Bitter Sweet (52 page)
Four and a half, and I never even suspected- me, a Family Life teacher who spent years teaching high school students about contraception only to blithely ignore it myself. How stupid I was!
So what ‘re you going to do, Maggie?
I’m going to tell Eric.
Do you think he can get divorced and married to you before this baby is born?
I don’t know... I don’t know . . .
Propelled by the hope that he could, she started the engine and headed home.
Chapter 16
Maggie had never called Eric at home, not since the previous summer when she’d been depressed and had unwittingly started all this at Dr Feldstein’s prompting.
Dialling the phone that afternoon, she felt transparent, vulnerable. What she feared, happened: Anna answered.
‘Yeah, Severson’s Charters,’ came her gruff voice.
‘Hello, Anna. This is Maggie Stearn.’
‘Who?’
‘Maggie Pearson.’
‘Oh... Maggie Pearson. Well, I’ll bejiggered.’
‘How are you?’
The, I’m fine. Got a new granddaughter, you know.’
‘Yes, I heard. Congratulations.’
‘And a grandson just graduated.’
‘One of Mike’s.’
‘Yup. And a son living back at home.’
‘Yes, I... I heard that, too.’
‘But fishing’s good, business is good. You oughta come out sometime and try it.’
‘I’d like to, but I don’t get much free time anymore since I’ve opened the inn,’
‘I hear your place is doing good, too, huh?’
‘Yes. I’ve had guests nearly every night since I opened.’
‘Well, that’s just swell. Keeping ‘em happy, you know, that’s what brings ‘em back. Ask me and my boys.’
A lull fell and Maggie could think of no way to break it but to inquire baldly, ‘Anna, is Eric there?’
‘Nope. He’s got a party out. What did you want?’ ‘Could you have him call me, please?’
‘Oh . . .’ At’tcr a sortied blank Anna added, ‘Sure. Sure, I’ll do that. Expecting him in around six.’
‘Thank you, Anna.’
‘Yuh, well, bye then.’
‘Bye.’
When Maggie hung up, her hands were sweating.
When Anna hung up her mind was clicking.
Eric docked the Mary Deare at 6:o5. Anna watched from the office window as he joshed with the guests, led them to the fish-cleaning shack, gutted their catch and hung seven salmon on the ‘brag board’ for photographing.
At 6:3o he breezed into the office, inquiring, ‘Anything to eat, Ma?’
‘Yeah. I fixed you a roast beef sandwich and there’s iced tea in the fridge.’
He patted her on the butt as he circumnavigated the counter.
‘Thanks, Ma.’
‘Oh, by the way, Maggie Pearson called. She wants you to call her.’
He stopped as if he’d run into an invisible wall, and wheeled around, suddenly tense.
‘When?’
‘Oh, about four or so.’
‘Why didn’t you call me on the radio?’
‘Why should I of? You couldn’t call her till you got in anyways.’
He slapped the doorfram and hurried off with impatience in every movement. While the returning fishermen came in for cigarettes and potato chips, she heard him making the call from the kitchen, though his words were indistinct. Minutes later, he came out to the office, frowning.
‘Hey, Ma, have I got a
party?’
‘Yup,’ she replied, checking a clipboard. ‘Party of four.’
‘How about Mike?’
‘Mike? No, he’s open.’
‘When’s he due in?’
‘About a quarter hour or so.’
‘Would you call out and ask him if he’d mind taking my
for me?’
“Don’t mind at all, but what’s so important it comes before customers?’
‘I gotta run into town,’ he answered vaguely, already hustling toward the kitchen. Minutes later she heard the ancient water pipes thumping as he filled his tub for a bath.
When he came through the office fifteen minutes later he was freshly combed and shaved, smelling good enough to tick and dressed in dean white jeans and a red polo shirt.
‘Did you get Mike?’
‘up.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He’ll take ‘em.’
‘Thanks, Ma. Tell him thanks, too.’
He slammed out the front screen door, jogged all the way to his pickup and took off spraying a rooster tail of gravel while Anna, with raised eyebrows, stared after him.
So that’s the way the wind blows, she thought.
Maggie had said she’d meet him out at a little Baptist church in the country east of
She was squatting on her heels beside one of the grave markers when he pulled up. She studied him as he opened the truck door, then returned to her preoccupation as she bent forward with her dress of lettuce green spread about her.
He paused, savouring the sight of her in the streaked light of evening, pouring water from a shoebox onto a clump of purple flowers, rising to wend her way between the ancient, lichened headstones to a black iron pump where she refilled the cardboard box before carrying it, dripping, back o the chosen plot. She knelt once more and watered the flowers while overhead the doves mourned, the day retreated, and the scent of wild sweet clover grew heavy in the gathering damp.
He moved without haste, across the crackling gravel which had trapped the day’s heat, onto velvet grass which foretold the night’s cool, picking his way toward her between the loved ones from the Old Countries whose names could scarcely be read on the weatherworn markers.
Reaching her, he stood in the long shadows and touched the top of her head.
‘What are you doing, Maggie?’ he asked, his tone low, in keeping with the doves.
Still kneeling, she looked up over her shoulder. ‘Watering these poor withering phlox. This was all I had to carry water in.’
She set the damp cardboard box at her knee and bent forward to pull two scrawny weeds from among the purple blooms.
‘Why?’ he asked, kindly.
‘I just...’ Her voice broke, then resumed, pinched with emotion. ‘I just.., n... needed to.’
How quickly her distress could disturb him. The sound of her choked voice brought an anxious tightness to his chest as he squatted on his heels, catching her elbow gently, urging her to face him.
‘What’s the matter, Maggie M’girl?’
She resisted, keeping her face lowered, and rambled, distraught, as if to postpone some besetting subject. ‘Don’t you wonder who planted these? How long ago? How many years they’ve been coming up and surviving, unattended? I’d hoe around them a little bit if I had something to do it with, and try to get the qu... quack grass up. It’s ch...choking them.’
But she was the one who was choking.
‘Maggie, what is it?’
‘Do you have anything in your truck?’
Confused by her obvious distress and her reluctance to talk about it, he relented. I’ll see.’
His knees cracked as he rose and headed for the truck. A minute later he returned with a screwdriver and handed it to her before dropping again beside her to watch as she worked up the rocky soil and tugged at the crowded roots. He waited patiently until the pointless task was finished, then sdlled her hand with his own, closing it over her fingers and the tool.
‘Maggie, what is it?’ he asked in a near-whisper. ‘Will you tell me now?’
She sat back on her heels, rested the backs of her hands palm-up on her thighs and lifted sombre brown eyes to his.
‘I’m going to have your baby.’
The shock ripped across his features, caught him like a kick in the chest and set him back on his heels.
‘Oh, my God,’ he whispered, turning white. He glanced at her stomach, back up to her face. ‘You’re sure?’
‘Yes, I’m sure. I saw a doctor today.’
He swallowed once. His Adam’s apple jumped. ‘When?’
‘In about four and a half months.’
‘You’re that far along?’
She nodded.
‘So far that there’s no mistake? And not much risk of losing it?’
“No,’ she tried to whisper, though no sound came out.
A smile of sheer hosannah caught his face. ‘Maggie, this is wonderful!” he exclaimed, flinging his arms around her.
‘This is incredible!’ He shouted to the sky, ‘Did you hear that? We’re going to have a baby! Maggie and I are going to have a baby! Hug me, Maggie, hug me!’
She could do little else, for he’d wrapped himself around her like a bullwhip. With her larynx flattened by his shoulder her voice came out reedy. ‘My hands are dirty, and you’re crazy.’
‘I don’t give a damn, hug! Kneeling in the grass, she hugged him with her dirty hands pressing the middle of his back-screwdriver and all - soiling his red shirt. ‘Eric, you’re married to another woman who refuses to give you a divorce and I’m - we’re- forty years old. This isn’t wonderful at all, it’s horrible. And everyone in town will know it’s yours.’
He set her back by both arms. ‘You’re damned right they will, because I’ll tell them! No more dragging my feet over that divorce. I’ll have her off like an old shirt, and what’s forty anyway? Jesus, Maggie, I’ve wanted this for years and I’d given up hope. How can you not be happy?’
‘I’m the unmarried one here, remember?’
‘Not for long.’ Giddy, he held her hands and rushed on, his face radiant. ‘Maggie, will you marry me? You and the baby? Just as soon as it’s legally possible?’ Before she could answer he was on his feet, pacing excitedly, the knees of his white trousers stained green. ‘My God, four and a half months only. We’ve got some plans to make, a nursery to get ready. Don’t we take some.., some Mazda classes or something?’
‘Lamaze.’
“Lamaze, yeah. Wait’ll I tell Ma. And Mike. Man, is going to be surprised! Maggie, do you think there’s enough time that we could have another baby, too? Kids should have sisters and brothers. One of each would be -’
‘Eric, stop.’ She rose and touched him, a cooling touch of common sense. ‘Listen to me.’
‘What?’ As still as the markers around him, he stared at her with an expression of utter innocence, his face flushed with exuberance, the same rosy gold as the western sky.
‘Darling, you seem to be forgetting that I’m not your wife. That privilege,’ she reminded him, ‘belongs to another woman. You can’t . . . well, you can’t just go around shouting hallelujah all over town as if we were married, it would be an embarrassment to
Nancy
, don’t you see? And to our parents as well. I have a daughter to consider, and she has friends. I understand your being happy, but I have reservations.’
He sobered as if some fatal accident had happened before his eyes, chilling his joy.
‘You don’t want it.’
How could she make him understand? ‘It isn’t a question of wanting or not wanting. It’s here,’ - she pressed her hands to her stomach - ‘and it’s nearly half-term already, which is much farther along than your divorce. And it will mean a tremendous interruption in my life, probably the end of the business I’ve been working so hard to get established, I’m the one who’ll carry it from now until you’re free, I’m the one who’ll get the curious glances on the street, I’m the one who’ll be called a homewrecker, If I need some time to adjust to these things, you’ll have to be tolerant, Eric.’
He stood motionless, digesting her remarks, while overhead the doves continued mourning.
‘You don’t want it,’ he repeated, devastated.
‘Not with the unconfounded joy you do. That’ll take some time. ‘
His face grew hard and he pointed a finger at her. ‘You do anything to get rid of it, and it’ll kill me, too, you understand?’
‘Oh, Eric,’ she lamented, drooping. “How come you even think such a thing?’
He turned away, paced to a maple tree and stared at its smooth, grey bark. For seconds he remained stiff and unmoving, then slammed the tree with an open palm.
Leaning against the trunk, he hung his head.
The stunning summer sunset continued to praise the sky.