Never Too Late

by Jo Barney

  The best seafood restaurant in town. Art could hardly bring to his lips the sole I used to batter up and serve with frozen French fries. Crawfish? The thought makes even me squirm a little. A look must have crossed my face at that thought because Kathleen chuckles. “It’s early. But I only have a sitter until six.”

  I tuck the receipt in my purse and get up. I, for once, know something Kathleen doesn’t. My daughter-in-law apparently doesn’t read the ads in the Oregonian’s entertainment section. “That’ll work,” I tell her. “Happy hour. Half price drinks. Very popular.” I pull on a sweater and head out the door. Kathleen doesn’t hesitate, except to reach for the tube of lipstick in her pocket.

  We make our way through a suited throng, men and women. The dark wood walls and marble-topped bar shimmer in the low, seductive light, drinkers’ voices softened by the low candles in the center of the tables and the slow jazz floating above us. I notice that while Kathleen fits into the generation of people in this room, I am the only gray-haired female. Some of the men have gray hair, of course, and gray eyebrows under which they peer at me and go back into their drinks. I’m getting used to that barroom glance. If I were undecided before, I now know that I will be a blonde very soon.

  We find a table, decide on the house’s special drink of the day, Long Island iced tea, and I hope that it also has a little alcohol in it because I have suddenly lost the reason I’m there. Kathleen brings me back to the task at hand.

  “Take out the credit card receipt. How much was it? For dinner or drinks and how many?”

  I can’t see in the dim light and hand the paper to Kathleen.

  “Shit.”

  While I don’t even notice when I come out with this four-letter word, I’ve never heard Kathleen use it. “What?”

  “Art spent over two hundred dollars on drinks and what looks like three meals. And a tip. A big one.”

  “Last time we went out it was to Applebee’s on a two-for-one offer.”

  “There’s a date on this. About three or four weeks before he died.”

  “He didn’t know two people, at least ones that he wanted to eat with.”

  “Maybe…”

  “Maybe his girlfriend had a girlfriend. Ménage à trois–like.” The drink is taking hold now, and I ease into the sweet cloud of music and murmuring. “Maybe my nose isn’t as good as yours.”

  Kathleen glances at me over the lemoned rim of her glass. “That was low, Edith.”

  I unhook my purse from the back of my chair. “Yes, it was. We should leave before I say anything else hurtful.”

  The waitress steps toward our table. “Five minutes to the end of Happy Hour. Time to order another Long Island iced tea?” I hear Kathleen say, “Of course, two more for the road, please.” Kathleen must be also feeling her drink and is ready to keep feeling it for a while. She fumbles in her pocket for some change. “Phone?” she asks. The waitress points to one sitting on the end of the bar near our table.

  Kathleen dials, and I hear her talking to her babysitter. “I’ve been held up a little, Jennifer. I’ll be there a little after seven, if that’s okay with you. If the kids are hungry, there’s leftover mac and cheese to warm up.” She hesitates and adds, “And Cherry Garcia in the freezer. Help yourself.” When she comes back to our table, she asks, “Did that sound like a bribe?”

  I nod, and our giggles bring glances from the next table. I don’t care. It’s not only the Long Island iced tea I’m drinking that makes me giddy, then nostalgic, and maybe even a little sad. It’s the fact that I haven’t laughed with another woman like this since… “Do you ever meet friends for Happy Hour?”

  Kathleen goes solemn. “My best friend is dying of uterine cancer. My other friends have gotten so involved in careers that they don’t have time to sit around talking. We get together maybe twice a year, share about work or gossip a little but, no, we don’t dig below the top layers like we used to.” She pauses. “I suspect you have to trust to do that. We lost that naïve quality as our life became about what we do, not about what we feel.”

  I understand what she means. “When my friends were mostly housewives, we talked a lot, over morning coffee and cookies. And I guess we trusted each other, except for the few we disliked, the ones who let us know their friendships were only temporary, until their husbands were promoted and they would withdraw to a better neighborhood. But our kids grew up, we grew up, moved, got involved in just staying alive, problems went inward.” That thought makes me lift my drink to my lips. “We all probably were a little lonely, but we asked ourselves, who isn’t a little lonely? And we just kept going, not caring much, knowing the light at end of the tunnel glowed faintly.”

  “Then you die? That’s it? Edith, that’s a horrible way to look at life.”

  I can see the lamps in the buildings nearby flicker, go dark. Shadows hurry through the dim air as workers head for home. Kathleen’s too young to understand getting old. “A few years ago,” I say, “one of my coffee klatch friends was found lying in her back yard with a plastic bag tied over her head. She didn’t die, but she wished she had from then on. When you are older, death is not so frightening. Art’s going apparently wasn’t awful for him; he ate gourmet meals until he maybe did himself in and escaped. My friend had the same hope.”

  Kathleen pushes her glass aside and her narrow fingers capture my knobby ones; the cup of her palm soothes the blue veins above my knuckles. I want to bronze the moment, like those baby shoes years ago: two hands, one old, one young, holding on to each other.

  “Mom, you can choose now, about anything that might come next.” She squeezes my hand, releases it. “You’ve never been able to do that.”

  I raise my glass. “I’m considering becoming a blonde and maybe doing something about my neck.” Long Island iced tea is talking, and it sounds so right.

  “Shit!”

  There, the perfect girl has said it again.

  “And we’ll go shopping!” Kathleen has raised her voice and an arm and almost spills her drink.

  “So why are we here?” Not to get drunk, I’m pretty sure. Someone, I realize, has to get us back on track again and, especially important, out the door. It’s close to seven. Cherry Garcia can only do so much when it’s bedtime. “Have we discovered anything?”

  The server stands at our table again, eyeing the dinner line at the door, letting us know that we have overstayed our welcome unless we are here for dinner.

  “Please look at this,” Kathleen says to her, smoothing out the wrinkles on a receipt: time of day, number of people? We are…working for a client who found this receipt, and she is needs to know how this piece of paper ended up in her husband’s pocket…Tiffany,” she adds, glancing the woman’s nametag.

  Tiffany tucks her pad under her arm and leans closer to the strip of paper and squints at the smudged carbon print.

  “Well, it lists four glasses of wine, a mineral water, three surf and turf, two salads, and three desserts. The time here, 9:37 p.m. The server was Becca, at table thirteen, the date, here.” She focuses on a smudge. Looks like three guests.”

  “So is Becca here tonight?” Kathleen opens her wallet, touches the bills filed inside. She’s up to something.

  Tiffany looks about the room, returns her eyes to the wallet. “Yeah, I’ll send her to you.”

  In a moment, a thin young woman comes to our table, and I’m not sure what to ask her. But Kathleen is on a roll, has a new story. “My mother and I are trying to locate my father, who has disappeared. He’s a little ditzy, you know, and he hasn’t come home since a few days after this receipt was signed by him.”

  Becca shakes her head. “That was weeks ago. I hope he’s all right. What does he look like?”

  “Older, balding, dark hair, a small facial scar, a little ditzy, two other people with him. Maybe two women. He’s inclined to be loud when he’s angry, which happens often, and—”

  I hold out the wrinkled photo. “—his hands tremble when he’s holding a glass o
r a fork. Part of the disease, I guess.” How else can I describe this unknowable man I’ve lived with more than forty years? “He doesn’t like most food or loud music.”

  “Well, that describes half of the old guys who come in here.” Becca shakes her head and turns. “Don’t remember him.”

  As a last minute thought occurs to me, I add, “One of the women might have been black with wild, curly ringlets. She’s probably too young to drink.”

  Becca glances back at us, at the photo, and at Kathleen’s open wallet. She says, softly, for our ears only, “I remember a table that caused a fuss when I denied a young African-American woman a drink. I thought she must be wearing a wig, her hair was so springy. She was okay about it, but the guy she was with wasn’t, turned kind of red, and raised his voice until the other woman calmed him down. Oh, yeah, and a terrible shirt.”

  “Hawaiian?”

  “Very. We don’t get much of that here in Portland, especially on a rainy night.”

  “And the other woman? Was she black also?

  “If she was, I don’t remember. She was pretty well put together, dark suit, gold earrings, silky blouse. I noticed her clothes because of the contrast between her and him. She seemed a little embarrassed by his behavior.” Becca doesn’t say any more, just looks at Kathleen and waits.

  Kathleen slips a bill out of her wallet, gives it to the waitress, slides another under her Long Island iced tea glass for Tiffany and then scrapes her chair back and stands. “Got what we wanted, Edith. Besides, I’m sloshed. Time to go home.”

  The best thing about this day is hearing Kathleen say she is sloshed. The next best thing is the warm palm on my back as we make our way out the door.

  Chapter Ten

  The thing that I can’t make go away––awake as I am tonight, wide awake, my legs twitchy, and my head cycling, cycling, never stopping––is that idea that maybe my philandering husband committed suicide. One last fuck-you to his family, to me.

  Did I really think those words? Fuck you. They have risen easily into my consciousness, as if they’ve been waiting for the appropriate moment to insert themselves into my vocabulary. I roll over, pull the quilt up to my neck, and squint at the clock. I’ve been seeing too many Tarentino films. The f-bomb has become ordinary, even necessary now, to describe certain events, like Art’s decision to leave me without explanation. Like the time his fingers left bruises on me, only then I didn’t have the right words.

  Fuck you, I could have said to Art when he squeezed my arm so hard. Fuck you, when I found him dead in my bed. And now that I know for sure he’s been with other women, has sat at bars complaining about his life, has eaten $200 dinners without me, I have even more reason to say, Fuck you, Art Finlay.

  But that once-taboo word wouldn’t have solved anything then, and they certainly don’t now. I lie twitching and awake and unable to make sense of it. Who are these women? And why does it bother me so much find out about them? It isn’t as if Art and I ever pretended to have a perfect marriage. By the end, we hadn’t bothered to pretend anything.

  I turn on the light, sit up, and reach for a glass of water. Liquid splashes on my nightgown, wetting my chest, but I can’t stop the churning, even with the room lit, a cold river creeping toward my crotch. A thought keeps bubbling up no matter I do to shove it under the surface. Art, lonely, depressed, did something about his dissatisfaction. I felt the same way and continued to fold the laundry and swish out the toilet. Resentments grew like poisonous fungi in a dark place inside myself. He had tried change things. I had not, except to turn into an unlovable shrew imagining a dead husband.

  Shit. I get up, tired of pounding on myself as if I were a slab of meat needing tenderizing. What did Kathleen say? Rearrange your thoughts to consider what’s next, not what’s past. What’s next, I decide, is blond. Not a cure for my surf and turf shock this evening, but at least a step towards dealing with the fungi.

  “So I’m in your hands. I do not like the battleship-gray mess that has docked on my head,” I tell Marie. “I want to be blond. And I want it to be a bit upright, maybe even butch, if that still is a style.

  Not my usual closed-eyes haircut. This time I watch, even direct the scissors a couple of times, once the hair is a somewhat-yellow. Perhaps I should have gone ginger, I think. Next time. But yes, of course I want product.

  Marie’s fingers weave themselves through my new do. I slip on my glasses to see what’s happened, and I am astonished. The woman in the mirror has cheekbones. And a smooth forehead. And ears that will support chandeliers.

  “Now the bags,” I say, satisfied with the first step. I walk across the mall to Faces and in an hour, the bags are not quite gone, but almost. Silver shadows the eyelids; no one will even notice the bags. “I’m not sure I can do this on my own,” I confess to Phoenix, my cosmetician.

  “Come in whenever you need some encouragement,” Phoenix assures me. “Everyone does. Maybe a peel next time. My specialty.”

  Whatever a peel is, I am going to do it. I’ve never felt so…what? Not just handsome. Today I feel sexy. Yes, that’s it. At this moment, I’d relish bumping into that lovely man, Seth, at Boo’s Soul, the one who started me on this trip to becoming all of myself. Along with, to be honest, Art, who helped with his $200 fling at Jake’s.

  I finally reach Kathleen on the phone, tell her to drop by, so I can show off and find out what’s going on with her. Kathleen arrives before picking up the kids after school, and she likes the new Edith. However, I am aware of a roundness that has become an unrelenting girdle around my middle, and I know its name is Snacks. Damn Trader Joes. If I am going to be new from the neck up, I’m going to have to work on the three-quarters of myself below my chin. I ask Kathleen about her health regimen.

  “I walk every day, about two miles, then stop for coffee and circle back. It’s becoming a ritual. I could meet you at mile two and you could join me for the trip back. Only I walk a little fast, and I do it at 6:30 a.m. Seven o’clock, if you meet up with me?” Her invitation is friendly, not critical. We don’t mention Brian. Not enough time, maybe.

  “Okay. Seven. I can do this. At least once.”

  And every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I decide after coming home the next morning, blood flowing, legs ready, mind, interestingly enough, only slowly churning, leaving me calm long enough to read the Oregonian and plan my day. Once again, Kathleen and I don’t mention Art or Brian, only how great it feels to get moving early, walking amidst damp fog that swirls though trees beginning to bud. I suppose we’re taking a break from the other fogs we also are trying to move through.

  However, two days later, Kathleen doesn’t show up at our meeting spot. I go out alone, come home, decide to dig once again into the manila envelope without my sleuth buddy. The Hilton. Why and who? No other clues, only that credit card receipt. I can do this by myself. I will pretend to have lost something that night. An earring. An important earring. I make the call, wait for housecleaning to respond, for the lost and found drawer to be searched. No earring. “Please let me know,” I say. At the number you have for the reservation.”

  “Let me see,” a saccharine voice says. “We have 289-4321 as a contact number. Is that correct?”

  The number is unfamiliar to me. “Yes,” I answer, and I jot it down on the list of to-do’s I’ve begun. I hang up, and when I dial the number, a voice tells me that it doesn’t exist; perhaps I should check it before I try it again, I’m advised. I’m over my blond head in this search. I need Kathleen, and she’s not answering her phone.

  Something’s wrong. Her silence. We started out so well, clues, tea, touches. And now, a week later, she’s missing. And I haven’t done anything to find out why, like a friend would, concerned only with the new woman I’m trying to become.. I need to work on the self-centered old woman I still am. I put the latest clue aside, escape into a Sue Grafton novel, let someone else besides me solve mysteries for a day.

  Chapter Eleven

  When I wake up the
next morning, I turn over expecting to see Art’s back. How long will I keep doing this? Forgetting that he is dead and buried. My mind wanders to that night at Jake’s, the waitress, the dinner receipt, the cheerful connection with Kathleen. But we didn’t talk about Brian, then or later. Thoughtless. Selfish. A person has to give as well as receive in a friendship, and that’s what’s becoming a surprising possibility between the two of us if I don’t mess it up by not doing my part.

  I find my slippers and dial Kathleen and Brian’s number, but only the message machine answers. “Just wanted to say thank you again for Jake’s, and for the walks,” I say into the receiver and hang up. Coffee. Then I’ll try again. I am pushing Mr. Coffee’s ON button when the phone rings. I hope it’s Kathleen, but a male voice responds to my greeting.

  “Mrs. Finlay? This is Sergeant Durrell.”

  For a moment I’m confused. I’d put this man away somewhere in the back pockets of my obsession, not willing to untangle Art’s death, only what he’d been up to before he died. I take a deep breath. “Yes?”

  “We’re about to close Arthur Finlay’s file, and we have only one question that relates to the cause of death. We did not find any evidence of psychotropic drugs or sedatives in the containers you provided, so the guess is that he got them from someone other than his doctor.”

  I exhale, manage an “Okay.”

  “The coroner has determined that the drugs he found were not sufficient to cause death, even with his alcohol reading, either by accident or by his own hand.”

  Apparently not suicide. “I see.” But there’s more.

  “He wonders, however, about the beta blocker, atenolol, Mr. Finlay was supposedly taking, prescribed by his doctor. His blood work did not indicate the presence of that drug. The prescription has to be confirmed by the doctor at regular intervals, which Dr. Blakely said he did a couple of months ago. However, the pharmacy where the prescription was sent has no record of your husband ever picking up the last order. In fact, the pills are still waiting on the pick-up shelf.”