Around the Bend (33 page)

“You know about Matt and Vinny and the tour?” Lillian said, clearly not the only surprised one in the room.

I nodded. “I just came from the Dog-Gone-Good Show. Harvey won Best Dog Overall, as well as the talent portion.”

A smile stole across Lillian’s normally still features. “That’s good. Dave would have liked that.”

“You were the one who kept Harvey between shows?” It all made sense now. Neither Susan nor Annie had housed Harvey. I’d just assumed he stayed with either Matt or Vinny or at some fancy-dancy dog boarding house when he wasn’t with Dave. I hadn’t even considered that Lillian was involved.

“Dave came to me, after you said no to the idea of a dog.” She shook a sugar packet, the granules settling into the base, before she tore off the top. “I’m not blaming you, Penny. If Harvey had been a cat or a cockatoo, I would have said no, too. I’ve just always loved dogs, especially Jack Russells because I had one when I was a little girl. For me, deciding to take in
Harvey was easy.” She stirred some sugar into her glass. Ice cubes clinked together, a quiet melody underlying Lillian’s words. “After Dave’s father died, I was lonely. Really lonely. Harvey, bless his little heart, helped fill that gap. He gave me something to do, something to look forward to every day.”

The chronology fell into place. Dave had found the dog, about a month after his father passed away, and at the same time as I’d been promoted, thus making me busier and less available if Dave had needed to talk. And much less open to the idea of a pet.

“I should have been there for Dave,” I said, understanding now, after going through the shock of losing someone, how much the death of his father must have hurt, and how little I had listened in those days, thinking he was just fine. He was a guy; he didn’t break down and cry. He went to work, more than ever before. I’d thought by making sure he had everything packed, by printing out his itinerary and by keeping everything smoothly running in the house, I was doing what helped Dave. I’d been so busy doing “the right thing,” that I’d never even noticed the chasm opening up between us. “He needed me, but I didn’t even see it. He never broke down, never had an off day.”

“Oh, you know Dave, sweetie. That man would have had a smile on his face if he was sinking on the
Titanic.
” She patted my knee. “He wasn’t much for sharing his feelings, even when he was little. If he needed you, he should have spoken up.”

“I was his wife. I should have known.”

“Bullshit,” Lillian said, surprising me with the curse out of her perfectly made-up mouth. “Whoever said that is an idiot. I was married for forty years to Larry Reynolds and I didn’t
know much more than the way he took his steak. Most men are impossible to read. They keep everything inside, like they’re saving it for a rainy day.”

I smoothed the condensation off my glass and then inhaled a deep breath. I had to tell her sometime. “Lillian, it was more than that. Dave married someone else.”

She paled and grew very still. “Married someone else? When? Before you?”

“Five years ago. While he was still married to me. That’s who Susan is. His other wife.”

Lillian’s mouth formed a perfect, open O. The facts came together in her mind, as they had in mine, and I saw her fit missing pieces into her own mental puzzle. “That explains a lot.”

“I’ve met Susan and you would like her. You also would have liked Annie, who was Dave’s…friend, I guess. He never married her.” I left off the rest of the details with the Annie story. Lillian didn’t need to know it all. I thought again of the keys and where they fit into this picture.

“My son was juggling three women? This from the kid who couldn’t keep up with the track team at practice?”

I laughed, more heartily than I had in weeks. “I guess so. If it helps, though, I think he did it for more or less unselfish reasons.”

Lillian sighed and put her glass down. She watched a blue jay flutter against a feeder hanging off a wrought-iron shepherd’s hook in the yard, spilling as much seed as it ate. “When Dave was young, I was so busy, wrapped up in helping Larry get his law practice off the ground, then Kevin came along and he was so colicky…” She ran a hand over her face. “Dave and his father, they just didn’t get along, oil and water,
those two. Their personalities clashed from the first bottle Larry tried to give to Dave.” She shook her head, eyes filled with bittersweet memories. “Dave had his issues, too, Penny,” she went on. “He tried to get close to his dad, Lord knows he did, by helping him wherever he could, but for some reason, it never worked. Larry was a hard man to live with, God rest his soul, and I think Dave might have grown up needing that reassurance that he was loved. I’m not exactly a warm and fuzzy mother. I was always good at the baking-cookies and holding-birthday-parties part, but the cuddling over a story, that was never my strong suit. There always seemed to be another dish to wash or someone asking me to find a lost glove. Dave, I think, got kind of lost in the shuffle.” Lillian leaned forward and touched my knee. “You were good for him in many ways because you kept him on track, made him accountable. You know Dave. He’d run off on a tangent here or there, and forget to pay his bills or register the car.”

“But I didn’t give him what he needed emotionally.”

“And I bet he didn’t tell you what he needed either, did he?”

I shook my head.

Lillian’s gaze grew misty and she turned away, staring at a misshapen ceramic ashtray Dave had made in art class when he’d been a little boy. “Dave talked to me all the time about how much he wanted children.”

“I didn’t give him that, either.” I swallowed back the ache in my throat.

“Dave may have been a great father, but he wanted kids for all the wrong reasons. I think he thought they’d fill up the holes inside him.” She stirred her drink again but didn’t sip it. “I told him, over and over, that a child required love to be
given
, that they weren’t there to feed
you
the love. I don’t think he ever understood that.”

“Maybe that’s why Dave kept looking for a woman who could do everything. Give him children, love his dog and be able to read his thoughts.”

“Instead of realizing no one person can be everything to another.” Lillian smiled. “I loved my son and I always will, but he wasn’t perfect.”

I watched the bright blue bird return to the feeder, dart in and grab a sunflower seed. “Neither was I.”

“You didn’t go find another husband, though.”

“Yeah, there is that.” I drank some tea, then put the glass down. Lillian immediately refilled it, the action coming so quick I knew it was more instinct than intrusion. “But I’m okay with the wife thing now. It doesn’t mean I won’t go home and throw darts at his picture someday.”

Lillian laughed. “I may be his mother but I’m also a woman, too, and I wouldn’t blame you one bit if you did that.”

Then I told Lillian what Susan had told me, how Dave had helped her. I did the same with Annie’s story. I filtered it through the protective lens of a daughter-in-law who truly did like her mother-in-law and didn’t want to see Lillian any more hurt than she already was by the loss of her eldest child.

We laughed, we cried, and we mourned the man both of us had loved, in very different ways. At the end, I handed over the keys I’d found in Dave’s box, knowing now that they were to Lillian’s house. She thanked me, then stared at the keys for a long moment, finally seeing in the glint of metal, I thought, that her son was gone.

Then Lillian steeled herself, leaned over and hugged me tight. “I want you to take Harvey home with you.”

“But, Lillian, he’s been yours for years.”

“He’s already closer to you.” We looked down at the floor and noticed Harvey, at my feet, with a pile of toys he had dragged into the sunroom while we were talking. He’d mounded them beside my shoes, as if giving me a mountain of vinyl squeaky gifts. “And besides, I think that right now, the two of you need each other. To heal. He’ll give you something to do, Penny, in the days ahead. A reason to get up in the morning. Because there are going to be days when this will hit you as hard as a brick wall and you’re going to need a reason to move forward.”

“What are you going to do?”

She smiled and looked out over the grassy space behind the sunroom. “I’ve been thinking about getting one of those Chihuahuas. Spoil the heck out of her, dressing her up in raincoats and tutus. I’m an old lady, I’m expected to have a dog like that. And, it’ll be fun to see if I can teach an old dog new tricks.”

“You mean a young dog.”

“No,” Lillian said, laughing. “I meant
this
old dog. Change is good and it’s about time I had one.”

I left my mother-in-law later that afternoon, promising to return again in a few months so that she and Harvey could see each other. Walking away from Lillian’s house seemed to close one more chapter. There might always be, I realized, a few loose threads in Dave’s life. You couldn’t tear apart the fabric of a life and not leave a few things unconnected. But I had enough of them tied together that I could stop searching and start concentrating on me.

“If this Chihuahua works out,” I whispered to Harvey as we left, “you better practice your bullfighting. I have a feeling you won’t be the only dog in the retirement community going after her heart.”

Harvey let out a bark that said he was up to the challenge.

I sat in the living room of the house I’d once shared with my husband, staring at his picture on the mantel, sipping a glass of wine. A fire roared in the fireplace, that day’s newspaper lay in a disarrayed pile on the floor, spun out of control by Harvey’s frantic feet. Half of me wanted to stack the papers again, to lay them on the coffee table in a pristine pile in alphabetical section order, but I had learned that life was too short to be stacking the newspaper and vacuuming straight lines into my carpet.

I was alone, except for Harvey, and had been for several weeks. At first, it had been harder than I expected to be alone. My husband had traveled all the time, I’d thought I was used to solitary life. But with the knowledge that he wasn’t going to walk through the door, that he wasn’t going to be the one to plant the mums, I had to find a new existence. So I planted my own mums, hired a neighborhood kid to mow the lawn and repainted my bedroom yellow.

I’d spent a lot of time going over the past in those first
couple weeks, before I finally realized I couldn’t change it so there wasn’t much sense in rehashing it.

On the notepad on my lap—I may have changed, but I hadn’t gotten rid of my lists—I scribbled the words
Life List.
I wrote a numeral one and then added a single item:
Move forward.

That was enough for now.

When I was done, I raised my glass toward my husband’s picture, still sitting on the mantel and, thus far, unmarred by darts. “Thank you, Dave, for sending me on a journey that changed my life.”

He smiled back at me, the same perpetual smile that Olan Mills had captured a few years back.

“And thank you for the dog. About him, you were right. The other wives, not such a good idea.”

Dave kept on smiling.

I would love him, maybe for the rest of my life, but I doubted I would ever truly understand what had driven my husband to keep all these secrets from me instead of simply having a conversation and trying to mend the broken toy he already had, as Annie had said.

Now it was time to put all this behind me. I glanced again at the list.

Move forward.

I picked up the phone and dialed a number I had memorized from the first time I saw it inside the box. Matt picked up on the first ring. “Hi,” I said, not sure yet what I wanted to say. Writing
move forward
was a lot easier than actually doing it.

“Hi,” he said back, delighted surprise raising his tone a few notes. “How are you?”

“Much better. Doing okay all by myself, which surprises me. I even fixed the faucet last week.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“I was thinking,” I began, fingering the notebook beside me, the same one that Dave had left with Harvey’s things. I ran my nail down the itinerary of the six-city tour. One thing that was good about being a workaholic, I had enough vacation built up to take a month, maybe two, off from work. “I’d like to take a trip. To Denver, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, San Diego. Maybe a couple other places, too.”

I could practically hear Matt grinning as he recognized the list of cities. “Planning on taking a certain dog along?”

“I’ll have to. I haven’t mastered the picking-out-the-banana trick yet. Harvey’s still the king at that.”

Matt laughed. “Do you want some company?”

“Yes,” I said. “That would be nice.”

“Good.” The huskiness of that one word sent a remix of the music he’d played in his kiss zipping through my veins. “Then I’ll meet you in Denver on the twelfth.”

Matt and I talked a little while longer, then we said goodbye and hung up.

Anticipation rose inside me, a feeling I hadn’t had in years. Would something come of the relationship between me and Matt? It was still too soon to tell and too soon for me to want anyone else in my life on anything other than a part-time basis. Two months after losing my husband, I was still working through being alone.

I’d divided the estate evenly between the four of us, because I’d figured that was what Dave would have wanted—for Susan, Annie and his mother to be taken care of as well
as me. There was plenty to divide. Matt had been right—Harvey was a cash cow. There’d been enough for Susan to finish her education, for Annie to buy a house and pay off the medical bills. I’d even sent a little to Norm and Rita, and their new baby boy, whom they had named Harvey. Poor kid. His photo sat to the left of Dave’s on the mantel. Norm had traded his singing ambitions for a job as a mechanic, but with the check I planned on sending them for their wedding gift, I hoped Norm would have enough money to afford a few days off for the upcoming
American Idol
tryouts. Who knew? Maybe I’d have two performers in my life.

Vinny still suffered the occasional flashback, but had told me he was planning on taking a Pekingese onstage next week. I asked him about the dog treats and he’d rattled something over the phone. “Plastic, baby, that’s the solution. Put the dog treats in this thing and it protects my banana, if you know what I mean.”

I’d had a letter from Susan last week, telling me about her budding relationship with Jerry, another from Annie today, saying that Max was on his way to being a star, if she could just get him to stop eating the Legos.

Someday, I’d stop by and see them again, but for now, I was working on the “Just Penny” campaign.

If you asked me, it was going quite well.

“Harvey,” I said, to the dog who was never far from my side and who had, as Lillian had promised, given me a reason to get up on the days when I’d rather have stayed in bed. “You up to another road trip?”

The dog did his frantic circle dance, spinning the newspaper across the room, then dashed away, returning a moment later with a clump of silver and gold in his mouth.
“My keys,” I said, laughing. “Are you a little anxious to go?”

He barked, then turned around and disappeared again. When he came back with a box of plastic wrap in his mouth, I knew Harvey was ready to move forward.

And so was I.