All That's Left to Tell(49)
“So I understand you and Joline had a little late-night conversation.”
“She tell you that?”
“No. I woke up and saw she’d taken Laura down with her.”
“Yeah. She let me hold her for a while.”
“She likes it here. The baby, I mean. Joline, too. It’s peaceful. We’re in an apartment on a busy street. Weekends get pretty rowdy with the college kids. We’ll have to move once Laura starts walking.”
Tom lifts his hand to the lid of the trunk.
“So Joline tell you her life story?”
Marc glances into his eyes, and then shakes his head and looks down at the ground.
“No? Well, she’s pretty free with it. I know more of it than you probably think.”
Tom slams the lid of the trunk, and then puts an arm around Marc and gives him a fast hug.
“Thanks for having us out. I’d like to come out again soon.”
“You’re welcome anytime.”
Joline walks with Kathleen out to the car. For the first time that morning, Joline looks fully into his face, and then she reaches for him and gives him a tight hug, the warmth of her body coming through even her winter coat. She pulls away slightly, with her hands still at his waist, looks at him, and then hugs him again.
She turns away for the baby without saying anything to him, and then gives her mother a kiss on the cheek and one final good-bye before walking to the car, settling the baby in her car seat, and joining Tom inside. They wave as they pull away.
Back indoors, the day brightening the rooms with a pale March sun as they both clear the dishes from the table, Kathleen says to him, “I guess it was a nice visit. Yesterday was a little hard.”
“It was good to have them here,” he says. He knows they will speak about it later, and perhaps Kathleen will call her son, Jon, and tell him about her conversation with Joline and ask about his marriage. And then afterward, Kathleen will come out of the bedroom and sit in the chair where Joline sat last night, and they’ll talk it over for a while. “She’s an interesting young woman,” he says.
“Interesting?” Kathleen lifts an eyebrow and gives him a half-cocked smile.
“Yeah, interesting. There’s a lot to her. She’s her mother’s daughter, isn’t she?”
Kathleen waves her hand at him and goes on loading the dishwasher. And after that, they are quiet for a long while, returning to the rhythms of their winter Sundays on the lake. They read the newspaper and drink coffee. Kathleen watches a gardening show while knitting, the quiet tapping of her knitting needles a comfort that Marc recognizes stretches back into childhood, when his own mother used to knit Christmas scarves for him and his sisters. Marc looks through a magazine for a new boat he might buy when the lake thaws, makes a soup for them that afternoon, and splits a little wood for exercise, though they have plenty to last them through the cool nights of spring, and he stops anyway after fifteen minutes because of the ache in his shoulder. He watches the birds at the feeder, and again thinks about taking up sketching, especially for the stark contrasts of the whites and blues and blacks of trees and houses and ice in the winter. The later afternoon feels warmer, damp, and still, and he thinks for a while that Claire’s presence has gone away with Joline and the baby, but as the sky dims with sunset he feels that chill again.
Because of his restlessness, he tells Kathleen, “I’m going for a little walk out on the ice.”
“Wow. Twice in two days. I don’t think you were out there at all before this weekend.”
“You might be right.”
“You want me to come with you?”
“No, that’s okay. You look comfortable where you are.” She is sitting in her chair with a book, her legs folded up in a way that makes her look young.
“It seems like it’s nicer out there today.”
“Yep. Warmer. Spring’s almost here.”
His footprints from yesterday alongside Tom’s have deepened with the slight melting that had occurred in the afternoon, though the thin crust of brittle snow has returned now that it is almost nightfall and colder. He listens to the pleasant and familiar crunch of his boots on the ice as he makes his way to the place he and Tom had stood. His conversation with Tom at the car had unsettled him—he wondered what Tom may have overheard last night. Marc looks up at the sky, and it is the same cobalt blue as yesterday, though lingering from the sunset is a shade of warm orange. He glances back at his home and sees the windows lit. He touches his fingers to his lips and remembers Joline’s kiss. Her mouth had been so warm. He still can’t understand why she’d given it to him.
He remembers a time, years ago, when he’d walked out onto the ice to watch the sunset. He’d learned from all his seasons here to watch for cloud formations that would lead to bright colors, and that evening the sun had turned the sky a brilliant blood orange, and the ice and the snow and even the cottages along the shoreline were drenched in it. Alone out on the lake, he’d wanted to call out to someone to come and look, come and see, but the only other person on the ice was a fisherman at least fifty yards away, and they’d given each other a brief, awestruck wave and together watched the sun descend. At the time, he had seen the orange sky as perhaps a sign, construed for him alone, and he’d remembered Claire, thought then that soon he might hear from her. But he’d been wrong.