No Dark Valley (68 page)

“My aunt is eighty,” she said. “She's actually my great-aunt.”

“Will the rest of your family be there, too?” he asked even though something told him not to, that she might think he had already been enough of a busybody.

“No, there will be only the three of us.” Still not looking at him, she shoved her tennis bag over to the side of her trunk, then rearranged a few other things and took out a bulging plastic bag, which seemed to be stuffed with other plastic bags, and looped it over one arm like a large purse. She closed the trunk and brushed her hands together.

He motioned back toward Kimberly's house. “Well, we'll only have you beat by one.” He laughed. “I'm not sure what all Kimberly's cooking up, but she was talking last week about fixing Cornish game hens instead of turkey. And macaroons instead of pumpkin pie.” Celia glanced up at him quickly, as if to see if he was teasing. “So is your aunt a good cook?” he asked, then added, “I used to have an aunt who made the best corn-bread dressing and giblet gravy every Thanksgiving. And my mother made this boiled custard she served in these white cups shaped like flower petals. Then my grandmother made sweet potato pie that was—”

He stopped. This was ridiculous. She couldn't possibly care about his grandmother's sweet potato pie. He sighed. Just once he wished he wouldn't act like an imbecile around this woman. “Sorry, I don't know what it is about you that makes me do this.”

“Do what?”

“Talk like this, on and on. I'm usually very . . . well, polished and poised. Very suave, very cool. I've even been told that I'm sometimes witty.”

The look on her face said, “Well, you sure didn't hear it from me.”

“But for some reason every time I talk to you,” he said, “I get all, well, sort of rambly and random and tongue-tied. So I'll shut up now and let you get on with whatever you need to do. Sorry for wasting your time. I won't bother you anymore, I promise.” There, he had said it. Let her think whatever she wanted to.

“Oh, it's okay,” she said, shrugging, “it wasn't a total waste of my time. At least I learned that the atomic weight of titanium is twenty-two.”

“No, that's the atomic number,” he said. “The atomic weight is forty-eight.”

“Right,” she said, nodding. “Just seeing if you would catch the error.” She appeared to be on the verge of actually smiling. “Well, I've got to go.” She took a step back. She seemed to be staring at his shirt. It was one of his favorite ones out of the few he owned—a maroon polo style, short-sleeved with a zipper instead of buttons at the neck. Immediately after spotting it on a revolving rack in Wal-Mart a year ago, he had found a size large and draped it over his arm as he headed to the checkout with his twelve-pack of root beer and box of Tide detergent. The shiny material reminded him of the nylon pajamas his father used to wear. What had been tacky in pajamas was probably even more so in a shirt, but for some strange reason it had struck his fancy, and he continued to pull it out of his closet and put it on time and again, even in cold weather.

“I'm not cold if that's what you're thinking,” he said to Celia, who was dressed sensibly in a navy sweater and white turtleneck.

She shook her head. “No, that's not what I was thinking.” But she didn't offer to divulge what she
was
thinking.

“Can you hear that train whistle?” he said. “It's the one that crosses Harper Bridge Road down by the old feed store. Same time every Tuesday. You hear it?”

“Oh yes, I have a very good ear for train whistles,” she said. Again she took a half step back.

He hated to let go of the moment. “Everything okay at the art gallery?” he said. “Any exciting new paintings lately?”

She nodded. “Yes. We've got a very good show up right now.” Again she moved to leave. “Oh, by the way, that's a great painting you've got over your sofa.” She immediately looked as if she wished she could take the comment back. “I saw it that night I kept Madison. I had to go over to get a couple of diapers, and I meant to tell you . . . I mean, I wasn't trying to—”

“Oh, listen, hey, thanks. I don't know if I ever really told you how much I appreciated what you did that—”

“Yes, yes, you did. It wasn't anything. I just didn't . . .”

“Say, do you need any help with that big bag of . . . bags?” Bruce said, stepping toward her.

She answered quickly, firmly. “No, thanks. It's only plastic bags. They're light as feathers. I've had them in the trunk to take to the grocery store, but I keep forgetting, so I'm going to put them in the recycle bin here.” And she twirled around and headed off as if such an important job couldn't wait another minute.

“I know what you mean,” Bruce called after her. “My plastic bags are piling up like crazy right now, too. Why, my apartment is practically overrun with them!”

She stopped and turned around, her small chin lifted, her nose slightly wrinkled if she were standing downwind of a slaughterhouse. “Well, you better go take care of them,” she said tersely, then turned on her heel and disappeared inside.

After a brief cordial conversation with his next-door neighbor, Bruce ruined it all with an ill-conceived attempt at humor
. That's how this scene would close if it were in a book, he thought as he walked back up to the front yard. Well, this was one more confirmation of what he already knew—this woman was supremely touchy. One minute she almost smiled at you, and the next she treated you like you were a skunk trapper. Of course he didn't know her well enough to tease her like that. She obviously thought he was making fun of her and her plastic bags. Definitely not suave or cool.

Two days later, on Thanksgiving morning, Bruce heard Kimberly's voice in the backyard, the high-pitched, singsongy quality telling him she must be talking to Maddy. Though he had been awake for a few minutes, he was still in bed, having decided that the best way to start Thanksgiving Day would be to list all the things for which he was thankful. He started with his parents, who, in spite of their faults, had given him much. On the table beside his bed was a small framed picture of his parents on their wedding day.

He picked up the picture and looked at the youthful faces of his mother and father. His mother's hair was like Kimberly's, dark and thick but shorter and a lot curlier. She had some kind of little headpiece nestled in it, like a tiara, with beads and sequins and a wisp of white netting poofed up behind it. She was wearing a white two-piece suit instead of a traditional wedding dress, with a sparkly flower design appliquéd on the lapels and decorated with tiny pearls and more sequins. Up near her face she held a nosegay of white roses tied with a white ribbon, her hands clasping it in such a way as to display her diamond engagement ring and wide gold wedding band.

If he could somehow separate himself from the woman in this picture, forget the sound of her voice, her touch, how he last knew her, Bruce knew he would pronounce her beautiful. As it was, he could see her only as his mother, far beyond simple modifiers, someone he had known from his first breath and had observed through all her evolutions, his last view of her being three years earlier when she lay in her casket, gray and grim.

Slightly behind her in the picture and pressed protectively against her was his father, with his clean-sculpted features and a headful of wavy brown hair that he would lose thirty years later to chemo. When it had started growing back in, the wave was completely gone, which dismayed Bruce's mother to no end. In comparison to everything else, the wave was a small loss, but one she never got over. The last thing she had said before the lid on his father's casket was closed was “Oh, the wave in his hair—they took that away, too.” She spoke the words with clenched fists and followed them with a curse. The funeral director had flinched slightly as though she were accusing him, though no one really knew who it was she was blaming.

The wedding photo was a closeup, taken from the waist up, so it was hard to tell whether they were sitting or standing. They had such open smiles, such youthful eyes, such anticipation of a long and happy marriage. “Thank you,” Bruce said out loud right now. “Thank you both for what you gave me.” Which in many ways was a fortune, for it was his mother who had taught him good manners and showed him how to pick himself up after a failure and move ahead with a smile, while his father had taught him patience and self-esteem. It was his father who had taken one look at him after the fire, after all the bandages were off, and had said, “Hey there, pal, what's a few little old scars? Why, nothing at all! You're still the best-looking kid around.”

And the lessons had somehow stuck even though the teachers had abandoned their own advice, his father surrendering and wallowing in self-pity the last two years of his life and his mother throwing all her good manners and fortitude out the window at the same time.

Elizabeth Landis had lost her father to cancer also, she had told him not too long ago. Had it drastically changed her mother's personality? he had wanted to know. “Well, not really,” she had answered after a pause. “Did
your
mother change?” And all he could do was shake his head and say, “There's no way to describe it.”

Suzanne had once asked Bruce if he thought their parents had loved each other too much. “Too much?” he had said. What did she mean? How was that possible? “Like they were a private club,” she said, “and no one else could join. Like they were singing a duet they had written, and nobody else knew the words and music. Like they were drinking tea for two all the time. Like they were—” “Okay, okay,” he said. “I get the picture. But no, I don't think you can ever love too much,” he said glibly.

“You mean you never felt like they overlooked you?” she asked. “Well, no, not really,” he said, realizing that Suzanne was champing at the bit to get started on one of her favorite topics: the way their parents spent their money, in particular the injustice of their not taking her to an orthodontist to straighten her teeth, yet plunking down two thousand dollars to go on a cruise for their fifteenth anniversary. “I can't believe you,” she said. “What about those twenty-four-carat gold cuff links she bought him for Father's Day the year you graduated from high school? The year she gave you a
shirt
, which you had to take back and exchange for the right size. Remember that, huh?”

“Hey, give her a break,” he said. “That was right after he was diagnosed with cancer. She was trying to cope.” “Yes, and weren't we all,” Suzanne said, then added, “You're in denial about this whole thing, you always have been.” To which Bruce replied with an air of superiority, calling after her as she flounced out of the room, “Love is not something you carefully measure out in controlled, equal amounts, Suzanne. And no, I still say
you can never love too much
.” As if he, with his vast experience, were the final authority on the subject of love.

That conversation was probably a good ten years ago, when he often said things off the top of his head with great passion to compensate for the fact that they didn't come from the bottom of his heart, things that sounded right, even exalted and idealistic, but wouldn't bear close scrutiny. Now that he was the same age Suzanne was back then, he wondered what his answer would be if she asked him again.

An idea came to him now. Could it be that his parents' love for each other had in some way discouraged him from marriage? No, he argued with himself, a strong bond like theirs should inspire their children to copy them, to find their own soul mate and steal away together to their own little deserted island. Or might it scare a child to think of trying to progress at a normal pace through life attached so closely to one other person, like those frustrating three-legged races?

Those unity candles in certain wedding ceremonies had always made him uneasy. “Wait, do you really want to extinguish your flame?” he felt like calling out to the couple, who evidently
did
want to do precisely that or else weren't thinking about what they were doing, for when they had lit the middle candle and snuffed out their own, they didn't even seem to notice the two pathetic sorrowful little puffs of smoke wafting up from the blackened wicks. He didn't have a problem with using the two candles to light another candle, but why did they have to blow out the first two? Wouldn't it be making a positive symbolic statement to leave them burning, something about the whole being greater than the sum of its parts?

Somehow his parents' two little candles had come together to light a bonfire instead of another single measly candle. Maybe a child with parents like that might be a little nervous about the whole concept of marriage. Might he wonder, every time he met a girl, not if she could provide enough flint to get a fire going but enough fuel to keep it burning hot for years and years? Starting a fire wasn't any big deal—there was kindling aplenty. But the sustained, steady heat of a perpetual flame—was that possible? Was it even desirable? Might you not want a little relief from the heat from time to time? That was something to think about, something to make a wise person hesitate before leaping into marriage.

He set the picture back on his nightstand. There were some thickets too thorny for him to push through in this weary life, in “this world of toils and snares,” as that hymn said—the one he had been so surprised to see in the old red hymnbook at church a few weeks back. He hadn't gone looking for it, as he had others, in fact hadn't once thought about it since watching the movie
Cool Hand Luke
years ago. One of the convicts sang it in that movie, slow and mournful—“Just a Closer Walk With Thee.” And then there it was years later, jumping out at him from a hymnbook, right across the page from another song they were singing in church.