She knew his body so well, as he did hers.
“Maybe you need to start hanging out with a different kind of woman,” she told him.
“Well, look at me,” he said. “I am, aren’t I?”
He should find someone younger, she told him. Someone who might have kids with him. Someone who didn’t spend her days caring for a brain-injured son. She started putting her clothes on.
“You know you’re my dream girl, right?” he said to Eleanor.
She laughed.
60.
Never a Good Time
Driving down the road to their old house to drop off or pick up the children, the words would come to her that she always used to whisper to herself when she rounded the last bend: “I’m home.” But this wasn’t her home anymore. She no longer spoke them.
She was not welcome inside their old house anymore, evidently. On Sundays, if it fell to her to pick up the children—as it did sometimes, when Cam was off on one of his physical therapy trainings and Phyllis was babysitting—the three of them were always outside waiting for her when she pulled up. If it was too cold for them to stand outside, Cam must have instructed them to keep an eye out for her, out the window, because they ran out very fast, as if to avoid the possibility that she might get out of the car and come in to get them.
She hardly ever saw Cam, but when she did, it caught her up short. He was cordial, but there was nothing in the way he behaved with Eleanor now to set her apart from some woman waiting on him at the hardware store or the bank. A person seeing the two of them together as they were now, meeting—very briefly—on the steps of the house where their babies were born, would never know these were two people who used to love each other, used to make love.
Those times in the driveway, watching her children disappear into their old house—the chill that lingered from the way she had become, to her ex-husband, a person he greeted no differently than he might a vacuum cleaner salesperson or a stranger canvassing for a political candidate—she took comfort where she found it. In ten minutes, she’d be climbing the stairs above the video store.
She had figured the visits to Timmy Pouliot would end when winter came. He’d lose interest, maybe, find a girlfriend his own age.But when the snow melted (cork people season, not that Eleanor and the children made those any more), she was still coming over, and in summer—the season she pictured him with some adorable new twenty-one-year-old on the back of his bike, they still had their Friday nights. Not every week, but more often than not.
After that first time she’d invited herself over, when she’d been so nervous—and Timmy so clueless—her visits felt like the best part of her week. Of all the things going on in her life—worrying about Toby’s brain and Al’s moodiness (call it what it was, depression), being mad at Cam, missing her house, missing the stars and the sound of the waterfall down the road, watching the changes in her children, figuring out how to pay the bills—this was the simplest part. Walking into Timmy Pouliot’s apartment and letting him unbutton her jacket. Stepping out of her jeans and into the bathtub.
He always poured her a glass of wine when she got there. “Tell me what’s going on,” he said. Mostly what Eleanor had to report had to do with her children, but Timmy always seemed interested.
There was this one Friday night, almost a year since Eleanor had started going over to Timmy Pouliot’s apartment. She must have looked even more worn out than usual. It was winter, and the drive to Akersville had taken a particularly long time. When she walked in his apartment, he had taken one look at her and said, “I know what you need.” He’d given her a massage. Then, as always, the bath.
Darla came to see her in Brookline. She’d only been to Boston a few times in her life—long ago on a school field trip to the Museum of Science and once, with Bobby, to Fenway Park.
On their big Boston weekend, Darla and Eleanor went out for breakfast and had croissants and cappuccino, a new experience for Darla. They brought Toby to the Children’s Museum and after, crossed the Congress Street Bridge to visit the Tea Party ships—Eleanor explaining the story of the settlers throwing the tea overboard, Toby more interested in the granola bar Eleanor had given him, and after he was finished with it, the wrapper.
Seeing him, as she did, every day, it was hard for Eleanor to pick up on changes in her son, but to Darla, who hadn’t spent time with the two of them in months, Toby was doing better.
“I have to hand it to Cam,” Eleanor told her friend. “He’s the one, when I felt hopeless, who started bringing Toby to yoga. That was the first time after the accident that he seemed interested in anything.”
“Cam’s not a bad guy, really,” Darla said.
“I know,” Eleanor said. It would have been easier if he were.
They rode back to Eleanor’s place on the T, another first for Darla. That evening, they left Toby back at the condo with the girls and went out for dinner in the North End. They had real pizza, not the kind you got in Akersville. Darla loved the North End—the markets selling fresh pasta, the smell of garlic, the street musicians at Faneuil Hall.
“When I get the cash together to leave Bobby, this is where Kimmie and I are coming,” Darla said. She had researched mortuary schools in the area. There were two.
When Darla had said this in the past, Eleanor always encouraged her, but this time what she expressed was simply impatience.
“You’re always talking about this and you never end up doing it,” Eleanor said. The words came out sharper than she’d intended. She could see, on Darla’s face, a flicker of hurt.
“This isn’t a good time.”
“There’s never a good time,” Eleanor told her.
61.
Just Like inThe Sound of Music
