Chapter Twenty-Four #4
At the beginning of August, Felix had a dream that Becky told him she’d had a dream wherein the two of them were lovers. Not a sexy dream, but one where they walked, holding hands and smiling at each other. He didn’t know for sure that he’d been dreaming, though.
—
There were different combinations of people at different times.
Sometimes Tom, with Bishop coming in and out.
Sometimes Bishop and Becky. Sometimes Cal and Tom together, or just Cal, sitting in the armchair diagonal from the foot of the bed, reading.
Felix asked what it was. Michener, Cal said.
Centennial. He looked about fifty years in.
It wasn’t strange anymore. To be in a room, just the two of them.
They’d never said much about what had happened; they’d covered it, though, it was covered up, and for the best. But as Felix’s convoy of thoughts began to line up in a horizontal column laid out across the water, he thought of things he’d never asked.
Like, How did you and Margaret meet? Did she tell you she was married? Did she talk about me at all?
There was a rhythm to the movement of a ship that was like leaning into a breath. The up and down of it, the surge and yaw. The ship’s breathing was the sea’s breathing. The sea’s breathing was Augie’s, was Felix’s.
There were things he didn’t have the breath to articulate.
There were things he decided to leave unasked.
—
Bishop carried him out to the backyard one afternoon in the third week of August, and they had a kind of picnic on a folding table Cal had set up in the shade of the oak tree.
They settled Felix into one of the Adirondack chairs, a few feet back from the table.
Tom grilled. Becky brought out a portable 8-track and played some nostalgia tape full of big band music from the forties.
Les Brown. Harry Roy. It took them all back—except for Tom, who groaned and wagged his head.
The day was pristine. They all forgot to be sad for a little while, Felix could see that in their faces, and he was grateful. He thought that he could sit and watch them, and listen to the music, for a very long time.
Say, forever.
What is it about time that confounds us?
We spend it. We save it. We while it away.
We waste it. We kill it. We complain about not having enough of it, or about having too much of it on our hands.
We regret what we’ve done with it. We give it away.
We want it back. We say “time and again” when something is bothering us and “it’s time” when something is supposed to end.
Felix saw it so clearly: all we should ever want of time is more of it.
Life was so simple when it was reduced to the barest of necessities: more time; more air; more Duke Ellington.
At the far end of the folding table, Tom pushed his chair back and stood, holding his paper plate with a half-eaten hamburger on it, his bottle of beer. Don’t leave, Felix thought. Please don’t leave.
But Tom isn’t leaving. He’s walking toward Felix. He’s sitting down on the grass next to Felix’s chair. Look just off to the side, and down. There he is, see? No one is leaving, just yet.
—
It was the first time she’d ever seen her son’s adult handwriting. The letter was brief, informed her that Felix was dying, said if she wanted to come, she should come soon, and if she didn’t, that was fine too. Mainly, the letter concluded, I wanted you to know.
Mainly.
She’d never thought she would hear from him, never thought he’d be the one to reach out.
She’d worried about him all throughout this terrible long war that was finally over, had maintained a subscription to The Hancock Gazette so that she could keep an eye on the names that were weekly listed there of any local boys who had died.
There weren’t many, which had made Calvin M.
Jenkins, Jr. leap out at her—she had forgotten, but of course Skip had been eligible for the draft too.
She’d felt wrenched for Cal and Becky. She’d almost sent them a card—had even considered sending an anonymous one to try to express her condolences.
She was certain they wouldn’t have wanted to hear from her, but she couldn’t imagine anything more tragic than losing a child to a war on the other side of the world, and receiving that information—however it was delivered to them.
Now the news of Felix’s condition seemed just as sad to her. The past felt suddenly, terribly close.
She’d put both of them away, was one of the hard things about this.
Put them away just as they were the last time she’d seen them.
Tom had grown up and would have changed considerably, but Felix…
she’d shellacked him in her memory. It was difficult to imagine him dying—or even aging.
He’d be sixty-five now; she was fifty-eight.
A soft fifty-eight, maybe, or so she sometimes thought—a little smoke and a couple of mirrors.
She’d had three marriage proposals in the last five years, and each one took her right back to Felix.
She saw the road and the handsome man driving, and she saw herself in the passenger’s seat, unhappy, and grabbing the steering wheel—over and over.
Unhappy, because she somehow never felt that she was where she was supposed to be, living the life she thought she would live, loved in the way she thought she should be loved.
And she didn’t know how to love back, had been lousy at loving, a bad partner in a less-than-ideal marriage having to face her own shortcomings, day in and day out.
Lousy at not fully reckoning with her own son as a person—not just as one of her main shortcomings.
For two days, she went back and forth about what to do.
It seemed impossible that she would go. It seemed impossible that she wouldn’t.
The letter said nothing about Felix’s opinion on the matter.
It said mainly, as if to imply there might be another reason Tom had written.
Or it said mainly, as if to withdraw the invitation a little, even while it was being extended.
For that’s what it was: an invitation. From Tom, to her.
—
Just as she’d put her husband and son away, she’d pictured Bonhomie as frozen in time too: smaller than it had been, even—a diorama of the place where she’d lived; she would have to shrink down like Alice to fit into it.
But on that hot August morning, she hardly recognized the town she drove into.
She spotted the Tuck she spotted its height and its bright green leaves from the corner.
There were cars parked along the curb. The three windows of the front room were up and the drapes were wide open, and as she rolled past, she saw figures inside, dressed in dark clothes, milling about.
The Jenkinses were hosting Felix’s wake.
She parked up the street, walked partway back. As she approached the tall hedge that stood between the Jenkinses’ driveway and the driveway next door, she hesitated, pretending to look for something in her purse while she glanced up at the house.