“You know,” she said, “Richard was not sure he wanted to move to the lake.”
Dottie raised her eyebrows, although she did think that Easterners tended to go on without the need of encouragement; this would not be the case with anyone from the Midwest. Incontinence was not valued in the Midwest.
“But that’s a different story,” Shelly said. “Well, sort of,” she said.
—
For no reason she could think of, and it may have been nothing more than the way the sun was slanting right then across the hardwood floor, Dottie was suddenly visited by the memory of one summer of her childhood when she was sent to Hannibal, Missouri, to spend a number of weeks with an ancient and unfamiliar relative. She went alone—her beloved older brother, Abel, had secured a job in the local theater as an usher and therefore stayed at home—and Dottie was terrified; in the way of some children who are accustomed to deprivation, she understood little and did as she was told. Why her decent Aunt Edna could not take her, as she had done before, to this day Dottie did not know. The only memory she brought back was that of an article she read in a Reader’s Digest stacked among meaningless magazines on a dusty windowsill, offering up the tale of a woman whose husband had served in Korea. At home with small children at the time, this wife—the woman who wrote the article—lived in the United States somewhere and raised the children and waited for each letter from her husband. He finally returned and there was much rejoicing. And then one day, about a year later, while her husband was at work and the children were at school, a knock came at the door. A small Korean woman stood there with a baby in her arms. Dottie was just at the age when she read this that her heart, so na?ve in spite of what she had already learned about life, or rather what she had already absorbed about life, because people absorb first and learn later, if they learn at all, Dottie had been, at the time she read this article, at the age where her heart almost came through her throat as she imagined the woman who opened the door. The husband confessed: He was very sorry for all the disturbance, and it was decided he would divorce his steadfast wife and marry the Korean woman and raise the baby with her, and the steadfast wife, while brokenhearted, helped out, meaning, she allowed her children to visit her husband’s new home, and she gave advice to the young woman, got her into an English class, and when the husband suddenly died, the first wife took in the young woman and her child and helped them get onto their feet until they could move somewhere else and get settled, and even then, at the time she was writing the article, she was helping to put the child through college, a truly Christian story if there ever was one. All this had made a rather significant impact on Dottie. She wept silently and fulsomely, young girl tears rolling down her cheeks, dropping onto the pages; the woman, betrayed and largehearted, became a heroine to Dottie. The woman forgave everybody.
When it came time for Dottie’s own knock on the door, she naturally remembered this story. She came to understand that people had to decide, really, how they were going to live.
Shelly Small sat in the armchair looking at the floor with an expression of misery, and Dottie said, “Where is the house, Shelly?”
“On a lake in New Hampshire.” Shelly sat up straighter, revived. “We bought it years ago as a small cottage, a darling little place, and we’d go up there weekends and in the summer for most of August if we could, and I loved it. I loved watching the water change with the sky, and in April there would be flowering laurel trees, just beautiful. I wanted us to retire there.”
“And why not?” Dottie said.
“I’ll tell you why not. Richard was not for it. And as time went on”—Shelly leaned forward in her chair—“as time went on, you see— Well, I’ll just say this, being a doctor’s wife is not a bowl of cherries. Doctors think they’re terribly important, honestly. And I raised the children and he would tell me I wasn’t doing it right, but was he there when the school called to say that Charlotte had just been caught defacing the girls’ room in the most disgusting way? No, of course not.” She suddenly laughed. “Well, finally for the first time in our marriage I put my foot down and I said, If you are not going to join me in rebuilding this cottage into a retirement home for us, then you are not the man I thought you were and not the man for me.” She waved a thin arm. “That’s all water under the bridge. I designed a lovely house, all that was required by the zoning laws was to keep the original footprint of the house, you know, just do that, keep the original footprint, and I brought in some architects from Boston and it took almost two years, but there it is, a lovely house, we were able to build it up high—it’s four floors, you know—and also down, by digging out a bit of the ground, so really it’s four and a half stories, it’s a lovely house. And we have friends come up on weekends, and we’ll retire there. Very soon. Richard’s tired of the way things are going. No one can really make a living in medicine anymore.”
“Get back to the Annie girl,” Dottie said.
Shelly’s face took on a quickness of expression. “She was hardly a girl. But she did seem it. She did seem like a girl.” And Shelly talked on quietly and steadily. It was getting dark by the time the door opened and her husband came in, and Dottie could see immediately how dismissive he was of his wife and the B&B proprietor sitting in the living room chatting over cold undrunk cups of tea. He spoke briefly, then went straight to their room, and Shelly, with a rather furtive and quick smile toward Dottie, gathered her things and followed.
Annie Appleby was much as Shelly had described her: Dottie found interviews and reviews and blogs and of course photographs, and the girl was really exceptional. She did not have that open-faced shiny thing that actresses so often had, as though they wanted to beam their way right out of the photo and into your lap. Very childlike, Dottie thought actors were, from what she saw on TV when they had their silly interviews, and on the Web too, but Annie didn’t look like that. She looked like you could stare at her forever and not know something you wanted to know that she was not going to let you know. It was a very attractive quality; Dottie could see a psychiatrist having trouble with the likes of her each week staring at him across the room, or lying down, or whatever it was a patient going to a psychiatrist did. Annie seemed to have stopped being an actress for quite a while, though. Dottie couldn’t find anything about what she was up to now.
Shelly had said that she and Annie had walked around the lake the last time Annie and David had visited, which was the first time Annie and David had seen the new house. The new house had a visitors’ suite downstairs where Annie and David had right away taken their bags, and Annie had said, Oh, how beautiful, Shelly, what an amazing job you’ve done! So then they had taken a walk around the lake, the men walking ahead of the women, and Shelly told Annie things. Of course Dottie wondered: What things? And of course Shelly told her without being asked. “What I told Annie was that I was older now, and it made life different. I mean,” Shelly said, straightening the top of her trousers, “Annie had this quality that made you feel you could really talk to her, and so that last day, that last time they were at the lake, I told her how I remembered years ago, when I was a young girl, a man passed me in the concert hall and said, Well, you’re a pretty thing, and I told Annie this. And I said, No one will ever tell me I’m pretty again.”
Dottie had to allow a minute for this to sink in. “And what did she say?” Dottie asked.