The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D (30 page)

Farther down the playing field James knocked his ball through the wicket, a long shot hit with a confident whack.

“Yes!” Dave called out, taking three long paces toward him with his arm raised for a high five. “And Spenser comes through with the birdie shot he needs to reclaim the lead.” Their palms met in midair with a clap.

Elizabeth’s description of him with his niece and nephew long ago had been an apt one. He was like a camp counselor of an uncle.
His skin is thicker, he’s got more patience, he smiles more
. At the time she wrote that, Elizabeth had struggled with two children; all day, here on the island, Kate had watched him fairly untroubled by three.
Though perhaps by the time Elizabeth had had Emily, she had hit her stride too. She certainly had appeared to. Kate remembered meeting Elizabeth in New York a few months after Emily was born. Kate was up for a culinary affair, and they’d met in the city for some fancy kids’ concert. When Jonah and Anna were horsing around, Elizabeth slid expertly between them without visible irritation. When they’d continued to be truly disruptive, she’d finally gotten up and ushered them out, one hand on the back of each of their heads, the baby across her chest in a sling carrier. She’d cast a breezy oh-well smile over her shoulder at Kate, and Kate remembered how unflappable she’d seemed. Kate had not yet reached those later years in the journals to know whether that was an accurate perception.

Dave returned to the step and took a long drink from the beer she’d placed on the stair.

“Do you miss golf?” she asked.

He hesitated a moment before answering, and she thought he’d sidestep the question with a blasé reply.
I still work in golf
.

“Yes and no. I love the game, no doubt about it. But it’s like that was the life of another person. What I did before, and what I did after. Act one, act two.”

He didn’t qualify his
before
. Most
befores
referred to Elizabeth’s death, but this could have meant prior to the break-in, before he quit the tour.

“I don’t know much about golf, but you were on a pretty good roll there when you left, weren’t you?”

“I was doing all right,” he said lightly, flicking at the label on his bottle with his fingernail. “Higher on the leaderboard, the money was better. But it takes over your whole world. I was never home. And when certain things happen in your life … I wasn’t really being much of a dad. Or a husband, probably. So it was time to find something else.” He stood, took the tray of patties from her, and began lining them on the grill like a dealer laying cards. “But yeah, it was hard to walk away from the tour. I worked hard to get there.”

It didn’t seem to bother him, talking about golf. She had expected it to be a forbidden topic. Maybe that had been true at the time. Or maybe that was just the way he and Elizabeth were with one another, locked in their disappointments. Too much vested in a certain version of the other to allow for variation, or weakness.

“It was hard for Elizabeth to stop working too,” Kate asked.

Dave paused, spatula in hand. “Yeah, to some extent.” He pressed down on a burger, and it sizzled. “The work had been dwindling for some time, but it was after Anna was born that she decided not to renew the contract.”

“Elizabeth ‘decided’?”

He looked at her sharply. Flames leaped as the fat from the burgers dripped below. As soon as she said it she wished she could take it back.

“Things were so busy with two kids,” he said. “It became more of a pressure.”

He did not look back at her a second time. But she felt that even if he had, she would not be able to read in his face whether he believed it himself.

Ice cream ran down their arms, and chocolate drippings stained their pajamas. The kids were silent with joy as the sunlight faded in the yard.

“I am going to miss this lawn when we go back to D.C.,” Kate said, licking her own cone. “It’s the best babysitter going. Just open the door and out they go, noise and fighting cut in half immediately.”

“We live in ours,” Dave said. “As long as it’s not pouring, we’re out there. We hardly ever go anywhere else. People come to us.” He pried open a plastic tub of blueberries and placed a few in front of Emily. “How many years you been coming here, this house?”

“This is our tenth. I love this place. There’s a reading room at the
top where the attic would be, this little nook. I’m up there all the time.”

Dave toyed with one of the blueberries, hiding it beneath his palm while his daughter pried up his fingers, one by one. “Sounds like a pretty good place to read the journals.”

Kate hesitated, then bit off a chunk of fudge in the ice cream. “It is. Up there at night, when no one needs me. It’s nice to look out over the water in the dark, see the lights on the boats.”

He held his beer bottle in front of him in both hands and rolled it between his palms. Emily pressed blueberries flat with her finger against the table, then drew in juice on her pajamas.

“Kate, I know you take it seriously, these notebooks.”

A line of ice cream slid down her cone to her finger, and she licked it slowly. The chocolate felt like lard between her teeth. He paused as if he expected her to interject.

“So now you’re gonna do whatever you think is the noble thing, store the trunk in your basement or set it aside for the kids, or whatever you’re deciding is what she would have wanted. But she was not herself last summer and I’m not sure that’s a call she would have made at another time, giving them to someone outside the family.” He had been looking out over the yard as he spoke, but now he looked at her pointedly. “I have a right to know, and I’m not just talking about last summer. So you can have your read, but I think we both know where those books should be.”

His eye contact was disconcerting. There was nothing about his body language that should register menace, but on some level she felt it: an implicit promise that no matter where she lived or where she went, or however long it took for her to get to the end of the journals, he would be there, waiting.

He put the bottle down on the table, which seemed to indicate that he’d had his say and would not belabor the point. He was more straightforward than she’d thought him capable of being and much more self-possessed, and the way he looked at her contradicted all she’d thought about him. Either she’d misjudged him, or he’d changed.

Under his look, she felt confidence pooling back in and filling the ruts. He wanted her to say okay, but she wouldn’t. Instead she murmured, “Mm hmm.”

He nodded and sat still on the step beside her. She didn’t elaborate, and he didn’t ask. After a moment, he stood.

“Kids, we have to leave in ten minutes,” he called across the lawn. He picked up Emily’s sippy cup and swept her crumbs into his palm, then spoke over his shoulder to Kate. “Do you mind if I take a quick shower while you watch Emily? I’d like to rinse off before the drive.”

His tone was stiff but not unfriendly. There’d be no ill will when he left, because they understood one another. This was always where the situation would bring them, and there was nothing left to say.

“Of course,” she said. “The outdoor shower is great. It’s right around the side of the house.”

“Do you mind if I go inside instead?”

That was surprising. Modesty? Luxury? She wouldn’t have expected either from him.

“Use the bathroom in our bedroom. Through the kitchen and to the right. The spare towels are under the sink.”

She watched him walk toward the house, and he no longer looked diminished or tired, or as if he had lost weight. His tanned shoulders were buoyant, and as he crossed the patio he came off the balls of his feet with a levity that belied the gravity of what he’d said.
I watched him walk away toward the corner with a rolling gait that bounces off the balls of his feet, heavy and solid like a draft horse, but light like a very contented one. He looks like he could carry you a thousand miles if he had to.

Elizabeth had looked miserable as Kate handed her the plant. She’d held it before her in both hands, quiet and serious as an altar girl. Kate had known she would miss Elizabeth. It was nearly impossible to replicate the companionship of a friend who’d known you since the first days of motherhood. She’d miss their Tuesday and Thursday afternoons on the playground, giving structure and support to
the no-man’s-land between naps and dinner. And if Elizabeth were to have the third child she hoped for, Kate would not live nearby to see that pregnancy swell or see that child grow, daily. The emotion of the moment suddenly felt to Kate like too much and she longed to cut it short, make light of it. But she saw with confusion that for Elizabeth it was more still. The glow of the porch lights showed the welling of her eyes. Kate had seen Elizabeth endure many things. But she’d never seen her cry.