Roy came instead, in December, alone, standing at the end of my dock one gray afternoon with his hands shoved deep in his coat pockets, looking out at water that had already started icing at the edges.
“I owe you an apology,” he said, before I’d even finished walking out to join him. “For the suitcase. For not looking at you once while I carried it out to that porch.”
“You were grieving,” I said. “People do strange, unkind things when they’re grieving, Roy. I’ve done a few myself, over the years.”
“Louise thought you were after his money,” Roy said. “I mostly just went along with what Louise thought, because it was easier than figuring out what I actually believed on my own. That’s on me, not on her.”
“And what do you believe now?”
He was quiet for a while, watching the water.
“I think my father spent fifty-three years wishing he’d never gotten on that train in 1972,” he finally said. “I think he found a way, right at the end, to make sure that wish counted for something real instead of just sitting in his chest his whole life. I think Louise and I were so scared of losing the version of him we already understood that we couldn’t stand to watch him become someone new at seventy-three. Even though becoming someone new, apparently, made him happier in fifty-eight days than I’d seen him in years.”
“That’s a generous way of putting it.”
“It’s the true way of putting it,” Roy said. “I’ve had four months to sit with the less generous version, Margaret. I’d rather try this one instead, if you’ll let me.”
PART 8
I still live at the cottage on Loon Lake, most of the year now, the trailer along the county road sitting mostly empty except when I go back to check on it.
Roy visits every few weeks, sometimes with his own two kids in tow, teenagers who ask me, with the particular bluntness of teenagers, whether it’s true their grandfather kissed me behind a set of bleachers back when dinosaurs still roamed the earth, and I tell them yes, it’s true, and no, it wasn’t quite that long ago, thank you very much.
Louise and I speak occasionally now — not warmly, not yet, maybe not ever entirely, but civilly, in a way that feels like the start of something rather than the end of one. She came out to the cottage once, in the spring, stood on the dock for exactly the length of time it took to say she was glad her father hadn’t spent his last fifty-eight days lonely, and then left before either of us had to figure out what came after that sentence.
I keep the diamond ring on every day. It’s small, exactly as small as a boy who once had nothing could afford, and I’ve never once wished it were bigger.
I think about that letter often, the one that put me down in the dirt beside my own laundry line — six weeks before he asked me to marry him. Before he even knew for certain I’d say yes.
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