Chapter Nine #4
Cal thought about that for a moment. “Chester Arthur once spent a whole summer here with his family, in a house out past the lake.”
“Something about you, I mean.”
Me? Ah, well, I ran a guy out of town a month ago.
He was making moves on my wife, and I got tough with him and put him on a train and sent him on his miserable way.
Now my wife and I hardly speak, and I’m sleeping in the guest room.
It was a rich story and one he couldn’t tell for so many reasons, not the least of which was that it made him feel a little queasy to think about it.
After mulling over an answer for the distance of several ties, he sank his hands into his pockets and told her no one really knew what it had been like for him, living with his dad after his mom and siblings had died.
Their house was just far enough past the edge of town that people didn’t pay much attention to all the junk in their yard, and no one but him and his dad ever saw what the inside was like.
Cal described it—a little—and told her how it all got there, and said it had been a challenge just to exist around all that crap by the time he started high school.
So he’d never really had any close friends—not outside of school—because he didn’t want other kids to see how he lived.
Plus, he never knew what shape his dad was going to be in—drunk, or ranting, or both.
“The last war did him in. And the Depression. Let’s just say it wasn’t a Norman Rockwell painting. ” He shrugged. “Maybe nothing is.”
Rockwell’s ability to paint a thing that resembled itself was impressive, but his work was too exact for Margaret’s taste.
He was always capturing perfect moments and then putting them under a microscope to find the cute parts.
Too many people turned in exact profile before some perfectly balanced backdrop, their cheeks ruddy, their skin egg-washed.
Cal was right, nothing was like those paintings.
And what he’d said about growing up without any friends outside of school struck a familiar chord with her.
She knew what it was like to live with that hard divide between the rest of the world and home. She wanted to hold his hand.
“And you?” he said. “What’s something the people of Bonhomie don’t know about you?”
As soon as she started putting the words together in her head—I grew up in an orphanage and was never adopted—she lost her desire to say them.
She didn’t want their bond, if that’s what they were forging here, no matter how small and ephemeral it was, to be about their lonely childhoods, their impoverished upbringings.
You didn’t leave that to go out in the world and tell people about it, she reminded herself.
You left so that you wouldn’t be that person anymore.
Still, she wanted to tell him something no one else knew.
“I don’t want children,” she said. Four words she’d never strung together for anyone, before now.
When she glanced at him he looked a little surprised. “Really?”
“I never have. I didn’t get bitten, I guess. By the motherhood bug.”
Cal, wondering how that would have played out in his own marriage, said, “What about Felix?”
“He wants them. One, at least. Everyone wants children. There’s probably something wrong with me.”
“No,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with you.”
Some twenty feet ahead of them, a speckled deer was sniffing at the hackberries growing alongside the tracks. It raised its head as they neared, then leaped over the rails and vanished into the trees. A smaller one appeared, and followed it.
“Do you hunt?” Margaret asked.
Cal shook his head. “When I was twelve, I shot what I thought was a possum with my BB gun. Turned out to be a shrew. That was it for me.”
“Because you’re fond of shrews?”
“Because people don’t eat them.”
“People eat possums?”
“During the Depression, we ate a few possums, yeah.” He gave her a go-figure smile that dimpled one of his cheeks. “My old man cooked squirrels too. But no shrews.”
“I don’t think I’d know a shrew if it bit me on the toe.”
“You’d know,” Cal said. “They’re poisonous.”
The rails began to hum on either side of their feet. A deep wet-throated whistle came from somewhere behind them, where the tracks bent around the trees.
“See?” Cal said. “Trains don’t sneak up on you.”
The engine came into view, pulling a long line of freight cars behind it.
As Cal and Margaret moved onto the grass, Cal dug a penny out of his pocket.
“I used to get in trouble for doing this when I was a kid,” he said.
“My dad would find flattened pennies on my dresser and blow his stack.” He leaned forward and set the penny on one of the rails, but the coin stuck to his finger, then dropped out of sight.
“Leave it!” Margaret said.
He picked it up and placed it back on the rail.
As the train neared, he reached down and centered the penny.
He was showing off, she knew; he’d done this a hundred times.
Still, she grabbed his arm and pulled him away from the tracks seconds before it seemed like the train would smash into him.
He laughed, nearly toppled. He couldn’t find the penny afterward and was disappointed; he’d wanted her to have a souvenir of the afternoon, he said.
“Does the afternoon have to be over?”
He wasn’t sure what she meant by that, so she clarified: she had no volunteer shifts for the rest of the day, and no plans; her dance card was open.
—
He told himself they were only entering the house on Roswell Lane together a second time to continue the conversation they’d been having on their walk.
But they’d talked a lot already. She invited him to sit on the sofa, then opened all the windows and pulled the curtains closed against the sunlight and turned on the standing fan in the corner.
As the air began to move in the now shadowy room she went to get them some iced tea.
Cal could see three different wallpaper patterns from where he was sitting. The sofa was light blue, shimmering. He ran his hand over the cushion and watched his fingertips make lines in the short piling, then smoothed them over, erasing them.
“Are you comfortable?” she said, coming back into the room with two tall glasses. He seemed to be perspiring down to his feet. One of his shoes was wobbling against the carpet as if trying to cool itself. She sat down next to him.
“Sure, sure,” he said. He accepted the tea and took several large gulps from it.
She was almost grateful he seemed nervous, because she was nervous too. Even if there was no reason to be. All she wanted was to kiss him one more time. To feel wanted by him. Was it too much to ask for, just that one small thing?
He set his glass on a coaster on the coffee table, looked toward the fireplace, and said, “I shouldn’t stay too long, probably,” and when he turned his head back, their faces were much closer than he’d remembered them being just a moment ago.
Who knew that the kiss they’d shared in the basement of the hardware store had been restrained?
It hadn’t felt like it then, but this he didn’t even recognize as kissing, because it didn’t end.
They went horizontal on the sofa, still doing it.
She untucked his shirt and slid a hand beneath it, so that, along with the pressure of her entire body against his and the feel of their mouths together, he felt her smooth hand on his chest, and she seemed to like the feel of it.
When her fingertips grazed one of his nipples, it sent sparks down to his calves.
He was hard against her, through their clothes.
With one hand still on his chest, she slid her other around his lower back and pulled him even closer to her.
They kissed and ground against each other and came up for air with amazed faces.
There were lines of gray in his blue eyes, she already knew, but now she saw there was also a circle of gray around each of his pupils.
Every time she looked at him, he was looking back at her.
In fact, with the exception of a few enthusiastic glances downward, Cal looked into her eyes the entire time.
She wanted to tell him: You’re amazing. But she also wanted to keep doing what they were doing, and more—today, if there was time.