One Last Thing

by Rebecca St. James

  GRANDMARY: I was mistaken then. Let’s just enjoy our coffee.

  Takes one and two both terrified me. Take three made me laugh. It was the one that had the least chance of happening.

  I gave up at seven, and at 7:55 I was in GrandMary’s room, tray in hand. The thin china sugar bowl and creamer did a nervous dance as I set it on the round lace-draped table GrandMary had pulled with two Queen Anne chairs in front of the fireplace. It didn’t help that one of my ancestral grandmothers was pursing her nineteenth-century prune lips at me from the portrait above.

  Someone had started a fire for us, though who GrandMary got to do that at this hour I had no idea and I wasn’t asking. When my grandmother has an agenda, you don’t bring new business to the meeting.

  She was still in silk pajamas, and can I just say that she is the only woman I know who actually wears a bathrobe, though I guess you could hardly call the mauve, tailored silk wrap a robe, and I would never have gone near a bathtub with it. GrandMary dresses better to go to bed than most people do for the ten o’clock service at church.

  Her silver-white pixie cut had been fingered into place, and what little makeup she wore had been applied. Now that she was finally showing her seventy-three years, the powder collected in the fragile lines across her forehead and her signature rosebud shade feathered on her lips. As she reached for the daisy-patterned cream pitcher, I noticed faint tan spots on the backs of her porcelain hands that weren’t there the last time I saw her, at my graduation in May. She’d always seemed so young compared to other people’s grannies, although now that I thought about it, her graceful, careful stepping into age had begun four years ago, right after Grandaddy died without warning from a rare heart infection. I still hadn’t gotten over not being able to say good-bye to him. I couldn’t begin to fathom what that felt like to her after forty-five years of a Great Romance, as my mother called it.

  It was hard to tell where my sudden tears were coming from—missing him, missing them, or being afraid I would never know what they knew.

  “What is it, baby girl?” GrandMary said.

  I’d gotten that part right, anyway.

  “I’m fine, GrandMary. It’s probably just—”

  “I don’t think it’s just anything. I think it’s a lot of something.”

  Did I know this woman or what?

  I let the tears fall—it was pointless not to—and used the five seconds it took her to tease a clean tissue from her sleeve to clear the waiting sobs out of my throat.

  “Did you have any doubts before you married Grandaddy?” I said after I’d blown my nose.

  I expected, None whatsoever.

  Instead she propped one satin-slippered foot on the chair and let her arms fall gracefully around her knee. Matte-finished nails stacked one over the other like small pink shells.

  “That depends on what kind of doubts you’re talking about. I had doubts about whether I could be a good wife.”

  “No, you didn’t!”

  “I certainly did.”

  She reached for the french press, filled an almost translucent cup, and raised her delicate eyebrows at the sugar bowl. I shook my head. She put in half a teaspoon anyway, and a generous splash of cream, and handed it to me, silver spoon poised on the saucer. There was no use trying to continue the conversation unless I took a sip. It helped.

  “I was as protected from the world as this set of china,” she said. “I didn’t know how to run a household or hostess a dinner party. And I certainly didn’t know how to make love to a man.”

  I spewed coffee all over the tablecloth. She mopped it up with a linen napkin without batting a mascaraed eyelash.

  “I didn’t. There was no sex education at St. Catherine’s School for Girls, and my mother certainly never told me anything. In fact, I don’t know how she and my father ever came to produce my brother and me, as much of a prude as she was.”

  “Okay, GrandMary,” I said. “I get it.”

  “So I take it that isn’t the nature of your question. You’ve been sheltered, too, but in this day and age, I’m sure you—”

  “I’m good there. I mean, I know about everything, but we haven’t . . . it’s fine.”

  GrandMary’s lips twitched. I drained the cup. I definitely hadn’t dreamed up this scenario.

  She poured herself another and stirred thoughtfully. “In terms of any doubt about whether I loved your grandfather, I had none. I fell like a truckload of bricks over William Patrick Kellen, and I don’t think I ever picked myself back up. Never wanted to.”

  I felt like something was falling on me.

  “But I was one of the fortunate ones,” she said. “If he had been a jackal like some of the men my girlfriends married, that wouldn’t have been a good position for me to be in. If I had known how it could have turned out if he had been a different kind of man, I might have been more careful about how hard I fell. But as I said, I was lucky.”

  She observed me over the top of the cup, her clear grey eyes never straying from my face. I should just tell her. She was seeing it anyway, wasn’t she? The very kind of doubt she was talking about simmering under my skin? Didn’t she already know it was there?

  “Seth’s a good man,” I said. “He has his issues, but like you said, every man has them.”

  “Did I say that?”

  I could have bitten off the end of my tongue. Yeah, she’d said that, in my imagination.

  “That must have been somebody else,” I said. “But it’s true, isn’t it?”

  “Well, there are issues.” GrandMary dabbed at her mouth with another napkin. “And there are issues. Leaving his dirty socks beside the bed is one thing. Chasing after other women is another.”

  “Seth isn’t doing that!”

  “That was just an example, baby girl.”

  One designed to do exactly what she’d just done: push my buttons. I took in a long breath.

  “I guess every bride gets nervous, right?”

  “Yes, but there’s nervous over whether anyone is going to show up and there’s nervous over whether she’s doing the right thing.” She set her cup and saucer on the table and rested her hands on her thighs as she leaned toward me. “Let’s stop chasing this around, Tara. If you’re having second thoughts, now is the time to face them.”

  “I just don’t know if they’re really—I mean, Seth says, and I believe him—that—I don’t know—he is a good man and I can forgive one . . . mistake.”

  GrandMary didn’t say anything for a minute. I mean, a full minute. Which is an eternity when someone is seeing into your soul.

  “If you’re trying to convince me, there’s no need,” she said finally. “If you’re trying to convince yourself, that’s another matter. And if you want to talk about it, it goes no further than that door.”

  I knew the silence that settled over the room then was only going to be ended by me. My whole being wanted to tell her, because who else wouldn’t make some judgment about Seth if they knew? She liked him; she’d always said so, and GrandMary never bothered saying anything positive about someone if she didn’t mean it. She just didn’t say anything about them at all. Or to them, for that matter, and I had watched her the night before, sitting next to him at dinner and quizzing him about his workout regimen as if she knew what crunches and bench presses even were. But she wasn’t attached to him. It wouldn’t rock her world if she knew this about him. I could tell her.

  I might even have opened my mouth to shape the words. I’m not sure now. But I do know that when she stood and picked up the fireplace poker and used it to push back the hanging screen, I saw the shape of her backbone through the cling of her silk robe. Each vertebra was a separate, fragile thing that no longer seemed connected to its neighbors, so that the column didn’t bend together. It was a regal kind of stiffness but it betrayed how easily she could break.

  Could a woman who spent forty-five years with a man whose only real issue was dirty socks by the bed bear up under what I was about to dump on
her? Maybe she could. Probably she could. But I was and always would be Baby Girl to her. I couldn’t risk inflicting even a thread of a crack, any more than I had been able to steal the magic from my mother’s eyes.

  “People are going to show up, aren’t they?” I said.

  “If they don’t they ought to have a darn good reason.”

  “And dirty socks. I can pick those up.”

  “Or tell him he’d better do it or he’s going to find himself barefoot after you’ve done the laundry that did make its way into the hamper.”

  “Oh, I can totally do that. So I’m good to go. Here, let me do that.”

  I took over the poker and made enough sparks to start another fire in the far corner of the room. That seemed like long enough for GrandMary to busy herself with something else. But when I turned around, she was blowing into her third cup of coffee and gazing at me through the steam.

  “One of the things I have always loved about you,” she said, “is that you can’t lie. Now is not the time to start.” She motioned me to her and kissed me on the forehead. “Especially to yourself. Now, we’d better both get dressed. I don’t think the Reverend Paul Grissom would appreciate us showing up in his sanctuary in our pajamas.”

  Like I said, GrandMary dressed better going to bed than most people did entering that sanctuary. She looked better and she saw clearer—and I had to get away from her.

  I made it to the door before she said, “You always know where to find me, baby girl.”

  “I do, GrandMary,” I said.

  SIX

  Seth called me at eight o’clock Monday morning to tell me that we were getting married in thirteen days. And to remind me to be at the townhouse before ten because the people were coming to deliver the furniture.

  “I’m sorry I can’t be there, Tar,” he said. “Just promise you won’t sit on anything without me.”

  “Oh, I’m so going to,” I said.

  We were close to being back to normal, so I’m not sure why I did what I did after we hung up. Maybe it was my conversation with GrandMary. Maybe I just had to be sure.

  We’d had rain the night before, which made the air clammy-warm. It was the kind of morning that kept the tourists inside the coffee shops and breakfast places longer, so the roads were almost empty as I made the six-block walk to Jones Street. I waited until I was well on my way before I called Jacqueline, because GrandMary was right about my lying skills; even passing strangers would have known I wasn’t telling the truth.

  “I need your computer expertise,” I told J when she answered.

  “’Kay,” she said.

  “I want to buy Seth luggage for a wedding present and I know he’s been looking for some online.”

  “You’re just now ordering it?”

  “I was having trouble deciding.”

  I really was bad at this.

  “Anyway, is there a way I can tell what he’s been looking at on his computer?”

  I felt myself grimace. Could I be any more obvious?

  “Sure. You can see his viewing history. Just start to type in the name of the company, and whatever related websites he’s been on should show up.” I could imagine Jacqueline tucking her hair. “You seriously don’t know that?”

  “I was in Lit Crit, right? All I ever did was look up articles about dead white men. Computers are not my friend.”

  “Okay, so, consider me your Internet guru,” Jacqueline said. “It’s what I do. It’s all I do.”

  She said something about getting herself a life, and I hoped after I ended the call that I’d responded somehow. My mind was already picturing me sitting in front of Seth’s computer. My palms were already sweating. I felt like a hacker.

  When I got to the townhouse I had a half hour to spare before the delivery people arrived, and as I made my way up the stairs to the second floor I told myself it was only going to take five minutes to be reassured that Seth was telling me the truth—that he was clean. Wasn’t that the way drug addicts talked—about being clean and sober?

  I squeezed the bedroom doorknob. This was an addiction? Something Seth had to have or he went into withdrawal?

  I made a sound that came out as an unbecoming snort. Looking at Seth’s viewing history wasn’t me checking up on him. It was me stopping myself from creating scenarios that didn’t exist.

  In June when Seth moved in, we’d bought our cherry sleigh bed and matching dresser and armoire, and I’d carefully placed the white quilted satin bedspread and mounds of pillows and organized Seth’s clothes by category and color in the walk-in closet and put every pen and paper clip in a compartment in his desk. Today, the bedroom looked like it had been searched by a team of police investigators. Items of clothing were dropped where he’d evidently taken them off, a damp monogrammed towel lay midway between the bed and the bathroom door, and protein bar wrappers trailed from the night table to the trash can but never quite made it in. Every drawer hung out with T-shirts and running shorts belching from them, and the closet doors yawned open as if they were bored with Seth’s refusal to close them. I almost giggled when I spotted not one but two pairs of socks next to the bed. Seth was generally a dead ringer for Mr. Clean, minus the shaved head, but he must’ve been in a hurry this morning.

  The computer was on when I rolled the leather desk chair up to it, which, I decided, accounted for the unmade bed and the half-full mug of cold coffee on the dresser and the sweat pants I had to knock off the arm of the chair. He’d either gotten up early and worked or stayed up too late working.

  Or.

  I didn’t go to Or.

  I swished the mouse back and forth on its pad and the screen sprang to life with a picture of me out at Hilton Head, head thrown back, mouth open to let out a laugh and take in the salty air, hair flying everywhere in the wind. Okay . . . he used Mozilla for his Internet . . . I got there and jittered my fingers on the tops of the keys. Jacqueline said to just start typing in the luggage company in the Google line.

  What was I really supposed to type in? Porn sites? Naked women? Cybersex?

  I pulled my hands from the keyboard and fisted them against my mouth. This was so not me doing this. I didn’t poke around in other people’s business. I didn’t sneak onto my fiancé’s computer like a slit-eyed suspicious she-wolf.

  I didn’t look for pornography.

  With my feet I shoved the chair back and rolled until it hit the end of the bed. If I didn’t trust Seth now, when was I going to start? What if I didn’t find anything on this brand-new CPU today? Would that be enough for me? Or would I be tempted to slip in and follow his tracks every time he left the house?

  I shivered and rolled back to the desk to close out of Mozilla and leave the computer the way it was before I came. My hand found the mouse and I moved the cursor. The white arrow hit the tool bar and I found myself staring into something I couldn’t name at first. Not until the unseen camera pulled out and gave me a long shot of a bed.

  Then it was all flashes—captured hands and pulled hair and enslaved cries. Whether those flashes were in the film for dramatic effect or only existed that way in my mind because my eyes couldn’t stay on the cruel images they saw—I still don’t know. It didn’t matter. I let go of the mouse with a panicked shove and sent it sliding over the edge of the desk.

  Kicking against the pine floor I got myself out of the chair and careened against the bed. The room spun so hard I had to grope at the walls to find the doorway. When I did, I ran, half-tumbling down the steps and landing at the bottom in a heap. I was crawling for my shoes in the foyer when the doorbell rang, filling the house with Westminster chimes like a taunt.

  The words, “Go away!” croaked out of me.

  I went for the door and flung it open. A startled African American man fumbled slightly with his clipboard before he said, “We’re here to deliver your—”

  “Take it back,” I told him. “Just take it back.”

  He stared at me for fifteen bewildered seconds before he fished in h
is shirt pocket. “I’m gonna have to call my—”

  “I don’t want it,” I said. “I don’t want any of it.”

  Somehow I managed to get past him and down the steps. Somehow I got myself pointed toward Gaston Street, slipping like a fawn on ice over the wet Belgian block walkways all the way. All I saw was the Spanish moss hanging forlornly from the oaks and the sycamores. All I felt were its tears falling down on me, weeping with me as I made my barefoot way toward home.

  When I got to the corner of Gaston and Whitaker, my phone riffed in my right hand. When I had picked it up I had no clue. Clutching my side with my left hand, I slid my right thumb across the screen and slammed it onto my ear.

  “It’s over, Seth,” I said.

  “Tar—what is going on? The furniture guy just called me—”

  “You lied to me! You didn’t stop!”

  “What the—”

  “I saw it—on your computer! You lied to me! I can’t trust you—how can I trust you?”

  “Where are you?”

  The panic in Seth’s voice overrode mine. A car slowed at the corner and the driver peered from a lowering window. I turned my back to it and waited for him to move on.

  “I’m almost home,” I said.

  “I’m coming over.”

  “No.”

  “Tara, I have to.”

  “No! I can’t look at you, Seth.”

  “We have to talk about this.”

  “And say what? What can we say? There’s nothing. You asked me to forgive you and I did and then you just went on and—it was horrible, Seth! It wasn’t even sex. It was—violence!”

  The silence was so dead I thought he’d hung up. Except for the rasping sobs.

  “I’m sorry, Tara. I thought I could stop.”

  “And you can’t.”

  “Not by myself. I need help.”

  “I thought you got help.”

  This time he didn’t even breathe into the silence.

  “You lied to me,” I whispered.

  “I went to Gavin and I thought it took, but last night when I got back to the house and I was alone and it all started crashing in on me—”

  “What crashed in on you, Seth? The idea of marrying me?”