How it Ends (28 page)

He shot me an amused look. “I’m going to need to get a snowplow for the pickup, too. There’s no way I’m going to shovel this driveway. I’ll have a heart attack before I even get past the pines.”

“Okay,” I said, spellbound at the sight of a doe poised at the tree line down near the pond. She lifted her head and sniffed the air, then sauntered across the grass and started grazing. Another joined it, and a moment later, two more.
Oh yes, oh yes.
“Okay to all of it. To anything.”

“Including the French maid?” he said, laughing when I smacked him in the arm.

“Do you see that?” I said, nodding in the does’ direction. “It’s an omen. It is. This is our home. It’s true. I can
feel
it.”

He watched the deer for a moment, tawny and graceful in the late afternoon sunlight and said quietly, “Me, too.” His hand closed around mine. “I think we could be really happy here.”

“Oh, yes,” I whispered.

Peter started singing again, not only when he left for work now, day shifts because he had some seniority under his belt, but when he came home. The door would open and he would great me with “Lovely Rita” and lift me in a hug and kiss me while I laughed and dangled and hugged him back, near tears because it felt so
good
to be happy again.

He tilled me two gardens, one for flowers and one for vegetables, as I’d learned something listening to the hippie chicks and that was about eating organic, and I wanted to try it. Peter didn’t—he said he wasn’t giving up chili dogs for anybody—and that was fine because it meant I could plant what I wanted and reap whatever I sowed.

Peter wanted to live off the land, too, but thankfully, while he did buy a shotgun and ammunition, that vision shifted to a less lethal one the first time a young buck at the salt lick, antlers fuzzy with velvet, lifted his head and stared back as we watched from the porch, breathless with admiration.

“Dr. Boehm thought killing and gutting them, then stuffing and posing them was bringing the natural world to life,” I murmured, not wanting to frighten the buck away.

“Boehm was an asshole,” Peter said, and went and bought a roll of
PRIVATE PROPERTY NO HUNTING ALLOWED
signs, which he stapled to
trees throughout the woods, just in case the ones at the property line were disregarded.

From then on, although it was never defined to outsiders as such, our home became a sanctuary to any and all wildlife that chose to live there, and the shotgun, stored in its case in the closet, has yet to be used to kill anything.

The place came with barn cats, three wily young males who took months to get close, and only then because I’d been feeding them through that first hard winter. I convinced Peter to take them in to be neutered, having read that fixed cats live longer, happier lives and were less likely to roam or get into fights.

And besides, by the time he did, we had two
more
cats, pregnant females who delivered a total of five sweet little kittens, and who also had to be caught and spayed once the kittens were weaned.

I’d never had a cat before, but we brought the females and their brood into the house to stay, as I couldn’t bear the thought of those playful little fluff balls falling prey to the owls or hawks or even the occasional car speeding along the winding country road.

One kitten, a cranky-looking little tiger named Wren, with a tail that stuck straight up in the air and a perpetual scowl as if we existed only to thwart him, climbed up the couch and wobbled onto my lap one afternoon. He looked in my face and began kneading my leg, tiny needle claws making a pincushion out of my thigh, but the expression on his unhappy little face grew so sloe-eyed and dreamy that I sat, enchanted, as his kitten purr rumbled out and his kneading intensified until, finally, overcome by his own contentment, he collapsed, asleep.

Thanks to Wren, I fell head over heels in love with cats.

Money was tight that winter, and after being late twice on the electric bill, I decided to stop waitressing and apply for an office job
instead. The benefits and pay were better, and it would be a relief to sit all day, so I went to a mortgage company in town and for the first time ever was asked to fill out an application. I read through the questions, heart pounding, and with a casual confidence I didn’t feel, checked
Yes
next to
Did you graduate high school?
and when asked where and what year, wrote in the name of the high school back in the town I’d lived in before my mother had died, and the year I would have graduated had I been allowed to keep going.

I hoped, because it was out of state and so far away, no one would bother to check.

That night, when telling Peter about it, I discovered he’d
always
said
Yes
to that question, too, adjusting the date he’d arrived here to accommodate a high school graduation in Holland so as not to automatically be disqualified from his career.

“But we’re lying,” I said.

“Louise, do you think you’re a stupid woman?” he countered, leaning back in his chair and running a hand over his hair.

“What?” I said.

“Do you think you’re stupid?” he said.

“No,” I said, frowning.

“No,” he said as if in agreement. “You read everything you can get your hands on. You have an extensive history in customer service. You’re used to making decisions on your own. You’re a whiz at managing our finances, what little there is of them.” He grinned at my look. “You’re an independent worker who doesn’t need a supervisor hanging over her shoulder all day just to make you perform. You speak well, you reason even better, and you’d be an asset to any company smart enough to hire you.” His smile faded. “Now, you can go in there, offer them all of that and make them gladder than hell that they hired you,
or
you can check
No
and tell them you didn’t graduate high school and watch how fast the door closes and you’re out of there.”

“Do you really think that’s what would happen?” I said.

“You have an interview tomorrow, right? Well, if you want to test the theory, go in and change your
Yes
to a
No
and see what happens.” He snorted. “Standards are set by people who have decided that you can’t possibly be considered smart unless some fat cat sitting behind a desk at some institution somewhere decides you are, and rubberstamps you to make it official.” His voice grew bitter. “You know, Hitler’s Youth was considered the best and the brightest once, too, and look at where all that lockstep conformity got them.”

“All right,” I said with a sigh. “I get the point.”

So I left it as a
Yes
and got the position. The money was good but
I
was better, as I was determined never to make them sorry they’d hired me. I did so well processing mortgage applications that I was promoted to assistant supervisor of the department, and then supervisor. I attended training sessions and seminars and soon had framed certificates marching in rows across my walls.

I was proud of them but in a distant, impersonal way. They meant a lot to the fictional Louise who had
chosen
not to have children, whose parents had absolutely been married, and who had definitely graduated high school, not to the real me whose journey had started the morning she found her mother dead.

With no children growing up and reminding us that we were getting older, time seemed inexhaustible, gliding by in whole seasons rather than days or weeks.

Fall into winter was the hardest for me, as the brutal snow, ice, and wind scoured the acres, driving some animals into hibernation and others into a desperate, daily search for food. I did research at the library, made lists of the types of plants the land would support and what the animals on it needed to help them survive, and in spring
planted white oak and crab apple trees, easter red cedars, dogwoods, sumacs, hemlocks, and honey locusts.

More cats came, sad, scrawny, cringing souls dumped by people who told themselves that cats could survive in the wild without a problem because
Look, they have claws!
or lied to their children with
They’ll find a good home on the farm
when instead, lost and terrified, they were often hit by cars, attacked by animals, or died of starvation because they were
domesticated cats,
not cougars, and simply didn’t know what to do.

Peter called me a bleeding heart for feeding them, but what was the alternative, turning my back on their hunger and desperation just because I didn’t
want
to see it? Ignoring it because their life-or-death struggle inconvenienced me?

Impossible.

If I hadn’t learned anything else from Margaret Boehm, I’d learned that.

So even though Peter sighed and muttered about going to the poorhouse, I noticed he always scraped his plate into the scrap bowl or stopped to pet whoever was brave enough to wind around his ankles on his way out to the barn.

I loved him even more for his good heart.

We got three chicks for an ongoing supply of fresh eggs, and they grew into two hens and a rooster, who became Cindy, Lucy, and the rooster Brunhilda.

Peter laughed when I named the rooster, and for a while, every time he would pass the proud, muscular Rhode Island Red scratching in the yard, he would sing in a warbling, Elmer Fuddian–type opera voice, “Oh, Bwunhiwda, you so wuvwy…”

The rooster would pause, giving him a beady look, and I would call, “You’re asking for it,” but he would just laugh and keep going.

All that ended one fall afternoon when Peter was kneeling at the
edge of the garden, sitting back on his heels and hunched over, deeply involved in planting a second crop of lettuce seedlings. His jeans, always hanging low on his hips, hung even lower in the back. His T-shirt had ridden up, too, exposing—at least from
one
bird’s-eye view—a dark, alluring crevice that might have contained any number of fat, tasty grubs or scurrying beetles and must have seemed maddeningly irresistible in the ongoing quest for dinner.

I was washing the dishes, thinking that Peter really
did
need a new belt for Christmas and absently watching Brunhilda stalking around behind him. When I finally realized what was happening, it was too late; the big bird zeroed in, cocked his head and, eyeballing that intriguing new crack in the landscape, rammed his beak into the promising darkness.

It was electrifying.

By the time I’d wiped the streaming tears from my eyes and staggered out onto the porch, Brunhilda had found safety behind his girlfriends and was muttering at being so cruelly misled, and Peter was muttering back, twisting around, groping himself, and trying to make out the damage.

“Did you see what that crazy bird did?” he said, looking both bewildered and outraged. “What the hell kind of rooster pecks a guy in the ass?”

“He was provoked,” I said, and then buried my face in my hands and howled.

One summer, the last truly pure and happy one, on Peter’s birthday I was upstairs getting dressed to go to work, standing at the back window in my slip, wishing for a cool breeze and debating whether to put on the dreaded panty hose when I spotted Peter standing out at the edge of the lawn looking at the pond.

He wasn’t doing anything in particular, just standing there gazing at the water, a man whose thick, black hair was now gray at the temples, whose beautiful, summer-tawny skin was looser, and whose muscular arms were growing slack, a man whose accent still stumped me at times and who still sang occasionally but no longer the newest songs, preferring to stick with old favorites like “Let It Be.” A man who once said,
I’ve crossed the state line, Louise. I can either leave you somewhere or you can marry me. Whatever you choose,
and who had then gone on to make me happier than I ever thought possible.

I don’t know where it came from, the rush of love that rose and enveloped me, the sudden desire to be that girl again and him that young man who had kissed and danced by the river, those two who had taken such pleasure in learning each other inch by inch….

I looked at the clock, then at Peter, who had turned away from the water and was walking slowly back across the lawn toward the house. Dropped the panty hose, ran down the stairs and out onto the back porch, scattering stray cats and causing him to look up in alarm.

“What?” he called, walking faster.

“Nothing, stay there,” I said, half laughing, near tears as I padded down the steps and ran across the grass to meet him. “I just love you, that’s all, and I wanted to say thank you for loving me back.”

He tilted his head and gazed at me, eyes twinkling and his mouth curving into a wonderful, bemused smile. “You know you’re out here in your underwear.”

“Am I?” I said, leaning forward and kissing the spot beneath his ear.

“People will talk,” he said, shivering.

“If they can see us, they’re trespassing,” I murmured, kissing it again and sliding my arms around his waist. “Let them tell it to the judge.”

“What’re you doing?” he said huskily, as I backed him toward a particularly thick patch of clover and sank to my knees.

“Everything I can think of,” I said, tugging him down beside me.

“Watch out for bees,” he said, and then with a small, wicked smile, “Maybe you’d better not sit in the grass, Louise. Maybe…”

“Maybe I’d better stay right up here,” I whispered, hiking up my slip, and then his eyes got smoky and his hands slid up beneath the lacy silk, and mine fumbled with his button and zipper, and I knelt over him, kissing and taking him, and the sun burned my back and the clover stained my knees and he did get stung once on the thigh, and several of the cats crept closer and watched worriedly from the underbrush, and I laughed and touched the gray at his temples and the lines of his dear, sweet face and whispered,
Oh, yes,
because what I’d hoped to discover was true:

In our hearts we were still who we’d started as.

“I can’t take this story,” I said, turning off the CD player. “First it’s a tragedy, then a horror story, then a romance, and now it’s what, a back-to-the-land thing? It’s a roller coaster, Gran, and no matter where I think it’s going, it never goes there.” I rose and, shaking my head, walked into the kitchen singing, “Oh, Bwunhiwda, you so wuvwy….”