Isabella Moon (11 page)

Much later, thinking about that day, it wasn’t the lunch that she remembered so clearly, but the early part of the day and the end of the race. Miles had come in second, not first, as he’d told her he would.

Only a few seconds behind the winner, he hadn’t seemed so much exhausted when he crossed the line as he did irritated. Mary-Katie didn’t think second was a bad finish. She even found herself a little relieved that he hadn’t won. If he had, he would’ve been the center of attention and she would’ve felt too awkward about approaching him. Still, she hung back until the early finishers had toweled themselves off before she broke off from the crowd to stand a few feet behind Miles, waiting to congratulate him.

Miles and the winner were standing close to each other when the winner suddenly turned to Miles and slapped him on the back.

“I thought you had me there, man,” he said. “That last quarter was rough.”

He offered his hand to Miles, who seemed taken aback. Just when his hesitation might have appeared rude, Miles grabbed the winner’s hand and shook it heartily.

“Next time,” he said, smiling. “What’s your name?”

“Lev,” the winner said. “My name’s Lev Kaplan. But, you know, I’m just out here for the practice. These half-marathons are just to keep me sharp for the real thing, you know?”

Miles dropped the man’s hand and turned away abruptly, leaving him standing there open-mouthed.

As he started past her, looking down, Mary-Katie said Miles’s name quickly.

On seeing her, his smile returned.

“You’re still here,” he said.

“I told you I would be,” she said. She was a little embarrassed for him, knowing that he had been certain he would win.

“Did you see the finish?” he said.

There was something about the way he asked that told her he hadn’t really wanted her to see.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I had to run back to my car for just a minute and I didn’t hear them announce that you all were coming in.” She didn’t like to lie, but there were times when it had to be done.

When she saw the relief on his face, she knew she’d said the right thing.

“That guy came out of nowhere. Didn’t even look winded,” he said. “Some of these people cheat and don’t think anything of it.”

After lunch, Miles wouldn’t let her go home in her own car.

“What would your grandmother say, you coming home from our first date tipsy?” he said. “And you shouldn’t be driving. You might hurt yourself.”

Mary-Katie thought she was fine to drive, but she didn’t argue. When he’d paid the bill, he guided her out of the restaurant, his hand resting proprietarily at the small of her back.

Somehow she’d known that his car would be black. She sank into the fragrant leather interior of the BMW and put her head back against the headrest. As the engine purred to life, music came through the speakers—bright, lively music, all violins.

“Do you like Vivaldi?” he asked. “I’ve got several other choices in the changer. Some Dvorak, I think some Chopin as well.”

“This is fine,” she said, closing her eyes. She didn’t know Vivaldi from spaghetti, but she didn’t want him to know how ignorant she was. It wasn’t until after they were married that she discovered that the manager of a small music store down in Savannah selected his music for him and sent CDs to him in the mail every month or so.

They drove out to the beach at the state park and got out of the car. The misty rain from the morning had long disappeared, and the wind coming off the Atlantic was brisk enough that she accepted the offer of Miles’s navy sport coat gratefully.

The beach was deserted. It was too windy and late in the day for fishermen, much too cool for sunbathing. As they walked, Mary-Katie felt the effects of the wine ebb with the receding waves. She marveled at the fact that Miles had known just what she’d needed.

Miles didn’t touch her as they walked. They spoke little, as though they were old friends who didn’t need casual conversation. When they reached the rotted husk of a boat half buried in the sand since a hurricane had put it there in the 1960s, they took shelter from the wind for a few minutes beside it. Mary-Katie laughed as she tried to run her fingers through her tangled hair, but Miles took her hand gently.

“Leave it,” he said. “It looks beautiful.”

He was looking into her eyes and she thought that he might kiss her then. She wanted him to kiss her. But the moment passed. Miles stood and she followed, a little puzzled, a little embarrassed, back to the car.

“I’ll take you home,” he said. “We’ll go back tomorrow for your car.”

That was how it was decided: She would see him the next day and the next and the next.

When they pulled up in front of the house she shared with her grandmother, she asked him to come in.

“Not today,” he said. “Soon. It’s important that I meet her. But not today.”

“Okay,” Mary-Katie said. She was disappointed. She wanted her grandmother to meet this strange, interesting man. She thought that maybe her grandmother could tell her what she was feeling. Right now, she knew only that she was drawn to him, but she wasn’t sure why. It was sexual, certainly. But there was something else, something that was at once comforting and darkly thrilling.

Miles kissed her tenderly on the cheek before she got out of the car.

“I’ll call you in the morning,” he said.

As he drove away, she stood at the door and waved. She knew that he would call. She knew that she would be waiting by the telephone.

9

WHEN THE PORTABLE PHONE RANG
in her gardening apron pocket, Lillian pulled it out immediately, certain it was Francie answering her page.

“What is it, Mama?” Francie sounded annoyed. Lillian knew she disliked being called at work. “Is something wrong?”

In the background Lillian could hear the other nurses laughing and talking. By now all the patients had had their dinner and first evening round of medications, so the nurses could hang around the station and update their charts until the shift change. She hadn’t wanted to call Francie early in the day because she knew she’d be asleep. Except for church, Lillian had been alone at the house all weekend, a mistake, she knew, after Friday night’s adventures. She told herself that she should have known better. It wasn’t that she was afraid—no, maybe
disturbed
was a better word. The notion that there were bodies buried in the cemetery not far from her house had never bothered her. But it did bother her, deeply, that the little girl might be there.

“You’d be the first person I’d tell, honey, if there were something wrong, and there’s just not,” Lillian said. “I was thinking that you should come by here for a late supper. I made a quiche and you know how the crust goes all soggy if you don’t eat it the first day.”

Francie sighed. “At nine I’m going to go home and get a shower, then I’m going straight to bed,” she said. “I’m whipped. Plus, I’m pulling a double tomorrow because Sarah’s starting her maternity leave.”

As Francie spoke, Lillian stood on tiptoe to hang a set of pottery wind chimes that she’d taken down for the winter. Francie had made the chimes in Girl Scouts, and their sound was nothing special, but Francie had etched each of their names on the three chimes: Francine, Lillian, Albert.

“You sound tired,” she said. “Should you be taking on extra hours? You would tell me if you needed the money?”

“Mama, we’re just short-staffed,” she said.

“Did you pick up the dry cleaning we dropped off on Friday?” Lillian asked. “It’s not right to make those folks wait for their money.”

Lillian could tell that Francie was getting impatient. Even when Francie was silent, Lillian could read her daughter loud and clear.

“I’m going to go now,” Francie said. “I’ll come by on Wednesday, okay? I’ve got to go check on a patient. Goodbye, Mama.”

Lillian waited for the disconnecting click, but there was none. She could still hear the nurses in the background.

“I love you,” Francie said. “I really will be there Wednesday. Okay?”

“You have a good rest tonight, baby,” Lillian said. “I’ll see you.”

Lillian slipped the telephone back into her apron pocket, a little sorry that she’d even brought it outside. Her Francie hadn’t been herself for a while now. She’d always been independent, but now her behavior was just plain manic.

When she was at the house, she was all nervous, worried about every little thing. Did Lillian have enough groceries? Were all her bills current? Was the yard work too much for her? Treating her like she was eighty years old, for goodness sake. Then, on the phone, she was distant, as she was tonight. She had no time for anyone, especially her mother. Lillian knew the symptoms well: Francie was involved with a man, a man she had no business being with.
If she had seen him, just days earlier, hurrying from a local widow’s house at seven in the morning, carrying his necktie, what could she say?
She would have done what she could about it, but her daughter was a grown woman. She would just have to wait it out and be there to help Francie put herself back together when things got bad.

In the trees, the few birds that had come back for the early spring were settling noisily for the evening. Out of the corner of her eye she saw her favorite late feeders, a ruby-colored cardinal and his dowdy mate. She watched as the male swept down from a chestnut tree at the edge of the woods to perch on the feeder. As he ate his fill, he looked about every so often to check for competitors. Finally, the female began her approach, one branch, one bush at a time, until she reached the ground just beneath the feeder. She pecked at the empty sunflower hulls scattered there while she waited for the male to finish. When he was safely away, she flew to the perch and ate a bite or two before darting back to the chestnut where the male waited. Lillian wondered how she sustained herself, eating so little.

Lillian had spent so much of her own life waiting, some of it in this house, some of it long before Francie was born, in rough apartments around the South, Georgia, Virginia, North Carolina, waiting for Albert to get home from whatever work he’d found, waiting to get on to teach at a school wherever they were. She was a good teacher, and even though school segregation was still struggling to hold on in many of the places they had lived, she never had a problem finding a job. But she had always wanted to come back home. And she’d had to wait a long time for that.

She carried her gardening trug, filled with weeding tools and trimmers, around to the back of the house. The light had faded considerably since she’d come out, but there was enough that she could see to pull a few brown, wintered-over weeds from the annual bed in the center of the backyard. For years Albert had teased her about being a midnight gardener, never satisfied with the daylight the Lord gave her.

She stepped carefully around the wheelbarrow and pitchfork that the Evans boy had left out when he went home to supper. Time was when she would’ve mulched the perennial beds herself, even helping the man from the garden center fork it off the trailer under Francie’s disapproving gaze. But the arthritis in her hands and wrists had put a stop to that.

The annual bed was rich with humus and manure she’d tilled in over the years, and, even though it was far too early for putting out the geraniums, heliotrope, and petunias that would give the bed its magnificent color, she liked to get a start on the weeds, the young dandelions and chickweed that had snuck in before they began to multiply. Reaching far into the center, she paid special attention to the space around the stubs of the bed’s single bush, a white hydrangea that, in the summer, dressed itself in a hundred puffballs made up of tiny, heart-shaped bracts that fell like snowflakes at the slightest touch.

Lillian and Albert had been careful for so many years, not wanting to have a baby when they were living like gypsies, staying in one place for no more than a year at a time. Now they were finally in their own house, built with the money left by her father, a man who never thought Albert good enough for his Lillian: too poor, too stupid, and, worse, with a mother who was white. But now that her father was dead, they were back in Carystown, where Lillian had wanted to be all her life.

It was deep summer and the peepers called from the woods. There were not yet houses on either side of them, and the only light to see by came from their kitchen window. Still, the yard was filled with the sparks of too many fireflies to count, and the night was clear, so that the stars shone with startling brilliance above them.

After dinner they sat eating their pie on the wedding-ring quilt she’d spread in the center of the yard that afternoon. Another quilt, also made by her mother for her hope chest, lay at their feet. When they finished eating, Lillian put their plates aside and they lay on their backs looking at the sky.

“So, it’s time,” Albert said, reaching for her hand.

She hadn’t known it would happen, but she began to cry.

Albert laughed softly. “Here, baby,” he crooned. He took her into his arms and kissed her tears and made love to her.