“Fine,” he snapped a little testily, and promptly stripped off his shirt.
It was the first time I had seen him shirtless. He possessed strong, muscular shoulders and a broad, sculpted chest, and I felt my eyes linger an instant longer than they should have. I began to glance away, but a curious round scar in the fleshy part of his right shoulder — the scar tissue gleaming almost white against the darker pigment of his skin — drew my eyes back.
The Colonel caught my gaze and glanced at his shoulder. “Breed’s Hill,” he said mechanically, and tossed his shirt on the beach. Suddenly, he realized the significance of what he said, and looked at me with sharp surprise.
But I was the one who did the double take. I knew all about Breed’s Hill. It was a little military operation outside of Boston, known in the history books as the Battle of Bunker Hill.
Chapter 23
In May of 1775, more than a year before the Declaration of Independence was signed, the British squabbled with Boston’s patriots over possession Bunker Hill. The hill had strategic importance to city, which both sides recognized, and the battle that ensued was a long and confusing. Ultimately, the British gained the hill but the Americans got the glory.
And Colonel Upton got a bullet in his shoulder.
So now we knew that the Colonel had been in Boston as well as Pennsylvania, and if I had thought to ask the right questions I might have pieced together a larger chunk of his past. But I didn’t, and the Colonel turned away from me. He waded out into the surf, dove into an on-coming swell and swam hard away from shore.
I sat down on the beach and monitored his progress as he swam first south and then north, paralleling the beach about a hundred yards out. After what seemed to me to be an alarming period of time, he headed in, emerging from the surf winded and dripping, and dried himself with his shirt.
We walked back to the car and made the eight o’clock ferry. This time we were among the last of the cars to come aboard, and we stood at the stern, watching the sun set gloriously over the Sound. But I couldn’t enjoy the beauty of it.
“It’s been a long day,” the Colonel ventured.
“It’s not that,” I said.
“What then?”
“My mother thinks I’m coming home tomorrow. Remember?”
“Ah, yes. I suppose you’ll need to do something about that.”
“What I need to do,” I said, “is think of another lie.”
*****
We disembarked the ferry and headed home, stopping along the way a take-out of barbequed ribs. One of our neighbors was entertaining a rather large crowd, judging from the sound of music and laughter wafting over the dunes, and the narrow sandy road leading to our cottage was lined with cars. I threaded my way through them, almost clipping one as I turned into the driveway.
“A regular press of conveyances,” the Colonel snorted. He inclined his head in the direction of the party noise. “Shall we join the reveillers?” he teased.
I slid the Accord into its parking spot and cut the engine. “I think I’ve had my revels for the day, and besides, I need to call my mother.” I folded the keys into my palm and called his bluff. “But you did so well navigating this brave new world. Why not just pop over there and introduce yourself?”
“Ah, well. Perhaps another night, then,” he said, gathering up our barbecue and following me up the stairs. I unlocked the door, listening carefully to the noises of the cottage as I did so, checking for anything that seemed out of place. This was a legacy of Monday night when we arrived home to an open sliding glass door.
Then I heard the phone ring and bolted for the kitchen.
“Kathy Lee?” It was Lila. I knew it would be, and I hadn’t even thought up a good story.
“I was getting worried, Sugar. I’ve been trying to get you for hours. I almost tried to call you on your cell phone.”
“I went to Bubba’s,” I said, filled with guilt, “and brought back some ribs. I just got in the door.”
“By yourself? You went down to Bubba’s by yourself at this hour?”
“It’s all right, Mother. Honest. There’s no place safer than—”
“Do you want to tell me what’s really going on, Kathy Lee?”
“Going on?” I squeaked. “Nothing’s going on.”
There was a pause. “Then I suppose we can expect you home for dinner tomorrow evening.”
I closed my eyes. The line hummed.
“Kathy Lee?”
I was in trouble. I could tell by her voice. Suddenly I felt like I was fourteen years old and had been caught smoking cigarettes. And then, at the last possible second, inspiration flashed.
“I’m leaving Cameron,” I announced. “I mean, for real. That’s why I’m here. To establish physical separation.”
“I think you need to establish separation in the state in which you’re seeking divorce,” Lila said drily.
Trust her to know. “Actually, I thought I’d do this in North Carolina if I can,” I improvised. “Although I haven’t talked to Henry yet.”
“Henry doesn’t practice divorce law.”
“But he can advise me,” I babbled on. “Refer me to someone.” (Actually, Lila might be a better source of reference, considering her experience.) “What I’d really like to do,” I went on, “is establish residency here, at the cottage, rather than in Fredericksburg. I mean, I’d really prefer putting some miles between myself and Cameron. And he won’t care, you know, if the kids aren’t conveniently located.”
“You’re right about that.” There was a significant pause, during which I knew Lila was assessing my story. “Why didn’t you simply tell me this before?” she asked finally.
“Because I didn’t know I was doing it. Leaving Cameron, I mean.” The irony of all this, I realized suddenly, was that I was telling the truth. I was leaving Cameron. I had been getting my feet wet, driving back and forth between Virginia and Pennsylvania, taking all those weekend trips with the kids, or hanging out for days at a time at River House. But this time I had been gone over a week. I hadn’t so much as checked the mail. In fact, I hadn’t even thought of home, the house on Prince Edward Street, and when I did I saw it as Cameron’s place, not mine, not even as a place I shared with him. For months I had been thinking about leaving him. I had been planning it, talking about, intending it, but not doing it. Until now.
Suddenly, I was close to tears and Lila knew it. “Never mind, Sweetie,” she said comfortingly. “I understand. You’ve been in denial for so long, I know this decision must have taken a lot out of you. On top of listing the house and all.”
In denial. One of Lila’s favorite fruit-farm words. As a former crazy person, she had the terminology down pat. Only this time she was right. If I wasn’t actually in denial, I was at least in avoidance. Or had been.
“And I hope you’ll go through with it,” she went on.
“Selling the house?”
“No. I mean divorcing Cameron, once and for all.”
I was startled. “You think I won’t?”
Lila sidestepped my question with one of her own. “So what are you doing about coming home?”
“I can’t,” I blurted out. “I mean, I will if you really think I should, but if I had another week—” I broke off. I couldn’t face another week without Blythe and Sammy. “Actually,” I plunged on, “I think I’ll drive up and get the children, bring them here with me.”
“I have a better idea,” Lila said interposed. “Helen called.”
Helen is Lila’s sister-in-law, my Uncle John’s wife.
“She invited me out to the farm for a few days,” Lila went on. “And she invited the children, too. I told her that you’d be home by then, but it really doesn’t matter, now that I think of it. You know how Helen is. The more the merrier. What do you think?”
I tried to untangle this. “You mean, you want to take the children with you to Helen and John’s?”
“Sure. Helen loves the kids and it will be fun for them.”
But the thing was, I wanted the children with me. I wanted to drive up to Fredericksburg and bring them down to Avon, and I wanted to do it now, tonight. I started to tell Lila this, wondering at the same time how I’d explain the Colonel to the kids, when she interrupted.
“It worries me,” she said seriously. “It really distresses me when you make these marathon trips with all this stuff on your mind and the kids in the back seat. I don’t mean to sound morbid, Kathy Lee, but … it’s all my eggs in one basket.”
“The Tipton Death By Car Curse,” I said.
“You’ve thought of it, too?”
“It used to worry me, actually, until Uncle Bennett dropped dead in his garden.”
“Still—”
“Okay,” I said, capitulating. I had upset Lila enough. I knew I had, and I knew I had no right to add the children to her worries. And beyond that, I wasn’t ready to introduce the Colonel to anyone just yet, not as my house guest, anyway, and especially not to my children. Who would, in short order, spill everything to Lila — and even worse, maybe to Cameron, assuming they ever saw him.
“I think that’s best, Kathy Lee, I really do,” Lila gushed, relieved. “Since you’re not coming up we’ll drive out to the farm tomorrow and come home at the end of the week. And and next Sunday—”
“I’ll be there for dinner,” I finished for her. “Do the kids miss me?”
“In the evening, when I put them to bed,” she told me truthfully. “They’re asleep now, Sugar, but call at breakfast, first thing, and say good morning to them.”
I promised I would, telling the truth.
*****
I hung up the phone with a heavy heart and wandered into the living room where the Colonel was spreading out Bubba’s ribs on the coffee table, happily humming a little tune. Eating with fingers was an eighteenth century specialty, but southern style barbeque sauce would be a novelty. I sat crosslegged on the floor opposite the sofa, and watched while he sampled a rib.
“Ah,” he said, his eyes closed in pleasure. “Quite worth the journey.”
I didn’t know if he meant the trip to Ocracoke or his journey across time. I forked some cole slaw onto my plate and pushed the container toward him. Then I mostly played with my food while I told him that Lila had given me another week.
“A reprieve, then,” he said. “That’s good news.”
“Yes, it is.”
He put down a bone, wiped his fingers on a napkin and looked at me. “Then why, Mrs. Finlay, do I detect some reservation on your part? You seem preoccupied. Is it the children?”
“Mostly,” I acknowledged. “But I’ve also been thinking about Cameron’s phone call last night.”
The Colonel shifted his attention to the cole slaw and baked beans while he contemplated what I said. “Have you reassessed the probability of a visit, then?”
“Oh, he’s not about to come while I’m here. But what bugs me is why he would want to come at all.”
“But he was just here, wasn’t he?” the Colonel, frankly puzzled, asked. “I mean, you found signs of a, ah, recent encampment. So if he’s been here before, then there’s a pattern. Why would he not wish to come back?”
“He would, actually. But he wouldn’t come alone,” I explained. “In fact, he wasn’t here alone the last time.” This was the first time I had mentioned that detail.
“Oh. Then on his visits he brings a friend,” the Colonel said carefully. I had his attention now. The slaw and beans sat untouched on his plate.
“Almost certainly.”
“One of his, ah, medical comrades, perhaps.”
“More like a nurse.” Or one of the Graphic Girls.
“He requires the services of a nurse?”
“A woman,” I elaborated. “Knowing Cameron, he wouldn’t be coming down without a woman in tow.”
Suddenly, the Colonel’s face was full of sympathy. “My dear Mrs. Finlay,” he said quietly. “Does that really surprise you, given his history? And in view of that, you mustn’t allow this to cause you any undue pain—”
“You don’t understand,” I interjected hastily. “It’s not me that Cameron’s cheating on. That is, he is cheating on me, of course, but it’s something more than that. He’s also cheating on … well … my family.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“The cottage is my mother’s. My children’s pictures are on the walls. It is lower than low to bring a woman to a place that is so intimately … not his. My mother would kill him if she knew. And the thing is, he really cares about being in her good graces, like she’s some sort of social maven who could undo him in a minute. She’s not, of course, but he doesn’t seem to know that.”
I took a breath. I didn’t mention the leverage my knowledge of Cameron’s activities might provide, given how he makes up to Lila. It was too much like blackmail, and oddly, I was reluctant to have the Colonel’s disapproval.
“So I just can’t figure it out,” I went on. “He’s always courted her, even when his relationship with me had fallen apart. He must really be head over heels to risk—”
That was it, of course. He’s head over heels. He’s actually in love. He really doesn’t care about burning Mansfield bridges. I paused, marveling at the idea.
“Do you recall telling me last night that divorce is not unusual in these times?” the Colonel asked me suddenly. “And when I asked you why your husband resists divorcing, you said it involved the concept of … upward mobility, I think it was.”
“Yes.”
“What did you mean by that? In respect to Mr. Finlay, that is.”
I hesitated a moment, wondering how to start. The thing is, Cameron was born in West Virginia, although God knows he’d never tell you unless he was applying for a passport and you happened to be the clerk. He has, in fact, gone to some lengths to obscure his antecedents. His father and both grandfathers were coal miners — evidently an unsuitable family tree for a plastic surgeon — and Cameron, who grew up in a trailer in an obscure and blighted hollow, was the first Finlay to finish high school, let alone go on to college, which he did on a full scholarship. In a normal person, this would be a point of pride. A normal person would probably embellish an up-by-the-bootstraps story like this to the point of tedium, but not Cameron. I think he tells people he’s from Richmond.
But during our courtship he told me the truth. I never met his parents, who died before he entered med school, but I’ve met his sister younger Mercy several times. She is pretty, fun, and unassuming, and I imagine we would have seen more of her over the years if her husband didn’t drive around in a Ford F150 with Yahoo! Heating and Cooling stenciled on the doors and a gun rack mounted behind the seat.
About the time Julie introduced Cameron to the Graphic Girls, she figured out his attraction to the Mansfields. “You’ve got to understand,” she told me one afternoon at lunch. “You represent everything Cameron ever wanted to be, Kathy Lee, everything he believes he isn’t, so he thinks he needs your family as a sort of camouflage. And you were so pliable when you met him. Remember how spineless you were in those days? Cameron simply told you he wanted to marry you and you said okay. Like maybe it would be rude to refuse.”
Which isn’t entirely true. The fact is, I was as taken by Cameron’s background as he was by mine. Here was a young doctor who got from the coalfields to the emergency room (where I met him when he stitched up my face after a particularly nasty riding accident) on grit and brains alone — a coal miner’s son with such a romantic and unlikely name. I was smitten. We married a year later and for a long time I believed Cameron was almost heroic. But somehow he’s used up all my understanding and compassion. He’s emptied me of everything I have and has left me with nothing more to give.
Explaining all this to the Colonel was a little like trying to explain obscure Italian idiomatic expressions to a beginning language student, but I think he got the gist of it. Eighteenth century England was a highly class conscious society, so the Colonel coul
d relate to being down-and-out in West Virginia without really knowing what West Virginia was.
“Cornwall,” he said, nodding.
“As in the Pirates of Penzance?” I asked blankly.
The Colonel never heard of Gilbert and Sullivan, of course, but he nodded anyway. “Yes, Penzance is in Cornwall. So are tin mines and fishing boats, poverty and … well, Cornwall is miles from any place. Places in Cornwall are miles from each other.
Cornwall was the Colonel’s equivalent of West Virginia.
“You’re simply his passport.” The Colonel, already bored, summed it up. Then he pressed on. “All right, so your husband will not divorce. But when were you last home? A week ago? More than that? And now you’ll be away another week.” He leaned across the coffee table, his face just inches from mine. “The other day I suggested you live separately, in separate households. At the risk of repeating myself, let me say that you might as well move here permanently and abandon the pretense of residence with Mr. Finlay altogether.”
Suddenly he reached out his left hand and took my chin in his fingers, tilting my face to the light. With his right hand he blotted at my cheek with his napkin, wiping away a smudge of sauce.
My mouth went dry. I cleared my throat. “Actually, I just told my mother…” I paused. “Were you eavesdropping on my conversation with my Lila?”
“I tried, but your voice was pitched too low.” He smiled.
“Well, I told her I’ve already done that,” I told him, smiling back at him. “Abandoned pretense and so on.”
“My point exactly,” he said, shifting his attention back to his plate. “If you aren’t making a pretense of living under the same roof, then what does it matter who he pursues or how smitten he is?”
“It doesn’t, not to me. But don’t you see? If he really is so taken by someone that he would actually bring her here, risking all with Lila … then maybe he finally wants out. Maybe he’s finally willing to cooperate with me. Maybe,” I added hopefully, “my life is about to be simplified.”
Out of Time Page 16
