Margaret from Maine (9781101602690)

by Monninger, Joseph

  She pulled Gordon closer. The lilacs threw their scent into the approaching night. The tea tasted sweet and warm on her lips. Part of her now wondered why she had agreed to go to Washington. This was where she belonged, but earlier in the evening she had made the call to Charlie King, the escort provided by the administration, and the conversation had been comfortable and informative. He seemed like a good guy, as she had told Grandpa Ben, not at all a bureaucrat, and he had competently outlined the travel arrangements, the per diem, and so forth. After the call she had been glad she had agreed to go, thinking of it as something concrete she could do for Tom, but now, with her son pressed against her, the day burning out, she wondered why she had ever consented to leave the farm.

  “Here it comes,” she whispered.

  He straightened against her and looked up. For the last three sunsets the prism had caught fire and it did not disappoint her this night. It sparkled bright white for just an instant, and she thought of Thomas, and she thought of good grace falling over the farm, and she hugged Gordon as the prism accepted light, bent it, and sent it on its way. She felt a lesson rested in its performance, that she, too, must accept what came toward her and pass it on its journey, but that seemed too grand an idea for the moment. Better, she realized, to concentrate on her boy, and the star her husband had hung for her, and to let day pass to night so that light might swiftly return.

  Chapter Four

  Charlie King, thirty-three, slid across the backseat of the town car, preferring to climb out on the blind side rather than the house side of the vehicle. As much as he tried to ignore it, he was conscious of his right leg and of the prosthetic that dragged beneath the stump of his thigh. Although he walked well with the prosthetic device—he had himself filmed as part of his therapy and he was pleased with the results—the artificial leg caused a problem occasionally climbing in and out of vehicles. It caused other problems, too, of course, but none that he could not overcome. As always, as he climbed out of the car—his hands on the door opening and hoisting his weight like a man levering out of a small window—he wondered how long it would take before the subject of the leg came up. It always did eventually. Still, he took it as a small challenge, a gauge of his returning health, that people sometimes failed to discover his leg at all. He did not think he was deluded in that.

  He stood to his full height, six feet, two inches, and straightened his suit jacket. It had been pleasantly cool in the car’s air-conditioning, but now, in the yard before the farmhouse, he felt the day’s warmth growing. He hated wearing a jacket, or a tie, for that matter, but if the occasion demanded it he did not complain. It was better, at least, than a dress uniform, something he had worn both at West Point and for five years in the army. This suit, a deep navy with a trace of a pinstripe through the fabric, fit him well. He put his two thumbs under the front of his pants and ran them to the points of his hips. He did this unconsciously, a tiny tic that he had kept since boyhood.

  He bent back into the car and grabbed a small bouquet for Mrs. Kennedy, Margaret, and a stuffed meerkat for the boy, Gordon. The driver—a local man whose name Charlie hadn’t fully caught but sounded like Caleb or Callum—turned slightly to see over his right shoulder.

  “Be a minute,” Charlie told him, his head still in the interior.

  “No rush,” the driver said with a Maine accent. “We have time.”

  Charlie closed the car door, self-conscious of the flowers and the meerkat. The flowers and stuffed animal were not strictly protocol, but they had seemed, when he left the Bangor hotel in the morning, like an appropriate ice-breaking gesture. Why not? he thought when he purchased the items in the hotel lobby. He particularly liked the meerkat, which seemed to take an interest in the ride out to the farm, its button eyes glowing with the lovely spring scenery as if actually alive. He tucked the meerkat under his left elbow, the same hand that held the flowers.

  On the short walk up to the porch, he smelled the heavy odor of cows and manure. He also smelled lilacs and something less familiar that he could not name. He turned a little to see if he could spot its origin, but he came away with the general impression of a farm and little else. He saw sheep fencing and a faded red barn; three Barred Rock chickens pecking in the field beyond the barn; and black and white cattle—Holsteins, he thought—grazing on the spring grass.

  When he turned back, an older man stood on the porch, watching him.

  “This is the right place,” the man said. “Did you find it okay?”

  “Yes, sir,” Charlie answered.

  “Well, you’re right on time. Margaret should be ready in a jot.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Charlie climbed the steps, aware of his leg not behaving properly as he did so. He felt the tiniest bit unsettled that the man had appeared on his porch so soundlessly. But the man had a kind face and held out his hand.

  “I’m Ben Kennedy,” the man said. “The boy up at the hospital is my son.”

  “An honor to meet you, sir,” Charlie said and meant it.

  Charlie had never felt a hand with more work in it.

  “I was going to come down to Washington, but we have the cattle to care for,” Ben Kennedy said. “You thank the people for asking me, though.”

  “Yes, sir, I will.”

  The man turned and called softly into the doorway.

  “Come on now,” the man said. “Don’t keep the gentleman waiting.”

  A boy came out first. He pushed open the door, obviously excited, but then became shy in the next heartbeat. The boy turned and held the door, waiting, though he glanced quickly at the meerkat and then looked back into the house. The boy, Charlie saw, wore clean khaki shorts and a sweatshirt. His hair was cut short and he had a child’s tan even this early in the season. He looked fresh and wholesome. A country boy, Charlie thought.

  The woman following the boy through the door caught him by surprise.

  She was younger, for one thing, than he expected. He quickly did the math—adding together a husband in the service, a young child—and realized she was essentially his age. Call it twenty-seven or – eight, thirty at the outside. Charlie was not sure why he had assumed she would be older. Perhaps it had been in her phone voice, he thought, or maybe it was merely the idea that someone living on a farm with a child in Maine was likely to be older. That made no sense whatsoever, and perhaps betrayed a slight prejudice against rural people on his part, but his mind, always fair when it grasped the facts, rapidly made the necessary revisions. His mind was further pushed in that direction by the woman’s beauty. Prepared as he was to behave in his official capacity, he could not ignore her loveliness. She did not dazzle. No one would mistake her for a runway model or a social climber down in the District of Columbia, yet he could not remember feeling so attracted to a woman in a long time. Part of the attraction, he imagined, came from the sense of the house, the open door into a fine old parlor, the sight of the boy leaning on the screen door, the benevolent father-in-law beaming his good wishes. She reminded him of a woman in a painting—was it Andrew Wyeth’s pictures of Christina?—her beauty somehow matched to the landscape. She possessed a natural lightness, a grace fortified by the ease with which she moved through the open doorway. Her hand reached out and brushed her boy’s hair, and then she smiled a deep, warm smile that carried upward into her eyes. The small crow’s-feet at the corners of her sockets crinkled with pleasure. She wore a plain dress that did not reveal her figure, and yet it suggested simplicity and elegance in a way that many women in D.C. sought but failed to capture. He found he could not look away from her eyes once they met his.

  “Mrs. Kennedy,” he said in a voice he had practiced, “on behalf of President Obama and the people of the United States, it is my honor to escort you to Washington, D.C. My name is Charlie King.”

  “How do you do, Mr. King?” the woman asked.

  She
held out her hand. His eyes stayed on hers.

  “If you’re comfortable with it, please call me Charlie.”

  He shook her hand.

  “If you’ll call me Margaret,” the woman said, her eyes still on his. “I feel as though I already know you from the phone.”

  “But Lord save you if you call her Peggy,” Benjamin chimed in.

  “And this is Gordon,” the woman—Margaret, Charlie repeated in his mind—“our son.”

  “Hello, Gordon,” Charlie said. “I’ve brought you something to keep you company this weekend while your mom is in Washington.”

  Charlie held out the meerkat. Gordon turned back and put his forehead against the screen door, effectively hiding his face. Margaret squatted next to the child, her knees pushed away and back toward the house.

  “Can you say hello to Mr. King?”

  The boy nodded but didn’t unwind.

  “And these are for you,” Charlie said, not sure the flowers were the right touch after all. They seemed slightly familiar, perhaps claiming greater personal territory than was strictly required by an escort.

  “Well, thank you,” Margaret said, standing and accepting the flowers. “I’ll put them in a vase right here and they will welcome me home when I get back.”

  She held the flowers to her nose. Her eyes smiled again over the buds. At the same time the boy slowly left the security of the screen door and swung over to his mother’s hip, his arms up to bracket her. She lowered the flowers so that he could sniff them, too. The boy nodded and buried one eye behind his mother’s hip. The other eye, Charlie noted, stayed focused on the meerkat.

  * * *

  He was handsome. He was very handsome, Margaret decided. Funny, because he did not strike her as handsome immediately. Certainly he was good-looking, no question, but he stopped somewhere short of handsome in her first appraisal. She felt, glancing at him as she did now, that he possessed a sort of jigsaw handsomeness, a manner and a look that had to be assembled rather than taken on first bounce. Maybe, she thought, she was getting old: older women, she knew, broke men down and analyzed their features. They did not swoon, as young girls did, taking a man in one large gulp. Charlie King, she decided, was greater than the sum of his pieces.

  She liked best of all the meerkat. Specifically, she liked the tenderness with which he offered it to Gordon. He held it forward, and bent, and she had seen the stiffness of his leg, making it difficult for him to lower himself. And he did not become annoyed or offended when her son did not respond at first. Smart man. He smiled and said he would leave it and if Gordon decided to play with it, okay. Then he let it go. Where some men might have made the child’s shyness an issue, Charlie simply smiled and went off to the next thing. She respected that. So often, given her circumstances, men overcompensated around Gordon, trying to be an instant father figure, trying to be especially warm out of an odd consideration for her husband. She detested that kind of bargain, and was pleased, many times over, when Gordon routinely saw through them. But Charlie King had struck the exact right note. She awarded him points for that.

  He was also polite. Part of it, she assumed, came from his duties on this trip. He was paid to be her escort, at least at some level, and naturally he would be selected for manners. But good manners, she had always felt, provided an insight to a person’s character. Charlie King was not falsely polite, but he moved and acted with slow consideration, putting her comfort before his with a naturalness that she found appealing. His leg, of course, made some of his movement the tiniest bit awkward; he had insisted on carrying her bags to the car, his gallantry highlighted by the difficulty he faced going down stairs. She had caught her father-in-law’s eye. Benjamin had not missed it. Charlie King had turned sideways as he went down the steps, lowering his body as a man might go cautiously down a slick loading ramp.

  She glanced across the airplane aisle at Charlie King. He looked up—he had been reading the Boston Globe’s sports page—and met her eye. He smiled. It was a good smile, full and genuine, with a single dimple on his left cheek.

  “I’m not much of a flier,” he said. “I never liked it much.”

  “I don’t mind it. It’s not my favorite thing, but it’s okay.”

  “How old is Gordon? He’s six?”

  “Yes, six.”

  “My friend’s son is six. I figured they were about the same age. What grade is he in?”

  “First grade. I thought about holding him back a year . . . he’s a little young for his class . . . but then I figured the socialization would be good for him. He likes it well enough.”

  “It must be fun for him, living on a farm.”

  “He likes the animals. But not the cows so much. He thinks they’re too big. I like the farm for him, though. And I like cows, as odd as that sounds.”

  Margaret watched Charlie smile. He put the paper down on his lap.

  “So are you with the Obama administration?” she asked. “I’m sorry. I don’t know your official capacity.”

  “I suppose I am,” he said. “I’ve just been posted to West Africa with the Foreign Service. I’m in Washington to do language and cultural training.”

  “How wonderful. That’s the diplomatic corps, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “ And you served in the military as well. Army?”

  “Yes. I went to West Point, the whole nine yards. Now I’ve decided I’d rather push a pen than a sword. That’s the little phrase I’ve been using for shorthand.”

  “How did you end up escorting me to Washington?”

  “I volunteered for it, actually. I have a brother who is in a vegetative state. My family lives in Iowa, and he jumped into a quarry and landed on rocks. Summertime, swimming, you know. He broke his back.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “He was a young kid, too. He was my older brother. So I’ve been interested in this bill. It won’t do much for my brother, but it will help other people in these circumstances. And I have to say, I respect what your husband did in Afghanistan. I read the report of his injury.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “It took a lot of courage.”

  “Did it?” she asked.

  He looked at her. She wasn’t sure why she made such comments, but it wasn’t the first time she had done so. She did, in fact, believe her husband, Tom, had acted bravely, but she did not see it in quite the same light as others wanted to see it. Although he had had a patriotic reaction after 9/11, he had also gone into the service for a salary. It had made financial sense, and she found it unsettling to hear other people attribute patriotic reasons for his service. For his heroism. She knew her husband—saw him bracketed by his son on one side, his father on the other—and she did not believe he would have acted courageously for a concept as vague as patriotism. No, it made perfect sense that he would raise his arms and try to protect a fellow soldier, but that had nothing to do with God and Country and flag waving. It had more to do, she long ago decided, with his innate decency, his willingness to rise out of bed at four thirty in the morning on the coldest day of the year to milk his cows, to treat them tenderly, to chip ice off their drinking water while his hands and cheeks turned bright red. Thomas had always acted kindly, gently, and he could no more have ignored the man behind him, fleeing for safety himself, than he could have ignored a broken-down vehicle on his way to town or a cow floundering in a muddy rut. He did what was in front of him, and the irony was that he had no strong political impulse, but he would stand up and take a bullet for any human being in need of his protection. So was it bravery, she wondered, or simply the fate his character brought about? She was not sure the distinction mattered anymore, and she only thought of it when others commented on his actions.

  “Yes, I believe it did,” Charlie King answered simply. “I admire his bravery.”

>   “Well, thank you.”

  “Have you been to Washington?”

  “Only once, for the medal ceremony.”

  “I find it a little exhausting to live there. Everyone has some sort of game going. It’s probably always been that way, but it seems worse these days. All these political winds.”

  “More polarity?”

  He nodded. He turned a little to face her. She liked the way he talked, the intent way he had of holding her eyes with his own.

  “So you grew up in Iowa?” she asked, partially to rid herself of political thoughts. “I saw it on your bio sheet. You must have felt right at home on our farm this morning.”

  “I grew up in farm country, but we weren’t farmers. My mom and dad are both teachers at the high school near Carroll. That’s in the center of the state. I had a pretty average upbringing.”

  “And you got an appointment to West Point?”

  “I did. I don’t want you to think I was some sort of born soldier, though. It was one of the best ways to pay for school. I would have done National Guard if I hadn’t received an appointment to West Point. I’m just cheap.”

  “And you served . . . ?”

  “In Iraq.”

  “I read that,” Margaret said. “Three tours. And is your brother still alive?”

  He nodded.

  “Yes, still. He has pretty good care. Ups and downs. You know how that is, I’m sure.”

  He smiled. Margaret smiled back at him. For an instant, just an instant, she felt a ridiculous, nearly forgotten flirtatiousness rise up in her. How strange, she thought. How absurd and how ill timed. She would have given a great deal to have her friend Blake beside her, if for nothing except to verify that his gaze actually contained interest. Sexual interest. She felt her face flush and she became aware of her body, of his opposite maleness, of the pleasure of talking to a man. How long had it been? She could not say precisely. She did not even permit herself to think of it, to believe fully that such a thing was happening, but she could not dispute the warmth and attraction of his eyes. She nearly blurted out her feeling because it came as such a surprise she could not take it seriously. She wondered if he felt the same thing. At any moment she imagined they would both burst out laughing, except his eyes remained on hers and in a pulse, maybe two, she understood that his interest was genuine.