In all the years I’ve had to think about it, I’ve taken the question apart a thousand different ways. And the only thing I’ve come up with is this: I wanted my own life. I didn’t want to live under my parents’ rules any longer. I wanted to be married to John. And I knew Mama and Daddy wouldn’t have let me until I was eighteen.
I don’t know if I believe that God deliberately punishes us here on earth when we disobey and do wrong. I guess I’d understand if He did. But I wonder if it’s more that He lets the consequences of our actions play out their natural course. We tip the domino, and the track is set, each piece falling in upon itself until the end result is the only one it could have been.
Maybe it’s inherent in human nature that we are drawn to those things we should turn away from. And I guess, really, that’s what Mama’s daily fussing was all about when we were little. Trying to teach us the things that would help us get through this life without pain. I didn’t see it that way then. But I do now. I just don’t think it’s something that can be taught. In one way or another, pain is something we will all know. Even when the danger signs are held up in front of us, we have to travel the road ourselves, hoping all the while that it will have a different destination for us than the one our parents warned us about. Only to figure out after it is all but too late that they were right all along.
23
The Other Parts
We must not say every mistake is a foolish one.
- Cicero
Now
It was an overwhelming task, the act of closing down another person’s life.
Matt started in the attic, the fourth floor of his grandmother’s house. He quickly realized that the things accumulated over decades of living could not simply be piled up and hauled off, but required careful scrutiny. He discovered boxes of dresses his grandmother had worn as a girl, an old trunk filled with Life magazines from the forties and fifties. He felt an enormous responsibility in being the one to declare their worth or lack thereof. What if he threw away something that had been especially meaningful to his grandmother, a family memory that once discarded by him would no longer exist?
The attic had no air conditioning or windows, and the May afternoons grew warm enough that he could only tolerate working there in the mornings. On the third day of sorting and boxing, he headed back downstairs at just after noon, wiping sweat from his forehead with the back of his arm. Just as he reached the foyer, his cell phone jangled in his pocket. He glanced at the caller i.d. screen. Phoebe. He considered not answering, but they hadn’t spoken in days, and under the weight of a pricked conscience, he flipped it open.
“Matt, let me come down and help you,” she said by way of greeting, a plea in her voice. “I know it’s an enormous job, going through your grandmother’s things. I remember how hard it was when my dad died.”
“I’m fine, Phoebe.”
“But it’s so much. And what about work? Won’t they expect you back soon?”
“Actually, I’ve taken a short leave of absence.”
“Oh,” she said. “For how long?”
“I’m not sure.” And he wasn’t. It wasn’t something he’d intended to do, but late yesterday afternoon, he’d found himself calling the senior partner of his firm to say he needed some time off. Life suddenly felt too complicated. Phoebe. Gran’s death. Becca.
He blinked at her name, as if he could brush her image from his thoughts. But there it was, etched against the back of his lids. Becca, sitting across that coffee shop table from him a few days ago. Becca, leaving, as if she couldn’t get away fast enough.
“Matt?”
“Yeah?”
“I want to come. Can’t you give me a chance to make this right?”
“What makes you think that’s possible, Phoebe?” he asked, anger edging his voice now.
“Maybe it’s not. But I want to try,” she said, humble with a contrition he had never before heard in her. A prosecuting attorney for the District of Columbia, Phoebe had been referred to as a ball-buster more than once by opposing counsel.
“You threw our marriage down the toilet, and I’m supposed to fish it back out again?”
She said nothing for a few moments, and then, “I messed up, Matt.”
He forced himself to consider that she was trying, reaching for a softness he didn’t feel. “Phoebe, what exactly do you expect of me?”
“Just a chance. You don’t know how much I wish I could change what I did. I’d give anything to go back and make a different choice. But I can’t do that.”
“No. You can’t,” he said. They were both silent then, and it felt as if there was nothing else to be said. “I’ll call you,” he added and then hung up.
He dropped the cell phone on the foyer table, going outside to sink onto the front porch swing. It creaked beneath his weight, and he moved to the center to keep it from tipping too far to one side. It was the same sensation he’d felt getting out of bed on the mornings leading up to Gran’s funeral. As if his life had lost its fulcrum, and he’d been left swinging crazy out of control.
The truth had spilled out like something on a less than original soap opera. He’d found the number on her cell phone one afternoon when he’d borrowed it without asking her. Mentioned it to her more from curiosity than suspicion. With the single question, she’d confessed the whole story, as if she’d been waiting for him to catch her. As if she needed him to. He’d wanted to stop her in mid-admission, push the pause button, rewind to the part where he saw the number, decided the attorney must have been looking for him and let it go.
If confession was good for the soul, Phoebe should have been completely recovered by the time she finished laying out how the whole thing had started, how many times she and Larry had met, etc. Larry. Lawrence. Metcalf, Esquire. Matt had stood mute and immobile, as if he owed it to her to listen. As if he had done something to cause it, and this was the price for his screw up.
Wasn’t there something inherently selfish about confessions, anyway? The guilty party’s chance to purge their guilt. Never mind that another person got flattened in the process. Ignorance was bliss. No pain in not knowing. He wished she’d kept it that way. Even if every other attorney in his firm knew his wife was spending her extended lunch hours at the Four Seasons. At least he could have gone on about his business, head buried in the sand. The view from there really wasn’t that bad.
But now he’d been handed the hat of forgiveness, expected to wear it with a-gosh-Phoebe-that’s-okay-graciousness he didn’t feel.
He got up from the swing, walked around to the back of the house and pulled a pair of pruners from the old shed where Gran’s lawn tools were still stored. He headed to the front and started shaping the enormous boxwoods that lined the walkway. They hadn’t been touched in years and long ago lost their roundness, unruly sprigs jutting out here and there. He aimed at restoring their shape without making them look like someone took a mower to them.
Matt worked for a couple of hours, breaking a good sweat. The constant clip, clip, clip of the pruners distracting him from his previous desire to put his fist through one of the columns on the front porch.
Finished, he stood back and surveyed his handiwork. Not bad. He suddenly felt energized, challenged, by the work at hand and it felt good. Really good.
On a roll now, he decided to take the weed trimmer around the house and fence. He pulled it out of the shed only to discover there was no gas in the red tank marked MIX. He threw it and a couple others in the back of the Land Rover and headed to the Exxon downtown. When he turned into the station, a car sat at the unleaded pump, so he pulled in behind it to wait. An older man with a cane walked out of the station. It took a moment, but Matt recognized him as Mr. Blankenship, the old man’s face transporting him back. He remembered the man decades younger when he and his wife Ruth sat in the front row at church every Sunday. Spotting him, Mr. Blankenship waved and stopped to speak.
“Real sorry about your grandmother, Matt,” he said.
“Thank you,” he said through his lowered window.
“She was a good woman,” he added. “Don’t come much better.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Been a long time since I’ve seen you around here. Where you living these days?”
“Washington, D.C.”
“Fast lane, huh?” he said, the grooves in his cheeks deepening into a smile.
Matt smiled back and opened his door to get out.
“Those were some good years of baseball you had at UVA,” he said. “We were rooting for you to go on to the pros around here.”
“Shoulda taken better care of this shoulder, huh?” Matt said.
“You’re not blamin’ your defection on that, are you?” The comment came from behind them. He turned around to find Wilks Perdue wiping grease-stained hands on a blue shop towel.
“Gotta blame it on something,” Matt said.
Mr. Blankenship opened the door of his car and got in. “I’ll let you boys debate that one. Y’all take care now,” he said and pulled out of the station.
Matt had heard Wilks was still living in the county. They hadn’t run into one another since before he’d left for college, the punches they’d ended up throwing at one another that last night, a final guillotine to their friendship.
Wilks looked like an older version of himself now, his hair a little thinner at the front, lines etched at the sides of his eyes. The smile was the same though, let’s-get-past-it-today’s-a-new-day.
“This your place?” Matt asked, noticing for the first time the Perdue’s Exxon sign above the garage door.
“It was either this or neurosurgery.”
“You never could stand the sight of blood.”
Wilks grinned. “You’re the one who threw up on the side of the road the night we hit that deer.”
“That how you remember it?”
“That’s how I remember it.”
Matt opened the back of the Land Rover, pulling out the gas cans. Wilks lifted the nozzle off the unleaded tank and handed it to him. “Thanks,” he said.
“I was sorry to hear about Mrs. Griffith.”
“Yeah.” Awkwardness took over, and Matt concentrated on the sound of the gas streaming into the can.
“Seen any of the old gang?” Wilks finally asked.
“Nope. Who’s still around?”
“Joey Mathers.”
“He still keeping the town in pot?”
Wilks shook his head. “He’s a pastor for a Holiness Church in Ferrum.”
“No way.”
“Way.”
Matt shook his head. Apparently, the road to reform could be taken up by most anyone.
“I heard Angie’s back. Divorced and living in her parents’ old house. She’s a teacher over at the high school.”
“Really?” This was the first Matt had heard about his old girlfriend in years. He’d dated Angie before he met Becca, and after he and Becca had broken up, Angie came up to UVA a couple times during his freshman year. They’d made a few false starts and then finally let go for good.
“How about Becca? Run into her since you’ve been home?”
Matt looked up, found Wilks waiting for his answer with an expectant expression. “Yeah. As a matter of fact.”
Wilks paused, as if weighing what to say. “I guess that was a shock, seeing her in that Little House on the Prairie get up?”
Something in his tone hit Matt wrong. He didn’t want to talk to Wilks about Becca.
“Hey,” Wilks said when Matt failed to respond. “I didn’t mean that as a slam.”
Matt wanted to ask him how he did mean it, but that was a place they didn’t need to go again.
“Besides,” Wilks said, “she’s done all right for herself from the sound of it. All those fancy restaurants around the lake think she’s some kind of magician in the garden. They buy her vegetables like it’ll get them a mention in Southern Living or something.”
Matt remembered then Becca’s interest in growing things, how she’d taken him through her garden the summer they’d dated, proudly showing him the prize vegetables she’d grown from seeds handed down through the generations of her family. He could see her continuing the work her grandmother had taught her, knew she would find satisfaction in it.
“So I guess you never got over her, huh?” Wilks went on, railroading past Matt’s silence. “I figured if she’d mattered to you, you wouldn’t have wiped this place off your map.”
“It wasn’t like that,” Matt said.
“Really?”
“Really.”
Wilks lifted a shoulder, clearly disagreeing. “You married?”
He hesitated, then said, “Separated.”
“Bummer.” Wilks pulled a tin of snuff from his pocket, took out a pinch and put it between his lower lip and gum. “Hey, the Red Robin’s still open up on 40. Come on out tonight, and I’ll buy you a beer.”
“Thanks,” Matt said. “But I’m working on getting Gran’s house ready to sell.”
“You can’t stay at it 24-7.”
“Lot to do,” he said, noncommittal, handing him a twenty for the gas.
Wilks gave him his change, staring hard for a moment, before saying, “Man, we were good friends once.”
“We were,” he agreed.
“Think we’re old enough to put all that crap behind us?”
The question held an earnestness that didn’t sound like the Wilks Matt had known. To rebuff his effort would make Matt the smaller of the two of them. Besides, it was Becca who had cut him out of her life. Becca who had walked away and chosen someone else. Holding a grudge wasn’t going to change the truth.
∞
Then
MATT HADN’T BEEN out in over two weeks. He’d been so tired after getting off work at the Millers that all he’d done every night was eat and go to bed. Wilks had left dozens of messages with Gran for Matt to call him back. Which he’d yet to do.
He took a shower, standing under the cold spray long enough to perk himself up. He didn’t really want to go anywhere, but decided he needed to do something more progressive than stare at the backside of a cow. And, too, he needed a diversion from thinking about Becca.
He didn’t know what to make of what had happened between them. Kissing her wasn’t something he’d planned. Or expected. But he hadn’t been able to think of anything else since.
And she had clearly been avoiding him. The few times he’d seen her today, she’d acted as if it had never happened, as if she would erase all of it if she could. He alternated between wanting to know why and being thoroughly pissed off.
He pulled on jeans and a t-shirt and went downstairs to dial Wilks’s number. He was cool at first, asking where Matt had been. Wilks was working the deep fryer at Burger Queen for the summer, no great challenge to mind or body, so Matt didn’t bother to enlighten him about the fact that he’d been getting up at four every morning.
Gran had gone to a special choir practice at church, so he went out on the porch to wait. Wilks rolled up in ten minutes, grudge forgotten as he talked about how he and some of the other guys from the baseball team had driven out to the lake yesterday and jumped off the cliffs, a tall face of rock where locals went to dive.
“Man, we got so wasted,” Wilks said, peeling out of the driveway. “I think Morris topped your high jump.”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t worry. You can rechallenge.” He grabbed a beer from the floorboard and handed it to Matt.
Matt popped the top, took a swallow, grimacing a little and setting it in the cup holder beside him.
Wilks gave him a look. “What? A job with the Dunkards, and you can’t drink a beer?”
Matt ran a hand around the back of his neck, beginning to seriously wish he’d stayed home. “Hey, man, why don’t you ease up?”
“Let me guess. You’ve got a crush on–what’s her name?”
Matt looked out the window and ignored the question.
“Becca. Right?” He sno
rted a laugh. “I guess if you’ve been looking at cows all day, she might start to look pretty hot, huh?”
“Shut up, man.”
Wilks laughed, stopping for the red light across from the Methodist church. “What you need is some fun. You been out in the boonies too long. We need to get that corn cob out of your butt.”
“You’re a jerk, you know?” Matt said. He and Wilks had been friends since second grade when Wilks’s family had moved to Ballard. They’d played t-ball together, then graduated to baseball. Wilks was going to Ferrum College for his freshman year, and if he got his grades up, transferring to JMU the next year.
He’d given Matt a load of grief about the scholarship to UVa, telling everybody Matt would turn into a preppie, leaving a pair of kelly-green pants hanging on the outside of his locker one day at school. There had been a point when this difference seemed like it was going to get between them, but Wilks had finally cooled it with the ridicule.
“Where are we going?” Matt asked.
“The Minute Market. Joey said he’d be there.”
“Aw, man,” he said, definitely not in the mood for Joey Mathers.
“What? He’s cool.”
Joey Mathers was usually so stoned you could tip him over with your index finger. Wilks and some of the other baseball players kept him around as their only connection to scoring dope.
“Right,” he said, picking up his beer and taking another swig. This time, it tasted a little better.
It was nearing dark when they pulled into the Minute Market beside Blake Harmon’s Chevelle. A group of kids stood around the back of the car, Joey holding court.
“By the way,” Wilks said, smiling. “Forgot to tell you Angie was supposed to be here.”
“I’ll bet you did,” he said.
Wilks threw a punch to Matt’s shoulder. “Can I help it if she’s still got it bad for you?”
Matt rolled his eyes, getting out of the car and leaving the beer inside. Most of the crowd they hung out with was there, ball players, a few cheerleaders. Wilks walked over, put his arm around Mimi Parker, one of Angie’s best friends. “Hey, Joey,” he said, “you bring any of the good stuff with you?”
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