Notes about: Judge Henry Morton Walker
Born: October 4, 1922 Died: July 10, 2008, approximately 1:30 a.m.
Fulton, North Carolina
Judge Walker was an elderly courtly man well known and respected in the community; he was smart, confident, handsome. He knew how to put everyone at ease, especially his wife, Marge, who stayed busy measuring his intake of fluids and excretion of urine and taking his temperature and telling everyone what to do. He called her the little general. He called her Bossy and Bully. But usually he called her sweetheart, and when he did, it was like the wind went out of her and for just a second she hung there like a limp spent balloon until she could refill herself, inflating with upset and agitation about how whoever made his bed didn’t do it very well: And what kind of nurse was that woman who was just there? It took her forever to find a vein in his hand. And she appreciated the Sunday school class coming to sing him a song, but haven’t they ever heard of something called the telephone, which a polite person should use prior to just showing up and ringing the doorbell?
“Come sit with me, honey,” he said. “Come rest for a minute and calm down.” But she could not stop cooking and cleaning and making corrections on everything that had been done. He told me that she had always been a busy little thing, but it had been worse during crises. He said that when their son was in Vietnam, she polished the silver weekly and berated every paper boy so badly that finally the editor who lived down the street hand delivered their copy every day. “She means well,” he told me. “And I could not have had a better wife.” Every now and then, when Marge thought they were all alone, she leaned in and kissed him in a way that surprised me. It went against everything you might have thought and maybe explained his great affection a little bit better. “You’re something, Marge,” I heard him say on more than one occasion. “You sure are something.” I never heard him complain or raise his voice. His one serious moment was when he told his son he wanted to give him a name to remember. This was a man he had sent to the chair twenty-five years before, and though all the evidence seemed conclusive, there was something that had always bothered him. “You may hear of the case,” he said. “He was found guilty for the deaths of his wife and baby.” And then on another day, he told me that he felt lucky to get to see the end coming, get things in order, be aware. He said he had seen so many tragedies and sudden deaths, those whose lives were stolen without any warning, that to get to be present and have time to say things and get your papers in order seemed like a real gift. He said he needed as much time with Marge as he could get—to say good-bye, to prepare her for all she would need to know. He said the pain in his spine was such that he could not roll over onto his left side to read as he had done nearly every night before sleeping since he was a teenager. He said there were so many things to miss, but there were also many things to be grateful for. “We appreciate all that you and your supervisors and the doctors have done,” he said to me. “Marge thanks you, too, even if she forgets to say it.” He told his children to leave and get some rest and he told me the same. He said he would see everyone bright and early in the morning and then he waited until Marge had fallen asleep in the chair beside his bed and he died.
Marge called as soon as she woke and found him there. She was furious that he did not wake her up before leaving and even angrier at the way the funeral home people made a mark on her living room wall with that stretcher. “I called and told them they could just come right back over and take care of it, too,” she said. “I could do it myself with a Mr. Clean sponge, but I didn’t put it there. How irresponsible can you be? Pick up the dead and ruin a freshly painted wall. Well, I have had it and they have not heard the last of me.” And then she went into her room and did not come out for several hours. Judge Henry Walker had once referred to his wife as Hurricane Marge—lovingly adding that she was a force, a beauty, something to behold and someone you’d better clear a path for. And he was the eye of that storm, a lesson in calm patience and control and dignity.
[from Joanna’s notebook]
Henry Morton Walker
Guilty or innocent. Guilty or innocent. Knox Godwin, lanky and lazy with a permanent smirk and a record as long as any in the county, but did he do what they said he did? Did they really prove it? Did he really stab his wife that many times and why so many? Why so many with her clearly dead—no human on this earth capable of surviving that infliction. Testimony said she was most certainly dead by the thirteenth stab and then to deliver eleven more? And then to do the same to the three-year-old watching. Knox Godwin, please rise, and he never looks up; even when ordered to look up he looks up and over as if staring at a spot on the wall as if his eyes won’t focus or maybe he is seeing what he said happened, that he came home from hunting and found the dog shaking in the yard, paws covered in blood and he ran in and cradled his wife and baby girl and screamed and screamed. Weren’t nothing I could do, he said, weren’t nothing I could do. But the jury finds you guilty—guilty as charged. I did not do it, he said. I love my wife. I love my baby. I did not do it. And there was a similar case several counties over and another several counties over from that, murders that seemed to happen randomly or did they and he didn’t push to know what if any connections there were. He didn’t want to think about it and the more time that passed, he really didn’t want to think about it. He wanted to trust the system. He was not God. He could not know. He upheld the system as best he knew how and he was there when they sat him in the chair and fastened him in and that’s when Knox Godwin looked at him and that’s when Knox Godwin said just wait until it’s your wife, your baby. Then you’ll see. Then you’ll know and that’s when he felt something ice cold and heavy weighing him so low all he could think was how he could not wait to get home, could not wait to see Marge there with everything watched over and organized; she would fuss about something so insignificant and he would hold her and comfort her and tell her not to worry, it would all be okay, it would all be just fine, their life at home a refuge far removed from the hatred and violence he witnessed day after day and Knox Godwin called his name: Judge Walker, hey, Henry Walker, and the lights flickered and dimmed as they always do—such current, such pulse, the burning smell leaving him feeling so cold and heavy and guilty, holding his breath, shielding his eyes and nose and mouth, sparks of light on his inner lids, bloodred lights.
Abby
ABBY WANTED SADIE TO stay awake, but she said she couldn’t; she said she was so tired, she could not hold her eyes open and would Abby please come back later. Everything will be better later, honey, she said. Everyone always feels better after lunch and recess and story time.
Everything will be better later. Now she repeats this again and again and has since leaving Sadie’s room and venturing back into the parking lot where she sat on the curb and watched the big black limousine parked there. She had waited until they wheeled out a stretcher—the person all covered and zipped into a bag. A woman in a navy suit stood there with her hand on the body until one of the men took her hand and led her off to the side. They closed the doors and off they went. She circles back by Esther Cohen’s on her way home, the dark trails of vines clinging as she pushes her way back through to the old section. There’s a cigarette butt rubbed out on the headstone and the other notes are gone. She stands, listening—squirrels in the leaves, birds singing, cars in the distance. This has never happened before and she reaches into her back pocket for the note she found earlier, but it’s not there, probably left at Sadie’s. She hears a dog barking but knows it’s not Dollbaby. She is about to leave when she sees the little folded scrap under the urn. Time’s up. F*ck you. She holds her breath waiting. It could be a trick, a trap; there could be people watching her, wanting to see her get all scared or cry and run toward home. She takes a deep breath and waits for her heart to stop racing. She hears rustling in the leaves behind her; she hears a distant car and then very slowly turns and begins walking, the note clutched in her fist. Everything will be better. Everything will be better.
When she comes out of the other side of the cemetery, her mother is out on the front porch, bending and looking under the big wicker sofa. When her mother stands and calls out to her, Abby knows that it’s not good. It’s the voice her mother always uses when something is not good. Abby is shaking her head and crying before her mother even says all the words—how she got a phone call and how Dollbaby was way out in the country, hit by a car, a nice old farmer took the time to move her off the road and read her tag and then he buried her.
“Why did he bury her?” Abby screams. “She’s mine. She’s my dog and I want to bury her.”
“Honey,” her mom says. “He thought he was being helpful.”
“Well, he’s not. He’s not being helpful.” Abby runs upstairs and into her prissy white room and rips the covers from the bed; she pulls the sheets off and bundles them all in the center of the room. Then she opens all of her drawers and dumps them out. She kicks and throws and tangles until her heart is pounding and she is all sobbed out, her eyes swollen and face splotchy. She cries until she dozes off that way, imagining Dollbaby is there, trying not to imagine how she looked there by the side of the road. She does not move when her parents come into her room, first her mother and then later her dad. He puts his hand on her back and holds it there, says he is so sorry. He wishes he had built a better fence. He promises a new dog when she’s ready and then she hears him go back downstairs and onto the porch where he is working on the chamber—the final touches, he had said and held out shiny brass handles that she saw through barely opened eyes. She keeps the covers pulled over her head to block the afternoon sun and imagines that Dollbaby is coming home. She hears her nails on the hardwood stairs, the kerplunk when she flops down right beside Abby’s bed. The next time she opens her eyes, the room is darker, past when Sadie usually eats dinner, and she begins putting everything back where it belongs, slowly folding and remaking and smoothing. The last thing she wants is a stupid birthday party. She is thinking of all the ways she might be able to get out of it when she hears her parents, the angry sounding whispers that will keep getting louder.
“They’re all so stupid,” Richie had told her. “They’re all so full of shit.”
She writes that on a piece of paper she plans to leave where they will see it. You are full of shit and I hate you. She stuffs a couple of T-shirts and her cheap MP3 player into her backpack. She’s supposed to get a real iPod for her birthday and she’s supposed to get a phone, but who cares? She’s not going to that stupid party. She’s going back to Sadie’s and ask if she can sleep over.
“It’s your fault,” her mother says. “You should have built a better fence.”
“Oh great, nice,” he says. “Be sure you tell everybody I killed the dog. Be sure you spin it so I’m the bad guy again. Be sure to call Andy and Liz so they’ll feel so sorry for you and want to take you to dinner or something since of course it’s all about you.”
Abby stands out in the front hall, but they don’t see her there.
“Maybe I will call them. Always nice to speak to an adult.”
“Price tag on your ass.” He points to a round white sticker on her mother’s pants. “I hear the price is up, though the value is down.”
“F*ck you.”
“Obviously not your job these days, but I do know you’re working somewhere.”
“You don’t know anything.”
“Don’t be a fool,” he says. “I know all I need to know.”
They aren’t even interested in Dollbaby. They’ve already forgotten all about her and they’ve forgotten about Abby, too. Nobody said, Let’s drive and get her. Nobody said, What can I do for you, sweetheart, the way that Sadie will do when she gets back over there. Sadie will know what to do because she cares. Her parents don’t care. They are just like Richie said. So f*ck them. When they look for her there will be no one home. Time’s up. F*ck you. She moves quietly through the hall and out the front door, then pauses at the opening of the cemetery. She almost takes the long way, on the sidewalk and around the big block, but she doesn’t want anyone to see her. The streetlights aren’t on yet, but they will be soon. She steps in and waits, listens until she hears the door slam. Her dad gets in his car and drives away and then she watches as the kitchen light comes on and then the one on the stairs. She is going to count to ten and then she is going to run as fast as she can. She will not stop anywhere near Esther Cohen’s grave but will run straight through to the other side and she will first go to Sadie’s room to see if she’s still awake, and if she is, she will ask if she can come in and talk. And if Sadie is sleeping, then she will just sit right there near her bed and wait. The shadows are long, the passage dark up ahead. Sometimes she counts the bats that fly out of the eaves of the long abandoned caretaker’s cottage over near Esther Cohen’s grave, but not now. Not today. Now she quickens her steps, her feet moving to the rhythm of Dollbaby, Dollbaby, Dollbaby. She tries not to think about what she looked like there by the side of the road. Dollbaby, Dollbaby, Dollbaby. She hears rustling beyond the shrubs as she passes and tries not to think. Don’t think, don’t think. Dollbaby, Dollbaby, Dollbaby. She walks as quickly as she can, eyes on the ground so she won’t trip and fall. Dollbaby, Dollbaby, almost there, almost there.
Stanley
STANLEY IS TIRED OF his game, tired of pretending he doesn’t notice what is really going on; the way it is so clear Sadie is fading away, the way Rachel Silverman clearly had more connection to Joe Carlyle than she let on, the way Ned, for all the pushing, is still not out there actively seeking a new life and company better than his flaky old man. After dinner he goes and sits in the chapel and stares at all the photos of Lois Flowers. He had known her for years. Some people thought she was a little uppity and overdressed for these city limits, but he admired the way she went her own way, or at least seemed to. He closes his eyes and pictures her swaying there in the dining hall, jet black hair fixed just so. He liked the way she could make her voice gruff and then come right back and hit every high note. She will be missed around here. She leaves a big empty hole.
He looks up and there is Rachel Silverman. She sits in the pew across from him, also looking straight ahead at Lois, a young Lois on a city street, a war bride, a young mother, mother of the bride, grandmother.
He’s so tired, but he has to say something, especially after being so serious earlier. He had hoped to sit with her at dinner, but she didn’t come and neither did Sadie. He sat with Toby who spent the whole time talking about how it just wasn’t the same without Sadie and Rachel. The silence is unbearable and he knows he has to break it. “This ain’t no synagogue, sister.”
“It’s interfaith.” She spits and then softens and points at the photographs. “I used to wear my hair just like that. In fact, I also had a sweater just like that, too. What a lovely person she was.”
“Lois was always known for her clothes. I’ve known her my whole life.” He feels a catch in his throat and has to say something else, quick, one of those stupid things he thinks up just for these occasions. “And speaking of clothes, why do they call a cheap little part of a turtleneck a “dickey”? Why not a neckey?” He can smell her cologne, can see the dirt on the side of her hot pink shoe. “A dickey should fit on something else, right? And where’d you get those shoes anyway? They make me think of jokes my sons used to tell when they were young and ridiculous.”
“I bought them.”
“I know how it went. Why did the elephant wear red tennis shoes? And then it was something like to hide in a strawberry patch or a bag of M&Ms or some other stupid place.”
“Are you calling me an elephant?”
“No, no way. I know not to tell women such things.”
“Shhhh.” Marge and a whole army of church women with walkers come in and sit right behind him. “This is a place of worship and respect.”
“You’re right,” Rachel says, and turns back toward the front and then in a few minutes she gets up and heads back out in the hall. Stanley waits until he hears the door close and then he follows, runs, in fact, to catch up with her. He gets right up behind her and asks if she’d like to come to his room to listen to Herb Alpert and drink martinis.
“Not this time,” she says sarcastically.
“You can pretend I’m Joe Carlyle.” He speaks the name in a way that makes it sound like it’s dripping in disgust. He walks ahead of her, self-consciously aware of how disheveled and demented he must seem to her. He is almost to his hall when she comes up behind him. She presses in close and whispers in his ear. “First of all, I do not have haunches like a sack mule as you said several months ago and I do not have horns, and secondly, I am on to you. If you would ever like to have a real conversation with me sans whipped cream and martinis and other malarkey bullshit, I am here, otherwise, just stay the hell away from me. This is hurtful. All that you are doing is hurtful.”
“What do you mean you’re on to me?” He can’t look at her.
“The act. I watch you. I’m no fool. You need to join the theater. You might actually be appreciated there.”
“What act?”
“Oh, come on. I spent years in a courtroom and I know how to study a face,” she says. He knows she is within a foot of him, but he still doesn’t turn around. He can smell her cologne. “You have nice eyes, in fact, and a captivating face when you aren’t behaving like some goddamned imbecile.” She says this last part with gritted teeth. “Earlier today, for instance, there was a moment.”
“Are you saying you find me attractive?” he interrupts.
“No. But I am saying that for a few minutes there you acted like a human being, and a kind one at that.”
“That’s sad.”
“What’s sad? Being kind to someone? That I know you’re faking, though God only knows why? That I thought you might be someone, like Toby or Sadie, who I could actually have a real conversation with? We were both lawyers. We both live in this”—she pauses—“this home for the aged. We both clearly have things we’re hiding from.”
“Oh boy.”
“I rest my case.” She steps around and bends forward to make eye contact. “So why?”
Stanley sighs and opens the door to his apartment, motions for her to come in and she surprises him and does, leaving him suddenly worried about the way it looks or what he might have lying about that she might latch onto. She walks straight and picks up a copy of Wrestlemania under which is a copy of the New Yorker and Harper’s, a stack of Wall Street Journals and all of his gardening catalogs. And under Herb Alpert she finds Frank Sinatra and Louis Prima and Cab Calloway and a whole library of classical. “What’s the deal?”
“My son. He wouldn’t leave me alone, said he was going to move in with me. I just want him to have a life.” He pauses, realizing how stupid it all sounds as he says it, recognizes how he has avoided dealing with all the barriers standing between the two of them, barriers that have been in place for as long as he can remember. “He thinks I saved him and that he’s forever indebted to me or some such crap and I want him to break off and have his own life.”
“But isn’t this kind of extreme?”
“Yes, but it’s such a long tiring story.” He waits, giving her the chance to bail, but instead she sits and makes herself comfortable and motions that he continue. “He f*cked up early in life—always in trouble—one of those kids who always got caught, then it looked like he was on a path and was going to be okay but no such luck. Too vulnerable. I want him to have a life. Kids need to live their own lives.” He takes out the Herb Alpert album and puts it on the stereo. “It keeps people from bothering me.” They both laugh. “In the beginning, people would come by and want to hear it, say things like, I haven’t thought of this in years, but after a while, it got old. Even Toby is sick of it.”
“But surely there’s an easier way to do this with your son,” she says. “I mean, think of what you’re missing by not having a real relationship with him.”
“We’ve never had a relationship,” he says, and the weight of the words hit him. He sits down, shocked by how sad and stupid it all is. “Oh God. We really have never had a relationship.” He puts his head in his hands and takes several deep breaths. “Me telling him what to do. That’s it. That’s all.” He feels her hand on his shoulder, patting and then held there. “Enough about me,” he finally says. “Tell me about you. Tell me about Joe Carlyle.”
She begins talking and he listens. In fact, he can’t believe how open and honest she is, her voice rising and falling in a way that he finds mesmerizing. She is able to describe in a few simple words the loneliness she felt in her life, the kind of loneliness that others don’t really see because everything looks so good and full from the outside. An inner loneliness. She said it was something she always thought would go away and then she thought, no, you just learn to live with it. Then she met Joe Carlyle at the height of loneliness and it felt like the whole world shifted. She was almost forty and was suddenly aware of all the doors that were going to begin closing—childbirth and career pursuits, even the geography of what you call home, family members and friends aging and dying and leaving new empty spaces to fill.
“Sounds pretty depressing, doesn’t it?” she asks, and smiles at him in a way he has never seen her smile. She is relaxed, leaning on the arm of his sofa, fingers toying with a piece of needlework thrown over the arm that Martha had always kept there and that Ned had reverently placed just so when he helped Stanley move into this place. Martha had done the work as a young woman and now Rachel Silverman’s sturdy ringless hand strokes the fine threads in a way that is tender and admiring. “But it feels good to talk.” She nods at him. “It does. It feels like I’m alive again. Which is what I felt that summer I met Joe. We live days and weeks and months and years with so little awareness of life. We wait for the bad things that wake us up and shock our systems. But every now and then, on the most average day, it occurs to you that this is it. This is all there is.”
“I do know this,” he says. “I know what you’re saying.”
“And Joe, whatever else he was, was a talker and a wonderful storyteller. Oh, he could make you feel like you were there. He talked about that Saxon River all the time, the dark brown water like tea, the low hanging branches, the moccasins zigzagging from bank to bank. I hung on his every word. I’ll confess I found him very attractive. Up until that moment, I wasn’t even aware that I had a libido.” She pauses, as if testing, checking to see if he registers a look of shock or surprise, so he is careful to keep his face as blank as possible and nod in a knowing way. He spent enough time in court to know how to do a few things, too. He nods again and motions his hand for her to continue and she does. “Well, I had one. It had been dormant my whole life and then all of a sudden there it was!”
Stanley is about to say Joe Carlyle affected a lot of women that way, but he stops himself and instead studies his own hands, the hair on his knuckles, his wedding band so loose lately he worries he might lose it. It also occurs to him how lucky Joe Carlyle was on that day—a man in the right place at the right time even if he was a son of a bitch.
“And so there I was as Art was dying looking ahead to the last chapter of my life and wondering how I wanted to spend it. I don’t have children to depend on or them on me. There it was, the ultimate freedom. Did I want to go to Europe? Go to some island somewhere? Take lots of trips and cruises with Elderhostel? Retire where I’d spent my whole life and just watch winter after winter come and go until I broke a hip and slid on downhill? Then I thought why not see the world Joe had made come so alive for me? The small-town life, the river beach and old pavilion. I wanted to see where he had been a child; I wanted to see where his heart developed. And of course I believed it to be a good heart; I still want to believe it was a good heart, that some part of what I had with him was real and worth protecting.”
“I’m sure it was,” he says without looking up.
“No you aren’t,” she says. “But I do appreciate your saying so. It’s kind of you, Stanley, and I need the kindness.”
“You will have it, then.” His voice shakes as he says this and it makes him cough. “I’ve really missed conversation. Never thought I would, but I do.”
“You know”—she reaches and puts her hand on his bare arm—“even if all he did was wake me up, that would be something good, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“And the way he described life around here sounded like a life I would love to have had. It was so different from anything I had ever known.”
“I’m sure about that.” He laughs and asks if she wants a glass of sweet tea before or after she accepts Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior. “But what about your heart,” Stanley says, unable to look at her as he says it, so aware of the portrait of Martha staring out at him from over the mantel, a bouquet of roses Ned brought earlier in the day, there in her favorite cut-glass vase. “Tell me about your heart.”
“Late. My heart came so very late. Little glimmers early on. The other day I was thinking maybe only now has my heart fully come to be. I sit and listen to Sadie talk and I close my eyes and roam to all the places I loved. And I didn’t even know how much I loved them, which is sad but better late than never.” She slides her hand along his arm, plays with the band of his watch before lacing her fingers with his. “She has opened something in me that probably should have been opened when I was eight. Right? Isn’t that what she always says. We’re all just eight years old. My parents were immigrants and they were terrified that at any moment someone in authority might show up and deport them. They lived like they were living by way of some mistake. My brother and I were their great hopes. First my brother because he was the oldest and of course because he was a boy. He became a doctor, which thrilled them and then I became a lawyer because I knew they would have to be proud of that, too.”
“Hmmmm.” He feels his face flush. “I’m sure they were proud of you. Not many broads our age doing that.”
“I didn’t want to be afraid like my parents had always been,” she said, “and of course the irony is that I was anyway. Foolishly, I had convinced myself I had no fear at all. In fact, I felt that way this very morning only to have it all unravel. At lunch today, I felt absolute terror to hear the truth and I also realized that without the stability I had in my life with Art, I would have always been afraid, I might never have done anything at all. Art’s presence kept me from being afraid and I never gave him credit for that.”
“Until now.”
“Yes, until now.”
“I had something similar, I think,” he says, so aware of not glancing at Martha’s portrait.
She leans her head back and closes her eyes. “Thank you for listening.” She pauses and he squeezes her hand in response, so aware of every particle in the room, the filigreed doily under her fingertips, the crack of the bedroom door where he can see the foot of his bed where one of Martha’s prize quilts is spread.
“I went back to my room after lunch,” she says, “and I thought of all the things I might do, everything from heading back to Boston to closing my eyes and pointing at a map, but then I started thinking that maybe there’s something good to find in it all. In the school of Sadie, we’d start looking for the positive things that might have led me here.”
“Did you come up with anything?” he asks. “You know, other than Jesus and lard and the Confederate statue and the fact that our winters are so much easier than those in MassaTOOsetts.”
“Meeting Sadie and Toby,” she says, and then adds “and you” as what seems an afterthought. “Watching someone like Lois leave the earth with such great style and grace.”
“Let’s go back to the part about me.”
“Okay. Meeting you here, and working so hard to figure you out. You’ve made me furious and you’ve made me laugh at ridiculous asinine things I couldn’t imagine laughing at and the process has sharpened and renewed all of my senses.”
“Nothing dull about you, that’s for sure. You’re the sharpest tool I’ve met here.”
“Thanks,” she says. “Though not the world’s greatest feat in this particular establishment.”
“You know,” he says, “I’ve got to tell you that I’m really feeling the need to put some better clothes on. Let you see how I’m supposed to look. You know I’m really capable of driving and doing all sorts of things. I still have my license and a car. If I tell Ned the truth, I can get my keys back. I can, hell, I can go and do anything I want. I’m only seventy-nine. They say my heart is that of a sixty-year-old.”
“You do have a good heart,” she says. “I would not have thought so a month—even a day—ago, but I think you do. And I think your son deserves to know that.”
“I hope so,” he says, and automatically switches channels as he has done for so long. “The heart is a tough old organ, you know? Like the liver, the kidneys, the lungs, the brain . . .”
“I think I see where this is going.”
“Really?” He pauses. “I’d love to know what you’re thinking. I was going to say spleen and thyroid, but here’s what I’ll tell you instead. I ain’t dead. I clearly ain’t what I used to be, but I also am not dead.”
“I see.”
“I’m putting on good clothes and shaving so you can see what I’m supposed to look like.” He pats her hand and rushes to his bedroom door. “Promise me you won’t leave.”
“I promise,” she says, and raises her hand. “Besides, where would I go?”
“Wherever you go every day. I watch you.” He raises his voice as he dashes to his closet to pull out a pair of pressed khakis and a starched pale blue dress shirt. “I see you going off into the woods twice a day.”
There is silence and at first he’s afraid she left without telling him. He waits, staring in the mirror, smoothing back his hair. “I go talk to Joe,” she says. “And Rosemary. I talk to her, too.”
“How about you talk to the living for a while? How about you talk to me? Come see me instead and we can talk. We can dance. I’m an excellent dancer, or used to be.” He slathers up and shaves, looks in the mirror once more, then checks his breath. He is old, but he’s not dead. She is standing and staring at Martha’s portrait when he comes out.
“Your wife was beautiful,” she says, and he nods, uncomfortable with the way she has conjured Martha into the room, disrupting what he thought might be a romantic moment.
“She was a good person, too,” he says. “I don’t think I ever realized how good either.”
“Yes, same with Art,” she says. “And Joe. You know I really don’t want to let go of what I had with Joe.”
“So don’t. Besides, he probably was different with you. Don’t beat yourself up about it. Do like Sadie, cut out the part you like and stick it elsewhere.”
She laughs. “I’m too much of a realist for that, always have been. I’ll get it all put in perspective. I’m very good at that sort of thing. It just takes time.”
“Yeah, I’m a realist, too,” he says, and she mouths right and lifts up a wrestling magazine from the coffee table.
“So tell me about Art,” he says, and she does. Practical and hardworking lawyer. Liberal thinker. Active in local politics.
“My God,” he says. “I think you were married to me.”
“I left my whole life behind me,” she says as if shocked by the realization.
“So did I. Except for Ned, of course.”
“And I’m supposed to go see everything tomorrow. The house where Joe grew up and the place on the river he loved so much. The road through the thick piney marshland where there are herons and mosquitoes almost as big.” She laughs. Joe always said they had two kinds of mosquitoes where he was from: the no-see-ums that can eat you alive without ever being seen and those big enough to open the door and walk on in. He told her that when they were stretched out on the sand and he kept wiggling his fingers in between the buttons of her blouse to give her a pinch.
“It’s a beautiful drive through there,” Stanley says. “And you can stop and get a hot dog right there at the halfway point. It’s just about all there is.”
“That’s what the girl told me. The girl who does hair and nails is taking me.”
“The one with all the metal in her ears and nose?”
“Yes. I like her,” Rachel says, and again lifts the magazine from the coffee table and opens it to a centerfold of the one they call the Undertaker. “She uses her metal and tattoos like some people use other things.”
“Tough life she’s had,” Stanley says. “She’s done pretty well given the hand she was dealt. A lot of sadness.” He lets his arm drop around her shoulders and is surprised at how easily she relaxes and leans into him. “I can drive you all those places,” he says, and without allowing himself a moment to think or reconsider, he leans in close with the idea he wants to kiss Rachel Silverman right on the lips, but she sees him coming and raises a hand between them.
“Isn’t this a little fast?” she asks.
“Maybe, but I’m thinking we’d be foolish to wait.”
“That may be.”
“In fact, I don’t think we should waste a minute, do you?”
“No. No, I suppose you’re right.”
He goes to pull the blinds and sees that strange little girl from next door running across the parking lot. He doesn’t know how Sadie can stand the way she runs in and out all day long, but it doesn’t seem to bother her. The sun has dropped out of sight, and there are just a few lingering streaks of violet light out there near the cemetery. He turns on the stereo—Herb Alpert. “A Taste of Honey.” “We can listen to something else,” he says. “But I can promise that when this is on, no one comes to visit.”
“So, then, leave it,” she says and walks over to him. “We can dance to this one. We can pretend it’s 1965.”