Роберт Паркер - All Our Yesterdays

She met Gus for a drink at the Ritz bar, where they had met first to talk of their children. People looked covertly at Gus. His picture had been everywhere.

“Been a while,” Gus said.

“Yes,” Laura said.

She glanced around the bar. “People recognize you.”

Gus nodded.

“How are you?” he said.

Laura nodded.

“I’m all right,” she said. “You?”

Gus smiled.

“Divorced, out of work, publicly disgraced,” he said.

Laura nodded again slowly.

“And our children are still estranged,” she said.

“Yeah.”

It was late afternoon, the bar was beginning to fill with people having a drink after work. The waiter came and took drink orders. Gus asked for beer. Laura, white wine.

“I’m sorry about everything,” Gus said.

“I know.”

“Is there anything you don’t know, anything you’d like to ask?”

Laura shook her head.

“I know too much already,” she said.

The waiter brought drinks. He put them carefully in front of Gus and Laura, each neatly on its little paper doily. He poured beer into Gus’s pilsner glass until it was half full.

When he left Laura said, “Did you know you were going to drag the whole department into it?”

Gus shook his head.

“That was Butchie, he plea-bargained a sentence reduction.” Gus picked up his beer bottle and carefully filled the glass, measuring the foam. “And, he took a lot of people with him. Evened it up, so to speak.”

“But you got off,” Laura said.

“I had a good lawyer,” Gus said.

“Chris.”

“Yeah.”

“And you plea-bargained.”

“Yeah.”

“And my husband is dead.”

Gus’s voice was soft. “Yeah.”

“It would have been worse, had he lived and stood trial,” Laura said. “For him, for us.”

Gus was quiet. Outside the window the bright yellow taxis came and went, bringing well-dressed people and taking them away.

“I sometimes think you might have had something to do with it.”

Gus shrugged.

“You were there.”

Gus nodded.

Laura waited.

Gus didn’t speak.

Laura shrugged.

“It has hit Cabot hard,” she said.

“I’m sorry.”

“I don’t know what it means to Grace... and Chris.”

“If they’re going to have a chance it had to happen,” he said.

“You truly think so?”

“Chris will be the first Sheridan I know anything about got a chance to live a genuine life. I hope that includes Grace. But if it doesn’t, it doesn’t.” Gus sipped his beer. “Still a genuine life.”

“And you’ve never lived a ‘genuine life’?”

“Not till now.”

“Not even when you were with me?”

Gus folded his thick hands together, and rested his chin on them. He looked at her and she could feel the weight of his gaze, as she always had, tired and cynical, yet full of power and passion and seriousness. It seemed to fill her up as it always did. It made her feel as if there were more of her.

“Probably the only happiness I’ve ever had has been the time with you,” he said. “In terms of men and women, it’s the only love I ever had.”

“What other terms would there be?” she said.

“I love my son.”

“Yes,” Laura said. “Of course.”

She twirled the stem of her wineglass slowly without lifting it from the table. She hadn’t drunk any.

“I guess that’s almost exactly true for me,” she said. “In fact for me it was genuine.”

“Yes,” Gus said.

“But it couldn’t be for you, could it,” Laura said. “You knew what my husband was. You knew, at least toward the end, what was coming.”

“It was like a train bearing down,” Gus said.

Laura smiled. “And we were doing it on the tracks.”

Gus’s beer glass was still half full. There was a wisp of foam along the inside of the rim. Laura twirled her wineglass some more.

“So where are we?” Gus said.

Laura stared into her slowly turning wineglass.

“I think what you did was right, Gus.”

She turned the glass slowly.

“But I don’t think I can get past it.”

Gus nodded.

“I didn’t love Tom, and, God, what I’ve learned makes me glad that I didn’t. But he was what I settled for and he was my husband and the father of my children.”

“Lot of history,” Gus said.

“Yes.”

“Be kind of hard to move right over from him to the guy who may have caused his death.”

“And who, even if he didn’t, exploited his life.”

Gus nodded slowly.

“Too hard,” he said.

The tears began to form in Laura’s eyes.

“I have loved you, Gus. And I know you have loved me.”

“Still do,” Gus said.

“Yes.” She patted her eyes with her napkin, but they filled again. “I’ll ruin my makeup,” she said.

“We can go,” Gus said.

“I want to go alone,” she said.

“You going to be all right?”

She paused for a moment and seemed to think about the question.

“Yes,” she said finally. “I think the time with you may have made me all right.”

Gus nodded. Laura stood and bent over and kissed him on the mouth and turned and left the bar. From where he sat by the window, Gus could see her as she went out the Arlington Street door of the hotel and spoke to the doorman. He watched as the doorman got her a yellow cab and held the door, and took her tip, folding it smoothly into his pocket as he closed the door behind her. The cab pulled away down Arlington Street and turned left onto Boylston Street, and went along that side of the Public Garden, past the Four Seasons Hotel, mingling with the rest of the late afternoon traffic, and out of sight behind the still thick foliage of the early fall trees.

The house was in Concord, a three-hundred-year-old farmhouse on twelve acres of land that sloped gently down toward the Assabet River. He was ripping out lath and plaster in the kitchen when Chris arrived. The back door was open and the radio was on. A music-of-your-life station was playing loudly. Gus wore tan shorts and work boots and a gray sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off. He put down the pry bar and slid the hammer into a holster on his belt. He went to the refrigerator and got out two cans of Budweiser Dry and opened them and handed one to Chris.

“What’s that song?” Chris said. He drank some beer.

“Tommy Dorsey,” his father said, “‘Song of India.’” He pointed out the back kitchen window.

“Look,” Gus said.

Through the window Chris saw three pointer puppies scrambling up the slope from the water toward the house. They were so young they didn’t run well and bumped into each other and fell down often. The shape and movement clear against the yellow-green, nearly April meadow.

“Jesus Christ,” Chris said.

“Coming to meet brother,” Gus said.

“Pointers?” Chris said.

“Yeah. German shorthairs.”

The dogs moiled into the house through the open back door and banged into Chris’s legs and rolled around on his feet and between his legs and licked his face as he squatted to pat them, and nipped with their pointed puppy teeth at his fingers and wrists.

“Guy I know in Canton raises them,” Gus said. “I bought all the females from his litter.”

“No males?”

“Males are trouble,” Gus said.

Chris smiled. “So are females.”

“I’m talking about dogs,” Gus said.

“They got names?”

“Patty, Maxine, and LaVerne.”

Chris straightened and looked around at the house. One of the puppies began to chew on his shoelace.

“Ill-gotten gain?” Chris said.

“All those years on the pad,” Gus said, “I managed to put a little something aside.”