A Soft Place to Fall (2 page)

"We can't leave you alone," Claudia said and
for once Susan agreed with her mother.

"Sure you can." Annie started moving them
toward the door. "I'll be fine. I promise."

"Are you sure?" Susan asked. Her eyes were
wide and dark-brown and she looked so much like Kevin that there
were times when Annie had to turn away.

"Positive." She waved goodbye to them from
the top step then closed and locked the door. The movers were gone.
The only thing she had left to do was sweep the floors, coerce the
cats into their carrying cases, then load everything into her
ancient four-wheel drive. She grabbed the broom and began to move
living room dust into one central pile. The Flemings were due to
arrive at three o'clock and by nightfall this quiet old house would
be bursting with laughter and children, the way it was always meant
to.

#

"We're crazy," Annie had said the night they
moved in. They were lying on afghans in front of the fire place in
the living room, watching the flames flicker and dance. "You know
we can't afford a house like this." They were only a handful of
years out of college. Neither one of them was established in a
career. He had only just started teaching and she had yet to sell
one of her paintings, much less study in Rome. It would be a long
time before they could even think about putting down roots.

"We can't afford not to buy it," Kevin had
said, filling her wineglass from the jug of Chianti they'd
purchased at the discount liquor store near the state line. "Face
it, Annie. This house has family written all over it. We're going
to grow old here." They clicked glasses for the third -- or was it
the fourth? -- time. "One day our grandchildren will play in that
backyard."

"Grandchildren?" she'd said with a laugh.
"First things first, Mr. Galloway."

"Five kids," he said, pulling her over onto
his lap. "Three girls, two boys."

"Five?"

He grinned at her. "It's my lucky
number."

"We only have four bedrooms."

"We'll add as many as we need."

"Kids or bedrooms?" She loved the way he was
stroking her hair, her shoulder, the warmth of his lips against the
side of her neck.

"Both," he said, sliding his hand under the
hem of her sweater. She gasped when he cupped her breast. He
murmured words of praise, wonderful, honey-drenched words against
her skin, the kind of words that melted a woman's bones. He could
talk a statue to life with those words, turn cold marble into warm
flesh. He had been doing it to Annie from the very first.

"We should wait another year or two," she
whispered, struggling to stay reasonable against the sensual
onslaught of his hands and mouth. "We don't even have furniture
yet."

"I love you, Annie Rose Lacy Galloway. I love
the family we're going to have together. Life is short. We're young
and strong and healthy and we love each other. Let's make a baby,
Annie Rose. Let's start tonight."

#

Annie turned away from the empty living room.
The ghosts were everywhere. There wasn't a corner of the house that
wasn't filled with them. They had made love that first night with a
sense of sacred abandon and Annie had been sure they had made a
baby. A son with Kevin's dark brown eyes and ready laugh . . . or
maybe a daughter with his strength and kindness. They were so young
then, so innocent. Believing in miracles came as naturally to her
back then as breathing. Why else would she have stayed with Kevin
until the very end?

"There's nothing to worry about," her doctor
had said to her as the months passed and there was still no baby.
"The test results are all unremarkable. You're healthy. Kevin's
healthy. Give it time, Anne. You'll have your baby."

But it took two to have a baby. A man and a
woman who loved each other and shared the same vision of their
future. A man and a woman who shared a bed and made love with
tenderness if not passion, not two strangers who lived alone in the
same house. He refused to listen when she suggested they look more
deeply into their infertility problem. He turned a deaf ear when
she spoke about adoption. Months turned to years and after a time
she began to believe that it was for the best. You didn't bring a
child into uncertainty and chaos. Not if you had a choice in the
matter. There was so much she hadn't known about her husband until
it was too late.

Nobody ever told her that you could fall in
love with a boy only to wake up one day and discover you were
living with a man you didn't really know at all. A man whose
problems ran deeper than your solutions, to a place not even love
could reach.

But then she probably wouldn't have believed
it. Kevin had taught her to believe in happy endings and right up
until the moment he drew his last breath she had thought they still
had a chance for happily-ever-after.

She knew better now. They'd never really had
a chance for happily-ever-after. Kevin had seen to that the day he
placed his first bet.

George's and Gracie's plaintive yowls sounded
from somewhere upstairs and reminded Annie that she still had a lot
to do before the Flemings arrived to take possession of the
house.

She swept out the living room, the foyer, the
kitchen. She wiped down the counters, cleaned the sink, dried the
faucets carefully until they gleamed. She wiped a handprint off the
door of the fridge then stood back and scanned the kitchen with a
critical eye she had rarely brought to housework before. The house
was over forty years old and unfortunately so were most of the
appliances. At first the ancient heating system and outdated
refrigerator had been a source of amusement for Kevin and Annie,
two of the many things they would take care of some day in the
far-off future when their bankbook recovered from the shock of home
ownership.

The only thing was, it never did. She put
aside her dream of pursuing a career in art and opened a flower
shop instead. Annie's Flowers took a while to get on its feet and
for some reason Kevin's salary didn't increase the way they had
hoped. Every month it seemed to Annie that the number of unexpected
bills went up and their checking account balance went down and no
matter how hard they tried to keep up with the house's demands,
their income couldn't keep pace with the required outgo.

"You're lucky it's a buyer's market," Susan
had told her when she first mentioned putting the house up for
sale. "No offense, Annie, but your place is falling down around
your ears. You'll have to replace the windows and put on a new roof
if you expect to even come close to getting top dollar."

It took three months for the house to sell
and then, as Susan had predicted, the price was well below the
going rate for big old houses on large lots of land.

"We could have done better," Susan lamented
after the Flemings went to contract. "You should've listened to me
about those windows, Annie. You would've earned back the costs
three times over."

Annie nodded and tried to look suitably
disappointed but the truth was she was grateful the sale had gone
through before she ran out of options and ended up with nothing at
all. Of course she wouldn't tell Susan that. She wouldn't tell
anybody. Kevin's secrets were safe with her, same as they had been
right from the start.

#

"I think Anne's making a terrible mistake,"
Claudia said as Susan backed her minivan down the driveway.

Susan, never one to consider her mother's
feelings, rolled her eyes and groaned. "And why do you think that,
Ma? Because she's moving out of that white elephant of a house or
because she didn't want you to stay for lunch?"

"I don't appreciate your sarcasm," Claudia
said with a slight lift of her chin. She chose to ignore the lunch
remark, even though there was more than a touch of truth to it.
"Anne loves that house. It's where she and Kevin were happiest. Why
on earth would she want to sell it and move into that -- that shack
out by the water?"

"Don't let Annie hear you call her new home a
shack."

"Of course not! I would never hurt her."
Claudia was stung that her daughter thought she was capable of such
thoughtless behavior. "I blame it all on Warren Bancroft for taking
advantage of Anne this way." She glanced over at her eldest child.
"You must know she's lowered her standards with this move."

"Ma, there are times I wish I was
adopted."

Susan screeched to a halt at the corner stop
sign, barely missing the rear end of another minivan. Claudia
gripped the edges of her purse and forced herself to keep her
remarks on visual acuity and reflexes to herself. Her daughter was
forty-six years old and her eyesight wasn't what it used to be, but
Claudia knew better than to comment on her daughter's driving,
weight, or marriage. Not if she wanted to keep peace in the
family.

"Annie doesn't need three bathrooms," Susan
went on as if they hadn't come this close to calamity, "and she
definitely doesn't need all those memories. I just wish she'd done
this sooner."

"There's nothing wrong with memories,"
Claudia said, fixing her daughter with a sharp look. "There will
come a time when a woman is very glad she has them."

"Annie isn't you, Ma."

"Watch the road." Claudia refused to
acknowledge the statement. "We don't need an accident."

"You know what I'm saying."

"I don't pressure Anne to do anything. She
makes her own decisions." Selling the house was certainly proof of
that. Claudia would never sell the house where she and John had
spent their married life. Selling it would be like losing him all
over again. His spirit still filled their house the way it had when
he was alive. Her children didn't know it, but she talked to him
sometimes. She didn't expect an answer; it was more like a running
conversation that was part monologue, part prayer.

If the kids knew she did that, they would
think she was crazy. Claudia had seen the looks Susan and Eileen
exchanged when they thought she wasn't looking, one of those
Mother-is-losing-her-marbles-looks that Claudia hated. They would
make an appointment with that fancy therapist John Jr. was seeing
and she would have to waste fifty dollars of her late husband's
hard-earned money to find out what she already knew: she was lonely
and she was old.

Why was it nobody seemed to understand that
without being told? She didn't have to work four days a week with
Annie at the flower shop. John had been very careful with their
money and, while she wasn't rich, she was certainly comfortable by
anyone's standards. She tried to keep up with the financial news by
listening to the experts on the radio and following their advice
when it felt right to her. So far, thank the good Lord, the market
had been kind to her. If her children stopped racing through their
lives for just one second and thought about it, they would realize
she worked at the flower shop because sometimes she needed a reason
to get up in the morning, someone to smile at her when she walked
through the door. They laughed at all of the seminars she took on
topics as diverse as money management to
ikebana
and never
one considered that maybe she just needed the pleasure of being
among people.

It was the same with the house. She and John
had moved in on their wedding day. Every significant event of their
married life had happened within its four walls. Living in the
house where she and John had raised their family made her feel
connected to him even though he was gone. Love filled her heart
each time she walked through those dear and familiar rooms. Oh,
there were too many rooms by half. She would be the first to admit
that. She couldn't keep to her old standards of housekeeping any
longer. Dust lingered a little longer. The floors weren't as shiny
as she might like. She told herself it was all part of getting old,
the letting go, the giving up, turning a blind eye to the same
things that drove you mad when you were young and strong.

Last Christmas her children and their spouses
had converged at the old house to celebrate the holiday, same as
they did every year, but with one small difference. This year they
were determined to convince her it was time to move on.

"It's time to simplify things, Mom," Eileen,
her youngest, had said to her as she served the eggnog. "This house
is way too big for one person. You'd have so much more free time if
you didn't have this barn to take care of."

"And where would the lot of you stay if I
didn't have this barn?" she had tossed back. "You'd be sleeping in
tents in the front yard."

Of course, Eileen's was only the initial
salvo in an assault designed to open her aging eyes to what they
considered to be reality. Terri commented on how difficult it must
be to keep four bedrooms and two baths clean and sparkling, which
made Claudia smile into her eggnog. It was certainly easier now
than it had been years ago when the house was bursting at the seams
with toddlers and teenagers and John's hobbies. The boys talked
about taxes and upkeep and how the plumbing was going to need
repairs before next Christmas rolled around and why hang onto a
money sink as if she didn't have the right to make up her own mind.
Finally she had to stand her ground.

"This is where I lived with your father, it's
where you grew up, and it's where I'm going to die," she had said
in a tone of voice that brooked no argument. "Now, who'd like
another piece of pie?"

Annie was the only one who understood what
Claudia was talking about. In an unfair twist of fate, Kevin's
death had united the two women in a way not even Claudia's
flesh-and-blood daughters could understand. Annie knew how it felt
to lose the man you loved, how it felt to sleep on his side of the
bed because it made you feel less alone. Annie knew without being
told that time didn't heal a broken heart, it only helped you learn
how to live with it.