The Confession Club

by Elizabeth Berg

  Iris nods. Swallows. Then she says, “Could I also get a side of mashed potatoes and gravy?”

  “Lord,” Monica says. “This must be man trouble. Is it man trouble?”

  Iris nods again, staring into her plate.

  “Come back in the kitchen with me,” Monica says.

  “That’s okay,” Iris says. “You’re busy.”

  “Not at the moment. And hey. I own the joint.” She lines up Iris’s dishes on her arm. “Come on.”

  Telling It Like It Is

  Back at home, Iris returns to the keyboard. She deletes what she’s written to Ed, and begins again.

  Dear Ed,

  I think it must be a fantasy many people might have, that of getting back together with their ex-spouse. I confess that since reading your email, I have been thinking about our doing that, even though you did not mention it specifically as something you would like to do. But in case you did have it in mind when you wrote to me, I’d like to tell you what I think of the idea.

  I believe we had a good marriage, one that became derailed over our disagreement about whether or not to have children, our waiting, and then my being unable to have them after that awful infection. If we were to revisit the idea of adopting a child together, could we get back on track? I don’t know, but I’m sorry to say I think not.

  I teach baking classes in this town (I can imagine your eyes widening), and sometimes the classes are for children. At the last class I had for them, there was a seven-year-old having her birthday that day, and she said, “I’m seven. That’s the first old age, right?” I believe she may have been referring to Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man—who knows how she came across it? At any rate, it made me think about the fact that we do seem to go through a kind of shedding of skins, not only at regular intervals as we age, but because of events and circumstances.

  I am no longer the Iris you knew, Ed, and probably you are not the Ed I knew. The changes I’ve undergone since moving to this small town have been profound, and it would be hard for me to try to articulate them—you’ve got to be here to see here. I can’t imagine ever wanting to live anywhere else, but I can’t see the two of us living together in Mason. I don’t believe you’d be happy here.

  I think it best that we take our final leave of each other, dear Ed—and you are still dear to me. I will never forget the feel of the top of your head, the basso profundo you attempted when you sang in the shower, the immediate attention you paid to home repairs, such a rare and wonderful quality. I know you as a kind and handsome and intelligent man capable of giving and receiving great love. In fact, it occurs to me now that you might have already found another woman and maybe were writing to share that news in case…I don’t know, maybe you need references? (I hope you’re smiling.)

  I’ve gone on too long, here. I’ve indulged my imagination on all fronts too much. So, I will end by saying that I do now and always wish you the very best, Ed. I carry a miniature you forever in my heart.

  Iris

  She pushes the send button. Then she puts her hands over her face and rocks back and forth in her chair. She can feel the sting of tears, but she does not let them fall.

  At the Henhouse, after Iris told Monica about John leaving, and about her idea of maybe getting back with Ed, Monica put her hand on Iris’s arm. She said, “Let me tell you something. I work in the food industry, and here’s what I know: if you want fried chicken and the restaurant is out of it, you ain’t never in a month of Sundays gonna be happy with the hanger steak. You’ll be eating it and the whole time you’ll be thinking, ‘Dang it, I wish they’d have had that chicken.’ Don’t settle, Iris. Don’t do you or your ex like that. I know you’re hurting. But you keep on. Walk toward whatever joy you find. You don’t know what’s going to happen. And in the meantime, get yourself over to see me and Tiny more often. Come and play cards or watch movies with us. Go about your business in the best way you know how, and love will find you. You know what they say: It’s like a butterfly—you do better letting it land on you than trying to capture it.” She looked over at Roberto, the short-order cook, who’d had his head bowed a little too fiercely over the grill. “Isn’t that right, Roberto?”

  The color rose in his face.

  “Roberto! You and me! Advice to the lovelorn, right? Nuestro nombre ‘Querida Abby,’ huh?”

  “Correcto!” he said, and turned to face the women. He smiled, batted his eyelashes, spread the dishtowel he kept tucked in his pants over him like a skirt, and curtsied. “May I help your problem, please?”

  Iris takes in a deep breath. She has a lot of work to do. She has a lot of plans for the farm that are still in place. She knows what she wants to grow there, what animals she might like to have—and she wants many animals. She’ll have a stable. A henhouse!

  She turns back to the computer and googles “baby goats.” And she smiles, then laughs out loud. For heaven’s sake, look at them; they are the very definition of the word gambol. She imagines the children she teaches running out to see them, holding out tufts of grass to feed them. In some of their faces will be exaggerated grimaces of fear mixed with pleasure. Iris will help them not to be afraid; she will tend to the children entrusted to her for the time that they are. There really are so many kinds of love in the world. Monica said that, too, and she was right.

  It’s Been Good

  to Know You

  Ollie Futters starts her coffeemaker and then sits at her kitchen table to wait for her first cup. She’s normally very cheerful in the morning, but today a sad memory is bothering her.

  It’s that man, John, the way he just up and took off. In her opinion, a person leaves someone or something that suddenly either because he really wants to go, or, ironically, because he doesn’t want to leave at all. He came to her door a few days ago and rang the bell and asked if there was anything he could do for her before he left town later that day.

  “I don’t have anything to repair right now,” Ollie said. “You know I keep on top of things.” Then, “Come on in, why don’t you? I was just fixing to have lunch. You want a BLT? They got that cooked bacon now, makes it real easy.”

  He hesitated, then said he’d love one.

  After they were seated with their sandwiches and potato salad and pistachio cupcakes from Sugarbutter, Ollie asked, “Where you going?”

  “Cleveland,” John said.

  “What for?”

  “Well, to see my ex-wife, as a matter of fact.”

  “Why?”

  John laughed, and Ollie did, too. “Always too nosy for my own good,” she said. “Is that why you wanted to do some work for me? Do you need some money for your travels? I’ll just give you some.”

  “No, no,” John said. “I was going to do it for free, to thank you for everything.”

  Ollie sat thinking. Then she said, “I guess I could go and bust something.”

  “I do want to thank you,” John said. “You’ve been a good friend to me.”

  “Well, if I’m a good friend to you, then I hope you won’t mind my saying I don’t think you should go anywhere. You’re a good fit for this town, and, believe me, I don’t say that to just anyone.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Why are you going to see your ex-wife?”

  “It’s hard to explain.” He took another bite of his sandwich. “This is really good.”

  “Don’t try to change the subject, young man.”

  John leaned back in his chair. “I did some bad things to her. It was many years ago. I was just back from Vietnam and I was…well, I guess they call it PTSD now, but then if you were feeling the effects of having been in that war, you were kind of on your own. Oh, you could go over to the VA and ask for help, but…”

  “Like farting into thunder, huh?” Ollie asked, and wiped delicately at the corner of her mouth.

  Joh
n smiled. “Something like that. Anyway, I was pretty abusive toward her, and I want to see her again to apologize. And to see where she is in her life, and…I don’t know. I just have to do it.”

  “You think she’s missing you?” Ollie asked.

  “I doubt it.”

  “You think her life is hard now?”

  “I don’t know. Seems like you don’t think this is such a good idea, though—is that right?”

  Ollie looked out the window. “Oh, what do I know. I’m just an old woman who never in her life was married or even serious about a man. I don’t know why, to tell you the truth.” She turned back to John. “But I guess all my free time let me pay a lot of attention to other couples. And I have seen that a lot of people need to unburden themselves at the cost of hurting someone else. Years ago, I had a good friend practically fall apart when her husband came back to see her to make ‘amends.’ There she was, all fine in a new relationship, and here he comes, waltzing back into her life, looking real good, all cleaned up, and it just threw her for a loop. He comes in and says, ‘I’m sorry,’ and that makes him feel really good about himself and then he leaves again and—”

  “I might not leave again,” John said.

  “How many years has it been?” Ollie asked.

  “Over forty.”

  “Lord,” Ollie said. “Well, it’s not my business, so I’m just going to say be careful, that’s all.”

  “I will.”

  “You might could weed my garden,” Ollie said.

  “Yes, ma’am. Soon as I finish my cupcake.”

  “Lord, you’re a handsome one,” Ollie said. “I’m going to miss looking at you.”

  Ollie pours herself a cup of coffee and sits back down at the table. She stares at the empty chair across from her. There he was, sitting right there, and she guesses she didn’t say the right thing. She looks out the window and scans the sky. It’s going to rain. Isn’t that perfect, what with her having an appointment this morning for a cut and curl at Hair You Doing. She gets out her magnifying glass and checks the weather report in the local paper. Rain for the next several days. There goes hanging her intimates out on the line on wash day tomorrow, too. She can’t lift sheets up anymore, but she at least likes to get her intimates out there. These little disappointments seem like paper cuts; they can bother you more than the big things do.

  A story on the front page of The Town Crier catches her eye. Benjamin Putterman called the police about an intruder in his backyard. Turns out it was a duck. This is the fourth time he’s called the police in a month, they added. “Well, for Pete’s sake,” Ollie mutters. “You don’t have to broadcast it.”

  Poor Benjamin. He’s as old as she is, maybe older, and still managing to live alone, though for how much longer, no one knows. He has a nice little house, but he likes best to sit on a lawn chair in his garage, from where he manages Benji’s Wondrous Bargains, his version of a pop-up store. He’s been doing it for years. He’s got wooden shelves built along one side of the garage to display his wares. He keeps hours of his choosing: you know he’s open when his sign is out. He sits in his garage in a T-shirt, baggy pants, red suspenders, a Cardinals cap, and house slippers, holding his cigar-box cashbox on his lap, though it is just for his take. He does not make change, as he finds it tiresome. He sells anything he finds interesting, whether it’s a potato masher from his house, or an abandoned bird’s nest he found outside, or a perfectly good bookshelf he found on the curb, or dahlias in a Dixie cup that he sprouted from seed. His prices are erratic: If he likes you, you can get something for next to nothing. If you’re a child, everything is for nothing. If he doesn’t like you, the cost is basically unaffordable. When Ollie paid eighty-seven cents (the amount that she happened to have in the change compartment of her wallet) for a beautiful, well-seasoned cast-iron pan that had belonged to his mother, he told her about some snoots who had pulled their fancy Lexus right into his driveway the other day so that they could browse his wares. “How much for the cast-iron pan?” the man asked. “Hundred dollars,” Benjamin said. The man laughed. “Can you massage the price a bit?” he asked. “Sure,” Benjamin said. “How about five hundred dollars?”

  Ollie will make Oriental casserole later for the two of them and call Tiny to bring her over to Benjamin’s house. He loves it when she surprises him that way, especially when she brings dinner. She won’t say anything about the embarrassment of his being on the front page—she knows he will have seen it. Benjamin reads the paper every day, just as she does, and he doesn’t even need to use glasses. She won’t mention his thinking a duck was a robber, and she won’t mention the Depends that she’ll bring him because it embarrasses him to buy them. But she’ll make sure he’s okay, and that he has what he needs, and before she calls Tiny to take her back home, she’ll plant a kiss on the top of Benjamin’s head. It makes her feel good to help him out. It makes her feel good to help anyone out.

  Little Things Mean a Lot

  “This is the tricky part,” Link tells Nola. “Try not to tear the onion skin. We want to have a big piece to look at.”

  The two are in Link’s room, preparing to use iodine to color the cells of the onion plant so that they can view them under Link’s new microscope. It’s his favorite possession, and Nola knows she must take extra care in touching it. She feels a tightness in her chest that he is allowing her to do so, and already is thinking of what she might do to reciprocate. Maybe she’ll give him the agate she found when she cracked a rock open yesterday. Now, though, she gently peels back the onion skin, using the tweezers Link gave her, and holds up a large piece.

  “Impressive,” Link says. “I don’t think even I could have gotten a piece that big. Here, lay it on the slide. Try to keep it flat.” Nola can feel her tongue wanting to come out of her mouth, but she doesn’t like to do that in front of people, so she is careful to keep it in. She bends far over the slide, and smooths the skin carefully with the flat end of the tweezers.

  “Good,” Link says. “Now we put a drop of water on the skin, and then we put a cover slip over it. Watch.” He shows her, then says, “Would you like to do the iodine part?”

  She nods, tightens her ponytail, and bends to the task.

  “Just a little,” Link says, his face close to hers. “Just put it on the corner of the cover slip.”

  “Were you eating butterscotch?” Nola asks.

  Link pulls back from her. “Yeah. Don’t tell my mom.”

  “Why?”

  “She doesn’t like for me to eat candy. But sometimes I do anyway.”

  “Can I have a piece?”

  “Sure. Wait, though.” He goes out into the hall for a moment, stands still and listens, then comes back into the bedroom, closing the door behind him. He opens his top bureau drawer and pulls out a sock. “It’s in here,” he whispers. “Help yourself.”

  “Wow,” Nola says, after she looks in.

  “What?” Link asks.

  “You have an Atomic FireBall in there, too.”

  “Yeah. I know. Do you like them?”

  “Yeah. A lot. They, like, burn your guts out of your mouth.”

  “Yeah, it’s awesome when it hurts. Sometimes you feel like you need a firehose.”

  She looks in the sock again, shakes around the candy. “Looks like there’s only one FireBall.”

  “You can have it.”

  “Thanks!” She unwraps the candy and pops it into her mouth. “Whoa!” she says, almost right away. She has tears in her eyes, but she’s grinning.

  “Right?” Link says. “Those are really good ones. You get them at Andy’s Candies next door to my parents’ bookstore. But come over here now. I want to show you what I was talking about.”

  Nola puts her eye to the microscope. It takes her a while to focus, but then she sees something extraordinary. “There’s so much stuff in there!” she says
.

  “It’s amazing, isn’t it?” Link says. “And see, plant cells have extra things that animal cells don’t. They have little things in there called ‘chloroplasts’ that hold chlorophyll. That’s what the plants use to make energy.”

  Nola shakes her head, still looking into the microscope. “All these things are just there, all the time!”

  “Right,” says Link.

  Nola knows that Link has a best friend and it is Hunter Jones, not Nola. But Link is Nola’s best friend, all the way. One thing she is very happy about is that they live next door to each other, because they run into each other a lot and oftentimes he just lets her do stuff with him, whatever he’s up to at the moment. Yesterday, Link’s father helped them build a tire swing in his backyard, and they will both get to use it. But now Link looks at his watch and she knows their time is up.

  “I gotta go,” he says.

  “Okay.”

  He hesitates, then says, “You’re a good kid.”

  “Oh.” She laughs a little, and her hands find each other.

  “What are you going to do now?” he asks.

  She blows her bangs out of her face. “Whew. Plenty. For one thing, Matthew and I are going with Iris to Tailwaggers. One of Lassie’s littermates that got adopted was returned, and they called Iris to see if she wants him. He’s going to be Lad. Lad and Lassie, get it? She might get another cat, too.”