Margaret from Maine (9781101602690)

by Monninger, Joseph

  “Marco says people who like magic still have the capacity to be surprised,” Charlie said as he held the door for her. “He says it’s a good trait that you like magic.”

  “If Marco says it, then it must be true.”

  “I think I’m getting jealous of Marco.”

  She took his arm and pressed her body against his. The air, Charlie admitted, felt wonderful. The river made a deep, restful hum as it passed. Somewhere above the inn Charlie heard the rapids that gave the place its name.

  “Thank you for dinner,” Margaret said. “It was delicious.”

  “Was it all right?”

  “It was great, Charlie. I could have eaten anything, I was so hungry, but it was well prepared. And the wine was excellent. You’re turning me into a lush. I don’t usually drink this much. There’s no real occasion except with Blake.”

  “We’re on vacation, so vacation rules apply.”

  “Is that what Marco says?”

  He nodded. She leaned toward him and kissed a spot beneath his ear. They continued to walk. The night felt chilly, but occasionally Charlie felt a fold of warmer air that moderated things. Now and then through the trees a cat’s paw moon raked the branches.

  “I had one of those moments as I was getting my jacket that made me stop,” Margaret said. “I realized that for plenty of women it’s not so completely out of the realm of possibility to visit a nice country inn with a man she cares about. Do you know what I mean? This has been an extraordinary couple of days, but it makes me realize I have set the bar pretty low for myself. I’ve been asleep, a little. Or maybe numb. You’re waking me up and I’m a little worried about that.”

  “Numb?”

  “Well, not to Gordon. Not to my responsibilities. But to my own journey, as Blake would say. She’s big on the journey thing. I guess I’ve grown a little bit of a shell. It’s safe and dry in the shell, but it’s also a little dull.”

  “Did you ever consider dating anyone at all?”

  She shook her head.

  “Not that kind of gal,” she said, “although I’ve often wondered if it would be easier if I were.”

  “Marco would say you’ve been waiting for me.”

  “Oh, really?” she said and bumped her shoulder into his. “Is that what you think?”

  “That’s what I know.”

  “You think we were destined to meet?”

  “Star-crossed lovers, no doubt.”

  They arrived at a small turnout with a view of the rapids. Charlie steered her to a bench and sat beside her. He tasted moisture in the air from what he guessed must be the Ruggles. An old willow, bent and misshapen, leaned over the river and dangled a few of its tendrils into the water. Margaret moved closer.

  “So what’s Blake going to say about all this?” Charlie asked.

  “Oh, she’ll be crazy to hear all the details. She’ll want to know about you, though I’ve already told her some of it. Her marriage . . . I think I mentioned . . . is not going great at the moment. Her husband is gone a lot, trying to build his business, and Blake is left holding the bag pretty often. Donny’s a good guy, but he seems a little surprised to find himself married with a child. I don’t know. Then Blake puts pressure on him and that only chases him away more and more. It’s complicated, but that’s why she’ll want to hear about you so much. You are a delicious little story that doesn’t come along every day. A nice distraction.”

  “So that’s what I am? A distraction, huh?”

  “You are a glorious distraction,” she said and held his arm. “What is it about men and women that makes it so difficult? A lot of my friends are struggling in their marriages. All this yearning we do, men and women. We all hope for something to be dramatic, but it usually isn’t, is it?”

  “There’s that old poem when the narrator says he isn’t Hamlet. He’s just a small actor to swell a scene. I think that’s the line. We act like we’re center stage, but really we aren’t.”

  “Do you know a lot about poems, Charlie?”

  “Actually, no. I have a good memory, though, and I retain things. I know movie lines, too. My mother always said I had flypaper between my ears.”

  “One of the things you’ve made me remember is that it can be easy between a man and woman. It doesn’t have to be wrapped in a hundred things. I know we don’t have all the usual concerns on a trip like this, but still it feels natural and simple.”

  “How about for you and Thomas?”

  “You mean before everything? I don’t know what to think about him right now. It’s a little like a movie star dying young, you know? We remember them for what they were. It’s hard to imagine him around today, being a husband, a father, all of that. Maybe we would have grown in different directions. You never know. But we felt solid at the time. That’s one of the things I see in Blake’s situation. She’s a good person and so is Donny, but they have this battlefield over the house and work and who does what and who should be doing more. I think they have their heads down and don’t see each other clearly anymore. Maybe I’ll try to say that to her when I get home.”

  “Will she listen?”

  “Blake is very open. Donny, not so much. They’re like Chevy Chase in the Vacation movie when they’re driving past everything without slowing down to look. The good stuff is on the pull-outs and the side roads. But they keep thinking they have to get someplace and you want to remind them there isn’t anyplace to go. They’re there already.”

  “How did you get so smart?” Charlie asked.

  “Oh, I’m far from smart. Maybe the cows slow me down, that’s all. It sounds funny, but I’m grateful to them. You can’t rush a cow.”

  “That should be a bumper sticker.”

  She slid her hands up under his sweater for warmth. He leaned down and kissed her cheek. She squeezed tighter against him.

  “You make me want to talk,” she said. “Sorry if I’m going on. I spend all my time talking to Gordon and Grandpa Ben, so I don’t use these particular muscles very often.”

  “Not at all. I like hearing your thoughts.”

  “What about you, though? Why aren’t you married, Charlie? That’s what I can’t understand. Women must have tried to snatch you up.”

  “A few have, maybe. But then I was in the service and I was injured and all of that took time. And at West Point, well, that’s just a crazy place. I feel like I’m ready now. Or getting ready. And now Marco made you appear, presto chango.”

  “I sure appeared, all right.”

  “I’m glad you did.”

  A wind came down the river and made the willow move. Charlie felt her shiver next to him. He used his arm to tuck her closer.

  “Ready to go back?” he asked, his lips against her hair.

  “To our beautiful room overlooking a beautiful river?”

  “Yes, that room.”

  “And will the Eagle Scout make another fire?”

  “The Eagle Scout is yours to command.”

  “Okay, three quick breaths,” she said and pushed away from him for a second. She stood and took a deep breath. She let the air out slowly.

  “Spring, spring, spring,” she said.

  * * *

  She listened to the river late at night, her ear against Charlie’s chest, her skin on his skin. She slept in little fits and starts, but she didn’t mind. She liked being awake, because she didn’t want this day, these few days, to end quickly. The fireplace had died down and the last coals burned with a red glow. Occasionally she smelled smoke, and it reminded her of bonfires outside, burning off the spring clippings around the dairy barn, brush piles pushing green smoke into the May air.

  She sent her thoughts to Gordon, wishing him gentle sleep; she thought of her husband, Thomas, and her eyes moved a little beneath their lids. Forgive me, she though
t, but that was wrong, that was incorrect. She had left with Charlie deliberately. It had been a choice. And if it was a sin, as the old priests would have told her in childhood, then she accepted it. But she did not believe it was a sin. Charlie was a joy. He was a welcome, kind spirit who had crossed his life with hers. She vowed not to regret a moment of her time with him.

  A little later in the night she woke to find herself worried. The fire had gone out and the room had become chilly. She reached for his hand and he settled around her, spooning her, his heat perfect and comforting. The world tried to push in: details about the cows, the decision to spray biosolids on the apple orchard, Blake and her marriage, a health plan changeover for Thomas, the ongoing but stalled renovations on the second farmhouse, but she resisted such thinking. Not now, she thought. She pushed back into Charlie’s arms and he tightened his body around her, and she admitted she liked feeling a man beside her in the small hours. Yes, it was a fact. It was a luxury. And as she settled into him she heard his breathing change and then his lips touched her ear.

  “I’m here,” he said, apparently sensing her restlessness.

  She took his arm and tightened it around her. Maybe light began to appear in the east, a mere glimmer, but she felt her body give way. And she took his heat and kept his arm over her chest, and for a while she slept as she hadn’t slept in years, deep and full, the wind calling her to come outside, to fly with it, to see the morning sun chase its reflection across the river.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Margaret turned her face to get the early morning sun directly on it. The air felt luscious. It was still early; the inn provided a buffet breakfast. Charlie had already said he would fish only a half hour or so, just to try his luck. Margaret felt hungry and content and part of her wanted to sit like a tortoise in the sun and think about nothing. But Blake needed her and she straightened a little on the boulder, making herself concentrate on her friend’s situation. It was not a story she hadn’t heard before, but perhaps Blake’s voice sounded more fatigued and dispirited than in any previous recounting.

  “Did you talk to Donny this morning?” Margaret asked.

  “No, he was out of here before it was even light. He works hard, I’ll always give him that. He might get a new contract doing the government offices in Bangor . . . the grounds, the arbor work. He’s put a bid in and he feels like he has a good shot at it. We’ll see.”

  “I’m sorry it’s going that way, Blake.”

  “You make your own bed, I suppose. It’s weird, but hearing you talk about getting away from here, I keep thinking if Donny and I could go somewhere and reconnect a little it would help. Just spend time as a man and woman instead of a husband and wife and parents . . . you know what I mean.”

  “I’ll watch Phillip anytime you say.”

  “I know you would. What’s your soldier boy doing now?”

  “Still casting. He hasn’t caught anything.”

  “You’re crazy about him, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. To my toes.”

  “Be careful, sweetie. I know I’ve said that, but it bears repeating.”

  “I’m being as careful as I can be. But it’s not easy.”

  “I should run. I’ll swing by this evening and check on your boys. What’s Gordon think of this whole thing?”

  “He doesn’t really know what’s going on, but he’s good about it. I think it lodges somewhere in his head in the ‘for Dad’ category, but what that means the Lord only knows.”

  Margaret hung up a moment later. A small wave of worry started in the pit of her stomach, but she pushed it down. Not now, she told herself again. Not while there is sun and a sparkling river and a man you are crazy about fishing and enjoying himself fifty yards away. Not when he is going to come back and you are going to have a good breakfast, and maybe you will see spectacular blossoms and you will travel on the Blue Ridge Parkway and take in the delicious air. Not now.

  * * *

  Charlie fished a hare’s ear nymph through the tailwater at the base of the Ruggles Rapid. He was not very good at this, he decided, and he felt slightly pretentious in his waders and fly jacket, waving a fly rod at innocent fish. But he liked being out; he liked standing in water, studying the currents, deciding how to replicate whatever happened naturally on the river. A hare’s ear, he knew, was as close to a universal fly as an angler could choose. He let it plunk in the white water above him, then chatter down gracefully into the swirls and eddies of the deeper pools below.

  His leg hurt. Through the months of rehabilitation, that had been the most singular thing about his injury. His foot and ankle and a portion of his shin had disappeared, shredded to strings of confetti by the blast, and yet he still felt pain in the missing area. Phantom limb syndrome, he comprehended, but no matter how he worked his mind around it the concept refused to make sense to him. It should have been the single advantage of losing a limb, the lack of pain, but instead it had become a troublesome annoyance, one that bothered him as much for its irrational underpinnings as it did for the actual sensation. It had something to do with the mind-nerve transfer, he had read, and doctors currently experimented with mirrors: it seemed if a patient could visualize the missing limb, see its absence reflected through the eye to the brain, then the brain would begin to let the limb recede and disappear. That was the coming thing.

  It was all too confusing, Charlie decided. He did not want to think about it now, although his missing foot, remarkably, felt cold with the river water. He deliberately waded a few steps downstream, careful to keep his balance, and he turned to Margaret for a moment and called to her softly across the water.

  “Getting hungry?” he asked.

  “Famished.”

  “I won’t be long. They don’t seem to be biting.”

  “You look like you know what you’re doing, Charlie.”

  “Looks can be deceiving.”

  “How’s the water?”

  “Cold.”

  “It’s wonderful in the sun here.”

  “How do I know you’re not a mermaid?”

  “No tail.”

  He felt a small quiver on the end of his line.

  “I may have just had a hit,” he said, turning back to the water. He cast again, trying to place the fly in the same patter of water where he had experienced the quiver.

  “A fish?”

  “Maybe. It’s hard to tell. It might have just been a little snag on the bottom, or a twig. . . .”

  But then he raised his rod tip and he saw a fish fly up and out of the water. He tightened the line with his right hand and kept a steady pressure on the fish. It was not big. He knew that from the weight in his hands and the bend in the rod. He backed a little out of the stream and led the fish toward him, playing the fish quickly so that he wouldn’t tire or injure it. The fish pulled and ran, darting back to the faster water, but Charlie checked it and moved it back. When it was within reach, he bent down and removed the hook easily. The fish hovered for a moment, stunned, then drifted away with the current.

  “Did you have one, Charlie? I wanted to see!”

  “It was a little brookie.”

  “You’re my hero,” she called, her voice teasing.

  “You’re easily impressed,” he said, smiling.

  He turned and began winding in the line. He was not paying attention to his footing, and he felt his balance shift, his foot slip on something on the riverbed. He lunged sideways, feeling drunken, and he tried to catch himself. He succeeded partially, but he knew he was going down, and he lowered himself onto his knee rather than take the full fall. Water rushed in over the top of his waders and he jerked himself back onto his feet, annoyed and embarrassed. He nearly lost the fly rod when he opened his arms and tried to regain his balance. He knew he looked clumsy because he felt clumsy.

  “Damn
it,” he said as he finally got his stance squared on the bottom.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I think the fish is taking revenge. But I’m okay. I got some water down my waders.”

  He saw her stand and come to the edge of the river, her face concerned. He couldn’t help it; he felt annoyed with his leg, with the stupid awkwardness it spread to his body at inopportune times. He felt like Caliban from The Tempest, a hump-backed, misshapen child of the devil, a hoofed creature stumping through life with a loss of grace. He did not give in to such feelings often, but he felt it rise in him now and he despised seeing concern on her face. He would rather see anything else, he thought, but pity.

  “Are you cold?” Margaret asked. “You must be freezing.”

  “A little. I’ve got a bunch of water in my waders.”

  “I thought you were going under.”

  “So did I, frankly,” he said and felt himself gain the shallows.

  He turned the fly rod around and held it out for her to take. Then he slipped the waders’ suspenders off his shoulders and pulled down the bib. Water rose up and spilled out, dripping down into the stream. His shirt and trousers were wet.

  “I told you I wasn’t much of a fisherman,” he said.

  “You caught one. That’s not bad.”

  “Are you always this nice, Margaret?” he asked, and he felt a small snake of his own frustration loaded onto the question. Why was he taking out his clumsiness on her? But he still felt annoyed at his leg’s betrayal, at his own feebleness. He climbed out of the water and deliberately took his time fixing his waders, getting the water out. He felt flushed and cold and his blood was stirred.

  She stood to one side with the fly rod.

  “I’m sorry. I was just frustrated with my leg,” he said when he finished stripping off his waders. “I have a little temper from time to time. The leg . . .”

  “Okay.”

  “You’ve done nothing wrong. Not a thing. It was all on me.”

  “I get it.”

  “Irked. I was irked,” he said, trying to bend the silly word into a joke.