ONCE UPON ANOTHER TIME

by McQuestion, Rosary

  The words I’d heard David speak in my head come back to haunt me.

  “Laura,” said Katelyn, as she leaned over the table with a devilish grin. “If there isn’t anything in particular, it could be that you are so in-like or in-lust with the man that a bit of insecurity is creeping into that pretty little head of yours.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “I’ve never noticed that about you before. It was only after you started dating David.”

  “Hmm, so, Laura how’s your sex life?” asked Katelyn pointedly.

  “Katelyn Walker, are you analyzing me?” asked Laura frowning.

  “Well, I am a doctor,” she said with eyebrows raised.

  Laura looked at the both of us and smiled sheepishly. “David does have an extremely good appetite for sex. Sex with him is like heaven. In fact, the man practically borders on kinky sexual perversion, and Katelyn, you know that Kama Sutra book you loaned me?”

  “Yes,” said Katelyn, her eyes twinkling.

  “He hasn’t objected to wanting to try some new things.” She let out a laugh that sounded like relief. “You guys are right, I’m just being stupid.”

  “Well, of course you are,” said Katelyn while laughing.

  Laura’s green eyes sparkled like jewels, as she leaned forward over the table and gave us an impish look. “Katelyn, you know that gadget you wanted Aubrey to order,” she whispered conspiratorially.

  “Yes I do,” said Katelyn wearing the biggest grin I’d ever seen.

  “Ha! I ordered it,” Laura said giddily.

  “No!” I said, practically throwing myself over the table. “Well?”

  “What can I say? It’s a virtual monument to womanhood. It even rotates,” said Laura, as she moved her index finger like she was stirring liquid in a glass. “It’s definitely a whole lot of toy for one girl to handle--not that I can’t!” She excitedly blurted this out.

  None of us noticed the young busboy standing to our side, until it was too late. Guessing from the blush on his face, he’d overheard our conversation. We all dissolved into giggles, like three teenage girls that had just sneaked a peek into the boy’s locker room.

  Three Seafood Cobb salads, forty-five dollars, two Pepsis, and one water five dollars, the expression on a young man’s face overhearing talk of a woman’s toy--priceless!

  The waiter brought the bill. Laura said it was her treat and quickly handed him her charge card. However, as soon as he walked away, Laura’s face took on the expression of just having eaten bad sushi. “That is just so disgusting.” The sound of disdain rang sharply in the tone of her voice.

  Katelyn and I followed her gaze to see who was behind us. Mario, owner of the Italian deli on Washington Street was seated at a table with a group of men. He was blatantly making eyes at a dark-haired, twenty-something waitress with a curvy figure, as she toted a tray of fruit salads and tinkling glasses of iced tea to a table not far from where he sat.

  “It’s a wonder how the Italian god of antipasto, a married man with three kids,” Laura quipped, “thinks he’d have a chance with her. There should be a law against married men acting like that!”

  Katelyn and I both knew that the one thing Laura could never get past, and found totally revolting, was a married man who so much as fantasized about cheating on his wife. Cheating was what her ex-husband was notorious for doing. To say she didn’t harbor bitter feelings and deep resentment for guys who stray, was like saying the character Michael Douglas played in “Fatal Attraction” didn’t deserve the psycho bunny-boiler he managed to snare.

  Again, David’s words came to mind, as I recalled the episode in Laura’s office. Exactly what was he keeping from Laura?

  * * * *

  As soon as we returned to the office, Ashley handed me my messages. Flipping through them I pulled one out, confused after reading it.

  “Isn’t this from this morning?” I showed Ashley the pink slip.

  “No, he came back. It couldn’t have been more than ten minutes after you left for lunch.”

  “And again, he didn’t leave a message?”

  “No, said he’d get a hold of you later.” A glossy sheet of black hair fell over Ashley’s shoulder as she flipped her head to one side and smiled up at me from her desk.

  “Who came back?” asked Laura.

  “This guy named Gavin,” Ashley said, as she thumbed through a stack of papers on her desk. “He’s really cute, too.” She hopped up from her seat, file folder in hand and gave Laura a wink, as she turned on her heels and made her way toward the filing cabinet.

  “Gavin who?” Laura asked.

  “That’s what I’d like to know.”

  “Hmm, a mysterious man who won’t leave his last name or a message, and also happens to be cute, stops by to see you?”

  Laura’s tone had a hint of mischief. It was as if I could hear the wheels turning in her head. They were squeaky and irritating and I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear what she was thinking.

  “Maybe he’s a secret admirer,” she said gamely.

  “Yeah right.”

  “You never know. Well, at least your life is becoming more interesting...” Laura’s voice trailed off as she continued down the hall.

  If only she knew just how interesting my life had become.

  I walked in my office to see Mr. Davis setting up a tall ladder next to my desk.

  He turned to look at me. “Hope I’m not catching you at a bad time Ms. Aubrey,” he said. “You left a message wanting me to check your overhead light. Said it was buzzing.”

  “Oh, yes, the buzzing.”

  As I watched Mr. Davis position the ladder under the light, I walked to my desk and sat down. I thought about Matt always fixing something around the house. “Mr. Davis, what I’m going to ask will sound like it’s coming out of left field. However, I’m curious as to why you never married again after your wife and baby died.”

  Mr. Davis abruptly stopped what he was doing to flash a look of surprise at me. “You weren’t kidding about that coming out of left field. Whatever made you think of that?”

  He seemed more curious than upset.

  I shrugged my shoulders. “Um, just wondering.”

  Mr. Davis leaned over his box of tools rummaging through it to find what he needed. “Smart people move on with their lives, but some are stubborn as mules always heehawing and carrying on, pulling away trying to go in the opposite direction. Not wanting to accept the hand that life had dealt them, always yearning for what they lost. But they never stop to think of the mark they’re making on their future.”

  He pulled a screwdriver from the toolbox and stood upright to look me in the eye. “Until it’s too late.”

  “So, are you saying you made the wrong decision?” I asked timidly, feeling as if I shouldn’t have impulsively asked the question in the first place.

  He didn’t answer. Instead, he climbed the ladder, flipped the light cover down, and checked the fluorescent tube. A thoughtful moan rose up from his throat as he began to remove the tube from the side sockets.

  Nice move McCory.

  “Please accept my apology Mr. Davis. You have every right to tell me to mind my own business,” I said feeling like a heel for being so intrusive.

  He cleared his throat. “At the time, I thought I’d made the right decision never to marry again,” he said, in his sweet potato pie Mississippi accent. “I guess maybe some folks aren’t brave enough to live their lives without the person they love. Some feel guilt over being alive when the love of their life is dead. They pour themselves into their work, acquire lots of friends, are socially active, but their lives don’t move forward. Not in a way that counts.”

  He stopped fiddling with the light to look down at me. “It was during the time when my friends’ children were older and they started having kids that I began to feel like an outsider. I didn’t share the same experiences in life, couldn’t share stories about children or grandchildren. All I had to talk about was materialistic things. That’
s when I realized I didn’t want to live in the loneliness of my surroundings, but it was too late. I was an old fool. I never staked my claim in life that would have marked my future of having children and the generations that could have followed.”

  Mr. Davis climbed down from the ladder holding the fluorescent tube. A sense of penetrating sadness, like the powerful swell of the stirring violins in Barber’s “Adagio,” pulled at my heartstrings.

  “I’m sorry. I never should have asked you anything so personal.”

  He stood alongside the ladder studying the floor thoughtfully and shook his head. “No, please don’t feel sorry. I’m glad someone finally asked the question,” he said soberly and raised his eyes to look at me.

  “I reconciled with myself long ago for the decisions I’d made in life. But admitting my mistakes silently is not nearly as cleansing to the soul as saying them aloud for someone to hear. It actually feels good.” The lines on his face deepened as he smiled at me.

  “So I guess my answer’s mighty obvious. I wish I’d been brave enough to take the leap and give my heart a second chance. I would have had a much more fulfilling life. Still, life has been good to me. I have money in the bank, a nice house and more importantly, good friends, a job I really like, and I get lots of time to spend on the golf course. A couple floors down, I met a mighty nice fella by the name of Mr. Burns, a widower. Like me, he never had any children. We hang out, play some chess, and go golfing every Saturday rain or shine. He even tried setting me up with his sister.” The bellowed sound of his deep, hearty laughter filled the office.

  “Well, I’d better go down to the maintenance room and get another one of these,” he said, as he held up the fluorescent tube.

  As he walked off, I paused in my own thoughts, while thinking about the meaning behind what Mr. Davis had said. And the one single thing that struck me most was he’d said he wished he’d been brave.

  I thought back to the novel, “Love Spirit.” The young man in the book was an architect. Matt was an architect. Despite the tragedies in the woman’s life, she was brave, and for all the years she’d been alone, she wasn’t sad or depressed. The young man was bitter, his emotions guarded, and when he thought about the woman, who had no one to leave her treasured things to, he knew one day he’d find himself living the same lonely existence if he didn’t do something about his life.

  I contemplated whether Matt came back to tell me something similar. Like if, I didn’t stop dealing with issues of the past I’d end up alone, forever. But I didn’t know how to change my life.

  * * * *

  That evening after the sun had gone down I stood in the great room gazing at the anniversary clock. Its crystal sphere pendulum that worked a few days ago had since lost its ability to move. I tried to make sense of it all, when I noticed the book, “Love Spirit” lying open on the coffee table, which was odd because I’d never brought it out from the study.

  I sat down on the couch and picked up the book. Next to the last paragraph on one of the pages, was a highlighted mark. I didn’t know how Matt was doing this, but I knew it had to be him.

  In the story, the architect had been thinking about the woman he had loved and lost…and then the woman he had caught a glimpse of the night before. Familiar with the story, I knew that the woman he loved and lost was his wife, but the woman he’d caught a glimpse of one night was the beautiful spirit who he could only dream of.

  I didn’t have a clue what Matt was trying to tell me. Obviously, he was the one I’d loved and lost, but who would I have had caught a glimpse of in the recent days, that person being someone I could only dream of. The only person I dreamed of was Matt.

  Ten

  Nicholas had his nose in a book reading up on prehistoric animals and fossils, as we drove to the cemetery to put flowers on Matt’s grave. It was early morning on July fifteenth, and as I thought about Matt being taken from this earth seven years ago to the day, I couldn’t help but wonder why there had been no sign of him since Wednesday, when I last glimpsed him in Laura’s office. And why did he always ask me to find him?

  “Mom,” said Nicholas as he brushed away a mop of sandy hair that fell over his forehead. “What are am...amphib...”

  “Amphibians?”

  “Yeah, what are they?”

  “They’re creatures that spend part of their lives in the water and part on land like frogs and toads. But they looked a lot different back in prehistoric times.”

  “How?”

  “Amphibians started out as fish that used their strong fins as legs to come out of the water, but they could only be out for a short time. Scientists don’t know for sure, but they think that after thousands of years had passed the fins became legs.”

  “Wow that’s cool! That’s why I want to be like Ross when I grow up.”

  I drew a complete blank as to who Ross was. “Honey, we don’t know anyone named Ross.”

  Nicholas rolled his eyes. “He’s Rachel’s friend...you know on the reruns. That TV program Friends?”

  “Ohhhh, you want to be a paleontologist.”

  “Yeah, a pal-eon...whatever, that would be my dream. Maybe I could become famous like Ross only even more famous by finding scientific proof that fish’s fins did turn into legs.”

  At Nicholas’s age, I wasn’t dreaming of anything as serious as a career. I only dreamed about living in the Brady Bunch household and having lots of brothers and sisters to eat grilled hamburgers and greasy fries with, as opposed to being an only child and eating veggie burgers.

  “Mom, can I pick out the roses?” Nicholas strained to look over the dashboard as I pulled up to the florist shop.

  “Of course,” I said, and unfastened my seat belt.

  Every anniversary on our way to the cemetery, we’d stop at the florist and choose five yellow roses to place at Matt’s grave. One for each year, we were married.

  After Nicholas carefully inspected and chose each rose, we took them to the checkout. Nicholas handed them to the thin figured, silver-haired man on the other side of the counter.

  “Will this be all?” asked the elderly man, when in my head I heard him say, “Why couldn’t God have taken me instead of Marion?” Sadness gripped me when I looked into his brown watery eyes.

  “Yes,” I answered. As he walked away to wrap the roses, Nicholas playfully hopped his dearly departed chameleon, Greenleaf, across the register counter and like a superhero, the chameleon was airborne and landed on a package of crocus bulbs.

  When the man returned with the green tissue wrapped roses, I wanted to squeeze his thick-veined hand and tell him it would all right. Instead, I pulled a twenty-dollar bill from my wallet. As he rang up the sale, he stared curiously at Greenleaf, while Nicholas untangled the chameleon’s stiffly bent tail from the plastic mesh packaging.

  “Well, I can’t say that I’ve ever seen a toy that looks quite like that one,” the man said with a smile while handing me my change.

  “He’s not really a toy,” Nicholas said, “he’s just dead.”

  “Oh!” said the elderly man, as he placed a palm on the counter and leaned over to get a better look.

  Suddenly, my hand found his. “Sometimes it doesn’t make sense who God takes or leaves on this earth, but just give it time and you’ll be all right.”

  The man looked startled as I hurried Nicholas out of the shop, not wanting to explain my odd behavior. As we drove away from the florist shop, I thought about how my life flashed before my eyes the day Matt died. It was like I was five-years-old again and at the beach with my parents. The colorful shells surrounding my feet disappearing in the rushing water rising to my knees, pulling me down, the ocean trying to swallow me up.

  “Mom?”

  I glanced at Nicholas. “Yes?”

  “Remember when you told me about spirits going to heaven. Well, if I leave Greenleaf at Dad’s grave, are you sure Dad’s spirit will find him even though they’re not in the same part of heaven?”

  I was proud that N
icholas made his own decision to part with his chameleon and take a leap of faith that his father would watch over his beloved pet.

  “Don’t worry, they’ll find one another.”

  As I drove my vehicle past the cemetery gates, the lush green lawn was drenched in sunlight that stretched through breeze-kissed weeping willows. The cemetery looked different that day. Almost reminiscent of a garden, magnificent marble mausoleums and gravestones sprouted up along the rolling hillside, while carved angel statues dotted the cemetery and gleamed like garden ornaments.

  I slowed my vehicle and stopped at the bottom of the hill of the three-tiered cemetery, glancing up at Matt’s gravesite on the second tier. Unlike that sunny day, Matt’s funeral was a sea of black umbrellas traveling through the cemetery in a heavy downpour. People hurried along to take shelter under the large canopy set up over his grave. Gusting winds flapped the canopy panels, as the priest led everyone in prayer, and afterward I laid five yellow roses on top of Matt’s coffin.

  “Mom, can I open the door now?”

  “Yes, but be careful.”

  Nicholas bolted up the hill toward his father’s resting place, as I kept a steady pace behind him. Off to my right, around twenty feet away, I saw a woman around my mother’s age, late fifties. A small Jack Russell Terrier playfully nipped at her heels, as she marched up the hill toting a canvas bag and a large bouquet of yellow and lavender wild flowers wrapped with a wide purple ribbon.

  Nicholas scrambled to the second tier and looked a little out of breath as he stood in front of Matt’s headstone with hands gesturing. I guessed he was introducing Greenleaf to his father.

  The woman beside me stopped at a black marble monument with a carving of a large Celtic cross.

  As I reached Matt’s grave, Nicholas said, “Mom, do you think I should set Greenleaf right here on the grass in front of Dad’s headstone?”

  “Looks like a good place to me. Honey, do me a favor,” I said while unwrapping the roses and handing a wad of tissue to Nicholas, “please go put this in that trash bin.” I pointed to the next tier up.