The Realm of Last Chances (27 page)

When he got back to the table, she was telling Jimmy he needed to remarry, that his clothes were always wrinkled and he was starting to lose weight. As Cal took his seat, she again touched his arm. “Don’t you agree?”

“Absolutely,” he said. “I think everybody needs to get married.” He should’ve stopped there but didn’t. “It’s the only thing,” he added, “that could’ve saved a wretch like me.”

In the kitchen, after the dishwasher had been loaded and turned on and all that remained were the dirty pots and pans and a few leftover serving pieces, Gloria said, “I’ll wash and you dry, or I’ll dry and you wash. Whichever you prefer.”

“I’ll wash,” Kristin said, pulling on a pair of yellow rubber gloves Vico had laid on the counter and getting busy with a scouring pad.

From the living room, they could hear the sound of instruments being tuned. Cal hadn’t particularly wanted to bring his guitar along, but when you were at Dave’s stage, he’d told her this morning, you needed to play with somebody else whenever you got a chance.

“My husband can’t believe his good fortune,” Gloria said as Kristin passed her a clean pot. “He says Cal’s not just a great player but a great teacher too.”

“Well, according to him, Dave’s progressing by leaps and bounds.”

“He lives with that thing in his hands now. For forty years he’s said he can’t carry on a conversation while watching a football game. But he can certainly watch while he plays the mandolin.”

“Cal’s never been able to do anything else when he plays. He usually closes his eyes.”

“Maybe he’s trying to see the notes.”

“Seeing them wouldn’t do him any good. He can’t read music.”

“That’s amazing. So he’s just a natural musician?”

“He’d object to that term.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You never asked?”

“No, I never did,” Kristin said, handing her a sparkling gravy boat. “I guess I always felt like the music was just for him. He used to play once a week with a bunch of other people at a little country store—this was close to Sacramento—and they’d all smile while they played, nodding at one another like they were sending special signals or whatever, but he never did. He just sat there with his eyes shut. When it was time for him to take a solo, he seemed to sense it.”

Gloria wiped the dish dry and stood it on the counter next to the pot. “How did he learn to play?”

“I’m not sure. He never told me.”

“There’s a lot you don’t know about your husband.”

The assessment was inarguable, the reasons hard to explain. For one thing, she could tell at once he was a private person, that he wouldn’t willingly surrender large chunks of information about himself or his past; for another, she was afraid to learn too much. The more you thought you knew, the worse it might hurt if it proved untrue.

“I guess that’s right,” she told Gloria. “Maybe I’m short on curiosity.”

“Well, curiosity can be good, or it can be bad. There’s no such thing as a standard marriage. What works for one doesn’t work for another.”

“It looks as if yours works well for you.”

“More or less.”

“But not completely?”

Gloria laughed. “I live in Cedar Park, Massachusetts. Not in heaven.”

“Was your marriage ever in trouble?”

“Maybe once. But that was a long time ago.”

“What made it last?”

“It wasn’t just love. I could easily love somebody and still leave him. People do that all the time. It was mostly that I’d gotten so used to having him around. And honestly? He’s a really great guy. He doted on our kids, he still dotes on me and we never have to call a plumber. He can work miracles with toilets and garbage disposals.”

“Cal can do pretty much anything around a house, including building one from the ground up.”

“It looks to me like you’ve got a great situation. A man that can take care of a house, serenade you on the guitar and who’s madly in love with you.”

The statement shocked her so badly she couldn’t disguise her surprise. “What makes you say that?”

Gloria was wiping down the huge turkey platter. “I have eyes,” she said. “And since I’m sixty-three, I usually know what I’m looking at. Don’t you?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Well, trust me then, because I am. And you know what? Good men don’t come along all that often. When you’ve got one, it’s best to keep him close by. There are too many women looking for something they can’t find.”

They finished the dishes, leaving all of them neatly stacked on the counter, then poured themselves two more glasses of wine and went into the living room.

Another ballgame was on, but Vico had turned the sound off so Dave and Cal could play. Kristin knew most of the tunes, though not always by name. They slowed them down to a crawl, so Dave wouldn’t be forced into making mistakes. Every now and then Cal voiced encouragement. “That’s it, go on and
reach for that D, you can hit it.” Then Dave laid the mandolin on the rug, and while Cal played chords and runs on the guitar the retired policeman sang “I Saw the Light.” He had a pretty voice, high and clear, if a little too nasal for her taste.

She sat there and listened for a few more minutes and decided not to drink the wine in her glass. She’d already had too much. Back in the kitchen, she’d come close to telling the wife of her husband’s new friend that while she didn’t know he was in love with her, she knew she wasn’t in love with him and that her marriage might be about to end. And that would’ve been cowardly. At least Philip had the decency to tell her to her face.

It was after seven, and they’d been gone several hours, so she could easily say she needed to look in on Suzy. “I’m going to check on the dog,” she said. “I’ll be back in a little while.”

“Why don’t you bring one of the big guy’s mandolins?” Dave asked. “I’d love to hear him bear down on that F-5.”

She glanced at Cal. “Want me to?”

“Might as well,” he said without looking at her. “It’s in the gray fiberglass case.”

Outside, she checked to see if Matt’s car was in the driveway, but it wasn’t. Probably still at his boss’s place. She unlocked her door and, as she’d suspected, Suzy dashed down the hallway and into the kitchen, where she stood panting at the back door. When Kristin opened it, she bounded down the steps into a distant corner.

The night was clear and cold. She’d left her coat over at Vico’s, so she pulled her wrap around her shoulders, waiting patiently on the steps. Lately, she’d noticed that Suzy was having trouble negotiating stairs, and if winter was as harsh as the forecasters were predicting she’d have a rough time. She’d never even seen snow before, and it was hard to imagine how she’d handle icy steps and the salt on the streets and sidewalks.

Kristin let her back inside and then picked up her cell, which
had been lying on the windowsill, and without pondering she called Matt, entered in her list of contacts as
S. Connulty
. She didn’t know what to say if he answered, and for that reason she mostly hoped he wouldn’t. She thought she might tell him she couldn’t do this anymore. If he asked why, she thought she’d serve up a single word in reply:
Guilt
. He probably wouldn’t ask, though. He’d probably try to talk her out of making any decision until they could see each other, and most likely she’d agree. And then the decision wouldn’t get made.

She was relieved when the call went to voice mail. “I hope you’re having a nice time at your boss’s,” she said. “I came home to let Suzy out, and now I have to go back. I couldn’t risk writing to you about it last night, but I spoke yesterday to one of my plagiarists and things are even more complicated than I thought. I believe I’m going to have to try to help her. I wish we could talk over the weekend, but I know you’ll be with your daughters.… Well, have a good time, okay?” Before ending the call she added, “By the way, Matt … I love you.”

She was standing in front of the kitchen window when she said it, her eyes trained on the China Bear saltshaker she’d purchased at a Chapel Hill flea market twenty-five years ago. It always sat on the windowsill, as amusement for when she was washing dishes. If the saltshaker hadn’t been there, she might have looked out the window, and if she had she couldn’t have failed to see her husband standing at the sink in Vico’s kitchen, looking right at her.

cal drove into downtown
montvale the following Monday and bought several cans of paint. When he got back home, he pulled most of the living room furniture into the dining room, spread an old speckled tarp on the floor and went to work priming the walls. He meant to have the ground floor looking good before Christmas. He had half a mind to buy a tree this year, though he’d resented having to in California. They’d only done it because she always gave an end-of-semester party for other administrators, and while none of them, according to her, was the least bit religious, they would’ve considered it odd if she didn’t have a Christmas tree. Even the Jewish provost had one.

Why Cal wanted a tree this year was a mystery to him, and maybe it was nothing more than living in a place with wintery weather. In the valley you could swim on Christmas Day if you wanted to, and most years he did, since he’d usually drunk far too much the night before, and the water in the pool was always bracing.

He worked through the day, stopping only to eat lunch and play the mandolin for a little while. In the afternoon, he went though his CDs and found
David Grisman’s Acoustic Christmas
, set the Bose to repeat and listened to the disc all the way through three or four times. When he’d finished priming the walls and taken a shower, he pulled out one of the Martins and tried playing “Auld Lang Syne,” doing his best to replicate Mike Marshall’s cross-picked guitar break. Easier said than done. But he thought Dave would probably enjoy learning to play a holiday tune on the mandolin, and it would be nice to accompany him on guitar.

He drank a couple of beers, popped a slab of Trader Joe’s frozen lasagna in the microwave and ate it with a little salad. After that, he washed the dishes and looked at the clock. Seven forty. He let Suzy out for a few minutes, then called her back inside, put on a heavy jacket and a pair of gloves and a wool cap and left the house.

In the days when he was working with his late friend Ernesto at the construction company in Modesto, he’d seen guys overlook all kinds of problems. A tile man would lay a crooked row in the shower of somebody’s two-million-dollar home, then walk off and leave it. A carpenter would sister-up a floor joist with the nails on the wrong side. They simply didn’t want to see those flaws and hoped no one else would either, but sooner or later someone always did.

His wife had been walking home from the train station late at night, even though it was already cold out, and if she wanted him to come get her—to drive up to Bradbury or down East Border to the station—all she had to do was ask. He didn’t suggest it because from the outset their marriage had been based on the assumption that neither of them would intrude on the other’s privacy. There were boundaries, and they respected them. If she came home late, she came home late. If she wanted to walk, she walked. If he’d changed his last name, well, he’d changed his last name. If he wanted to stay up all night and sleep in a different room, he did. That they retained some rights for themselves didn’t mean they couldn’t trust each other. As the last year had proven, there wasn’t much in the world you could bank on, but he’d always banked on that.

The other night, when he stood in Vico’s kitchen drinking a glass of water and saw her mouthing those unmistakable words, he knew there was something he couldn’t overlook much longer. What he didn’t know, and was scared to imagine, was what he’d do when forced to place a label on it.

•  •  •

The Cedar Park station had just two sets of tracks, each with a covered platform and three or four benches. There was also a small parking lot that could accommodate forty or fifty vehicles. Most of the spaces were unoccupied when he got there. He took a seat on the southbound side, choosing a bench at the north end of the platform. He could stay out of the light there while keeping an eye on both the platform and the lot.

Around eight thirty it started to rain, and the night felt even colder. A southbound train should be arriving at eight fifty-three; that was the one she usually took, assuming she’d been telling him the truth. He hoped she was on it now. Then he could stop thinking about whatever was wrong until at least this time tomorrow.

The train pulled in, only about two minutes late, rainwater streaming off the cars. As they passed, he watched the windows but didn’t see her. The train was nearly empty anyway. How many people would be riding toward Boston at this time of night? Almost everyone would be going in the opposite direction, heading home after working late in the city.

The conductor stepped down and scanned the platform, his gaze briefly meeting Cal’s. No one else got off. Eventually, he waved toward the front of the train and climbed aboard, and a moment later the undercarriage creaked into motion.

Cal continued to sit there. A northbound train pulled in a few minutes later, and ten or twelve people got off. The ones who didn’t immediately find their cars in the lot opened their umbrellas and slogged away on foot.

About nine fifteen a car turned in, either a Honda or a Toyota. The driver headed for the end of the lot, not far from where Cal was sitting, finally turning into an open space. When he saw the dented rear bumper, Cal recognized the car. He watched as two heads came together in the front seat for a long kiss. And when the passenger door opened, his wife climbed out under her umbrella.

the next morning
the rain turned to snow, the flakes big amorphous butterflies that melted the instant they fluttered to earth. After taking a peek out, Matt padded downstairs in his bathrobe and slippers, turned the heat up and put on a pot of coffee. Then he unlocked the front door and stepped onto the porch to pick up the
Globe
. He thought he’d spend half an hour with the paper, read a couple more chapters of
Kristin Lavransdatter
, then devote a few minutes to the little exercise he’d begun on Sunday night after Nowicki drove away with the girls. It probably wouldn’t amount to much, but you never knew. Nobody, he’d decided, could deny you the right to hope except yourself.