Another You (41 page)

She sat on the black iron bench. He sat in a chair. In the distance, he heard a dog yapping. A plane passing overhead.

“When did Evie give you the necklace?” he said.

She fingered it. “When she died. There was a nurse friend of hers who packaged some things from her room and sent them to us. I hope I haven’t said something I shouldn’t have said. This nurse said she was supposed to pass on things to both you and Gordon. She said Evie reminded her all the time, and they had a joke: the nurse would pretend to scold her, saying, ‘Is that the only thing you keep forgetting? You mean that’s the one and only thing you’re senile about?’ She’d promised her a hundred times she’d do it, she said.” She sipped her beer. “She seemed quite nice on the phone,” she said.

“Yes. I know who you mean. She was very nice. She did bring us things, come to think of it, on the day of the funeral.”

“I feel bad we didn’t come to Evie’s funeral,” Beth said.

He shrugged. “To come all that way for someone you didn’t really know,” he said.

“I know, but I was surprised Gordon didn’t go. He went and sat on the floor of the ocean. That’s what he spent the day doing.”

“Well,” he said, “that would have been a long way to come just for the funeral.”

“He doesn’t like to face some things,” she said.

“No, I suppose none of us do,” he said.

“But he just doesn’t do it. I had a lump in my breast biopsied last year. Everything was fine, but the day he was supposed to go to the doctor’s office—we weren’t even going to hear right then, it was just a biopsy—he had somebody call from work to say he’d gotten tied up. He didn’t even call me himself!”

“That’s unfortunate,” Marshall said.

“It is unfortunate. He has more capabilities than he calls on.”

Marshall nodded. He would just as soon not hear these things about Gordon.

“Maybe a lot was expected of him when he was young,” Beth said. “It was that way with my older brother. I have an older brother, too. He works for a conservation group in Africa. He’d do anything for an animal, but he doesn’t even send my mother a birthday card. Sometimes a postcard, but there’s never much information on it. She was going to visit him once, and he told her there were too many diseases, not to come.”

“He was probably telling her for her own sake,” Marshall said.

“Men stick together, they really do.” She sighed. “I don’t even believe that you believe that.”

“I don’t,” Marshall said.

“I like you,” she said again. She looked around. “I was thinking about getting a few ficus, or something like that. Do you think there’s enough greenery, or would more look nice?”

“It looks perfect to me, but I’m not very good at envisioning things when they aren’t in place.”

“Hmm,” she said. “Gordon’s very good at that, usually. You know what he does? He gets a piece of paper and he draws polka dots on it. He says doing that allows him to envision what things will look like before he breaks his back moving everything.”

He nodded.

“Did he tell you about the letters?”

“Letters?” He had been thinking about ficus trees. Were ficus the ones with small, wrinkly leaves? The ones they sold sometimes in the supermarket in New Hampshire?

“He didn’t tell you,” she said, matter-of-factly. “I don’t suppose I thought he really had.” She slid forward, placing her feet together, the beer bottle half-empty. “Don’t tell him I told you,” she said.

“What about letters?” he said.

“The nurse. That woman, who was so nice. She called to say they’d be coming. I really shouldn’t tell you this, because you almost got the letters. Evie was going to give them to Sonja and you until just before she died. She changed her mind, the nurse said, and wanted them to be sent to me and Gordon. I hardly knew her, so she was sending them to Gordon, not to me.”

He frowned.

“Don’t tell him,” she said again.

“Okay,” he said.

“Well, she called to say how sorry she was, but to say she’d heard from the nurses at the hospital that she didn’t die a painful death, and all of that. Gordon told her we’d see her at the funeral. I was going to go. If he went, I was going to go with him. Anyway, the nurse was calling to say she was sending the things by Federal Express, because she didn’t feel right about putting jewelry in the mail and just mailing it. I told Gordon he should send some money to reimburse her, that that was probably what she was hinting about. Well, she did send it. This necklace was in its original box, from a jewelry store in Boston. I kept the box, because it’s beautiful too. I started to read the letters, but I didn’t understand anything in them. Sort of business letters, about somebody’s delayed arrival. They were boring, to tell you the truth. I put them aside and thought maybe I’d look at them again some other time, and then Gordon got home from work and started reading them. They were in three packages, tied with ribbon. He read about half of one pack and then he said, ‘You know, the truth of the matter is, I don’t much like surprises.’ He doesn’t, either. He likes to know in advance what I’m getting him for his birthday. He told me right out, when I hardly knew him, that if I ever gave him a surprise party, he’d never speak to me again. I wish you’d gotten the letters, because then I could find out if that stuff meant anything. I saw them and they didn’t look like love letters. I think he was just teasing. But he didn’t like having them, so do you know what he did? He took them with him when he made a night dive. He and his buddy went out together, and when he went down he tucked the whole pile of them under a rock on the bottom of the ocean. Littering the Atlantic! At first I thought he was kidding me, but then it turns out to be true. He took a bunch of her old letters and drowned them.”

“Jesus,” Marshall said. He remembered, now, the box the nurse
had brought with her to the house the day of the funeral. With the exception of the necklace, Evie had given Sonja the entire contents of her jewel box. His father’s pocket watch had been in there. Sonja had given that to him. It seemed almost obscene that Tony Hembley had looked at it admiringly—that he had stood in the living room, joining the little cluster of Sonja and Marshall and the nurse, and peered into the pink satin jewel box and looked appreciatively at the watch Sonja drew out, his father’s octagonal watch dangling from its platinum watch fob. The nurse had done just what Evie had asked. Her timing might have been better, but he supposed that if someone other than Tony had gazed in, he wouldn’t feel so cantankerous. It was hardly a private matter, really: a box filled with an old lady’s brooches and rings, bracelets and necklaces, costume jewelry with only a few precious stones dropped in among the tangle, Sonja had told him later. It wasn’t as if the Hope diamond were hiding in there.

“I think maybe it made him sentimental,” Beth said. “Letters from so long ago.”

A bird began to shriek, its piercing cries making Beth spring up, grabbing the top of the fence and hissing at a cat that had begun to prowl the bird’s cage in the neighbors’ yard. “They hooked up some electronic thing that was supposed to keep that cat ten feet from the birdcage,” Beth said. “It works all day until late afternoon, and then I just don’t know. The cat’s right in there like there was nothing set up at all.” Next came a recorded voice, as he watched her, white-knuckled, clinging to the fence. “You have entered a secured area,” the voice said. “Oh, fuck you,” Beth said to the recording. “If I didn’t grab the fence and hiss, that three-hundred-dollar bird would be dead, and that would be a very happy alley cat.”

“Where are the people?” he said.

“Oh, they don’t ever do anything about their hair-trigger alarm. They’re probably inside smoking dope.”

“Really?” he said.

“Oh, I don’t know. The owners keep going back and forth between here and Boca Raton, and they’ve got some Rastas staying in there who don’t care about anything but dope and sunshine. Why they’d leave the bird that way, I don’t know. The guy really likes the bird. He’s out there every evening he’s home, trying to get it to say things.”

“What does it say?” Marshall said.

“It says ‘Margaritaville’ and ‘tropical breeze’ and things like that. Now it says ‘good weed.’ His girlfriend’s the one who rented to the Rastas. Now he’s gonna be furious at her.”

“Hey, beauty!” the bird hollered. “Helloooooooo.”

“I save your life every day. Can you say, ‘Save my life?’ ” Beth hollered.

Silence from the bird.

“I do,” she said.

Marshall sloshed the last inch of beer around in the bottle. He could see living this way: blue skies; warm winters; flowers.

“Hey, Marsh!” Gordon hollered, appearing at the end of the long hallway. He was backlit, just a shape, his features indistinguishable as Marshall went toward him. Gordon embraced him one-armed; the other held a bag of charcoal and a string bag dangling from his thumb, filled with things from the store.

“Hey, I hope the party didn’t keep you away last night. You didn’t check into a motel just because those idiots hadn’t cleared out, did you?”

“No, no,” Marshall said. Gordon smelled of alcohol. Beth stood smiling at him, having picked up both empty beer bottles.

“Corona, babe?” she said.

“Yeah, sweetie. Thanks,” he said. He put his arm around Marshall’s shoulder. “Very good to see you here, man,” he said. This time he sounded more enthusiastic. “Hey, quite the transformation, don’t you think?” he said.

“He never saw it before,” Beth said.

“Oh, right. Right. We were out on Duck Key when you and Sonja came down a few years back. Right,” Gordon said. “Well, nothing would do for Beth but to be a townie, hey, hon?”

“I didn’t want to live my life driving in from Duck Key,” she said.

“She doesn’t appreciate the fact I have to work for a living,” Gordon said. “She wants us to live like it’s our twilight years right now, today. Maybe I can hunch myself over and limp over there near the kitchen and get me a beer for my twilight years. Toast them the way we bring New Year’s in.”

“People retire in the United States before they’re old,” Beth said. “What’s so wrong with having money and deciding how you want to spend your days? Some of us, rich or not, prefer to spend them kicking
along parallel to the ocean floor. I guess I understand that by now.”

“Don’t give me that shit. You see me plenty. Plenty more than you want to sometimes. He’d shown up last night, I could get more of a report on what a party girl you are than you might provide me with yourself.”

“I have never flirted with a human being since the day we tied the knot,” Beth said. She had opened three beers and put the bottles on the kitchen counter. She opened a jar of peanuts.

“Vacuum-packed,” Gordon said, taking the jar from her. “Close as she gets to a vacuum.” Gordon laughed.

“This place is fantastic,” Marshall said.

“You got yourself a new house, didn’t you?” Gordon said.

“No. We’ve been in the same place since we moved to New Hampshire.”

“Is that right? I thought you’d gotten yourself another place.”

“No,” Marshall said.

“I guess you’d know,” Gordon said.

“Honey, did you get any food?” she said, unloading the string bag.

“All the way down,” he said.

She pulled out a package wrapped in white wax paper. “Oh, snapper,” she said. “Good. Do you like snapper, Marshall?”

“Very much,” he said.

“You look just great. Come on outside and we’ll drink these beers,” Gordon said. “Outside, by Mount Vesuvius.”

“He calls the hot tub Mount Vesuvius,” Beth said, rolling her eyes. She pushed two of the beer bottles toward them. Gordon, like Beth, was thin—thinner than Marshall had last seen him, and slightly wobbly on his feet. His hair was combed strangely, a crooked part dumping long bangs over half his face. His nose was red: drink, or sunburn? His brother was in constant motion: wiping his hands on each side of his jeans, passing the bottle of Corona from one hand to the other as he dried his hands; tucking the long flap of hair behind his ears, freeing it; scratching his chest, adjusting his shirt.

“She tell you how she got that hot tub?” Gordon said.

“He loves this story,” Beth said.

“She had it delivered, never mentioned the first thing about it,”
Gordon said. “Her girlfriend came down with meningitis. What happens but Beth starts waitressing for her. Don’t outguess me here: she does
not
make the money in tips. She makes the money—this is gonna kill you—a guy comes into the Hyatt, sitting at the bar, he’s got a cold. Miss Health-Conscious gives the guy her jar of vitamin C out of her bag, tells him when he gets back to his room to take the vitamins, then put a hot washcloth on top of his head, and sit in a chair for ten minutes, thinking positive thoughts about the disappearance of the cold. You know what happens? This’ll make you laugh, but the first time Beth tells you this, I swear by it: it works. She presses the vitamin C on him—”

“One thousand milligrams a pop,” Beth said. “You have to have a high concentration to make it work.”

“Yeah, babe, but you say that’s also not good for your kidneys,” Gordon said, pushing the screen door farther back, walking out on the deck. Marshall followed.

“Here’s what happened,” Gordon said. “She goes into work the next day and the guy has left an envelope for her, doesn’t even know her name, just writes on the outside it’s for the blond-haired waitress with the flower earrings who was on the previous night at ten p.m. The bartender takes it, writes ‘Beth’ on it. She gets there and opens it: four thousand dollars—a buck for every milligram of vitamin C. The guy thinks he’s found a miracle worker, someone who’s got the cure for the common cold. Says so, in his note. It used to be hung on the refrigerator with one of those refrigerator magnets: a pink cow holding a nice, handwritten note that accompanied four thousand dollars cash. You know what Beth did? Went to Tropical Tubs right after her shift ended, picked out what she wanted looking through the gate, next morning in she walks with her money, and here it is.”

Beth shrugged. “It works more times than not,” she said.

“Hey, listen,” Gordon said, turning his attention to Marshall as if he’d just walked through the door. “How the hell are you? How’ve you been?”