The Kind Worth Saving (Henry Kimball/Lily Kintner, #2)(58)

They’d gone to one more movie after that night, something called Lady Macbeth, although it had nothing to do with the Shakespeare play, and afterward Richard told Karen that it wasn’t a good time for him to be in a relationship. A month later she’d quit the hardware store.

“Hey, Richard, I’m sorry if this is uncomfortable for you. Trust me, it’s uncomfortable for me, too.” Karen looked extra pale in the harsh light of the pizza restaurant. She had a nose ring that looked like it had been put in recently, the skin around the piercing bright red.

“It’s fine,” Richard said.

“Look, I’m going through a thing. I don’t know how to describe it exactly, but I just need to know what happened with us. I know we just hung out for a short period of time, and that it was no big deal, but I keep going over it and over it in my mind, and I want to know why you didn’t want to see me anymore.”

Richard spun his coke on the tabletop and didn’t immediately say anything.

“There are absolutely no wrong answers, Richard. Like if you found me repulsive then please just tell me that. Or if you were bored, or you’re gay, or I was terrible at sex, or you hated the movies I made you go to. Just . . . I guess I want to know because it bothers me that I don’t. I want to know the truth.”

Richard pressed his lips together and looked up from his soda. “I mean,” he said, “it was nothing to do with you. Not really. It was—”

“Please just tell me,” Karen said, rising a little in her seat. “Sorry to interrupt, but it’s never entirely just about one person, is it? I mean, if I was your perfect match in the whole universe, you’d have tried to make it work, right? There must have been something about me that you didn’t like.”

Richard was now shaking his head, and for one terrible moment he felt an ache in his throat and thought that he might cry. Words were running through his mind, as though maybe he could just tell her about everything, just let her inside. But as soon as he had that thought it went away. There was too much to tell, for one thing, and too many things to tell that would scare her away. She wouldn’t begin to understand who he really was.

Sometimes, in hard or awkward moments, Richard would think to himself: What would Joan do? She understood the world, the social world, in a way he never would. So he thought about it now, and he said to Karen, who was rubbing at an earlobe, “I’m into someone else, actually. She’s someone I knew back in high school and now we’ve reconnected, and . . . the truth is, I guess . . . the truth is that I’m in love with her and I can’t really be with anyone else.”

Karen was nodding, and he realized he’d said something that was helpful. “Was she . . . were you two together when we were together?”

“Oh, no,” Richard said, before he could stop himself. “I was thinking about her, though. She got married to someone else, but that’s over now. No. We’re not together, it’s just that . . .”

“She’s the one for you,” Karen said, and spun her own soda around, taking a big sip through the straw.

Later, that night while he was in bed, Richard went over the rest of the conversation with Karen, and how he’d told her a little bit about his relationship with Joan. Most was made up, but not all of it. And for whatever reason he was now thinking about Karen again instead of Joan, imagining a scenario where he would tell her even more than he’d already told her, maybe even tell her that the only time he’d had sex was with her. He imagined them doing it again, only this time Richard would last and last, Karen begging him for more.

He was still thinking about Karen at the hardware store the next day while he was restocking the plumbing aisle. Maybe she’d come back to see him again, but he doubted it. When they’d said good night, she’d seemed happy, as though she’d gotten what she’d come for.

Richard was crouched over a box when he felt a tap on his shoulder, a man’s voice saying, “Excuse me.”





Chapter 26





Kimball


On the Emerson College website there was a phone number for Elizabeth Grieve, and also a listing of her office hours. I figured that if I called her directly on her line during her office hours there was a good chance she might pick up.

I still hadn’t decided what to say yet. All I really wanted to establish was that she’d been at the Windward Resort, with her sister Joan, at the time that Duane Wozniak had drowned. If she confirmed that, then that would be one too many coincidences that linked Joan Grieve and Richard Seddon.

I did think about calling her up and telling her that I was doing a deep analysis of her poem, “Tides,” from her chapbook Sea Oat Soup, then asking if I could interview her about it. That was a stretch, though. Even if Elizabeth Grieve had illusions of grandeur there was no way she’d buy some critical theorist calling up out of the blue to dissect a poem she’d published in a book that had a print run of two hundred copies.

So I tried to come up with other ways to ask her. While thinking about it, I read through her poems again. It seemed clear to me that during a trip to Maine (and Kennewick was mentioned twice) she’d discovered that she was a lesbian. There were actually two mentions of her sister in the book, the one that referred to her as being “the tender age of murderers” and that she’d gone swimming with a boy who hadn’t come back. The other mention was vaguer. It was in a poem called “Moonsnail,” and the line went, “my sister has broken out in scales / and they look ravishing on her.” But that was a throwaway line in a poem that seemed devoted to the character of “you,” the sporty girl she’d met on that vacation. I got distracted and wrote a limerick on the back inside cover of Sea Oat Soup.