Promise of Safekeeping : A Novel (9781101553954) (25 page)

“Don’t get me wrong,” his mother said. “We were happy. Life wasn’t easy, but I don’t think anybody would have called it
bad
.”

“Excuse me for asking,” Lauren said. “But why are you telling me this?”

“Because my son won’t.”

Lauren looked down at the baby sleeping in her arms. She was conflicted to hear Will’s mother talk about Will so candidly, especially given that Will had taken such pains to keep Lauren from knowing anything about his past. On one hand, she was eager to know more about him—to better understand—and Will’s mother wanted to tell her. On the other hand, she respected Will too much to pry into his life. Because she didn’t know what to do, she sat quietly. She brushed her finger over the baby’s soft cheek.

“You know he dropped out of high school, right?” Jacqueline asked.

“No, I didn’t,” Lauren said, truly surprised. Will might not have been formally educated, but he could compete with any of her colleagues who had gone to Ivy League schools. He was as smart as he was intelligent—and all his knowledge he’d acquired on his own. “I guess he’s more of a hands-on learner.”

“Hell, no. He just about slept through eighth grade with all A’s. Certainly didn’t get it from his father’s side of the family. He dropped out when he was a senior. Nearly killed me. But he wanted to work.”

“I know what that’s like,” Lauren said. She’d begged her father for her first real job, a job that wasn’t babysitting or shoveling snow. And he would have let her get a job too—if she’d been legally old enough. She was eleven when she’d written her first résumé.

“Once Billy decided to make money, he
made
money—know
what I’m saying? He didn’t work at some five-dollar-an-hour job. He started digging around, selling old stuff. Used to pick through the trash dumps on some of the old farms, where the farmers used to throw the milk bottles. He’d shine them up with the garden hose and sell them in town. And it helped, you know. It helped me. He’s always been generous.”

“You must be proud,” Lauren said.

“Yes. I am.” She took a long drag of her cigarette, sizing up Lauren as she smoked. “You know he likes you.”

Lauren was quiet.

“That’s okay. You don’t have to say anything. I just don’t want to see him get hurt.”

“And I wouldn’t want to hurt him,” Lauren said.

Annabelle came through the house’s back door, and Lauren felt a shift in the air as she approached, a lessening of tension. She was glad for her return.

“He behaving for you?” Annabelle asked.

“He’s perfect. An angel.”

“I know I am,” Will cut in. He came around the house from the garage, smiling cheerily. The wind blew his hair up in the back, and he pushed it down.

“You wish,” Annabelle said.

The moment Lauren became the object of Will’s attention, she knew it. She felt his awareness of her like a tightening from head to toe. He wore long jeans and boots—a uniform of sorts no matter how hot the weather, because of the perils of picking—but he’d changed into a clean shirt before dinner. It fit him snugly; it had some kind of scrolling design with words she couldn’t read. She guessed he might have borrowed it from one of his brothers.

His face softened as he looked at her. “Can you stand to part with Louis and come with me for a walk?”

“Of course she can,” Will’s mother said, stubbing out her cigarette
in an ashtray. “It’s time Nona had a turn now, anyway, isn’t it, sweetheart?” She leaned down to pick up the baby. “Yes, it is. It’s time for Nona.”

Lauren smiled. On her lap the baby had been a small furnace; now, as she got to her feet, the evening felt almost cool against her skin. “I could use a walk. Where are we walking to?”

“We’ll know when we get there,” he said.

Eula did not date regularly. Her friends who were still single seemed to date systematically and with a specific goal in mind, so that if a date did not promise to meet that goal or perhaps threatened to alter it, the contact was cut off. But Eula had no path she was carving for herself through the crowded and confusing world of dating. She’d been dropped back into the single life when—in fact—she’d had no intention of ever being single again. And now she was merely wandering this way and that, without enough love of dating to do it regularly and without enough hatred of it to quit.

She’d started seeing a man from her church, Mitch, a few months ago. She liked him a lot. His laugh was warm and his spirit was kind. His hair was flecked with gray squiggles, but there was a gold, youthful light beneath his dark skin that made his face glow. Her friends referred to him as “the doctor,” not because he was one, but because he had a handsome, scholarly, thoughtful face like a kind pediatrician on a soap opera.

But Eula didn’t think he seemed nearly that shallow; instead, it seemed to her that he had been gifted with the special kind of grace God bestowed on people who had known too much sorrow. If there was anyone she might talk to about her unending pain over Arlen—if she could force herself to bring it up to anyone—she thought it might be him. His wife had died years ago.

Eula’s girlfriends kept telling her: the man was perfect. Why
didn’t she bag him up? And yet when he kissed her, she could not seem to stop holding herself away.

Tonight was their eighth date in half as many months. He’d invited her to his home. They ate on his screened-in porch, and though it wasn’t a restaurant, he wore nice gray-green pants and a crisp white shirt. Tonight, he was obviously taking pains to impress her. He lit candles. He put on soft music. He cooked: spinach salad with raspberry vinaigrette and almonds. A few crackers with Brie. And a roast slow-cooked in coffee and soy sauce—a bit heavy for summer, but it smelled delicious.

She realized she’d been lost in her own thoughts for a few moments too long. The conversation had lagged, and she wasn’t sure how best to pick it up again. She poked at her food. “The salad’s fantastic.”

“Oh yes. Pure decadence,” he said, and she laughed. “It’s funny. My wife made me eat so much damn salad. Hated the stuff.”

“My mama hates salad,” she said quickly. He knew about her mother, the dementia and the precancerous cells. She told him a story about her mother’s refusals to eat healthy food, and he laughed where it was appropriate and nodded his head to encourage her to go on. He was easy to be around.

From the beginning, he’d made no secret that he was spending time with other women. She knew he wasn’t having hanging-from-the-chandeliers sex with them, nor was he promising his exclusive love to any or all. He was simply fighting off the loneliness, just like she was. And she was glad to know she wasn’t the only woman he was seeing. It removed some of the pressure to perform.

“Eula . . . 

Mitch put his hand out on the table. She knew he wanted her to take it, so she did. She smiled.

“Where are you tonight?” he asked.

“I’m sorry. I’m just a little distracted.”

“Anything I can do?”

“No. I mean—thank you. That’s sweet. But no.”

She looked at her hand in his and then pulled away to drink the last sip of her wine. She tipped her glass toward him for a refill.

“I’d like to see you again,” he said. He finished pouring her wine. “And . . . I want us to be exclusive.”

She toyed with the cloth napkin on her lap. “I’m not sure I can do anything too serious right now.”

“I’m with you there. That’s why I like you. Believe me—five years later, it feels too soon for me too.”

His brown eyes were warm and sincere. When she thought of what he’d been through—the shock of losing his wife, the wondering
what if
, turning to say something only to realize there was no one there—it was so familiar. In a way, she’d been widowed too. But her spouse had returned from the dead, and his never would.

She leaned forward a little bit. “If you want to see me again, I have to tell you something. Something about my ex-husband.”

“I knew you were married before.”

“But that’s all you know?”

“People have tried to tell me things about you—all well-meaning people. But I told them I didn’t want to hear it. I figure if something’s important, it will come up in its own time.”

“This is important,” she said. “If you’re thinking about getting serious with me.”

“I’m not afraid of ex-husband stories. Or ex-husbands.”

She took a breath. “The man I divorced was . . . is . . . Arlen Fieldstone.”

He dabbed his mouth with his napkin and put it down on the table. “I see,” was all he said.

The road leading away from Will’s mother’s house curved gently around steep hills and into the dips of shrubby ravines, so that
when Lauren got around one blind corner she found herself facing another. She and Will walked by the light of the moon and the barest glow of day left in the sky. There was no double yellow line down the center of the road. No shoulders marked by white. The trees and shrubs along the road’s edge crowded in with such tenacity that she felt as if turning her back on them might give them permission to swallow up the road.

They strolled along a steep curve, hugging the side of an overgrown hill. Fireflies lit up the underbrush, but Lauren hardly noticed. She wanted to look only at Will, to better see what it was that she was missing about him, the fundamental thing that she didn’t yet understand. She studied his profile: his high forehead, the curve of his nose, his jaw that was neither strong nor weak. Most of the men she’d dated had been of the devastatingly handsome variety, but Will’s beauty was subtle, real.

She looped her arm through his and hoped the gesture came off as friendly and comfortable. “So tell me,” she began, and he interrupted.

“Oh, no. Why do I have the feeling I’m about to get the grilled.”

“Is it profitable being in antiques? Do you make a killing?”

“Maybe not by some standards. But I do okay.” They walked for a while, slowly and without intention, Lauren’s arm through his. “The thing about antiques is that they don’t go out of style. With anything else you’d buy and sell, the stock goes out of date in a matter of months, maybe years. But with antiques, the older they get, the better. For the most part, anyway.”

“Is that one of those recession-proof businesses?”

“When times get hard people start to sell things. Cheap. That’s when I can pick up a good deal, hold it for a while, and flip it for a killing a few years down the line. That’s how it’s supposed to work, anyway.”

She heard something in his voice: he was talking as much to
himself as to her. She drew the logical conclusion. If he needed to reinforce his own rule, he was probably at risk of breaking it. “You keep many of your picks?” she asked.

“Course I do.” In the near dark, she wondered if that was a blush creeping up his neck, or if they’d simply stepped into a shadow from the moon. “I like to hang on to the more interesting finds.”

“What makes you keep something?”

He glanced away from the road before them, into the dark of the woods. “If something strikes me. Or if I know it’s worth some money. Lots of reasons, really.” She didn’t miss it now: the way his jaw had clenched, then let go. “So how’d you do with my mom and Annabelle? Do I need to apologize for their interrogation tactics?”

“No waterboarding or stress positions,” she said, letting him change the subject. She had no interest in making him uncomfortable. “Your mom wanted to know if we were dating.”

The muscle of his arm tensed under her hand. “Did you tell her you’re already seeing someone up in Albany?”

“I’m not seeing anyone,” she said. She pulled her arm from him. “What do I have to do to convince you that I’m unattached?”

“You’re hung up on the guy.”

“I’m not hung up,” she said. And it was true. She realized that even though she’d thought of Edward, she hadn’t actually missed him in days. It was Will who took up more and more space in her mind now.

This afternoon on their pick, she’d flirted with him—or, at least, she hoped that was what she was doing. She’d never been very good at flirting. To flirt required a certain lack of directness, a willingness to hint and imply and be frivolous that she simply hadn’t been able to perfect. Elusiveness was not a tool worth developing. If a thing needed to be said, she said it—without playing around. That was what she’d liked about Edward. On their first lunch date, he’d said, “I want to take you to bed.” And the feeling
that had washed over her was nothing shy of relief, because it was what she’d wanted too.

But today, standing on the road with her shoes getting soaked with mud, she’d wanted to flirt. To tease Will a little, to draw him out and see if she could make him want her. The trouble was, she hadn’t thought much beyond that.

“It must be hard for you, in a way,” Will said suddenly.

She stiffened. “Sorry?”

“I just think it must be a tough way to live. To see things the rest of us can’t. To see the future.”

“I can’t see the future,” she said.

“What I mean is, you can see a lot. Is that why it didn’t work out with the guy in Albany?”

“It was more complicated than that.”

“ ‘Complicated’ is woman-speak for, ‘It’s not going how I want but we’re having sex anyway.’ ”

“And you’re the expert on woman-speak?” she teased.

“I do have a sister. And a mother, you know.” He clasped his hands together behind his back. “You like my family?”

“I do like them.”

“Read them to me,” he said. “What did you see?”

“Oh, I can’t do that.”

“They’re that terrible?” Will said, laughing.

“No! No, not at all. They’re great. Really warm, nice people who are absolutely crazy about you and want you to be happy.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

She hooked her thumbs on her jeans. When she and Jonah were young, they used to do party tricks for their friends sometimes, just for fun. People would ask:
Does Kris Bronsen like me? Is Mrs. Dickerson really a lesbian? Could you go ask Mr. Oakley if we’re having a test today, and then let me know?

Most of the time, the errands and readings were harmless
enough. But when middle school girlfriends had started warring—Lauren still had no idea what had caused the rift—she’d been caught between two equally vicious factions, each demanding she scout information from the other side.