Anne Tyler - The Beginner's Goodbye

Then he set his palms on the table and looked around the room. “Any butter in this place?”

I didn’t pursue the subject further.

Gil was the only person whose answer made some sense to me.

And I didn’t even ask him! I’d have had to be insane — right? — to walk up to my contractor and ask if he’d ever communed with the dead.

All I said was — I was looking at the new bookshelves in the sunporch and I said—“I’m just sorry Dorothy can’t see these.”

“I’m sorry, too,” Gil said. He was squatting to adjust the time on the clock radio on the floor. His men had a habit of plugging it in wherever they were working and just letting the numbers flash 9999 all day, which seemed to irk him.

“She always did want more space for her medical journals,” I said.

“Well, these should have made her happy, then,” he told me. He stood up, with a grunt. “Damn. I’m getting old. Did I ever tell you how my dad liked to come back from the dead and check on my work?”

“Uh, no.”

“He passed away when I was in high school, but after I went into the building trade I’d catch a glimpse of him from time to time. Just here and there, you know? Kind of shambling around a project, looking to see what was what. He’d grab hold of a corner stud and shake it, testing it out. He’d bend down and pick up a nail that had dropped. Couple of times I got to work in the morning and found this little bunch of nails laid in a row on a sill. God, he did hate waste.”

I tried to make out Gil’s expression — was he joking? — but he was tipped back on his heels now, squinting up at the frame above one window.

“Must have been a couple of months or so he did that,” he went on after a moment. “He never said anything. Me, neither. I’d just stand there watching him, wondering what he was after. See, the two of us had not been close. No, sir, not at all. Not since I was a little fellow. He’d disapproved of my riotous manner of living. So I wondered what he was after. Anyhow, he moved on by and by, I can’t say exactly when. He just stopped coming around anymore, and eventually I realized. Know what I think now?”

“What,” I said.

Gil turned and looked at me. His expression was perfectly serious. “I think I was his unfinished business,” he said. “He was sorry he’d given up on me while I was sowing my wild oats, and he came back to make sure I’d turned out okay.”

“And so … do you figure he accomplished what he wanted?” I asked. “Was he satisfied, in the end?”

“Was he satisfied. Well. Sure, I guess so.”

Then he wrote something on the Post-it pad he carried in his shirt pocket, and he tore off the top sheet and slapped it onto the window frame.

I was sitting on a bench in the mall while Nandina was in the Apple Store. I hate malls. I wouldn’t have gone with her except her errand was business-related. But the Apple Store was packed, and I started getting restless, so she ordered me out. I sat there all itchy and grumpy and annoyed, but gradually I calmed down. And then I began to understand that Dorothy was sitting next to me.

I didn’t speak. I didn’t look at her. She didn’t speak, either. It seemed we’d agreed to start back at Square One: just be together, at first. Just sit. Don’t talk; don’t ruin things. Just sit there side by side and watch the world go by.

Picture two statues in some Egyptian pyramid: seated man, seated woman, facing forward, receptive.

We watched three old ladies in flowered dresses and huge white spongy jogging shoes, taking their exercise walk. We watched a teenage couple strolling by so entwined and interlaced that you had to wonder how they kept from falling on their faces. We watched a mother scolding a little boy about nine or ten years old. “I just want you to know,” she was saying, “that I’m going to have to apologize to your wife every single day of your marriage, for raising such a selfish and inconsiderate person.” We sat a long, long time together, absolutely still.

She didn’t leave, exactly. It’s just that, after a while, I was sitting alone again.

Now that I’d learned to see her, she began showing up more often. It wasn’t so much that she arrived as that I would slowly develop an awareness of her presence. She would be the warmth behind me in the checkout line; she’d be the outline on my right as I was crossing the parking lot.

Think of when you’re threading your way through a crowd with a friend — how, even if you don’t look over, you somehow know your friend is keeping pace with you. That’s what it was like with Dorothy. It’s the best I can describe it.

Let me say right here and now that I wasn’t crazy. Or, to word it a little differently: I was fully aware that seeing a dead person was crazy. I didn’t honestly believe that the dead came back to earth (came back from where?), and I never, even as a child, thought there were such things as ghosts.

But put yourself in my place. Call to mind a person you’ve lost that you will miss to the end of your days, and then imagine happening upon that person out in public. You see your long-dead father sauntering ahead with his hands in his pockets. Or you hear your mother behind you calling, “Honey?” Or your little brother who fell through the ice the winter he was six, let’s say, passes by with his smell of menthol cough drops and damp mittens. You wouldn’t question your sanity, because you couldn’t bear to think this wasn’t real. And you certainly wouldn’t demand explanations, or alert anybody nearby, or reach out to touch this person, not even if you’d been feeling that one touch was worth giving up everything for. You would hold your breath. You would keep as still as possible. You would will your loved one not to go away again.

I discovered that she seemed more comfortable outdoors than indoors. (Which was the opposite of how she had been before she died.) And she stayed away from Nandina’s, and she never came to my office. Understandable in both cases, I guess. She and Nandina had always had an edgy relationship, and I think she’d felt like an outsider at my workplace. Not that anyone there had been unfriendly, but you know that office clubbiness, the cozy gossip from desk to desk and the long-standing jokes and the specialized vocabulary.

Harder to figure, though, was that she didn’t visit our own house — at least, not the interior. Wouldn’t you suppose she’d be interested? The closest she’d come was that time on the sidewalk. But then, one Sunday morning, I caught sight of her in the backyard, beside where the oak tree had been. It was one of the few occasions when she was already in place before I arrived. I glanced out our kitchen window and saw her standing there, looking down at the wood chips, with her hands jammed in the pockets of her doctor coat. I made it to her side in record time, even though I seemed to have left my cane somewhere in the house. I said — slightly short of breath—“You see they removed all the evidence. Ground the stump to bits, even.”

“Mmhmm,” she said.

“They asked if I wanted to replace it with something, a maple tree or something. Maples are very fast-growing, they said, but I said no. We’ve never had enough sun here, I said, and maybe now—”

I stopped. This wasn’t what I wanted to be talking about. During all the months when she had been absent, there were so many things I had saved up to tell her, so many bits of news about the house and the neighborhood and friends and work and family, but now they seemed inconsequential. Puny. Move far enough away from an event and it sort of levels out, so to speak — settles into the general landscape.

I cleared my throat. I said, “Dorothy.”

Silence.