Unremarried Widow (22 page)

“I got to tell you,” Bea said as she took a sip of her Bloody Mary, “I am tired of being alone.”

“I hear you,” more than one of us said.

She set her glass on the table. “What I wouldn't give for a man to hold my hand.”

“Or to take me out to dinner,” Linda said. “I wouldn't mind that.”

“Or just to have someone to talk to,” Lan-fah said.

The table was quiet as each of us mulled this over, and when Jeanie spoke we all turned to listen.

“Well, I have some news,” she said in a low voice. “I'm not sure what you girls are going to think.”

The other tables sent up the combined noise of silverware against plates, glasses clinking, napkins shuffling. We waited for Jeanie to finish.

“I'm seeing someone,” she said.

There was a beat of silence at the table as we took in the news, and then we were cheering and our questions spilled over one another.

“Who is it?”

“Where'd you meet him?”

“What's he like?”

Jeanie laughed. “If I had known you were going to have this reaction—”

“This is great news,” I said.

“Do you like him?” Lan-fah asked.

“I do,” Jeanie said. “I really like him. He's a good guy.”

Linda lifted her wine glass in a toast.

“I'm so happy for you,” she said.

Lan-fah raised her glass and I touched mine to both of theirs. Bea added hers last.

“Me?” she said. “I'm jealous as hell.”

We laughed then, all of us, because we were jealous too.

Thirteen months after the unit
returned home and two years after Miles's death, Captain Scott Delancey came to see me in Florida. Some of the soldiers did that—stopped by or called to pay their respects. In my driveway Scott looked taller than I remembered him, broader through the chest and back, and he had grown older in the time since
we had last seen each other. I suppose I had grown older too. When he bent down to hug me, the feeling of being so close to someone I associated with Miles was nearly overwhelming. I pressed my face to the crook of his neck and breathed him in.

“How've you been?” he asked when we pulled apart.

“Good,” I said. “Happy to see you.”

On a dare we drove to an arcade north of town where there were batting cages and go-cart tracks and we were the oldest people by a decade. We played rounds of air hockey and Scott beat me every time, but he had the courtesy to let me win on the go-cart track. It felt good to be with someone who had known Miles, and I liked that Scott was generous—he gave me tokens by the handful—and funny. I liked, too, the way other women watched him.

On the drive home from the arcade, Scott reached across the car and took my hand.

“Do you know how to drive a stick shift?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

He placed my hand on the gearshift and kept his fingers over mine.

“Now's a good time to learn.”

We drove like that for a while, my hand cupped in his as he shifted gears, my face flushing each time his skin pressed against mine. When we were nearly home, Scott pulled off the road and into an empty parking lot.

“Your turn now,” he said.

“No way. I'll destroy your transmission.”

“You'll be fine. I'll be right here to help.”

We switched seats and I took the car on a halting tour around the parking lot. The gears ground and the engine stalled but Scott just laughed.

“Keep going,” he said. “You'll get it.”

I was nervous—from the driving, from him—and my body temperature climbed. I sweated and the windows fogged over, and after a
time I called the lesson done. Scott drove the rest of the way while I sat in the passenger seat and wondered what was building between us—if anything. At home, Scott walked me to my front door and said good night. Before he turned to leave he placed a kiss at the corner of my mouth, that small stretch of skin that is for neither friendship nor love but some nameless place in between.

The
Florida Weekly
office
had grown in the time I'd been writing for the paper. Framed copies of prizewinning editions decorated the walls, and the space buzzed with a low hum of activity. Phones rang in the sales office and I could hear a reporter speaking to an editor in the back room. Somewhere a coffeepot percolated and the smell gave the space an industrious feel. Jeff came to fetch me in the reception area wearing new square-framed glasses that made him look hip.

“You guys are busy,” I said on our way to his office.

“We're putting out the paper in four counties now,” he said. “Our circulation's up to a hundred thousand.”

“Not bad.”

Jeff laughed. “Not bad at all.”

In the office, I sat across from Jeff's desk and admired the framed newsprint that hung on every available space. The paper had reported a story on local casualties of war, and Miles's photo—the cropped picture from our courthouse wedding—looked down from a copy of the article. Life is funny that way.

Jeff leaned back in his chair, cocked his elbows, and put his hands behind his head.

“So I hear you need a recommendation letter.”

“For journalism school,” I said. “At Columbia.”

Jeff whistled. “That's serious. You ever lived in New York?”

I shook my head. “I heard it's a crazy city.”

Jeff lowered his arms and leaned forward. “So, why journalism school? You've already got a gig here.”

“I need to figure out how to do it right,” I said. “How to tell the big stories.”

I promised to send him information on the recommendation letter, and when I stood to leave he walked me to the front office.

“Thanks again,” I said, my hand on the door.

“Keep me posted,” Jeff said. “And good luck.”

My time with the Tuesday
night grief group was nearing its end. I'd watched the women who were there before me graduate themselves out of the group. Some remarried, some moved away, most simply learned to balance the realities of this new life. On one of my last nights, the usuals gathered, plus the newcomers just testing the place, deciding if the group would work for them. There were the usual flimsy tissue boxes, and we told the usual stories in familiar rhythms. When there was a lull, we sat in companionable silence for nearly a minute before Richard, whom we gossiped about at dinner, who had a beautiful wife—Linda saw them at the grocery store—and whose young son had died many years before, told us this story.

“My grandmother used to say—”

We clutched our rough tissues and looked at him with our swollen eyes.

“She used to say that if you took all the sorrows of all the people in the world and hung them from a tree like fruit and then you let people choose which one they wanted, we would still pick our own.”

I thought back to the phone call with Psychic Suzanna months
before and to the first time I met her in the hotel bar. What if she had told me then what was to come? Not just meeting Miles, not just his death, but afterward. That Miles would be the catalyst for this blossoming life, that my time with him would lay the foundation for some braver, more fearless me. That through knowing him and loving him I would become someone with the wherewithal to seize my dreams. I searched across the circle and saw that the other women had turned inward, as I had turned inward, and I imagined us meeting in that orchard of sorrow. Perhaps my mother would be there. Would she still choose this life with its sadness and memories and hopes?

I looked up to see the other women nodding and I found myself nodding too.
Of course,
we seemed to say, all of us.
Of course we would pick our own.

At Fort Bragg the memorials
to fallen soldiers are scattered throughout the base, often tucked behind unit headquarters and forgotten by nearly everyone except the families of those who have served and died.
M
ILES
H
ENDERSON
is carved into the memorial for the 82nd, and I like to imagine the strangers who might someday run their hands over the stone. Will they trace the letters with careful fingers? Will they say his name out loud? Perhaps they will ask themselves if the war was worth even this one life.

On the third Memorial Day after Miles's death, Teresa parked her Buick on the paved road that runs alongside Section 60 at Arlington. An old oak stood at the edge of the cemetery, its branches reaching inward toward the graves, as blistering heat blanketed the city. I imagined scorched earth as we walked across the grass, the bones beneath our feet blackened and burned, the world set on end. In grief parlance they call this upended life the “new reality.” They don't tell you it doesn't feel like any sort of reality at all.

Teresa stopped in front of John's plot and I stopped beside her. She first sat back on her heels and then stretched her legs in front of her while I stepped out of my sandals and lowered myself to the ground. I kept to the space between John and his neighbor but Teresa sat directly over his grave.

“I wish I could sleep here,” she said. She smoothed the ground the way a person might smooth a bedsheet. “I miss him so much. Both of our boys. Miles too. You know, I never think about John without thinking about Miles.”

I nodded. I missed them too. I missed the days on the lake in John's boat, crystal-clear afternoons of heat and cool water. I missed Miles beside me. I missed the way Teresa had been when John was alive, sure of this world and her place in it.

“You and me,” Teresa said. “Who would have thought?”

I would have been the last to think it. But there we were. She scooted forward so she sat next to the headstone, and I watched her from the corners of my eyes. She traced John's name with one finger and ran her thumb over the line that said
B
RONZE
S
TAR
.
She touched the places where John's birth date and the letters of his rank had been carved into the stone. She did not turn her eyes to the left and right, to the graves beside John, the ones that said
P
URPLE
H
EART
beneath the names. She had trained herself to stop looking.

But I had not stopped. I looked at all of them, the markers stretching out in a sea of white. When we buried John his grave had been the last in the line. Now the plots snaked in front of his, grave upon grave, reaching to the edges of the field. I tipped my head back to the hot sun and took the brunt of the glare full in the face. I did not turn away from any of it—the sky, the sun, the graves, Teresa and her worries. If I were another kind of woman, I would have put my arms around her and told her how thankful I was that we were in this together. I would have said how proud John would be of her and how much I admire her. But I am
not that kind of woman. Instead I offered the only things I know how: my silence and my presence.

“This is so hard,” Teresa said. “You know?”

I watched her sit back in the grass and run a hand over her damp brow.

“I know,” I said.

She leaned forward to crawl onto her knees and stand slowly, one leg at a time. I followed, fanning my shirt like a bellows. Teresa touched John's gravestone and turned toward the road while I let my own hand linger on the marble. I followed her to the car, and in the shade of the old oak I sensed the roots pressing into the earth. I imagined a time when the heat might subside.

I have read that the
human heart is roughly the size of a fist. This is how I saw my own heart: as a fist curled in the space behind my breastbone. The fingers of that fist ached, they'd been cramped together so long. Sometimes I tried to imagine what it would feel like to unfurl them and extend an open palm.

In the late summer, I told Scott Delancey the good news about journalism school.

“New York City,” I said. “Can you believe it?”

“Amazing. When are you moving up?”

“Before school starts. In a month or so.”

“Need any help?”

I laughed. Was he joking? Of course I needed help.

But instead I said, “I've got it.”

“Seriously?” Scott insisted. “It's no problem.”

“I'm staying with a friend until I find my own place. There'd be nowhere for you to stay.”

“I'll get a hotel room.”

“You're serious?”

“It's too easy,” he said.

New York was steeped in
heat the day Scott flew in and a dense jungle humidity lay over the city. Sweating bodies crammed the streets and the asphalt boiled beneath our feet, but Scott laughed off the hot weather.

“This is nothing compared to Iraq,” he said.

That night we made our way to a bar in Hell's Kitchen where candles flickered on the tables and reflected off the red walls. I was on edge in my nice clothes, trying to figure out if Scott was there because of me or Miles. He ordered a whiskey and Coke for himself and a club soda with lime for me. He finished his second drink before I broached the subject of where I would spend the night.

“So,” I said, “it's too late for me to go back to Queens.”

Technically untrue. I could have caught the subway, which ran all night, and walked back to my friend's apartment, twenty minutes from the train station. Not the safest trek but doable. Scott waved a dismissive hand.

“Stay at the hotel with me.”

I gave him a sidelong look. I didn't want him to think he had me so easily, that I was like any other girl he could pick up.

“But we can't sleep together,” I said. “You have to promise.”

Scott tilted his head back and laughed, then he leaned over and kissed me on the cheek.

“You're my friend's wife,” he said. “Nothing will change that. I'll always be here to look after you and protect you. But we're not sleeping together. You're not even in my orbit.”