Here to Stay

by Suanne Laqueur

  “I just wonder when I’m going to be home,” he said, sighing. “You know? Home for good with you.”

  “I know,” Daisy said. “I want it so bad.”

  Hand-in-hand, they ambled around Market Square. They passed a jewelry store, the bright lights in its window display making gold, silver and jeweled sparkles. Erik stopped. Daisy kept walking a few steps, stretching their arms out. He pulled her back to him.

  “What do you like?” he asked.

  “What do I like?”

  He put his fingertips on the glass, above a white slotted tray holding diamond rings. “Which one?”

  She glanced at him. “This is just conversation?”

  “Let’s say I’m getting to know you better.”

  She smiled and bent her head toward the glass. “Second row from the top. Third one from the left. I like.”

  It was a simple rectangular diamond in a plain gold band.

  “That one?” he said.

  “It’s an emerald cut. I’ve always loved it. And I like the stone alone. No baguettes or any of that fancy stuff.”

  “Huh,” he said.

  “Which did you think I would like?”

  He found the biggest, gaudiest ring in the tray and pointed it out to her. “But with more fancy stuff.”

  She swatted him. “You have so much to learn.”

  Canadian Thanksgiving came in October, along with Erik’s thirty-sixth birthday. The weekend before Halloween, he made a short trip to Rochester to see his mother before she and Fred left for Florida.

  In one of the great, mystical redundancies of his life, Erik found himself up a ladder, having a man-to-man. As he scooped dead, rotting leaves out of the gutters, he asked Fred why he and Christine didn’t just sell the place and move down to Key West permanently.

  “She still needs an outpost here,” Fred said around the pipe in his teeth. The tobacco he smoked smelled of burning vanilla and Erik liked how it mixed with the autumn air.

  “An outpost for who? Me and Pete? We’re big boys now.”

  “Nobody knows that better than her.”

  Erik tossed the last handful and looked down at Fred. He was tall with a high, lined forehead and grey hair blowing around in the wind. He’d started dating Christine in Erik’s senior year of high school. A retired town justice, Fred always reminded Erik of a pair of scales, perfectly balanced, weighing all sides of an issue. Erik hadn’t taken many problems to Fred, but if consulted, Fred always gave good advice. He helped Erik negotiate buying his first car. And he was good to have around if you had a civics paper to write, or needed a guest for your high school Career Day.

  “What do you think?” Erik asked, leaning his elbows on the top of the ladder.

  Fred smoked a while before answering.

  “Erik, I’ve been with your mother nearly two decades now.”

  “You ever going to make an honest woman of her?” Erik said, grinning. “You don’t need my permission.”

  “Don’t I, though?”

  Erik tilted his chin. “You have it,” he said. “If it’s worth something to you, you have it.”

  “Well, thank you,” Fred said, with a small bow. “I appreciate that. And maybe it’s not my place to tell you why I think she won’t marry me, but…”

  “What?”

  Fred rubbed the back of his neck. “Between you and me, I think she’s still married to your father.”

  If he had kicked the ladder out from Erik’s feet, the surprise couldn’t have been greater. “No, she’s not,” Erik said. “They divorced. When I was ten.”

  Fred looked up at him, his face a blend of apprehension and conviction. “I don’t think so,” he said softly.

  Erik stared.

  “Promise me this stays between us,” Fred said. “I’ve never voiced that thought aloud. I have absolutely nothing to back it up.”

  Erik nodded. The idea of judicious Fred making a statement without evidence made a nervous chill run down his neck. He came down the ladder and they manhandled it to the next section of gutter. The wind kicked up, blowing leaves around in a cloud of red and orange.

  “I hear we’re in for a hard winter,” Fred said.

  “You’ll be far from it,” Erik said. “I don’t know why anyone would stay in Rochester through winter if they had an alternative.”

  “The way I see it is after your father left, your mother built a spectacular floor under you and Pete,” Fred said. “Her pride in how she raised you was bound up in your house on Graceland Avenue. That house was the embodiment of everything she survived and everything she accomplished.”

  “But she sold it.”

  “And it was one of the hardest things she ever did. Leaving Rochester entirely would be even harder. The last tie severed. She’s not ready to let go yet and I won’t force it. Because you don’t know hell until you’ve lived with a resentful woman.”

  Erik laughed. “You’re good to her,” he said. “I always thought so.”

  “She stays for you more than Pete,” Fred said. “I know on paper you’re the oldest but no doubt, you’re her baby.”

  “You think?”

  Fred tapped his pipe against the strut of the ladder then put it in his shirt pocket. “A watershed moment exists in every man’s life,” he said. “Sometimes it’s profound, sometimes it’s barely a blip. But every man has the moment when he stops being his mother’s son and becomes another woman’s man. When he goes from protected to protector.”

  Erik thought about that, looking down at Fred’s gentle expression. “I wonder when mine was.”

  “I don’t,” Fred said, smiling. “It was when you crawled out of the lighting booth.”

  Flung backward in time, Erik stared into the air, nodding slowly. “You’re right,” he said. “I remember… When the glass was breaking over my head, I had this one clear thought. My mother doesn’t know where I am. It was there, then it was gone. And from that point on I only thought of Daisy.”

  “It was your moment,” Fred said.

  “I can’t begin to think what Mom suffered that day. All those parents.”

  “Well, when the news about Lancaster was on the TV and we couldn’t get through to the school… It was about an hour window when your mother didn’t know if you were alive. I’ll face down a fleet of tanks rather than re-live that hour again. She looked me in the eye and said, ‘If I lose him, I will die.’ I didn’t think for a nanosecond she was exaggerating.”

  WHILE CHRISTINE CLEARED UP after dinner, Erik told her about the article he found on Peñedo, the Finnish utopian colony in Brazil.

  “It was almost like a religious movement,” he said. “They thought God was in nature and they were going to build this communal farm and be entirely self-sufficient. Create a new society in the tropics.”

  “Shangri-La,” Christine said. “Scandinavian style.”

  “The land turned out to be crap though. Coffee farming ruined it all. The only way to bring in money was to have paying guests in their homes.”

  “What guests?”

  “Other Europeans,” Erik said. “Looking for their own kind. Then Brazilians got hooked on the whole sauna thing and they started coming up to the area. Little by little, tourism became the main source of income.”

  “Isn’t that interesting,” she said. “I never would’ve thought.”

  “It doesn’t prove Farmor was there,” Erik said. “But if all this was going on in the twenties and thirties, it at least matches up with her timeline. She could have been there or been part of that wave of immigration. Do you want to wash these pots by hand?”

  “Cram as much as you can in the dishwasher and we’ll run it.”

  Erik hesitated, then said casually, “Daisy and I were looking at rings the other day.”

  Christine glanced over her shoulder. “Were you now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you buy anything?”

  “No, I just wanted an idea of her style. She likes an emerald cut.”

/>   “Really.”

  “It’s like a rectangle.”

  “I know what it is,” she said, and he could hear the smile in her voice.

  He squeezed detergent into the dishwasher, closed it and hit the power button. On the stove, the tea kettle began to wail. He turned off the burner and poured water into the waiting mugs.

  “When did you first start making me tea?” he asked.

  “I didn’t,” she said. “You drank it because your grandfather did. If Farfar drank warm river water with a sprig of algae, you would too.”

  “I wish I remembered more,” Erik said, spooning a little sugar into his mug and a lot into Christine’s.

  Christine rubbed the back of her hand across her forehead, leaving her bangs damp. “Do you remember your Aunt Kirsten?”

  Erik closed his eyes. “Kirsten,” he said. “Farfar’s sister? No, that was Trudy. Who was Kirsten?”

  “Farfar’s sister-in-law. His younger brother Emil’s wife.”

  “Oh.” He didn’t remember and it embarrassed him.

  “I liked her best,” Christine said, scrubbing her broiler pan hard. “She was a pip. Everyone loved her. She smoked, drank and cursed like one of the boys, but then out the other side of her mouth, she could discuss classical music, quote poetry or dictate a blueberry pie recipe. She was always laughing, always had a kind word for everyone. She and Trudy taught you to play poker one summer.”

  “She did?” Erik frowned into his mug of tea and tried to wriggle backward through the wormhole of time. He was sure he remembered a woman who played cards with him in a fug of cigarette smoke, but he always identified her as Astrid. Maybe his memories were a composite of all the women in the Fisher Hotel.

  “She kept in touch a little while,” Christine said. “After we left Clayton. Christmas cards and bits of news. Then it just trickled away. You talking with that new cousin of yours the other day got me thinking about it.” Christine flicked on the faucet and began to rinse away the brownish foam from the pan. “I know your memory is choppy from those years.”

  “When I started to reach back and touch those memories,” he said, slowly, for he had never shared this with her. “When I was in therapy. It was like they were feathers. I couldn’t breathe heavy on them or grab at them. I had to let them come to me. Settle in my hands. If I held still they would come back.”

  “Sit down,” Christine said. “I’ll be right back. I want to show you something. Give you something, rather.”

  He took the mugs to the table and sat, put a cloth napkin on top of Christine’s mug to keep the steam in.

  Christine came back with a box and a folded packet of papers. She gave the papers to Erik, who unfolded them and wrinkled his eyebrows at the flourished letterhead reading LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT.

  I, Astrid Martje Virtanen Reyes Fiskare, being of sound mind and body, do declare…

  “This is Farmor’s will?”

  “Yes,” she said, and reached to turn some pages. “Here. Read this part.”

  To my daughter-in-law, Christine Savonarella Fiskare, residing at 94 Graceland Way, Rochester, New York, I leave the diamond from the engagement ring given to me by my first husband, José Alexandre Reyes (deceased) and the diamond from the engagement ring given to me by my current husband, Kennet Emil Fiskare. I make this bequest in the hope her sons, my grandsons Erik and Peter, will want to give them to a fiancée.

  Christine opened the box and took out two smaller velvet boxes. One royal blue, one black. She opened the black one and unwrapped a bit of tissue paper. Into her palm she tipped an emerald-cut diamond. Erik’s eyes widened.

  Christine set the tissue paper aside and gazed down at the stone. “This and the other one got me through the bad times,” she said, smiling. “Astrid wasn’t the most demonstrative of women. She was a practical old bird. She wrote the part about fiancées and it sounds romantic, but I don’t doubt she thought I could sell them if I needed to. I kept them in my jewelry box. The last reserve. I’d tell myself, ‘well, it’s not so bad that I have to cash in Astrid’s insurance policy. It’s not so bad that the boys won’t be able to give their girls a ring.”

  She held it up between her thumb and forefinger, let it catch the light. “Lot of love in this little bugger.”

  Erik held up his palm and she put the diamond into it. It shone along its two long edges and glinted along the two short ones. The light dropped down like a mirror into its faceted surface and reflected back in white and grey and silver.

  “I’d love if you gave it to Daisy,” Christine said.

  Erik tipped the stone from one palm to the other. He took a taste of his mother’s love and his heart swelled under his ribs.

  So much Christine never told him. So much he simply never asked. Save for the necklace he wore, he had turned his back on Clayton and his name and dismissed it all.

  Christine could have sold the diamonds. Said to hell with love. Love is a pipe dream. Cash in hand is what sustains you.

  Instead, in her wisdom and grace, she chose not to throw the souvenirs of the past on the bonfire of spite, but keep them safe for a day that might not even come.

  “Funny,” Erik said. “For a time I thought all the women I loved made me feel useless. Like nothing I did was good enough. But now I see those women have always picked up the things I threw away or buried and kept them safe. They saved the best parts of me.”

  Christine slid her arm around his shoulders and pressed her lips to his temple. “Because you’re worth saving, Byron Erik,” she said.

  “Did Dad give you an engagement ring?”

  Her hand ran soft over his hair. “He did. But I sold it to help pay for Pete’s cochlear implant. I have my wedding band, though. Upstairs in my jewelry box.”

  “You kept it?”

  “I did.” She pushed the tissue paper toward him. “Now wrap that diamond up tight. Take the little box, too.”

  AMERICAN THANKSGIVING IN NOVEMBER marked a year since Erik picked up the phone and started turning things around. He and Daisy flew down to Pennsylvania to spend it with Joe and Francine.

  La Tarasque was shrouded in fog Thanksgiving morning. Erik slipped from his and Daisy’s bed in the carriage house. He walked across the yard and up the porch steps.

  In the study, Joe was at his desk with coffee. Francine curled in her chair by the window with the paper.

  The lemon trees were in flower.

  “Erique,” Francine said, folding down the pages and peering over glasses. “You’re up so early.”

  “I wanted to show you something,” Erik said. “Before I show Daisy.”

  Joe came around the desk. Francine pushed her glasses up on her head. Erik took the box from his pocket and opened it to show them the ring.

  “Oh, darling,” Francine said, clapping her hands together.

  Joe’s hand dropped on Erik’s shoulder, fingers reaching to tug his earlobe.

  “The diamond belonged to my grandmother,” Erik said. “My cousin Vivian helped design the setting.”

  “It’s beautiful,” Francine said, running a knuckle beneath one eye before she reached up to take the ring from its velvet slot.

  “I’m touched you wanted to show us first,” Joe said.

  “Well. You don’t seem the type to grant permission for her. But I…” Erik rolled his lips in, thinking. “I left once. This time I’m staying. I guess that’s really the point of me showing you first.”

  “Darling,” Francine said again, holding the ring up to the window and letting it catch the light. The sun had broken through the fog and was slicing through the lemon blossoms. “The point isn’t that you left,” she said, making the diamond throw tiny rainbows on the sleeve of her blouse. “The point is you came back.”

  The ring stayed, shy and secret, in his pocket through Thanksgiving dinner. A half-dozen times he went for it, only to balk. Thinking irrationally, what if she says no?

  Don’t be stupid. She won’t say no.

  He didn’t k
now what he was waiting for.

  It’s never going to be the perfect moment or the perfect place. Just fucking do it.

  Will texted the next day. Have you fucking done it yet? I’m dying here.

  Finding out the ring was still burning the proverbial hole in Erik’s pocket, Will called to give cheerful hell. Erik grabbed the compost pail and headed outside to talk.

  “Good Lord, you’re a wuss,” Will said. “Where’d you propose to your first wife?”

  “She proposed to me.”

  “Oh.”

  “In bed.”

  “Hey, bed is a perfectly respectable place to pop the question,” Will said. “You’re horizontal, you’re most likely naked, you’re in the most intimate room in the house save for the bathroom. Just do it there.”

  “Where’d you propose to Lucky?”

  “In the bathroom.”

  “Shut up.”

  “I carved ‘will you marry me?’ into a bar of soap. Left it and the ring on the little ledge thingie just before she got into the shower. I waited. And waited. She’s singing. She’s jabbering away. I’m shaving at the sink and dying. Finally, I just yanked the curtain aside and pointed to the damn thing like Hello?”

  Erik laughed. “I think the more elaborate the proposal plan, the more chance it has to bomb.”

  “Seriously. Go simple. Just ask.”

  Friday night they went to the bruschetta festival, hosted by the county’s Italian cultural society. The parking lot of the volunteer fire department had been transformed into a Tuscan piazza. A long line of grills made from split oil drums held charcoal fires. On lopsided tables made from boards and sawhorses, volunteers were slicing loaves of bread. Others were dealing the slices down the long length of grill, or turning them to reveal the charcoal stripes. The toasted slices went into giant bowls where a third gang of workers drizzled them with olive oil, salt and pepper before setting the bowl out. The crowd grabbed and the bread kept toasting.

  From booth to booth, Erik and Daisy followed the masses, trying all the toppings. Endless finger food, the ultimate cocktail party under the stars. Erik had the ring in his pocket and contemplated giving it as they sat eating on some hay bales. But a hundred people were around and his hands were a juicy mess, as were hers.