Then Charlie came along. It was funny at first, when he claimed love at first sight. I used to do that in high school, for heaven’s sake, get dreamy crushes on either Fabian (television teen heart throb) or Bobby Willis (football team tight end, and that wasn’t referring to the position he played, which I couldn’t have identified to save my soul, but how adorable his rear looked in his uniform), or Ted Keefer (biology lab partner, gorgeous dark hair, and eyes under thick sexy eyebrows, who did my lab report for me when it involved testing my blood, which I whispered made me feel faint so he’d hold my hand, prick my finger, and test it for me).
My mother despaired that I was boy crazy. Louisa was the one motivated to go to college; I wanted to get married and set up housekeeping, and Phillip had a handy heart murmur, a 4-F deferment that kept him out of Vietnam but not out of action in bed. Plus he was muscular and cute. Perfect. Except when it counted. “You’ll be too soon old and too late smart,” Dad used to warn me. He never had warmed to Phillip. Well, crap, he’d been right once, and when Charlie showed up twenty years later, I was for sure not going to let Dad be right again even if he had been dead for ten of those years.
Charlie had come to Indianapolis on business. He worked for some huge Atlanta contracting company that had architects and various kinds of engineers, though he was none of those, but a liaison or coordinator for their huge construction projects in the eastern half of the country. At least that’s what I understood about it, which was probably the top two percent, not that Charlie didn’t try to explain his job. At the time, I just wasn’t much interested in gigantic projects for corporations and didn’t tune in with every available brain cell. Charlie was in Shandon because he’d driven his rental car out to the sticks to visit his cousins, who, it happened, were neighbors of Mom’s. And Lucille next door had it in her head what a shame it was that poor me had no husband and was always on the prowl for middle-aged widowers or divorced men, she didn’t care as long as they were available. Whether or not I wanted a man, which I had been polite but adamant about saying I didn’t. “Nonsense,” Lucille said, and the really bad thing about my getting involved with Charlie had been that Lucille was so smug about being right, peering over her glasses, eyebrows raised, lips pressed as if suppressing her triumphant told you so. I’d never liked Lucille much, and that sealed the deal.
Our initial meeting happened when Lucille dragged Charlie next door because my car was in Mom’s driveway, and Charlie asked me out for “a bit of refreshment.” He meant a drink, but was too careful to say it in front of Mom—I, of course, refused. Graciously, but firmly. He kept trying. Got my phone number from Lucille, who got it from Mom.
The construction in Indianapolis was an eighteen-month project and Charlie managed to find himself needed there regularly to straighten out all kinds of issues. And, strangely enough, he had discovered a new closeness with his dear cousins in cow-and-corn country Shandon, Indiana. Which he hadn’t visited since his parents had dragged him there as a child, such a shame, he’d loved it so, he claimed. Bless his heart.
It was after I finally relented and agreed to one drink if he’d stop calling me, and then, after we had that one drink (a vodka martini for him, white wine for me) in Paesano’s, Elmont’s nicest Italian bar and restaurant, and had stayed for another drink and then stayed on and ordered dinner, that I withdrew the condition that he stop calling me. He was such a gentleman and gentle man, dear and kind. It hadn’t hurt, either, that he was handsome, his hair charcoal-silver, his nose aquiline, his eyes that unusual green. I liked his height, and his hand on my back felt good when he opened doors for me.
He was a widower; he told me that early on. No children. His wife had had a hysterectomy, but too late. The cancer had spread. After our fifth date, we were in his car, talking in my driveway, he filled in details of what he’d been through. We’d talked on the phone in between dates and had been seeing each other long enough that it was easy for me to take his hand, and I’m sure my face showed my sorrow because he said, “It’s all right. I’ve healed. It was a long time ago. It was the only other time in my life I’ve had the love-at-first-sight experience. I hope you’ll forgive me for being so . . . persistent. It’s just that I knew when I first saw her that she was the one, and then, when I saw you . . .”
It was so unlike me. Charlie said that and I didn’t object. He kissed me and I didn’t pull away. We sat and held hands on an October night, the harvest moon already past, the crickets singing of sleep and death, warning of the earth’s relentless turn toward winter and endings. I knew then that if I loved him and let him love me, I’d lose him or he’d lose me. One of us was going to suffer. Isn’t that the outcome of every love story, one way or another? Could I bear it again?
It took me months more before I told Charlie everything about the lost babies and my stillborn son. About Phillip, why he’d left. And Charlie took me in his arms, just that. When he finally looked at me, his green eyes were wet. “I’d like to go to your son’s grave with you,” he said. “Would you take me? When you’re ready to share him, I mean.”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes. I will.”
And when he asked me to marry him, and move to Atlanta, I said it again. “Yes. Yes. I will.”
Louisa
Déjà vu. That’s what it was. No, it was déjà vu all over again, and it wasn’t even amusing to mock the poorly taught people who actually said that, because the redundancy was ridiculously appropriate. CarolSue’s call about Charlie had jolted Louisa into some two-fisted time warp, back to the first call she’d gotten about Cody, and then the one about her Harold, dead by his own grieving choice at the same spot on the highway where the drunk driver had run down their only grandson. Louisa had known the frenetic panic that was running in CarolSue’s veins right then, and how soon it would be replaced by paralysis. So, of course, she’d hung up and sprang into action to take over, just as her sister had done for her both times. They always had each other’s backs. If Louisa were Gary, she’d be praising Jesus up and down the glory aisles for that. As it was, Louisa preferred to be simply very grateful, though she felt no need to blab about it on the internet, which Gary was in love with and Louisa didn’t use.
On the plane taking her sister home with her, though, with CarolSue next to her like a wilted lily (at first she’d thought dying lily, and then, horrified, changed the word in her mind), the ramifications of CarolSue moving in started to become real. She and CarolSue had always told each other everything. But some months ago, Louisa had started omitting certain details. Well, maybe they were more than details. Possibly she hadn’t told her something big.
She closed her eyes, thinking she might be able to sleep, but an argument started in her head. What are you going to do now? You should have told her. It reminded her of Marvelle, her tuxedo cat, who often swished her tail disdainfully at Louisa’s best Plans.
Louisa bristled back, her defense rising over the white noise of the engines: I was going to tell her. At the right time. How was I supposed to know Charlie was going to drop dead?
But Louisa of all people did know how people disappeared, here to track mud on your clean floor and laugh when you complained about missing chocolate chip cookies one instant, dead the next, and you don’t get two weeks’ notice in the mail that it’s going to happen.
She tapped the shoulder of the bald man with things in his ears in the aisle seat and gestured that she needed to get out. (Possibly CarolSue had been right about laying off the coffee before the flight, but Louisa was not about to say so.) At home, Marvelle would be waiting for them. She’d take in what was going on, jump off the back of the chair in disgust, and saunter to the back door, wanting to be let out. Marvelle thought she knew everything. Well, Louisa had handled fifth-grade boys, who were a lot sneakier than field mice, and she would damn well make it work with CarolSue there.
The man scarcely moved his knees a quarter inch to let Louisa out. It wasn’t exactly pretty, but she made it, straightened up, and sauntered toward the restroom. Her bladder was the size of a pea.
Gary