“Floyd.” Viola stood beside her husband of sixty years today, dressed in a tea-length golden gown that, coupled with her gold
dragonfly clasp behind her ear, her sapphire blue eyes, and her white gossamer hair, made her glow like a jewel herself. “Do
you have to bring that thing out when you’re wearing your tuxedo and a boutonnière?”
“Of course I do, Viola. The grandchildren are here.”
All afternoon long, cars had been coming and going from the shady side of Long View Lane. The refreshment table had been refilled
three times. Relatives took turns heeding the doorbell, welcoming guests, and telling them to sign the guest book on the table
with the white feather pen.
“Thank you so much for coming.”
“Nice of you to be here.”
“Just shove your way on in. Grandma and Granddad are in the other room.”
Around Abby’s feet barreled the stampede of barking Chihuahuas who, once they’d heralded and herded the next onslaught of
well-wishers, settled into a huddle on the sofa where Floyd was not allowed to put his feet. Through the scissoring legs of
guests, Uptergrove great-grandchildren and first cousins and nieces and nephews scampered without supervision. David and Abby
had brought Samantha along. Braden and Sam, although still awkward with each other, joined in on the wildness of the other
kids without much coaxing at all.
David stood next to Abby in the crowd. The muscles around his mouth were stiff. All these jostling and hugging happy people,
and the Treasures remained about as animate as two planks of cedar.
He frowned, a sort of slow discomfort in his face.
She tried to smile, but only managed a closed, mulish grimace.
All that had come between them, and here they were, pretending to rejoice. Here they were, celebrating someone else’s marriage
that had lasted sixty years.
Tightly, David said, “Well, we’d better go and mingle. Find Viola and Floyd and let them know we’re here.” The rest went unspoken
between them:
The sooner they know we’re here, the sooner we can leave
.
“Okay,” Abby said, taking a breath as if she was on a springboard about to plunge in. “I’m with you.” Because her mind was
set on surviving through this crowd, Abby absently reached, the way she’d reached for a dozen years at crowded parties, to
find the security of her husband’s hand.
It wasn’t there.
She jerked her hand to her side, hoping David hadn’t noticed. He was looking over her head, greeting people he knew from the
bank, and several of the Uptergrove children he’d met in the office who helped Floyd keep his financial affairs in order.
“Have you met my wife, Abby?” he asked. And, this time, it was David’s turn to reach for her without thinking. She felt the
slight pressure of his arm, the splay of his fingers gathering fabric in the fiddle-bend of her back, searing her skin as
he guided her along.
“There’s a picture of them over here. Look.” Abby flipped open the leather-bound album. “Do you want to see?”
Would this be enough for You, Lord? If I grit my teeth and made myself accept him touching me? Even if I don’t trust
him
anymore, could I just trust the way his touch makes me feel?
How many times had she counseled women at the shelter about this very thing?
Reality isn’t something you can make yourself feel.
And you don’t look to find it by your feelings. You have to stand on it, even though you don’t feel like it’s there.
In the picture, there stood the Uptergroves, as neat and polished as a pair of farmer’s Sunday boots. Floyd grinning, Viola
with her curled-under hair and her rich, dark lips, brandishing that knife as if she was going off to hand-to-hand combat
herself.
“Is that Floyd?” David asked. “And look at Viola!”
“Look. I can prove it to you. It was really me,” boomed a voice from behind them, and there stood Floyd in the same dusty
old Navy brim hat. “Like Cinderella. See, I can come up with the glass slipper to prove I was there.”
“Crazy Grandpa.” One of the many children hugged him around his legs. “Grandma’s the Cinderella today, not you.”
“It fits, too. Head hasn’t gotten any bigger in all of sixty years.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that, Floyd Uptergrove,” Viola said from across all the people in the room.
Just that fast, Floyd stole David away. “Come outside for a minute with me, son. I’m looking for somebody to help me fire
up my potato gun.”
“I haven’t shot one of those things off for years.”
Floyd bent his lips toward his teeth and nodded once, a sign of pure confidence. “Handmade by my brother. The good old-fashioned
way. Viola, do we still have potatoes?”
“There’s a whole sack in the pantry.”
Braden, Samantha, and a throng of other distantly related children strung along past them just then. David grabbed Samantha
and Braden’s hands.
“Come see this, you two. You aren’t going to believe what you’re about to observe.”
“What?”
They were out of the play and intrigued by their father’s plan faster than a mayfly gets gulped by a trout. The three of them
tumbled out into the yard, both children with their chins lifted in adoration toward David. David’s limber length bent low
so he could hear what they had to say, while Abby stood at the Uptergroves’ window, clutching a curtain, watching them go.
Abby struggled with an unwanted pinch of melancholy. This was the first time, in all the years she could remember, that David
hadn’t turned and said, “Abby, come on. Don’t you want to go with us, too?”
Well, she would miss some things. But she would have her own special times with Braden. She would see to that
.
In the front yard, while revelers gathered, Floyd brought around his esteemed and prized toy. While the others watched, Floyd
polished up the span of black PVC pipe on his arm. Abby watched him say something to the kids, who began pawing with both
hands through the sack of potatoes with the zeal of treasure hunters, obviously searching for the perfect size.
The satisfactory potato was inserted, the end of the pipe was unscrewed and, out of his tuxedo pocket, Floyd pulled a can
of Final Net aerosol hairspray. He shot one squirt of the stuff into the PVC, rescrewed the end, and, ready to go, stood like
Arnold Schwartzenegger in a movie, his legs straddled, his shoulders thrown back in his tuxedo, his eyes searching the rooftops
for possible targets.
He waited as long as anybody would let him. The children began to vault up and down beside his knees and David wasn’t much
better. At last Floyd hitched up his pants legs and aimed the gun at an appropriate angle. He found the handle on the attached
charcoal lighter and he pulled the trigger.
With a rewarding
pop
, the potato launched. Up, up it sailed, high over the rooftops, high against the backdrop of the mountain, and higher still.
If it hadn’t been a fat potato, they would have lost sight of it all together.
Hard to tell the moment the potato began to come down. One moment they were watching it grow smaller, and the next it started
getting big again. Down it came while the children clapped and cheered. Down, past the telephone poles, toward the rooftops.
It came straight at them so they scattered and ran.
The potato hit Viola’s bird feeder and pulverized it. Thistle and wood splinters flew like a small explosion. Chickadees and
finches fluttered away in a state of shocked confusion.
All that remained was the metal hook extending from the eaves and half of a shingle that had been its roof, still swaying
from the force of the blow.
The potato shattered on the ground.
“Well,” Floyd said, sounding a little dejected. “I just built that birdhouse for Viola. I guess I can build her another one.”
Outside the window, everyone jostled in line for a turn. David went next and shot a potato to the north over two condominium
buildings. Braden went next. Then Samantha, very proud and careful, got to do the same.
Inside the window, Abby clung to the curtain, peering into a life that had once been hers, halfway smiling. Because, no matter
the reality between her and David, it seemed impossible not to smile at this.
Viola and her walker, which had been twisted and tied with silver and gold streamers for this grand occasion, sauntered up
behind Abby as if she could feel her being left out. “Come help me spread this new quilt on the bed,” she suggested. “The
kids gave it to us for our sixtieth. Did you see what Floyd just did to my bird feeder?”
“I did.”
“He builds it, he breaks it, he builds it again. Sounds like a sign you’d see in a china shop.”
Grateful, Abby followed her, flopped the quilt lengthwise upon the mattress, and admired its stitching and colors.
“It’s pretty, isn’t it? But a new quilt? After sixty years? What on earth am I going to do with the old one?”
A daughter poked her head in the room as she passed in the hall. “Give it away, Mother. That thing is ratty and as old as
the hills.”
“But it was a wedding gift.”
Abby smoothed out the new one while Viola watched. After a long moment, in spite of the walker, it seemed as if Viola couldn’t
stand to keep her hands off the pattern. She touched with her fingertips the cool, plump edges of the fabric, the tiny perfect
embossing of the thread. “You know,” she said in a girlish, confiding voice without ever looking up at Abby. “I
have
kissed another boy in my lifetime besides Floyd.”
“You have?”
“Yes.”
Abby couldn’t keep the incredulity from her voice. “Only one?”
“Only one.”
Abby’s considered her hands where they lay on the hand-patched cotton. She stared hard at the new-moons of her own fingernails.
Goodness, but Viola was sharing the secret of her soul!
“He had the prettiest curls I’d ever seen whenever he took off that straw hat.” Viola looked past Abby’s left shoulder, as
if she could see something far away. “Clifton Bates, that was his name. We’d been out for a drive and then he brought me home
to the porch swing. Sitting right there, where I could see the top of my father’s bald head through the front bay window,
Clifton says, ‘Miss Viola Lynn, do you mind if I give you a kiss?’ ”
“Oh, my.” Abby leaned on her hands, surveying quilt stitches intently in an effort to hide her smile. “What did you do then?”
“I said no. Any girl in her right mind, when asked for a kiss, should say no. Then I sat there looking at him thinking, Laws
of mercy, Clifton, why do you have to be such a gentleman? Why don’t you just kiss me without asking and not put me in a spot
like this?”
“But, I thought you said—”
“I
did
. But that’s it. Because there’s times that what you’re thinking you ought to do and what you want to do are two entirely
different things.”
“So?”
“So I grabbed Clifton Bates by the hat brim and
I
kissed
him
.”
Abby hollered right out loud, “Viola!” Even now, Viola blushed.
They smoothed the quilt together a third and fourth time even though there wasn’t a wrinkle or lump to be had. Every few seconds
or so, one cast an amused Victorian glance at the other, across the movement of their hands. Abby’s gentle laughter mounted
from deep within her, a place both protected and vulnerable, that she didn’t know still lived.
Viola laughed, too. She shoved the gilded walker away and watched it roll. She plopped into a threadbare wing chair and chortled
like a meadowlark, kicking her swollen feet up onto the ottoman and leaning back hard like she was in a porch swing just this
minute.
“S-shame on you, Viola,” Abby said, giggling, her mirth bubbling from a free fountain. Nothing on earth could make it stop.
“Talking about old boyfriends at your wedding party.”
“Oh, pshaw!” Viola waved the whole thing away with her hand. “That’s one reason you do it, don’t you see? I think of all the
things I might have had, and then I look at what I
do
have, and… and it’s okay. It’s very good.”
Abby’s giggling toned down a notch. “You really think so, Viola? That it’s okay to measure what you do have with what you
might have had?”
“I think so.” Viola kicked her feet sideways off the ottoman and leaned forward. “When you look back, you count all the times
you’ve broken faith with each other. And you count all the times of truth. Because, if you’re being really honest with each
other, every marriage has plenty of both.”
“Yes,” Abby said. “But some marriages are worse than others.”
“During sixty years of marriage, Abby, do you want to know what was the hardest thing of all for me?”
“What?” Abby asked, yearning for some answer, yearning for a way to survive these next days. “What was it?”
Viola said, “Being kind to each other. That was sometimes the most difficult thing. Just being kind.”
“Presents! Picture show!” a family chorus went up from the next room. “Grandma, can you get him in here for this? If you don’t,
he’ll be out there with the potatoes all day.”
Abby stood by the bed, her palm across three hand-sewn squares, looking like she’d been taunted—as if that hadn’t been much
of an answer at all. Viola turned back to her. “Can I ask you a question, Abby?”
“What?”
“It’s a question about David.”
Silence. Then finally, “I guess so.”
“It’s this. How calm does water have to be before you walk on it?”
“What? What does that have to do with David?”
“If you walk on water during a storm or during calm, you’re still walking on water. Do you measure the journey by the wind
and the waves around you? Or do you measure the journey by knowing you’re walking somewhere that’s impossible to walk in the
first place?”
The squares of the quilt, so many shapes and sizes and colors stitched together. Abby said, “But I thought I knew the man
who would be reaching for me when I went under. Now I don’t know the man who’s holding out his hand.”
“Look at the ten commandments in the Bible, Abby. Look at every one of them that starts with ‘don’t’ or ‘stop.’ All those
rules, and God was telling people that they ought to stop walking away from love.”