The Lemonade Year

by Amy Willoughby-Burle

  I think about Cassie always holed up in her room. She won’t let me talk to her about Dad, but I know she’s hurting. She’s already cut me loose from her life, and I’m not ready for it. I don’t know what she’s thinking or how she feels about much of anything these days. I didn’t even see it coming. She grew up without asking me how I felt about it. She was three and then seven and then twelve and then gone.

  I want her to grow up—she must. I knew she would stop needing me—stop coming to me with every discovery, booboo, and heartache. I knew she would start to form her own opinions and not seek my advice. I knew there would be a time when she’d lead a life I didn’t participate in.

  I just didn’t know it would happen so soon. I didn’t know she would leave me while she was still at home.

  I’m not ready for this. I miss her, and she’s still right here.

  My throat gets scratchy, and although I try to bite back the tears, they come anyway.

  I sit down in the grass beside Dad’s plot—his spot in this new neighborhood. So, this is where we’ll come to visit our father, like he has merely moved or gotten a new phone number or a webcam. I envy my mother the optimism that makes her think we can simply open the earth and toss in our sadness.

  I don’t know how long I sit there at Dad’s gravesite. I begin to judge the time by the progression of my crying. Long enough to feel like I might cry, long enough to try not to cry, long enough to give in, begin to sob, stop, then start again. Not long enough, however, to play off the fact that I’ve been crying.

  “Hi.” I hear Oliver’s voice behind me.

  I wipe at my eyes as if I am trying to get out a piece of dust or grit, something that was making my eyes water through no fault of my emotions. I don’t know why I feel the need to hide. Crying is an involuntary reaction to a disturbance in the body, like sweating or shivering or even laughing. Although crying is much less socially acceptable.

  Oliver walks around and kneels down beside me, giving me time to collect myself.

  “I’m beginning to think that you’re not real,” I finally manage to say.

  He laughs, tossing back his head so his face is lost in sunlight. The sound of his laughter glints off the stones, splits the air around us wide open, its bizarre echo ringing in the ears of the dead.

  “What does that mean?” He stands up and sticks his hand out to me, helping me up off the ground.

  “You only turn up when I’m sad. And you have a weird way of making me feel better about feeling bad.”

  “So I’m a sort of aptly timed apparition, if you want to keep the graveyard motif going?” Oliver says in his easy way, taking my hand right there in public, as it were. When I stand up, he brushes my hair back from where the breeze had blown it forward.

  “Exactly,” I answer, very aware of his hand around mine.

  Our evening together hangs between us like a book on a shelf that both of us reach for but neither takes down. I’m afraid if I open the pages, I will want to know how it ends.

  I wipe the last of the tears from my face. Oliver steps closer to me and I’m drawn in a step as well. He reaches out like he means to touch my face but doesn’t.

  “Come with me,” he says.

  He heads deeper into the cemetery. I follow, letting him walk us away from the breathing world.

  “I hope you don’t mind me finding you here. You weren’t at your office,” he says as we step over a low hedge and into an older section of the cemetery.

  “You went to my work?”

  Oliver smiles apologetically. I’m flattered that after only one night he remembered where I said I work. Jack never seemed interested in that part of my life. Truth be told, I’m not sure I was all that interested in his either.

  “Who did you tell them you were?” I ask Oliver, watching the ground, avoiding gravesites.

  I fear him saying that the receptionist thought he was my son. He’s probably only ten years older than Cassie at best.

  “I told the girl at the front that I was your priest,” Oliver says, looking straight ahead.

  “And she bought it?” I ask when he stops walking and turns to me. “You don’t look like any of the priests I’ve ever seen.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.” He runs his hand through his hair in what I’ve already come to realize is less of an egocentric mannerism and more a nervous tick.

  “What did she say?” I ask, wondering if she said anything about Jack.

  “She said your other religious guru was already there so I’d need to make an appointment for some time later in the week.”

  “She’s good cover that way,” I say, remembering that she never really liked Jack anyway.

  Oliver never tells me what he actually said. As we walk, I let him joke and talk, and his words begin to fade in and out and I lose track of our conversation.

  Somewhere near the back of the cemetery, we stop. Standing amid the stones, I feel cold and sad. I shiver like a cloud has crossed the sun suddenly enough to chill the air.

  “Nina,” Oliver asks. “Are you ok?”

  “Yes,” I answer.

  He pulls me softly towards him and wraps his arms around me in an embrace. I can hear the words that are meant by the gesture, the I wish you weren’t sad, the I don’t really know what it feels like to lose your father, the This is all I know how to do right now to make it better.

  I can’t breathe without breathing him in. I step back, but we don’t completely separate. For a moment, I think he’s going to kiss me, but then he pulls away and lets go.

  “What are we doing here?” I ask, taking a long breath to clear my head.

  He offers a slight smile. “I wanted to show you this one,” he says and kneels in front of an old stone so weathered it is more readable through touch than sight.

  I go down on my knees in front of the stone to see what he’s looking at. Oliver and Nina, together in death where it could not be in life—1912.

  “Spooky, huh?” He lies down on the ground beneath his name and pats the spot over the other Nina.

  I stand there and look down at the space beside him. He pats the ground again and winks at me. I’m thrown off by him. The wink isn’t a come-on, it’s a comfort. I stretch out in the grass and weeds beside him and over her. Normally, it would seem like bad luck to walk over a grave, but there’s something in the intimacy of this supine position that feels more like connection than irreverence.

  “Is this how we end up?” I ask, filling the silence.

  “I don’t know.” He reaches across the scratch of grass between us to take my hand. “The more I figure out, the less I know.”

  I look over at him and he looks at me. The gravestone with our names protrudes from the ground inches from the tops of our heads.

  “Who do you think they were?” I ask.

  “People who should have, but didn’t,” he says, looking up toward the bright spring sky.

  “You think this is us?” I ask, worried that this is all some weird fantasy, me with my agenda and he with his—some lady named Nina who fits into his play, some young lover to take my mind off this painful part of my life.

  “No.” Oliver chuckles. He rolls over onto his side to face me, props his head up with his hand. “I just find it an interesting coincidence. It makes me think about the choices we make and how to know what’s right.”

  “Did you just find this?” I roll to my side, mirroring him.

  “No, I took a class in college about genealogy,” Oliver says and touches my cheek with his free hand. “Did a paper about life and death and what comes after.”

  “Cheery stuff.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be all broody and moody in college?” Oliver brushes his hair away from his eyes. “Anyway, all the writing about death and the afterlife left me thinking, so I came here to tool around and figure things o
ut.” He laughs at himself and shakes his head.

  “The chicks must have really dug you,” I scoff. “We always go for the dark and dangerous.”

  “Well, we didn’t have too many women hanging around the department in my field of study.”

  “Math geek?” I asked, realizing he’d never said what he went to college for in the first place. I was just glad to hear that he was old enough to have gone already. “One of the Poindexter crowd?”

  I picture him in khakis with his shirt tucked in too tight, a pair of thick glasses, and his hair cut too short. No, still too gorgeous to fit that mold.

  “No, I’m no good at math,” he answers, but doesn’t offer an alternative.

  We both lay back flat on the ground and rest in silence for a while. I can almost feel this other Nina and Oliver beneath us, all dust and regret—carved only in stone what they should have engraved in the flesh. I feel for a moment like the world is a gaping hole that I must find my way out of. I feel the bone Nina reaching up to take me under with her, while the spirit Oliver sifts up through century-old dirt, easy as smoke, to whisk the living Oliver away.

  “What is it that you want?” Oliver asks, a sudden challenge so deep he may not even know what he’s asking.

  “For things to go as planned,” I answer, resting both hands on my stomach.

  “And what if that doesn’t happen?” he asks, putting his hand behind his head. “Why not choose another path and give that a try?”

  “I don’t know that I’m that fearless,” I say and roll over again to face him. Trying to be brave—to look into his eyes and see a way around my fear.

  “You’ve lost faith, that’s all,” he says, staring up into the clouds. “It’s easy to do.”

  “Perhaps,” I say. “How do I find it again after all this?”

  “I’m the wrong person to ask these days,” he says. “The meaning of life has eluded me, after all.”

  “You’re pretty deep for a carefree college guy.” I nudge him playfully.

  “Ex-college guy,” he says, looking at me briefly and then glancing back toward the blue above. “Just trying to find myself. Well, maybe I’m trying to find someone else—or find my way back. I don’t know.” He makes a face and raises his eyebrows at some internal thought. Then he shakes his head like he’s wringing something from his mind.

  “So what do I do now?” I ask, hoping he has an answer.

  I lay back, feeling bone Nina reach out to her Oliver, ever out of her reach, and I know she envies me. I’m sad for her and hope I have enough will to be brave for the both of us. Would she have made a different choice if she had it to do over again, or was the one she made, however hard, the right one?

  “You can’t turn around and head back down the road you’ve already traveled,” Oliver says as if he can read my thoughts. “All you can do is keep walking forward and hope that you’ll come across the path that leads you home.”

  A couple of years after Lola’s accident, Dad took me out on the lake. The dim blue water was lit with thin ripples of sun, white on the tips of the wake. Further out, the sun sparkled like a fistful of glitter cast like a net to drag in something beautiful.

  When the two of us dragged in our own cast, a few fish gave way to a net full of crabs. Suddenly they were clicking and sliding along the fiberglass bottom of the boat. I high-stepped it around until I made it up onto the row seat, and Dad laughed as he tossed the crabs one by one back into the water.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “If this was what we were after, we’d be in high cotton.”

  The claws clip-clapped at him as he reached down. I wanted to be brave enough to toss them out, to not fear the pinch of the claws. One caught Dad on the cuff of his sleeve. I swatted at it, and it fell into the water.

  “Good job,” Dad said. “Next time we pull this net in, it will be full of fish.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked. “Can you see what’s in the net before you pull it in?”

  “If the water is clear,” Dad said. “But once you toss it out, you have to pull it in no matter.”

  “What if it’s just crabs again?” I asked.

  “Then we toss it out till we get what we came for,” he said.

  Now, the wind shifts as it sometimes does in spring, and the sky tunes up above us. Hot and cold meet somewhere in the atmosphere, causing a collision so forceful that it draws sound and light out of thin air.

  “We should get out of here,” Oliver says, sitting up and taking hold of my hand to help me up.

  The first warning drops tag my arm, and we both look to the sky. Still holding hands, we run back through the cemetery. The sky is dark and rumbling, but the rain hasn’t caught up with it yet.

  “Do you have more time?” Oliver asks when we reach my car. “Or do you have to get back to your office?”

  “I should,” I say, not getting in. “Book deadline.”

  “Yeah,” he says, his eyes lighting up. “I saw some of the cover art in the lobby. Food books. You a good cook?”

  “No.”

  “Well, no worries. I am.”

  He steps closer to me, and I feel the tiny hairs on my arm stand on end. I could attribute it to the electricity in the air from the storm, but that’s not where it’s coming from. I shouldn’t do this. This isn’t something a levelheaded, recently divorced, mother of a teenager should do. My old friend, guilt, sidles up next to me. He’s like a chill in the room, and I shiver.

  “You’re cold,” Oliver says as the rain begins to fall. “Follow me.”

  He takes off, running toward his car, and I’m not sure if I’m supposed to run after him so I just stand there in the rain. He pulls up beside me.

  “Get in your car, Nina,” he says. “Come with me.”

  “Are you going to take me to another graveyard?” I say, raising my voice against the wind and blowing rain.

  “No,” he says and winks at me. “I’m going to make you dinner.”

  I realize I’m starving and get in my car.

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  He waits for me outside his house, huddled under the little overhang above his door. He times the opening of the door to match my dash up the stairs and steps aside to let me in.

  He drops his keys in a bowl by the door and heads for the kitchen. “Make yourself at home,” he calls from the next room. “I’ll whip up something quick.”

  I stand in his living room, confused. I thought dinner meant “dinner,” but apparently, it actually means dinner. I feel silly for thinking it might be a ploy to get me alone with him again. In the light of day, I’m a different package than I might seem to be, tucked in the darkened bookshop amid the tales of love and woe. But then there were those kisses and shared looks that I don’t think I’m misunderstanding. I listen to the sounds of cooking—the click of the oven coming on, the whoosh of the refrigerator door, the chop of something being diced.

  I sit on the couch and wiggle this way and that. Make myself at home. I put my feet up on the coffee table, but immediately take them down. I move to the old rocking chair and lean back into its sturdy frame. Outside, the storm catches up with us, turning the sky out his window darker than the day is late.

  “Put on some music if you want,” he calls out. “I’m assuming you know how to work that old CD player.”

  I do, but the comment stops me. Do I actually think this young guy has any real interest in me?

  Oliver hurries out of the kitchen, holding up a finger to me, gesturing to wait. “On second thought,” he says, “how about this?”

  He goes right to the shelf of music and slides out a case. He opens the stereo CD drawer and puts in a silver disk. He chooses a track and steps back with his arms open like a conductor waiting to lift his baton. Etta James’s low and lingering voice sings through the speakers.

  At last, my love has come
along . . .

  I raise my eyebrows.

  “Don’t you think is perfect for our doppelgangers?” Oliver says. “The other Nina and Oliver. Makes you ache on their behalf, doesn’t it?”

  I feel foolish for thinking the song was about me, but I’m relieved on the other hand. I lift myself out of the rocking chair and meet him on the other side of the room.

  “Oliver, what am I doing here?” I ask. “What is this?”

  He smiles widely at me and goes back into the kitchen. Moments later, he returns with a tray of flatbread pizzas. He sets it down on the coffee table and does this cute little flourishing bow.

  “I saw something like this on the wall at your office,” he says. “Ok, it’s not really cooking, but it’s fast, and, I don’t know about you, but I’m starving. I’ll do better next time.”

  I had taken the photo he was talking about. It’d been for the book Tuscany in a Hurry.

  “Rosemary flatbread focaccia,” he says, picking up one and handing it to me. “Pesto, tomato, smoked salmon, and fresh gouda. Little dash of salt. Am I close? Probably mozzarella, but I didn’t have that.”

  “Yes,” I say. “Just about perfect.”

  He nods at me to take a bite. I do and briefly close my eyes in delight.

  “This pesto is wonderful,” I say.

  “Made it myself. Always keep some on hand. Love it. Eat up, eat up.”

  The food is delicious, and now I’m completely confused. Am I just an extension of my father—is Oliver just taking care of me? It’s time to eat your dinner, Nina. You’ve got to take your meds and get back into bed soon.

  Etta continues singing and Oliver continues talking about cooking and I continue to feel like the old fool that I might be. We finish eating, and he looks at his watch.

  “It’s getting late,” he says. “Did I make you miss your deadline? Will you be in trouble?”

  I shake my head. “Thank you for dinner,” I say, getting up from the chair and hesitate as I face the door.

  “Sure,” Oliver says, seeming hesitant as well. “Anytime.”

  He follows me to the door, but puts his hand against it when we get there so that I can’t open it. He leans closer and looks at me extremely intensely. He seems confused and perhaps a little frustrated. I am too.