It's Never too Late

Figuring he should probably just leave her be, he turned away from the window.

She was new to town, too. Didn’t know anyone, either. Was she over there missing the town she’d come from? The people? The familiar?

Was she dreading the homework that awaited her, too?

He opened the refrigerator. Grabbed a second beer.

And headed outside.

* * *

“WANT A BEER?”

Addy stared up at the tall figure standing next to her in the darkness, knowing that she shouldn’t be glad he was there. He was wearing a white undershirt—like the macho, working-class hunks depicted in the old beer and cigarette commercials. “No, thanks,” she said. If he’d offered her a glass of wine she might not have been able to refuse.

She’d heard him come in. Had been imagining him with Nonnie, asking about her day. Thinking about the things that his grandmother wasn’t telling him.

He had a right to know.

And telling him wasn’t Addy’s place.

Nonnie was allowed to have her secrets.

“How was your day?” He took a sip from his beer, still holding the other in his hand.

“Good.” Mention the nightmare, she implored him. I’ll assure you that

it was an aberration. I’ll be calm. Unaffected. I’ll make it seem like a nonentity and we will never have need to speak of it again.

“Nonnie said she’d called out to you. Invited you in.”

“I visited with her a bit.”

“How was she?”

“Tired, but she seemed fine.”

“I dropped by for a late lunch,” he said. She already knew that. She’d heard him come home. “She seemed tired to me, too. Hopefully she’s still just recovering from the trip out here.”

His expression, or what she could make of it in the shadows, appeared pinched. Worried.

“Is her disease progressive?”

“Not so much as it comes and goes. At times it completely incapacitates her and then she goes into a form of remission and can get along fairly well.”

“Can she walk at all?”

“Not anymore. Her bones are too brittle and the arthritis in her knees makes walking too dangerous.”

Mark hopped the low wall that separated their patios and returned with a chair that matched hers. He set it down a foot away from her and opened his second beer.

She focused on the fountain. Searching for equilibrium in an unrecognizable world. “She told me that people dropped in on her all the time back home.”

His gaze swung sharply toward her. “She’s homesick?”

“She didn’t say that.”

“Oh.” He turned back toward the fountain and was silent.