The Goodbye Summer (34 page)

“Yes.”

“So your grandmother raised you, and you still live in Michaelstown? What do you do besides teach music? Come in the kitchen, I want to hear about
you.
”

“Did you say you have a tape?”

“I forgot, it’s in the other room. I used to listen to it every once in a while, but it’s been a long time. Just a sec.”

She came back with a cassette and a dusty boom box, which she plugged, grunting, into a crowded outlet behind the night table. Caddie watched her, bent over and graceless, her rear end stretching the fabric of her green pants, and she thought,
I love you already. I really do.

“Okay, you listen, and then take as long as you want in here. Come on in when you’re ready, we’ll probably still be eating pie. That one, the young one, my Lord, he looks like a starving crow.” She swooped down for another fierce hug, and then she was gone.

There were two songs on the demo. Caddie put the tape in the player, then sat still with her finger on the play button, not thinking about anything, just listening to the quiet of her own breathing. Drawing out the moment. She admired the shape of her hand, how long and thin the fingers were, just the right sort of hand for playing a violin. She couldn’t remember her mother’s hands very well. Maybe she had her father’s. As soon as she pressed play, she would hear their voices. His for the first time in her life. What a day.

She pressed the button.

Electric guitars ripped out a fast, twangy, upbeat intro to the verse—her mother singing about wishing she was home, she’d had enough of the bright city lights.
Ha,
thought Caddie with real amusement, no cynicism, waiting for the chorus. Here it came—but it was the whole band, and she’d been wanting her father’s voice by itself. Verse again.
Oh, Mommy,
she thought. She hadn’t heard Jane’s voice in a long time; it was softer and
higher than she remembered. And pretty, but not hard or bluesy, not really a rock-and-roll voice at all. Had she wanted to be Linda Ronstadt or someone like that? Her soprano was too breathy and feminine even for this driving song about being on the road too long, missing her sweet someone.

Serves you right,
Caddie caught herself thinking, and in the next instant,
Poor Mommy.
She felt both sentiments about equally. She must still be angry—odd, she hadn’t known that about herself.

The second song was a love song. Jane’s voice was just right for this—yes, because,
oh God,
here came Bobby’s voice, winding the harmony around it. Caddie went blind, lost every sense but one. If she could have, she’d have climbed inside the tape machine. But in spite of her intense concentration, when the song ended she couldn’t remember it. She ran the tape back and played it again. This time her head was clearer, the path between her ears and her brain not as cluttered. She could hear. Well, it wasn’t really a love song. Against the sweetness of the melody, the subversive lyrics made her laugh.

She wanted more of his voice; she wished she could turn everything else off, like reverse karaoke. She played the song again with her eyes closed.

He was a tenor. Warm but not trained, a little gruff around the edges. He sounded like a grown man, but he looked like a boy to her in his photos. Well, no wonder: she was older now than he’d been when he died. Sweet hippie boy. In the picture of Red Sky, shot in front of a rusty old barn, he wore faded, low-slung jeans and a collarless Mexican shirt, a belt with a turquoise buckle, saggy suede boots, and a black hat studded with silver stars. It made her laugh, but she pressed it to her heart.

Her mother wore jeans, too—everybody in this picture wore jeans—and a cardinal-red poncho down to her knees. No shoes, and feathers in her hair. She and Bobby stood together, close but not touching, with the other band members behind or off to the side. Think if they had stayed together—and lived, saved each other somehow. Think if they’d never stopped being in love.

Would Dinah lend her this tape? She couldn’t get enough of it. She wanted to play it until it was a part of her, till the music entered her bloodstream and beat in her arteries and veins. How else could she get her parents back? She listened to them sing together over and over, and dreamed.

When she went back in the kitchen, Dinah was setting the dinette table for six. Magill and Cornel were still at the counter. They turned when they heard her and looked at her with interest, the way you look at someone who’s come back from a long journey or an illness. To see how they’ve changed. A burly, thick-necked bald man,
completely
bald, who was sitting between them, also turned around and lumbered off the stool to his feet.

“Caddie, this is Earl,” Dinah said with a wide smile, holding a stack of plates to her stomach.

“Caddie.” He put his enormous hands on her shoulders and gave her a gentle, ardent shake. “Welcome to the family.”

“Thank you.”

He had a long, olive-skinned, bullet-shaped head and a pug nose, thick lips, and crinkly, penetrating blue eyes. His belly sloped over the top of his pants, but the rest of him was built like a furniture mover. “I knew Bobby since he was born,” he said, keeping hold of her shoulders, “same as I knew Dinah. He was like my little brother, too, almost. I wish I’d known he had a kid when he died. He was so young, and it just broke everybody’s heart.” Suddenly his eyes welled with tears that spilled over and ran down his smooth cheeks. He finished in a high voice, “If we’d’ve known about you, I just believe it would’ve made it a little bit easier.”

“Earl, now, don’t go getting everybody all blubbery. You should hear him say grace when the whole family’s over. We tell him he ought to’ve been a preacher.” She made a face at Earl, as if to warn him not to embarrass Caddie.

He paid no attention. He grabbed her again and hugged her against his flannel shirt, which smelled of chemicals or mothballs, and she didn’t mind at all.

They were staying for dinner, Dinah announced, there was no point in arguing. Could everybody eat pork chops? Caddie mashed the potatoes and wondered why the odor of frying meat didn’t send her running for the bathroom—maybe pregnancy was a state of mind—while she filled Dinah and Earl in on her unadventurous life, where she lived, how she’d grown up, what she was doing these days. “My, my,” and “Mmm, mmm,” they said after every revelation, as if they were proud of her. As if she belonged to them already.

Have I found it?
she thought. The family she’d always wanted, with La-Z-Boy recliners in the den and a quiz show on television, and a “Home Sweet Home” sampler in the kitchen shaped like a rooster? A family the neighbors could rely on, who went to church but didn’t make a big deal of it, who had normal troubles and ate in the kitchen and went to the movies and the library and high school football games? Had she found them?

“Earl, what do you do for a living?” she felt comfortable enough to ask over dinner, a feast of juicy pork, mashed potatoes and gravy, corn, fresh kale, a Jell-O salad with pineapple chunks and Redi-Whip. Dinah sat beside Mother Haywood, cutting her meal into tiny bites, and the old lady picked at it in contented silence.

“Well, now.” Earl stopped eating and put his elbows on the table, knife in one hand, fork in the other. The question pleased him, she could tell. “I’m in business for myself these days. I used to work for the chicken plant and do some taxidermy on the side, but now I’m pretty busy full-time with my own little company.”

“Not so little anymore,” Dinah put in.

“What do you do?”

“Well, I freeze-dry people’s pets.”

Caddie stalled, a forkful of potatoes halfway to her mouth. “Really.” If she were at home, she’d have put her head down on the table. So much for her dream.

She made the mistake of looking at Magill, whose eyes were dancing. He’d read her mind. She felt a rush of tenderness wash over her like a wave, so strong it made her dizzy. She liked it that he was laughing at her. God help her, she liked it that his job was making feet.

Cornel was thrilled, he wanted to know everything about freeze-drying pets. Was there a special machine? Did the animals still have their innards? How much money could a fellow make in that line of work? He peppered Earl with a million questions, all except the one Caddie wanted to ask, which was, Why would anyone want to freeze-dry their pet?

“The thing most people don’t get,” Earl wanted them to know, “is how much of an art there is to it. Sure, your customer sends pictures and writes a letter about how their cat used to sit, how she cocked her head or what-not, but posing an animal you never knew in life is not something just anybody can do. You’ve got to have a
feel
for it. Now, most taxidermists won’t touch a pet, it’s too personal. A hawk, marlin, deer head, turkey head, no problem, but Fluffy the cat? They can’t take it.”

A turkey head?

“Now here, I just finished up a golden retriever, the prettiest dog you ever saw, and I did a darn good job.”

“Oh, is she out?” Dinah asked. “Does she look good?”

“Come down and see.” He looked around at all of them. “I mean if you want,” he added, suddenly delicate. “Some people don’t, and that’s fine. But now these folks’ll get Honey back, see, and they’ll set her by the front door, and every time they go by they’ll pat her on the head and say, ‘Hey, Honey girl,’ and they’ll feel good.”

“Can they just keep on patting her on the head,” Cornel asked, “or eventually does her hair start to fall out?”

“Nope, nope, just give her a fluff and a little spritz of cedar residue to keep her shiny, she’s good to go for eternity. Or as near as any of
us
’ll ever get to it.” He winked.

Dinah shook her head with fond tolerance, as if that were a line and a wink she’d heard and seen a million times, but the guy they were coming from was still a winner in her book, a sweetheart, so she wouldn’t complain.

Across from Caddie, Magill had his elbows on the table and his chin in his hands, gazing at her steadily, looking drowsy but fascinated. He had the longest eyelashes she’d ever seen on a man. More like a little boy’s eyelashes. She felt so tired, so wonderfully tired. It looked to her as if all her people were tired and all the Krausses were wide awake.

But she roused herself to help Dinah do the dishes, and Magill and Cornel found the energy to go down and take a look at Earl’s workshop with him, check out Honey, as well as a freshly freeze-dried bird, a cock-atiel named Floyd.

“I hate to go, but we have to,” Caddie said when the men returned.

“I wish you’d stay
here,
” Dinah protested, “there’s room if Cornel and Magill don’t mind sharing.”

No, Caddie explained, they’d left Finney back at the cottage, he’d been cooped up for—she looked at her watch—four and a half hours, and that was about his limit.

She kissed her new grandmother goodbye. The old lady was back in her recliner. She reached up and patted Caddie’s cheek, smiling familiarly. “Bye,” Caddie said, and Mother pressed her lips together twice, as if she might be saying
bye-bye.
“I’ll come back,” Caddie promised, and Mother nodded as if she knew that.

Outside in the yard, Dinah put her strong arm around Caddie’s waist. “I feel like I’ve got another child.”

The men were already by the car; Earl was explaining how the freeze-drying process preserved the animal’s size and shape but eliminated eighty percent of its body weight.

“I’m pregnant.” She’d wanted to tell Dinah that, Caddie realized, almost from the moment they’d met.

“You are? Well,
child.
Is it his?”

“Whose?
No.
” Dinah was looking at Magill. “No, somebody else, and he’s not in the picture now.”

“Well,” Dinah said, shaking her head in sympathy. “Well, bless your heart. Anything I can do, you let me know, hear?”

“I’m all right—I just wanted to tell you.” She put her arms around her aunt’s solid body and held on.

Earl held the car door for her. She rolled down her window as soon as she was in. “Thank you. For everything. It’s been…” She couldn’t think of a big enough word.

“Come back soon,” Dinah said, shiny-eyed, holding on to Earl’s arm. “Now that you know where we are.”

“I’ll call you,” Caddie said.

“We can e-mail,” Dinah realized. “I
love
e-mail.”

They kissed. Caddie backed out of the driveway, waving, savoring the smell of cinnamon.

Finney found the perfect tuft of grass and peed on it long and blissfully in the field behind Goose Creek Guest Cottages.

Magill, on the other end of the leash, said, “Good work,” in a proud voice, man-to-man. Ignoring him, Finney pulled him over to a different tuft and went again.

The moon was full but hiding in a crowd of fast, serious-looking clouds, and the wind felt cool and damp, as if rain were on the way. If this was Goose Creek, this smallish body of water the moon picked out at coy, irregular intervals, it was really more of a pond because the murky silver water didn’t appear to be flowing anywhere. Finney wanted to explore it more fully by jumping in, but Magill held steady on the leash and dissuaded him.

“I like it better where we live.” Caddie’s voice silenced a cricket somewhere nearby in the meadowy underbrush. What was it doing here so late in the year? “It’s beautiful, but I like hills and mountains.”

Magill nodded. “Impediments. I want to feel there’s more to what I’m looking at than I can see.”

“Obstacles in the way.”

“Like life.”

“Not necessarily mountains, but there
have
to be hills,” she said.

“Otherwise, your inner and outer geography don’t reflect each other.”

They nodded wisely.

“It’s getting colder,” Magill said.

“It is getting chilly,” she agreed.

He put his arm around her shoulders.

“Well,” he said after a nice, quiet pause. “Looks like you’ve got a new family.”

“Looks like.”

“Aunt Dinah and Uncle Earl.”

“And two cousins and a grandmother.”

“How does it feel?”

She shook her head. Indescribable.

“I’ve got cousins,” he said thoughtfully. “I ought to go see them.”

“Or your mother. You could go see her.”

He looked up at the sky. “Does it feel like things are changing? It feels like a big wheel is turning, just enough to make everything different.”

“I’m ready for that,” she said.

“Me, too.”

Finney stopped prowling and sat down in front of them, sniffing the air, drinking in the night.

“Once my grandmother, I mean Nana”—how funny to have to distinguish between grandmothers—“organized something called the Frame Project. Well,
she
called it that, and ‘organized’—I think she got one other woman to do it with her. The idea was to go around framing anything they saw that struck them as art. So, you know, people would see it with new eyes, whatever it was, a fire hydrant, the bus stop bench, a sleeping dog, a child’s toy. And realize that art is everywhere.”

“A sleeping dog,” Magill said appreciatively. “What did they make the frames out of?”

“Anything, wood, PVC pipe, whatever was around.”

“
Big
frames.”

“Some were. I remember they tried to frame the garbage man. He wouldn’t stand still, I think he felt patronized. But anyway—you asked me how it feels. The Frame Project didn’t last long, but it’s always stayed with
me. I still do it in my head sometimes, frame things. Tonight—I put a frame around a hundred things.”

The moon came out long enough to glitter, delta-shaped, on the surface of the pond. Then it disappeared, and the stars caught in the intervals between the racing clouds seemed to wink more brightly to compensate. An owl hooted somewhere across the water,
hoo hoo-hoo hoo.
The wind picked up, smelling of rain and earth. It blew a lock of Caddie’s hair in her face; she swept it away, and in the same smooth move she slipped her arm around Magill’s waist.

“I told Dinah about the baby,” she said.

“I heard.”

“You did?” He’d been so far away.

“I’m glad you’re keeping it, Caddie. I mean
her.
You’ll make a great mom.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“Oh, yeah. But I was wondering.”

“What?”

“Does this mean we’re getting married after all?”

She laughed a little too loudly. Magill watched her from the corner of his eye. She thought of what Cornel had said—it seemed much longer ago than just this afternoon. A lifetime. “I think what I was thinking, before, is that abandonment is something you catch, like a bacteria. Or a gene you pass down, mother to daughter, father to son. But it’s not, it can stop wherever you want it to. I’ve figured out that the only person I have to worry about as far as this baby is concerned is me, and I won’t be leaving. It stops with me. I’m steady.”

“You’re steady.”

“I am.”

They agreed. A puff of breeze blew her hair in her eyes again, and this time Magill stroked it away with his fingers. “Getting late.”

“We should go in, I guess.”

They dropped their arms and stepped away from each other.

“Come on, Fin.” The dog wouldn’t budge. Typical; he probably wanted
to go in, but now that he knew
they
did, he was against it. “Rotten dog,” Magill said amiably. “You are
this
close to being freeze-dried.”

“Well,” Caddie said in front of her cottage door. Magill handed her Finney’s leash. “Would you like to come in?”

He said yes and followed her and Finney into the room. Things could be so easy sometimes.

Back when it was a cabin, it was probably rustic, but in making it a cottage they’d covered the log walls with drywall and painted them green. So now it was just a regular motel room with too much furniture—two double beds, a bureau, desk and chair, TV set, closet, miniature bathroom. Finney, ignoring his dog bed, had staked out the double bed nearer the bathroom. You could tell, because he’d scratched one of the pillows out of the way and burrowed under the spread, making a jumble of the covers. Caddie and Magill sat on the other bed.

“Are you tired?”

“Yes.” She was exhausted.

“Me, too.”

“But don’t go yet.”

“All right.”

They smiled at each other. She traced her finger around the faded shape of a flower on the quilted bedspread. “Does Cornel snore?”

He cupped his ear. “Can’t you hear him?”

She laughed, standing up. “Move.” She pulled the spread back, folding it into thirds at the bottom. She took off her shoes. “We could turn on the TV.”

He sat down and untied his hiking boots. They got in bed, bunching the pillows behind their heads. “Uh-oh. The remote’s over there.”

“Rats.”

They looked at it, sitting on top of the TV, but neither one moved. Caddie could see herself in the section of mirror over the bureau the television set wasn’t blocking. Her back hurt. She had to pee. She looked happy, though. “ ’Scuse me,” she said, got up, and went to the bathroom.

When she came back, Finney was on their bed, making himself comfortable between Magill’s long legs.
“Hey.”
She did have
some
rules. Finney
even knew this one. He dropped off that bed and jumped back on his, careful not to look at her. Pretending it was his idea.

“It seems a lot longer than just this
morning
when we were home, doesn’t it?” she said, continuing her train of thought from the bathroom. “So much has happened. Do you miss Thea?”

“Yes.”

“I thought of her so many times tonight, how much she’d have loved this. Dinah and Earl, Mother. Everything.”

“She’d have loved Earl’s job.”

Caddie watched herself smiling in the mirror.

Magill said, “Thea told me I can never be forgiven. She said I can only forgive myself.”

Was that what she’d whispered to him, that night at Caddie’s house? “That’s true, I guess. Except
I
forgive you,” she said softly. “For what that’s worth.”

“She did say I’d need a little help from my friends.”

She rested her head on his shoulder. She couldn’t see her face in the mirror anymore, just the white of her bent neck. “You need to eat more. Your shoulder’s bony.”

“Holly’s parents can’t see me.”

“What do you mean?”

“They can’t look at me. They say it wasn’t my fault, but they can’t be around me. I don’t hold it against them.”

“Oh, I do.” She put her hand on his chest. “I wish I could heal you,” she said on a sigh. If she could just change his heart with the palm of her hand. If she could just fix him. “Henry.” She said it just to hear how it would sound. “I saw your factory, where you make feet. Thea and I drove by.” Their faces were very close; she could see specks of her own reflection in the blue of his eyes. “You should go back. You can’t be a scarecrow man forever.”

His lashes came down; her image disappeared. Without opening his eyes, he leaned toward her and put his lips right where hers were. A soft, light press. She was surprised and not surprised. She moved her hand in a circle on his shirt and kissed him back, made it a real kiss.

They pulled away to look at each other. Had he just wanted her to stop talking? If so, it worked. She smiled, worried about his serious, searching face. He had a big nose, it was his most prominent feature. But a nice nose. Like the prow of a ship, very sharp and determined. Nice whiskers, too, not too spiky, coming out of his smooth skin, shiny-brown and distinct.

Sliding down in bed, he lay flat with his head on his pillow. He took her hand and pulled her down with him. “If you’d said yes, you’d marry me, you know what I was thinking?”

“What?” She reached over and turned out the light.

“There’s something about me you don’t know.” Yellow parking-lot light gradually brightened along the thin vertical line where the curtains didn’t meet. Pretty soon it wasn’t dark in the room at all. “I can play the saxophone.” He turned on his side; when he drew up his knees, they bumped her leg. “I pictured us in your grandmother’s living room in the evenings, noodling away.”

“Family musicales, I’d love that. Which grandmother?”

“You like jazz, right? We could play jazz so progressive, nobody would know if we were hitting the right notes.”

“I can see it,” Caddie said.

“Me, too,” Magill said. “It’s very vivid to me.”

She wasn’t sure which one drifted to sleep first. It felt like a dreamy, tender, mutual abandonment. Something woke her—Magill sitting up, struggling to take off his jean jacket. She was warm, too; she stripped off her sweater and dropped it on the floor. “Cornel won’t worry, will he?” she asked as they stretched out again under the covers. Magill said no, and they fell back to sleep as easily as before.

When she woke again, the parking-lot light wasn’t a line anymore, it was a bright rectangle glaring in her eyes. She blinked, disoriented, and glanced over her shoulder. Magill lay with his head propped on his hand, eyes wide open.

“I opened the curtain,” he whispered. “Sorry.”

“Why?”

“So I could see you.”

She turned over. His face was all cutting, angular shadows. Usually his
eyes were the warmest blue, but the harsh light made them glitter like chips of stone. She touched his raspy cheek, to warm it. She wanted him to smile. She kissed him.

They slid into each other’s arms, pressing together to kiss, pulling away to see each other’s eyes. She wasn’t dreaming, and yet everything was happening so slowly and smoothly, as if they knew what they were doing because they were duplicating something they’d done before. She sighed against his lips, his nice warm lips, but he wouldn’t go any further, do anything more, until she said, “Let’s,” on the softest of breaths, not even a whisper, he could hear it or not. It was out of her hands.

He heard.

Being with him was strange at first, like lying with a long, rangy rack of bones with hot skin and a lot of sharp joints. She’d honestly thought his body might be something she’d have to
get over
to enjoy, and that made her feel tenderer toward him. It made her hide less of herself than she usually did in bed with a man. She felt generous and flowing, womanly, as if her relatively abundant flesh was her gift to him, more freely given than ever before.

After a while, though, none of that mattered, wasn’t even true. Nobody was giving anybody a gift, it was more fundamental than that. More romantic. Layers of herself peeled away, she felt as if she was diving down through levels of soft veiling, swimming down toward what true nakedness, not just of the body, felt like. Christopher, her old touchstone for physical passion, surfaced in her mind from time to time, but always he was bested or unmasked or overwhelmed in some way by the more raw, factual, incredibly sweet honesty of Magill.

“Henry,” she called him, and every time she did it sort of woke him up, made him smile and frown and focus on her eyes. He didn’t know if he liked it or not, her calling him Henry, she could tell. But she liked it.

She liked slicking her hands down over each protruding knuckle of skin on his bumpy backbone. She liked his weight on top of her, just right, and she liked cupping his shoulder blades and pressing his hard plaque of a chest to her breasts, and curling her legs around his sharp, stuck-out knees.

“Don’t let me do anything to hurt you,” he said, just on the brink, the
cusp, and she didn’t understand for a second what he was talking about. Then she remembered: the baby.

“I forgot,” she said, and went into a very odd, bubbly gale of solo laughter. Nervous euphoria, she assumed. She indicated to him in some fashion, not words, that all was well, and would they please return to whatever they were doing before, she couldn’t remember exactly what it was, maybe it wasn’t a particular thing, but if he could get them back to that place, that moment—

He did, or she did, one of them did. Afterward she lay very still beside him, debating whether he would be glad or frightened to hear that what had just happened to her had never happened before. Not even with Christopher. Or sad, maybe he would be sad. It made her sad, a little, so she didn’t tell him.

The jig was up. Caddie could tell by the way Cornel glowered at his newspaper and wouldn’t talk throughout the entire free continental breakfast in the coffee shop. Magill had given her a goodbye kiss and sneaked back to his room even before the sun came up, but Cornel wasn’t born yesterday. This wasn’t even his predatory-bird scowl, it was worse, it was his wrath-of-God scowl, the face God probably put on when he found out what bounders Adam and Eve were.