Raising Hope (18 page)

“Oh, fine,” I say. “I’m through whenever you’re ready.”

“Do you need to get back right away?” he asks. Maybe he wants to keep working. Or perhaps he’s not as eager as I am to resume talking the way we were on the ride over here.

“I mean,” he explains, “we could grab some coffee in town, walk around, and explore a little bit.”

Well. Does this mean he likes me? I thought he might, the day he asked about coming here to the garden with me. But today he acted more like a friend or colleague. Oh, for goodness’ sake, I’m sure I’m mistaking his friendliness for something else. But what if I’m not? What if . . . My mind is whirling in a million different directions, and my face feels frozen, like a Halloween mask. What do I say? I can’t . . . I want . . .

“Why?” I blurt out, confused. Dear Lord, have I completely forgotten how to act, how to be around people? “I mean ‘yes.’ Yes,” I say hastily, shaking my head as if to dismiss my silly question.

“Yes?” he asks, ducking his head to look at me. His eyes look confused, and why wouldn’t they? God! I could kick myself for being such an idiot.

“Sure,” I say, looking up to meet his gaze, and I give a little shrug and smile apologetically. It’s either smile or run away, and I’m thinking that smiling is the better option. And, it’s so funny, but once I smile, my mask thaws and I feel all this . . . well, possibility surrounding me. I feel the way I do on the first nice day of spring, when the sun is finally out and I’m raking my perennial beds. I rub my arms just to feel my tingling body that’s been asleep for more than a decade.

“Cold?” Sam asks.

“No.” Still smiling, I shake my head. “Not at all.”

My father died the winter after I came home from the law firm. He had a heart attack while he was reading over some legal briefs. It was a lovely death, really. It was quick, and he was doing what he most loved. But my mother was beside herself. She aged ten years in a month. I don’t think she realized how much she had depended on him. She had developed a rhythm with him wherein he was the background music and she was the lead vocal. She hadn’t realized how important that background music was until it was gone.

My father’s death is intertwined in my memory with Bobby Teller. I was sleeping with Bobby. Of course I was. There wasn’t an option to involve myself halfway, not when I went home after that first night at O’Malley’s with my mouth sore and bruised and my insides unsettled and yearning from all that kissing.

We had sex everywhere—in my car, in his car, in his friend’s apartment, in the storeroom of O’Malley’s, in a motel outside Hadley where no one knew us. I thought about him constantly, the way he gasped and held me tightly when he came, the way I pushed my hips against him, again and again, faster and faster, until I was practically crying as I came, too. “God, you’re beautiful,” he’d say when we were finished. He’d smooth my hair back from my face and look at me, shaking his head slowly. “I can’t believe I’m lying here with Sara Lynn Hoffman,” he’d say.

Being with him was like stepping into a world I hadn’t known existed. It was as if I’d been color-blind before we started seeing each other. I’d seen the objects surrounding me, but I hadn’t been aware that they were so impossibly, beautifully colored. All my senses were heightened—the smell of his body when he lay next to me, the feel of his cheek when he needed a shave, the way his voice sounded when he said something sweet. One late afternoon, we were walking in the woods, and he pulled me up on a large rock. “Come on,” he said, ignoring my protests and gripping my hands hard. When I stumbled up there with him, he put his arms around my waist and pulled me in. “You and me,” he said in my ear. “Together.” He thrilled me; he truly did.

I thought nobody knew about us. Or at least that very few people did. Ruth knew. I tried to be nice to her when she came to clean, but she just answered my questions in monosyllables, not stopping her work. “Why does she hate me so much?” I asked Bobby once. We were in my car, the heater turned up full blast as our hands fumbled under jackets and sweaters and jeans.

He laughed. “What do you care?”

“I’m just curious.” I pulled away and waited for him to answer.

“You’re not like other girls in this town, Sara Lynn,” he replied. “You’re different. She doesn’t trust you because you’re different.”

“Do you trust me?” I asked teasingly, sliding my hand back into his jeans.

He flinched a little from my cold touch and smiled as he reached up under my sweater. “Not even a little bit.”

“Not even a little bit?” I asked as I began to move my hand.

He groaned and kissed me. “Maybe a little bit,” he whispered in my ear.

He didn’t come to my father’s funeral. I told him it would be better if he stayed away. He didn’t argue with me, and I was disappointed. I wished he had insisted on coming, that nothing, not even my words, had kept him away. But he hadn’t read the same romantic books I had, and there wasn’t going to be any changing him.

A few weeks after the funeral, I tiptoed into the house at two in the morning and found my mother waiting up, marching to the front door to meet me, her eyes wild and her mouth set hard in grief. “Where’ve you been?” she asked me as I locked the door behind me and hugged myself to get warm.

“Mama,” I said softly, “what are you—”

“No,” she said, pulling the belt on her robe tighter. “No questions for me. I’m absolutely through with your questions, and your insinuations and your . . . your judgment of me.”

“What are you talking about?” I said wearily. I was grieving, tired, and in need of a shower.

“I told you. I’m not answering your questions anymore. Why I did this, why I did that to you growing up . . . I have nothing to apologize for.” Her voice thickened for a moment, but she tossed her head and went on as if it hadn’t. “You”—she pointed at me—“you failed down in Boston. For the first time, you failed at something, and Lord knows, I wish it had happened earlier. Maybe if you’d failed earlier and more often, you wouldn’t be acting so . . . so crazy right now.”

“I didn’t fail,” I said hotly.

“Yes, you did,” she said, her eyes blazing. “You failed, and you’re just sick about it.”

“I’ve got to go up to bed.” I’d had enough. All I wanted was to wash the sex off of me and go to sleep. I brushed by her, and she grabbed my arm.

“No,” she said. “I’m through pretending I don’t see you ruining your life, and all because, for once, you didn’t get what you wanted.”

“You have no idea what I want!” I yelled, tears smarting in my eyes.

“Neither do you,” she said, still gripping my arm. “Unless it’s to throw everything in your life—everything—away!”

“Mother!” I cried, jerking away from her and wiping my eyes. “What are you talking about?”

“What I’m talking about . . . ,” she said almost triumphantly. “What I’m talking about . . .”

“What is it?” I cried, wanting to just drop to the floor from exhaustion and rage.

“What I’m talking about is your blindness!” she shouted. “Your blindness! You’re supposed to be so smart, so goddamned smart . . . ha! You’re the stupidest girl I’ve ever met!”

My mother never got angry and certainly never swore. I wondered if she’d have a heart attack like Daddy and drop dead right in front of me. She began to sob, folding her arms across her chest as if she were trying to comfort herself.

“Mama . . . ,” I said, touching her arm. She was scaring me.

“Don’t you touch me!” she shrieked. “I know where you’ve been tonight. I know what you’ve been doing. You’ve been giving yourself away to that Teller boy.”

My face crumpled. “How . . . did you know that?” I whispered, putting my hands to my mouth.

“It’s all over the goddamned town! People have eyes, Sara Lynn. Are you so stupid that you don’t know how people talk?!” She sank to the floor, putting her head in her hands. Her shoulders jumped up and down with her sobs. “My God! I just keep picturing you with him in that way. . . .”

“Mama,” I pleaded through my own tears, “I’m a grown woman. I’m not doing anything wrong. I . . . I think I’m in love with him.”

She jerked her face up to look at me with swollen red eyes. “In love with him? You think you’re in love with him? Oh, God, you aren’t, Sara Lynn! You aren’t! Do you know what your life would be like if you married him? Do you have any idea?” She got to her feet and took my shoulders in her hands. “You have nothing in common with him. Nothing. Good Lord—think of your future! Do you really want to have children with someone so . . . so beneath you?”

“You don’t even know him,” I said quietly.

“No,
you
don’t know him. I know plenty. Mary Teller’s been my cleaning lady since before you were born, and I know that you might as well be a different species from anyone in that family. You are asking for a life of misery if you join yourself to him!” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Now, I like Mary, but I certainly don’t want to share a grandchild with her.”

“Mama,” I said gingerly. I hated seeing her like this. “Nobody’s talking about grandchildren, or getting married, or anything like that.”

“Then shame on you,” she replied, crying fresh tears. “Shame on you for giving the milk away for free. I thought I’d raised you better than that.”

“These are different times,” I said thickly. “It’s not like when you were growing up.”

“You don’t think so?” She laughed bitterly. “Oh no, there were fast girls around when I was growing up, girls like you! And I know exactly what happened to them! Their reputations were gone forever, just like that”—she snapped her fingers—“and their lives were ruined.” She looked up at me and laughed again, a hollow, mean laugh. “You know,” she said, “I wonder, I truly do, whether your father knew about you, if someone had told him. I wonder if that’s what killed him, knowing his daughter was whoring herself to the cleaning lady’s son.”

I began to cry myself then, all my sorrow over my father’s death pouring out of me. “I didn’t kill Daddy,” I said, and I kept repeating it as if saying it again and again would make it true.

“Stop saying that!” my mother shrieked. “My God, are you some sort of crazy person, saying the same thing over and over? Please God, may you not be mentally deficient on top of everything else.”

“I’m just . . . I’m just so . . . so . . .” I sobbed, unable to find the words.

She drew herself up. “Yes.” She nodded. “Your father’s death has broken your heart, and that’s understandable. But now it’s time to move past that, and past all the bad decisions you made in your grief.”

I saw what she was offering me—a way to end my relationship with Bobby and keep my dignity and her love. It didn’t matter that I’d begun seeing Bobby well before my father’s death. In my mother’s mind, we could tidy up the whole mess and chalk it up to a poor decision made entirely out of grief. We could even push the blame onto Bobby, for who but a monster would take advantage of a grief-stricken young woman? I was so tempted to reach out and grab her excuse, to pretend I was still the good Sara Lynn who’d never once had an independent thought in her entire life. But then I thought of Bobby and the comforting weight of him on top of me tonight; I thought of how he’d turned me on my stomach, lifted up my hair, and kissed the nape of my neck again and again, murmuring, “You’re so beautiful, Sara Lynn, so beautiful.” In a flash, it was ruined, though. The images of Bobby that I’d hugged to myself night after night weren’t mine any longer. I was seeing them through Mama’s horrified eyes now, and they just seemed sordid and ugly.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked her softly as my last sweet memory of Bobby faded away.

“For your own good, darling,” she replied, reaching out and touching my cheek. “For your own good.”

I closed my eyes and reached up to grasp her hand, and I never went to O’Malley’s again. She was my mother, and she knew what I should do. Make a clean break of it, she advised, and that’s just what I did. To see him again would be too risky, especially now, when I wasn’t in my right mind because of my grief.

After that night, I made sure I was gone when Ruth and Mary Teller came to clean, and Ruth must have told him that’s when I left the house because he followed me one morning, cut my car off, and motioned me to pull over. I turned onto a side street and stopped. I watched from my rearview mirror as he got out of his car and walked through the snow over to mine.

“What’s up?” he asked as he climbed inside my car and shut the door. I smelled his familiar smell, and my mind flashed to him lying over me, looking at me, doing things to me. I closed my eyes for a moment and then opened them.

“I can’t do this anymore,” I said.

“Do what?”

“What we’ve been doing.”

He laughed. “You mean having a lot of good sex?”

I closed my eyes again to stop the tears from streaming down. I nodded.

“Hey, you can’t be serious. Did I do something?”

I shook my head no. “It’s just not going to work out,” I said.

He didn’t say anything for a minute; then he banged his gloved hand against the dashboard. “Who said anything about it working out?” he asked. “We were just fucking.”

The tears slid down my cheeks then, and I didn’t make any motion to stop them.

“Aw, I didn’t mean that,” he said, and he clumsily touched my cheek through his heavy glove.

“No,” I said, grabbing his hand and pulling it away from my face. “Don’t touch me.”

“Don’t touch you?” he snorted. “I’ve done a hell of a lot more than that.” He shook his head. “Damn! I don’t get you.”

I just sat, motionless, and he opened the car door. “See you around,” he muttered, banging the door shut. And those were the last words I heard from Bobby Teller.

“What’re you thinking about?” Sam says in his soft, gravelly voice.

“Me? Nothing,” I say. We’re driving home from a wonderful day of walking and eating and talking. And now, on the ride home, we’re being silent together, and that feels just fine, too.

“I have to make this turn,” I tell him, sitting forward in the driver’s seat and squinting as I try to locate the tiny dirt path on which Sam lives. “I couldn’t find it to save my life this morning.”