Gun Lake (13 page)

Don turned left on a gravel road and coasted down it. No urgency. He didn’t really have to come here, to be honest. He had nothing else to do. And maybe someday Walt or Alice Patterson would buy a gun and
really
spice things up. But Don doubted it. They weren’t that kind of arguing couple. They’d been married since, what?—the Civil War? All right, that was stretching it, but they were up there in age.

The squad car approached the last house on the drive, a small, dilapidated cabin with a shedding roof and grimy windows.
Walt Patterson was sitting on the porch, cell phone in hand. This was what made this couple so hilarious. They’d lived here most of their lives, in this little rundown shack that kept getting worse by the year. And yet each had a personal cell phone, something they had signed up for when a guy from Grand Rapids was at the local tavern trying to drum up some business. The Pattersons also had a nice boat down at the docks, probably worth three times what their house was worth. Sometimes things didn’t make sense, didn’t even need to, but simply stood as truth and as day-to-day reality.

Don got out and walked over to the porch where Walt sat. The man was eighty if he was a day, with wrinkly skin and no hair except a small ring the shape of a horseshoe. He shook his head at Don and looked at him with pleading eyes.

“This time she’s gone too far,” Walt said.

“How’s that?” Don asked, stepping onto the wooden porch and studying it to see if it would hold his ample weight.

“She locked me out of the house,” Walt said.

Don nodded, crossed over to the front door, tried to look inside but couldn’t see because of the dirt on the glass.

“You guys havin’ a little argument?”

“That woman is pure evil. She’s the antichrist, I tell you. Maybe they say the antichrist is a man, but not me, no way I know who it is, and I’ve been livin’ with her for sixty years.”

“Oh, come on now.”

“I swear it’s the truth, so help me God.”

Don knocked on the door. “Alice? You in there?”

Nothing.

“She’s not gonna let you in. You gotta call the fire department or something. We gotta break into the house.”

“Have you tried the back?”

Walt shrugged as if to say,
Of course I did; I’d be an idiot to not have thought of that
, but then the look on his face gave him away. He wasn’t too sure if he had. Don bet the odds were good that Walt had forgotten to check the back door, had simply used that good ol’ cell phone of his to call the authorities.

“Good thing you brought your phone out here,” Don said.

“I carry it with me everywhere. Get a pretty good signal too.”

“Talk a lot on it?”

“More than Alice does. She doesn’t even know how to turn it off. Uses the batteries up and then has to try and charge it, and she doesn’t know what she’s doing. Some people just shouldn’t be using technology, you know?”

Don suddenly had an awful thought. What if he went into the house and found Alice Patterson, a healthy eighty-something-year-old woman, stretched out on the couch after downing a bottle of aspirin or perhaps slumped over the kitchen table after doing something even worse?

There had only been one suicide during Don’s time on Gun Lake. It hadn’t been pretty, either. This wasn’t the sort of action he wanted. Not the excitement, the change of pace, that would have given him satisfaction.

Killing yourself was the wrong way out anyway. You had to be desperate, on the very last rung of a very low ladder to even think about it. Billy Stewart must’ve been on that rung, because he had decided to hang himself on a big oak tree behind his house. When Don arrived at the scene, Billy had still been swinging from side to side. The deputy who had found him was so sick he couldn’t bring himself to cut the poor guy down.

That had been seven years ago, and pretty much the extent of the bad happenings around these parts. Sometimes Don’s mind would wander, think awful thoughts, think about Billy Stewart and wonder what could’ve driven a man over the edge like that and wonder if everyone had an edge like that. Then he would think of a couple like the Pattersons and worry about them.

Don walked around the cabin and opened the back door. He glanced back at Walt, who looked as though Moses had just parted the Red Sea.

“Alice, you in there?” Don called, not wanting to just walk in. He kept seeing Billy, only twenty-five years old, dangling from that tree, his neck purple and—

“I don’t want him in here,” Alice Patterson said.

The round woman with curly gray hair sat at the kitchen
table, looking like a child who’d been forced to sit there and sulk after not eating her broccoli.

“You doin’ okay, Alice?”

“No.”

“What’s going on?” Don asked as he stepped into the kitchen and saw the remains of eggs and bacon on a plate in the sink.

“I’m married to a fool, that’s what’s going on.”

“You hush,” Walt said, staying close by the door, feeling he might get struck by lightning or by a frying pan.

“Why’d you lock Walt out of the house?”

“I didn’t do such a thing. You came in on your own, didn’t you?”

“She unlocked it just so you could come in. I swear she did.” Walt had evidently followed him around back and was standing on the kitchen door landing, looking in.

“All right, hold on now,” Don said. “You guys’ve been doing okay. I mean, I haven’t been by to visit you for a while now.”

“Would you like some breakfast?” Alice asked. “I still got some stayin’ warm in the oven.”

“Uh, no, thank you.”

“You sure? You can stick around—I got some coffee.”

Don nodded. “Yeah, well, maybe a cup of coffee is fine—no, hold on, I’ll get it.”

“You don’t want to eat that bacon,” Walt said.

“I told you it was another brand and it wasn’t anything I done,” Alice said, her face turning red.

“Whoa, whoa—hold on. Walt, you just keep it quiet for a few minutes. What’s this—bacon?”

“I fixed him some bacon—well, some of it’s in the sink. It was a new brand I bought at Hampton’s that they said would be good and I fixed it—”

“Tasted raw—”

“Walt, come on,” Don said again.

“And I told him that it wasn’t my fault, and after makin’ him breakfast for something like sixty years—”

“I don’t ask for it—”

“Walt,” Don said, louder.

Walt flinched like a scared dog.

“I should make him eat in town. See how he likes their food.”

Don fixed himself a cup of coffee, then sat down at the table. He sighed and continued listening to Alice talk about making breakfast and cleaning up after her husband. Then he had to listen to Walt’s lame defense. Don sat there for the better part of an hour before he decided this morning visit to the Pattersons was finished.

Sometimes he wondered if this couple just got bored and decided to call somebody, anybody, to get more attention.

Maybe Don wasn’t the only one who needed a little excitement in his life. He thought of the soap commercial from years ago. Zest soap, he recalled. According to the commercial, just smelling it gave you this burst of energy. A shower left you feeling alive and gung ho for the day.

The Pattersons needed a case of Zest. So did Don. He sat in their kitchen, smelling bacon and eggs and drinking stale coffee, and wondered if this was what happened when you were married for sixty-something years. He couldn’t help thinking of Collette again and wondering if they would end up like this.

A thought ran through his mind. An awful one.

I’d be lucky if we ended up like this
.

And as awful as it was, he knew it was also true.

“LOOKING BACK IS LIKE looking over your shoulder,” Grace once told him. “If you do it too often, you might trip over something.”

Paul Hedges had always been good at not looking back. But today, walking through the lush gardens of the nursery, he was taking a quick peek backward. Just for the moment. Just before he left.

It had been a couple of years now since she died, but he still thought about her every day. About the woman he’d gotten to know through rows of hydrangeas and daylilies, amidst flowering trees and ferns and shrubs. It had been on a whim, going out to the nursery to look for some trees that might bring more life to his little house and yard. Instead of finding adornments for his yard, he’d found one for his soul.

Paul met Grace Williams that day and had a simple conversation. He learned she was a widow, that she worked in the nursery part-time, that she liked perennials. And he kept coming back because of something about her. The friendly tone with which she spoke to him. The way she smiled. The way she made him feel like a real human, a real person. The way she actually noticed him.

That was almost seven years ago. They knew each other for five. Five years of first being a friend and then falling in love with Grace.

What a notion, to fall in love with Grace. The very fact that her name was Grace wasn’t lost on Paul. He didn’t deserve Grace, but she befriended him anyway. Could a fifty-four-year-old man find love again? Could he find a love that wasn’t physical, that wasn’t contractual, that was something more than simple words and feelings? He wasn’t sure at the time, but he did find it, became engulfed in it. And then he lost it. He lost Grace, lost his last chance.

A man like me can never hold on to Grace. Not after all my sins
.

This wasn’t the only time he had come back to this nursery simply to walk around. Younger workers, usually high-school or college-aged girls, would come up and ask if he needed help. Just like today. An older man needing help—that’s what they saw. And always he’d shake his head and continue to walk the rows, remembering when he did the same with Grace.

He told her he loved her, told her all the time. And she never reciprocated, never said those words. She felt wary of using them flippantly. But Paul knew she loved him, at least the Paul she’d gotten to know at this late point in her life. The teenaged Paul or the twenty-something Paul would never have crossed paths with
Grace. They’d lived in separate universes then. But somehow, for a short time, they found each other.

And in the five years he knew Grace, he could admit that she helped change him. Not enough, perhaps. Not enough to save him, to make up for everything else. But he knew he wasn’t the same.

And he missed her. That was the hardest thing—the painful emptiness he would sometimes wake up with and not be able to shake, no matter how many errands he ran, how much time spent in his yard, how many drinks he served on the riverboat. Regardless of how full his day might be, Paul always longed to just talk with Grace again. Talking with her always made him feel so—well, so
normal
. And this was something of a rarity for Paul.

“I always tell you more than you tell me,” Grace would say to him.

It was better that way, he thought, and eventually told her. He hinted at his sordid past, the failed relationships, the chances he had blown. Grace only smiled and sometimes even held his hand and seemed to understand. How a woman like that could understand anything remotely close to what Paul had gone through was beyond him. But he honestly felt like she did.

Paul rounded a corner, stepped around a tangle of watering hoses, and headed into another section of the nursery. He passed a patch of sugar maples with a sign announcing, “Layaway Now, Plant at Christmas.” He smiled. Being here changed his mood, his disposition. Maybe it was just thinking about Grace that did it. When she was around, he did change. The gray of his life changed to orange and red and green. He wondered if even a tint remained.

“I’m thinking of heading to Michigan,” he would have told Grace if she was with him now. “And I want you to come with me.”

She would have never done such a thing. What would people say? How would it look? What about the people in her church? The horror. Paul would laugh and agree with her that they weren’t young and ripe twenty-somethings who could just run off together. But he would have wanted her close by. When she was living, he would have never left. Now he could.

I wish you knew the truth
.

Given enough years, Paul would have told Grace everything. About his family, about his mistakes, about his life. He was getting so close to finally opening up and telling someone
everything
. She would have understood. And Paul believed she would have stayed by his side. That showed her love. She didn’t need to utter the word like they did over and over in those awful soap operas. Love wasn’t just about saying the words. It was about listening and understanding and being there.

Something she stopped doing when her body gave up battling the cancer two years ago.

He had never cried about losing her. Was that a normal thing? He went to the funeral, and it was beautiful in a haunting sort of way. Everybody spoke about Grace’s life and how full it had been and what a wonderful life it had been and how she was now in a better place, even better than her beautiful garden. She was in heaven and wasn’t in any more pain. And knowing this probably helped the family and friends to cope, but it didn’t help Paul. It scared him. Because for once, he couldn’t shrug off the mention of heaven and say it wasn’t for him. He wanted a place like that to exist now, because he knew if it did, a woman like Grace was walking its golden-lined streets.

The thing was, he wanted to be there too.

Yet a guy like Paul didn’t go to heaven. He knew that truth as surely as he knew he needed air to breathe. All his life, he’d told himself that heaven and hell were fantasies. All his life … until Grace’s death. Then something had begun pricking at him, urging him to think about life after death, prodding him to wonder where Grace had gone and why she had lived the way she did and things like that.

I’d ask you so many questions if I could
.

But the open, talkative, expressive man he was slowly becoming with Grace ended up retreating into his shell after her death. He didn’t feel spiteful or angry. He knew Grace had gotten cancer and that she had done everything she could to stay with him, but in the end it hadn’t been enough. She had led a good life for almost sixty years, and what more could anybody ask for?
Even if Paul started now to live the best life he could, how could he even get a fraction of the sort of good life someone like Grace lived?