Karen Templeton - Marriage, Interrupted

His eyes narrowed, Blake scanned the horizon, waiting for the awkward moment to dissipate on its own, like an unpleasant aroma. “Cass still asleep?” he asked after a moment.

“Far as I know.” Speaking of unpleasant aromas, enough perfume for an entire chorus line wafted over to him on the stiff breeze. Blake casually moved upwind of her, squinting from the glare bouncing off the rhinestone trim of her electric-blue sweatshirt. She lifted her head, peering at him from the south side of a floppy-brimmed straw hat with chiffon ties securely anchored beneath a wattled chin. “You get Shaun to school okay?”

“We just made it,” he said to mirror-coated sunglasses. “If I’d known he was supposed to catch a bus, I would have hustled him out a lot sooner.”

Crimson lips spread out into an amazingly wide smile. “Wouldn’t have done you a bit of good, cutie. Kid misses the bus every single day. And every single day Cass chews him out for it.” The hat quivered as she nodded toward a white wrought-iron patio chair with a plastic floral cushion lashed to it. “So sit. Enjoy your coffee while I putz.”

So he sat, occasionally offering a comment in response to one from Lucille as he nursed a cup of Towanda’s miraculous coffee, staring toward the west at white-capped Mt. Taylor glittering against an endless sky. As warm as it had been yesterday, the temperature had dropped again overnight; he flipped up the collar of his denim jacket against the breeze. At least the March sun still listed southward enough to splash a few welcome rays across the western-facing deck, taking the chill off the air. Still, it was a magnificent spring morning, at such odds with the understandable tension in the house.

Suddenly aware he was being eyed, he smiled. Her brow knotted, Lucille didn’t return it. Tension coiled at the base of Blake’s neck, as if he sensed what was coming.

“I shouldn’t have insisted you stay here,” she said, returning to her task. Silver gecko earrings swung in dizzying circles as she poked and prodded in the soil, a three-inch-wide silver-and-turquoise cuff smothering a wrist that looked far too frail to support it.

His fingers tightened around the mug’s handle. “What makes you say that?”

“Because you still have feelings for Cassie.”

Blake allowed the breeze to carry away a brittle chuckle. “You don’t mince words, do you?”

“At my age, what’s the point? So, am I wrong?”

He tapped a finger against the edge of the mug. “No,” he admitted quietly.

“And does Cassie know?”

“What do you think?”

The old woman sighed, her expression unreadable behind the huge sunglasses. Then she heaved herself to her feet, clumping in red plastic gardening clogs over to the tempered-glass patio table where she’d left the rest of the flowers.

“So tell me something…Cassie and Shaun have been living here for more than a year. How come this is the first time I’ve seen you?”

The swallow of coffee in his mouth turned acrid. “It seemed the more prudent course of action, considering Cass was married to another man and all.”

“Yeah, but your son wasn’t.” Before he could figure out what, if anything, to say to that, she said, “Which would lead to one of two conclusions. A, that you’re a slimeball. Or B, that you didn’t want to risk seeing her. So which is it?”

“You forgot C. All of the above.”

She batted at the air. “Nah. Believe me, I know from slime-balls. You don’t even come close. So I’m going with B. Okay, next subject—I suppose you’re wondering why I don’t seem more broken up over my son’s death.”

Blake doubted he had enough caffeine in his system to keep up with the woman, but as she didn’t appear interested in slowing down, the best he could do was hobble along behind. “I hadn’t… It isn’t my place to…”

But she wasn’t listening. Now kneeling on a bright yellow foam pad, she gouged the soil with probably more vehemence than necessary. “You bring a baby into the world,” she muttered to the dirt, “you think nothing can go wrong…”

She jerked her head up to Blake, several strata of makeup insufficient to mask the mixture of bafflement, anger and profound sorrow etched in what had once been, he decided, a beautiful face. “Why am I telling you this? A stranger? Except, maybe, who else can I tell?” she went on without waiting for a reply. “To keep all this locked inside…” She pressed one fist to her sternum, wagging her head. “Maybe this is why you’re here, so an old lady can vent her spleen.”

Blake leaned forward, gently removing the sunglasses to see turquoise-lidded green eyes shimmering with tears. “Vent away.”

She removed a tissue from a pocket tucked into the sweatshirt, then dabbed with extreme care at her eyes. “You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Lucille let out a great sigh, then said, more to the pansies than to Blake, “Before Cassie, Alan had never married. Dated, yes, but never married. When he hadn’t settled down by thirty-five, his father and I, we figured maybe he was…well, you know.”

She lowered her voice, as if the neighbors might hear. “It was a disappointment, but what could we say? A person’s gotta follow his own path, right? Anyway, after Alan’s father died—we’d been out here ten years already, we couldn’t take those awful winters back east anymore—Alan asks me if I’d like to move in with him, so I wouldn’t be alone. So I figure, why not? I mean, Wanda came in to do for me, sure—I’ve got a bunch of medical problems, you don’t want to know, Wanda’s a practical nurse but she doesn’t like telling people ’cause then they all start asking her for medical advice—but being by myself at night didn’t sit so well, it was true.

“But then, once I move in? He barely talks to me. Acts like I’m invisible or something. Always too busy, always away on some trip or something, especially once he sold his dry cleaning business, four, five years ago. So I ask you, what was the point of my being here, since I was alone at night, anyway? Or worse, when he was around…” Her lips pursed. “He’d get this look in his eyes, like I was some kind of huge embarrassment to him, like he couldn’t figure out how I was his mother. Nothing but criticisms, every time he saw me. I didn’t talk right, dress right, think right. All I was, was some stupid old woman.…”

Her sentence left hanging in midair, she dug in her sleeve for a tissue, then blew her nose, while Blake felt as though someone had stepped on his chest. “And it finally dawns on me,” she continued, “this is why my meshugah son never married. Never in my life did I see a man more wrapped up in himself! So I figure, the hell with this—I’m outta here, as the young people say.”

Blake couldn’t hold back a smile. “And?” he prodded.

“So I make up my mind to move out into one of those whaddyacallits, those gated communities—except it’s criminal how much they want for rent in those places, so I wasn’t going anywhere—when suddenly Alan brings home this lovely young woman and announces they’re getting married. Out of the blue, just like that, with him pushing fifty, already. Me, I’m thrilled, thinking maybe my son’s finally got his head on straight, that this woman’s performed some kind of miracle. So now, maybe, things will be better.” She hunched her shoulders in a helpless gesture. “I should have known, right?”

A frown pinched Blake’s brow, waiting for her explanation. To his chagrin, however, she veered off on one of her tangents, leaving her thought in the dust.

“That Cassie is a keeper, let me tell you,” she said instead. “Always treated me like gold. And at my age, listen—a daughter-in-law I could get along with…what more could I ask? Oh, sure, it would have been nice if she’d been Jewish, but you can’t have everything, right? But you know something, I love that girl from the bottom of my heart, like she was my own.” She went back to stabbing the dirt. “If anybody deserves good things, it’s her.”