Those We Love Most
Read Those We Love Most Online
Authors: Lee Woodruff
Tags: #Romance, #Contemporary Women, #Family Life, #Contemporary, #Fiction
For Prince Liam
,
who taught us more about how to live in
his six short years than most people
come to understand in a very long life
“Loss
is not
the end.
It’s simply an
invitation
to change.”
A Conversation with Lee Woodruff
It was only the front edge of summer and the yard already looked overgrown, as if the squalls of May and early June had held a kind of magical elixir, a formula that put all of the plants on steroids. Standing on the perimeter of the flagstone patio with her coffee, Margaret studied the impatiens with their fat, red heads, nodding downward, and the fecund look of the peonies as they passed their peak, rotting from fuchsia and ballet slipper pink to a brown mush.
She began to walk out past the shed where the yard narrowed between two bent willows, toward her beloved vegetable garden. When the kids were little, she had carved out slivers of her day to be here, sacrificing so she could embrace the peace this plot of land afforded her. Morning was her favorite time to be out among her plants, when her energy and joy for the day were at their peak. “Your mistress,” Roger had called her garden once, and she’d never forgotten it. The irony, she’d thought bitterly.
There was another one, she noticed, as her mouth curved downward with displeasure. Another chipmunk hole, or possibly a mole, next to the bright green shoots of her coreopsis. It had been burrowing down and feasting on the tender roots, and nothing enraged her more than having her flowers under attack. Rodents were where she drew the line, rodents and slugs. Summer was just beginning, and they were already declaring war.
Margaret could feel her agitation rising and fought to contain it. It was too early in the season to get worked up. In many ways, gardening was an exercise in patience, an endurance sport. She loved how it changed through the seasons. In July and August, she became an avid canner, preserving vegetables and then freezing sauces for winter. Autumn brought late-September raspberries, ropy vines with fat, lumpy pumpkins and squash. There was always enough zucchini to supply the neighbors, and she derived pleasure in baking bread and muffins. Her labors slowed in September until the first frost of October stopped the leggy fall dahlias, asters, and mums in their tracks. When it all hung brown and yellowed from the cold, she would cover the beds and perennials with dried leaves in a quiet funeral ritual, digging up the dahlia tubers to winter over in peat moss.
Weeding between the rows of beans, she thought she heard a distant sound from the house. Could that be the phone, or was the breeze playing tricks on her? There again, so faint from all the way out back. No matter. She’d be in soon enough. There was nothing that couldn’t wait. It was probably Roger, calling from the road. This trip was Denver first and then Florida, if she remembered. It was hard to keep all the deals at his commercial real estate firm straight sometimes, and frankly she’d given up trying.
The members of her family were like lines intersecting at random points. Her two grown daughters close to home, Maura and Erin, and her son, Stu, in Milwaukee, flitted in and out of her weeks, as did her grandchildren, with their multiple school and sports activities. Roger was mostly consumed with his work and weekend golf at the club. These days, there were times she simply felt like an afterthought.
Margaret sighed and hauled herself up off the weeding pad and toward the shed. She would find a new sticky trap and then dig out the pack of Merits stashed behind the slug pellets on the top shelf. Although her kids thought she’d quit long ago, Margaret indulged her secret vice once or twice a day, sometimes with her morning coffee and usually with a glass of pinot grigio before Roger came home.
Now there was the phone ringing again, just seconds after it had stopped. Someone must need to reach her, or maybe it was just coincidence. There were so many of those automated callers now, even on the off-hours, but it wasn’t even nine in the morning. She sighed and tucked the cigarettes back on the shelf in the shed. Maybe it was Maura calling. Her daughter knew she would be alone until late that night, perhaps she had an invitation for dinner. Margaret’s spirits rose. She’d bring the rest of the blueberry banana bread she had baked yesterday.
As she approached the house, Margaret heard the measured cadence of Roger’s recorded voice on the answering machine asking callers to repeat their phone number twice. There was the shrill beep of the machine and then a woman’s voice; it was impossible to tell who was leaving a message. The words were indistinct but the tone urgent, the voice muffled as it carried across the yard and out to where she was walking. Margaret quickened her pace as she headed in.
Roger rolled over onto one elbow and squinted at the strip of white light blazing through the slender gap in the curtains. The Florida sun was low but already warming the manicured grass, and it promised to be another hot, steamy day. A blanket of humidity lay over the city, permeating even the air-conditioned room and its muggy, damp smell. Outside, the low buzz of a leaf blower droned and some kind of tropical bird squawked. The staccato, unevenness of the noise was unsettling.
Julia’s tanned toffee-colored back pressed against him with its gentle curve. Her shoulders rose and fell softly with her breathing. Roger’s thoughts leapt ahead to the evening, when he would board a plane home to Chicago. It would be at least a month or more before he would see her again, and he felt a melancholy about that, mingled with the comfort of heading home. He knew, from previous experience, that today would feel both eternal and swift.
Last night they had looked like any other older couple, swaying on the hotel veranda to the band. They’d ordered fruity drinks, and Julia had laughed at his jokes, almost too loudly, as the waiter delivered them with tiny paper parasols. He’d enjoyed that, her amusement at simple things. The way Julia clasped her hands in front of her chest in delight made him feel as if he were an all-powerful magician who could conjure up her happiness.
On his last day with her he would inevitably think of Margaret, despite his best intentions. She and the kids would intrude as he began the mental transition home. Roger forced himself to push those thoughts away. His children were grown now, with families and homes of their own, no longer in his daily orbit, yet he marveled at how the habit of that responsibility persisted.
As he had raised his glass the night before to toast Julia, an image had flickered briefly in his head of his wife scraping the remains of her dinner into the disposal and methodically lowering the plate onto the bottom rack of the dishwasher.
Julia rolled toward him on the bed, eyes fluttering open as a half sigh escaped her lips. This last day was always harder on her. She lived alone in this small stucco house in Tampa near the freeway, where she’d raised two sons and outlived her husband. For the past five years this had been their arrangement, and he had been careful never to promise her anything more.
“How long have you been awake?” Julia asked groggily.
“Not much before you.” He shrugged.
“You have that look,” she mused, rolling up on one elbow. “It’s your leaving-day look.”
“Then it must be leaving day.” The words came out more harshly than he had intended, and he silently chided himself for beginning the distancing process this early in the morning. They had most of the day left, with plans to take a walk. Perhaps they’d grab some scrambled eggs at the beachfront diner first.
Julia looked down at the white blanket, picking at a snag in the weave. Roger closed his palm over her smaller, birdlike hands and tilted her chin up toward him, meeting her eyes with a reassuring smile. Her fine high “Puerto Rican cheekbones,” as she called them, were burnished with a few freckles and deep crow’s-feet around her eyes. Julia’s hair was jet-black, but a line of silver-gray roots growing in from her scalp jarred him. He appreciated the illusion of Julia’s seemingly effortless beauty.
“I’m sorry,” Roger offered quietly.
“No offense taken,” Julia said breezily, though he knew he’d stung her.
“We’ve got one great day left, let’s go down to that little coffee shop by the beach for some eggs.”
Julia smiled weakly and rolled into his arms. Roger liked the way it felt to hold her. He enjoyed the heft of this woman, the fleshy fullness so substantial and weighty. Her shoulders were broad and her arms heavily freckled from the sun. Dozens of tiny white buttons swooped up the front of her lavender nightgown, ending in the soft cleave of her bosom. It was an ample bosom, seductive, womanly, anything but matronly. Roger began stroking her back slowly, and her foot moved across his leg in response.
The shrill ring of his cell phone pierced their silence, and Roger rolled onto his side, picking the phone up off the bedside table. He pressed
IGNORE
when he saw his home number and rolled back toward Julia.
It rang again, immediately afterward. Odd that it was Margaret calling him twice this early in the day. Without remark, he half-turned from Julia and swung his feet onto the wooden floor, reaching for his reading glasses to scroll through his e-mails, his brow furrowed. Julia studied the flecks of moles down by his lower back and the patchy hairiness up near his shoulders. She reached to smooth his hair at the nape of his neck, still full and only flecked with gray, and then she traced her finger down the length of his spine.
“Everything all right?” she asked casually.
“Fine. Fine. Just a call I need to return. Why don’t you hop in the shower, and I’ll follow,” said Roger, with a more businesslike tone than he intended.