The Best of Me (5 page)

She knew the distinction, and she’d never been a prude about drinking. There’d been several occasions in college when she’d had one too many at a party, and she still enjoyed a glass of wine with dinner. Sometimes she might even follow that with a second glass, and that almost always sufficed. But for Frank, what started as a way to numb the pain had morphed into something he could no longer control.

Looking back, she sometimes thought she should have seen it coming. In college, he’d liked to watch basketball games while drinking with his friends; in dental school, he’d often wanted to unwind with two or three beers after his classes had finished for the day. But in those dark months when Bea was sick, two or three beers a night gradually became a six-pack; after she died, it became a twelve-pack. By the time they reached the second anniversary of Bea’s death, with Annette on the way, he was drinking to excess even when he had to work the following morning. Lately, it was four or five nights a week, and last night had been no different. He’d staggered into the bedroom after midnight, as drunk as she’d ever seen him, and had begun to snore so loudly that she’d had to sleep in the guest room. His drinking, not Tuck, had been the real reason for their argument this morning.

Over the years, she’d witnessed it all, from a simple slurring of his words at dinnertime or at a barbecue to drunk and passed out on the floor of their bedroom. Yet because he was widely regarded as an excellent dentist, rarely missed work, and always paid the bills, he didn’t think he had a problem. Because he didn’t become mean or violent, he thought he didn’t have a problem. Because it was usually only beer, it couldn’t possibly be a problem.

But it was a problem, because he’d gradually become the kind of man she couldn’t have imagined marrying. She couldn’t count the number of times that she’d cried about it. And talked to
him about it, exhorting him to think of the kids. Begged him to attend couples counseling to find a solution, or raged about his selfishness. She’d given him the cold shoulder for days, forced him to sleep in the guest room for weeks, and had prayed fervently to God. Once a year or so, Frank would take her pleas to heart and stop for a while. Then, after a few weeks, he’d have a beer with dinner. Just one. And it wouldn’t be a problem that night. Or maybe even the next time he had one. But he’d opened the door and the demon would enter and the drinking would spiral out of control again. And then she’d find herself asking the same questions she’d asked in the past. Why, when the urge struck, couldn’t he simply walk away? And why did he refuse to accept that it was destroying their marriage?

She didn’t know. What she did know was that it was exhausting. Most of the time, she felt she was the only parent who could be trusted to take care of the kids. Jared and Lynn might be old enough to drive, but what would happen if one of them got into some kind of accident while Frank was drinking? Would he hop in the car, strap Annette into the backseat, and race to the hospital? Or what if someone got sick? It had happened before. Not to the kids, but to her. A few years ago, after eating some spoiled seafood, Amanda had spent hours throwing up in the bathroom. At the time, Jared had his learner’s permit and wasn’t allowed to drive at night, and Frank had been on one of his binges. When she was nearing dehydration, Jared ended up taking her to the hospital around midnight while Frank lolled in the backseat and pretended to be more sober than he really was. Despite her near delirium, she noticed Jared’s eyes flicking constantly to the rearview mirror, disappointment and anger warring in his expression. She sometimes thought that he shed a large part of his innocence that night, a child confronting his parent’s awful shortcomings.

It was a constant, exhausting source of anxiety, and she was tired of worrying what the kids were thinking or feeling when
they saw their dad stumbling through the house. Or worrying because Jared and Lynn no longer seemed to respect their father. Or worrying that, in the future, Jared or Lynn or Annette might begin to emulate their father, escaping regularly into booze or pills or God knows what else, until they ruined their own lives.

Nor had she found much in the way of help. Even without Al-Anon, she understood that there was nothing she could do to make Frank change, that until he admitted he had a problem and focused on getting better, he would remain an alcoholic. And yet what did that mean for her? That she had to make a
choice
. That she had to
decide
whether or not she would continue to put up with it. That she had to form a list of
consequences
and stick to them. In theory, that was easy. In practice, though, all it did was make her angry. If he was the one with the problem, why was she the one who had to take responsibility? And if alcoholism was a disease, didn’t that mean he needed her help, or at least her loyalty? How, then, was she—his wife, who’d taken a vow to remain with him in sickness and in health—supposed to justify ending the marriage and breaking up their family, after everything they had been through? She’d either be a heartless mother and wife or a spineless enabler, when all she really wanted was the man she’d once believed him to be.

That’s what made every day so hard. She didn’t want to divorce him and break up the family. As compromised as their marriage might be, part of her still believed in her vows. She loved the man he’d been, and she loved the man she knew he could be, but here and now, as she stood outside Tuck Hostetler’s home, she felt sad and alone, and she couldn’t help wondering how her life had come to this.

She knew that her mother was expecting her, but Amanda wasn’t ready to face her just yet. She needed a few more minutes, and as dusk began to settle in she picked her way across the overgrown
yard to the cluttered garage where Tuck had spent his days restoring classic cars. Parked inside was a Corvette Stingray, a model from the 1960s, she guessed. As she ran her hand over the hood, it was easy to imagine that Tuck would return to the garage any minute, his bent figure outlined against the setting sun. He would be dressed in stained overalls, his thinning gray hair would barely cover his scalp, and the creases of his face would be so deep they’d almost resemble scars.

Despite Frank’s probing questions about Tuck this morning, Amanda had said little, other than to describe him as an old family friend. It wasn’t the whole story, but what else was she supposed to say? Even she admitted that her friendship with Tuck was a strange one. She’d known him in high school but hadn’t seen Tuck again until six years ago, when she was thirty-six. At the time, she’d been back in Oriental visiting her mother, and while lingering over a cup of coffee at Irvin’s Diner she’d overheard a group of elderly men at a nearby table gossiping about him.

“That Tuck Hostetler’s still a wizard with cars, but he’s sure gone crazy as a loon,” one of them said, and laughed, shaking his head. “Talking to his dead wife is one thing, but swearing that he can hear her answer is another.”

The old man’s friend snorted. “He was always an odd one, that’s for sure.”

It sounded nothing like the Tuck she’d known, and after paying for her coffee, she got into her car and retraced the almost forgotten dirt drive that led to his house. They ended up spending the afternoon sitting in rockers on his collapsing front porch, and since then she’d made a habit of dropping by whenever she was in town. At first it was once or twice a year—she couldn’t handle visiting her mother any more than that—but lately she’d visited Oriental and Tuck even when her mother was out of town. More often than not, she cooked dinner for him as well. Tuck was getting on in years, and though she liked to tell herself that she was
simply checking in on an old man, both of them knew the real reason she kept coming back.

The men in the diner had been right, in a way. Tuck had changed. He wasn’t the mostly silent and mysterious, sometimes gruff figure she remembered, but he wasn’t crazy, either. He knew the difference between fantasy and reality, and he knew his wife had died long ago. But Tuck, she eventually decided, had the ability to make something real simply by wishing it into existence. At least it was real for him. When she’d finally asked him about his “conversations” with his dead wife, he’d told her matter-of-factly that Clara was still around and always would be. Not only did they talk, he confessed, but he saw her as well.

“Are you’re saying she’s a ghost?” she asked.

“No,” he answered. “I’m just sayin’ she don’t want me to be alone.”

“Is she here now?”

Tuck peered over his shoulder. “Don’t see her, but I can hear her puttering around inside the house.”

Amanda listened but heard nothing other than the squeak of the rockers on the floorboards. “Was she around… back then? When I knew you before?”

He drew a long breath, and when he spoke, his voice sounded weary. “No. But I wasn’t trying to see her then.”

There was something undeniably touching, almost romantic, about his conviction that they loved each other enough to have found a way to stay together, even after she was gone. Who wouldn’t have found that romantic? Everyone wanted to believe that endless love was possible. She’d believed in it once, too, back when she was eighteen. But she knew that love was messy, just like life. It took turns that people couldn’t foresee or even understand, leaving a long trail of regret in its wake. And almost always, those regrets led to the kinds of
what if
questions that could never be answered.
What if
Bea hadn’t died?
What if
Frank hadn’t become an alcoholic?
What if
she’d married her one true love? Would she even recognize the woman who now looked back at her in the mirror?

Leaning against the car, she wondered what Tuck would have made of her musings. Tuck, who ate eggs and grits at Irvin’s every morning and dropped dry-roasted peanuts into the glasses of Pepsi that he drank; Tuck, who’d lived in the same house for almost seventy years and had left the state only once, when he’d been called to serve the country in World War II. Tuck, who listened to the radio or phonograph instead of watching television, because that’s what he’d always done. Unlike her, Tuck seemed to embrace the role that the world had laid out for him. She recognized that there was probably wisdom in that kind of unflinching acceptance, even if she’d never be able to achieve it.

Of course, Tuck had Clara, and maybe that had something to do with it. They’d married at seventeen and had spent forty-two years together, and as Tuck talked to Amanda, she’d gradually learned the story of their lives. In a quiet voice, he’d told her about Clara’s three miscarriages, the last of which came with serious complications. According to Tuck, when the doctor informed her that she’d never be able to have children, Clara had cried herself to sleep for almost a year. Amanda learned that Clara kept a vegetable garden and had once won a statewide competition for growing the largest pumpkin, and she saw the faded blue ribbon that was still tucked behind the mirror in the bedroom. Tuck told her that after he’d established his business, they built a small cottage on a small plot of land on the Bay River near Vandemere, a town that made Oriental seem like a city, and they spent weeks there every year, because Clara thought it was the most beautiful spot in the world. He described the way Clara used to hum to the radio when she was cleaning the house, and he revealed that every now and then he used to take her dancing at Red Lee’s Grill, a place that Amanda frequented during her own teenage years.

It was a life, she eventually concluded, that had been lived in the middle ground, where contentment and love were found in the smallest details of people’s lives. It was a life of dignity and honor, not without sorrows yet fulfilling in a way that few experiences ever were. She knew Tuck understood that more than anyone.

“With Clara, it was always good,” was how he’d once summed it up.

Maybe it was the intimate nature of his stories, or maybe her growing loneliness, but over time, Tuck became a sort of confidant to her as well, something Amanda could never have predicted. It was with Tuck that she shared her pain and sadness about Bea’s death, and it was on his porch that she was able to unleash her rage at Frank; it was to him that she confessed her worries about the kids, and even her growing conviction that she’d somehow made a wrong turn in her life somewhere along the line. She shared with him stories about the countless anguished parents and impossibly optimistic children she met at the Pediatric Cancer Center, and he seemed to understand that she found a kind of salvation in her work there, even if he never said as much. Mostly, he just held her hand in his gnarled, grease-stained fingers, soothing her with his silence. By the end, he’d become her closest friend, and she’d come to feel that Tuck Hostetler knew her, the real her, better than anyone in her current life.