“We have plenty of money, but you want to keep working.”
“We both worked. We always worked. No one came to the school and offered me a buyout. I’m still working.”
He looked at me. “This is the time we have.”
“So you want me to quit my job and start flying again? Neither one of those things interests me.”
“Well, see, that’s the problem,” he said. “Right there.”
“I’m not sayingyoudon’t interest me. For as long as you’ve known me, I’ve been a non-flying schoolteacher. I haven’t changed. We’ve rented the house in Wellfleet this summer. We still go away.” Jonathan was a wonderful person, a wonderful husband, who had become a little destabilized by his newfound free time. He was adjusting. I held fast to that.
“I want to go to Fiji,” he said. “I want to see the Milford Sound.”
I didn’t say anything. I waited to see where this was going. We were both looking up at the stars.
“All of Candy’s dreams had to do with travel. We were going to go places when the girls got older, when we had some money put away.”
“Candy?”
“She never got to do any of it. She was forty years old when she died, and for the years before she died, she was too sick totravel. She’d been to Rome and Florence when she was in college and that was it.”
“And I’m sorry. It was a terrible thing, but I don’t see—”
“It’s that we die, and we should think about doing the things we want to do while we’re able to do them.”
It might have been the looming prospect of cleaning out his mother’s house that was bringing this up, or maybe, if he really did feel threatened by the arrival of Eddie, he was letting me know that he could go, too. Maybe he was thinking about how gladly his first wife would have gone to Wisconsin to sort through the boxes of old report cards in the attic. All I knew was that he was leaving in the morning and I didn’t want to fight. “Maybe one of the girls would want to go.”
“Go where?”
“I don’t know. Fiji, the Milford Sound.”
He shook his head. “They’ve got their lives. They can’t walk out the door and travel with me.”
And clearly I could. “Ask Bea,” I said.
He sat with that one for a while.
“Bea never gets to go anywhere,” I said. “She’s been stuck taking care of your mother all these years. I bet she’d be thrilled to go.”
Jonathan ate another strawberry. “Maybe.”
“You’ll have plenty of time to talk about it.”
He waited. I could tell he was rolling the idea around, seeing if he could picture the two of them in Kyoto or Rome. “I’m sorry I said anything about Candy.”
“You know you can talk about Candy.”
He shook his head. “I still feel bad for her, that’s all. I think about all the things she missed, not only the travel but theweddings, the grandkids.”
I reached out across the wide arm of my chair and took his hand. The lightning bugs dotted the grass with brief yellow light. “You still have to pack.”
When we stood up, we held each other for a couple of minutes, and when we went inside, I took the suitcase off the bed and we made love, which was the best way I knew to reassure him. I was telling him he could go and come back and I would be here and it would all be fine.
In the morning I drove Jonathan to the airport, the secondmost reassuring thing I knew how to do. I thought about calling my mother on the drive home and telling her I’d seen Eddie, but I kept getting stuck on that week after the car accident when I was nine. Leda was still in the hospital on the second floor, unable to achieve peristalsis in her bowels, and Eddie was in the hospital on the fourth floor, having had surgery on his ankle. In 1980 the insurance companies were fine with people staying in the hospital until they had recovered. All I had was a brutal row of stitches down the left side of my face. My mother had arranged for me to stay at the Cathcarts’ house down the street. I would go to school with my best friend, Tavia. There was plenty to worry about, but nothing was coming to an end. I liked going to the hospital. I’d get Leda to write a note to Eddie: “Dear Eddie, I am sorry about your foot. Feel better soon. Love, Leda.” Leda confessed that she didn’t know how to spell “ankle.” Then I would take the stairs two flights up and deliver it, waiting for Eddie to write out his reply. “Dear Leda,” he began on the back of the same piece of paper, “I am sorry to hear you are still in the hospital. I hope thereis more fun on your floor than there is on my floor. The fourth floor is the dullest floor of all. The food is bad and I am lonely. I think they should put us together in a double room. I would give you my ice cream. Love, Eddie.”
Eddie did not seem to be having such a terrible time. Our mother brought in the fat manuscript he’d been working on, and he sat propped up in bed, marking away. Eddie in the hospital didn’t seem so different from Eddie at home, except that he was wearing a green gown beneath his robe. What was different was me. I wanted to stay right there with him. I wanted to sleep rolled up at the foot of his bed.
“How are the stitches?” he asked me.
