Chapter 48 Lindy
Lindy
When Lindy walked arm-in-arm with David into the SCPA clubhouse, Hailey and Jack trailing them, everyone who’d gathered to
enjoy the food from Greta and Tom’s erstwhile anniversary party burst out in applause, laughter, tears. A telltale platter
of cookie cake crumbs on the nearly empty food table, while Marjorie Westfield was nowhere in sight, spoke to the fact that
some folks had clearly been there and gone, but those who remained didn’t stint on cheering.
David finally held up his hands and, although he didn’t want to, made a little speech. He thanked everyone for their support
and concern and ended with, “I’ve promised my wife, if I ever go camping again, I’ll be sure I speak with her in person to let her know my plans.” More cheers, huzzahs.
Emma was the first in line to hug David, and she hugged him for a long time, seeming like a little girl again. When she finally
let go, she said that Eli should be arriving any minute with Tiffany and Raj, who’d picked him up at the bus station in Portland.
“Grandma and Grandpa are waiting for you back at Innisfree, but they said no rush,” she added.
Cody came up next, shaking his head. He was taller than David by four inches, and the look on his face was stern.
“Don’t get me wrong, Dad, I’m glad to see you, but imagine if I’d done what you did,” he said.
“Did you think about the consequences your actions would have on everyone? On Mom, especially?” He began ticking off the damages on his fingers as he enumerated all that the family had been going through—the worry and speculation, the traveling and searching, the fear and lack of sleep and upending of plans, the way Lindy had gotten Eli and Emma to lie—and David’s face grew pale.
“You could’ve at least called,” Cody continued. “You call once and don’t talk to anybody and just leave a message on the machine?
And you think that’s sufficient to be gone for an entire week, especially when we had so much going on and we were counting on you for it? And I’m not gonna
say it’s a bad thing that Hailey isn’t marrying that douchebag, but how could you fucking disappear two weeks out from her
wedding and not think it was going to totally fuck everything up?” He folded his arms, waiting for an answer.
Lindy was so proud of her youngest son in that moment. He had grown up. He saw things clearly. He was good and kind and thoughtful
(thinking of his sister’s wedding, for example!). And he was holding David accountable.
David glanced at Lindy and seemed about to say something to Cody, when Kate and Josh came up to take turns hugging him. “You’d
better speak to us in person, too, if you go off on your own again,” Kate told David, as Josh wiped away tears. Then Kate pulled Lindy aside.
“Goddamn it, Lindy,” she said, glaring even as she, too, blinked back tears. “David told me over the phone that I shouldn’t
blame you for anything, he takes full responsibility and all of that. But what were you thinking, not telling me and Josh
the truth?”
Lindy had ridden with David in the Subaru back from Downeast. Hailey had followed in the Protegé, while Jack brought up the rear in the Volvo.
Nobody was about to let anybody else out of their sight, so when Lindy and David stopped to make calls from the first pay phone they could find, Hailey and Jack had stopped, too.
They’d called Innisfree first, then Eli in Cranston, then, finally, the yellow cottage, where David had spoken with Kate.
(Lindy, standing by, could hear Kate’s screams of joy and, after a moment, rage, at hearing her brother’s voice.)
“I’m sorry,” Lindy said now. “I just—what you said about your mother. And I saw you were taking it so hard. Drinking so much
again. And I really thought . . . I really thought he was cheating! I was so . . . embarrassed.”
Kate sighed, still frowning. But then she reached for Lindy’s arm. “Well, we’ve been friends a long time, Lindy. And we’ve
got a long way to go, hopefully. So, please. Let me in, next time.” Then she laughed slightly, shooting a look at David. “Not
that he’s going to do this again. I’m going to be having a serious talk with him, let me tell you,” Kate said, as if she were the older sibling. But
perhaps she’d taken on that role decades ago, after all. “But, Lindy, seriously, let me in, okay?”
Lindy blinked back tears of her own. “Yes. Okay.”
David came over and touched the small of Lindy’s back. “Lin?” She turned to him, wiping her eyes. “Cody and I are going to
take a walk,” he said.
“Okay, honey,” she said, and as he turned away, she met Cody’s serious eyes and gave him a little nod that said, Let him have it, and Cody nodded back, still looking very stern, to say that he would.
“Ah, good,” Kate said, noticing, too.
Lindy and David had made some decisions on the drive back. She had told him about her book club friend Samantha’s offer to
create a job for her at the interior design studio. If a hundred thousand dollars was enough to get her parents set up in
Florida, Lindy told him, and her mother would agree to the idea of owner financing on Innisfree, Lindy was going to ask for
that job so she could make the payments without putting additional strain on David.
Lindy had realized a few important truths in thinking about this potential job.
First, there was no denying that she had been drawn to the importance of rooms—what they communicated, the way they shaped lives—ever since all the hours she’d spent in the period rooms at the Met when she was a teenager.
Redecorating at Innisfree and the Cranston house had always brought her joy.
Clearly, working with Samantha would be the dream job she had never quite thought to dream of.
This led to her second realization: She had been setting aside her own natural interests for almost as long as she could remember!
Third—and most jarringly—no one needed her to do that anymore. The truth was, the kids were grown; they no longer needed her
to manage their lives. David clearly knew far better than she did what he needed to do to take care of himself. And Lindy’s
mother had made it plain that she wanted to take charge of Lindy’s dad’s care—in Florida. So, Lindy would go visit as often
as she could—maybe she’d work only part-time for a while. But she would do as her mother wanted, and she wouldn’t let her
dad’s diagnosis stop her from moving forward with her own life.
If the events of the past week had taught her anything, it was that trying to control the lives of the people she loved had
only led to wrong assumptions, blindnesses, too much left unspoken—and it had caused pain for everybody, including herself.
In the car, David had been—to her amazement—thrilled to hear about the job possibility, for reasons that surprised her. She
hadn’t known that he harbored regrets over things that had happened between them, things he’d said and done long ago. “I think
I might’ve discouraged you,” he said. “I might’ve made you think the things you cared about weren’t important. When the truth
was, what I fell in love with you for, from the start, was your ability not just to see beauty but to create it. It was something
I didn’t have a talent for, and I admired it. I wanted to soak it up. And instead, maybe I killed it in you. Or made you bury
it, anyway.” He laughed a little, sadly. “I gave you a life where the true you could only come out in little spurts here and
there.”
“We built our life together,” she told him. “We built our kids. Our family. I don’t regret one thing.” He reached over to
squeeze her hand. “But,” she went on, “I am looking forward to a new chapter. To discovering who I am.” She took a breath,
then added, “And to who we are now, together.”
“Me, too,” David had said. “I’m really looking forward to that, too.”
David and Cody returned to the party after about fifteen minutes, appearing to have come to some understanding.
Cody went to grab a plate of food, and David brought Lindy a fresh glass of wine where she, Hailey, and Jack stood chatting with Lloyd and Anne Ralston.
Lindy liked the sweet way Jack was looking at Hailey, and very much liked how Hailey seemed to have had a heavy weight lifted off her, for good this time.
“How’d it go with Cody?” Lindy asked David quietly, and he said, “Fine,” in a way that said he’d tell her more later. He draped
his arm over her shoulders, and the weight of it, mixed with the familiar scent of him, filled her throat with tears, as Anne
and Lloyd chatted obliviously on.
When Eli walked in a few minutes later, trailed by Tiffany and Raj, everyone cheered again, and there were a lot more hugs
all around. “We didn’t have any trouble recognizing this boy as your son,” Tiffany told David. “Man, you did give us a scare, though! You have to promise not to do anything like that again, okay? You don’t even know how many people rely on you.”
David smiled and thanked her, looking both surprised and dazzled by her being there. Well, who could blame him? Lindy thought, oddly glad to see that she hadn’t conjured her suspicions from absolutely nothing, relieved to know that love
could exist in a lot more forms than the stereotypical ones.
“Hey, Dad, what is your password for your phone?” Eli asked, running a hand through his messy curls. “I tried everything and
couldn’t figure it out.”
David grinned, as if pleased to have stumped his brilliant son. “It’s ‘David.’ Whatever numbers that is. I had it written
on a Post-it in the desk drawer.”
Eli groaned. “The Post-it! I can’t tell you how long I looked at that thing trying to figure out what it meant or what it
was for. The code. Three-two-eight-four-three. So obvious that it’s a genius beard.”
“Thank you!” David said, and everybody laughed.
Eli dug into his pants pocket, pulled out the old flip phone, and handed it to David. “Well, here it is. I charged it up and everything. We’ll have the ceremonial gluing to your hand in a bit.”
“There wasn’t even any signal up there,” David said, scowling down at it in his hand. “I’m telling you, the thing is useless.”
“Nevertheless,” said Eli, and Lindy, Hailey, Kate, Tiffany, Cody, Emma, and even Jack echoed him in an extravagant chorus,
all saying the same word, “Nevertheless,” until David finally laughed and said, “Okay, okay, I’ll start carrying my phone.”
It was late—past nine—when they all got back to Innisfree, but Greta was waiting up, and she hugged David, then insisted they
all sit together in the living room. Lindy was excited to talk about the owner financing idea, and she needed to make sure
they got the gun out of the attic, too. But, seeing how tired everybody looked, she said, “It’s been a long day, Mom. Maybe
we should talk in the morning?” The gun had been stashed upstairs for decades, apparently; it wasn’t likely to start causing
trouble right away now.
Greta shook her head. “I have exciting news,” she said. Lindy couldn’t imagine what could be more exciting than finding David,
but she, David, their kids, and Jack, who hadn’t left Hailey’s side all evening, gathered around Greta in the living room.
Tiffany and Raj had taken off to find a hotel so they could have a relaxing last night of vacation before heading back to
Rhode Island tomorrow.
Greta folded her hands in her lap, cleared her throat, and said, “First, David, I apologize for confiding in you about my
plans to sell Innisfree and then asking you not to tell Lindy. That wasn’t right for me to do, and I regret any pain that
it caused either of you.”
“Thanks, Greta,” David said, with a glance over at Lindy beside him, a little squeeze of her knee. Lindy pressed her shoulder
to his just to feel the heat of it, to remind herself he was real.
“Mom, we—” she began, because it seemed like the right time to tell her they had a big check to give her, but Greta interrupted.
“I’ve had the most generous offer. Now, you know that I would give Innisfree to you if I could. But, if you will take her
up on it, Marjorie Westfield would love to loan you the money to buy Innisfree, to keep it in the family. Just call Marjorie
tomorrow and you can get it set up. She said she’ll give you a very favorable interest rate, and perhaps even let you go a
few months to start off without making any payment at all.”
The room was silent for a second, as everyone looked to Jack, who smiled and shrugged to indicate he’d known nothing about
this, then the kids all started cheering, hugging each other, taking turns hugging their grandma. Lindy glanced at David.
The happy shock on his face mirrored her own, and even as she joyfully did some quick calculations on the earthly stuff—she’d
get that job, and, if they didn’t have to make payments on Innisfree right away, they could start paying off the rest of their
bills, figure out reinvesting their retirement savings—in his eyes she saw the profundity of what was really true now.
In the end, though she would not be able to save her father, nor save herself from losing her parents to Florida, to Time,
not everything was lost. In the end, she and David would be able to keep loving each other. To keep their marriage and their
family intact. And they would be able to keep Innisfree for the next generations, for their children’s children, and their children’s children after that.
In the end, she was the luckiest woman alive.