I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(33)
Beneath the obituary was a stack of photographs, each a piece of Joseph—a hand, a temple, a hillock of shoulder, the curled corner of his mouth—never a full shot of him, but somehow each photo felt complete and so reverent, as if someone believed that the tiniest part of the man was worthy of the most exquisite attention. Not someone. Edith. On the back of each, just “My J” in small precise lettering and a date.
Beneath the photographs was their marriage certificate, faded and so old the paper was soft as suede. They’d been married here in Antioch Beach. I held the certificate under the lamplight to make out the date, then quickly double-checked Joseph’s death certificate, hoping I’d gotten something wrong. I hadn’t.
“Oh, no. Let it not be true,” I pleaded to the empty room.
Distilled and rare and rampant love everywhere, in every corner of this house and spilling over into the front garden, the backyard, eddying into the canal that led to the bay, all that, and Edith and Joseph had had just two years together.
With tears in my eyes, I picked up a photograph Edith had taken of her husband: his inner wrist, twin tendons running down its center, the narrow valley between them as private, as holy a place as any I’d ever seen.
“This,” I said, cradling the photo in my palms. “This is it. The thing you hold out for. You wait a lifetime if you have to.”
It felt like a vow, and, for a second, I wished I had a witness, but then I realized that I did. The house was my witness.
Chapter Thirteen
Edith
September 1953
Later, once she had dragged herself far enough out of her swamp of grief to look back, Edith understood that it was the guests who had kept her going. This despite the fact that she resented them, sometimes fiercely, on and off, for at least the first year, resented their presence, outsiders tromping all over her and Joseph’s sanctuary, their voices crowding out the memory of Joseph’s voice, their carefree, cut-loose vacation happiness reminding her piercingly, hourly of every joy she had lost.
The guests forced her out of bed. They forced her to wash her face, brush her teeth, apply a touch of makeup, and get dressed, not in the blue jeans she’d favored when her house was empty, but in a neat dress or pair of pedal pushers. They forced her to pay attention, to button each button in the right order, to bathe regularly, to not lie facedown on Joseph’s side of the bed for hours or days wishing she were dead.
Each morning, she would tiptoe from her attic bedroom and down the stairs, avoiding the creaky spots as she passed the second-floor bedrooms where the guests stayed, and would start the percolator, set the table with her wedding plates and flatware and with little cut-glass bowls of jam and butter, slice peaches or melon or bananas, mix up a batch of drop biscuits, put them in the oven, and then would go out in the backyard with her coffee and sit in a chair, drinking and watching the sun toss coins across the canal and tiny jellyfish beat like gauze hearts just below the surface of the water. For those few stolen minutes, she found she could let go, second by second, of everything that haunted her until her mind was empty as a scoured bowl and all she knew was flavor on her tongue, air against her face, the small, dazzling details of her scrap of world. Then, she would go inside, ready to smile and chat, to fry and pour, to lean over the open oven to check for just the right amount of goldenness.
She was busy, busy, busy, but also—for the first time she could remember—bored. She learned what she would never have imagined: that heartbreak and boredom could be paired. Apart from the guests, most people stayed away. No more cocktail party or dinner invitations, no more of the interminable coffees that she, rocked with loneliness, might even at long last have welcomed.
Out of sheer desperation, despite her terror at how painful it might be, Edith began to venture out alone in her canoe. The first time was a horrible, racked, air-gulping, hair-tearing ordeal, and she swore she’d never go again. But one afternoon, when the guests were at the beach, she found that she missed, down to her bone marrow, the very specific sight of sun glazing the mussel-studded bank of the salt marsh at low tide, that lacquered, rainbow-suffused black. By the third time, she didn’t cry. By the fifth, the sensation that Joseph’s canoe was gliding along parallel to her own comforted her instead of torturing her. On the sixth trip, she took her camera, and—in narrowing the sprawling, intractable everything into one small, contained rectangle after the next—felt tiny stirrings of hope.
John Blanchard dropped by now and again to check on her with a genial, matter-of-fact concern for a woman living alone that never tipped over into condescension or judgment. In the months following Joseph’s death, Edith had a handful of male callers—Donald Smith dropping off a casserole his wife had made; Richie Fulton, barely out of his teens, who cut her grass and trimmed her bushes; old Len Pilgrim, an avid bird-watcher, who came around occasionally to brag about his sightings to the only other person he knew who cared; and a few bachelors and widowers, slick-haired and sheepish, who brought flowers and never got farther than the front lawn—all of whom were subjected to searing, raised-eyebrow scrutiny by Edith’s neighbors.
Because of his job, John was mostly, however grudgingly, granted the benefit of the doubt, but Edith knew that even he wasn’t gossip proof. Joseph had told her his story: divorced after a brief marriage, his wife a restless type who should never have gotten married to anyone, least of all steady, quiet John, a few years spent living with his widowed sister and her little girl until a couple of years ago when she met a tourist at the boardwalk, married him, and moved away. Single, tall, blond, and blue-eyed, with an unshakable aura of quietude and the ability to deflect flirtation like those new Teflon pans, the women in the town regarded him as either utterly dreamy or the dullest man in the world. How much of this he realized Edith wasn’t sure, but she did know that, while he’d sit on the screen porch or at the backyard table and talk for an hour, he steadfastly and politely refused her invitations to come inside the house.