“Nothing has changed between you and me,” she says, squeezing his hand gently.
Then he hears himself ask another question. “Which of them is it?” He realizes only in the asking that he does not know, could not guess.
She lets go of his hand, but her voice remains gentle: “I think the way we’ve always handled these things is best, don’t you?”
Now he asks, “Does the other one know?” But obviously not. Otherwise none of this would now be a surprise to him. He would surely have heard from the excluded one.
Linda straightens before him, taking a deep breath. Her eyes do not narrow or harden or flare, as they can do when he and she argue. If anything, they soften for him. He feels a twist of admiration over this. Then a tighter twist, of tenderness. And then a sudden chest-clamping regret.
She says, “Are we wrong, my darling? Surely not. We have always been so smart about this. Love on this earth is not a singularity. It is a profusion. As simple as a kind word at a checkout counter. As complex as you and I. But love always has boundaries. By the parts of us — mind, body, heart — that are involved, or not involved. And to what degree. And for how long. I feel certain this is a partial thing now before me and a brief thing. Our love for each other — yours and mine — is the bedrock for any other experience in this fleeting gift of my life. It’s the same for you, isn’t it? We’ve said so to each other. Often. Aren’t we grateful for that?”
And at this she lifts her hand and touches his cheek and says, “Whichever of us dies first, I want our lips to touch in that moment.”
She pauses, and she says, “I love you, Jimmy.”
She waits, her fingertips lingering on him.
He can think of nothing to say.
He is not moving.
He can’t imagine what’s showing on his face.
She withdraws her hand.
She shifts her legs, squares her shoulders to him a bit more.
She says, “Why don’t you spend a couple of weeks with that girl Heather. She would like nothing better, I’m sure.”
He still can find no words.
She says, “Maybe she’ll help you stop worrying about what’s next.”
Just before noon Robert answers the foyer phone. As he expects, it’s his mother. “Darling, he’s off the morphine drip and starting to wake up.”
“I’ll be there within the hour.”
Peggy rightly takes these as his last words and jumps in. “Before you hang up. I’m out in the hallway. I need to ask. Did you try?”
“Jimmy?”
“Of course Jimmy.”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“He’s not coming.”
Robert hopes that will be it.
He waits for her.
She waits for him.
Not for long. “Why are you doing this to me?” she says. “What did he say?”
“Do you really want details?”
“Yes.”
“There aren’t many. We didn’t instantly turn into chums.” Robert hesitates only very slightly before the lie: “I don’t recall the exact words.” He recalls them quite clearly. “But it amounts to this: Nothing has changed. We all need to let him go.”
Robert waits for a dramatic sound on the other end of the phone. A stricken word. A sob even. But there’s only silence.
This troubles Robert more than her usual emoting. Better for her to be angry. She needs to be fighting. He says, “We’re still toxic to him.”
“Did he say that?” This comes out sharply. Her dukes are up. Good.
“No,” Robert says. “Not those words.”
“What words?”
“I’m not going to be his proxy in an argument with you, Mom. I’ll see you in an hour.”
“Toxic,” she says.
“Listen. The only way this thing could have been made right was for Pops to reach out. Not Jimmy. Years ago. At the latest when Carter gave the amnesty. Pops should have told Jimmy to come home. Told him — God forbid — that he understood, that he didn’t condemn him.”
Robert has said all he intended to, and Peggy delays only long enough to draw a breath. She says, “I am so sick and tired of the men in this family.”
Robert lets her have her big curtain line unchallenged.
But she stays on the phone.
So does he, though she’s no longer on his mind. He wonders at Jimmy, at how firmly he grasped his own life and held it close all these years.
“Are you still there?” Peggy finally asks.
“Yes.”
“Why? Come up here to me.”
And a short time later he is passing the Blood of the Lamb Full Gospel Church. He turns his face to it, puzzles over what that was all about yesterday morning. A man in coveralls is carrying a ladder along the side of the church building.
And then the church vanishes with a run of pine along Apalachee Parkway.
Peggy is waiting for Robert in the hallway outside his father’s room. She steps toward him.
“Have you been waiting out here all this time?” he says.
“No,” Peggy says, keeping her voice hushed and flapping her hand at him to do the same. “It’s been an hour. You’ve always been punctual.”
“Is he still awake?” Robert accepts her tone, has kept his own voice low. A private conversation in the hall would cause an argument for her and Pops.
“Fully awake,” she says.
They’ve already been arguing.
Robert says, “So what do you need to say on the sly?”
Peggy’s head snaps ever so slightly. It always comes as a surprise, that he sees through her.
“Yes, well,” she says, “I just wanted to remind you he’s in a delicate state.”
“Of course.”
“Not just in his body. His mind. He’s lost his mind.”
“The drugs,” Robert says.
“He’s lucid,” Peggy says. “Just mad.”
“Let me guess. He doesn’t want a priest to come visit.”
“I won’t even tell you how he put it,” she says.
“It’s his choice,” Robert says.
“So please don’t let him get worked up about anything.”
“I’ll do what I can.”
Peggy clutches Robert’s hand. Somehow it feels real, this gesture. “I know you will.”
He takes both her hands in his.
She says, “I’m just so afraid I’m going to lose him now.”
“He’s a tough guy. He can beat the odds.”
“God knows I’ll miss him,” she says. “Even at his worst.”
Especially at his worst, Robert thinks. His worst has kept you happily energized. But he gently compresses her hands and says, “The best thing is for you to go on downstairs and get some coffee and a Danish. Linger over them. I can handle Pops better if it’s just the two of us.”
Peggy searches her son’s face, seems to reassure herself about something, and then nods.
They let go of each other, and without another word Peggy is gone.
Robert approaches his father’s hospital door.
He steps in.
At first the only sound he recognizes in the room is his father’s heart, digitized into a soft monitor beep. And now the faint hiss of the air flowing from the wall into his father’s lungs. Pops lies in his bed, his torso angled upward, his arms laid out on top of the blanket, the left one wrapped thickly from hand to elbow. He is watching out the window: the bright afternoon sky and the distant tops of longleaf pines.
Robert hesitates. His father keeps his watch. Always clean-shaven, as if he were standing for inspection by Patton himself, his cheeks and chin are covered now in dark scruff.
Robert says, “Pops.”
William turns his face abruptly to his son. “Sorry,” he says. “I thought you were Mother.”
Robert approaches the bed, wondering briefly if his father’s mind has indeed gone wrong, if he was expecting his own mother, the long-dead Grandma Quinlan. But of course he meant Peggy.