Marriage Seasons 03 - Falling for You Again (28 page)

Without waiting for a response, Charlie stormed through the door and out toward his golf cart. Ridiculous kid. Life was too short to have to listen to the kind of nonsense that Brad Hanes could spout. And he complained about Ashley being a talker? Brad jabbered like a blue jay. His head was so swollen that his brain had just about quit working.

“‘I used to play first base,’” Charlie mumbled as he drove along the road toward his house. He could imitate Brad’s bragging voice to a tee. “‘I was the high school quarterback. I bring home a paycheck. I work hard. All the women at Larry’s treat me right.’”

“What are you muttering about now, Charles Moore?”

Charlie looked up to find Esther walking toward him, sweater around her shoulders and purse hanging on her arm. In the waning sunlight, her silhouette looked small and fragile. She was limping a little, as if the arthritis in her knees was bothering her again. White hair aglow, she paused and smiled at him.

“I thought I’d come get you,” she said. “Dinner’s in the oven.”

Disconcerted, Charlie stopped the golf cart and reached toward her. “You shouldn’t have left the house at this hour, Esther. It’s almost dark. You could have fallen.”

“I wanted to bring you something.” Her breath shuddered as she took his arm. “Drive me down to the lake, Charlie. Will you?”

“We’ll need a flashlight in a few minutes. Where’s Boofer?”

“I left him at home. This is just between you and me.” She leaned against him as they rode to the commons area and then stepped out onto the crisp, brown, wintry grass. Her voice sounded small in the growing darkness. “How was work? Have you finished the drywall?”

“Nearly,” Charlie said. “That Brad Hanes is as dumb as a box of rocks. No wonder Ashley’s frustrated. I don’t know how much more of him I can take.”

“Ashley said Brad graduated near the top of his class,” Esther protested. “Oh, are you talking about the fight they had the other night? Did Brad tell you about their argument over where to eat Thanksgiving dinner?”

Charlie had to chuckle. “Is there any neighborhood gossip you don’t know, Mrs. Moore?”

“Not a drop.”

“I guess Ashley must have confided in you,” he said. “Did you give her some good advice?”

“Yes. I told her they should do what we did. Simple as that.”

Consternation furrowed Charlie’s brow. “What did we do?”

“We had all the holiday meals at
our
house, silly! Don’t you remember? We decided that if our parents wanted to celebrate with us and spend time with Charles Jr. and Ellie, they had to come to our home—not the other way around. It was the perfect solution. No arguing, no fighting, no problems. When I told Ashley about it, she was so relieved she burst into tears.”

“I understand she does that a lot.”

“What woman doesn’t? I don’t know a female worth her salt who won’t break down and sob now and then. Surely you and Brad have figured that out by now.”

“Maybe we both fell off the turnip truck yesterday.”

“Not you, Charlie. You’re very wise. Much smarter than I am.”

He could hear Esther swallowing again and again while they strolled down the length of the dock. She sniffled as she clung to his arm on the swaying wood plank flooring. Was she trying not to cry?

Charlie began to worry. What was this trek to the lake all about? Did Esther have a big announcement to make? Maybe after almost fifty years of marriage to a dull man who didn’t know how to give a present better than a gas station snow globe, Esther had decided to run off with her artist friend.

The thought of losing his wife made Charlie nauseous. No matter how upset he’d been with Esther, he didn’t want to lose her. Not to another man. Not for any reason.

As they arrived at the end of the dock, he sat down on his favorite fishing bench. “What’s going on, Esther? What are we doing down here?”

Instead of answering, she opened her purse and lifted out one of the glass pickle jars she always saved. Charlie could see some sort of gray substance inside—maybe pepper—filling it halfway to the top.

Holding the jar up in the last rays of golden-orange sunlight, Esther turned it one way and then another. “Ashes,” she announced finally. “Cody helped me. I explained to him that there are some things in life that you wish you could do all over again. People make mistakes, I told him. By the time we’re old, sometimes we have regrets, and the best thing to do—if we can—is to set everything right again. Cody seemed to understand. So he found the chain to open the damper in the fireplace, and then he helped me put everything into a big pile on the grate. We stacked all of it—the magazines, the sketches, the letters. I struck the match, and Cody and I sang a hymn as the fire took hold and burned it up. You know what we sang? ‘Just As I Am.’ Like Patsy’s store. Cody had reminded me that everyone has a black blot. Evidently Pete Roberts was talking about his blot the other day. Cody said that Pete actually cried a little bit, so it was okay for me to cry too. I was crying more than a bit because I felt so awful, and Cody put his arm around me and patted me on the back. Wasn’t that sweet? He’s such a dear boy.”

Charlie had held his breath most of the way through the speech. Now he let it out in a rush as he spoke his wife’s name. “Esther …” “It took me a while to admit you were right,” she went on, unscrewing the lid of the pickle jar as she talked. “I didn’t want to let go of my memory and all the little things that had once been important to me. Oh, I had given myself all kinds of excuses to hang on to that stuff.
He was just a friend. Charlie wouldn’t mind.
I suppose I even blamed it on you—I told myself that if you’d been more attentive in those early days, I would never even have noticed George. And besides, the artwork is valuable now.”

She shook her head. “But you
did
mind, and in my heart I knew you would—otherwise I wouldn’t have kept it hidden.” She paused, and again it sounded as if she was swallowing and sniffling. “Charlie, what you said the other day … it was absolutely true. A married woman should not have
any
kind of friendship with another man. There, I’ve said it. No matter how innocent it seems, it’s just plain wrong. I saw the hurt in your eyes the moment you first spoke his name.” She sighed. Her voice grew small again. “I never meant to hurt you, honey. But I did. And now I realize what a dark blot my actions cast on our marriage. It wasn’t your fault; it was mine. I’m so sorry, Charlie.”

Before Charlie could respond, Esther knelt on the dock and dumped the contents of the pickle jar into the lake. The ashes swirled for a moment, spreading over the surface of the water. And then they vanished. She rinsed out the jar, put the lid back on, tucked it into her purse, and sighed again. “All these years, I’ve thought if we just put the past behind us and kept looking forward, we’d be fine. I’m sorry it took me so long to see the problems with that. I hope and pray you’ll forgive me and believe how very much I love you. I always have loved you, and I always will. Shall we go home to dinner now? Cody and I just put a meat loaf in the oven.”

As Esther moved to leave, Charlie caught her arm. “Sit down with me here a minute longer,” he said, patting the old bench. “I want to make sure I understand this.”

“I’ve told you everything.” She seated herself beside him. “I’m so silly, you know. Oh, you won’t believe what I did today. Remember our plan? After my set-and-style, Patsy was going to take me over to the grocery store for a few minutes to pick up some things for our Thanksgiving dinner next week. Well, she did, so I was pushing my cart down the aisle and studying all the different kinds of cranberry sauce. I chose one, put it into the cart, and kept on going. Suddenly, a lady started calling out to me, ‘Hey, hey! That’s my cart!’”

Esther laughed. “Can you believe it? I had put my cranberry sauce into someone else’s cart and gone off with it. She and Patsy helped me track down my own cart, which was back at the tuna fish. Oh, what a day! But my hair looks pretty, don’t you think? Patsy always does such a nice job on my set-and-style.”

Charlie took Esther’s hand and wove his fingers through hers. As always, his wife bounded from one topic to another until he could hardly keep track. But that was one of the things he had always loved about her. Chasing Esther’s conversations kept things lively. Sometimes she went so far afield that neither one could remember what they’d been talking about to begin with. Usually they ended up laughing. But not tonight.

“Let me make sure I comprehend what you’ve told me,” Charlie said. “Are you saying that you and Cody burned up everything I took out of that bottom drawer?”

“Not everything. I had saved cards the children gave me and sweet notes you left me on the toaster before you went off to work and little bookmarks from my mother’s Bible. I didn’t burn those. But all the rest of it is gone. The old magazines, too. Poof. Just like that. It didn’t take but a minute or two to turn everything to cinders.”

“You burned that sketch?”

“It was the first thing to go. It finally dawned on me how foolish it was to want to hang on to anything that might harm our marriage. It’s all gone in a flash of flames. I didn’t even want the ashes in our house. Cody helped me sweep them up and put them into a jar. And now they’re all at the bottom of the lake with the muck—exactly where they belong.”

She leaned against Charlie. “I hope you feel better, honey. I sure do.”

“Does this mean you agree with everything I said the other day?”

“Yes, I do.”

Charlie’s heart was beating harder than he could ever remember. “Esther, did you tell me the truth when you said you and … George … never touched each other?”

“No more than a handshake.”

“But did you love him? In your heart, did you ever care for him more than you did me?”

She pondered a moment. “I wish I could say I didn’t. But that first year of marriage, I was so young and scared and frustrated. You were gone, and he was there. Once in a while, I would get it into my mind that an artist was somehow better than a mailman. How silly. It’s not what a man does that matters. It’s who he is. And once you’re married, that’s not even the most important thing.”

“What is the most important thing, Esther?”

“Well, the vows, of course. On our wedding day, I promised to love and honor you. No matter what. I shouldn’t have nourished and dreamed about a friendship that filled the holes in my heart. That was wrong.”

“Do you still have holes in your heart, Esther?”

“Sometimes I feel a little ache when you and I don’t see eye to eye, or when you start acting bullheaded and deaf to what I’m trying to tell you. But you’ve learned a lot. Once I gave you the chance, you figured out how to meet my needs pretty well. Well enough that I wouldn’t ever want to lose you.”

Charlie had to think about this. It bothered him that he hadn’t been able to make Esther completely happy. But then, she never had been the ideal wife either. They both had flaws; they did little things that annoyed one another; they made mistakes. Charlie knew Esther hadn’t filled his every desire and dream—in the bedroom, with the children, even in the kitchen, though he’d never admit to that last one. Evidently he hadn’t been all he should have for her, either. Was that so bad? Was it enough to give up on a marriage?

For nearly fifty years, it hadn’t been bad enough to ruin them. And it wasn’t bad enough now.

“I’m sorry too,” Charlie said, putting his arm around Esther and drawing her close. “Brad Hanes is so ignorant about how to treat his wife … but I bet I was nearly as ignorant myself.”

“It took me a while to train you.”

“I wish I hadn’t needed training.”

“Well, you did. Anyone foolish enough to get drunk and go into a strip club needed a lot of work. But then, I had plenty to learn too. By having a male friend outside our marriage, I put everything that was happening between you and me on hold. All the things we needed to work out, everything we had to learn—it all stopped in its tracks. We could have fallen apart at the seams, Charlie. And then we would have missed such a wonderful life.”

“Do you really mean that, Esther? Has our marriage been good? Are you satisfied?”

“Satisfied?” she asked. Leaning forward, she kissed his cheek. “Utterly.”

Charlie chuckled. “Good, then let’s go start on that meat loaf.”

“Meat loaf?” Esther stood. “Did I say meat loaf? Oh, what was I thinking? I knew I put something with ground beef into the oven. I meant lasagna. Cody and I made lasagna. You should have seen the boy trying to hold on to those noodles, Charlie. Oh, it was the funniest thing in the world!”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

H
urry up, Charlie!” Esther called to her husband from the master bathroom that Saturday. “We’re going to be late to the Thanksgiving weenie roast. I don’t care how goofy I feel today; I’m going on that hayride. If you fiddle around and make us miss it, I’ll be hopping mad, and don’t you doubt that for a minute!”

Esther pressed the button on her hair spray and gave her curls another shot of mist. God had provided Deepwater Cove with the most beautiful sunny and bright autumn afternoon imaginable, but Esther knew that even the slightest whiff of humidity could make her hair collapse like a soufflé. She was wearing her favorite fall outfit: a lovely violet sweater set with embroidered leaves and tiny purple seed pearls made into bunches of grapes. The matching slacks with their elastic waist would provide comfort and warmth for the evening to come.

A hayride. Apple bobbing. A bonfire. A weenie roast. Lots of friends and plenty of fun topics to discuss. She could hardly wait.

Thank goodness she hadn’t forgotten about the event, Esther thought as she opened her cosmetics drawer. Missing Halloween had bothered her, even though everyone insisted that few children had come through the neighborhood. No matter what people said about the dark aspects of the holiday, Esther viewed Halloween as a time to enjoy giving little gifts. Nothing pleased her more than the shine in a child’s eyes when she handed out one of her net bags filled with treats.

“Are you ready, Charlie?”

He was in the bedroom getting dressed, Esther knew, and she still had to apply her lipstick and a little mascara. For some reason, throughout their marriage, her husband had always dawdled. One might suppose a mail carrier would be prompt and efficient. But not Charlie. He would search for a jacket or a pair of shoes until Esther nearly went out of her mind.