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.“Your wife?”“My wife.” The words came out thick and uncertain.“My wife.I haven’t said that in a long time.At first, I said it a lot.It sounded so—strange.’ My wife just called.My wife is picking me up after work.My wife is having her hair done.My wife is having an affair.’ At first, you say it a lot.Then—” He didn’t finish his sentence.He stared intently at a water ring on the red-checked plastic tablecloth.I was torn between curiosity and embarrassment.To avoid looking at him, I glanced around the restaurant.It seemed odd, after being in Charleston and Columbia, to see so few blacks.Until I’d lived downstate, I’d never realized how white the hill-country folks are.Odd how being away could teach you about home.I tipped my glass and watched the ice cubes melting inside.We sat in an uncompanionable silence for far too long.Then Melvin shook himself, reminding me of a dog after a dip in the pool.“A’vry, when I decide what it is I want to be when I grow up, I’ll let you know.You’ll be one of the first.”“You do that, Melvin.It might give me some guidance.”His giggle faded into a small burp.“Melvin, you ready to head home?” I waved away the waitress, who should have known better than to offer him anything else, and laid out money to cover the check.I think he nodded.At least he seemed willing enough, with some help, to sway out to the parking lot and into my grandfather’s prized Mustang.If he threw up in it, I’d have to shoot him.We made it to his brother’s house without incident.“Melvin, this is getting to be a habit, me bringing you home.”I reached across him as he slumped in the front seat and unlatched the car door.He blinked in the glare from the dome light.When I nudged his shoulder, he started and swung his legs out onto the driveway.“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.He didn’t say anything.I last glimpsed him disappearing into the opened garage door.Not until I had backed out and driven away did I think to worry that he might wander into the pond behind the house and drown.But I talked myself out of turning around to find out and drove on up the mountain.The cabin stood dark and quiet, with none of the raucous racket of tree frogs that echoed and swelled all summer.No water lapping quietly in a boat’s wake.Just silence.And stars and the stark outline of trees darker than the dark sky, more solid than the rippled black water reflecting the security lights scattered around the lake.I swung open the back door to the cabin—the one closest to the weedy drive—and slammed it shut behind me, the noise too loud.I threw the deadbolt home and scanned the cabin.Maybe Melvin’s melancholy was contagious.Maybe too many people had reminded me how alone I was up here.“Get a grip,” I said aloud.The sound of my voice dispelled some of the monsters.Filling a tumbler with water and ice, I tried to wash the smoky taste of cigarettes from my throat.I’d have to shower the smell of smoke and fried grease out of my hair before I could go to sleep.I pulled the curtains to block out the darkness, and filled the sitting room with lamplight.The sofa, musty from humidity and age, sat next to a battered empire library table.The cabin had collected, over the years, the worn, lumpy, faded castoffs from the many families that had used it.Nothing anybody had to fuss over or worry about.Balancing my water glass on my tummy, I reached over and pulled from the table drawer a cracked leather book.My grandfather’s journal.I’d found it tucked behind a shelf of dusty Reader’s Digest Condensed Books I’d thrown away in my cleaning frenzy.I hadn’t been able to bring myself to read it then.But tonight, after witnessing Melvin’s painful trip down memory lane, maybe I could purge some of Melvin’s past with some of my grandfather’s.I’d glanced through it when I first found it.But I’d found myself reluctant to read it, as if, through the arching, sharp scrawl, I would find an entrance into my grandfather’s most intimate space—a space he’d never invited me into.Or anyone else, as far as I knew.But I kept coming back to it, with a guilty curiosity.I’d known my granddad as an adoring granddaughter does.And I’d had the uncommon pleasure of knowing him as a mentor.He’d stood in my comer and cheered me on through college and into law school.I’d never gotten to sit in his courtroom when he served as judge—he’d hit the mandatory retirement age before I hit kindergarten.But I’d seen him in the courtroom, on into his seventies, stooped but tall, distinguished in a silver-haired, slow-talking way.And, to my eyes, infinitely wise.And funny.Granddad often displayed his bitingly sarcastic sense of humor, though never at my expense.He tended to target folks who took themselves too seriously.Or others too casually.In him, I saw a man who focused intently on others, who usually left people smiling, but who seemed to genuinely enjoy solitude, strolls down Dacus side streets or paths alongside a trout stream, the quiet of this cabin.And the thinking of his own thoughts.I fingered the dry leather of the book, aware that I intruded on what held those thoughts.Would that intrusion have been unwelcome?I thumbed open the journal to a place in the middle.He must have written with a nibbed pen, the letters varying in thickness, the pages slightly embossed with the pressure of his strokes.I just paged through, watching the precise lettering move like a stereopticon.Aunt Vinnia’s name caught my eye.May 27, 1958.Vinnia had her friend Olivia Sterling over for supper tonight and the girls played bridge on the porch.The weather already has too much of the hint of what’s to come to suit me.My dear sister Vinnia, as usual, has taken Olivia under her wing, trying to cheer her.Sometimes, watching another suffer the pangs of lost love, one is struck with the awkward melodrama of it.Until one remembers, with a painful catch somewhere deep in the chest, the intense pain of one’s own losses.What’s it been now? Too many years.No point in counting.Surely I’m old enough for the pain to be duller now.But I still walk into the kitchen and, somehow, I’m surprised that she’s not there.Or the morning sun will catch the dressing table mirror just right and I’ll swear she’s sitting there, brushing her hair [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]