A Piece of the World(69)

“You loved her, didn’t you.” I choke out the words. “I kept you here.”

“Christie—”

“Will you ever forgive me?”

Al rocks back and forth in his creaky chair. Reaches into his pocket and pulls out his pipe, tamps down the tobacco, swipes a match against the oven door and lights it. Mumbles something under his breath.

“What?”

He sucks in the smoke and blows it out. “I said, I let myself be kept.”

I think about this for a moment. “You felt sorry for me.”

“It wasn’t that. I made a choice.”

I shake my head. “What choice did you have? I made you feel like you were abandoning me, when you were just trying to live your life.”

“Well.” He swipes at the air with his hand. “How could I leave all this?”

It isn’t until he gives me a wry grin that I realize he’s making a joke.

“Nobody else knows how I like my oatmeal,” he says. “And anyway. You would’ve done the same for me.”

I wouldn’t have, of course. Al is being kind, or maybe it’s easier for him to believe this. Either way, it doesn’t excuse what I did. Here we are, the two of us, not partners but siblings, destined to live out our lives together in the house we grew up in, surrounded by the phantoms of our ancestors, haunted by the phantom lives we might’ve lived. A stack of letters hidden in a closet. A dory in the rafters of the shed. No one will ever know, when we’re gone to dust, the life we’ve shared here, our desires and our doubts, our intimacy and our solitude.

Al and I have never hugged, that I can remember. I don’t know the last time we’ve touched, except when he is helping me get around. But here in the murky darkness I put my hand over his, and he lays his other hand over mine. I feel the way I do when I lose something—a spool of thread, say—and search for it everywhere, only to discover it in an obvious place, like on the sideboard under the cloth.

I think of what Mamey told me long ago: there are many ways to love and be loved. Too bad it’s taken most of a lifetime for me to understand what that means.





A FEW DAYS after Andy started sketching me in the pink dress in the grass, he takes his drawings upstairs. I work in the kitchen all morning, scraping my chair around the floor. I leave biscuits cooling on the counter, a pot of chicken soup on the range. At noontime he comes downstairs and helps himself, scooping a biscuit through his bowl of soup, gulping water from the pump in the pantry, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Heads back upstairs. In the afternoon I bake a blueberry pie, cut a warm slice, push it ahead of me on a plate to the stairs, and call for him to come and get it. It’s worth the effort for the grin on his face.

He rows home at dusk. Comes back the next day and troops upstairs, his heavy thudding footsteps the only sound in the quiet house. I hear him pacing around up there, opening doors, shutting doors, walking into different rooms.

This goes on for weeks.

One month, then two.

There are traces of Andy everywhere, even when he’s gone. The smell of eggs, splatters of tempera. A dry, splayed paintbrush. A wooden board pocked with color.

The weather cools. He’s still working. He doesn’t leave for Pennsylvania as usual at the end of August. I don’t ask why, half afraid that if I speak the words aloud, they’ll remind him that it is past time for him to return home.

While he’s upstairs I go through the motions of my routine. Heat water for tea. Knead the bread. Stroke the cat on my lap. Watch the grasses sway out the window. Chat with Al about the weather. Settle in to enjoy the sunset, as vivid as a Technicolor movie. But all the time I’m thinking of Andy, tucked away in a distant room like a character in a fairy tale, spinning straw into gold.

One October morning Andy doesn’t show up. I haven’t seen Betsy in weeks, but the next day, when I’m darning socks, she pops her head in the kitchen door. “Christina! Will you and Al come to dinner?”

“To your house?” I ask with surprise. They’ve never invited us before.

She nods. “Andy talked to Al, and they agreed Al can bring you in the car. Please tell me you’ll come! Just a simple meal, nothing fancy. We’d adore it. A nice send-off before we head back to Chadds Ford.”

“Andy’s finished for the season, then?”

“Finally,” she says. “It’ll be nice to have some peace and quiet, I’ll bet.”

“We don’t mind. We have a lot of peace and quiet.”

IT’S LATE IN the afternoon a few days later when Al—wearing a light-blue collared shirt I made for him years ago that I rarely see him in—lifts me out of my chair in the kitchen and carries me down the steps and into the back of the old Ford Runabout. It’s been a long time since I’ve been anywhere in a car—since I’ve been anywhere except Sadie’s, in fact. I’m dressed in a long navy cotton skirt with forgiving panels and a white blouse—an old uniform, but at least it isn’t torn or stained. Hair smoothed back and tied with a ribbon.

The backseat of the car is dark and cool. As we bump down the drive I lean back and close my eyes, feeling the vibrating thrum of the motor against my legs and a flutter of nervousness in my stomach. I’ve never seen Andy anywhere except in our house, with his paint-spattered boots and pockets bulging with eggs. Will he be a different person in his own home?