The Last September: A Novel (13 page)

It was true. Despite Charlie’s meals I was losing weight, the effort of loving him, of accommodating him, burning more calories than I could possibly take in. I picked up the fork and ate a small bite. My mother watched me, her brow furrowed. Fading freckles obscured whatever lines marred her forehead. She had blue eyes and fair skin. Her hair used to be red, and she’d let it fade to dark gray, still curly and abundant, pulled off her forehead with a silver barrette in a way that should have looked girlish but didn’t. As one day few people would take Sarah and me for mother and daughter, so it had always been with the two of us.

Mom sat back, placing her broad, freckled hands flat on the table. “I don’t understand what you’re doing,” she said. This was the posture she always assumed when posing questions to her class. Measured questions, meant to incite conversation and even argument. She would float them out and then sit back, waiting to observe and assess the reaction.

To stall, I took another bite. She wouldn’t understand anything I told her. If my mother ever went on a single date after my father died, I couldn’t remember it. I could only remember my serious, widowed, tenured mother. Two simple missions in life: raising me and teaching literature. Specializing in Yeats and Coleridge, all the romance in her life existing in the poems she studied. I couldn’t say that Charlie was my Sue Dickinson, because she didn’t agree with my theory. So instead I used Yeats’s muse.

“He’s my Maud Gonne,” I said.

My mother removed her hands from the table and tilted her head with a loud and exasperated exhalation. “That,” she said, “only works for poets. Not even for them. Just their work. And honestly I’m not sure it works for that post – nineteenth century.”

A group of college girls banged noisily into the shop, laughing with each other and then with the baristas. My mother watched them find a table at the far side of the cafe. I took the opportunity to examine her face. She looked more worried than angry, but I also thought she looked the tiniest bit relieved that she hadn’t found me in an even worse situation. In the stretch of time between Ladd’s phone call to her and now, I’d avoided her, returning calls when I knew I’d get her voice mail. She had waited until fall break to make the ninety-minute drive from Randall and show up on my doorstep. Unfortunately, Eli had answered.

“Well,” I said, when the girls’ chatter was far enough away, and it looked like my mother wasn’t going to break the relative silence. “No one’s brought up marriage. So it’s not a worry for right now.”

“What about Ladd?”

“He hates me now.”

Another deep intake of breath from her, this one more mournful than frustrated. I’d ruined everything.

“Listen,” she said. She retrieved her fork and took a bite of the cake, then frowned at its sweetness. “I’ve been offered a teaching fellowship at University College Cork. It’s a three-year position.”

“That’s great,” I said. She’d always wanted to go to Ireland.

“I’m not sure I should take it now.”

“Oh, Mom. Take it. I’ll be fine.”

“How long will his brother stay with you?”

“Not much longer,” I said. “A few more days.”

“Because I’m really not comfortable with this arrangement.”

“It’s not an arrangement,” I promised. “It’s just a visit.”

Abruptly, as if we’d agreed on a specific time for this coffee date to end and she realized that time had arrived, she pushed back her chair and stood. As I followed her out of the cafe, a notice on the community bulletin board caught my eye, written on lined notebook paper. A kennel just outside town looking for a live-in employee. I ripped off one of the phone number tabs.

By the time I got outside my mother had already headed across the street to Sweetser Park. She sat on the edge of the fountain, staring at the tumbling water. I sat down next to her and said, “I’m sorry.” She nodded as if apologizing were perfectly reasonable. She’d been so looking forward to the idea of me and Ladd, her daughter happy and rich and taken care of.

“I was thinking of selling the house,” Mom said. “And moving in someplace smaller, an apartment maybe, when I get back. But now I’m thinking I’ll just rent it. Maybe I can find someone on a month-to-month lease, so you’ll have a place to go, if you need one.”

Part of me wanted to protest, but I didn’t. The loss of the house where I’d grown up—its book-lined walls and my mother’s overgrown garden—would be great enough to want to forestall. Today, when Mom had arrived at my apartment, after Eli let her in, she’d spent less than five minutes talking to Charlie. Apparently that was enough time to convince her that one day I might need to run from him, or perhaps more accurately, that I would need a place to recover after he ran from me.

She said, needing me to urge her more than once, “Or maybe I shouldn’t go at all.”

“No,” I said. “Don’t be silly. I’m a grown woman. I’ll be fine.”

My mother frowned. “Just promise me you won’t marry him,” she said again, her voice so low she might have been speaking to herself more than me.

“Oh, Mom,” I said, not wanting to say,
But I love him so much.
Instead I said, “You barely spoke to him five minutes.”

“I know,” she admitted. “But I’ve spent a lot of years with young people. I can read them. That one, Charlie, he’s the kind of person who’d only come to every other class.”

My lips twitched with the effort not to smile. Of course she was exactly right. Whereas Ladd would attend every single class, arriving on time, if not early.

“Okay,” I said. “I promise I won’t marry him.”

On my left hand, the reverse tan line created by Ladd’s ring had already become invisible. A few blocks away, at that very moment, he was packing up his house, probably making sure to discard any objects that held trace memories of me.

CHARLIE TOLD ME HE
loved me in odd moments, not nearly as often as I wanted to tell him. If my life had become an effort not to complain—about Eli’s remaining on my couch, about Charlie’s running out of money and my TA stipend’s feeding all three of us—the greater effort lay in not announcing my own feelings every time I saw him. I drank up every intimation of his possible love for me, the food he prepared, the broad hands he laid upon me so carefully, and—best of all—the smile that erupted at the sight of me. In all the world, I wanted one thing, to keep him with me. I had to prevent myself making any false moves, from frightening him away with the sheer degree of everything I felt.

As for Eli, he barely registered interest when I gave him the number of the kennel, but he did call. I helped him pick out what to wear for his interview. “Use lots of soap,” I told him, before he showered, and he did, emerging damp, a towel wrapped around his growing midsection, the sour odor very nearly masked. I ironed a pair of khaki pants and a blue plaid shirt, clothes that took the interview seriously enough yet indicated a willingness to be muddied by dog paws. On the drive over I didn’t say anything when Eli lit a cigarette, having already ceded victory in that particular battle. His hands shook, ever so slightly, as the flame caught the paper. It almost made me want to light it for him. He rolled down the window and sent the stream of smoke outside.

“Are you nervous?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “To tell you the truth, it’s hard to feel much of anything these days.” His brows did a funny little twitch, toward each other. It could have been anger or else an expression of nerves he didn’t realize he felt. I wanted to reach out and touch him, close my hand around his forearm, or place it on his shoulder. Something. On the other side of the wall from where he slept, Charlie and I existed in a world of skin on skin. Whereas Eli’s only physical contact was with the cat. Once again, his cat.

I pulled up in front of the kennel. It would be a noisy place to live, with dogs constantly barking. But there was a nice white clapboard office—I guessed the apartment was on its second floor. Its windows looked right out on the dogs. Probably the cats boarded inside and Eli would be able to sneak one out at night and take it to sleep with him if he got the job. I didn’t consider letting him take Tab. My generosity always stopped just short of enough.

“Do you want me to come in with you?” I asked, as he stepped out of the car. Maybe they would take me for his girlfriend; I could confer the needed degree of normal.

“No, it’s okay. I can do it.”

“Break a leg,” I said, and he smiled a little, a rare glimpse of the old Eli, the appreciative crinkle around his eyes.

While Eli interviewed, I sat in the car reading
Austin and Mabel
, the tangled account of Emily Dickinson’s brother and the woman he became involved with after his marriage to Sue began to crumble. Every page I turned, every minute that ticked by, felt like a good sign. After about a half hour, Eli emerged with a plump gray-haired woman who appeared to be giving him a tour. Another good sign. I stepped out of the car to stretch my legs. A black-and-white collie took note and barked ferociously, a high-pitched warning. Eli reached through the wire and offered her a hand, and the dog quieted, trotting over to him.

“Hey,” Eli said when he came back to the car. “I got the job.”

I walked around to hug him. His fingers trembled at my back. “Good work, Eli,” I said. “Congratulations.”

By the time we returned to my apartment to collect his scant belongings, Charlie was there and came with us to install Eli in his new home.

“I love you,” Charlie told me as the two of us drove away, the sound of barking dogs fading behind us. He reached out, covered my hand with his and added, “Thank you.”

YOU KNOW WHAT HAPPENS
next. After fall gave way to winter, and winter to spring. After Eli worked a few months at the kennel and then abandoned his meds and wandered the streets for weeks before landing back in the hospital. After my mother left the country. On an evening still cool enough for cardigans, Charlie and I carried a bottle of wine across the street and sat on the bench at the Homestead. He knew I liked to be there after dusk—not far from where the Poet herself used to garden, once the light had faded and she knew she wouldn’t be seen.

“Tell me,” he said, handing me a plastic cup, “what it was that Emily liked about Sue.”

“We can’t call her Emily,” I told him. “We have to call her Dickinson. Or the Poet.”

“Tell me what the Poet liked about Sue.”

“Everyone liked Sue,” I said. “She was very magnetic. Very charming. Beautiful. All that.”

“Like you,” Charlie said, touching a strand of my hair.

“No,” I said. “Like you. Emily was like me. Studious. Infatuated.”

“The Poet,” Charlie corrected me, and I smiled. “Is that what you are?” he said. “Infatuated?”

“No. Not just that, anyway.”

“You were going to marry Ladd.”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to marry me instead?”

A leap inside me. There was no ring. Only Charlie, sitting there, looking earnest. Spontaneous. Utterly believable. Still, for the first time since the Fourth of July party, I allowed myself to be suspicious of him. I was too afraid to let the gathering joy bubble to the surface.

“But Charlie,” I said. “You can’t commit.”

He laughed. “I just did.”

“Why?” I whispered. “Why me?”

“Because I can always tell what you’re thinking.”

This was the last answer I wanted, so I turned away from him, but he cupped my chin, gently bringing my gaze back to his face. Charlie’s smiles never seemed like a reflex. They started slowly, his eyes on you. There was never any doubt—you were the one who inspired it.

“Look,” Charlie said. “I could give you a list of qualities. Beautiful. Smart. Sexy. Right? But those are just words. They apply to a million women. But only this applies to you. I love you. Because I do. Okay? I just do. So let’s get married.”

He kissed me, not bothering to wait for my obvious yes. I let not only happiness boil over but triumph.
I knew it
. Even back in Colorado, even after I’d given up on him. Somewhere inside myself, I knew it. If only I could love him enough, he would come to me, and he would stay.

MY MOTHER TRAVELED FROM
Ireland for the wedding even though we scheduled it at the worst possible time for her, the fall, because we wanted to wait until Eli was well enough—medicated enough—not only to stand up with us but walk me down the makeshift aisle to the very edge of the lawn, overlooking the ocean. Me in a simple white dress, Charlie waiting for me in a white button-down and khakis. A string quartet played as I walked toward Charlie and the Unitarian minister, my arm looped through Eli’s. I must have been beaming, because Charlie had the extremely fond and bemused look he generally wore in response to my adoration. I took the last few steps up to him, and Eli took his place beside his brother. We stood there, listening to the minister, and I kept my eyes mostly on Charlie, my hands closed around my sunflower bouquet. For one moment, I let my eyes leave his, to scan the crowd of a hundred or so people, many of whom I’d last seen at Mrs. Moss’s funeral.

And when my eyes came back to meet Charlie’s, he was gone. Vanished. I stood there alone, the minister still speaking, his voice strained with the effort of pretending nothing was wrong. It took me about ten seconds to locate Charlie, standing off to the side with his head in his hands. Eli stood next to him, talking quietly. I noticed a tangle of poison ivy in the brambles beside them and worried about Charlie’s bare ankles in his Top-Siders. I didn’t dare look at my mother.

It didn’t last long. The whole episode took a total of two, maybe three, minutes. I stood alone at the altar while the minister politely continued to speak. Everything around me and within me froze, but I knew if I could only endure this short stretch of time (promising myself even in that moment that I would never so much as think about it again) my reward would be continuing on as Charlie’s wife. And I was right: Eli brought him back to me, holding on to his elbow with purpose, Charlie looking pale and ever so slightly unlike himself.
Are you okay?
I mouthed, and he nodded, and reached over to fold his hands over the stems of my bouquet, weaving his fingers between mine. He said “I do,” clearly and loudly, for everyone to hear.