A Thread So Thin (8 page)

“Oh, no. Nothing like that,” Liza answered immediately, and that made me suspicious. When she wasn’t being truthful, Liza had a tendency to respond to questions rapidly, as if she’d prepared her answers in advance.

“Charlie didn’t have anything to do with this. I’m really just interested in knowing more about people’s opinions on marriage.”

“Mmm,” I murmured, not entirely convinced.

Liza wasn’t acting like herself this evening. She was working on a third glass of cabernet, but the wine hadn’t mellowed her in the least. She seemed nervous. We’d been working for nearly an hour, but she had yet to stitch a single “scale” onto the tail of her quilted mermaid. Instead she just kept sorting and re-sorting the pile of pearl-colored paillettes, moving them around like a picky toddler pushing peas around a dinner plate. Something was bothering her. On a night when I was less preoccupied with my own concerns, I might have tried to dig deeper.

“This isn’t the kind of thing I can give a simple yes or no answer to, Liza. It’s not that easy. I spent more than half my life with Rob. We were happy. Not all of the time, but much of it. Even now, I wouldn’t want to give back a single one of those happy memories.

“But yes, when Rob told me he didn’t love me anymore, that our marriage was over, I felt like my world had come to an end. In a way, it had. The end of our marriage marked the end of my life as a couple. What I didn’t know at the time was that it also marked the beginning of my new life as an individual.

“It’s been hard. But in many ways, I find life richer and more satisfying now than it’s ever been. I’ve only been in New Bern a couple of years, but I actually feel more at home here than I did after twenty years in Texas. This is my home. Where I’ve got wonderful friends,” I said and lifted my glass a hair to acknowledge them, “the best ever. And, if it doesn’t sound too conceited to say so, I’m really proud of this shop. When I stumbled down the alley, spotted this awful, broken-down building, and decided to open a quilt shop in it, maybe one person in a hundred would have given odds on it surviving the first year.”

“Oh, I don’t think the odds were nearly that good,” Abigail said with a smile. “More like one in a thousand.”

“You’re probably right. But,” I said, “they were wrong! All of them. I
did
survive that first year and the next and the next one after that. I didn’t do it alone, of course. Without all of you, I’d have closed in six months. But I did have all of you, and Cobbled Court Quilts became what I always hoped it could be: a real community, a place where people make friends, and are friends, and slog their way through life arm in arm.

“Look at it now,” I said, spreading my hands out to encompass every foot of this wonderful, formerly ramshackle old ruin of a building, the embodiment of my dream come true. “The oddsmakers were betting against us a thousand to one, but here we all are. Maybe that’s my point. When it comes to making the big choices, the ones that really matter—falling in love, following your dreams, taking a chance—you can’t just sit down and tally up the odds. If you try to make important choices based on the odds of winning and losing, you’ll never make any choices at all.

“A person can think this out all they want, and they should. Carefully.
If
I ever decide to marry again,” I said, giving Abigail a pointed glance, “you can bet I’ll sit down and give it a lot of serious, practical thought beforehand. Much more than I did the first time. But even so, even after calculating all the pros and cons, compatibilities and differences, in the end it would involve a huge leap of faith on my part. It does for everybody. Liza, there’s not a marriage in the world that comes with a gilt-edged guarantee. There never has been.”

G
arrett and I had breakfast at the Blue Bean on Saturday morning.

We drank coffee and ate bagels spread thick with cream cheese and raspberry jam, talked about how my research for Professor Williams was coming along, and the classes I would be taking next semester, and the website design business Garrett was starting on the side.

We talked about everything under the sun except the elephant in the room: Garrett’s proposal and my answer.

After breakfast, we walked down Commerce Street, looking into the shop windows with the signs offering twenty percent off merchandise that hadn’t sold over the holidays. This time of year the temperature in New Bern rarely rises much above twenty, but when the sun is shining, glinting a mirage of diamond dust off the snow, it feels warmer, especially if you’re walking next to someone you love with his arm around your shoulders and your hand tucked into his jacket pocket because you lost one of your gloves.

For a little while, I forgot all about the elephant, the unanswered questions of life, everything except the fact that when Garrett looks at me with his huge brown eyes, I feel beautiful, and when he laughs, my heart laughs along with him. Sweet.

We strolled toward Hidden Treasures, a shop that sells old silver, china, and estate jewelry. The display window was filled with a dazzling array of diamond, emerald, ruby, and sapphire jewelry. But it was a less ostentatious piece that caught Garrett’s eye, an art deco bracelet with alternating rectangles of green chalcedony and black onyx in a simple silver setting. Exactly the piece I’d have chosen if Garrett had asked me which I liked best. But he didn’t have to ask. He knew me.

“I’ll get it for you,” he said. “Let’s go in.”

“Oh. No, you don’t have to do that. You already got me a Christmas present and—” I stopped, suddenly aware of the silver chain around my neck and the weight of the ring that hung from it, hidden beneath the bulk of my wool sweater. “Anyway, it’s probably too expensive.”

“It can’t hurt to ask. Besides, I can afford it. I never spend any money. New jeans twice a year, a couple of sweaters, and I’m all set. My paychecks just sit in the bank and collect dust. I should be doing more to support the local economy.”

“Oh, yeah? What about your addiction to all things technogeek? Your obsessive need to own the absolutely newest model of every electronic and computer gadget on the face of the earth? Not to mention your ever-growing collection of jazz recordings from the twenties and thirties, three-dimensional puzzles, and antique baseball cards. You’re a man of many hobbies. All of them expensive. Didn’t you just tell me that you started storing your towels in the oven because you needed more room in the linen closet to store the puzzles?”

Garrett grinned and shrugged. “Okay. So your boyfriend’s a big nerd. So what? But fortunately I’m a computer nerd, and that’s the best kind—very profitable. Didn’t I just tell you? I’ve got three new web design clients. I’m rolling in dough. Come on. Let’s go inside.” He lowered his arm from my shoulder to my waist and urged me toward the door of the shop.

“No, Garrett. Really. I don’t need it.”

“I know you don’t need it, but you want it, don’t you? It’s perfect for you.”

“No! I don’t want anything else. Not right now.”

My voice was emphatic, maybe a little more emphatic than I’d intended. I pulled my arm out of his grasp. The light went out of his eyes. Standing so far apart, I could suddenly feel how cold the day was.

Garrett looked at me. He didn’t say anything else about the bracelet. “Do you want to have dinner tonight?”

“Can’t. I really should get back to the city. I’ve got to finish cataloging those articles for Professor Williams. I really just came up for the quilt circle meeting. If I catch the one forty-five train out of Waterbury, I’ll be back in New York by four.”

Garrett nodded. “You need a ride to the station?”

“Thanks. That’d be great.” My feet were cold, the chill of the snow coming up through the soles of my boots. I looked at my watch. “I’d better go back and get my stuff, say good-bye to Abigail.”

“Yeah. Okay.”

We turned away from the store window, crossed the street and then the Green, leaving two trails of footprints in the snow, walking side by side with a shaft of sunlight beaming through the space between us, my hands in my pockets, balled up into fists, trying to generate their own warmth.

Back in New York, I continued my survey.

I posed my questions on marriage to a woman I sat next to on the train, my landlady, the lady who runs the cash register at the mini-mart on the corner, and two reference librarians. They all said pretty much the same thing that Evelyn had said, but less eloquently: It’s a big decision, love is crucial, but love isn’t always enough, and, no matter what, there are no guarantees.

But I want a guarantee. I
need
a guarantee.

I lost my father before I knew I had one. And I lost my mother, the only person I was ever sure I could count on, before I was even out of high school. Unless it’s happened to you, too, you can’t know what it was like. I sat by her bed in that white, sterile hospital, surrounded by monitors blinking green, numbers descending as the minutes passed, watching my mother’s chest rise and fall, rise and fall, rise and fall, until it didn’t anymore and she was gone.

And I was still here. Abandoned, orphaned, alone, and in pain, the kind of pain that rings in your ears and seeps out your eyelids and rakes your throat and heart and insides raw. The kind of pain I never want to feel again.

I want a guarantee. Please, someone give me a guarantee.

If I ask enough people, surely I will find someone, just one person who will tell me the secret to love that never ends. I want more time. And no matter how unrealistic it may be, I want a guarantee.

But reality is Monday night and a knock on my door and Garrett standing in the hallway with his eyes that see inside me, asking if he can come in. Reality is that you can question a million people and never find the answer you want to hear.

Reality is that I love Garrett and he loves me and he doesn’t want to wait any longer for an answer. Reality is that I’m afraid to put him off again, afraid that I’ll lose him now because I am so afraid of losing him someday. Reality is Professor Williams’s words echoing in my mind.

Of course I’m lonely. Aren’t you? Isn’t everybody?

And so I push down my fears, take a step back, open the door a little wider, and tell him to come inside.

“M
om, why do you keep tapping the brakes?”

“Because I want to make sure the other cars see me,” she answered indignantly. “I took a defensive driving class at the community center, and the instructor said you should tap your brakes every now and then to make sure you’re visible to other drivers.”

“Oh,” I said.

I wondered if Mom and the instructor had the same definition of “every now and then.” To Mom, it seemed to mean about every twenty feet, which meant a fifteen-minute drive to the grocery store took about twice as long as it should. She’s cautious. So cautious that she’s a little bit dangerous.

Other drivers were impatient with her pace and following too close, probably thinking this would urge her to increase her speed, but it only made her nervous, and that made her drive even slower. A teenager following us in a green Mustang honked his horn. It rattled her so much that she didn’t see the stop sign and went straight through the intersection. Fortunately, there were no other cars waiting at the four-way stop.

“Mom,” I said, trying to sound casual. “Do you want me to drive?”

“No!” she snapped. “I do not. I’m perfectly capable of doing it myself. I’ve been driving for sixty years and I’ve never had an accident….”

Not yet.

She shouldn’t be driving, not anymore, but living alone with her only daughter hundreds of miles away, what other choice does she have?

I only arrived yesterday, so it’s hard for me to know for sure exactly how things are with Mom, but I was relieved to see that she looks about the same as she did last time I came home. A little thinner, though. Her gait seemed as steady as ever. Perhaps her fall on the ice was exactly what she said, just one of those things, the hazards of living in a cold climate. It could happen to anyone at any age, right?

To celebrate my arrival, Mom made my favorite meal from childhood: T-bone steaks, a layered salad with iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, peas, bacon bits, cheddar cheese, and a thick layer of mayonnaise, plus her famous twice-baked potatoes stuffed with sour cream, more cheddar cheese, and a sprinkling of chives to make them look pretty. Dessert was homemade caramel pecan bars and vanilla ice cream.

The total cholesterol count for that meal was enough to make a cardiologist break into a cold sweat, but these were the dinners I, and everyone I knew, grew up eating. How it is possible that we ate this stuff and didn’t grow up to be as fat and round as a flock of Butterball turkeys, I can’t tell you, but we did. I suppose only getting three TV channels—the fuzzy picture beamed in via a set of rabbit-ear antennae—may have had something to do with it. Lacking the endless choice of electronic enticements that kids have today, my friends and I spent a good part of our time playing outside—red light, green light and kick the can in the summer, snowball fights and ice skating in the winter.

Mom and I sat at the table after supper, laughing and talking and remembering those times. She remembers so much. She told me about buying this house soon after she and Dad were married, how she was sure they’d never be able to make the payments and how, trying to think of every way she could save money, she’d served variations of cheese or tuna and noodle casseroles every night for almost two weeks until one evening Dad came home from work in a huff, slapped a paper-wrapped packet containing a five-pound rump roast on the counter, and said, “Virginia, I don’t want to see another noodle on my dinner plate until the spring thaw.”

He didn’t, and they managed to make the mortgage payments just the same.

Mom told me all about those happy, early days in this house she was sure they couldn’t afford. She told me how Snowball, the first in a series of rescue cats, just walked in the back door one day, settled herself into the sunny kitchen window, looked at Mom as if to say, “Well? Are you going to just stand there or get me a saucer of cream?” and never left. Mom was a firm believer that cats adopted their people, not the other way around. Mom’s current feline resident was a very regal, very fluffy, and very spoiled tortoiseshell tomcat. Apparently, when Mom brought Petunia home from the rescue shelter, the paperwork listing gender had been in error. By the time the vet pointed this out, it was too late to change; Petunia was already used to his name. At least that’s what Mom says.

With Petunia sitting on her lap, sleeping, Mom told me how she’d gone about making the old place into a home and how, in the days before strippable wallpaper, she’d spent hours and hours steaming and scraping dark, flocked papers off the walls, then repainting them herself.

“Oh, there was miles of that stuff,” Mom said, shuddering at the memory. “Once I got it off, I vowed I’d never have another inch of wallpaper in my house. And I didn’t, until you were born. I saw that Bo Peep paper at the hardware store and just couldn’t resist.”

“That’s right! I’d almost forgotten about that!” I exclaimed, pouring a stream of honest-to-heaven cream into my coffee and stirring it. “The sheep were all hiding behind fences or under bushes, and there was poor Bo Peep standing there in her big pink skirt and looking confused.”

Mom smiled. “You loved that paper—right until the day you turned nine and decided you were too big to have animals on your walls. So I pulled out the steamer again and took it all off.”

“You spoiled me.”

“A little,” she said, and patted my hand affectionately. “But you turned out all right.”

We sat up reminiscing for hours. When I finally climbed into bed in my now sheepless and Peepless childhood bedroom, I slept well, sure that I’d been worrying over nothing and that Mom was as capable as she’d ever been.

But when I got up the next day I started to notice things, little things, that concerned me.

Mom has always been a meticulous housekeeper. The house was still clean; there wasn’t the least sign of clutter anywhere. Her collection of Hummel figurines was lined up neatly in the china hutch in exactly the same order it’d stood in since I was a girl. But there was a layer of dust on the glass shelf of the hutch. In the bathroom, I noticed that the grout between the bathroom tiles was chipping. That kind of thing would have never escaped her notice in the past. The lenses of her glasses were a little thicker than they’d been when I last saw her. I wondered if she could still see the dusty corners and neglected repairs in the old house. And, in spite of the sumptuous repast she’d cooked for me the night before, when I opened the refrigerator in the morning, the pickings inside were surprisingly thin.

The freezer held a half-eaten pint of vanilla ice cream, left over from the previous night, two microwavable chicken and rice entrees, and a package of English muffins. I pulled out two of the muffins to toast for breakfast, spreading them with homemade raspberry jam because I couldn’t find any butter. After that, I checked out the cupboards. They weren’t much better stocked than the refrigerator, containing only a box of wheat crackers, a half dozen cans of condensed soup, and some tomato paste.

What had she been eating?

“Oh, I just haven’t been to the market,” she said when I asked her later. “I wasn’t sure what you’d want to eat, so I decided to hold off until we could go together.”

And I guess that could be true, but when I took another look and saw how loose her pants were around the waist, I wondered.

It took a good half hour to locate the car keys. Mom finally found them in the pocket of her other coat. When we were halfway to the store she remembered that she’d left the shopping list on the kitchen counter. She wanted to go back home and get it, but I assured her that we’d be fine without it and so, like a pair of speeding turtles, we continued on our journey. We finally pulled into the parking lot of Aldi’s grocery a good hour and a half after we’d decided to make the trip.

Inside the store, I was pleased to see that so many people knew Mom and were happy to see her—and me. Mr. Segers, the butcher, stood behind the meat counter in his spotless white apron and cap, just as he had when I was a teenager.

“Evelyn! Haven’t seen you in a long time! How are you? How’s your boy?”

“Garrett’s fine. He lives in Connecticut now. Does all the computer work for my quilt shop.”

“Does he? Well, isn’t that something. Time sure flies, doesn’t it? Last time I saw him he was just so high.” He held his hand flat at a spot a little above his waist. “That was back when you and your husband came out to visit your folks in the summer. I gave him a slice of braunschweiger to try. He didn’t like that at all.”

The old man laughed, remembering the look on Garrett’s face when he took a bite of the unknown delicacy and realized that braunschweiger had liver in it.

“It’s good to see you, Evelyn. You, too, Mrs. Wade. Where’ve you been lately?”

“Oh, I came in just a couple of days ago,” Mom said airily. “Picked up two nice T-bones. You must have been on a break.”

“Must have been,” he said with a nod and then clapped his hands together. “Now, what can I get for you today? We’ve got some nice, thick pork chops on special.”

We took two pork chops, two chicken breasts, and a half pound of sliced turkey for sandwiches before heading over to the produce and dairy departments, where the various clerks expressed delight over seeing Mom, echoing the butcher’s comment about how long it had been. Mom had answers for them all, explanations as to how they might have missed her, but I wasn’t buying it. She obviously wasn’t getting to the store as often as she used to. Maybe because the driving had become too hard for her, or maybe because cooking for one seemed like a lot of bother for nothing, but whatever the reason, she clearly wasn’t eating as well as she should.

By the time we got home and unpacked the groceries, with Petunia winding hopefully around our legs until Mom opened the packet of deli meat and fed him some turkey, it was almost noon. I told Mom I wanted to take her out for lunch.

“Well, that’s silly. We just bought some perfectly good lunch meat. It won’t take me two shakes to make sandwiches. Why spend money going out to eat?”

“Because your only daughter’s in town and she wants to spoil you a little, that’s why. Come on. Get your purse. We’ll make sandwiches tomorrow.”

“Well, I don’t know,” she said, reaching up to pat her hair. “I’m not dressed to go out to lunch. I look just awful.”

“What are you talking about? You look great. You always look great.”

“Oh, don’t give me that,” she said, shooing the compliment away with her hand. “My face looks like fifty miles of bad road. Well”—she shrugged—“if you’re set on going out…. But at least let me go fix myself up a little first. I’m not going anywhere without lipstick and earrings.”

A new restaurant had opened near the college. Mom said she’d heard it was good, so that’s where we went. After a little resistance, she let me drive. I ordered a bowl of butternut apple soup and a green salad. Mom got the Southwestern chicken salad.

“What’s this?” she asked suspiciously, poking at a white sliver of vegetable with her fork.

“Jicama. It’s from Mexico—tastes kind of like a potato, but sweeter. Try it.”

She took a tentative nibble. “Mmm. It’s good. Crunchy.”

I tasted my soup, which was delicious, and made a mental note to ask the waitress for the recipe. Some men want a present when their girlfriend goes on a trip, but Charlie is just as happy with a new soup recipe.

“It’s so nice to see you, Mom. I wish you lived closer so we could get together more often. You know, now that you’re living alone, the house must be an awful—”

Mom put down her salad fork. “Evelyn, don’t say another word. I knew you’d come out here with ulterior motives. But you listen to me, young lady, and listen well. I was born in Wisconsin and I will die in Wisconsin! I am not moving and that is all there is to it!”

I held up my hands, warding off this verbal attack. “Okay! All right. I’m just concerned about you. I hate being so far away from you.”

“Well, who says you have to be? If somebody has to move, then why not you? Go right ahead. But I’m not pulling up stakes and leaving behind eighty years of memories just because you’re a worry-wart. Honestly, I don’t know what you’ve got to be concerned about. I’m perfectly fine.”

The time had come to lay my cards on the table.

“Mom, that’s not entirely true and you know it. You’re nervous about driving. Admit it,” I said, stopping her before she could contradict me. “Driving is getting to be hard for you. So hard that you don’t even want to go to the store anymore. Other than the incredible meal you made for me last night, the ingredients of which I’m pretty sure you asked a neighbor to pick up for you…”

She didn’t say anything to this, just pressed her lips into a thin line of irritation.

“…I bet you haven’t been to the market in weeks, have you? There is hardly any food in the house. Everybody at the store was so surprised to see you.”

“That’s ridiculous. I get to the store as often as I ever have. I can’t help it if people are too busy to notice me when I am there. Who notices an old lady, anyway? The only reason they were so friendly this morning is because you were with me.”

I decided to let this pass. I love my mother. I didn’t want to accuse her of lying to me, even though I knew she was.

“But you
have
lost weight, Mom. Those pants are hanging off you.”

“Oh, they are not,” she said dismissively. “Yes, I’ve lost a little weight. Big deal. Two or three pounds, but what’s wrong with that? I just started getting some exercise is all. The doctor’s been after me to do more walking, so I finally listened to him. Last month I started taking a walk every afternoon before supper—three times around the block.”

She started a walking regimen? In Wisconsin? In January, when the average temperature is sixteen degrees and the snow is three feet deep? I didn’t think so.

“What about your fall? You could have really gotten hurt, broken a hip or something.”

“For goodness’ sakes, Evelyn, it was just a fall! I slipped on the ice. Could have happened to anyone. Haven’t you ever fallen on ice?”

“Sure, of course—”

“Well, there you go,” she interrupted. “One little fall doesn’t mean I’m doddering. Not yet anyway.” She bent her head over her salad and stabbed a chunk of chicken with her fork.