Good Harbor (15 page)

“Yes, I do.”

Kathleen walked Brigid to her car.

“Will you come back sometime, Nathan?” Kathleen asked.

He looked at her for a moment and nodded.

“So you’ll call me when you’ve gotten a chance to look through this stuff?” Brigid
asked.

“Yes.”

“Say bye-bye, Nathan.” But Nathan shook his head no.

“Bye-bye,” said Kathleen.

The house felt empty. She switched on the radio, but that only made the rooms seem
even more desolate. The phone rang. “How ’bout a fish sandwich for lunch?” Buddy asked.

“Okay,” Kathleen said, thinking of the way Nathan nodded with his thumb in his mouth.
Danny had sucked his two middle fingers.

Buddy showed up twenty minutes later with the sandwiches, french fries, and two chocolate
milk shakes. Kathleen had dropped eight pounds since the surgery. Buddy had noticed;
she saw it in his eyes every time she changed into her nightgown.

Marcy had noticed and asked about her appetite. But Kathleen liked being thinner.
It made her feel younger. Besides, food didn’t appeal to her much these days.

Buddy coaxed her to finish his shake after she polished off hers. “I guess I was hungry,”
she said, spooning the last of Buddy’s coleslaw onto her plate.

“Good. Now, how about a nap? You were up again last night, weren’t you?” he said.

“Maybe I could sleep.” Kathleen shrugged. “Would you lie down with me for a moment?”

“Sure.”

He lowered the blinds and turned back the bedspread. Kathleen took off her gardening
pants and stretched out. Buddy came out of the bathroom in his shorts. He lowered
himself to his side, his eyes on her.

“What are you looking at?”

“My beautiful wife.”

Kathleen smiled. “Keep the glasses off, m’dear.”

“You are beautiful,” he whispered. “Even more than when we met.” She kissed him and
ran her fingers over his kind, rugged face. He was still a good-looking man, but he
had aged. His face was craggy, his chin was starting to slacken into jowls, and there
were thick white hairs in his nose and ears. She could go for days on end forgetting
how much she had changed, but Buddy’s face reminded her of the passing of time.

Of course, she never said that to him. There were lots of things she never said to
Buddy. Kathleen believed it was the secret of their marital happiness.

She’d known a man, once, to whom she had said everything that popped into her head,
but that was years ago. Stan might be dead, for all she knew.

It was good to have Joyce to talk to.

She smiled at her husband, whose eyes were still clear and tender. “I love you, too.”

He leaned in to kiss her. A real kiss, mouth to mouth. He drew her toward him. Kathleen
was flattered on the occasions Buddy got aroused. He reached around, holding her backside
in his big hands, a move that still made her feel like a girl. She pushed into his
embrace, feeling his erection.

“One second,” she said, and turned to get the lubricant from the drawer.

Kathleen woke up an hour later and found a stem of Sweet William on the pillow beside
her. She stared at the red-and-white stripe of the flower and ran a finger around
its pinking-shear edge. Does anyone still own pinking shears? she wondered.

She was restless. She hadn’t climaxed with Buddy. She reached under the sheet and
touched herself. She tried to remember what it was about Stan that had been so tempting,
so compelling. She had risked everything for those afternoons, each one thrilling
not just for the sex, but also for the talk. Stan was a great talker, and she had
never made anyone laugh so much. Now she couldn’t even remember what he looked like.

She closed her eyes, and Dr. Singh’s face materialized. Kathleen giggled. She wondered
whether all his patients fantasized about him.

She thought of his full, cupid-bow lips. She remembered his hands on her. The nut-colored
skin. Hands with long, tapered fingers, long, oval nails. Oh, those hands.

J
OYCE
spent another whole week behind the wheel of her car, working her way through a long
list of errands in advance of Nina’s departure for camp. And then there was her daughter’s
urgent social calendar: she
had
to sleep at Sylvie’s house; Rachel’s sleepover was
the last one until September;
going to the movies with Jesse was the
only thing
she wanted to do.

“What if I sit on the other side of the theater?” Joyce asked as she drove the girls
to the multiplex. “You won’t even know I’m there.”

“I would, too, know it,” Nina snapped.

Joyce opened her mouth to argue, thought better of it, and said nothing.

Nina finally agreed to spend a few hours with Joyce, shopping for camp clothes. They
bought sneakers and shorts at the sporting goods store without incident. The underwear
purchase went smoothly, but at Old Navy, Joyce said, “Honey, I’m not going to spend
forty-nine dollars on a pair of pants that are going to get wrecked at camp.”

“I am not going to wreck them,” said Nina, her eyes instantly glazed with furious
tears. “These are the only ones that fit me.” She slammed the dressing-room-cubicle
door.

A woman outside another door caught Joyce’s eye and shrugged. “They’re all like that,”
she whispered. “They get better.”

“Promise?” Joyce whispered back.

The well-dressed stranger nodded as her daughter — tall, chubby, and pouting — walked
out of another cubicle carrying a stack of jeans. “Nothing,” she said, glumly handing
the jeans to her mother in a messy heap.

“Do I look like the maid?” the woman asked in a strangled voice that Joyce recognized.
The girl shot her mother the Teenage Death Ray look, grabbed the pants, and shoved
them at another sullen teenager wearing a headset, whose miserable job was to fold
rejected items.

“Nina,” Joyce said softly through the door, “let’s just buy those pants and go home.”

Nina opened the door and smiled. “Thank you, Mommy.”

Joyce and Frank drove two cars to see Nina off. Side by side, they watched as the
buses pulled away. “Seven weeks,” Frank said. “I don’t know whether to cry or cheer.”

Joyce nodded.

Frank took her hand. He chewed the inside of his lip. “She’ll come back more mature.”

Joyce, fighting tears, didn’t respond.

“You’re a great mom.”

“You’re not so bad yourself,” she said. “Want to grab a cup of coffee?”

“Sorry, Joyce, I’m already late for a meeting that I can’t miss.” He kissed her on
the cheek. “See you later?”

“Are you going to come up to Gloucester?”

“Looks good. I’ll call this afternoon.”

Joyce watched Frank drive off. She sat in her car and promised herself that she would
write every single day that Nina was gone. She would walk the beach with Kathleen
every day. She would start Nina’s room this afternoon. And she wouldn’t wait for Frank
to make the first move. She’d ask him what was going on. She’d do it tonight.

Or maybe she wouldn’t have to. Maybe he would show up at the house with flowers and
they would make love every night for a week. Maybe things would be fine.

FRANK DIDN’T COME
up that night. He called at four to say he’d just been informed of an evening teleconference
with a new set of potential buyers. He called at eight-thirty the next morning to
check in. “I should make up it there tonight.” But at four, when Joyce was at the
supermarket, he left a sheepish message about a programming bug that might take all
night to correct. In the morning he said he probably couldn’t come up that evening
since they had a 7
A.M.
meeting the following day and that it was possible he’d be stuck working through
the weekend.

Joyce let that bit of news hang on the line between them.

“Joyce? I’m really sorry, but it’s crunch time here.”

“I know,” she snapped. “What about Sunday? Can’t you at least take off Sunday afternoon?”

“I’ll try. I’m sorry. Is it nice being up there?”

“It’s beautiful,” she said icily.

“Are you getting work done?”

“Yes.”

“You seeing Kathleen?”

“Yes.” Joyce wasn’t going to let him off the hook by making her life sound pleasant.

“I’ll call tomorrow.”

“Fine.” Joyce slammed the phone down. Son of a bitch, who needs him anyway? She was
enjoying the physical labor of painting. She was sleeping ten hours a night. And her
time at the beach with Kathleen was wonderful.

They seemed to have an endless supply of things to talk about. Headlines, bathing
suits, books, and story by story, themselves. As soon as she caught sight of Kathleen
at Good Harbor, Joyce became aware of the clenched tightness in her jaw and noticed
how it eased as they walked together.

“I think I’m relieved Nina is gone,” Joyce said as they started across the beach.
“In fact, I’m so relieved that I don’t even feel guilty.”

“It’s probably good for you to have a break from each other.”

When two women stopped Kathleen to ask about how her treatment was going, Joyce stared
out at the horizon. By the time they reached the end of the beach, she marveled at
the change in her mood. “I can’t believe how much better I feel already. Why is that?”

“I think it’s the emptiness,” Kathleen said, rolling up her trousers. “Or that straight
line between the sea and the sky. Or the size of it all. I don’t know, but it does
put things in perspective.”

As the week progressed, Joyce and Kathleen permitted longer silences into their conversations,
confident that the lulls would end in new territory. Like troughs between waves, Joyce
thought.

After a few minutes of quiet, Joyce said, “You’ve told me a lot about your sister,
but I don’t know anything about the rest of your family — your father, your mother
. . .”

“My poor mother,” Kathleen said, shaking her head. “Pat, my mother, and I lived with
my gran, my father’s mother, after he walked out on us. My grandmother decided it
was my mother’s fault that he was a drunk, which was terribly unfair, but there was
no challenging Gran.

“My mom worked for an insurance agency to support us all. Gran stayed home with Pat
and me, and she was good to us — as good as she knew how to be. But she made my mother’s
life miserable. My mother bore it in silence, as far as I know, and I suspect she
did blame herself for my father’s desertion. I was fifteen when we heard he died.

“My mom and my gran died within a year of each other. Strokes, both of them. Neither
one lived to see my boys.”

“I’m sorry,” said Joyce.

“Yes. And what about your mother, is she still alive?”

“My mother is alive and well on a golf course outside of Prescott.”

“Where is that?”

“Arizona. She and my dad got divorced when I was a freshman in college, and she remarried
a couple of years later. Bob, the second husband, had four kids, and she raised the
two younger ones. Her life revolves around his children and golf. And since I hate
golf, our conversations are pretty brief.”

“I’m sorry,” Kathleen said.

“Yeah, me, too. But it’s been like that for twenty-two years, so I don’t expect anything
else. Boy, was I ever determined to be totally different from her. To have a house
full of kids, instead of an only child like I was. And to never ever let that kind
of distance come between Nina and me. Of course, I’m learning how little control you
actually have over what happens between you and your kids.”

Kathleen nodded and linked her arm through Joyce’s. “Hang on. Nina still has a lot
of growing up to do, and you are not doomed to repeat your mother’s mistakes.”

“The universal fear of women everywhere,” Joyce said. “I suppose Nina has already
joined that club.”

Kathleen squeezed Joyce’s arm closer. As they approached Salt Island, Kathleen asked,
“When do you want to go on our little adventure?”

“Whenever you say, fearless leader.”

“I’ll check the tide and let you know.”

KATHLEEN CALLED ON
Sunday morning and asked if Joyce was ready to climb Salt Island. “I could pick you
up at five, and we’ll get to see a sunset over the water.”

“Nice of you to arrange that,” Joyce said.

By the time they arrived at Good Harbor, a cool breeze was chasing the last of the
stragglers off the beach, which meant that Joyce and Kathleen had the sandbar virtually
to themselves. On sunny weekend afternoons, it could be as crowded as a city sidewalk.
Everybody went for the walk, tourists and locals alike; most just strolled out and
headed straight back; a few lingered to peer into the tide pools, but only a handful
climbed up to the top.

The deserted sandbar was flat, hard-packed, and cool under their feet. “It’s like
a magic highway,” Kathleen said. “It appears and disappears. Brigadoon.”

“Mont-Saint-Michel — minus the castle,” said Joyce. “And it’s pretty close to walking
on water.”

“Or parting the seas.”

“With a hint of danger, don’t you think? The outside chance of getting stranded, like
Robinson Crusoe.”

“Well, within sight of a snack bar,” Kathleen said, pointing at the weather-beaten
shack onshore.