Tea and Primroses (26 page)

“You did?”

“Sure. You’re special, Connie. Everyone knows that.” He paused, picking up one of my mother’s throw pillows and holding it on his lap. He traced a flower on the pillow with his index finger. “You seem different.”

“How so?”

“Smaller somehow.” He looked up at me and his eyes were nothing but kindness and compassion and forgiveness.
Uncomplicated
. “I thought you’d come home bigger.”

“The farther you go from home the smaller you get.”

“Oh.” His brows furrowed. He cocked his head to the side just as he had done in class when he was trying to understand something but couldn’t quite grasp it.

I meant it figuratively, of course. Time unfolds and if one chooses to take chances and live fully, the inevitable disappointments and heartbreak bring humility, even to a person like me who thought she was incapable of being brought to her knees by anything but professional disappointment.  To him, I said, “The world humbles you, if you really live.”

“Is that what it was like to leave here? Living?” A spot on his neck, just under his right ear, flushed bright pink.

“I lived here, too,” I said, gently. “But going away made me grow up in a way I couldn’t have if I’d stayed here under my mother’s control.”

His eyes returned to the pillow. “Why’d you come home?”

“You want the truth?”

“Yeah.”

So I told him the truth—all of it. He listened without interruption, his expression stoic. Afterward, wiping the tears from my cheeks with the handkerchief he always kept in his pocket, he asked me the same thing he’d asked me at the beginning of our conversation. “You want to come to the football game Friday? Tim and Louise will be there.”

This time I said yes.

And that Friday night after the game, in the back of his father’s hardware store, I let him make love to me. I was numb by then and it felt like nothing. Nothing felt fine.

Afterward, we were on the floor, near Miller’s desk; he wrapped a blanket around me when he noticed I shivered. “I know you’ll never love me like you did him,” he said. “But I don’t care. I love you enough for both of us.”

“Miller,” I said, soft. “I want to love you. Is that enough for you?”

“To have you with me, to take care of you. Yes, it’s enough.”

***

The next afternoon I found Reggie at Murphy’s, watching sports with some other men I recognized from the docks. He rose from the table of men, obviously startled to see me but breaking into a grin. He opened his arms and I went into them. “Princess? You all right, now? What’re you doing home?”

I slid out of his embrace. The place smelled of stale beer and cigarettes. I was nauseous and swallowed hard to keep the bile from coming up. “Things didn’t work out, Reggie.” My voice choked. “I needed to come home.”

“Well, now, that’s what homes are for. To come home to.” He put his hand on the small of my back. “Come sit with me. We can talk at the bar here. You want a beer?”

I shook my head. “A ginger ale, maybe?” Reggie waved to the bartender and ordered for me before turning back to study my face.

“This about your parents?”

“I didn’t know until my mother picked me up at the train station. She said it’s been six months since he moved out?”

Reggie shifted on the stool, scratching under his cap and grimacing, as if recollecting. “That’s about right.”

“Is he living with you?”

The bartender brought the ginger ale. I absently fingered the sweaty glass, keeping my gaze fixed on Reggie.

He looked uncomfortable. “No. Not exactly.”

“Not exactly?”

“I’ll let him tell you about his situation.”

“Is he still working?”

“Sure.”

“Reggie, what happened? Can you tell me the truth?”

“Well, now, it’s hard for a young person to understand, I reckon. But after a time a person gets worn down from a woman like your mother.”

“That’s not hard for me to understand.” I smiled. “I guess I thought he loved her.”

“Princess, you’re the smartest girl around and I know you know things are complicated between two people, especially when one of them is your mother.”

“Yeah, I understand that but he was a cactus, you know, just never seemed to need much of anything to survive.”

“Well, see, that’s just it. All your daddy’s needed all these years to survive was knowing you had everything you needed. Never saw a daddy love someone like yours loves you. He didn’t ever want you to be stuck there alone with her and as long as you were here, he felt obliged to stay. But after you left, he understood it was time for him to be free too.”

“Is he happier?”

A strange look passed over Reggie’s face. “Well, now, you’ll have to judge for yourself but if I had to venture a guess, then yes, he is.”

Then, suddenly, I knew. “He’s with a woman, isn’t he?”

Reggie clicked his tongue, shaking his head. “That’s not for me to say.” He asked the bartender for a pen and then wrote an address and phone number on one of the cardboard coasters. “Princess, just make sure you’ve got your game face on when you see him. He needs to see you’re strong or he’ll weaken. You understand?”

I smiled, resting my head on Reggie’s shoulder for a moment. “You mean it’s time for me to grow up and think of someone besides myself?”

“That’s about right, Princess.” He took a long sip of his beer. “Now tell me about who broke your heart and where I can find him to kick his ass.”

“Oh, Reggie, how did you know?”

“I loved someone once.” He chuckled. “I know it’s hard to believe but I was young once too.”

The storyteller in me came alive. I had to stifle my immediate desire to know everything about it. But instead I answered the first question. “I was happy, Reggie. And now I’m not.”

“Ah, Princess, I hate it for you. But, as my mother used to say, ‘This too shall pass.’”

“Does it, Reggie? Because right now it feels like I’m dying.”

“I know, Princess.”

“A publisher wanted my first book. It’s coming out next October.”

He slapped the table. “Well, I’d like to act surprised but I ain’t.” He paused. “Your daddy’s gonna be so proud. How come he don’t know yet?”

“I was just going to send you both the book in the mail. Telling you that way seemed to be more fun even though it was terrible to have to wait.”

“Either way, it’ll be something to see your name in print.”

I picked up the coaster, looking at the address Reggie had scrawled there. It was an address in the town just north of us. “Did he meet her before he left my mom?”

“You could say that.”

I looked at him questioningly.

“She was his first love. In high school. But her father disapproved so she married someone else. But I’ll let him tell you the rest.”

After I left Reggie, I went home to my mother’s. Thankfully, she was out somewhere. I sat in the kitchen as the outside light turned dark, turning the coaster over and over in my hands. My father had loved someone once. He loved her again? Had he ever stopped? Would I ever stop loving Patrick?

I drank a cup of tea. Then, standing at the sink with the phone cord stretched across the room, I dialed the number Reggie had scrawled on the back of the coaster. A woman answered. She had a soft, melodic voice, with a lilt on the end of the word hello.

“Is Harry there?” I asked.

She hesitated. I heard her take in a breath, like she was surprised. “May I ask who’s calling?”

“This is Constance.”

“Oh, yes, of course. Constance. Just a moment.”

The phone sounded muffled for a moment. Then, my father’s voice, the same as always, low and kind. “Sweets, is that you?”

Tears came to my eyes. “Yeah, Daddy. I’m home.”

“Home?”

We spoke over one another. “I went to see Reggie. He gave me this number.”

“Why?”

“Why am I home?”

“Yes. What happened?”

I started to cry. “Daddy, I’ve had some trouble.”

“Stay there. I’ll come get you.”

“Mother’s on her way home.”

There was silence for the briefest of moments on the other end of the phone, perhaps a split second, but it was enough of a pause that I knew how hard it was for him to say what came next. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

Although it was cold, I sat on the porch waiting for him to arrive. Mother was still out; I had no idea where. Our street was empty. The sky was gray, with low, dense clouds, making it darker than it should be in early spring. The trees, newly sprouted with leaves, whipped in the wind. I thought back to the trees in Patrick’s yard and the images of him and our walks, his cabin, the seasonal colors—everything vivid in my mind. I wondered if they would ever lessen, these memories that haunted all my thoughts.

My father’s truck appeared, barreling down the street. I’d never seen him drive so fast. The headlights blinded me as he turned into our driveway. I didn’t wait for him to get out but ran down the porch steps and was inside the cab of the truck before he could turn the engine off.

He smiled and leaned over to me. I kissed him on the cheek. “Hi, Daddy.”

“Hi, Sweets. You hungry? I could take you to dinner.”

“That’d be nice.” I paused. “What’s her name?”

He looked at me for a moment, his face changing from surprise to sadness. “You know about her?”

“Reggie told me.”

He nodded, glancing between the spokes of the steering wheel. “Her name is Clara.”

“Do you love her?”

His eyes flickered to the steering wheel and back to me, his face bearing an expression I’d never before seen, wistful and joyful all at once. “Yes, very much. I have all my life.” He put the truck into gear and backed out of the driveway, like I’d seen him do thousands of times.

“Is she why you left Mom?”

He shook his head. “No. I’d already filed for divorce when I happened to run into her.”

“Where?”

“You won’t believe it.”

“Try me.”

“At the bookstore in Cannon Beach.”

“Our bookstore?”

“Yes. I was there shopping for you. She was in the fiction section, reading the first page of some book. I’m sorry, I don’t remember what, and I know you’ll ask me that next but I was startled, like seeing a ghost, and I only remember her. She was wearing a light blue raincoat and she’s small and soft with these big brown eyes like a cow and brown hair she wears short and it curls around her face like a cap.” He blushed. “Well I say all that to say, I recognized her right away. She’s hardly changed. It took her a moment to know who I was, though. The docks have done their damage.”

“Was she married?”

“Divorced. Three years now. No children.”

“You knew her in high school?”

“We had Senior English together, years ago. She sat in front of me in Mr. Young’s class. I remember the way her hair curled at the nape of her neck when she leaned over a book or assignment. But she went to college after high school and I went to work on the docks. I asked her to marry me but her dad didn’t think I was good enough for her—forbade her to see me and in those days girls did what their fathers told them. He sent her across the country to college to keep her away from me. Then she married someone else, a lawyer from a wealthy family. It always seemed right to me. I knew her dad was correct. I wasn’t good enough for her. And then I met your mother, you know, and she just had this way of making whatever she wanted happen. And for a long time there was you. It was enough, Sweets, when you were home. But your mother and I barely spoke even when you lived with us and after you left we were like distant roommates creeping around that house trying to avoid one another.”

“Daddy, I know how Mother is. I don’t know how it took you this long to get out.”

He flinched from this truth. “I didn’t want to leave you alone with her.”

I sighed, thinking of my father, all the wasted years. “Oh, Daddy, it was too much, too many years.”

“Not one moment of my life with you is anything close to a waste. I would do nothing differently. Don’t you ever forget that.”

We were at the edge of town now, and he turned left, toward the water. “There’s a new fish house open since you left. It’s called Myrnas. A little fried food might put some meat on your bones.” He reached over and patted my knee, like he used to when I was a girl. “You look too thin, Sweets.” I thought of the way my mother had made the same comment and yet when he said it I felt nothing but love instead of criticism.

“I haven’t been eating much.”

“It’s a man did this to you, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. Patrick Waters.”

He nodded. “I’d like to throttle him.”

“Can I meet Clara?”

He took in a deep breath, turning on a side street. “Yes. When the time is right. Let’s get some food in you, okay?” Myrnas (no apostrophe, I noticed immediately) was on the right side of the street, built in the year I was gone on a lot that had sat empty for many years. It was nothing spectacular, just a plain, gray building with a big plastic sign with the name and an emblem of a fish with a smile on its face. Why was it smiling if it knew it was about to be eaten? If I’d felt more myself I would have asked my father that question out loud and we might have laughed. But I was too disoriented and disheartened.

I looked over at him. He seemed younger than I’d seen him look in years. His hair was cut and combed carefully. Was he wearing a new jacket? “Daddy, you seem different.”

He parked the truck and turned off the engine before turning to me. “I am. For the first time I’m happy about something besides you.”

I started to cry again. “Daddy. Everything’s changed since I left.”

“Well, that’s the only thing we can count on, you know—change.”

“And taxes.”

“And death.” We smiled at one another despite my tears, enjoying our shared and repeated joke. For the first time since Patrick left, I felt a little better. “I missed you.”

“Sweets, you have no idea what missing a person is until you have a daughter.”

Over dinner I told him everything, leaving nothing out but speaking softly, even though we were at a table near the front, apart from the other patrons. Daddy listened carefully, asking questions every so often. After I finished, he set down his napkin and took my hand from across the table. “I’m sorry, Sweets. I can recall like yesterday what it felt like when I lost Clara. And I’m here for you, no matter what you decide to do.”