Justin Cronin - The Summer Guest

For a large woman she was surprisingly fast, and she could handle a breakfast rush with the coolheaded precision of a bomber pilot; in one continuous motion she stepped to the stove, flipped a line of pancakes, dropped two slices of bread into the toaster, pulled a plate of rolls from the warmer, and cracked two eggs into a bowl for beating.

“Lucy, order’s almost up. Let’s get a move on, please.”

I looked at Joe, who had returned to the table and his bear claw. They were a specialty of Daphne’s, dripping with honey and completely irresistible. “Well? I promise to like your beard if you answer the question.”

Joe shrugged, not interested but willing to play along. “He’s just some friend of my dad’s. A regular, been up the last few summers. I guided him a few times. I guess that’s his kid.”

I peeked out the door again. Harry was gesturing toward the window, pointing something out to Hal. At one of the other tables, a man lifted his head and moved his eyes around the room, scowling: Where the hell’s my waitress?

“Okay, so he’s good-looking,” Joe said, and laughed. “Quit your mooning.”

I felt my face flush again and backed away from the door. “I am not mooning.”

“Sure you’re not. He’s as old as your dad. He’s also some kind of big shot, what my dad tells me. A good tipper too. Usually gives me at least ten bucks. Kinda folds the bill and slips it to me, like I might be embarrassed to take it.”

I could somehow see this. “How about his wife? Is she a good tipper, too?”

Joe frowned impatiently, and I felt my stomach tighten. Why was I asking this? And why was I asking Joe, of all people? “How should I know? He always comes by himself, until now.” He gave a thoughtful look and wiped his hands on a napkin. “Actually, I heard his wife’s sick or something. Don’t know why I’d think that, unless maybe he mentioned it.” He lifted his eyes to me then and smiled, ready to change the subject. “So, how about it?”

“How about what?”

Joe glanced over at the stove. He pointed at me, then himself, and mouthed the words: the picnic.

Behind him, Daphne sighed irritably and banged her spatula against a pan. “Lucy, for heaven’s sake, order’s up now.”

Two new tables seated, orders backing up, and I had forgotten Hal’s chocolate milk. “Oh, shit.”

Daphne spun and nailed me, hard, with one of her librarian glares. “Lucy, I won’t have that kind of talk in my kitchen. I expect it from the men, but not from you. And Joe,” she continued, pointing her spatula, “don’t you have anything better to do? Go help your father. Go on now, scoot.”

I fetched milk and chocolate from the fridge, made Hal a glass with an extra squirt of syrup-what the heck, maybe I could make him like me after all-and set up the trays, with menus for the new tables tucked under my arm. I was wondering how I’d get it all outside when Joe stepped up and held the door for me. He raised his eyebrows as I passed.

“Okay,” I said, and stifled a flirty laugh. There was something about him at that moment, a gentle sweetness, that always worked on me, and I would have kissed him right then if I could have, scratchy beard and all-though for a moment it also struck me that maybe I was thinking of Harry, that I had confused myself that much.

“Okay what?” he said, grinning.

“Just okay,” I said, and bumped my hip into his to let him know my meaning, and took my trays outside.

And there they stayed, the two of them mixed together in my mind: Joe and Harry, my handsome boy and this beautiful man who’d blown in from nowhere. I went on the picnic with Joe, giving myself a good case of razor-face as we passed a lazy hour under the birches, and all that week I served Harry his breakfast and lunch and dinner, tucking bright little bits of conversation about absolutely nothing into my trips to his table. Even Hal got the hang of things, trying to woo me with his fish stories and reformed good manners, like a boy trying to impress a friend’s older sister. And when my shifts were over I went off to find Joe, my thoughts still full of Harry: a recipe for permanent confusion, if ever there was one. By the end of the week Joe’s beard had softened, or else my face had gotten used to it; and then on Saturday I came into the dining room at 6:00 A.M. and found an envelope by the hostess station, with my name on it, and this note: Off at 5:00 A.M. Thanks for the conversation. See you next year. Yours, Harry Wainwright. I folded it like money, put it in the pocket of my apron, and let it ride around there for the rest of the summer. Say what you like, but I was just a girl; I felt like I’d been secretly kissed.

I knew about Meredith, of course, just as Harry knew about Joe. Bit by bit over the next few summers we let our stories come out-because we wanted to, and because we had no reason to hide them. Harry was Harry, and I was who I was, the most pertinent detail being a single mathematical reality: there were twenty-two years between us. Joe had been right. Harry was, in fact, exactly as old as my father, give or take a month. There was a point in my life when age wouldn’t have mattered, and I’m not sure it ever should have mattered, though I say this as a woman of forty-seven, so consider the source; but it seemed to matter back then, a great deal in fact, when I was seventeen and Harry was thirty-nine, a man with a son not much younger than I was and a slowly dying wife, a man I saw exactly seven days out of every three hundred sixty-five. There was a way in which we loved each other from the start, I think, a cosmic symmetry that could not be refused, but it was a love that was always folded into other loves, and that is the real story of me and Harry Wainwright.

Which is why I didn’t want to see him that way, that August evening when he arrived; didn’t want to see his bones so brittle, his muscles wasted away, his hair gone thin, or just plain gone, from chemo; I did not want to see the light dimmed in those blue eyes. I did not want to see him helped from the car, or strapped to a walker and oxygen, or see the spittle fall from his chin as he spoke. I also knew he wouldn’t want me there, to see these things, so when Joe told me that Hal had called from the pay phone in town, putting them thirty minutes away at the most, I went upstairs under some pretense-sheets and towels to be folded, rooms to be dusted and cleaned-and watched it all from the window.

As Harry knew, and as I believed he would. When he lifted his head by the parked Suburban, everyone all clustered around and breathless for his sake, it was me he was really looking for, and found at once: those blue eyes hit me where I stood in the window, hit and passed right through; eyes the same ice blue despite the cancer, like lights in the windows of a ruined house.

Who are you here for? I asked him with my own. For me? And, I’m glad you’re here, Harry.

And I heard him answer: Yes, for you. But I’m dying, Lucy. So not just you: everyone.

Still I could not make myself go see him; I did my made-up chores and a few extra tasks besides, finished up the books for the night, ate a turkey sandwich and drank a glass of milk in the kitchen with Joe, our custom. Most evenings during the summer months everyone was too busy for a proper meal, so when we ate together our suppers were like this, small and late, both of us too weary to talk. All our long winters together had taught us to do this well, a skill that, I think, many married people never really get the hang of. There were whole weeks of snow when neither of us could recall having spoken one full sentence to the other. And yet of course a lot was said.

We finished our sandwiches and rinsed the plates, and I put a kettle on for tea. It was late, nearly ten o’clock-practically the middle of the night in a place where everybody gets up before five. While the water thrummed on the heat, I stood at the stove, looking out the window at the dark lake. All that summer, since we’d agreed to sell, I’d been looking for ways to say good-bye to it, trying them on like hats. I’d found that the best way was simply not to: instead of thinking anything in particular, I’d just let my mind float over its surface whenever I had a free minute, and by the time my attention turned to something else, I always felt that a little bit more of it had gone somewhere inside me, a morsel I would get to keep.