Flying Solo(86)

We just lost track of each other, kinda slow, Laurie repeated inside her own head, looking at Nick and looking down at her hands. “But we still knew some people in common, so I’d hear how she was doing now and then. At least until everybody got so old.” He chuckled. “But a few years after my wife was gone, this would have been maybe five years ago, I did call her.” For a minute, he just looked down at the picture. “I was lonely. Bored. I called her up, said ‘Dot, how have you been?’ And we were on the phone probably two hours. Talked about you, talked about your brothers. Your mom. My kids.”

“That must have been really something,” Nick said.

“It really was.” He reached over and put the photo on his windowsill, propped up in front of a small flowerpot. “I sure loved her.”

“I did, too,” Laurie said.

“She was proud of you, you know,” he said. “When we talked, she was ‘oh, my niece the writer’ this and ‘oh, she’s in a magazine’ that. Don’t tell anybody else, but I think you were her favorite.”

“She was my favorite, too.”

They stayed with John for a couple of hours. They ate lunch with him in the dining room, where they sat at a big round table with a couple and two single women in their seventies. Everyone who walked by would put a hand on John’s shoulder, ask him how he was doing, drop a piece of gossip or ask him how the food was. The food was forgettable, honestly, institutional and resolutely acceptable, but the place hummed with overlapping casual and less casual bonds, like a college dining hall.

When it was time to go, John walked them out to the lobby. Laurie admired his straight back, his confident walk. Dot would have added him to her list of people in their nineties who aged well. In fact, she probably had. He took both of Laurie’s hands and said, “I am so glad that you came by.”

“It was my pleasure,” she said. And she leaned over and kissed his cheek. She picked up a Gatecrest brochure, plucked a pen off the desk, and wrote her phone number on the back. “Call me anytime you want to chat. Really.”

“Nick,” John said, and they shook hands. “Thank you for putting this together for us.”

Nick nodded. “If you don’t mind my saying so, sir, you might enjoy meeting my grandmother. Maybe I’ll bring her by sometime.”

“What a good idea,” Laurie said, thinking about his need to connect things to other things, people to other people, a person to a book, a woman to her family.

“I’d love that,” John said. “You stay in touch.” Laurie could tell John didn’t really think this would happen, and she couldn’t blame him. He would logically think this was the hollow let’s get together soon that you say at the end of a class reunion, but that was only because he didn’t know Nick. Laurie, on the other hand, would have bet a hundred dollars Nick would be back here with Ginger within a month.

They drove home the longest way possible, taking apart and turning over every detail of what he had told them. That Dot had made something beautiful, something she and someone she loved were very proud of, but something she didn’t think she could talk about. It had been enough for her to have it, to keep it, and maybe to know that someday, someone would find it when she was gone. You don’t keep a thing for fifty years by accident, Nick said; not even a secret. He figured that Dot might even have known that Laurie would be the one to find it, the one to figure out what it was. Maybe this was a stretch, but it was as good a version of the story as any, and Laurie gravitated eagerly toward it. This faith in Laurie’s capacity to discover might not have been true of Dot, but it felt true to Dot.

By the time they pulled up in front of Dot’s house, it was gray and the air was heavy, and it had started to drizzle. “Do you want to come inside?” Laurie said. “I can make tea or something.”

He looked over at her. “I know that you’re leaving in a few days.”

“Yes.”

“I just wanted to say that before I come in, because I don’t want you to think I’m not listening.”

She nodded. “Let’s go in.”

There was not tea. They stumbled through the kitchen wrapped around each other, up the stairs with her tugging his hand, into the bedroom with their shirts already halfway off. In the big bed they sweated and laughed and she tried to memorize exactly how it felt to be under his weight, or hovering over him with her hair falling onto his cheek, or lying with her face buried in the side of his neck with her eyes closed while their hands worked under the covers. She couldn’t keep it, this feeling. It was a thing she had started, knowing that it would end. And while she would not be the first woman to ever feel a love story slipping away, she wished she could stitch it or carve it or quilt it and then save it, tucked into the bottom of a cedar chest and never entirely gone.





Chapter Thirty


They fell asleep with the damp gray afternoon darkening the windows, and by the time they woke up, it was raining. “I should get home,” Nick said. “I know you have a lot to do.” He rolled out of bed and started pulling on his clothes.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yes.” He turned around to smile at her. “I’m okay. I mean…I’m going to miss you, Laur. But I’m okay.” He put on his watch, which he had set on the nightstand, and he looked back at her, still stretched out in the bed in only the T-shirt she’d pulled on before she fell asleep. He raised an eyebrow at her. “I’m going to remember you exactly like this. Forever. In my dreams. When I’m John Harlan hanging out with my ninety-year-old friends griping about the food in the dining room, I’m going to remember you mostly naked while it pours down rain outside, and I’m going to be the happiest guy there.”