Gray thought of that kiss again. How could he not when she looked at him with gratitude for what he was doing for her father? Did she like him now? Was he redeeming himself? He didn’t know why it should matter, whether he had or not, but it did.
With a hand on her father’s elbow, she directed him as though he were a treasure, mutely trusting Gray to keep him safe. She retreated into the house.
Gray wished she were coming with them, envisioned her in rubber boots and jeans and a flannel shirt tied at her waist, her face as fresh as it was now without eyeliner, mascara and lipstick.
She would be a vision sitting in a canoe in the sunshine. Had she ever fished with them when Gray was young? No, he remembered no time that she had ever joined them. Billy had when he’d been really young, but that had stopped when he became a teenager and started to run around with a crowd older than Gray’s. Why hadn’t Audrey also come? Maybe it was as simple as not being interested. Maybe those were the times she’d gone off to garden with her aunt.
Reluctantly, he turned away. Something else bothered him...why, if Gray had spent so much time with Jeff, had he never been friends with Audrey? Jeff had said they were, but Gray didn’t believe it. He would remember.
Had Jeff just naturally spent more time with Billy and sometimes with Gray, because they were boys and he could relate to them? With a little more thought, he realized that so much of his relationship with Jeff had been based around the lumberyard. Of course, Audrey wouldn’t have been part of that.
He guided Jeff to the car. Looking hesitant, not wholly believing that today could work, Jeff settled in. They sipped coffee from thermal mugs while Gray drove them to the spot where they used to fish when he was young.
At the lake, the sun peeked over the horizon, shaking the sleep from the world and setting the surface of the water on fire.
As he unpacked the car, took the canoe from the roof and settled Jeff into the middle seat, got out life jackets and loaded Mom’s lunch, Gray thought of old traditions. He’d turned away from them for ages, sometimes in those early years away at school coming home at Christmastime reluctantly, resenting the time away from new friends and city attractions.
In a matter of days, what he had treated so callously could be torn away from him, and he missed it already.
No, he wouldn’t think about that today, wouldn’t waste time on the future. He would cherish these moments in the here and now with two men he’d respected all of his life.
Gray helped Dad into the front, Dad’s hand frail and his step unsteady, and seated himself in the rear.
Dipping the paddle into the lake and steering them out onto still, crystal water in the quiet hush of dawn felt almost religious, sacred, the silence hallowed.
Soon, they had lures in the water and were talking, memories of the town and the business flowing from his father’s and Jeff’s lips like manna from heaven.
“Jeff, do you remember the time...” Dad paused in what he’d been about to say to include Gray. “Gray, you were there. You were already a teenager by then. We’d rented one of those small cottages on the far side of the lake.”
“I remember,” Gray said. “It was a boys’ weekend. I think I was about twelve and Billy about fourteen.”
“Yes. Do you remember what happened that night?”
Jeff was already laughing. “Gray, your dad and I were on the dock smoking cigars and talking. Must’ve been about two in the morning. You boys were inside in bed asleep.”
“We’d been drinking these godawful Black Russians,” Harrison said. “Vodka and Kahlúa. What the hell were we thinking, Jeff?”
“Your dad was wearing this straw fedora he loved. It was ancient—”
“Belonged to my father.”
“It was disreputable. Holes in it everywhere. Looked like a mouse had been chewing it.” Jeff cast his lure into still water.
“I loved that hat.”
“Anyway,” Jeff continued, “a gust of wind took it off your dad’s head and sent it into the water. Your dad got up to retrieve it.”
Dad was laughing. “We’d been out in the canoe earlier and had gotten water in it, so it was up on the dock turned facedown to drain and dry out.”
“Your dad had to reach across it to lean into the water to fish out his hat. He put his hand on it, the thing tipped on to its side, and your dad went head over teakettle into the water. Fully clothed.”
When they finally stopped laughing, Harrison said, “A lot of help you were. My clothes and shoes were waterlogged, and you didn’t do a thing to help me out of the water.”
“How could I? I was laughing too hard.”
“Hey,” Gray interjected. “I remember something.”
He’d been laughing with them, thinking that this was only their memory. “When I got up in the morning, Dad’s wallet was on the fireplace hearth and all of his ID was spread out. His driver’s license was curled up at the edges, and his money was wrinkled.”
“He’d put it all there before we went to bed to dry in front of the fire’s embers.”
“Boy, we were hungover that morning, weren’t we, Jeff? We never drank Black Russians again.”
Gray smiled while Dad and Jeff ran through story after story, often about a lot of people Gray knew.
Gray had lost more than he’d known when he’d turned his back on Accord, on the people.
Hours later, with six fish between them, Gray dropped his father off at home. Then he took Jeff to his house, where they scaled Jeff’s two fish together, Gray guiding Jeff’s hand and the two of them laughing when Jeff got the angle wrong and scales flew into their faces.
They left the fish for Audrey to cook when she came home, and sat in the living room to toast a good day with the meager remains of the bottle of Chivas.
All in all, it had been a good day. The best.
* * *
AUDREY FINISHED HAULING the last bags of yesterday’s soil delivery into the back of the store. She’d been too busy yesterday and today with customers to unload the shipment. Just as well that she trusted the townspeople to not steal her product. It had been sitting out back on skids all Saturday night.
She didn’t mind being busy. Busy was good. It meant money in the cash register. It also meant her feet were killing her. She’d had next to no time to sit.
“Come on, Jerry. Let’s blow this pop stand.” He followed her out the door and waited patiently while she locked up. By the time she got home and put Jerry in his kennel with a bowl of food and fresh water, she was dead tired.
Dad sat in the armchair waiting for her.
“Well?” she said. “Did you catch any fish?”
Dad’s face split with a grin bigger than anything she’d seen in years. It took her breath away. Dad was happy.
Thank you, Gray.
“Go look in the kitchen,” he said.
She did and then came back.
“Two fat, gorgeous fish. Well done.” On impulse, she kissed his forehead and hugged him, then pulled back. “You smell like you’ve been fishing all day.”
She helped him up the stairs to the bathroom. “Shower while I make supper. Frozen fries okay with you? I’m too pooped to make mashed.”
“Frozen are good. Do we have any corn?”
“Only tinned. Will that work?”
“Yep.” He didn’t complain when she chose his clean clothes for him, a sign of just how improved his mood was. She hated how sometimes he mixed a plaid shirt with a patterned sweater.
You’re anal, woman.
So what? I like fashion.
She skipped downstairs to fry fish and cook vegetables. Even though she’d told Gray she didn’t like him, if he were here at this moment, she would kiss the daylights out of him for putting a smile on her father’s face.
* * *
; ON MONDAY MORNING, bolstered by the good time he’d had fishing the day before, Jeff decided he’d tackle those basement stairs that had intimidated him since his eyesight had begun to falter. He planned to visit the basement.
Billy used to live down there. Jeff hadn’t gone down since his eyesight had first faded.
Somehow, today, he felt a need to connect with his son. When Billy was a child, they had gone on so many fishing trips together.
Yesterday, Jeff had been happy, but he’d also thought of Billy. Billy should have been in the canoe with them.
The story about Harrison falling over the canoe on the dock into the water had brought back good memories. It had been a father-son weekend, and Billy had been happy.
He hadn’t returned after that year, though. He’d become a teenager and had been out with his friends. He’d grown up and away from his father. A couple of years later, he’d gotten a girlfriend, Monica Accord, who had later become his wife.
Jeff could no longer see his son, but he needed to connect with him somehow, to feel Billy’s spirit. In the basement, Jeff could sit in his place, among his things, and maybe feel close to him there.
Audrey had left for work, so Jeff had the day for himself and it stretched too long ahead of him. Days used to be measured in hours—how much work could he get done before lunch, how much before going home for the day? Now? It was marked off in the excruciating slowness of minutes and the ticking of a clock on a mantel.
Why Audrey had to work when the store was closed puzzled him. She’d said she had to water and weed and trim and prune her plants at the greenhouse.
Fair enough, he guessed. Funny that the thought of her working with her flowers didn’t make him as angry today—maybe because yesterday had been such a good day.
Feeling his way along the wall, he arrived at the basement stairs.
Billy’s domain.
Jeff used to be angry that Billy had gone off and gotten himself killed. Underneath Jeff’s puzzlement when Billy had enlisted—he’d always been a lover, not a fighter—had been fear. He hadn’t wanted to lose his boy. Jeff used to be furious with Billy’s best friend, Gabe Jordan, for taking Billy away.
Jordan had set him straight on that. Last year, Gabe had confessed that he hadn’t persuaded Billy to go to war; in fact, he’d tried to dissuade Billy from going. But Billy had gone anyway—a sign of courage. His son had been strong. A hero. Like all of those boys who died in World War II. Heroes every one.
Jeff opened the basement door and felt for the light switch. Darned blurriness. Where was the first step? He shuffled. Moved his foot forward. Too far. Felt himself slipping.
He grabbed the handrail. His foot skidded off the stair. Pain in his shoulder. He couldn’t hold on. His weight carried him forward. He went down, and down and down, rolling and banging his way to the bottom.
He hit the floor hard, landing on his left hip, pain a harsh reminder of helplessness. You can’t do for yourself anymore. You aren’t a whole man anymore.
He panted and waited for the pain to pass, then checked out his hip. It wasn’t broken, but he’d be black and blue tomorrow.
In more than sixty years of living an active life, he’d never had as many bruises as he’d gotten in the past year.
With the fingers of his right hand, he felt the face of his watch, the one Audrey had given him with the raised numbers. Ten to ten.
Audrey probably wouldn’t be home for hours.
He couldn’t lie here all day.
Leveraging himself onto his uninjured hip, he pulled himself up.
He was weak. He used to be strong. He’d let himself go. How could he not? He wouldn’t go to the gym, wouldn’t entertain the crowd with the spectacle of the blind guy trying to pump up.
His attempt to step onto the first step failed. His hip was too sore. He needed to sit for a while.
He tested it. He could walk. He just couldn’t climb. Shuffling, he found the sofa by bumping into it.
In adolescence, Billy had turned the basement into a hangout for himself and his friends. Jeff hadn’t touched a thing.
In his mind, his son still lived down here, in the things Jeff could no longer see clearly but could feel, in the old sofa and armchair, in the posters on the wall of whatever movie stars and models had been hot at the time, in Billy’s football awards on the shelf under the small basement window.
Gabe used to run in and out of this house.
Jeff had thought he was Billy’s friend. Why hadn’t he protected Billy from that IED? Why had it been Billy who had been killed and Gabe only wounded?
Jeff rubbed the side of his head where it had hit the railing on the way down. Calm down. War is capricious. Only fate decides who lives and who dies. Not you. Not the soldiers themselves.
His hand smoothed the worn fabric of the sofa. Billy used to sit here with his friends to watch football games on the old TV.
Jeff’s palm touched the remote. Still here from the last time Billy had used it? If only he could feel Billy’s heat still radiating from it. He picked it up and turned on the TV. A talk show came on. He’d go nuts if he watched daytime junk until Audrey got home. Watched being a weird word choice. All he did these days was listen.
He dozed until his empty belly woke him. Jerry Springer was on.
No. He couldn’t listen to this drama, to the foul language. What kind of low humans thought it was okay, even desirable, to air their dirty linen in public?
These people lived while a good man like Billy was gone.
Jeff flipped channels. Nothing better. Crap and more crap. By feel, he hit the button on the VCR. Maybe Billy had been watching a movie when he had last sat here. He could share that with Billy, as though his son were sitting here beside him.
He closed his eyes. Silence. Nothing in the machine.
And then...Billy’s voice.
Jeff’s eyes shot open. “Billy?”
It wasn’t his son alive. It wasn’t a ghost. It was a voice from the past in an old football video.
Billy and Gabe used to have their friends shoot their games with Jeff’s video camera, and then they’d come down here and do endless replays and analyses of how games had been won or lost, as though they were budding coaches as well as players.
“Gabe!” Jeff heard his son yell. “Pass it here.”
Billy must have fumbled the ball, because he swore and then laughed. Jeff tsked. He’d taught his son it was bad to swear, but he smiled because of the fun in Billy’s voice.
The sound of that laugh, the life-affirming joy in it, brought tears to Jeff’s eyes, and he swiped them away.
Real men didn’t cry.
He felt his way around the remote until he found the button that let him replay that laugh, once, twice, eighteen, thirty times. He listened with his eyes shut, because even the blurry light at the edges of his vision was a distraction from the purity of Billy’s laugh.
With shaking fingers, Jeff wiped his eyes again.
Real men didn’t cry.
* * *
AUDREY WORKED IN the greenhouse for six hours before quitting for the day. She’d labored right through lunch and was starving.
On her way home, she picked up groceries. Dad had been in a good mood this morning. Maybe he would be open to something healthy like a quinoa salad for dinner.
Her laughter filled the car. Nah. Not a chance would Dad eat quinoa in any shape or form. She settled for pork chops.
Balancing the bags in her arms, she unlocked the front door.
“Dad? I’m home.”
No answer.
“Dad?”
He wasn’t in the living room. Maybe he was upstairs taking a nap.
She put down the bags and scooted to the second floor. He wasn’t there. Strange. Was he in the kitchen, ma
ybe? But he would have heard her call. Worry started to hum through her.
Downstairs, she picked up the bags to take them to the kitchen, but stopped, halted by distant sound coming from the basement.
She approached the door. The hairs on her arms stood up. Billy. Laughing.
Oh. Dad had gone downstairs and had put in one of Billy’s videos. What had prompted this?
She hurried down. She really wished he hadn’t chanced these stairs alone. They were so steep.
The sight of Dad on the sofa, eyes closed, tears on his cheeks, stopped the words that were about to spew out, the chastisement for coming down here by himself.
How could she possibly give him heck? He’d just wanted to be near his son.
“Dad?” she whispered.
Slowly, as though waking from a dream, he opened his eyes.
She approached the sofa. “Are you okay?”
“Hurt myself.”
She noticed his pallor, and her heart stuttered. “What? How?”
His mouth twisted. “You can go ahead and tell me I told you so. I fell down the stairs.”
She snatched the remote from his hand to stop that disconcerting, disorienting blast from the past of Billy’s voice.
While her pulse pounded, she touched his shoulder. “What did you hurt?”
“My hip.”
Oh, Dad. “Broken?”
“Bruised. I’m tired. Help me up the stairs.”
He stood and wobbled. She put his arm around her waist, but he hissed in a breath.
“What is it?”
“I wrenched my shoulder trying to stop the fall. Come around to the other side.”
She did and gave him her support.
The second they reached the stairs, though, she knew it wouldn’t work. Dad’s hip might not be broken, but climbing the stairs hurt too much. It was likely swollen. She was a strong woman, but the stairs were steep, and she didn’t want to risk both of them falling backward to the bottom.
“When did this happen?” She helped him to the sofa.
“About fifteen, twenty minutes after you left.”
“What? Why didn’t you call me?”
“I left the phone upstairs. I wasn’t thinking.”
Because of Audrey Page 13
