He wasn’t sure he did, but nodded anyway.
She started to say something, then stopped, and when she finally spoke he had the distinct impression it wasn’t what she’d started to say. “He doesn’t make me unhappy.”
“Well,” he said, his heart sinking, “that’s something, I guess.”
Did she call after him as the door swung shut? He paused in the corridor but heard no further sound from inside the room. In fact, in that instant the whole world was still.
Down the hall Laura and Andy came out of another examination room and told him they didn’t want him driving anywhere, but he said he was fine, just exhausted, and offered to take them back to the Hedges, but Laura said they’d wait for her mother. Outside, he took the urn from Joy’s SUV and left the keys in the cup holder as instructed. After popping the trunk of his rental car, he paused, half expecting his mother to object, but it had been a long day and apparently even ghosts slept, so he slipped his father’s urn into the wheel well opposite hers. Then he got into the car, rolled the window down and just sat there. The magazine with “The Summer of the Brownings” was still on the dashboard. The evening hadn’t provided the right moment to give it to Joy, and he doubted tomorrow would either. He could leave it in her SUV, he supposed, but then decided not to. He was suddenly just too tired to walk back across the hospital lot.
The night air was rich with the sea, and he breathed it in deeply, thinking how good it would feel to fall asleep right here. Again it occurred to him how different Maine was from the Cape. What would’ve happened if he and Joy had honeymooned here, as she’d wanted to, instead of Truro? Would they have drawn up a different accord? He was nodding off when he heard shouts coming from the direction of the hospital. Lord, he thought, what now? But it was just the idiot twins, Jared and Jason, expanding the search for their stepmother. In the voice of the man they still imagined to be their father, they shouted in marine unison, “Dot! Where are you, dot damn it!”
By the time he got back to the B and B, the clock on the nightstand said 12:07. He undressed in the dark, as quietly as possible, and slipped between the sheets in stages so as not to wake the woman who now shared his bed. They’d been together for several months, but it still felt strange-and never more so than tonight-to be with a woman who wasn’t Joy. When she stirred he expected her to ask how things had gone at the rehearsal, if she’d missed anything good, but she didn’t and her breathing quickly became regular again. A minute later he was asleep himself.
Then he was wide awake again and listening, for what he wasn’t sure. According to the clock it was just after one. The window closest to the bed had been cracked open a couple inches, and in the unnaturally still Maine night he heard the thunk of a car trunk below. Someone stealing his urns was his first, lunatic thought.
Struggling out of bed, he padded barefoot over to the window and saw a taxi idling in the circular drive. Its driver pulled a suitcase from the trunk and handed it to his fare, a well-dressed young man who gave him some money. Apparently surprised by his generosity, the driver said, “Hey, thanks, pal,” and when the young man turned toward the inn, Griffin smiled, realizing it was Sunny Kim who’d just arrived.
There was stirring behind him now. “Jack? Is everything okay?” Her husky voice was low and intimate in the dark.
Yes, he told her. Everything was fine.
“Good,” said Marguerite.
11 Plumb Some
The night of his daughter’s wedding Griffin had a particularly vivid (no doubt alcohol-and anxiety-induced) dream in which he was driving over the Sagamore Bridge in a pouring rain that made the surface slick and treacherous. The bridge went on forever, and his was the only vehicle on it. Harve, for some reason, was in the backseat, instructing him. You’re never too old to learn to drive, he was saying, in the same tone of voice he used when telling Griffin how to play golf. You just have to keep both hands on the wheel and both eyes on the road.
Griffin explained that he already knew how to drive, but Harve paid no attention.
It’s not complicated, he went on. Just the two things to remember: hands on the wheel, eyes on the road. Hell, I taught my three daughters to drive, then both my sons. If those two can learn, so can you.
Harve, Griffin said, listen to me. I already-
Car! his father-in-law shouted, pointing in alarm, and Griffin hit the brake. Immediately the car’s rear end lost traction and came around, which meant, according to the dream’s curious logic, that he was now facing Harve, who was sitting in the backseat and saying, Both hands on the wheel. Griffin braced for impact against one of the bridge’s stone buttresses, but when it came, it was surprisingly gentle, like a boat nosing into a dock.
I just wanted to test your reflexes, Harve explained. Without good reflexes you’ re just an accident waiting to happen.
When Griffin got out to inspect the damage, he saw that the trunk had popped open and both his parents’ urns had ruptured. The trunk was full of their mingled ash, about a hundred urns’ worth, it looked like, and the rain was turning it all to mud.
Now you’ve done it, said Harve, who’d materialized at his elbow. How you going to figure out who’s who?
Rather than contemplate the problem, Griffin woke up.
It was raining out, less hard than in his dream but definitely coming down. The soft dream-collision had been occasioned in the real world by Marguerite getting out of bed. Not quite ready to face a new day, he closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep. Marguerite adored weddings and after yesterday’s she would be, he feared, in one of her best and brightest moods, and he wasn’t sure he could confront either it or her just yet. He sensed her standing there, observing him, probably suspicious, but eventually he heard the bathroom door open and close, and when the shower rumbled on moments later he realized he’d been holding his breath.
“Well, I think it was a lovely wedding,” she told him fifteen minutes later, her first words of the day, as if he’d expressed a contrarian view in his sleep. She was toweling off unself-consciously at the foot of the bed. It was amazing, really, how different she was from Joy, how confident and secure she was in her own naked, glistening skin. Even fully dressed, she always managed to convey that she was patiently waiting for someone to suggest a skinny-dip. Maybe her body wasn’t what it once was, but she remained confident there were men around who desired it and probably would be for quite some time. “Are you going to shower,” she said, “or did you have something else in mind?” That was the other thing. Marguerite loved sex, as fervently as you loved something you’d been denied when you were young and which you were now making up for.
“Shower,” he said, because they had a long drive ahead of them and a task at the end of it-the scattering, finally, of his parents’ ashes-that was unpleasant enough to have wormed its way into his dreams. “How about tonight?”
She was right, though, Griffin thought as he stepped under the burst of hot water. The wedding had been lovely-and, like all events that involved months of intricate planning, over surprisingly quickly. It had gone off without further melodrama, a well-earned blessing, all agreed, after the catastrophic rehearsal. Despite the scratches on her forearms, Laura had been, just as he’d promised her, a heartbreakingly beautiful bride. Drawing on some reserve of optimism that hadn’t been there the night before, she’d given herself over fully to richly deserved joy. Only once, just minutes before the ceremony was to commence, did she allow herself to express any fear. The bridesmaids and groomsmen were lining up at the end of the corridor for the procession, and she and Griffin were cloistered in a small anteroom. He’d told her how lovely she was and how proud he and Joy were of her, and she’d told him he looked very L.A. (he’d found a pair of very dark glasses to cover his still-hideous but not-quite-so-swollen left eye). But when Pachelbel’s Canon leaked into the room, she took a deep breath, looped her arm through his and said, “I don’t want you and Mom to get old.”