All Our Yesterdays (40 page)

The lightning flickered again and one of the puppies picked it up, or picked up the sound of thunder still inaudible to Chris and Gus. She scuttled under Gus’s chair. The other two ignored her and continued to snuffle through the grass, bumping frequently into each other. Two were ticked chocolate-white, one was nearly all chocolate.

“Piper wants to be mayor on his own.”

“So he hires Flaherty’s heroic prosecutor,” Gus said.

“Yeah. He figures I appeal to the Micks, being Irish, and to the Goo Goos, being Harvard.”

“Piper’s too stupid to have thought that up.”

“I think Mary Alice put it together.”

“Probably,” Gus said.

“She’s a hell of a woman,” Chris said.

“I know.”

“I gave her your address.”

“Yeah. She’s been out here.”

Chris waited. Gus said nothing more. Chris didn’t press.

“I’m seeing Grace tonight,” Chris said.

“I hope it’s all right,” Gus said.

“Either way, I’ll be all right,” Chris said.

“Good,” Gus said. He stood and walked with Chris to the car.

“I’ll be over this weekend, if you want, to help.”

Gus nodded.

“Good luck tonight,” he said.

“Thanks,” Chris said.

The lightning flickered again, and now for the first time they could hear, faintly and long after the flash, the sound of the thunder. All the puppies heard it and scrambled trying to get under Gus’s feet.

He bent and scooped them up in his arms, and held them, squirming and scared.

“We’ll be fine,” Gus said.

“Yes, we will,” Chris said.

He and his father stood silently for a moment, then his father put a free arm around Chris’s shoulder and hugged him. Chris hugged him back for a moment and pressed his cheek against his father’s face, feeling the day-old stubble of his father’s beard. Then he got in the car and drove away.

After he was gone Gus took the puppies inside and fed them and, when they had eaten, followed them outside. The thunder had stopped for the moment, and so, no longer hearing thunder, they forgot that there had been thunder. He stood on the porch watching them as they made their final run of the day across the meadow. It was evening and he could no longer see the river. All he could see were the three dogs, against the now darkening grass, running, sniffing the ground, tracking, jostling one another, occasionally stopping to roll in the grass, and jumping up
again to run free across his land, where his house stood that he was building with his son. There were a few wide slow flakes of snow beginning to spiral down. The thunder sounded louder, and the dogs turned and started back, away from the river, like horses for the barn, picking up speed as they came, running full out their still uncoordinated, ambling puppy run, only white showing now, in the grassscented darkness, running toward home, toward him. He could see them so brightly and then they blurred and he realized he was crying…. And though he tried as hard as he was able, he couldn’t remember when he’d done it last.

T
he snow had stopped and there was a faint milky hint of dawn outside Grace’s window.

“Two sleepy people,” I said. “By dawn’s early light …”

“I’m not sleepy,” Grace said.

“I was sort of implying the next lines of the song.”

“I know,” Grace said.

I stood and went to the window and looked out. The cars in the parking lot were shapeless with snow. We’d have to dig to get out of here. A big plow came slowly down Grace’s street, the thick, wet snow peeling off the canted blade. There was no thunder anymore, no lightning. The mercury streetlights were still on, looking yellow in the encroaching morning. I turned back toward Grace.

“I’m done,” I said. “I don’t have anything else to say.”

“How do you feel about this police-commissioner thing?” Grace said.

“Scared.”

“Of?”

“Of the responsibility. Of facing the men, when I’ve never even been a cop. Scared I’m not tough enough.”

“Why’d you take the job?” Grace said.

“All the reasons I took the special prosecutor job.”

“And?”

I took my hands from my pockets and locked them behind my head and pressed my neck back against them.

“There’s more?” I said.

“I think so.”

“Yeah. There is.”

“Gus,” Grace said.

“Yeah. When I saw him this afternoon, actually I guess it’s yesterday afternoon, now, I … there was a point where he picked up all three of the puppies—they were scared of the thunder—and held them in one arm. And they sort of squirmed in against him. It haunts me. That image of him … he has an arm like a tree limb, you know? and these three little brown heads peering out. It’s my father. I wanted to sit in his lap.”

“You did it for Gus?”

“No, not quite. I did it because of Gus. Because of who he is and was and what he is and did, and because Gus never got it straight with his father, and who the hell knows what my grandfather had going with his father. And because … I don’t know. Just because.”

“This is my beloved son,” Grace said, “in whom I am well pleased.”

Grace’s face was tired. It was almost shocking to see. She never got tired. She never looked tired. The strain of the night had been for her one of restraint, of listening, of containing herself while I ran free.

“And what about us?” Grace said.

“Ah,” I said, “the overwhelming question.”

“The other man is gone,” Grace said.

I held on. Don’t spill it now.

“That’s a start,” I said.

I could hear the clatter of the plow, softened by snow, as it forced its way along Grace’s street.

“You’re alone now.”

“Yes.”

“I would like to marry you,” I said.

Grace was quiet.

“Or I want to say good-bye.”

Grace stayed quiet. I was quiet with her.

“You can do that?” Grace said.

“Yes. I told you when I came in. I’ll miss you for a while. I’ll be sad for a while. And I’ll find someone else in a while and be happy with her.”

“There’s Gus,” Grace said.

“Gus?”

“In your eyes, in your voice,” Grace said. “I don’t know the word for it. A benign craziness, maybe. ‘Here I come and the hell with you.’”

“Remember the puppies,” I said.

“Yes.”

There was no sun, the clouds were still too thick. But the faint luminosity of the morning became a little pinkish as the sun came up behind them.

“When you said you would like to marry me,” Grace said, “what were the conditions?”

“Monogamy,” I said.

“No others?”

“None.”

“Seems a reasonable condition.”

I waited. The morning was entirely quiet. The street outside Grace’s place was cleared and the plow had moved on.

“When you said you wanted to marry me,” Grace said, “was that a formal proposal?”

“You may consider it such,” I said.

“Then I accept,” Grace said.

The morning was slowly warming and the wet snow that had piled up during the night had already begun to melt. I could hear in the silence the slow, wet sound of its melting as it dripped from the window ledge and the eaves.

“Are you too tired to make love?” Grace said.

“No,” I said, and the opening in my throat seemed very narrow.

“Then I think we should each shower,” Grace said, “and brush our teeth, and go upstairs, and lie down, and start over.”

“Yes,” I said. And we did.