19
THE END OF THE STORY
After three months, Steven’s new office still had
an unfinished feel to it. The waiting room still bore the sharp
smell of fresh paint and carpeting, and the walls were bare except
for a single framed print of a dancer in an impossibly bendy
position. Hard to tell whether this was meant to soothe, inspire,
or taunt his patients.
“Would you like to speak to your
brother?” Emily asked her.
“We’re supposed to have lunch
today.”
“Dr. Oliver didn’t tell me that. We’re
rather busy.” When Grace glanced around the deserted waiting room,
Emily looked at her with long-practiced patience. “He’s in with his
last morning patient now. Naturally I’ve blocked out the schedule
for his lunch, but he only has thirty minutes.”
“I’ll try not to keep him
late.”
“Dr. Oliver’s next appointment is at
one.”
“Do you always call him Dr. Oliver?”
Grace asked her.
“Of course,” Emily said.
“Never Steven?”
“No.” Two red stains appeared in
Emily’s cheeks, but Grace couldn’t tell if she was embarrassed or
offended.
“Emily, how would you like to come to
my father’s house for Thanksgiving?”
Emily flinched a little. “I couldn’t
intrude.”
“An invited guest isn’t an intrusion.”
Grace laughed. “Unless your name is Uncle Truman.”
Emily’s blank stare sobered her,
however, and Grace remembered Lou saying that he wanted the holiday
just to be close friends and family. So maybe he would consider
Emily an intruder. Then again, with her history littered with
unhappy foster homes and group houses, if Emily didn’t intrude on
someone sometime, she would never get anywhere. Besides, she’d
worked with Steven forever. That had to qualify her as a close . .
. something.
“I appreciate the offer. . .
.”
“It’s more than an offer. I want you to
be there.”
Emily smiled so politely, it was
maddening. The woman was a tough nut to crack. “If you’ll just take
a seat, I’ll let Dr. Oliver know you’re here the moment he is
free.”
It was twelve-thirty by the time that
moment occurred. Grace was surprised Emily didn’t drag the poor
patient out bodily for this incursion on her carefully planned
schedule. Steven came out, looking a bit harried himself. “We can
grab a sandwich next door,” he told Grace.
“I invited Emily over for
Thanksgiving,” she told him as they were in line to place their
orders.
Steven frowned. “Why?”
She gave him a quick whack on the arm.
“To be polite.”
“What did she say?”
“She said no, but I want you to work on
her. Make her change her mind.”
“If she doesn’t want to go . .
.”
“She will, if you second the
invitation.”
“You mean if she’s coerced?” He
extracted a little bottle of orange juice from a hill of chipped
ice. “I’ve worked with Emily for years, Grace. She’s the best admin
worker I’ve ever come across—I’d be at sea without her. I don’t
want to upset her by forcing her into awkward social
situations.”
“Trust me, she’s not going to quit over
a meal at our house. Our family isn’t that bad, is
it?”
He darted a quick look at her and then
placed his order.
When they were settled at a table, she
decided she might as well plunge in with the plans she was making.
Emily’s clock was ticking away. “I’m leaving after Thanksgiving,”
she told him. “Back to Portland.”
“That’s good.”
“So I was looking at your room the
other day. We could get it painted and fixed up a little. Also, I
should start looking for someone who could come in during the
day.”
His smile collapsed. “To tell the
truth, I’ve decided against that.”
“The home help? What else can
we—”
“No, I mean I’ve decided against moving
back home. I don’t think that would work. It might sound selfish,
after you’ve been here all these months, but I’m not sure that I
would want to be pushing forty and living with my dad. It’s not as
if I’m looking to get married again—obviously, I’m not even
divorced—but I don’t quite want to give up the idea of any kind of
social life in the future. And a man living with his father . .
.”
Grace nodded. What he said made sense.
It would be a little Sanford and Sonish.
“We should be looking for a full-time person, then. Live-in,
too.”
Something rumbled inside her just to
think the words, much less say them. Their father would never go
for this, even if they could find someone. But she couldn’t force
Steven to move home against his will.
“I’ll ask around,” he said. “I’m sure
some of the doctors I know have had to recommend home help for
patients. There’s probably an agency that deals in
this.”
“I wouldn’t want it to be someone
different all the time. I think Dad would feel better with someone
regular, who he could trust.”
“I know what you mean,” Steven said.
“Just leave it to me.”
After ten more minutes, Steven had to
get back to his patients, and she needed to get home in case her
dad arrived home early. Truman and Peggy had driven him out to
Llano to eat barbecue.
“Don’t forget to ask Emily,” she said
as they parted.
“I won’t,” Steven promised. “But don’t
expect her to come, Grace. She’d probably feel like the odd man out
at our family gathering.”
Grace knew something about feeling like
she didn’t quite belong at a family shindig. She also understood
the longing to be there anyway. “Just ask her.”
That evening, as she stood on the back
porch, wondering how she would ever work up the nerve to broach the
subject of live-in home help with her dad, she caught sight of Ray
dashing around his backyard. He was so tall that she could see the
top of his head from her vantage point on the porch. Ray was
hauling the ladder toward the pecan tree in the center of the
backyard. Closer up, he looked a little demented.
“Are you going to pick pecans?” she
asked. A lot of them were still wearing their green
husks.
He halted in midmovement and darted
glances all around, trying to pinpoint where the voice had come
from. He spotted her and exhaled in relief. Maybe he’d thought he
was hearing voices.
“I’ve been neglecting the bird
feeders!” he said. “I haven’t even thought about
them.”
She noticed there was one hanging from
a large branch on the pecan tree. It was fairly high
up.
“You’d better let me spot you on that
ladder,” she said.
“I’ll be all right.”
“Famous last words.” She hopped down
and came around the side of his yard and let herself in. On the
other side of the fence, Iago was showing his discontent at being
left behind by attempting to claw through the wood.
“I never once thought about the bird
feeders till this morning,” Ray said. “Can you believe that? All
these months—who knows what the birds have been living
on.”
“Well, it was summer. Now is the time
when you should be tending to them, I
think.”
“Really?” He looked somewhat relieved
as he crawled up the rungs and unhooked the house-shaped
glass-and-wood structure. He climbed back down holding the bird
feeder away from him with his fingertips.
“I assume birds survive okay in the
warm weather just eating worms and whatnot,” she said.
“I hope so,” he answered, scoping out
where the other feeders were. Now that Grace had an eye out, she
spotted several. Ray headed for a hummingbird feeder hanging off
the back porch. “Jen would have been able to say for sure. There
wasn’t a bird that came into this yard without her noticing it. She
knew them all, and what they ate, and where they
wintered.”
“She was a bird-watcher?”
“A bird freak,” he corrected. “She set
up this backyard as a sort of private, open aviary.” His gaze
snagged on a birdbath full of leaves, pecan shells, and what looked
like the petrified remains of an old baseball. He shook his head.
“But now look at it. I wonder how long it took the birds to realize
they needed to decamp.”
“They’ll come back,” she
said.
He furrowed his brow at her. “Do you
know anything about birds?”
She laughed. “Zilch, actually.” Then
she nodded at a bird feeder hanging off a linden tree by a window.
“You missed one.”
He obediently moved the ladder. “I
wonder how often I should be checking these things.”
“You could put Lily on it,” she
said.
He swung his head around.
“Lily?”
She nodded. “She lives to observe.
She’s over at our house right now.”
“I know.” She squinted at him and he
explained, “They leave me notes. I don’t know how to thank you for
being so patient, letting them invade your home all the
time.”
“No thanks necessary. Dad loves having
them over. I do too.” She felt a pang about Ray, though, abandoned
by his loved ones, rattling around the house all by himself,
angsting about bird feeders. “I think they’re about to start
watching The Lord of the Rings. Have you
seen it?”
He laughed. “Asking a software engineer
if he’s seen The Lord of the Rings is like
asking him if he reads Dilbert or has ever tried Indian food. Jen
and I had seen it twice by the end of opening
weekend.”
She watched him unhook the feeder that
looked like a little red barn. “Jennifer was an engineer?” She
hadn’t known that. “Is that how you two finally got together?
Work?”
He climbed down. “It was earlier,
actually—in college.”
“You went to the same
college?”
“We weren’t supposed to. I went to
Stanford, but then in my second year, my dad had a stroke and had
to stop working, so I transferred to UT and lived at home to save
money.”
“That couldn’t have been
easy.”
“No, it wasn’t. Most of my friends from
high school had left, and I was living at home, so I didn’t really
feel part of college life at first. Then one day as I was walking
to my electromagnetics class, there was Jen in the hallway. I
nearly walked right by her, until I heard her say my name. She was
on her way to chemistry. We were taking some of the same courses,
but in different sections. Later on we met in the student union and
caught up. Her parents had moved to Little Salty, so I had lost
contact with her for a while. She asked me if I was dating anyone—I
thought this was my big chance—and then she told me she wanted to
set me up with her roommate. Cheryl. So I went out with her
roommate for a while.”
Grace felt as if someone had slapped
her. He had gone out with someone else?
“Why?”
“Because Jen already had a
boyfriend.”
But Jennifer was your
true love, she wanted to say. He was supposed to be a
hopelessly devoted, tortured Olivia Newton-John man. Why would he
have settled for Cheryl?
“It was sort of devious,” he admitted.
“I didn’t like the guy Jen was going out with—he was a really slick
business school guy. I thought if I kept an eye on him, I’d find
out he was cheating on her. Sure enough, he was. After a while, it
was really obvious. He was being incredibly edgy around the
apartment, and sometimes he even looked guilty. And one time on
campus I saw him making out with a girl—I couldn’t see her, but I
suspected it was not Jen.
“Afterward, I invited Jen out for a
pizza—at Milto’s—and she seemed distracted and upset. It was clear
she knew. I was about to tell her what I knew, just to confirm her
suspicions, when she suddenly blurted out, ‘That bitch!’ Really
loud—right in the middle of the restaurant. Then she apologized for
ever having introduced me to her.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Cheryl,” Ray explained. “It was Cheryl
who Jen’s boyfriend was cheating with. Cheryl! I couldn’t believe it. He wanted Cheryl when he
already had Jennifer. And at the same time, Jen said something
like, ‘I can’t believe she’d rather go out with him than
you!’
“Well, that stopped both of us. We sort
of gaped at each other for what seemed like a minute or so, and
then I said, ‘But you preferred him, too.’ And she said no, she
didn’t, and I said she obviously had because she had been going out
with him and not me for five months, and she said that was because
I had never asked her. And I explained that I hadn’t asked her
because I assumed she’d turn me down flat, and she said that was
the stupidest thing she’d ever heard of, and I argued that it was
actually perfectly logical since we’d known each other forever and
had never dated. Then she repeated that if I had asked her that
might not have been the case, and I replied that we’d never know
now because it was all in the past, and she said it wouldn’t be all
in the past if I would just finally for once ask her out on a damn
date. And then it struck me—she really did want me
to ask. So I did.”
Grace felt like a kid listening to a
fairy tale. Never mind that she knew the ending, her attention was
rapt. She just needed to hear the words. “And what did she
say?”
“She looked at me like I was the
biggest jerk in the world and practically yelled, ‘What the hell
took you so long!’ ” He grinned. “And that’s how we finally got
together.”
And they all lived happily ever
after.
For a while.
The sadness of his loss hit her full
force.
“You two must have gotten married
pretty soon after college,” she said.
“The month after we graduated. Jen
didn’t want to wait to have a family. She was an only child and had
always dreamed of having a big family, but at the same time, she
wanted them all out of her hair by the time she was forty-five,
when she would still be young enough to try skydiving or take trips
to the Amazon without worrying about anything happening . .
.”
As his words hung in the air, Grace’s
smile faded, and she looked down.
Ray busied himself with birdseed.
“Thanks for helping me,” he said. “I can manage on my own
now.”
She didn’t want to go—though he clearly
expected her to. Without thinking, she blurted out, “Would you like
to come to Thanksgiving dinner with us?” At his look of surprise,
she continued, “Dad wants to have all his friends and family over,
and I’m sure he’s going to want to invite Dominic and
Lily.”
“Thanks, but my in-laws mentioned
coming down.”
“Oh. Well that’ll be even better, for
the kids. And probably for you, too.” His expression seemed so
serious, she worried she had embarrassed him. Or maybe he thought
that she was being pushy, or God forbid, coming on to him. “I just
thought I’d make sure you weren’t alone for the holiday. We’ll have
lots of people coming over. My boyfriend is coming from
Portland.”
“Your boyfriend?” He seemed startled,
as if he didn’t expect that she would have one.
She nodded. “His name’s Ben. We live
together.” He laughed, and she felt her cheeks burn. “Is that so
hard to believe?”
“Well, it’s hard to believe you’re
actually living together when you’re here and he’s two thousand
miles away.”
“True, but it’s only temporary. In
fact, I’m probably going back with Ben after Thanksgiving. My being
here was never supposed to be permanent.”
“I couldn’t imagine being away for so
long from someone I love.” He turned back to his tree. “Not
voluntarily.”
The implied criticism in his words hit
her with a glancing sting. She felt like defending herself, but
that was foolish. She didn’t have to explain herself to this
neighbor who didn’t know the first thing about her.
Not knowing what else to say, she
settled on “Well, I’m sure the birds will be back
soon.”
“What?” His head snapped up as if he
had already forgotten she was there. “Oh, sure. Thank you for your
help.”
She wandered back to her side of the
fence and was greeted by an ecstatic Iago. For the rest of the
evening, and for much of the next few days, she felt a bitter
regret for not clearing up the idea that she was somehow a bad
person because she had abandoned Ben. Because she hadn’t abandoned
him, really. She had just extended her stay. And why should she
feel compelled to justify her actions to Ray? She didn’t care what
he thought.
Besides, it wasn’t as if he was the
king of interpersonal relationships himself.