Peggy was the only one remaining in the outer office. She sat with her back to me, typing, and I was about to stop and make some friendly remark about how she shouldn’t work too late when she said, still clicking away, “Don’t forget your cane.”
That irritated me, so I didn’t stop after all. I said, “Got it,” and walked past her to the coat tree, where I had hung my cane that morning.
“Twice last week you went home without it,” she said.
“Yes? And? You admit I somehow managed to hobble back in the next day, even so.”
Behind me, the computer keys went silent. I turned to find her looking at me with her very wide, very blue eyes.
“Oh,” she said. “Are we supposed to pretend you don’t use a cane?”
“No, I … It’s just that in actual fact I actually don’t really need it,” I said. “I could do without it altogether if I had to.”
“Oh.”
I felt sort of bad about barking at her, but by that time she had gone back to her typing and so I just said, “Good night, then.”
“Night,” she said, without looking up.
It hadn’t escaped my notice that I was very snappish these days. I thought about it as I was driving home. At our office meeting that morning, when Nandina brought us to order by tapping her pen against her coffee mug, I had nearly bitten her head off. “For God’s sake, Nan,” I had said, “do you have to act as if this were the Continental Congress?” But Nandina, after all, could give as good as she got. (“Yes, I do have to,” she’d said, “and you know perfectly well that I hate to be called ‘Nan.’ ”) Peggy, on the other hand … A child might have drawn those eyes of hers, with the lashes rayed around them like sunbeams.
I parked in front of Nandina’s and thought, I’m turning into one of those grouches that kids are scared to visit on Halloween.
Nandina’s car was in the driveway, I was sorry to see. I had hoped she wouldn’t be back from her appointment yet. I sighed and heaved myself out from behind the wheel. Maybe I could head straight upstairs to my room — bypass her entirely.
But when I opened the front door, I heard her talking in the kitchen. Evidently her appointment was here at the house; some workman, perhaps. And then the workman answered her and it was Gil. I recognized his voice even if I couldn’t catch the words. Still in my jacket, I went out to the kitchen. “Hello?” I said.
Gil was sitting at the table, with his parka draped over his chair back and the sleeves of his flannel shirt rolled up. Nandina stood at the counter, slicing an orange. “Aaron!” she said, turning. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
“Hi, Gil,” I said, and he raised one baseball-mitt hand and said, “How you doing, Aaron.”
“Everything okay at the house?” I asked. He didn’t usually come by till later in the evening.
But he said, “Oh, yes,” and then started patting his shirt pockets. “I did bring that lighting estimate,” he said. “Somewhere here …”
“I’m making Gil a drink,” Nandina told me. “Would you care for one?”
“What’s in it?”
“Orange juice, a kiwi, ginger root, a papaya—”
“Wow.”
“—half a cantaloupe, two stalks of celery …”
She had her juice extractor out on the counter — a complicated piece of equipment I hadn’t seen in use since that time a few years back when she was dating a vegan. It had turned out to be a lot of work, as I recalled. Supposedly you could clean the thing in the dishwasher, but that wasn’t very practical, since the various parts constituted an entire load in themselves.
Wait.
When she was dating a …
I looked from her to Gil, who was sitting there placidly waiting for his drink. I looked again at Nandina.
She blushed.
I said, “Oh.”
5
How could I have missed so many clues?
Nandina’s frequent intrusions on my meetings with Gil, for instance. Granted, she had always been a bit nosy, but this was extreme: if Gil and I were conferring in the living room, she just happened to need a book from the living-room bookcase, and then, while she was at it, she had to offer us some refreshments, and when she returned with a tray, she would oh-so-casually linger to contribute her two bits, eventually drifting toward a chair and dropping into it as if without realizing what she was doing.
And her willingness to drive over to my house on the slightest excuse — to empty my fridge, check on the plastering, verify my choice of caramel or whatever-it-was flooring. Always in the daytime, you notice. Always when Gil was most likely to be there as well.
And those questions she had asked about his background. Why, she hadn’t been asking out of suspicion! That was personal curiosity. She was like a high-school girl who ferrets out the most trivial details about a boy she has a crush on — his gym schedule and his homeroom number. And, exactly like a high-school girl, she seized on every opportunity to speak his name. “Gilead,” she had said, and her spoon had halted in the saucepan.
Plus, she never changed into a housecoat anymore. I hadn’t seen her in a housecoat in weeks.
But did Gil return her affections?
I felt a twinge that was almost a pain. I couldn’t bear it if I were forced to pity her.
Consider this, though: Gil really hadn’t needed to meet with me as often as he did. More than once I had told him that the work appeared to be going fine, and he should just let me know the next time he had any issues to discuss. It seemed he constantly had issues. And at every meeting he was more talkative; more extraneous subjects arose; it seemed more like a conversation with a friend. Here I’d been flattering myself that it was me he was warming to! I’d sniffed the air when he’d walked in recently, caught the scent of Old Spice, and said, “Somebody’s got plans for the evening,” expecting we might embark on a little chitchat about his social life. But he had merely turned red, and I had wondered if I’d overstepped — assumed too quickly that we were more than employer-employee.
Besides which, how come he had told her, but not me, that he’d be coming unusually early that evening?
I didn’t say anything direct to either one of them. I accepted a glass of Nandina’s juice, sat talking with them a few minutes, let Gil present his report on that day’s work. But underneath, I was extremely alert, and I saw how Nandina continued to hang around even though his report concerned some antiquated wiring they’d discovered in my living-room wall—not an interesting topic, and certainly not one that called for her opinion. I saw how their hands happened to brush when he passed her his empty glass. How she leaned against the doorframe and tipped her head alluringly as we were seeing him out at the end of the meeting.
Then she hurried back to the kitchen to start supper preparations, not giving me so much as a glance, allowing me no chance to question her.
I didn’t pursue it, of course. She was a fully grown woman. She had a right to her privacy.
Everything I knew about Gil so far had made me like him. He seemed to be a good man — honest, reliable, skilled, kindhearted. He may not have finished college, but he was clearly intelligent, and I imagined that he and Nandina could operate on a more or less equal footing. So I had no objections.
But I couldn’t help feeling, oh, a bit wistful as I watched them together over the next couple of weeks.
It was April, by then — early spring. Although the weather was still coolish, the daffodils were in full bloom and the trees were starting to flower. Gil and Nandina began to go out openly on what I guess you might call dates. The first date, shortly after the juicer episode, Nandina informed me about obliquely by announcing that she wouldn’t be cooking supper the following evening. Gil had suggested they try this new café in Hampden, she said. I said, “Oh, okay, maybe I’ll reheat some of that beef stew”—as if food were really the issue here. The next evening, I sat reading the newspaper on the couch, and when Gil rang the doorbell I let Nandina answer. He stepped into the living room to say, “Hey there, Aaron,” and I raised my head and said, “How you doing, Gil.” He looked sheepish but determined, his face gleaming from a recent shave and his short-sleeved shirt carefully pressed. How long had he been coming to this house in clothes too fresh to have been that day’s work clothes? Almost from the start of our dealings together, I realized. So he may have felt attracted to Nandina all along.