Chapter 27
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Margo was cheating at gin, which she did by keeping up a stream of conversation designed to make Bernie lose track of the discards, and it worked about half the time, and this was one of the halves.
“You picked up the eight,” he said.
“I did no such thing.”
“You picked up the eight of clubs and now you’re pretending to think about a card you already know you’re keeping.
” Bernie shuffled the flamingo-backed deck, the good cards, the ones Bernie’s brother had mailed up from Florida because he thought flamingos were the funniest thing in the world.
The brother had wanted to send manatees—more dignity, he’d said—and Bernie had never stopped being grateful he hadn’t.
“Discard, Margo. I have somewhere to be.”
“You have nowhere to be. You haven’t had somewhere to be in a good long while.
” But she discarded, a four, no use to him, and made a small satisfied sound, and on the refrigerator behind her the tally on the yellow legal pad, MARGO over BERNARD under the round black magnet, said she was up by a number that had stopped being believable a long time ago.
They played the hand out. She got him, of course, gin before he’d made anything of his hand, and she wrote it on the legal pad and set it back under the magnet, and Bernie watched her reach up to the refrigerator to do it, slower than she used to, one hand flat on the counter for balance, and did not say anything about that either, because there were a great many things the two of them had agreed without ever discussing not to mention out loud.
She sat back down but she didn’t deal. She squared the deck and set it aside, and he knew the shape of that, a woman setting the cards down because the cards had done their job of getting her into the chair and now she wanted to say the thing she’d walked over to say.
“The children are in trouble,” Margo said.
“Yours are always in some kind of trouble. It’s the most interesting thing about them.”
“Not that kind.” She told him. She told it plainly, the way she told everything, no softer for the softness of it—the baking that had gotten away from them, the party, the grandmother’s quince that never got made, the two of them using up what the party needed.
How they’d decided, on their own, with nobody making them, that they had no business risking the family’s whole living on something they loved, and had put it down, and were walking around now like two people who’d buried a dog.
Bernie listened. He was good at listening—it was most of what the newsstand had been, in the end, forty years of people telling him things over a folded paper before the day made them pretend they hadn’t.
“And there’s the other piece,” Margo said.
“Joey. He doesn’t want the program. The marine thing.
He told Stella he’s done with it—doesn’t like it, wants out.
” She turned her coffee cup on the table.
“The fund sent that boy to school, Bernie. Richard’s scholarship fund, the one I’ve kept going all these years.
I signed the letter that got him in. And he’s been sitting in a program he can’t stand this whole time and thanking me for it every time he sees me, because he thinks wanting out would be letting everybody down.
He doesn’t want to be a marine anything.
He wants to be in that kitchen. He’s known it a while and he hasn’t been able to say it, because how do you say no to something that was given to you as a kindness. ”
Bernie didn’t answer right away.
He was thinking about his father. He hadn’t thought about that in a long while, but it came up whole—a Huntington kid who’d wanted the least respectable thing there was, a newsstand, papers and gum on a bluff, and a father who thought that wasn’t a life.
Accounting was the steady thing, his father’s idea, and Bernie had gone along with it a year out of the same responsibility Margo had just described in Joey, the going-along, until he couldn’t.
So he’d left—not far, twenty miles down the coast to Laguna, eleven dollars in his pocket and a room over a bait shop—but far enough that the life was his and not his father’s.
“I came out here running from something my father picked. Numbers. I was good at them, that was the trap, everyone kept saying you’re so good at it like being good at something was the same as wanting it.
” He almost smiled. “I met your husband on the beach, if you can believe it, both of us watching the same nothing at six in the morning. And we got to be friends before anything else. A couple of years of Fridays, him and me and a sandwich, arguing about baseball. He never once asked me what I was going to do with myself, which is the thing everybody else asked, and I loved him for the not-asking. And then one day he asked.”
“What did you want to do?” Margo asked.
“What did I want to do?” Bernie nodded slowly.
“I was nineteen when I got here. And I didn’t have an answer that day.
Then a while later he asked me again, and by then I did—I wanted the newsstand, I wanted to be the man who knew everybody’s name and had their paper ready, I didn’t know why, I just knew it the way you know you’re hungry.
I didn’t have a dime to build a lemonade stand, let alone a newsstand.
Didn’t matter to Richard. He found a napkin somewhere and drew the whole thing right there—two boxes and the road, that’s all it ever was—and tapped the smaller one.
He folded it up and put it in his shirt pocket and said we’d get to it.
” He stopped. “Kept that napkin two years. Then I had a good day at Santa Anita—one good day, the only one that ever mattered—and I came in the next morning and put the money on the counter, and it was enough for the wood and not much else. Richard took the napkin back out of his pocket like he’d been carrying it the whole time waiting, and he said, well, okay then.
Let’s do it. And then he gave me the rest of it—the ground, his own strip next to the Shack, and the whole summer standing out there building it with me, board by board, because I could keep books but I couldn’t have raised a wall alone if my life depended on it.
The winnings bought the lumber. Richard gave me the land and the summer and every part I didn’t have. I ran it for decades.”
The kitchen was quiet. Out the window the light was going down, gold coming up the hill.
“He never let me pay him back,” Bernie said.
“I tried. He wouldn’t hear it. He said you don’t pay a thing like that back, you’re thinking about it wrong.
” He looked at his hands on the table, the big knuckles, the hands that had built something.
“I never did understand what he meant by that. For years. Thought it was just Richard being Richard, saying something that sounded wise to get out of a conversation.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m old enough to know what he meant.” He said it simply. “You can’t pay it back. There’s nobody to pay.” He looked at the window a moment. “That was never the direction it was supposed to go.”
Margo looked at him for a long moment but didn’t say anything, and he was grateful, because she’d understood the whole thing and hadn’t made him say the part he wasn’t going to say.
They talked a while after that, the way they did, about nothing and everything—about how the two of them had gotten to be this old without noticing the getting, about the children and how little the children knew what was coming for them.
Bernie said it made him tired to think of it, everything those kids would see, and Margo said it made her glad, and they were both right, and neither of them was entirely.
The light moved off the water, and she said it was getting to be time she headed back up the hill. She said that earlier now than she used to.
At the door he offered to walk her. He said it casually, hands in his pockets, and it was a real offer now in a way it hadn’t been a year ago, back when the knee wouldn’t have made it down her front walk let alone up the hill and back.
“You will not,” Margo said. “It’s not far and I’ve been walking it since before you could find this town on a map.”
“The knee’s fixed. I could use the—”
“Bernard. No.” But she was smiling. She got as far as the step, and the tote over her arm, and then she turned around and came back the one stair and put her hand flat on his chest and kissed him.
It was not a long kiss. It was the kiss of two people who’d known each other more years than most people got, unhurried, familiar, and brand new, because they’d only just started doing this.
She stepped back and looked at him, pleased with herself.
“Wanted to get that in,” she said, “while I was thinking of it.” And she went down the walk before he could answer, the only way to leave a man after something like that, and he stood in the doorway and watched her go until the dark and the hill took her.
He didn’t turn the light on right away.
He went instead to the wall by the window, where the photographs were, the ones he never made a production of and looked at every day—and the one he wanted, the one of Richard behind the first grill, sleeves up, laughing at whoever held the camera, young, already himself.
Bernie took his wallet out. From the fold behind the license, where it had ridden for more years than seemed possible, he slid the ticket—soft as the flamingo cards now, the print of it nearly gone, the name of a horse still faintly readable to a man who knew where to look.
He held it a moment. He looked at Richard looking at him out of the picture.
Then he put the ticket back in the fold, and put the wallet in his pocket, and stood there in the last of the light with his oldest friend, not saying anything, the way you don’t have to, with the people who already know.
“Well, okay then,” Bernie said, to the photograph, to the room, to nobody.