“Hardly, but I’ve gotten better, watched cooking shows, tried some techniques I was unfamiliar with. What am I saying, I was unfamiliar with every technique except maybe toasting toast, frying an egg.”
“What prompted that?” She knew immediately the question was a mistake, but her words hung in the air, impossible to retrieve.
“My wife died,” he said simply.
“Oh, Rob, I’m so sorry…I…I’m just so sorry.”
A dull cocoon enveloped them, the room silent except for the sound of water running and the knife slicing through thick crisp carrots.
“You couldn’t know that, and the only way you’d learn is by me telling you—or Jennie saying something.” Rob continued chopping. His voice had a robotic quality. Slow, emotionless. “Car accident, Sandra, my wife, and her mother, Christine. Wrong place, wrong time. They weren’t at fault, and they didn’t have a chance. And it still doesn’t make any kind of sense to me, but there it is, a piece of life that doesn’t make sense…happens all the time.”
Piper remained mute, unsure whether the concise report meant that Rob wanted to talk about his terrible loss or move on to another topic. Maybe he just wanted her to go away.
“You haven’t done or said anything wrong, and I’m glad you’re here,” he said, reading her correctly. “I can’t really remember how I got through it, how Jennie got through it, those first months. You always wonder where strength comes from. I can see that I’m better than I was a year ago. Just like the saying, time does heal. Heal all wounds, completely, I don’t know. I’m a work in progress, I guess.”
“And Jennie?” she said.
“I’ve read everything I can on bereavement—for me, for Jennie. And a while back, I took her for some counseling, but kids are hard to figure out. She seems okay now as far as I can tell. A year is a long time in the world of a five-year-old.”
“Yes, and children have a resilience that always amazes me.”
“You see a lot of kids in your line of work, Piper. Does she seem like a normal child to you?”
“I haven’t spent that much time with her, but from what I can tell she appears to participate well in activities, has acceptable skills development, and demonstrates…wait a minute! Sorry, that’s teacher jargon, isn’t it.” She laughed and he joined in. He was as relieved as she was, she thought. “Let me take another run at that. Jennie seems well adjusted to me, sweet, inquisitive, happy. I don’t detect any red flags.”
“Please, please.”
“Well, okay, but take it easy with them, they’re eating utensils, not weapons.”
“I know that, Daddy,” Jennie said.
She squinted at him, her head angled up, and Rob knew she was feeling better. Amazing recovery. He wondered if it was kids in general, or something to do with Jennie in particular. Well, now he had an expert to ask about any kid quandary.
“Chicken is slippy-slip—” Jenny sat still, her chopsticks in the air.
“What is it, sweetheart?” Rob asked.
“I’m thinking…”
“What about?”
“Rocky and Ginger.”
“Who are Rocky and Ginger?”
“Dad! You know Rocky and Ginger…in the movie…. Piper knows Rocky and Ginger. I don’t think I should be eating them, I mean this chicken. I like Rocky and Ginger.”
“Oh, right, that Rocky. This isn’t Rocky and Ginger, this is a distant cousin, Sophia. So it’s ok—” He was instantly aware of his blunder.
“Dad, I can’t eat Sophia. Rocky and Ginger would cry.”
“Okay, okay, put Sophia down and just eat the broccoli and carrots and rice.”
As Jennie concentrated on manipulating her chopsticks, Rob looked across the table at Piper. She smiled, shrugged amicably and continued with her own meal, chicken and all. The atmosphere felt good, right, camaraderie filling the room. But no, she was not a comrade. What could she be to him? When “lover” popped into his mind, he wanted to banish the word. Sandra still occupied that place in his heart. He felt that growing confusion: a one-woman man, mated for life, feeling attracted to the new friend sitting across his dining room table. How the body ignored the mind.
He lowered his head and busied himself with his chopsticks, using too much gusto so that a piece of chicken slid to the other side of the plate. When Jennie and Piper looked at him with quizzical expressions, he made a face that usually entertained Jennie and said he was trying to prevent an escape. Jennie couldn’t help giggling and he was relieved and able to again appreciate the pleasant atmosphere.
Dinner had begun late and proceeded at a pace more leisurely than usual. Finally though Jennie went upstairs to put on her pajamas. Rob excused himself and followed her a few minutes later. She ran downstairs for a good-night to Piper and was back quickly and crawling into bed. Rob saw that she was tired, that she didn’t ask for a story.
“Are you feeling better, Jennie? Tummy okay,” Rob said, as he tucked the duvet around her small body.
“Yup, and don’t forget, snug as a bug in a rug,” she said, gripping his hand through the duvet.
“Yes, little bug, how’s that?”
“Just right…good night, Daddy.”
“Good night, my Jennie junebug.”
“Daddy, how long is Piper going to live here?”
The question stopped him. It was a matter that had crossed his mind, as well. When she had moved in, he’d been happy to rent on a monthly basis as a way of sticking his toe into the landlord/tenant waters. They hadn’t really talked about a firm leaving date.
“Well, I guess she’ll be here until her house has been fixed.”
“When is that?”
"After the summer is over, I think. After you start back to school. Why, sweetheart?”
“She’s nice,” Jennie said simply. She shut her eyes tightly and turned over onto her side, still clutching his hand.
PIPER PUT A
few finishing touches on the cleanup, which had largely been taken care of by the three of them. She’d been impressed with what she’d decided was routine for Jennie and Rob, who had fallen to their kitchen duty in a practiced fashion. Jennie carried dishes and cutlery from the table to the counter beside the sink. And she folded napkins and threaded them neatly through napkin rings. They had joked about bouncing broccoli as a bowl of leftovers made a tipsy journey to the fridge. Jennie had picked up a fallen spear and kissed it, said it would be all right after a bath and handed it to Rob to run some water over the wayward green clump. It was easy to see that the after-dinner cleanup was not a chore; rather, Rob had designed it as one more way to have some easy and enjoyable interaction with his daughter. Piper liked that.
But now she felt a twinge of discomfort, sitting by herself at the kitchen table. She flipped through a cookbook that featured large, full-color photographs. Some of the pages had marks on them. Color-coded check marks and occasional comments about changes to the recipe or how the dish had been received. “Jennie’s fave…” “No way…” “Compost…” Piper liked one notation in particular—“Nope, Jennie said it made Brocky fart.”
Jennie had run back downstairs after changing into her pajamas. She had delivered a brief, tight hug and kiss on her cheek, and whispered breathily, “Nighty-night, Piper.” The tenderness had caught Piper off guard. Rob called down for Jennie to get into bed and added, for Piper’s sake, that he wouldn’t be long. Now she wished she had made her exit at that point. The three of them together had been fun; the two of them alone suddenly felt dangerous for reasons that were not clear to her.
Rob hung back at the top of the stairs, Jennie’s words replaying themselves. He was rattled, didn’t feel like himself. Jennie was right. Piper
was
nice. Piper was a very nice woman who had been extremely generous with her time today. Those were the words he used to frame his dilemma, but he knew they were incomplete and the sensation gripping him right now was not the result of Piper’s “niceness.” He was shocked by his reaction. He felt a flood of desire for her, strong enough to make his knees weak and images of her flash in his mind. Piper with fewer clothes on, Piper pulling him to her, Piper in his bed—that’s when he was able to break the connection.
To distract himself, he thought about sanding the stairs. What a pain-in-the-butt job that would be. He leaned over to look at a deep groove on one of the treads. That was beyond a scratch. He ran his fingers over another tread, checking its condition. Then he stood up, equilibrium regained. This was the first time in a year that he’d felt an attraction to another woman and he was behaving like a teenager. He felt disloyal to Sandra.
There could be no Piper in his bed. He reminded himself that there would never be another woman in his bed. And if he was this shallow, this unfaithful, having these sorts of thoughts at the first sign that he still did have a libido, then tonight was not the time to be alone with Piper, to share a bottle of wine, share confidences, pretend to be someone he was not—namely, a willing and free man who was willing to be seduced and snared by a beautiful and free woman. Only a bastard would make promises he couldn’t keep.
“Red, or white?”
Piper was aware that only moments ago she had been anxiously waiting to leave. “Red, thanks.” She sat down again at the kitchen table. Oh well, no harm at this point if she stayed for another ten minutes. “What do you like in reds these days? When I buy wine, it’s always the same bottle. I look at the wine reviews and then can’t remember a single recommendation.”
“How about a nice cab sav? These days I like Chilean wines, and this is one I’ve been wanting to try.”
“Sure,” she said, and adjusted her position on the straight-backed chair.
“And let’s move to the living room. These chairs are miserable to derrieres after about an hour.”
She laughed, more relaxed now. It would have been a mistake to leave without saying goodbye. Walking into the living room, she eyed a big leather armchair with an ottoman in front of it. After she sank into the comfortable upholstery, Rob placed her glass of wine on a side table and sat on the couch.
“I don’t really know very much about you, Piper, other than a couple of basics. You’re a teacher, your house is being repaired, and you’re very helpful.”
“Well, you know that I pay my rent on time,” she said, and raised her eyebrows.
“Yes, I noticed that. You’re not a procrastinator when it comes to writing checks. When did you decide to teach, and do you like it? Correct choice for a career?”
“From the time I taught my stuffed animals to spell, I knew I wanted to be a teacher. That kind of single-mindedness makes things kind of easy. I never had to do soul-searching, wondering what I liked, what I’d be good at. Never took the inkblot test. Never had to find myself. I know it’s not like that for everyone.”
“I think you’re right, on all counts—you got a lucky break, just knowing what you knew.” Rob looked at the floor, then up at the ceiling, and cleared his throat. “Is it too personal to ask whether you’ve been married?”
“No, not at all. I was married, divorced a long time ago, have a daughter, Kathleen, who has finished her first year in Engineering at Waterloo.” To Piper’s own ears, her words sounded matter-of-fact, idyllic. Twelve months from now, she could be saying,
I have a daughter who dropped out of school, has a child and a deadbeat boyfriend, and no means of support other than me.
“Engineering, that’s great, huh, and a little unusual, even these days. Rob thought for a moment before continuing. “I’m curious…could you tell she would head in that direction, as a child? Was she always a little engineer?”
“The main indication, now that I’m looking back with twenty/twenty hindsight, I think, was her love of Lego. Didn’t mean she didn’t play with dolls and bake sets, she certainly did, but her Lego love lasted the longest. Piper laughed, remembering storage containers filled to the brim and the ongoing projects that occupied most flat surfaces throughout the house. “Let’s see, she entered Lego competitions and kept doing that right into high school. By then she was definitely headed down the science path. But I really didn’t know what form it would take. Her acceptance into engineering at Waterloo was a bit of a surprise to me.” Piper remembered Kathleen’s breathless call to her, hardly being able to get the words out.
“That’s a feat in itself, being accepted at Waterloo. And how was her first year.”
Piper now wished the conversation would end. “Uh, her marks were pretty good…for first year,” she said lamely.
“Seems like a crazy question, with only one answer, but do you like art?” Rob said, apparently having picked up on her discomfort. She wasn’t sure how she felt about his ability to correctly read her.
“
Like
is too faint a word. I love art. And speaking of that, you have some absolutely beautiful paintings in here, like this Tom Thomson print. Doesn’t matter how often I see it, it is an absolutely gorgeous work of art,” she said, jumping up to examine it more closely.
“I love it, too,” Rob said, rising to join her.
“Wait a minute—”
“Yes, you’re right—it’s an original. I had a great-great-aunt on my father’s side who was good friends with Tom Thomson. She ended up with this painting, and gave it to me…us…as a wedding gift.” His voice had trailed off and they stood unmoving in front of the painting.
Piper eventually broke the spell by rubbing her hands together and shifting from side to side. “Well, it is certainly beautiful, yes, and now I should really get back downstairs…take care of a few things.” She knew her tone was brisk, her words rushed, but she didn’t care. She knew only that she had to get out of there. Too raw. He was too adorable and too raw, the whole situation tinged with sorrow that would be there for an undetermined time, probably forever. Still she didn’t actually leave and Rob remained close beside her, immobile and mute.
They continued to stand in the noiseless stationary cage together. She listened to his steady breathing, and smelled the aftershave she’d noticed, favorably, on him earlier.
In one motion, he turned toward her, placed a hand on one shoulder and pulled her closer.
“Rob, I—”
His lips were suddenly pressing lightly on her own. His other hand lifted and loosely touched the side of her face. She closed her eyes, a wave of pleasure rolling over her. She leaned into him to deepen the kiss. Then both his hands were framing her face for one brief moment before he moved away, dropping his hands to his sides.