Butternut Summer (23 page)

“I wasn't trying to get drunk,” she said, eating her sandwich and not looking at him.

“You're a lousy liar, Caroline.”

She glared at him, but then relented. “Oh, all right.” She put her sandwich down. “I
was
trying. I just didn't know it would be so hard.”

He smiled. “Oh, I'd say you did all right for yourself. You were slurring your words pretty well by the time I got there. You sound better now, though. You look better, too.”

“My head still feels funny,” she admitted a little sheepishly. “Like it's buzzing or something.”

“That'll go away,” he said. “But I want to know what sent you running for a vodka bottle tonight.”

She studied him for a long moment, and he knew she was trying to decide whether or not to tell him the truth. Then she shrugged, a tiny shrug. “For the record, Jack, it's none of your business. But . . . Buster and I ended our relationship.”

He looked at her sharply. He hadn't seen that coming, not so soon. But he'd be lying if he'd said he hadn't wanted it to come.

“Oh, don't look so pleased with yourself,” she said. “It had nothing to do with you, Jack, if that's what you're thinking.”

“No?” he challenged.

“No. It had to do with Buster and me. We decided we'd reached some kind of . . . natural break point, I guess, and that it was time for us to move on. That's all. We're both mature adults, Jack, and we made the decision together.”

She looked down at her plate. The woman couldn't lie to save her life, he thought. So it hadn't been a mutual decision; she'd ended it, obviously. And thinking about that, Jack felt a tiny, welcoming flicker of hope.

“And now I have a question for you, Jack.” Caroline looked him directly in the eyes and seemed, for the first time that night, to be completely sober. “Why'd you come back here? Why'd you
really
come back here? And don't say you came back here because Wayland left you his cabin, because you've already tried that one out on me.”

Jack leaned back against the booth, watching her and weighing his options. He hadn't meant to tell her this yet, so soon after moving back here. But he wondered if now wasn't as good a time to tell her as any; after all, timing was everything. But perfect timing? That was rare.

“I came back here,” he said, finally, “because I wanted to be with you. I've always wanted to be with you. I just . . . I just lost sight of it for a while.”

Her eyes widened with surprise. “Jack,” she said softly, questioningly. But after a moment she recovered herself, and her wonder was replaced with cynicism. “Lost sight of it for eighteen years,” she said. “I don't think so.”

He shifted again and thought about how to respond to her skepticism, her justifiable skepticism. He decided to just go for broke and tell her everything. It seemed simpler, somehow, than serving the truth up to her one spoonful at a time.

“Okay, I didn't lose sight of wanting to be with you,” he said. “Not exactly. I just didn't think there was anything I could do about wanting to be with you, not while I was still drinking. So I just, I just put that hope away, I guess. Or I tried to. But it was always there, Caroline. Every single second of every single hour of every single day. And then, a couple of years ago, I got a phone call from Wayland. We'd lost touch, by then, but he was sick, really sick, and when he asked me to come visit him in the hospital, what could I say?”

He rubbed his eyes now, trying to erase the memory of how Wayland had looked in that hospital bed. “Anyway, I drove out to see him. He'd told me on the phone he wanted to reminisce about old times, but by the time I got there, he was too weak to talk. So I . . . I just sat there and held his hand, until . . .” He shook his head. “It was a hell of a way to die. Nobody there but me, and I hadn't even known he was sick until a few days before.”

“I'm sorry it had to be that way for him,” Caroline said quietly. “But he'd burned a lot of bridges by then.”

Jack nodded. If there was one thing drunks did well, it was burn bridges.

“But, Jack, I still don't see what this has to do with us,” Caroline said.

“I know. I'm getting to that.” He sighed and rubbed his eyes again. “I stayed with Wayland until he died, and then I drove straight to Elk Point, straight to my first AA meeting. And that was it. I haven't had a drink since.”

“So you were afraid if you didn't stop drinking, you might die that way too? With only an old drinking buddy to hold your hand? Or worse, maybe all alone, with nobody to hold your hand?” And her skepticism, he saw, was back.

“No, Caroline. I wasn't afraid I'd die alone; I was afraid I'd die without trying to get you back—you and Daisy. So I dragged myself to an AA meeting every night, and I sat in some musty church basement, wanting a drink so badly that I could only measure my sobriety in minutes, and I told myself that if I could stay sober for a year, I could get back in touch with Daisy. And if I could stay sober for two years, I could come back here, to Butternut, and be with you. Or
try
to be with you, I should say. Because I knew, even then, it wasn't going to be easy. And you, Caroline, have not disappointed me.” He smiled at her, a little nervously, not knowing how she'd react.

For a moment, she didn't react to it at all. Then Caroline pushed her plate with the half-eaten sandwich on it abruptly away from her and said angrily, “I don't believe you, Jack. I believe you, I guess, about the getting sober. But I don't believe you when you say you spent eighteen years pining away for me and Daisy. Do you remember how you left here, Jack? Do you?”

He nodded, ashamed at the memory.

“You woke up one morning,” Caroline said, her face flushed with anger, “and you threw your clothes in a suitcase, and you were gone. Just like that.” She snapped her fingers for emphasis. “And you never said good-bye. Not to me, not to Daisy. You called us from the road, Jack, from some gas station. You said you needed a ‘break,' and except for our divorce, and your child support checks, I didn't hear from you again until this summer. So either you're a liar, for saying you cared so much, or you're a complete idiot, for caring so much and waiting almost two decades to do anything about it.”

“The second one,” Jack said quietly.

But Caroline only shook her head in exasperation.

“Look, I remember the morning I left, Caroline,” he said, resting his elbows on the table and leaning forward. “But I remember it a little differently than you do. I'd been up for most of the night before, drinking and playing poker with friends, and I'd just crawled into bed when the alarm went off. I could barely open my eyes; I mean, I felt like I'd been hit by a Mack truck. I know you've never had a hangover before Caroline—though that may change now—but, trust me, some of them are their own special form of torture. Anyway, I dragged myself out of bed and stumbled into the kitchen. You were there, already showered and dressed and headed downstairs, but you asked me to look in on Daisy.

“So I go into her room, and she's climbing out of that new toddler bed you'd just bought her, and I pick her up. I can tell right away she's sick. She has a fever, and her nose is running, and she's miserable, poor kid. So I try to comfort her, and the next thing I know you come back upstairs and say the dishwasher's broken, and it's going to be a busy day, and we're going to have to hand wash all the dishes. So I ask you to take Daisy for a second, because she's really fussing by now, and I go into the bathroom to splash some cold water on my face, and, as I'm doing that, I look at myself in the mirror above the sink. It isn't pretty. I look like hell. And I feel like hell. And I know I'm useless to you two—worse than useless, really. Because I'm holding you back; you'd both be better off without me.”

“Oh, I see, so you were actually doing us
a favor
by leaving, Jack?” she said bitterly. “You were actually being selfless. How convenient for you to remember it that way for all these years.”

“No.” He sighed. “No, I wasn't being selfless. I know that now. I was being a bastard, and a cowardly one, to boot. If I'd been a better man, I would never have left. Or, if I had, I would have come right back.”

“And now, Jack?” she asked, her pretty mouth hardening. “Are you a better man now?”

“I sure as hell am trying to be,” he said honestly. “But as to whether I am or not, you'll have to be the judge of that.”

Caroline looked at him, long and speculatively, and Jack could feel the coffee and the grilled cheese doing their work. She was sobering up, a little.

“I don't know Jack,” she said finally. “I just don't know. I can't get past the fact that you never came back before now. Not once. In all those years.”

“Actually, I did come back once,” he said quietly. “I just didn't tell you I'd come back.”

“What do you mean, ‘you didn't tell me'?”

“I mean, I saw you and Daisy, but you didn't see me,” he said reluctantly. He'd never talked about this—ever. Not even in his AA meetings.

“Are you saying . . . are you saying you spied on us?” Caroline asked, her blue eyes narrowing.

“I guess you could say that,” Jack said, studying the pattern on the Formica tabletop. “But I didn't mean to spy on you. It just sort of happened that way.” He looked up at her and kept going before he lost his nerve. “It was about six months after I'd left. God, I missed you two. I missed you two like crazy. And I had this idea that maybe you missed me, too. Maybe you even
needed
me, crazy as that seemed. So I drove back here. It was the Fourth of July weekend. I was going to go to the fairgrounds for the fireworks and try to find both of you there. But I got to Butternut before all the festivities started, and I didn't know what to do. I didn't want to just show up at your front door, but I couldn't wait to see you either, you or Daisy. So I parked on Main Street, across the street from Pearl's. And I just sat there, sweating bullets. I was so goddamned nervous. I was alone, and I wasn't drinking. And I prided myself on not drinking alone. You know, it's one of the lies I told myself then. ‘I can't have a problem with alcohol if I never drink alone.' But I remember thinking, as I sat there all afternoon, well, maybe I could have just one beer by myself.

“Finally, I saw you two. You came out of the building and turned down Main Street and walked right by my truck. By some miracle, you never saw me, even though you were close enough for me to reach out and touch you.”

“Why didn't you, Jack?” Caroline asked suddenly. “Not reach out and touch us, I mean. Why didn't you do something, or say something, if you'd missed us so much?”

He smiled, a little sadly. “Because you weren't alone, Caroline. You had another man with you.”

“Another man?” she murmured softly, and he watched her face as she searched for and then retrieved a memory.

“Oh,” she breathed, understanding. “Todd? Todd Macomber?”

“Was that his name? Who was he?” he asked, still desperately curious, even after all these years.

Caroline sighed, a little sadly, he thought. “He was new in town. He was a shop teacher at the high school. Still is, actually. I'd met him when he came into Pearl's. I wasn't ready to date then, I really wasn't. It was so soon after . . . But he was a nice enough guy. And Daisy liked him, I remember. She liked him a lot. So I thought, why not? You were never coming back. As far as I knew,” she added, with a little shake of her head.

“Well, I watched the three of you walk down the street together,” Jack said, when he realized Caroline was done talking. “I didn't know anything about this guy, obviously. I didn't recognize him. But he looked nice enough, as far as I could tell; you know, clean cut, neatly dressed, that kind of thing. And the three of you, you looked, you looked . . .
so normal
together, so happy. Daisy was between you two, and she was holding both of your hands, and you were both swinging her into the air. And she was laughing . . .” His voice trailed off, as he lost himself in the memory. But Caroline, he could see, was waiting for more, so he kept going.

“I can't quite explain what it was like, seeing the three of you together. It was strange. I mean, on the one hand, it hurt like hell; it was like someone twisting a knife in my gut. Seeing you with someone who could replace me, who maybe already
had
replaced me. But on the other hand, I felt glad, in a way. I thought ‘Good for you, Caroline. Good for both of you. Because you both deserve someone better than me.'

“After that, I drove home. Straight through the night and into the next day. I was trying to be happy for you, Caroline. I really was. But all I could think about, for some reason, was the little dress Daisy had been wearing. It was a sundress, white with little red cherries on it. I don't know why, but thinking about that dress just about killed me.”

“I remember that dress,” Caroline said suddenly. “She loved that dress. She wore it that whole summer. I was lucky if I could get it off her long enough to put it in the washing machine once in a while.” She smiled now, at the memory of that dress. But then something else occurred to her.

“Jack,” she said. “What you saw that day, parked in your car, it was a date. And not a very good one either, as I recall. Not that Todd wasn't a nice guy. He was;
is
, I mean. He still comes in here sometimes. But it was too soon for me. I ended it a few weeks after that, I think.”

“That's not what I thought, Caroline. I thought, when I got served with those divorce papers six months later, that it was because you wanted to marry him.”

“Marry him?” she said, with surprise. “Why would you think that?”

“Because never, in a million years, did it occur to me that you wouldn't get remarried. That you two wouldn't finally have the husband, and the father, you deserved. I was counting on it when I left. It was the only thing, really, that made me think I'd done the right thing by leaving.”