Starting from Square Two (30 page)

“And…”

“He likes me, and he's not used to that. We're going to start seeing each other again. We both admitted to having played games. But I think we got to know each other. And I have to think that maybe we only played games because we cared. If we didn't like each other, we wouldn't have bothered, right?”

“Maybe,” Gert said doubtfully, smoothing the dress out.

“If he says something phony, I'll call him on it,” Hallie said. “I'm not going to be afraid anymore. I don't want to be the woman who's always making excuses for her jerky boyfriend. But I want at least to give him a chance to be honest.”

“Good for you!” Gert said.

“Uh…so in case it doesn't work out, did you get me names from the wedding like you promised?”

Gert laughed. “I met a med student who's a friend of Michael's.”

“Hubba hubba.”

“He's young,” Gert said, sitting down on the bed. “But legal.”

“Sounds good.”

Todd came out of the bathroom wearing a towel and rubbing the side of his head with a different one. Gert laughed because on a list of movie clichés that she'd once gotten as an e-mail forward from Hallie, it said that men coming out of a shower were always rubbing the side of their heads with a towel.

“What's so funny?” Hallie asked.

“Nothing,” Gert said. “I have to go. Todd and I are taking a nighttime tour of Boston.”

“You brought Todd to Michael's wedding?”

“He came up here with me, but he stayed at the hotel,” Gert said. “And I'm glad he's here.”

Todd knelt down and kissed her on the cheek. He smelled like soap.

“All right. Call me when you get home.”

Gert hung up. She looked up at Todd.

“Excuse me,” she said. “Can I borrow your towel? My car just hit a buffalo.”

“I think it's ‘water buffalo,'” Todd said, smiling. “What's that from, anyway?”

“Fletch,”
Gert said.

“Overrated,” Todd said.

 

It was cool out. The boat passed through the harbor. It was a large two-decker, with various couples, mostly older. There was a square bar in the middle of the ship.

Gert was near the railing, looking over the water. Orange lights shone across the surface, shimmering over the ripples. Todd was standing behind her, holding her around her waist. He felt strong.

“What's that clock?” Todd asked.

“I don't know,” Gert said, looking at the building with the lit-up round clock. “Marc would know. He knew everything about Boston.”

“Did he have an accident?” Todd asked.

Gert turned around and looked at him. “What?”

“Oh my God,” Todd said. “I meant, ‘Did he have an accent.' A Boston accent. I'm so sorry.”

Gert looked at him for a second.

“I didn't mean to say that,” Todd said.

Gert laughed. “You poor thing.”

Todd was quiet. His arms felt more tentative around her. “I really didn't mean it….”

“I've done things like that,” she said. “It's okay.”

“I really am sorry.”

“You're being silly. Don't worry about it.”

He held her firmly from behind again, and she was glad. She looked back over the water. “I guess he might have had an accent, at one time,” she said. “But he expunged it. His mom has one pretty bad.”

“Well, Boston's a great town,” Todd said. “I would have married him just for the town.”

“I'm sure your homeland of East Grass Patch, Virginia, is equally charming,” she said.

“East Grass Patch? I've never heard that one. I'm from Emporia.”

“Sounds like a supermarket.”

“Don't mock my town. Hometowns are like little brothers. Only you can pick on your own.”

She liked that line, and smiled. “I won't make fun of Food Emporia ever again,” she said.

“You should never make fun of any place unless you've been there.” He put his chin on her shoulder and whispered in her ear. “I have a week off next month. Do you want to come down there with me?”

Gert turned to look at him. “Do you want me there?”

“Yes,” he said. “I'd
love
to have you there.”

“I'd be meeting your parents.”

“If you're up for the challenge,” he said.

“
Is
it a challenge?”

He laughed. “Of course not,” he said. “When they see how much I care about you, they're bound to care about you just as much.”

Gert smiled. It was the sign she'd been waiting for.

“Besides,” Todd said, “thanks to my brother, who's brought home every purple-haired girl to ever set foot in Staunton College, they'll be pleased as punch to meet you. I thank Bill every day for blazing this primrose path for me.”

She laughed.

 

At night, as they were quietly changing for bed, facing in opposite directions, Todd said, “Do you need to go to the grave before we leave?”

She turned around. He was still facing away from her, changing. She knew it had probably been a difficult thing for him to
ask. But it was the right thing, too. She found that Todd was becoming increasingly intuitive about her.

“Would that bother you?” she asked him.

“No,” he said, but he still wasn't facing her. She knew that he must feel funny—it was sensitive material, and he wasn't an expert in handling it. But the important thing was, he had cared enough to try.

Todd headed into the bathroom. He said, “We can make a stop before we head home.”

 

Todd waited by the road, outside the cemetery gate. Gert made her way past the rows and rows of graves until she got to Marc's.

There were purple flowers on it.

Gert remembered the old woman.

She knelt down.

“Hi, Marc,” she said. There were no motors or birds this morning. “Michael got married yesterday,” she said. “I'm sure you were there. He's starting to look like you.” She smiled. “I miss you. You know that. I miss you every day. I'm not going to stop.”

She stood up. She felt sad. It felt like an ending. She wasn't sure why.

“I'll be back here on July fourth,” she said. “I promise.”

She thought of the July fourth photo she had of him at home, taken two months before he'd died.

She made herself smile. “I think about you every day,” she said. “You know that.”

She said goodbye and turned to walk away.

Before leaving, she stopped at Colin's grave.

“Hey, Colin,” she said. “Nice Web site.”

 

It was drizzling when Gert and Todd headed out of town. Small drops splattered on the windshield. The wipers swished silently.

The roads were slightly wet. Todd drove carefully.

They approached a railroad bridge, a small thick black one whose high metal walls had a fast food banner painted across. A freight train was stopped on top. The train was silvery, with vertical slits, and painted across it in red and blue was Union Pacific.

“Those are cattle cars,” Todd said as they passed under it.

“I didn't know they still moved cattle by train,” Gert said.

“How else did you think they move them?”

“Mooooove them?”

They were quiet for a few minutes. Gert thought about how important Todd's job was. No one really thought about it much these days.

They kept on through Massachusetts' small towns, heading toward the highway. Gert saw grassy yards, colonial homes, maple trees, supermarkets. She had that subtle longing for the suburbs again. Even though the city was convenient for now, it didn't feel like family. Marc's parents' house had felt like family. Her own parents' house felt that way. The city was rushed, tense, crowded. It was full of bars and clubs: bars on the windows, clubs on the steering wheels. And it felt transitional.

“Did you think they seemed like a good couple?” Todd said, out of the blue.

“Who?” Gert asked.

“Michael and his wife.”

“Why do you ask?”

He shrugged. “I've been to three weddings in the past two years,” he said. “One of them was fun, but the other two were so serious, I didn't even get the impression that the couple liked each other. It seemed like a chore meant to satisfy their parents, not the happiest moment of their lives. At the wedding I went to last summer, the best man gave this long speech and said he knew the groom's bachelor days were over when the groom turned to him and said, ‘I really like this girl.'”

Todd shook his head.

“And?” Gert asked.

“I don't know,” Todd said. “I just expect a guy to say more
than that about someone he's going to spend the rest of his life with.”

“So you were disappointed,” Gert said.

“I guess, a little,” Todd said. “I mean, ‘I really like this girl'? Is that the best you can come up with for someone you love? It seems like getting married should be about more than that.”

“Maybe guys don't always gush to their friends about girls,” Gert said.

“I gush about you,” Todd said.

“No, you don't.”

“Sure I do. I say that you're smart and witty and beautiful.”

She blushed. “You don't say that.”

Todd nodded. “
Those
are the things you say about someone you want to spend the rest of your life with.”

She looked at him, but his eyes were on the road.

“Hey, we'll be passing Darien in a couple of hours,” he said.

“We told you,” she said. “It's Dari-
anne.
”

“Just for that, we're not stopping at the diner for coffee.”

G
ert and Todd were sitting on the couch reading the Sunday paper. Sun streamed through the windows and bathed the coffee table. Neither of them had to go anywhere for the entire day.

Todd's toes wiggled on the table, in white socks. Gert noticed he had the comics open.

“One time,” she said, “Marc was reading Blondie, and he decided we needed to make a Dagwood sandwich right that afternoon.”

Todd said, “Sounds like fun.”

“It was.”

They were quiet for a moment.

“Speaking of the comics,” Todd said, “did I ever tell you my theory about why comic strips are like freight trains?”

“I couldn't imagine there could be one.”

Todd laughed. “There is,” he said. “They're both colorful and have this great link with history. Some of these comics have been running since the Depression. They've got the same characters and a story that goes back seventy or eighty years.” He
put the paper down for a second. “There's something great about that, you know?”

She did.

That night, Todd went to bed early because he had to go to work at 5:00 a.m. Gert wandered alone through the house. She made her way into Marc's trophy room, or whatever it should be called—the extra bedroom, the study, the would-have-been-baby's room.

She wiped the dust off the top of the computer and stood there a minute. She felt full of love for so many different people. She didn't know if she had to choose only one.

She noticed, through the window, that in the house across the street, something was moving.

The little blond-haired girl was peeking out, poking her fingers through the blinds.

The girl had a look of wonder on her face. Gert knew why. It had gotten very warm that day. Spring was finally there. Gert figured the girl was thinking that she might like to go out and play tomorrow.

Soon the girl would be old enough to go to school. Gert would see her walking in the street, holding her mother's hand.
Wouldn't Marc be surprised to see her old enough for that?
Gert mused. The girl would proceed through elementary school and high school. At some point, someone might tell her that in her early twenties, she would meet a great guy, marry him and have kids. The girl might even hear it so often that she would come to expect it.

Gert wondered if the girl would meet her future husband in school or at work, whether she'd become an artist or office manager or doctor, whether she'd experience her first kiss in her backyard or under the elevated subway station or on some far-off college green. Gert wondered if she herself would still be living on the same block as the girl by the time the girl was that old. She doubted it.

Then again, there were no guarantees. Gert had thought there were, once—she'd thought her condo was just one on a
series of steps, a temporary place and she'd split in a few years. Now she had no idea how long she'd stay. Now she didn't know anything for sure.

She still believed, though, that she would leave fairly soon. Being in Queens felt like living with someone but not marrying them; an intermediary semisettledness, but no real commitment. Manhattan was like singlehood. Gert wanted to be where life was a little slower. She hoped she'd have someone to go back to the suburbs with.

It was true that if she moved there, she and her significant other might go entire weekends without passing more than three other people in the street. But she still thought she'd be happier.

Sooner or later,
she thought,
we all pair off.

The little girl disappeared from the window. Gert's gaze wandered upward, toward the roof, and it was only then that she realized that the Christmas lights were gone.