“Nan,” he said breathing heavily.
CJ’s voice interrupted them.
“Hello?” CJ called down the stairs.
Nan jumped up, tucking in her t-shirt and trying to pull her hair back up before CJ found them.
“Here!” she called. “Hold on, I’m coming right up,” she said looking at Charlie with an ‘I’m sorry’ expression.
“It’s okay. He needs you. Let’s go,” Charlie said, and followed her up the stairs.
CJ looked relieved when they emerged, and readily agreed when Charlie asked if he’d like to take a ride around the harbor. Nan resumed her spot in the passenger chair, and Charlie in the one next to it. He smiled and gave her hand a quick squeeze. Nan squeezed back thinking that she’d like to never to let go.
They spent another hour cruising far out into the Atlantic Ocean, and finally back up the river. Charlie guided the boat into its vacant mooring at the dock, and after a quick clean up, helped Nan and CJ off the vessel. CJ was babbling fast as the river as he stepped down the plank carrying his fish in a small cooler Charlie had given him.
During the ride back to Nan’s house, Charlie reached over and took her hand again. He trailed his thumb over the space between Nan’s thumb and her forefinger, making circles in the small web of skin. It felt wonderful and sent a tingling sensation up the length of her arm.
They pulled into her driveway and CJ hopped out. Charlie opened the car door for her and helped her to her feet.
“I had an amazing time Nan.”
“Me too,” she answered, afraid to say anything else. She knew if she opened her mouth, Charlie would not be leaving. But after putting it off for twenty-four hours, she needed some time to think about what she was doing. Despite that, Nan went ahead and invited him to dinner for the following evening. She hoped by then she’d have a clearer sense of things. It wasn’t likely, but she wasn’t quite ready to give up just yet.
Nan spent much of the next day arguing back and forth with herself. A few times she must have spoken out loud because CJ would ask what she was talking about. Late in the afternoon, after the movers returned to take the tent and tables away, but a few hours before Charlie was to arrive, she sat pondering the situation in one of the chairs on the patio. It wasn’t quite as warm as it had been and she pulled her sweater around her. She was deep in thought when a voice made her jump.
“Hey Nan,” Buddy said.
“Buddy, Jesus. You scared me!” she exclaimed.
“Looks like you were daydreaming. Sorry to interrupt,” he replied caustically.
CJ shouted hello to his uncle from the shade of a tree nearby where he played with his cars.
“Hey kiddo,” Buddy answered still looking at Nan.
“What’s your problem Buddy?” Nan asked. As if she didn’t know given the look on his face.
He lit a cigarette and offered one to her, but she declined.
“No thanks. So what’s going on?” she demanded again, her impatience clear.
“How’d you like your sail yesterday?” he spat.
“Fine,” she bit back. She wasn’t sure how he knew, but he did so there was no point denying it. That said, she wasn’t about to offer up any additional details.
“Fine? Fine?” Buddy said, his voice rising.
“Look, I know that I’ve made some mistakes, but I hardly think…” she started, but he interrupted, exploding.
“Some mistakes? Some fucking mistakes Nan? Is that what you call ‘em?” he shouted, causing CJ to look up from his cars.
“CJ, go into the house,” Nan said without taking her eyes from her brother’s. The little boy moved quickly at the tension in his mother’s voice.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing,” Nan hissed once she was sure that CJ was out of earshot. “What, the hell are you doing!”
“What am I doing? Oh that’s fucking rich. You’re gettin’ ready to put both of us in the line of fire and you have the nerve to ask what I’m doing! Don’t you ever think? Jesus fucking Christ, if you did every once in awhile, you wouldn’t be in this mess now!”
Nan couldn’t remember ever seeing Buddy so angry with her. It ratcheted up her ire, a putrid thing that had been simmering for years. Although it hadn’t been directed at Buddy, this didn’t stop her from lashing out at him now. She leaped from her seat.
“You listen to me big brother. I am a fucking adult. I know I have screwed things up in the past. You remind me of it every goddamned day! Don’t you think I have done nothing but fight this thing with Charlie? Don’t you think I have spent every single minute reminding myself of what’s at stake? I am so fucking tired of having you, mama, everybody looking at me like I am incapable of living my life! All of you can go to hell!”
She was breathing heavy and although her eyes were wet, she wasn’t sad. She was pissed and just getting started.
“What the fuck are you going to tell him?” Buddy said. “He wants to be a fucking cop, for Christ’s sake!”
The reality of Buddy’s words tapped a crack in the façade she’d built up and her anger quickly gave way to despair. Could she possibly live with herself if she put Charlie in that position? Nan couldn’t believe she’d been so stupid and selfish not to have concluded this on her own. What business did she have being anyone’s mother? She was a wrecking ball, and now her past, her stupid fucking mistakes threatened to hurt Charlie. And CJ too, when he lost the only good man Nan had ever brought around him.
“Oh my God. Oh my God,” Nan moaned, dropping back on the chair, covering her face with her hands. “What have I done? What was I thinking?”
“Nan. Nan listen,” Buddy said pulling a chair next to her and wrapping an arm around her shoulder. “Get a hold of yourself.”
“Buddy, what am I going to do?” she said desperately. “I think I’m in love with him. No, I am in love with him!”
Buddy pulled her hands away from her face.
“Look. I’m sorry, so sorry that things are the way they are. You know, maybe it won’t be like this someday. But it’s just too soon. And Charlie, Jesus…a cop…” he said trailing off.
“I don’t give a shit about someday. I don’t give a shit about finding someone else,” she said, resigning herself to spend the rest of her life alone, raising CJ alone.
“When are you supposed to see him again?” Buddy asked without a trace of doubt that she was planning to.
“Today. He’s coming here tonight. What am I going to tell him?” Nan asked, looking up at her brother. Buddy tried to wipe the tears that rolled quietly down her cheeks, but the stream was endless.
“Just tell him it’s not good timing,” Buddy replied. As if it was going to be that simple. Nan knew that Charlie would never buy it and would want to know why the timing was bad. But she didn’t think arguing with Buddy would be productive so just nodded.
“You sure you’re gonna’ to be able to do this?” Buddy asked.
“Yes,” she whispered. She knew what she had to do.
Buddy sat with her in silence for a few more minutes, leaving once she seemed to have calmed a bit. After hearing his car roar out of the driveway, Nan went in to check on CJ. She told him that everything was fine. Brothers and sisters argue, that’s all. He accepted the explanation since he didn’t have any frame of reference himself.
Charlie arrived around six and was startled by Nan’s condition. She was pale and had clearly been crying.
“What’s the matter, Nan?” Charlie asked, setting down the bouquet of roses he carried. In his other hand he held a small version of his officer’s cap for CJ.
“Later,” Nan said, looking down at CJ, making it clear she didn’t want to talk in front of him.
“Okay,” he agreed, concern written all over his face.
They had dinner out back on the patio as the sun made its way down in the west. It was a night not unlike the one just two before when Charlie and Nan danced under the stars, although a distinct chill had settled into the air. The wedd
ing seemed so long ago to both of them and so much had changed since then. A small blaze ensconced in a stone fireplace built into the wall of the patio threw off some warmth, but Nan felt frozen to her core.
All through the meal Nan thought she might gag on her food and ended up throwing it away. Half-formed sentences floated through her mind, none right to say what she needed to say. How was she going to tell Charlie she couldn’t see him again? And what would her latest blunder do to CJ? How would her son be able to forgive her once more? She’d lose him for sure this time and wondered if it might have been better for him if she’d never come back at all.
CJ’s chatter filled most of the quiet space, every moment of which tortured her no end. She watched as Charlie helped her son build a kite from the funny pages and two long sticks they found on the ground. Her little boy was delighted with the hat Charlie brought him and wore it cocked to one side. As she observed the man she loved, the man she would have to give up, standing with CJ in the fading light of the day Nan’s stomach clenched.
Charlie escorted CJ in while she washed the dishes. Nan heard the television come on and when she finished cleaning up, she stood in the doorway of the living room and looked from her son to Charlie to the television. The Wizard of Oz in all its splendid Technicolor played on the screen. The movie was one of her childhood favorites and was the only one she’d seen in a theater before she had been old enough to pay her own way. It still held some magic for her so she settled on the other side of CJ and let herself get lost in the story.
CJ almost made it through the whole film, but his head began to bob around the time Professor Marvel showed up to carry Dorothy back home. As the credits rolled, he was out cold. Nan started to lift him, but Charlie stopped her. He wanted to do it and she let him. She followed them up the stairs and together they tucked CJ in. Nan kissed his forehead and wished him goodnight. Charlie bent over and whispered something in CJ’s ear that made him smile and say ‘thank you’ in a soft voice. Nan felt her heart flip over in her chest.
Charlie walked behind her through the hallway and back down the stairs where she asked him to sit on the couch. She retrieved a bottle of wine from the dining room and deliberately foregoing her mother’s exquisite stemware, she brought two paper cups left over from the wedding reception. Charlie picked up on her attempt at levity with the paper cups, and gave her a tentative smile as he took his.
“To the perfect ending,” Nan said, raising her glass in one shaking hand.
“To the what?” Charlie asked. “Nan, what the hell is going on? My God, when I left you yesterday, you were…I don’t know…with me. What’s changed? What’s changed?!” he repeated, his voice rising.
“Charlie, it’s complicated,” Nan started. “You just don’t know all of the mistakes that I’ve made. You don’t know how bad they were,” she said, beginning to cry. “I thought I could just ignore everything and it would all be fine. I was so stupid to think that anything would ever be okay.”
“Nan, look, whatever it is, please, please, please let me help you. I don’t care what’s happened in your life. You know we belong together. I promise you, no matter what it is, we can get through it. Just let me help you. Just let me be with you,” Charlie pleaded.
Nan couldn’t bear the pain this was causing him, so ashamed that she’d let it go this far.
“Oh God, I’m so sorry, but Charlie…I can’t. It doesn’t just involve me. Other people could be hurt. You don’t understand. I just can’t!” she blurted on a hiccupping sob.
She wouldn’t listen when he tried convincing her again, but when he pulled her close, his arms wrapping around her, she didn’t resist. His shirt dampened with her tears as he slowly ran his hands through her hair. Charlie moved her face so that he could look at her.
“Nan, please don’t do this. Please just let me stay and love you. Please,” he said one last time.
“Shhh,” she said touching his lips briefly, using her other hand to bring his face down to hers. The kiss began soft but as it grew more insistent, Charlie began whispering ‘please don’t end this’ between kisses. He traced her neck with his lips, pausing at the place where it met her shoulder and Nan moaned.
“Upstairs,” she said quickly, her breath coming in short bursts.
He carried her up the staircase, kissing her all the way. And as he laid her down on her bed, he promised that no matter what she’d been through, no matter what she’d done, he would always love her. No matter what.
Chapter 10
It was August, 1956 and Nan had never felt so fucking stupid in her entire life. Any disgrace brought on by her father’s alcoholism or her mother’s calculated ascension to the peak of the social ladder was dwarfed by her humiliation after Eddie took off. This misery existed on a plane Nan never, until this point, had the misfortune to visit.
Her retreat to Elsie and Joe’s after CJ was born stretched from days into weeks, weeks into months. Nan spent hours on end locked in her room more or less loathing herself, leaving only to use the bathroom or to grab oyster crackers and bottles of warm Coca Cola from the pantry downstairs. It wasn’t a broken heart that stole her appetite along with her self respect. She had cared for Eddie, but the truth being what it was, she knew from the start that he wasn’t the one. Nan wasn’t sure if the one was a concept that carried any weight in the real world, but if it did, she knew Eddie was definitely not it. No, what locked her in the fetal position day in and day out was the painful redheaded reminder of Eddie’s betrayal.
She tried telling herself that there hadn’t been any reason for her to suspect Eddie, at least until the very end, and by then it would have been too late anyway. Her lame attempts to throw herself a life preserver always died a quick death though. The reality was, she concluded, that what had happened with her husband did so because she was foolish enough to have let it. This was confirmed to her by the expressions on her family’s faces in the aftermath. It was a stew of pity, condescension and fulfilled expectations, burning her raw every single time she saw it.
Perhaps if she’d had the chance to look Eddie in the eye, and maybe spit in it for good measure, Nan might have been able to place blame squarely where it belonged. However she would never be given the opportunity. She would never know what became of him because legally, as the Navy had informed her, she had no right to know. She’d in no way ever been his wife, and the baby they shared was nothing more than a bastard child that she was now stuck raising.
CJ grew quickly from newborn to crawler, though through the lens of her depression Nan viewed him as if from a great distance and always enveloped in a haze of resentment. A part of her knew that he was no more responsible for what Eddie had done than she, but it didn’t ease the wave of nausea she felt whenever he flashed his father’s smile in her direction.
During the first few months, Elsie tried her best to get Nan to respond to her son. The few times she’d asked Nan to hold him while she heated his bottle, it felt as if she’d been asked to hold a bucket of writhing snakes. The look on her face must have told Elsie all she needed to know because the requests came further and further apart and eventually stopped altogether.
Nan’s apathy greased the skids for Elsie’s evolution from grandmother to mother. The baby’s budding dependency on her mother was obvious to everyone, including Nan, but at the time, she couldn’t find the energy to care. The sight of CJ’s red curls as they grew in made Nan’s insides knot up and the less she had to do with him, the better.
Somewhere in the middle of Nan’s breakdown, Elsie resurrected the farce of Sunday brunch. It was something she started right after marrying Joe in an attempt to reconcile her new life and new husband with the remains of her previous one. What Nan’s mother failed to understand was that the two were like mixing tuna with chocolate ice cream. They had no business in the same bowl together. When Sunday brunch petered out the first time, less than a year after it started, Nan hadn’t been sorry. Now Nan’s mother was determined to try again.
“I don’t want to mama,” Nan mumbled, face down in her pillow.
“Nancy, you will get out of this bed and come down to the table even if I have to throw you over my shoulder,” Elsie responded.
“Why? I don’t feel like it today. Can’t I wait and do it next week?”
“You have been in this room for the better part of eight months. It’s time for you to pick yourself up and move on. You can’t stay in here forever, and in case you’ve forgotten, there is a little boy downstairs who needs you.”
Nan tensed at the mention of her son. She flipped over onto her back and looked up at her mother.
“I can’t.” Nan stated simply. She wanted to say more, to beg her mother not to make her as if she were five and being told to get in the tub.
Elsie sighed and ran a hand through her unusually mussed hair. Nan noticed the formula stains on her mother’s shirt and the tired look in her eyes. Elsie’s appearance epitomized the look of new motherhood while Nan’s equally disheveled state resulted from her avoidance of it.
“Listen Nan, your brothers are down there. It’ll do you some good to join the living if only for a little while. You don’t even have to get dressed if you don’t want. Just come down,” Elsie pleaded.
Nan grunted noncommittally and rolled back over. She heard the click of the door as her mother left and then began to cry for what felt like the millionth time in the past few months. When she was done, all the snot wiped from her face, she stood up. Her legs felt wobbly and spent, and she seriously doubted she could do this. As Nan descended the stairs, the unfamiliar hum of conversation reached her ears. It sounded so normal. The voices hushed abruptly as she reached the doorway of the dining room.
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