She had planted a lavish three hundred feet of flowering plants that ran the length of the property from the lake almost to the road. The border was already at its summer peak. Antique pink and red shrub roses exulted; irises fluttered like flights of bluebirds on their stems.
Then I noticed that someone else was in the garden, a man, and I found myself grinning. “Hey,you,” I called.
Twenty
“HENRY!It’s so good to see you,” I said to the tall, wiry man who was taking gardening tools out of a pickup truck. His hair was a snowy semicircle around a balding pate, his bright eyes sparkled, and he moved with more agility than you’d expect from a man in his mid-seventies.
“Jennifer, I was hoping I’d see you,” he said. “I missed you at the hospital by a couple of minutes yesterday. You look beautiful, sweetheart.” Then Henry gave me a big kiss and a hug that might have left a permanent impression.
I told him what I knew from that morning’s call to the hospital—that Sam was the same. Henry nodded and I saw the pain in his eyes. I was remembering all the times I’d seen him and Sam putting the garden through its paces.
Henry Bullock had trained at Wisley in England and was Lake Geneva’s resident master gardener. Sam was an obsessive amateur. But Henry always bragged that “Sam has a great eye. She’s a great partner.”
“I almost died myself when I found her on the kitchen floor,” he told me, shaking his head as if he didn’t want the memory in there.
“You found her?” I asked in surprise.
“I did,” he answered, touching a handkerchief to his eyes. “I wish Sam could see her border this morning.”
My God, his pain brought back mine. I hugged him again, and we murmured assurances to each other that Sam would be home soon. Henry had always seemed like a part of our family.
Moments later, a machine chatter made our conversation just about impossible. Joseph, one of Henry’s sons, had started up the mower in the front yard. I said good-bye, then mounted the porch steps.
My watch read twenty to nine, and I figured I had time to read a couple more letters before I went to see Sam.
Twenty-one
Dear Jennifer,
I want to ramble on a little about the importance of second, and even third, chances. I was helping out in the library one day when a bookmark fell from the pages of a novel. Actually, it was a handwritten note, a quote attributed to a Father Alfred D’Souza. D’Souza had written: “For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin—real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be got through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.”
Jennifer, that’s how I felt as my life creaked forward. I know that I always put up a cheerful front, but that’s how I felt inside.
More than twenty years had passed since I’d sworn I’d give myself a second chance and still I hadn’t done it. I’d raised two wonderful daughters. I’d made about ten thousand dinners, thirty thousand beds, Brownie trooped and PTA’d and lawyer-wived my heart out. But I was resigned to my marriage with Charles, and you know what? I no longer believed that a second chance was really possible.
That little quote moved me.
And maybe it prepared me for one of the most important moments in my life.
I was only forty-three, but I had been married for nearly twenty-six years. My children had grown, and I felt that my spirit was drying up like a bug in a web in the corner of a dusty room. Jennifer, I had never really been in love. Isn’t that something?
Three weeks after reading that note at the library, I met someone. I won’t tell his real name, Jennifer. Not even to you.
I called him Doc.
Twenty-two
Jennifer dear,
If this blows your mind a little, and it should, imagine how it blew mine. KA-BOOM! Rockets to the moon!
Let me tell you how it happened. Actually, Doc and I had known each other for years, but the night I began to really know him was at an endless dinner for the Red Cross at the Hotel Como. We happened to be seated at the same table, and once we began to talk that night, we never wanted to stop. I can’t even put it into words, but soon I was glowing. I was feeling something again, too. I think the electricity between us straightened my curls right to the ends. I could have talked to him all night, right into the morning. We even made a joke about doing just that.
Of course Charles never noticed a thing.
I remember exactly what Doc was wearing that night: a beige linen suit, with a blue oxford shirt, and a hand-painted blue tie. He was slender and tall, with thick blond hair streaked with silver, easily the most handsome man in the room (in my eyes, anyway). Over dinner, he told me about the stars, in particular about a comet that was about to cross our patch of the universe and wouldn’t appear again for two hundred years. He knew about all sorts of things, and he was passionate about life, which I loved and had been missing for years.
We had many common interests, but electricity aside, I felt comfortable with him. Immediately. He liked to listen, and for some reason I felt I could trust him to accept who I really was. Jen, for that night anyway, I felt that I was home. For the first time in twenty-five years I almost felt like myself again. Can you imagine what that’s like? Actually, I hope that you can’t.
