“Oh, no, you’ve all been—”
Then I sensed a person walking on the curb side of me. She was several feet distant, but she was keeping pace with us. I sensed her roundness, her darkness, her silence, her intense alertness. I didn’t dare look over at her, though. I came to a stop. Peggy stopped, too. So did the other person.
I told Peggy, “You go ahead.”
“What?”
“Go!”
“Oh!” she said, and one hand flew to the satin bow at her neckline. “Yes, of course!” she said. “I’m so sorry! I’m — Forgive me!”
And she spun away and rushed off.
I would have felt bad about it, except that I couldn’t be bothered just then. I waited until she had run up the steps to our building and disappeared inside. Then I turned to Dorothy.
She stood watching me soberly, assessingly. She seemed as real as the NO PARKING sign beside her. Today she wore her black knit top, the one she’d worn the night we first kissed, but it was scrunched beneath the slant of her satchel strap as if she had just come from work.
She said, “I would have asked more questions.”
“Pardon?”
“We could have talked all along. But you always pushed me away.”
“I pushed you away?”
Somebody passed so close that his shoe nicked the tip of my cane, and I turned toward him for one split second, and when I turned back she was gone.
I said, “Dorothy?”
Pedestrians were parting around me like water around a stone, sending me curious glances. Dorothy was nowhere to be seen.
Weeks passed, and all I thought about was how to make her come back.
Was there some theme here? Was there some unifying factor that triggered her visits? The first time, I had been reflecting on our life together; but the second time, I’d been perusing the butter lettuce, for Lord’s sake. And the third time, I had been deep in conversation with Peggy. As far as I could determine, each set of circumstances was completely different.
“Nandina,” I said one evening, “have you ever … Did Mom and Dad ever … like, appear to you after they died?”
“Mom and Dad?”
“Or anybody! Grandma Barb, or Aunt Esther … You were always close to Aunt Esther, as I recall.”
Nandina stopped slicing peaches. (She was making one of her juice drinks for Gil.) She looked at me, and I saw that her eyes were glowing with pity. “Oh, Aaron,” she said.
“What.”
“Oh, sweetie, I wish there were something I could say.”
“What? No, really, I’m fine,” I said. “I was just wondering if—”
“I know you must feel as though you’re never going to get over this, but, believe me, one day you’ll … Oh, I don’t mean get over it — you’ll never really get over it — but one day you’re going to wake up and see that you still have your whole life to live.”
“I already see that,” I said. “What I’m asking—”
“You’re only thirty-six! Lots of men haven’t even begun their lives at thirty-six. You’re attractive, and smart. Some really nice woman is going to come along and snap you up one day. You probably can’t imagine that, but mark my words. And I want to say right here and now, Aaron, that I would wholeheartedly welcome her. I would welcome anyone you brought home to me, I promise.”
“You mean like last time?” I asked.
“You’re going to look back and say, ‘I can’t believe now that I ever thought my life was finished.’ ”
I could have told her that I worried more about my life stretching on and on. But I didn’t want her going all compassionate again.
One late afternoon when I’d stopped by our house, still with no sign of Dorothy, I went around back to where the oak tree used to stand. The tree itself had been carted away at some point, and even the stump had been removed and the hole filled in with wood chips. Gil had arranged for that. I remembered paying the bill, which was considerable.
I was thinking, Come see this, Dorothy. Come see what changed our world. But the person who came was old Mimi King, from across the alley. I saw her picking her way through my euonymus bushes. For once she carried no casserole, although she did have a bib apron on. Her gray hair was rolled into little pink curlers that bobbed all over her head. “Why, Aaron!” she said. “How nice to find you at home! I looked out my kitchen window and all at once there you were.”
“Hi, Mimi,” I said.
She arrived next to me, breathless, and gazed down at where the tree had stood. “If that is not the sorriest sight,” she told me.
“Yes, well, it had a good long life, I guess.”
“Nasty old thing,” she said.
“Mimi,” I said, “how long is it since your husband died?”
“Oh, it’s been thirty-three years now. Thirty-four. Can you imagine? I’ve been a widow longer than I’ve been a wife.”
“And did you ever, for instance … feel his presence after he died?”
“No,” she said, but she didn’t seem surprised by the question. “I hoped to, though. I surely hoped to. Sometimes I even spoke out loud to him, in the early years, begging him to show himself. Do you do that with Dr. Rosales?”
“Yes,” I said.
I took a deep breath.
I said, “And every now and then, I almost think she does show herself.”
I sent Mimi a quick sideways glance. I couldn’t gauge her reaction.
“I realize that must sound crazy,” I said. “But maybe she just hates to see me so sad, is how I explain it. She sees that I can’t bear losing her and so she steps in for a moment.”
“Well, that’s just absurd,” Mimi said.
“Oh.”
“You think I wasn’t sad when Dennis died?”
“I didn’t mean—”
“You think I could bear losing him? But I had to, didn’t I. I had to carry on like always, with three half-grown children depending on me for every little thing. Nobody offered me any special consideration.”
“Oh, or me, either!” I said.
But she had already turned to go. She flapped one withered arm dismissively behind her as she stalked back toward the alley.
I asked at work. We were sitting around with a birthday cake — Charles’s — and paper cups of champagne, and Nandina had just stepped into her office to answer her phone, and I was feeling, I suppose, a little emboldened by the champagne. I said, “Let me just ask you all this. Has anyone here ever felt that a loved one was watching over them?”
Peggy looked up from the candles she was plucking out of the cake, and her eyebrows went all tent-shaped with concern. I had expected that, but I’d figured it was worth a bit of Oh-poor-Aaron, because she was just the kind of person who would think her loved ones were watching over her. She didn’t speak, though. Irene said, “You mean a loved one who has died?”
“Right.”
“This is going to sound weird,” Charles said, “but I don’t have any loved ones who have died.”
“Lucky you,” Peggy told him.
“All four of my grandparents passed on long before I was born, and my parents are healthy as horses, knock on wood.”
Ho-hum, was all I could think. People who hadn’t suffered a loss yet struck me as not quite grown up.
Irene said, “My father died in a car wreck back when I was ten. I remember I used to worry that now he might be all-seeing, and he’d see that I liked to shoplift.”
“Ooh, Irene,” Charles said. “You shoplifted?”
“I stole lipsticks from Read’s Drug Store.”
It interested me that Irene imagined the dead might be all-seeing. More than once, since the oak tree fell, I had been visited by the irrational notion that maybe Dorothy knew everything about me now — including some past fantasies having to do with Irene.