Sebastian went back for my crutches and leaned them against the foot of the bed. He put my pills and my book on the nightstand. Sebastian kissed my forehead with kindness, the same way my brothers had kissed me as a child. He would get me awheelchair. He would make sure someone took me to the play. I think I was asleep before he was out the door, and then I was awake again and Duke was kissing me, the startling taste of tequila filling my mouth. He must have come straight from the lake and into my bed. He covered me with his pervasive dampness. “You’ve been gone forever,” he said, pushing off his espadrilles.
“Did Duke come and see you before the play?” Emily asks, her brow knit with concern. Joe has gone off to the goats while the girls and I wash dishes. Cherries, cooking, goats, dishes, the past. Days are endless and the weeks fly by.
“He did.” I lean into the pan to scrub off bits of whitefish. “In between rehearsal and the performance.”
Maisie shakes her head. “Knock yourself out, Duke.”
“They were busy days,” I say.
“Not that busy,” Nell says.
I smile. “No, you’re right. Not that busy.”
“Your girlfriend’s laid up in bed,” Maisie says.
“And she doesn’t get to finish her run ofOur Town,” Nell says.
“In fact, she never plays Emily again,” I say, joining them for a moment in the third person. Nell had already come to this conclusion but I can see that Emily and Maisie didn’t know.
“Never?” Emily asks.
I shake my head.
“It’s just like Uncle Wallace,” Nell says, then catches herself. “I don’t mean that. It’s nothing like Uncle Wallace.”
Emily puts down her dish towel. “Never Emily or never anything else?”
“I stopped acting after that.”
“When you were twenty-four?”
“Twenty-five. I turned twenty-five in the hospital.”
“I really can’t stand this,” Maisie says.
“It redefines the quarter-life crisis,” Emily says.
“The what?”
“Quarter-life crisis,” Nell says. “It’s when your life falls apart at twenty-five or thereabout. The pandemic is our quarter-life crisis.”
“Ah.”
“But yours was so much worse,” Nell says.
“Not getting to act inOur Townagain is not worse than the pandemic,” I say.
“Did you really go and see her be Emily?” Emily asks.
“Sure I did. All my friends were in that play. I had to be there for them.” I can’t remember if this is true, if this is the person I was at the time or the person I became later. Certainly we preached it to the girls growing up: Work for the good of the collective, root for the team, get over yourself.
“You went in a wheelchair?”
No one is doing dishes now, and I clap my hands the way their father does to restart their engines. “I went in a wheelchair. One of the swings fromCabaretcame to get me. This isn’t a Dickens novel.”
“So how was Pallace?” Nell asks. This is the question all three of them want answered: How was Pallace?
I tell them the truth. She was spectacular.
