Clay the rest of the day and into the night when the family gathered to watch fireworks, but I couldn’t seem to keep myself from looking his way a ridiculous number of times. I hated that, but at the same time I loved it, because every time I looked at him, he was looking at me.

Could it really be that Clay Laswell was as enamored with me as I was with him? For the first time in my career, I was eager for the summer break to end so the school year could begin.

That might have concerned a cognizant woman.

I actually looked forward to the tedious, time-consuming meetings that always precede the first day of school, because Clay would be presiding over many of them. But instead of milling around the meeting room, talking to him comfortably as I had in previous years, I waved from several rows back and left without saying a word. I couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t sound contrived.

It was a month before Clay dropped by my classroom on a Friday afternoon. After all, Maisey was in her second year of middle school and I had survived the trauma of her leaving these halls well enough. I did not need Clay or anyone else checking on me. I had almost quit looking for him when he appeared one Friday in early October, so handsome, so concerned, asking if I had another good class this year. “I think it might be,” I said, hoping my face wasn’t flushed. It felt flushed.

Needing something to do, I began erasing the whiteboard behind me. I caught my breath when I realized he was standing just behind me, reaching over me to erase what was nearly out of my reach. I stood there without moving, holding my breath and my eraser, until he finished and moved away. “Thanks,” I said, thinking I should make eye contact but finding that impossible. He didn’t stay long, but if Paula had been standing in the doorway while we were doing that little dance, there would have been no possible way for me to ease her mind.

It was shortly before the Thanksgiving break when Clay stopped by again after a meeting in the elementary building. “How’s it going?” he asked as I sat at my desk entering math scores in my grade book. Instead of coming in and sitting on my desk as he had the year before, he leaned against the wall near the doorway. That’s when I realized he was as afraid of me as I was of him, as drawn to me as I was to him. I had the shocking and overwhelming desire to stand up, walk across the room, and kiss him.

“It’s going okay,” I said.

He didn’t say anything. Just watched as I entered the last of the grades.

“I’m about done here,” I said, shutting my grade book and putting the lid on my Sharpie. I stood up and stretched. “I need to get home.”

That wasn’t entirely true. I had spelling tests yet to record and I had nothing to get home for, at least no one was waiting for me there—Maisey was spending the night with Jackie, and Luke had told me that morning he would be working late, not to bother fixing dinner for him. “Just come home and relax,” he had said. He knew I liked to chill after my work was done each Friday.

“Okay,” Clay said. “I’ll walk you to your car.”

I should have said,
No, that won’t be necessary,
but then he might have turned and left, hearing what he needed to hear in that subtle rejection.

“So,” I said on the way to the car, “what are you and Rebecca doing tonight?”

He sort of laughed.

I did a double take. It was such a strange thing for him to do.

“Rebecca and I aren’t doing anything tonight,” he said. Then he opened my car door after I had unlocked it with my key fob. “How about a ride to the office?” he asked, going around the car and getting in before I had a chance to say anything.

I started the car, and he leaned his head against the back of the seat. “Rebecca’s in St. Louis for the weekend,” he said.

“Another seminar.”

“Are you upset?”

“Not really.”

“Well, Clay, you sound a little upset.”

“Let’s just say I’ve always admired your balance, Kendy.

You have a life outside of your job.”

“My job allows for balance. Besides, Maisey’s still home; balance is a necessity. If I remember right, Rebecca didn’t work at all when your kids were home. I guess she was volunteering at the shelter some, but still.”

He shrugged.

I pulled up to the empty parking space next to his SUV, trying to remember a time Clay had seemed anything other than upbeat.

“Are you okay?” I asked, turning off the ignition and turning to look at him. “Maybe you can come to the house tomorrow night for dinner? It’s been forever since you’ve come to dinner.”

Although I had turned to look at him, he wasn’t looking at me but at the console between us, and he didn’t seem to be listening. That was very unlike Clay.

“Do you really have to get home?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re not a good liar. I imagine you’ve had little practice.”

I stared through the windshield, biting the inside of my bottom lip.

“I just doubt you have to get home, that’s all,” he said.

I could have responded in several ways that would have ignored what he was saying or the intent behind it. Instead I chose a directness that wasn’t any wiser, in retrospect, than his question. Don’t the magazines and books insist that married men and women should never let someone they’ve found themselves drawn to know how they feel?

“Well, tell me this, Clay,” I said, gripping the steering wheel. “Wouldn’t you say I
need
to get home?”

He looked at me sweetly and got out of the car.

Tears burned my eyes as I drove away, and I was still wiping them from my face when I pressed the button on the garage door opener fifteen minutes later. I had wanted to stay with Clay. I had desperately wanted to stay.

After that day, seeing him was unbearable and
not
seeing him was unbearable.

If Luke was late getting home or if he volunteered for an out-of-town trip when I was sure it could not be his turn, I ceased to care. It just gave me more time to think about Clay. I thought about him when Luke was gone, when Maisey was asleep, and even, God forgive me, when I sat in church on Sundays with Luke and Maisey, Miller and Anne, Clay and Rebecca, and any other family members in attendance. I never gave a thought about what or who was ultimately and necessarily being neglected when my thoughts were consumed with Clay, never thought about what I was missing and would never retrieve because of the time I devoted to him.

I think it’s safe to say I was losing my mind; I certainly had forfeited right thinking. I was led by my utterly unreliable emotions, a broken and useless compass. By Christmas it seemed like I did my hair a certain way, or applied my makeup with special care, or wore blue the color of my eyes for only one reason: to please Clay.

It is a sad, stupid, pitifully common story, though the Father of Lies presents it to soul after soul as unique. Luke has always disliked any movie that venerates unfaithfulness. He absolutely hated
The Bridges of Madison County
. I, on the other hand, thought it had some poignant moments.

I no longer think so.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Maisey

I have talked Marcus into taking time for a nice lunch. I scoot into the booth and don’t need a menu to know I’m going to order an oriental chicken salad.

“Oh, ease up,” Marcus
says.

But I remind him that for three months I have been determined to do whatever it takes to fit perfectly into the outrageously expensive dress Dad let me buy.

“Anyway,” I say, “I like salads.”

“Don’t be stealing my fries, then.”

We wait for our order a long time, but I don’t mind. Our waitress keeps the sodas coming, and Marcus entertains me with sibling stories I haven’t heard. He tells about a Friday night he and his parents were coming home late from a friend’s card party and noticed a car that had been pulled over by the police. They did a double take and about flipped out when they realized the car belonged to Marcus’s sixteen-year-old brother, Max. In the whirling lights of the police car, they saw him walking a chalk line. Max escaped incarceration in the city jail, but the Blair household became his jail cell for two long months, and he didn’t get his car keys back for a month after that. The Blairs told Max he had been under the influence of certain friends even more than he had been under the influence of alcohol, and that he had better make wiser choices if he wanted them to respect and trust him.

“So,” I ask, “did he reform?”

“He did, but according to Max, that was the only time he had gone out drinking with his buddies. No one, he claimed, could have worse luck than he did. My parents told him the opposite was true: He was lucky, or more likely, blessed.”

I ask Marcus if he was ever in serious trouble with his parents.

“I wasn’t turned that way,” he says, shaking his head. He submitted his kindergarten bear for Exhibit One. On a bulletin board in the front of the room, every five-year-old had a cardboard bear that stood at the starting line of a track that led to Big Trouble. Every time a student got reprimanded for any infraction of the posted rules, the bear moved up a notch on the track. Parents of any student whose bear made it all the way down to Big Trouble were called and asked to come in for a meeting with their child and the teacher. That didn’t happen Marcus’s year, although several students’ bears got precariously close.

“One day,” Marcus says, “Mom picked me up after school and asked if my bear had moved yet. I said, ‘Are you crazy?’ So, to answer your question, no, I didn’t get in trouble much. I was sent to my room a few times but not without supper.”

“Not eating would have been worse than corporal punishment for you.”

“Mom would never have been that cruel,” he says. “What about you? I can’t imagine your parents ever having to discipline their only child.”

“Well, they did,” I say, almost offended. “I was put in timeout any number of times and grounded once.”

Our food arrives, and we give it our full attention. Chatter practically comes to a halt, and before long our plates have been taken away, Marcus’s credit card has been processed, and we have made a quick stop in the relatively clean bathrooms before we start the trip home. Sitting in the car now, full and relaxed, Marcus is listening to ESPN again, and I’m jamming with my iPod, glad the tension that filled the car this morning is gone.

I’m trying not to think about what will happen when we get home. I didn’t see
I Know What You Did Last Summer
, but the title I recall—change
last
to
that
, and it is a perfect title for the last nine years of my life. I wish for all our sakes I had kept to myself what I have known for so long. Maybe everyone will choose to worry about it another time, or better yet, agree to go on from here the best we can, no discussion required.

I’m watching the road now, remembering the day my parents grounded me. During the spring of my junior year of high school, Jackie, Heidi, and I spent the night with Caitlin, knowing her parents were out of town for the weekend. Jackie and I had been scandalized when we heard they were leaving Caitlin alone. Later we learned her parents had not left her alone at all but thought she was spending the night with Heidi. After Jackie and I had discussed it for at least a week—we’re talking premeditation here—we decided it would be fun. We didn’t
exactly
lie to our parents; we just let them assume Caitlin’s parents would be home. What we didn’t realize is that Caitlin and Heidi had told a couple of people about our plans, and they had told a few more people, and by nine that night half the school had shown up, out of control before they even arrived. When several pieces of the outdoor furniture were thrown into the pool and a window had been broken, Jackie and I flipped a coin to see who would call whose parents. I lost, but at least Mom and Dad picked us up before the police arrived.

After dropping Jackie at her home, my parents told me to sit on the couch, and they proceeded to demand a full explanation, which I eventually gave. Afterward, Dad said I was grounded for a month.

“A month!” I said.

My horror did not faze him. “We can make it two,” he said, and I crossed my arms over my chest and crossed my legs and glared at the floor between us.

He told me to look at him, something I did not want to do. My glare immediately turned to tears when he said he was disappointed in the choices I’d made connected with this “little incident.”

Mother, who had sat across the room without saying anything, finally came to sit beside me. She took my hand and said, “Maisey, honey, deceit is a terrible thing. We don’t want you to take it lightly. It will get you into a lot of trouble. More important, it will hurt your soul.”

You should know, Mother.

I almost said that aloud. Instead I pulled my hand away and asked if I could go to my room.

They looked at each other.

“Okay,” Dad said.

They didn’t make me say I was sorry. I knew they wouldn’t. They think an apology should be sincere.

I started up the stairs, still in stomping mode but careful not to truly stomp and get myself in more trouble. At the top of the landing, I stopped and turned. They were standing at the bottom of the stairs, watching me, just as I knew they would be.

I wanted to say
I’m sorry
, but the words wouldn’t come out of my mouth.

Kendy

I call Phillip, and he says things have gone well and that Mother is in her room resting comfortably. “Resting comfortably” is a lovely cliché. I’m relieved. The sun is shining brightly, as though nature is celebrating Mother’s good report.