parents.
“Your parents must have taken it pretty hard,” Maribeth said, wise beyond her years, and almost as though she knew them.
“Yeah. Everything kind of stopped when she died. My parents stopped talking to each other, or even to me. No one says anything, or goes anywhere. No one smiles. They never talk about her. They never talk about anything. Mom hardly ever cooks anymore, Dad never comes home from work till ten o'clock. It's like none of us can stand being in the house without her. Mom's going back to work full-time in the fall. It's like everyone's given up because she's gone. She didn't just die, we did too. I hate being home now. It's so dark and depressing. I hate walking past her room, everything seems so empty.” Maribeth just listened to him, she had slipped her hand into his, and they were looking out over the lake together.
“Do you ever feel her there with you, like when you think about her?” she asked, feeling his pain with him, and almost feeling as though she knew her. She could almost see the beautiful little girl he had loved so much, and feel how devastated he had been when he lost her.
“Sometimes. I talk to her sometimes, late at night. It's probably a dumb thing to do, but sometimes I feel like she can hear me.” Maribeth nodded, she had talked to her grandmother that way after she died, and it had made her feel better.
“I'll bet she can hear you, Tommy. I'll bet she watches you all the time. Maybe she's happy now …maybe some people just aren't meant to be in our lives forever. Maybe some people are just passing through …maybe they get it all done faster than the rest of us. They don't need to stick around for a hundred years to get it all right. They get it down real quick …it's like …” She struggled to find the right words to tell him, but it was something she had thought about a lot, especially lately. “It's like some people just come through our lives to bring us something, a gift, a blessing, a lesson we need to learn, and that's why they're here. She taught you something, I'll bet …about love, and giving, and caring so much about someone …that was her gift to you. She taught you all that, and then she left. Maybe she just didn't need to stay longer than that. She gave you the gift, and then she was free to move on …she was a special soul …you'll have that gift forever.”
He nodded, trying to absorb all that she'd said to him. It made sense, more or less, but it still hurt so damn much. But it felt better talking to Maribeth. It was as though she really understood what he'd been through.
“I wish she could have stayed longer,” he said with a sigh. “I wish you could have met her.” And then he smiled. “She would have had a lot to say about whether or not I liked you, who you were prettier than, and whether or not you liked me. She was always volunteering her opinions. Most of the time, she drove me crazy.”
Maribeth laughed at the thought, wishing she could have met her. But then maybe she wouldn't have met him. He wouldn't have been going to the restaurant to eat three or four times a week, he'd have been home with his family, having dinner.
“What would she have said about us?” Maribeth teased, liking the game, liking him, comfortable sitting on the sand near him. She had learned some hard lessons in the past few months about who to trust, and who not to, and she had sworn she would never trust anyone again, but she knew to the bottom of her very soul that Tommy Whittaker was different.
“She'd have said I like you.” He grinned, looking sheepish, and she noticed freckles on the bridge of his nose for the first time. They were tiny and almost golden in the bright sunlight. “She'd have been right too. Usually she wasn't.” But Annie would have sensed immediately how much he liked her. Maribeth was more mature than the girls he knew at school, and the most beautiful girl he'd ever seen. “I think she would really have liked you.” He smiled gently, and lay back on the sand, looking at Maribeth with unconcealed admiration. “What about you? You have a boyfriend back home?” He decided to ask her now so he'd know where things stood, and she hesitated for a moment. She thought about telling him the fiction of the young husband in the Korean war, but she just couldn't. She'd explain it to him later on, if she still had to.
“Nope. Not really.”
“But sort of?”
She shook her head firmly this time in answer. “I went out with one guy I thought I liked, but I was wrong. And anyway, he just got married.”
He looked intrigued. An older man. “Do you care? That he's married, I mean?”
“Not really.” All she cared about was that he had left her with a baby. A baby she couldn't keep, and didn't really want. She cared about that a lot, but said nothing about it to Tommy.
“How old are you, by the way?”
“Sixteen,” and then they discovered that their birthdays were only weeks apart. They were exactly the same age, but their situations were very different. However useless to him they were at the moment, he was still part of a family, he had a home, he was going back to school in the fall. She had none of those things anymore, and in less than five months she was having a baby, the baby of a man who had never loved her. It was overwhelmingly scary.
He walked out into the lake after a little while, and she went with him. They stood together while he fished, and when he finally got bored, he walked back to the shore and left his fishing pole, and dived into the water, but she didn't join him. She waited for him on the sand, and when he came out, he asked her why she hadn't gone swimming. It was a hot sunny day and the cool water felt good on his flesh. She would have loved to swim with him, but she didn't want him to see her bulging belly. She kept her father's shirt on the entire time, and only slipped her jeans off while they stood in the water.
“Can you swim?” he asked, and she laughed, feeling silly.
“Yeah, I just didn't feel like it today. I always feel a little creepy swimming in lakes, you never know what's in the water with you.”
“That's dumb. Why don't you go in? There aren't even any fish, you saw I couldn't catch one.”
“Maybe next time,” she said, drawing designs in the sand with her fingers. They ate lunch sitting in the shade of an enormous tree, and talked about their families and their childhoods. She told him about Ryan and Noelle, and how her father thought that sons should get everything, and girls didn't need to do anything except get married and have kids. She told him about how she wanted to be something one day, like a teacher or a lawyer, or a writer, how she didn't want to just get married and have kids straight out of high school.
“You sound just like my mom,” he smiled. “She made my dad wait for six years after she finished high school. She went to college and got her degree, and then she taught for two years, and after that they got married. And then it took her seven years to have me, and another ten to have Annie. I think they had a really hard time having kids. But education is really important to my mom. She says the only valuable things you've got are your mind, and your education.”
“I wish my mom felt like that. She does everything my dad tells her to. She thinks girls don't need to go to college. My parents don't want me to go. They would have let Ryan, probably, if he'd wanted to, but he just wanted to work in the shop with my dad. He'd have gone to Korea, except he was 4-F, but Dad says he's a great mechanic. You know,” she tried to explain things to him she had never said to anyone before, “I always felt different from them. I've always wanted things no one else in my family cares about. I want to go to school, I want to learn a lot of things, I want to be really smart. I don't just want to catch some guy, and have a bunch of kids. I want to make something of myself. Everyone I know just thinks I'm crazy.” But he didn't, and she sensed that, he came from a family that felt exactly the way she did. It was as though she had been dropped off at the wrong place when she was born, and had been doomed to a lifetime of misunderstandings. “I think my sister will do what they want in the end. She complains, but she's a good kid. She's thirteen, but she's already boy crazy.” On the other hand, Noelle hadn't gotten pregnant by Paul Browne in the front seat of his car, so Maribeth felt she was in no position to cast aspersions.
“You really ought to talk to my mom sometime, Maribeth. I think you'd like her.”
“I'll bet I would.” And then she looked at him curiously. “Would she like me? Moms are usually pretty suspicious of the girls their sons like,” especially her, in a few months. No, there would be no way she could meet Mrs. Whittaker. In another month she wouldn't be able to hide it anymore, and she wouldn't even want to see Tommy. She hadn't figured out what she would tell him yet, but she would have to tell him something eventually, even if he just came into the restaurant and saw her. She'd have to tell him the story about a young husband dying in Korea, except that now it sounded so stupid. She would have liked to tell him the truth, but she knew she couldn't. It was too terrible, too irresponsible, and much too shocking. She was sure he'd never want to see her again. She'd just have to stop seeing him in a few weeks, and tell him she was seeing someone else. And then he'd
