The Last Time I Saw You (6 page)

She pours herself a cup of coffee and snaps open the
Times
and starts reading the front-page stories. When, after about half an hour, she hears Cooper coming down the stairs, she can’t help it, she feels glad. She folds the
Times
back up and puts it on his side of the table.

He comes into the kitchen, pours himself a cup of coffee, and sits heavily at the table with her. “Damn, that coffeemaker’s loud,” he says.

Her mouth tightens.
Not today, Coop
, she thinks.
Today
you’re
taking care of
me. And yet she hears herself saying, “I’m sorry. Did I wake you up?”

“Well, Candy, what do you think?” He opens the newspaper.

“Do you want some breakfast?”

“Yeah, in a minute, let me wake up.” He wipes at something under his nose. “Get me a tissue, would you?” he asks, and she does.

She moves to the center island to begin chopping onions and peppers for an omelet.

“What time did you get up, anyway?” he asks.

“I didn’t even look. The sun was just starting to come up. It was two pink clouds after a star.” She figures he’ll turn around and say, “
What?
” and she’ll say, “You know, like two minutes after five,
two clouds after a star
.” But he doesn’t turn around. He doesn’t do anything.

When she puts his omelet in front of him, he says, “Smells good.” So, you know. She sits down. She salts her omelet. She eats it. When she has finished, she will put on one of the beautiful St. John suits he insists she wear. After the appointment, no matter what the news is, she’ll tell Cooper that she’s going to her high school reunion this weekend. When she got the invitation and asked if he’d like to go, he’d said, “Good God, no.
Clear Springs?
No. Thank you.” She waited a day or two, then called the airlines to make a reservation for herself and her dog, and then called Pam Pottsman to say she’d be coming, alone except for her bulldog; and Pam was so excited. “Are you still unbelievably gorgeous?” Pam said, and Candy said, “No, Pam, I am not.” Pam said, “Oh, yes you are!” and they both laughed. And it was fun, that moment on the phone. It lifted her heart to hear Pam’s voice and to be suddenly enriched by a rush of memories. She saw the wide steps of the high school, smelled that janitorial waxy smell you always noticed when you first came into the building, saw the lit trophy case out in the hall with the photos of outstanding athletes. She saw the crowds of students walking down the hall, the teachers standing at the fronts of their classrooms. She saw the gymnasium at night, decorated for a dance, felt the pressure of a crown being put on her head as she sat on a plywood throne that had been painted gold. After Candy hung up, she went to look at herself in the mirror, and for the first time in a long time she saw how her blond hair was still thick and lovely (if chemically enhanced), how her wide eyes were still a clear green, how her expensive night creams had kept wrinkles at bay. She thought,
I
am
still kind of gorgeous
.

She’s going to that reunion tomorrow, no matter what. Before, she just kind of wanted to. Now, she needs to. Now, she would go in jeans and a sweatshirt and a shower cap and no makeup, just to sit at a table and be surrounded by people she used to know, just to be near someone familiar in the old way. Someone from before.

SEVEN

L
ESTER, ON LUNCH BREAK FROM HIS VETERINARY CLINIC
, takes the mini Lop from his nine-year-old neighbor, Miranda. He holds the rabbit tight up against his stomach, facing out. “When you examine a bunny,” he says, “the thing to do is to hold it like this.” The bunny begins to kick wildly. “And when they kick, which they usually do, you rub your hand slowly over their tummies, which sort of hypnotizes them.” He demonstrates, and the rabbit does indeed calm down. Lester uses one hand to support the rabbit’s bottom and turns him to face his owner.

“Yup. He looks pretty happy, now,” Miranda says.

“What did you decide to name him?”

“Custard.”

“Ah.”

“Because he’s gooshy like custard. You’re the one who told me to name an animal because of how it
is
.” Miranda pulls her T-shirt away from her neck and blows down on herself. It’s a warm afternoon. She and Lester have just had lunch, as is their custom on Friday afternoons. Lester does scheduled surgeries on Friday mornings, and most times there’s a couple hours’ window before he needs to be back at the clinic for routine appointments. Miranda, who comes home from school for lunch, began eating with Lester on Friday when she was seven, and they alternate preparing the food. Today was Miranda’s turn, and she brought a sophisticated roll-up: lemon hummus, lettuce, tomato, onion, and kalamata olives, which were inconsistently pitted.

The little girl is set on becoming a veterinarian herself, and thus far Lester has given her a stethoscope, an otoscope, a white lab coat, a thermometer, empty vaccine bottles, and syringe barrels minus the needles. She brings a notebook on the days they have lunch, and she writes down the things she learns. She has a cat, a dog, and a parakeet, and she taught the bird to retrieve quarters she rolls across a table, something Lester frankly doubted a parakeet could do until he saw it with his own eyes. Just yesterday, she and her parents rescued the rabbit from the humane society. The people who surrendered him had him for only four days before giving him up, saying he had destroyed all the downstairs electrical cords. “Do you think it’s really true he did that?” Miranda asked Lester when she first showed him her new pet. And Lester told her that the only thing rabbits like better than electrical cords is birdseed. “Really?” Miranda said, and Lester said yup, that for rabbits, birdseed is like candy. You shouldn’t give them too much, though, just like people. A little went a long way. The girl considered this, then asked, “Do
you
like birdseed?” Lester allowed that he had never tasted it. “Should we?” Miranda asked, and Lester said he thought he’d rather have the sandwiches Miranda had brought. “That’s not all,” she said and showed him the red apples, the entire roll of Oreos, and the napkins she had decorated with rainbow stickers.

Now she lays Custard in her lap and pets him. “Aren’t they so luxurious, rabbits?” she says. “They’re like you have a mink coat but you don’t have to kill anything.” She looked up at him. “I have something to ask you.”

“What’s that?”

“Tomorrow night? There’s a play at seven o’clock in Mr. and Mrs. Pichiotti’s basement. This kid Eddie Sandman wrote it. He’s twelve. It’s about a vampire, and guess who the vampire is?”

Lester strokes his chin. “Hmmmmm. Would it be Custard?”

Miranda giggles. “No!”

“Would it be Eddie Sandman?”

“No, he’s the
director
!”

“Hmmmm,” Lester says. “Give me a minute.…”

“It’s
me
!” Miranda says.

“You’re
kidding
.”

“No!”

“You can
act
, too?”

“Yes! Can you come? I get to suck blood two times. And we have strawberry jelly hidden in a Baggie in my cape and I secretly smear it on and it looks exactly like real.”

Lester sits back in his chair and reaches over to pinch off a dying leaf from one of the plants on the windowsill next to the table. He’s got a series of glass shelves in lieu of curtains, and they’re full of flowering plants. It had been his wife’s idea; the window got lots of sun. “I can’t come tomorrow night. I’ll be out of town.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going to a high school reunion. You know what a reunion is, right?”

Miranda scratches a mosquito bite at the side of her neck with apparent satisfaction; it makes her mouth draw over to one side. “Yeah, it’s really good friends who all come from all over to see each other again.”

“Right,” Lester says. Though to himself, he thinks,
Well, really good
friends…

“What all are you going to do?” Miranda asks.

“We’re having a dinner and dance and then brunch the next morning.”

“You can
dance
?”

“Why, yes, Miranda, I can.”

“I never saw you dance!”

“I never saw you dance, either.”

“Well, I can.”

“And so can I. For your information, I took ballroom dancing as a young man.” Not that it did much good, actually. Lester was an awful dancer. But at least he knew how the steps were
supposed
to go. The fox-trot. The waltz. The cha-cha; oh, how he had hated doing the cha-cha. He had wanted to murder his mother every time he did the cha-cha. There was simply no good way for a guy to hold his hands when he did the cha-cha.

“What
is
ballroom dancing?” Miranda asks.

“Well, literally, it’s dancing in a really big room made for dancing. But if it’s a class called ballroom dancing, it kind of teaches you everything you need to know. I mean, the basics, anyway.”

“Who are you going with?”

“Nobody. I asked Jeanine and her husband to come, but they can’t.”

Miranda studies his face as though it’s a palm she’s reading. She worries about him, has told him on numerous occasions that he needs a girlfriend, and has made recommendations ranging from Miley Cyrus to the cashier at BuyLow who told Miranda she loves animals, too. “I can go with you. If you want.”

“That’s very nice of you. But what about the play?”

She slaps the top of her head. “Oh, yeah!”

Lester looks up at the wall clock and tells Miranda he’s got to get back to the clinic, and she back to school.

“Do we have time for Three Things?” she says.

Every week, Miranda is told three things about various animals. Parakeets have about a teaspoon of circulating blood volume; elephants grieve; horses can get sunburned on their noses; dogs sweat through the pads of their feet—that sort of thing. “Well, you have one thing already,” Lester tells her. “Rabbits like birdseed.” Miranda dutifully writes it down. He notices that she has moved into an elaborate cursive and he’s happy to see it. He’s heard that many schools aren’t teaching cursive anymore, and it makes him unaccountably sad. He still remembers Mrs. Lord in her blue crepe dress and enormous pearl clip-ons, standing over him in elementary school, trying to impress on him that good penmanship was a sign of good character and civility. She used to wear entirely too much perfume, Mrs. Lord, a heavy, spicy scent that reminded Lester of carnations. She wore rhinestone pins on her shoulder every day, and her ankles seemed to spill over her low pumps in what Lester knows now was a sign of congestive heart failure but at the time believed was a kind of
decision
she had made—flesh as accessory—and he wasn’t quite sure how he felt about it. He used to look at his mother’s slender ankles and wonder if she wasn’t lacking somehow.

“What’s another thing?” Miranda asks.

“Well, let’s see…,” Lester says. “How about a cow one? We haven’t done a cow one for a long time.”

“I’ve decided I’m not going to be in large animal practice,” Miranda says. “I don’t want to be driving around all over to farms and to hell and back.”

“I see,” Lester says.

“Can I
ask
two things?” Miranda says.

“Of course.”

“Is it true that dogs can’t see colors?”

“No,” Lester says. “They can see colors. Just not like you. They see gray, and they see the colors of the world as basically yellow and blue. You know, a lot of people don’t know that dogs don’t actually see all that well, period. They rely more on scent and hearing. For some sounds, they hear hundreds of times better than people.”

“They are always better than people.”

“Well,” Lester says.

“It’s true! There are hardly any people as good as dogs, you have to admit. Name me one person you ever met who was as good as a dog.”

“Oh, I’ve met a few.”

“Who?”

“My wife, for one. And you, Miranda Bryson, if you must know. You are as good as a dog.”

“I am?”

“You are.”

“If I
think
about it, I guess you are, too.”

“Thank you. But listen, we have to go. Hurry and ask me your second question.”

“Okay. Okay, it is… Oh! Custard keeps rubbing his face on me. Why?”

Lester puts their plates in the dishwasher. “Well, that’s for a good reason. He’s marking you. Rabbits have scent glands under their chins, and they secrete something from there that only other rabbits can smell. It’s totally odorless and only a little bit damp, so you might not have noticed. But he’s saying you belong to him. That behavior is called ‘chinning.’”

Miranda smiles. “That’s a good one.”

“I thought you’d like that.”

They go out the front door onto the porch, where Lester’s dog, Mason, is sleeping in the shade. “Let’s go, buddy,” Lester says, and the dog leaps up and heads for Lester’s truck.

Lester is backing out of the driveway when he hears Miranda calling his name. He leans his head out the window.
“What?”

“You should wear something
blue
to the renewion!”

He nods, waves, and as he drives toward the clinic, he thinks,
Maybe I will
. His wife used to like him in blue, and since she died, he’s purposefully not worn it much. But maybe it’s time.
Renewion
. He looks into the rearview mirror, at Miranda fading away in the distance. There was a period in his late thirties when he seriously considered adopting a child, but he worried about whether he’d be able to adequately care for a son or daughter as a single parent. Now it’s too late, and in quiet moments, he sometimes feels a profound regret about not having gone through with it. It could have worked. He could have hired someone to help him. It might not have been ideal, but he would have had the experience of raising a child, something he thinks he would have enjoyed for all kinds of reasons. The day after his wife told him about her pregnancy, she’d given him a miniature fishing rod and tackle box. It’s still in the back of his closet, and sometimes he takes the little metal box out and looks at all the lures Kathleen had chosen. Their child would have loved it, he’s certain.

He supposes, too, that it would have been nice, at this point in his life, when retirement is not so very far away, to think that he belonged to someone, and they to him—to chin and be chinned.

He shifts the truck into third and catches a glimpse of himself in the rearview mirror. There are a few years on him, yes, but he’s in pretty good shape. He wonders if Candy Sullivan’s coming to the reunion. He used to think about her in a certain way, though he knew it was useless. He used to sit at his desk doing homework and then stop and look out the window and think of her. Maybe he’ll have a drink and tell her that.

He walks into his clinic, thinking about how fast time goes by, one’s whole life. When Jeanine sees him, she slams down the phone and stands up behind the reception desk. “I was just trying to call you. Samson’s back. He’s in trouble; his temp and heart rate are sky-high. He’s in room one.”