One Last Thing

by Rebecca St. James

  Was I not sexy to Seth? Did I turn him off—even though he said he loved me? Was I just the “right wife” but not the “wanted wife”? Was that part of the thing that had such a hold on him?

  Was it?

  I shook off the covers and went for the window, but I still felt like I was shrouded in something, something that clung to me like Shelob’s web. It wasn’t until I sank into the cushions and let it pull me into its trap that I knew: its name was shame.

  Somehow I managed to get through my shift that day. Maybe because that strangling sense of inadequacy had choked off all my tears. Or maybe because Gray and Helen showed up a full hour before I was off and sat with their heads bent together at our table. Or because fifteen minutes before I took off my apron at the end of my shift, Betsy joined them.

  “Your fan club is waiting for you,” Ike said when I was finishing my side work.

  “Is that okay?” I said.

  He lowered his chin. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Because I didn’t know anything.

  When I sat down with them, Ms. Helen moved a bowl of chicken noodle soup in front of me, steam still curling from it. Her red nails, painted perhaps to match her checked scarf, tapped the plate beneath it as if she were giving me Morse code for “Eat this. Now.”

  “Hey, we were talking,” Gray said. She leaned back and stuffed both hands into the pockets of her jean vest. It would have been an awkward position for anybody else, but it seemed as natural for her as the grin that twitched at the corners of her mouth. “The Watch has every angle of marriage covered here.”

  “Oh?” I said. My most unfavorite subject. I didn’t have the energy to change it so I took the Reed & Barton spoon Ms. Helen produced from her bag and rearranged the noodles.

  “Ms. Helen’s a widow. I’m divorced. Betsy’s happily married. And you . . . I take it the jury’s still out?”

  I nodded. Under Ms. Helen’s hazel-eyed look I slurped some broth.

  “Now, you say happily married.” Betsy took a long sip of the iced tea, which I didn’t see how she could drink on such a cloudy, sullen-skied day. “Let me qualify that. Leon and I have had our share of unhappy times.”

  Gray grinned. “How much do I love that your husband’s name is Leon?”

  “As much as I love that yours is Grainne and I don’t care what you say, I’m calling you that.”

  Right then she could have called me anything she wanted and I wouldn’t have argued with her. Her very presence at the table was like a mother’s hand on a feverish forehead.

  I moved away from that image. I was avoiding my mother so I wouldn’t blurt out the truth to her, and I hated myself for the hurt that left all over her face.

  Gray nudged me with her elbow. “You don’t have to tell us, but I have to ask. That’s just me. Why did you break off your engagement?”

  “How do you know I was the one who broke it off?” I said.

  “I would just assume that no man in his right mind would call off a marriage to you,” Ms. Helen said.

  “Maybe he’s not in his right mind.” Gray nudged me again. “Am I close?”

  Betsy didn’t say anything to get me off this hook. Why I wanted to tell them something, I didn’t know. Was it the soup? The silverware? The questions that weren’t asked with the licking of chops? The watching eyes that clearly didn’t hope for answers they could savor like a forbidden piece of cheesecake? Was it some of that? All of it?

  “Let’s just say my vision of marriage to Seth was shattered,” I said into the soup.

  They fell silent, the way people do when a kid has said something naively adorable and nobody wants to laugh at her.

  “Vision,” Gray said. “I had one of those once. You, Ms. Helen?”

  “Oh, honey, yes. Until the first time I found lipstick on one of my Douglas’s handkerchiefs and it wasn’t my shade.”

  “Ooooh,” Betsy said. Or rather sang. Like some kind of exotic brown bird.

  “I was afraid to confront him at first and then I did and he said he’d loaned it to a woman at a meeting because she was crying.”

  “What did you say to him?” Betsy said.

  “I said the least she could have done was launder it and iron it before she gave it back to him.”

  Gray actually snorted. “That was the shattering of your vision?”

  “I just knew I better not have a vision of perfection because anything could happen, and I needed to take off those rose-colored glasses, now, and start getting real.”

  “Oh, I know that thing.” Betsy shook her head of closely cropped fuzz. “The first time Leon pushed himself back from the table and said my ham salad wasn’t as good as his mama’s, you know I was not happy. And when he suggested I might be fillin’ out my jeans just a little too much. And when he started callin’ me Mama just like the children did. Don’t you know I gave him the silent treatment for days.”

  “And you’re still married to the man?” Gray said and then shook her own head, setting the ponytail swaying from side to side like an indignant pendulum. “Actually I get that. I put up with so much stuff before I finally left. Serious stuff. I’m not talking about the whiskers in the sink and the horse poop on the rug and the jeans he wore until they stood up in the corner of the laundry room by themselves. All I had to do was whistle to them and they’d run to the washer. That’s how much bacteria was on those things. And then I’d have to empty the pockets. You have no idea what you can find in a horse dentist’s pockets. I actually found an incisor in there one time. Huge thing.”

  “Girl, you need to stop!” Betsy said.

  She and Ms. Helen were both laughing to the point of tears. So was I. Except I passed the tears and went straight to hysteria. Cries I’d never let out beyond the vault of my own bedroom broke from my gut and wouldn’t stop, not even when heads lifted from laptops and awkward silences fell over conversations like nets.

  Fairly certain that would not be okay with Ike, I grabbed my purse and thanked the Watch of women and ran, through the misty, chilling night, all the way home. I ran and wailed because I might never get to check anyone’s pocket or forgive him for dissing my ham salad. Just because of that.

  I begged off dinner and went straight to bed, but sleep wouldn’t come. It wasn’t just that I lay awake, frustrated by insomnia. I was plagued with racing, invasive thoughts that brought me straight up off the mattress in a clammy sweat.

  The same thing happened the next two nights. No matter how hard I worked at the Piebald, no matter how much energy I expended keeping up a brave front for Mama and Daddy and putting on a failing façade of okay-ness with the Watch, even the fatigue that brought on wasn’t enough to put me to sleep. By Monday, the fifth of January, I knew I couldn’t face another night of wakefulness woven with heinous half-dreams.

  And so at midnight, I put on the black North Face jacket I’d worn in the colder North Carolina winters of grad school, turned off the house alarm, and crept out to walk the streets of the historic district. If I was in any danger I didn’t care, because the night mist and the directionless putting of one foot in front of the other made me numb. Numb was what I wanted.

  The district’s live oak trees, some of them two hundred, two hundred fifty years old, cut off the just-blocks-away highway noise and insulated me as I crossed from street to stony street, taking no notice of the sleeping old houses or the brooding statues in the squares or the fountains now silent in the night.

  Occasionally I crossed someone else’s path, usually a guy with a Yorkie or a Great Dane on a leash, but they never seemed to wonder what I was doing out there, hands parked in my pockets, gaze averted, clearly going nowhere but down.

  As the night grew deeper and the dogs and their masters all went home, I was surprised at how many lights remained on in the row houses as I passed them. Each time I saw one gleaming in an upstairs room or caught the blue flicker of a computer screen, my mind snagged.

  Was there s
ome man up there looking at porn while his wife slept, ignorant of the box of pain she would open if she woke up and found him there? What atrocities were unraveling behind the haint-blue plantation shutters and the red doors, all painted to keep out the evil spirits?

  The longer I walked—down Charlton, up Taylor, across Monterey and Madison and Chippewa Squares—the deeper my beautiful, romantic Savannah sank until she seemed nothing more than a sham. The churches were perhaps the worst perpetrators. The twin spires of Wesley Monumental spiked in silhouette like a pair of horns. The stained glass of Lutheran of the Ascension was dark and leaden as lies. First Baptist’s white pillars faded into the shadows as if they held up nothing.

  I did the same thing the next night, crawling into bed exhausted at four a.m. and waking up at noon in time to get to the Piebald. There was no comfort in the walking, really. It just kept me from going mad.

  Although, that may have only been my assessment of my mental state. Wendy took one look at me Tuesday and said, “When was the last time you ate something?”

  “Yesterday,” I said. Ms. Helen had coaxed me to eat half a croissant.

  “Uh-huh.” Wendy pressed a cup of tomato basil soup into my palm and waited for me to wrap my fingers around it. “On your worst day you look better than the rest of us do when we’ve spent six hours in front of the mirror. But anorexia isn’t a good look for anybody, so don’t even think about working until you drink that. All of it.”

  “You always look good,” I said. “I wish I had your—”

  “Don’t go there. Drink.”

  She waited, arms folded, until I drained the cup.

  “Thanks, boss,” I said.

  As Wendy took the mug from me she rolled her eyes. “I wish. I want to be a shift manager so bad I can taste it.”

  “You’d be great.”

  “I know I would. Somebody ought to tell Ike that.”

  “I will,” I said.

  Wendy looked abruptly stricken. “No. Don’t,” she said. “I want him to get it himself.”

  She was straight-arming me again as she took the mug and headed for the sink. Still, I couldn’t help envying her. She knew where she wanted to go.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t work hard when I was at the Piebald. I did. I refused to be like Zoo-Loo and the other SCAD students on my shift, who took every break in the action as permission to sketch on a napkin or stick their earbuds in each other’s ears and go, “You gotta hear this. It’s stupid good.” But maybe my always looking for something to wipe up or reorganize or tidy was a substitute for a lack of passion. And not just the kind Fritzie talked about. Passion for anything. And that made me strangely angry.

  On my walk Wednesday night, that anger rose to a peak as I stood in front of the brick Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist and watched the moonlight gleam on the bronze-colored iron columns and thought of my Seth, who had once seemed as holy and magnificent to me as those spires and arches. Why? I mean, really—why? Wasn’t anything real? Wasn’t anything what it seemed to be? Was there anything to trust? Anything?

  I clutched both fists to my chest. “I need somebody to hear how awful I feel!” I cried out to the brick-silent church before me. “But who won’t be hurt? Who won’t try to make it okay? I want to be heard! Do you hear me?”

  I couldn’t contain that kind of fury, and its roar petered out and down into a sadness I couldn’t hold either. So the anxiety came, spearing me with its needle-spikes, and all I could do was flee from it.

  Letting my jacket flap out behind me, I ran, down Harris and across Madison Square. I wasn’t aware until then that a chill rain was coming down almost sideways, soaking the already slippery street and the walkways I careened across as I fled blindly from my fear.

  I was almost to the west side of the square when my sole caught a flattened assemblage of slick oak leaves and flew out from under me. I was already in full forward motion, and I landed on the arms I outstretched to break my fall, skidding all the way to the curb. Tires grabbed at wet pavement, and I waited for them to roll over me. In that instant I knew why Seth took those pills—and then called for help. The hope for final peace succumbed to the will to live.

  Nothing happened as I lay still with my face hanging over the gutter. A car door slammed and hurried footsteps approached. When I lifted my shoulders I saw a pair of Nikes near my head.

  “Are you all right?” a male voice said.

  “Yes,” I said, although I had no idea whether I was or not. My hands burned from their scrape across the bricks, and my insides felt as if they’d been ripped out and reassembled.

  I started to get up and the man stopped me without touching me. His voice was enough—low and calm and Yankee tight. If I’d heard a Southern accent I might have become hysterical again.

  “You may want to wait a minute,” he said. “You fell pretty hard.”

  “Can I at least roll over?” I said. “I’ll feel better if I don’t have my face in the gutter.”

  I thought I heard him chuckle as I maneuvered myself around and looked up into the face of a guy around Ike’s age, maybe a little younger, with brown-rimmed glasses and loose-curled hair that was starting to drip. I couldn’t see much more even in the wet glare of the streetlamp, but he didn’t look like a mugger, so I stayed there. Of course, my concept of people-to-be-afraid-of was limited to James Bond and Mission Impossible movies, so I said, “I don’t have any money on me.”

  “I wasn’t looking for any,” he said. “You want to try to sit up?”

  I nodded and got myself to a sitting position.

  “Everything feel okay?” he said.

  I nodded because it did, surprisingly. All except my pride, but then, there wasn’t much of that left to begin with.

  “I can stand up,” I said.

  He straightened and let me struggle to my feet. I was fine then, too, except for the fact that even my waterproof coat was soaked all the way through to my clothes. I immediately started to shake.

  “Do you live around here?” the man said.

  “Yeah, just over on Gaston.” I knew immediately that I shouldn’t have told this stranger that, so when he said, “May I drive you home?” I shook my head, splattering us both with droplets that mixed in with the still slanting rain.

  It wasn’t only that I shouldn’t trust him. I couldn’t go home. It wasn’t time yet.

  “Do you want to come inside and get dried out?”

  I felt my eyes widen, but he was pointing to St. John’s Church, waiting quietly on the other side of the street. Unlike the other churches in the historic district, it was quaint and unassuming and was bordered on one side by a cloister right out of medieval England.

  “Inside there?” I said.

  “Right.”

  It was that or go home or continue to wander around with my coat stuck to my body like a sopping sock. So I nodded and followed him across the small street and up to the arched red door, which he opened with a key.

  I stepped inside and felt warmth start at once to do its work on my wet face.

  “You probably want to take that off,” he said, nodding at my coat.

  I peeled it away while he removed his hooded windbreaker. He hung them both on hooks just inside the door and said, “Why don’t you sit down for a minute?”

  Okay, he had a key to the church, he hadn’t tried to touch me one time, and he wasn’t looking at me like I was a lunatic escaped from Silver Hill. And in the dim gold light of the church foyer, I could see that his brown eyes were kind, even more so when he took off his now foggy glasses and wiped them on a handkerchief. Besides, who but an old-school kind of guy carried a hanky—Ms. Helen’s Douglas notwithstanding.

  “My name’s Ned,” he said. “Ned Kregg.”

  “Like Daniel Craig,” I said, stupidly.

  “Different spelling. Mine’s K-r-e-g-g.” He gave me a soft smile. “And nobody would ever think I was related to James Bond.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You rescued me.�
�

  I hoped it didn’t sound like I was flirting. Stuff was just coming out of my mouth so I wouldn’t cry.

  “I’m going to get you a towel,” he said.

  “No, really, I’m okay.”

  He smiled again. “You’re not okay to get in my car. You really need to let me drive you home. It’s not getting any better out there.”

  I agreed and he went off to get a towel, and I sat there with my arms wrapped around my damp self and wondered how in the world I got here and whether it really mattered. Just beyond the bench where I waited, a sign on a stand, penned in calligraphy, listed the worship service times. Seven a.m. every weekday? These people must be diehard Christians.

  I hadn’t been to church since Christmas Eve—for three reasons. One, I couldn’t look at Paul Grissom without seeing his face the day he asked Seth what half-truth he’d told his employer. Two, I couldn’t bear the memories of Seth and me growing up together in those pews and the never-realized image of us standing together in front of the altar. Three, I had only spoken to God twice in my recent history. Make that three times, if you counted tonight’s tirade in front of the Catholic cathedral.

  Was I talking to God then?

  “I brought two.”

  I jumped.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.” Ned Kregg handed me a pair of scratchy navy-blue towels, obviously laundered by someone who didn’t know about fabric softener. Who kept bath towels in a church?

  I wanted to wrap one around my head but I felt a little awkward doing it in front of him. I threw one around my shoulders and wiped my face. That, combined with the cozy air, stopped the shivering.

  “Am I dry enough to get in your car?” I said.

  “You ready to go home?” he said.

  No. But, really, I had no place else to go.

  “Put this on,” he said, and handed me a dry jacket, a brown windbreaker with a small white logo above the front pocket. “Otherwise you’ll be right back where you started.”

  “I’ll give it back when we get to my place,” I said.