“Thank God I found you,” she said. “I can’t believe you just left.”
“My ankle hurts,” he said. “I need to ice it.”
“You should have told me.”
“It looked like you were having fun.”
“Fun?” she said. “With those bozos? I can see them whenever I want. My time with you is precious.” She linked her arm through his and helped him up to the deck where Beth and David were playing cards. Garrett realized that David hadn’t gone home and come back; he’d been here all along.
“How was the party?” Beth asked.
“Fine,” Garrett said.
“Terrible,” Piper said. “I need to get out of this place.”
Now that Piper was gone, the memory of the party was even more painful to Garrett. Later, Piper had accused him of not liking her friends and Garrett pointed out that he hadn’t even met her friends, only Kyle. Kyle was her friend, she said, and Garrett admitted that Kyle seemed like a jerk. Yeah, Piper said, Kyle is a jerk. They’d left it at that, but somehow Garrett understood that he’d failed in her eyes. The people at that party were her real life, and he hadn’t fit in. He was a “summer person.” Now, in the car, a turn was coming up and Garrett signaled. He hit the brake kind of hard and the car bucked a little. His turn was tight. If there had been another car at the intersection, he would have smashed it. He sighed.
“What’s wrong?” Beth asked. “You’re doing fine.”
“Nothing,” he said. He never talked to his mother about girls, although truth be told, he felt differently this time. Maybe because his mother was connected to Piper through David. Maybe because Beth seemed different now that she was unmarried. Garrett couldn’t believe he was thinking such things. He checked his rearview mirror. The road was deserted, ahead and behind. He gave the Rover some gas. It surged forward.
“How did you and Dad meet?” Garrett asked.
“You know the story,” Beth said.
“I know the Disney version,” Garrett said. “Tell me the real story.”
Beth leaned her head back and closed her eyes. “I had just graduated from Sarah Lawrence. I was twenty-two. We met in July. I spent that summer in New York-it was the only summer of my whole life when I wasn’t here on Nantucket. Your father was in law school at NYU and he says he was studying on the subway platform when he got distracted by a pair of legs coming down the stairway.”
Garrett said, “And he vowed to himself, ‘I am going to marry the woman attached to those beautiful legs.’ ”
“See,” Beth said. “You already know.”
“But what was it like?” Garrett said. “When you first started dating? Did you know you were in love with him?”
“No,” Beth said. “I’d sworn off men at that point in my life. I wanted to make some money so I could pay my rent. But your father was persistent. Once a week he took me on what he called ‘Date Package A,’ which was a fancy restaurant and drinks at a club. Sometimes dancing. Then once a week we went on ‘Date Package B,’ which was the movies, and beers afterwards. Some nights we walked in Central Park or the Village or Chinatown. We went to the Frick or the MOMA on Sunday afternoons. We ate at the Turkish restaurants on Eightieth Street. Your father knew the city inside and out. I always teased him that he had the subway maps tattooed on the inside of his eyelids.”
“He knew every stop on every train,” Garrett said.
“He lived with Gram and Grandad on Sutton Place, so he had no rent to pay. They gave him plenty of money to take me out. They wanted him to get married.”
“What about you? Did you want to get married?”
“No.”
“Why did you, then?”
“Well, because. We dated for almost two years and then it was time.”
A stop sign up ahead. Garrett touched his foot to the brake gently. “You married Dad because it was time?” he said. “What about being madly in love?”
Beth pointed out the windshield, indicating that it was safe to proceed. “Why are you asking me this?”
“Because I want to know.”
“You and Piper just met, sweetheart. It’s infatuation. Puppy love.”
Garrett clenched his teeth. “Don’t tell me what it is.”
Beth bit her lower lip. “Okay, sorry. You’re right. Yes, I married your father because he was smart and funny and I knew he’d take care of me. I’ll tell you something now that I’ve never told anyone else. I didn’t fall in love with your father until after we were married, and even then I can’t pinpoint a moment. It was a process-the process of shedding the cells of Beth Eyler and growing the cells of Beth Newton. I very slowly became a woman who was deeply in love with your father. That is the real story.”
Garrett turned onto their dirt road and his heart crumbled at the thought of three days in their house without Piper. He reviewed his mother’s story. It was funny to think of his mother as a single woman who at one time could have decided to resist his father’s advances. Who, in fact, had married his father without loving him.
“So you gambled on him, then?” Garrett said.
“I trusted myself,” Beth said. “I had a gut feeling that marrying Arch was the right thing to do.”
“If you’d married someone else, you wouldn’t be a widow,” Garrett said. He pulled into the driveway and shut off the car, hoping his mother wouldn’t cry. He wasn’t sure why he’d just said that.
“True enough,” Beth said. “But I don’t regret being married to your father for one second. If I’d known he was going to die at the age of forty-five, I would have married him anyway.”
“Really?” Garrett said.
“Really,” Beth said. “Because that’s what unconditional love is all about. The ‘no-matter-what’s.’ ”
Garrett walked into the house. It was quiet; Winnie and Marcus were probably at the beach. He would join them; he felt too lonely to hang out in his room by himself, although he needed to finish Franny and Zooey. He wondered, would he love Piper no matter what? Not yet, but Garrett felt the possibility growing. As he changed into his swim trunks, he eyed the urn of ashes on his dresser.
“I never thought I’d say this,” he said. “But you were a lucky man.”
With Piper gone, Beth figured she would finally get a break from David. She had seen him every day since the dinner party. When he came to pick Garrett up, he showed up early and knocked on the screen door, and just seeing his silhouette on the other side of the front door brought back a host of memories-David knocking on that door when he was still a teenager. His very presence in her life now was so astonishing that Beth couldn’t help herself from inviting him in for a beer. They talked about everyday things-his work on huge summer homes owned by twenty-eight-year-old millionaires, traffic, taxes, the new recycling laws. Every so often, he called Beth by her old nickname, “Bethie,” pronounced in a drawn-out New York accent, and as their conversations deepened, he unearthed a memory or two from their summers together: watching the meteor shower from First Point on Coatue, the time they went blackberry picking at Lily Pond and David got stung by a bee, fell into the prickly bushes and ended up the next day not only with awful scratches, but a bad case of poison ivy.
“I can honestly, say, Bethie, I haven’t eaten a blackberry since then.”
For the first time since Arch died, she found herself able to laugh.
Although she relished the companionship, she was still steeped in the morass of her sorrow. She still half expected to be picking up Arch at the airport on Friday afternoons. She still took a Valium in order to sleep. One night, when Garrett and Piper went to a party, David enticed her into a game of cards on the deck, and she made a point of telling David about her marriage to Arch.