Chapter 14 Audrey
Audrey
Friday morning, reunion weekend
I wake up completely here and feel limp with relief.
In the past few months, there have been times when I open my eyes unsure what day or week or month or even season it is.
I wonder how old I am. Sometimes I wonder why I’m sleeping in my parents’ room.
Other times, I’m panicky and scared—am I late for something?
Who needs me? Did I screw up? What am I supposed to do today? Is Stephen here?
I push back the covers and guide Gracie off the bed.
Gone are the days when she’d leap off, my poor sweet girl.
Her tail wags as she looks at me, and I take her graying face in my hands and kiss her on the head, ruffle her ears.
I hope she won’t die before I do. I feel guilty at the thought of leaving her, but worse at the idea of me without her.
I kiss her pretty head once more, open the bedroom door, and she heads straight for the stairs and the smell of bacon.
I’m just about to follow her when I see my pajamas at the foot of the bed. I look down at myself. I’m wearing jeans, a T-shirt and socks. The socks are dirty and damp, stained with green and brown.
Apparently, I had a little nighttime adventure.
It happened once before . . . Clay came out in his pajamas, irritable and tired, and brought me back inside.
“You can’t just be traipsin’ around in the dark, Audrey!
I’m gonna have to lock you in your room if this becomes a thing.
” He had to wake up early to drive to a yoga-and-cheese festival in Putney and resented the interruption in his sleep.
When we moved back to Bitter Creek Farm, my husband turned into something of an idiot.
With the inheritance from Pop-Pop, Clay, the master carpenter and gifted furniture-maker, suddenly lost interest in carpentry.
Instead, he became the worst kind of transplant—a fevered devotee of all things Vermont.
He flung himself into those clichéd crunchy things .
. . organic gardening, which failed when the critters ate everything.
He made his own beer (so bitter) and asked if we could tap into my inheritance to start a microbrewery.
(No.) He surprised me with sheep so we (he) could card, spin and dye our own wool.
Smelly clumps had hung all over our house, dripping with vegetable juice, because Clay wanted to dye it himself.
When a ewe broke into our house and shit on the kitchen floor, little turd pebbles scattering for Gracie to eat, I insisted he sell the sheep to someone who knew what they were doing.
Then Clay decided to make and sell maple syrup.
Mind you, he’d never even tasted real maple syrup until he met me.
This is Vermont, where half of us have been doing this since we could walk, myself included.
He got out the taps and the tubes and the evaporator from the loft and ignored everything I said, mansplaining the process to me.
“I’m actually very aware how syrup is made, Clay,” I said.
“Right, baby, but this here is my special Southern touch. Mine’ll have that smokier flavor.”
“You’re overboiling it,” I said.
“You just wait, sugar.” Sugar was an apt word, since his special Southern touch caused the syrup to crystallize into cement-like sugar that he couldn’t dig out of the jars.
He went dairy-free, then gluten-free, then added dairy back, then became a vegetarian, then suggested we all go vegan.
When I walked into the Stone Hearth one day and saw him eating a bacon cheeseburger, he went back to a regular diet.
He took up knitting, started three sweaters and never finished any of them, then became an oil painter (fall foliage), then a goldsmith and now a potter.
In short, Clay indulged his every whim, pretended Mathilda was happy and drifted further and further away from me. “Do you want to try marriage counseling?” I asked Clay one night when Mathilda was at a basketball game with her friends.
He looked up from his book—The Psilocybin Mushroom Bible—and made a face. “Can’t say that I do, Audrey. I mean, I don’t put much store in the opinion of some headshrinker who doesn’t know us. I think our marriage is just fine.”
I suppressed a sigh. “By the way, you’re not growing magic mushrooms on this property. We have a child.”
He looked wounded but said nothing.
I did freelance work for a couple of area architects.
Interior designers were a dime a dozen here, but my friend Toni knew everyone and recommended me after I drew up the plans for the renovation of her first floor.
Toni had been two years behind me in school and was delighted when I moved back to town, coming over that first week with a sour cream coffee cake and giving me all the town’s news since I’d been away.
By the end of the visit, she’d asked me to help at the library fundraiser and invited me to join her book club.
So I was back in Stafford circles, helped by the lingering love of the Porter and Chevalier names.
Yes, I was Dr. Kate’s daughter. Yes, she really was.
Thank you. Yes, George Chevalier was my grandfather.
A great man, for sure. Thank you. Oh, Dad’s doing fine.
Lives in the Finger Lakes area now. Yes, Stephen’s a doctor. I know, we’re very proud.
In my spare time, I rode my horse, gardened, put my touches on the house by painting a few rooms, redoing the upstairs bathrooms, moving a problematic door, making the space over the old stone dairy into a three-bedroom guest suite.
Stephen visited often, and sometimes I’d join him at the end of a medical conference, and we’d spend a couple of days in San Francisco or Chicago, eating out and catching up, sightseeing and buying souvenirs.
It wasn’t a bad life. It just wasn’t the life I thought I’d have.
I found myself fantasizing about becoming a widow—maybe a rock would fall on Clay’s head as he tried to make a giant Celtic cairn, or he’d choke to death on his stale homemade granola.
I wouldn’t have to stumble on puddles of beeswax or trip on his meditation pillows in my father’s den, coughing myself half blind because of the incense.
It occurred to me that I could get a divorce.
Then came the fogs, the forgetfulness, the fear and, finally, the diagnosis.
So there would be no divorce, no second half of my life.
Clay was the epitome of kindness when the bigger dementia things happened, like when I got stuck in the laundry room.
It was the little things that bothered him.
“Hon, I just told you that,” or “Audrey, for God’s sake, why’d you leave off half the list when you got groceries?
If it’s too much for you, I said I’ll do it. ”
He won’t miss me much. Mathilda won’t even twitch.
Well, shit. I’ve been standing here looking at my pajamas for ten minutes now. I take off my dirty socks and stick my feet in slippers, put on a sweater. Make the most of each good day, the dementia literature said, and so I will.
Downstairs, Beck, Micah, Jasmine and Clay are sitting at the big kitchen table, platters of eggs, bacon, pancakes and an assortment of pastries in front of them. “Good mornin’, darlin’,” Clay says, generically twinkling at me, same as he does with our mail carrier. “Let me get you some coffee.”
“Thanks, hon,” I answer. “Are these from Lola’s?” I point at the platter.
“I stopped by this morning and loaded us up,” Jasmine said. “I read that an all-carb diet is good for dementia.”
“Oh, thank God,” I said. “I thought it was only chocolate, so this is just more good news.”
“I’ve just been gettin’ to know your lovely friends,” Clay says as he presses a mug of coffee into my hand. “It’s a shame we haven’t had y’all here before.”
We four exchange a glance. Men. They are incapable of understanding how complex female friendships can be.
“I’m glad you’re here, offerin’ your support to Audrey,” Clay says. “Difficult times, to be sure.”
That’s almost as funny as real, real sad from last night. I see the others are also trying not to laugh.
Jasmine clears her throat. “Audrey says you’ve been wonderful.”
Clay bows his head. “I’m glad she thinks so. I try.”
His sanctimonious answer irritates me, but I go over to him and slip my arm around his waist. He gives me a squeeze back.
He smells like clay (the pottery kind) and woodsmoke and autumn leaves, because every morning he meditates in the woods.
He’s had more than his fair share of heartache, and there will be at least a little more ahead.
I should be warmer with him. Leave him with some fond memories.
“I hear Ché Anderson’s doing a little razzle-dazzle with both teams before the actual game tonight,” Beck says. “Give the kids the thrill of playing with a legend.”
“I can’t believe y’all went to high school with him,” Clay says. As my husband is from Georgia, where football is second only to the Resurrection, he was stunned to learn Ché was from my little town. “What’s he like?”
“He was always great,” Beck says. “We did a lot together senior year. All those sports awards nights and stuff. A sweetheart, really.”
“Very nice to everyone,” I add, pleased that I actually remember this. “And fun.”
“One of the few guys in our class I never got anywhere with,” Micah adds thoughtfully. “Said he was saving himself for a queen.”
“Well, he found her,” Jasmine says. “He posts pictures of her on Instagram all the time. Three kids.”
“Good for him,” I say. “Sounds like he’s happy.”
Clay leaves to feed the horses and chickens; Gracie tries to follow, but her hips are stiff today. I give her the medicine that’s good for that . . . The name escapes me, but I know where it is, and she eats it delicately.
“So what do you want to do today, Auds?” Beck asks. “We’re up for anything.”