Читать книгу Song of Silence - Cynthia Ruchti - Страница 14

Chapter 8

8

They talked more details with their daughter until Charlie dropped Lucy where they’d left Lucy’s defaced Malibu. She wondered if the term vermiculture originated in the similarities between vermin and worms, or if the “verm-” part was a Sergeant Schultz pronunciation of worm. Sergeant Schultz. Hogan’s Heroes. TVLand. The places her mind drifted these days . . .

It wasn’t until she’d strapped herself into her battered car that she realized Olivia’s temporary homecoming would make what they called the guest room off-limits for worm breeding. Things were looking up.

When they got home, Lucy immediately aimed for the guest room. What could stay? What would have to relocate to make room for their grown daughter and her accumulation of things? When she’d stayed only a night here and there, the guest room had sufficed the way it was, with just a sliver of space in the closet. Lucy started a mental list.

“So . . .” Charlie entered the room behind her.

“Doesn’t seem that long ago we converted this room from her college-break hovel to this much tidier version of a bedroom.”

“So . . .”

“What is it?”

Charlie ran his hand along the edge of the chest-high set of drawers. “I made breakfast.”

The grapefruit half she hadn’t eaten. “Yes?”

“It’s lunch time.”

She wasn’t hungry. He was. A good wife would—would what?

Her mother would have apologized for not realizing it was past noon, dropped everything, and raced through getting the breadwinner something to eat. Ania would have said, “I’ll take a grilled ham and cheese. Thanks.” Scratch that. A grilled eggplant and roasted red pepper. Lucy’s sister—twice divorced—would have planted her hands on her hips and stared him down until he said, “I’ll . . . I’ll just go make myself something.” To which her sister would have replied, “You do that,” and muttered merciless adjectives under her breath. Olivia might say, without missing a beat, “Oh, you’re right. Time flies. I’m not hungry yet, and I’d like to keep working here. If you have trouble finding something in the kitchen, let me know.”

Lucy had been all of the above at various stages of their marriage and to varying degrees. She only planted her hands on her hips and gave the stare-down in her mind, never externally. And she wasn’t that fond of eggplant.

The answer she most admired? Olivia’s.

“I’ll get you something in a minute, Charlie.”

An answer like that was supposed to make her feel good about doing the selfless thing, like Jesus taught. Why did it make her feel as if she’d missed His larger point?

She tried singing while she made tuna salad. After the first few notes of “who lives in a pineapple under the sea?” she abandoned the musical soundtrack for lunch prep. Some of her students’ influences weren’t worth archiving.

“Want to eat on the deck?” Charlie asked when she called him away from the noon news. “Beautiful day out there.”

During summer school, in an ordinary summer, she would have grabbed a nectarine and a bag of microwave popcorn for lunch between her packed schedule of students’ individual lessons or the group lessons for beginning musicians. In nineteen years, she hadn’t yet, but had intended to start taking the stairs or walking the track outside the school for exercise. This was the summer, she’d told herself. Best laid plans.

She looked at the dome of tuna salad on her plate surrounded by a halo of barbecue-flavored potato chips. She replaced one chip with a baby carrot. Good enough for today. “The deck. Sure. That sounds great.”

It did. And it was. Enough of a breeze to keep the bugs away. Everywhere she looked, something was blooming, chirping, or flying. Under the lawn a few inches, grassroots earthworms created fertilizer for the green blades that fought dandelions for dominance.

Charlie opened the tabletop patio umbrella to shade the two of them from the high sun the maple tree failed to block. Lucy sank into her favorite glider patio chair and pulled up to the table.

Charlie prayed briefly over their meal, with an extra line thrown in for Olivia. Lucy wondered if Olivia had called her brother. She and Sam had become such good friends in adulthood. Who would have thought? They’d tolerated each other as toddlers two years apart. They’d loathed each other in high school, tormenting each other both intentionally and unintentionally. How had they moved from tolerating and tormenting, she wondered—watching Charlie smear tuna salad onto a potato chip—to admiration and respect?

They’d grown up.

Now, that was a dangerous thought.

“This is my definition of perfect,” Charlie said, leaning back in his matching patio glider rocker, then leaning forward to grab a napkin to catch the dollop of tuna that landed at breastbone level.

“Perfect? The breeze helps. And the umbrella. Sometimes I wonder,” Lucy said, not for the first time, “if we shouldn’t have screened in this deck when we moved here.”

“I wasn’t talking about the weather.”

Oh.

“This ‘us.’ Just us. Nothing to do but sit here and enjoy one another.”

Her left eye twitched. She turned her head so he wouldn’t see if it happened again. It did. Lucy couldn’t imagine a world in which “nothing to do” and “perfect” fit in the same paragraph. A pouch of tuna, mayo, celery, potato chips, nothing to do, plus her spelled contentment for him. Her list didn’t start with tuna.

His was the face she wanted to see at the end of the day, the eyes she most wanted to dream about, her favorite embrace. She craved holding hands all day every day when they were in college and never being apart far enough to slip a dollar bill between them, like testing for gasket leaks in a freezer door. At this stage of life, the idea made her claustrophobic. Guilt clamped iron fingers around her upper arm as if hauling her to relationship jail. He wasn’t her teenaged, annoying, flatulence-obsessed older brother. Except for the flatulence and older. He was her husband. Hus. Band. For life.

Other summers, he’d worked and then come home at the end of the day. Other months of the year until this past year, they’d both worked and come back together at the end of the day. Lucy separated the celery from her tuna salad with her fork.

Something landed on her forearm. She brushed it away. His hand. “Sorry. I thought you were a June bug.” Perspiring more than necessary for a day with a soft breeze, she reached for his hand and replaced it on her arm.

Charlie’s face broke into the irrepressible grin that had fluttered her heart so many days of their marriage. “A June bug. That’s a compliment, right? Because I know how much you l-o-v-e June bugs.”

“You startled me. My mind was elsewhere, I guess.” Actually, it was right where they sat, but try explaining that.

His fingers traced her arm from fingertips to shoulder and back again. And again. “Lucy, you know I’m on your side, don’t you?”

“In what?”

“Battling this depression.”

“I’m not depressed.” I’m sad. That’s all. Incredibly, deeply, soul-woundingly sad.

“Sometimes . . . when a woman reaches your age . . .”

She bit the side of her tongue. “Menopause? You think this is from menopause?” She’d check a mirror later for broken blood vessels in her eye.

He stopped stroking her arm and wiped the condensation from his glass. “Maybe it will be good in more ways than one for Olivia to move back home for a while.”

The great shrinking house. Did he think he’d have reinforcements when Olivia got there? “It’ll be good to have her here. For a while,” she agreed.

Lucy needed to turn a room for overnight guests into a longer term guest room. She had flowerbeds that needed water and weeding, not in that order, and she craved a few minutes on the computer to look up clinical depression so she could prove that wasn’t her problem. Charlie might have all day, but she had things to do.

“It’s funny Martin hasn’t called lately to take you fishing with him,” she said.

Charlie swallowed, most of his mouthful, and said, “He calls almost every day.”

“He does?”

“I turn him down.”

Lucy’s eye twitched again. She pressed a finger against the offending muscle. “Why would you do that?”

“You’ve been kind of needy lately.” The tilt of his head and almost impish look—so like Sam’s—said he didn’t mean it like it sounded.

She forced her face into neutral rather than the glare that begged to form. What I’ve needed is a little breathing room. She should tell him exactly that. Yes. “I think you should take him up on it one of these days. Go. You need to get out on the water while the fishing’s at its peak before it gets hotter and the fish aren’t eating as voraciously as they are now.”

“Listen to my outdoorswoman here.”

“I’ve heard your fishing stories for a good number of years, Charlie. And, for the record, I’m not needy.” She flicked her celery bits back into the pile of tuna and stirred extra long.

***

“Did you get Martin on the phone?” Lucy grabbed another armful of out-of-season clothes hanging in the guest room closet.

Charlie leaned against the doorjamb of the room that would become Olivia’s again. “Yeah.”

“And?”

“We’re not going today.”

“Okay.” She shifted the weight draped across her arm. “Why not? Too late in the day?”

“Too late”—he sighed—“in life.” He lifted the bulk from her arms, laid the clothing on the empty bed, and swallowed her in his fierce embrace.

“Charlie? What’s . . . ?” She could feel him trembling.

“Eve had an appointment today,” he breathe-spoke into her hair. “Her doctor thinks it’s early onset Alz—”

“No!” Lucy matched the grip of his embrace. “Martin must be devastated. Oh, Charlie!”

“Don’t leave me, Lucy.”

“I won’t.”

“I mean, mentally. Or . . . emotionally. I don’t even know what I’m saying. Just don’t. Okay?” He rocked her back and forth. Almost a dance. Not quite.

“What are you whispering?”

His dance slowed. Stopped. “Praying for Martin.”

Lucy pulled back. She wiped the moisture from the corner of his eyes with her thumb, and marveled that two polar opposite hearts could beat as one. “And I was praying for Eve.”

She smoothed the curls of silver in front of his ears. The man needed a haircut again. In her head, the melodies of every Top Forty love song tumbled over each other. Yes. This man. Forever.

Somehow.