Two new tables seated, orders backing up, and I had forgotten Hal’s chocolate milk. “Oh, shit.”
Daphne spun and nailed me, hard, with one of her librarian glares. “Lucy, I won’t have that kind of talk in my kitchen. I expect it from the men, but not from you. And Joe,” she continued, pointing her spatula, “don’t you have anything better to do? Go help your father. Go on now, scoot.”
I fetched milk and chocolate from the fridge, made Hal a glass with an extra squirt of syrup-what the heck, maybe I could make him like me after all-and set up the trays, with menus for the new tables tucked under my arm. I was wondering how I’d get it all outside when Joe stepped up and held the door for me. He raised his eyebrows as I passed.
“Okay,” I said, and stifled a flirty laugh. There was something about him at that moment, a gentle sweetness, that always worked on me, and I would have kissed him right then if I could have, scratchy beard and all-though for a moment it also struck me that maybe I was thinking of Harry, that I had confused myself that much.
“Okay what?” he said, grinning.
“Just okay,” I said, and bumped my hip into his to let him know my meaning, and took my trays outside.
And there they stayed, the two of them mixed together in my mind: Joe and Harry, my handsome boy and this beautiful man who’d blown in from nowhere. I went on the picnic with Joe, giving myself a good case of razor-face as we passed a lazy hour under the birches, and all that week I served Harry his breakfast and lunch and dinner, tucking bright little bits of conversation about absolutely nothing into my trips to his table. Even Hal got the hang of things, trying to woo me with his fish stories and reformed good manners, like a boy trying to impress a friend’s older sister. And when my shifts were over I went off to find Joe, my thoughts still full of Harry: a recipe for permanent confusion, if ever there was one. By the end of the week Joe’s beard had softened, or else my face had gotten used to it; and then on Saturday I came into the dining room at 6:00 A.M. and found an envelope by the hostess station, with my name on it, and this note: Off at 5:00 A.M. Thanks for the conversation. See you next year. Yours, Harry Wainwright. I folded it like money, put it in the pocket of my apron, and let it ride around there for the rest of the summer. Say what you like, but I was just a girl; I felt like I’d been secretly kissed.
I knew about Meredith, of course, just as Harry knew about Joe. Bit by bit over the next few summers we let our stories come out-because we wanted to, and because we had no reason to hide them. Harry was Harry, and I was who I was, the most pertinent detail being a single mathematical reality: there were twenty-two years between us. Joe had been right. Harry was, in fact, exactly as old as my father, give or take a month. There was a point in my life when age wouldn’t have mattered, and I’m not sure it ever should have mattered, though I say this as a woman of forty-seven, so consider the source; but it seemed to matter back then, a great deal in fact, when I was seventeen and Harry was thirty-nine, a man with a son not much younger than I was and a slowly dying wife, a man I saw exactly seven days out of every three hundred sixty-five. There was a way in which we loved each other from the start, I think, a cosmic symmetry that could not be refused, but it was a love that was always folded into other loves, and that is the real story of me and Harry Wainwright.
Which is why I didn’t want to see him that way, that August evening when he arrived; didn’t want to see his bones so brittle, his muscles wasted away, his hair gone thin, or just plain gone, from chemo; I did not want to see the light dimmed in those blue eyes. I did not want to see him helped from the car, or strapped to a walker and oxygen, or see the spittle fall from his chin as he spoke. I also knew he wouldn’t want me there, to see these things, so when Joe told me that Hal had called from the pay phone in town, putting them thirty minutes away at the most, I went upstairs under some pretense-sheets and towels to be folded, rooms to be dusted and cleaned-and watched it all from the window.
As Harry knew, and as I believed he would. When he lifted his head by the parked Suburban, everyone all clustered around and breathless for his sake, it was me he was really looking for, and found at once: those blue eyes hit me where I stood in the window, hit and passed right through; eyes the same ice blue despite the cancer, like lights in the windows of a ruined house.
Who are you here for? I asked him with my own. For me? And, I’m glad you’re here, Harry.
And I heard him answer: Yes, for you. But I’m dying, Lucy. So not just you: everyone.
Still I could not make myself go see him; I did my made-up chores and a few extra tasks besides, finished up the books for the night, ate a turkey sandwich and drank a glass of milk in the kitchen with Joe, our custom. Most evenings during the summer months everyone was too busy for a proper meal, so when we ate together our suppers were like this, small and late, both of us too weary to talk. All our long winters together had taught us to do this well, a skill that, I think, many married people never really get the hang of. There were whole weeks of snow when neither of us could recall having spoken one full sentence to the other. And yet of course a lot was said.
We finished our sandwiches and rinsed the plates, and I put a kettle on for tea. It was late, nearly ten o’clock-practically the middle of the night in a place where everybody gets up before five. While the water thrummed on the heat, I stood at the stove, looking out the window at the dark lake. All that summer, since we’d agreed to sell, I’d been looking for ways to say good-bye to it, trying them on like hats. I’d found that the best way was simply not to: instead of thinking anything in particular, I’d just let my mind float over its surface whenever I had a free minute, and by the time my attention turned to something else, I always felt that a little bit more of it had gone somewhere inside me, a morsel I would get to keep.
“You’re doing it,” Joe said from the table, startling me.
“What do you mean?”
“That thing. You know,” he said. “Where you look at it and sort of disappear.” He was leaning forward over the table on his elbows. “It’s all right. I get it.”
The kettle whistled; I made the tea and brought it back to the table with the sugar bowl for Joe, who liked his extra sweet.
“How did Jordan take the news?” I asked.
Joe bobbed his bag in the steaming water. I could still smell the Scotch on him. When he was satisfied with the color of his tea, he spooned in three tablespoons of sugar, squeezed out the bag, and placed it neatly on his spoon. How he slept with all that sugar in him I never could figure out.
“To tell you the truth, I’m not sure he really knew how. How would anyone feel? It’s going to be a big change for him. Guide to owner, in two minutes flat.”
“Think he can handle it?”
Joe blew the steam over his tea. “If anyone could, it’s Jordan.”
For a while we sat without talking, letting the tea warm us. I wondered what Joe was thinking. I knew he didn’t regret selling the camp, not really-we had been over the deal carefully, considering every angle, and knew it was the right move. All that money in the bank was persuasive: you see those extra zeros on your statement, lined up like eggs in a carton, and it knocks the breath right out of any worries you had about being sorry. Now there would be money for Kate, for her college loans and medical school-Dartmouth Hitchcock was the current fave; her trip out West had more or less convinced her of that, too congested and nothing you could honestly call weather and nobody serious about anything, she said-and money for Florida, Joe’s new gangster boat and his plans for the business; as well as money for things we hadn’t really figured out yet, having never had enough money to begin with: pleasures, like travel and good restaurants, and sensible items like furniture or a new truck when the old one died and maybe a car besides, a nice sedan or one of those big things with four-wheel everyone was driving. So I knew he wasn’t sorry, not exactly, but I also knew that the most obvious course is not always an easy one; and Joe was feeling some of that. It was a chilly night, and the kitchen windows were open, filling the room with the coppery smell of the lake and the small noises it made at night: the dark water bulging against the shoreline; the sighing air currents that swished like smoke over its face; the random splashes here and there that I should have expected but somehow always startled me, the way that Kate, when she was a baby, could yank me from the deepest sleep with a single cry from her crib. We listened together, Joe and I, and eventually we heard voices, too: a man’s voice, Jordan’s or Hal’s or maybe one of the other guest’s, and then the sounds of footsteps on one of the cabins’ old porches and screen doors squeaking open and slamming closed on their springs.