But I had this: the perfect thing for one Midwestern woman. The skirt was six-gored with a trumpet-flare at the bottom, and I was working on the cutting line, completely absorbed by the question of how to shape it, when the doorbell rang at a little after eleven.
Jamie was on the doorstep. Blond hair hanging by her face, a pink tank top showing her pale shoulders. It would sound better to say we both burst into tears, that we fell into each other’s arms right there, but in
fact it was very awkward, the two of us with our arms folded across our chests, standing outside and then standing in the kitchen and finally sitting down, glasses of iced tea gripped in our trembly hands. We talked in the way of two people with something enormous and impossible to speak of: we talked about movies, the weather, a new CD she wondered if I’d heard. Gradually I relaxed. I realized we didn’t have to say everything that morning. Or soon. Or ever.
She stayed for half an hour. Exactly, as if she’d decided in advance. Standing to leave, she asked if I’d like to come for dinner some night. “We take turns cooking,” she said. “You can come on one of my nights, I’m the only one who ever cooks a green vegetable.”
I said I’d like to. Walking to the front door, we passed the dining room. She glanced in at my work, and I told her what I was doing.
“Didn’t I tell you you could make a ton of money sewing?” She smiled and tipped her head to the side. “Maybe I’ll hire you next.”
“What makes you think you can afford me?”
“Hey, I’m rich—I don’t pay rent anymore.”
I looked at her clear green eyes. I reached over and touched her arm, and she glanced away. I said, “Are you going to stay home for a while?”
She nodded.
“How is she?”
“She came home for a visit last weekend. Mixie and Lynn and I said it was like having this very polite houseguest.”
“And your dad?”
She shrugged. “He didn’t say much.” She looked at me and then looked away and grasped her shoulders, her elbows coming together in front of her chest. “I shouldn’t have blamed you,” she whispered.
I shook my head. “It’s—”
“I shouldn’t have.”
We reached the front door. I opened it, and we stood there looking at one another, the moment for putting our palms together suddenly upon us.
I held the doorknob. She kept hold of her shoulders. Out on the sidewalk, a tabby cat stopped to look at us, then trotted away.
“Your dad,” I said. “Does he cook, too?”
She broke into a smile. “Are you kidding? You think we’d let him get away with that?” Her smile widened. “He’s Mr. Taco King. He makes tacos every Sunday night.”
• • •
After Jamie left I called Mike and suggested lunch, then cleaned up the dining room and headed over. He was on the deck waiting, dressed in a short-sleeved blue-and-red plaid madras shirt, tennis hat firmly on his head.
We’d been eating a lot of ethnic food, or as ethnic as it got in Madison—enchiladas and pad thai. Today he suggested the Union terrace. We drove over and I found an easy parking place right on Langdon—graduation was over and summer school hadn’t started yet. We went out to the lake and took the ramp up to the terrace. Mike waited at a shady table while I went inside for deli sandwiches, thinking that the deli sandwiches I’d gotten for us there must number in the hundreds. Back outside I sat next to him, both of us facing the lake.
We didn’t talk much. It was one of those noontimes when all of Madison seemed to be on the lakefront, students and professors and secretaries and eccentrics, sitting or walking in the sun. The lake itself was a deep, deep azure, calm under a windless sky.
I put a straw in his iced tea and positioned it near the edge of the table so he could bend over for a drink. He’d asked for turkey and swiss but I’d forgotten to say no lettuce, and for a while he fed himself amid a shower of chopped iceberg until he asked me to give him bites instead.
He swallowed and looked over at me. “Dirk Nann called yesterday. He said they could use some help. He said I could start with twenty hours a week and then see.”
Dirk Nann was his old boss at the bank, and I tried to contain my excitement. Mike could go on and on about the uselessness of trying to be useful, but I thought going back to the bank would be the best possible thing for him. “Are you going to?”
He made a face. “I thought I’d never go back there. It’s so out there. Meet the public. But I realized the main thing I wouldn’t be able to do is shake hands with people.”
“Which doesn’t matter.”
He looked at me, something stirring way back behind his eyes. “It does matter. But it’s not the end of the world.”
He motioned for his sandwich, and I held it up so he could have another bite, cupping my hand underneath to catch what fell. His forearms rested on the armrests of the wheelchair, freckles showing between the hairs. I set the sandwich down and put my hand on his bare leg, just above the knee. “Can you feel that at all?”
He hesitated. “No, but I think I’d know it was there with my eyes closed.” He closed his eyes. “Don’t say anything,” he whispered.
I didn’t. I kept my hand where it was, curved over his leg, my diamond catching the light. I breathed in, breathed out again. I looked around while I waited for him to speak. I saw a pair of frat boys strutting by, a barefoot girl with a golden retriever, an elderly woman with a purple scarf around her neck, sitting on a bench in the sun. I thought of the weight of their lives, the long, hidden history each of them carried. That the frat boys were also sons, maybe brothers. That the girl might be from another continent. That the woman had thoughts about people no one on the terrace had ever seen, for reasons we couldn’t imagine. I looked across the water, and there was Picnic Point, a finger of land pointing into the lake. I remembered Stu’s story, of walking across the ice with Mike and Rooster, and I imagined Mike out there, wrapped in a down jacket, huge boots on his feet as he took step after dangerous step in the drifting chill of a December night.
“I’m not sure,” he said at last, opening his eyes. “This’ll sound sick, but sometimes I ask myself, Would you rather be blind? Would you rather be deaf?”
“And what do you answer?”
“Either, but not both.”
I pulled my hand away, and at my side he took a deep breath and then sighed. “Can I ask you something?” he said.
“Of course.”
He looked down and colored slightly, then looked up again and his eyes met mine. “Are you back to stay?”
“Yes,” I said, but my throat felt funny, and it came out hoarse and scratchy, hardly even a word. “Yes,” I said again.
He smiled a complicated, inward-looking smile: of warring emotions quieted, if only for the time being. He bent over for a sip of his drink, then straightened up again. “So you’re what, going to fly back for your car?”
I turned and watched a gull perched on a low wall. It looked out at the water, its white neck curved like an S. “I sold it,” I said.
He sucked in his cheek and nodded. “Oh. That makes sense. It must be hard to park in New York.”
“I needed the money. You can’t imagine how expensive it is to live there.”
He scowled a little. “Yes, I can.”
We sat there. A group of five professorial types arrived at the table next to us, each man bearded and serious-looking and each licking an ice cream cone, the pastel flavors of summer. Off to the side, the gull hopped twice and then soared away, wings stretching wide.
I felt Mike’s eyes on me, and I wondered what he could see, if I had
Kilroy Was Here
written on me somewhere in a tiny, hurried scrawl. Of course I did. Just as Kilroy had
Carrie Was Here
on him, where it would stay whether he tried to rub it away or not. He was a map of messages, read by no one. I’d felt them with my fingertips, but they’d been hieroglyphic, indecipherable. I wondered how he felt about telling me about his brother. I hated to think he regretted it. Longing for him overwhelmed me, and my throat swelled. After a moment I busied myself with my sandwich: I leaned over the table for a big bite, and the harsh taste of the mustard pleased me. I chewed and chewed, then leaned back in my chair. My left hand was resting on the edge of the table, and Mike looked down at it: at my ring, his ring, our ring. Our eyes met. “Hock it if you want,” he said.
“I would never.” I twisted the ring around my finger, then took it off and put it on my right hand and held it out for him to see. “It’s a friendship ring now.”
“How’d that happen?”
“It just did. Presto change-o.” I smiled at him. “The ring, it has changed.”
“If you say so.”
“I do,” I said, and then I realized what I’d said—
I do
—and our eyes met again and we both laughed: awkwardly at first and then happily, chortling together over a joke only the two of us could fully appreciate.
A bit later we went back to the van. Instead of heading for the Mayers’ I turned the other way and drove up past the observatory, then swooped down toward the hospital and past it. By the time I’d parked he had to know what I had in mind, but he didn’t say anything. I cut the engine and helped him out.
The path was wide and smooth, and we moved side by side through deep shade and into spots dappled by sunlight. There were no other people around—no joggers, no picnickers, no kids playing hookey on one of the last school days of the year. How tall the trees were, making it an expedition by green tunnel, unseen water on both sides.
For a while Kilroy was there, too, walking a pace or two behind us. I wanted the anguish I felt to stay with me—knowing it would fade was the saddest thing in the world. I kept looking over my shoulder but saw only the path, running back the way we’d come, winding through the trees. Six weeks later I would get a postcard that I’d know only by inference came from him, blank but for my name and address. The photograph showed a sunny field of lavender in front of a row of silvery trees. “A hillside in Provence,” it said on the back in three languages. And, in the ink ring that canceled the French stamp, the word “Var.”
That was still ahead of me, though. Today, Mike and I moved along
the path. The little clearing off to the left, where we’d lain on my beach towel—we passed it, neither of us commenting. It had been there long before we had.
A songbird trilled from high in a tree. A little later Mike looked up at me. “We never would have gotten married, would we?”
I reached over and pulled a glossy leaf from a bush we were passing. I ran my finger across the surface, then let it fall. “I don’t know,” I said. “It was beginning to seem like maybe not the best idea.”
“I think I know why,” he said. “It was like we already were married—we’d gone too far.”
I nodded. We would say more about it later, both of us. For now I looked around, at the trees, at the sky high above. I breathed in the clean smell of pine. The path grew shadier and twisted to the right, then to the left again. We ascended a slight rise, and a blackbird beat its wings as it settled on a branch.
“Here we are,” he said, and we entered the final, sun-filled clearing, the water pale blue and all around us, visible between the limbs of trees. He stopped moving and smiled up at me. “Well, what do you know,” he said. “Mike Mayer returns to Picnic Point.”
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ann Packer is a past recipient of a James Michener award and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Her work has appeared in
The New Yorker, Ploughshares
, and other magazines, as well as in
Prize Stories 1992: The O. Henry Awards
. The author of
Mendocino and Other Stories
, she lives in northern California with her husband and two children.