“All this time?” He shook his head. “I thought it was you who couldn’t stand to . . .”

Kathleen turned off the music. All those years of unspoken grief and unheard condolence. “Maybe it was me who couldn’t bear to talk about him, and I just laid not talking about it on you. I’m sorry, Buddy. I’m so sorry.”

“No need. No need.”

Kathleen put her fingertips to Buddy’s cheek. “I was talking about him to Joyce on the drive up. I told her about the trucks. Remember how much he loved trucks?”

“Trucks and coffee ice cream.”

“Coffee ice cream! I didn’t tell her about that. That was your father’s doing. Danny Levine was the only little boy in America who preferred coffee ice cream to chocolate, or vanilla or strawberry.

“We should talk to Hal about Danny, too,” Kathleen said softly.

“I do. Or I have.”

“What does he say?” Kathleen was crying.

“He used to feel terribly guilty, I think. Like he should have been able to protect Dan. But” — Buddy took a breath — “he says he worked through that in therapy. He worries about you, though. He thinks you’re still — oh, what did he call it? — unresolved. But he can’t understand what it means to lose a child. A baby. You don’t ever get resolved. You just get, I don’t know what, you just get older, and life goes on.”

“When did he tell you that?”

“He came by the store the other day. We had lunch.”

Kathleen looked at Buddy’s profile in the passing lights. “And Jack?”

“I haven’t talked to Jack about Danny,” Buddy said. “He never asked me. Did he ask you?”

“No,” Kathleen whispered, wondering how she’d taught him not to ask. “Never.”

Kathleen put her left hand over Buddy’s right on the wheel. He held her fingers between his as they made their way over the bridge, past the turn to their house, up the road to Rockport.

Buddy dropped Kathleen in front of the sub shop. The only sound was the hum of the streetlights, vibrating in the fog. “I’ll see you there,” he said, and pulled away. Kathleen followed Joyce’s directions to the tan Corolla, pocketed the parking ticket, and got in.

In the ten minutes it took to drive back to Gloucester, Kathleen felt her senses sharpen. It had rained earlier, so the road gleamed in the headlights. She opened the window and inhaled mulch, brine, tree sap, honeysuckle, grass, brine again, all of it sharpened by the darkness, heightened by the moisture in the air. Kathleen shivered with pleasure.

My husband is a better man than I knew, she thought. My sons have come home. I’m going back to school in September. I have a true friend. The cancer is gone.

Thank you for Buddy. Thank you for Hal and Jack. Thank you for Pat, and for Mae and Irv. For my gran, for my poor mother. Thank you for my health. And for Joyce.

Thank you for books and work and for kindergarten children and for my garden. For my life in this garden. For these trees. For this perfumed night. For this wind on my face.

Thank you for Danny. I haven’t counted him as a blessing for twenty-five years, have I? God forgive me, I must have wished he’d never been born.

Thank you for Danny. For letting me love him. For his love. For all my sons. Thank you.

“Amen,” she said, pulling into Joyce’s driveway, past Buddy’s truck, idling at the curb. “Amen and amen.”

SEPTEMBER

THE TABACHNIKS’ yard looked like a combination interfaith garden party and construction site. The priest, wearing a clerical collar, short-sleeved shirt, and dark pants, and the rabbi, in a navy suit and yarmulke, shook hands as a flatbed trailer truck hauling a backhoe pulled up.

“Steve!” Father Sherry called out. “Why the big rig?”

“Sorry, Father,” Steve said, “but I’ve got to move this thing today, and it’s on my way.”

“Sheesh,” said the priest.

Father Sherry had enlisted the contractor to cut the statue free and deliver it to the Lupos, who were glad to give it a home. When the priest had named the date — Sunday around three — Joyce had asked whether she should ask some of the neighbors for a little block party. “That would be lovely,” Father Sherry said, and offered to invite the Loquastos. Joyce was a little nervous at the thought of them seeing how much she’d changed their home, but she told Father Sherry to go ahead.

Tags: Anita Diamant Fiction
Source: readsnovelonline.net