“We have to end it,” she said.
“No.” He was sitting on the polished wooden floor, his back to the wall. It seemed appropriate.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m not willing to buy my happiness with your marriage. And neither are you.”
“I love you,” he said. His voice sounded bewildered in his own ears. “Am I just supposed to stop loving you?”
She shook her head. “It doesn’t work like that. I wish it did. Then I wouldn’t feel as if someone put a stake through my sternum. No. We just… go on.”
“That sounds like that idiotic Celine Dion song.”
“Yeah.” She stared at the falling snow. “You know it’s a bad sign when the theme song from
She had taken his seat on the floor, back to the wall, legs stretched out in front of her. He was sitting on the second-from-bottom tread of the stairs leading to the loft. “No lunches at the Kreemy Kakes Diner anymore,” he said.
“No,” she said.
“I won’t drive by the rectory to check things out anymore.”
“No.”
“But it’s a small town. We’ll wind up seeing each other. We won’t be able to help it!” He suddenly felt wildly, irrationally angry with her. It was his town, dammit. He was here first. She should go. He was happy before she came.
Happy like the dead in their well-loved graves. Unknowing, unseeing, unfeeling.
“How often do you run into Dr. McFeely, the Presbyterian minister?”
“Uh… I don’t know. Once in a while I bump into him at the post office or the IGA. I’ve seen him at the hospital a couple times.”
“It’ll be the same with me, then. Less. I’ll start shopping over in Glens Falls.”
“You don’t want to make that drive in bad weather,” he said automatically.
“I don’t care!” Her voice cracked. “If it means I won’t be coming face-to-face with you buying groceries or mailing letters, I’ll do it!” She took several short, jerky breaths, then a deep one. “With luck, we won’t see one another more than once a month or so. I signed another one-year contract with my parish in December. Next year, I’ll tender my resignation and ask the bishop to reassign me. Or maybe I’ll just go home to Virginia.” She knocked the back of her head against the wall. “I’m such a screwup as a priest. I should never have left the army.”
He wanted to tell her no, she was a wonderful priest, and if he could ever believe in a God, it was when he saw Him shining out of her, but the words were stopped in his throat by the realization that she would be going away. In a year or less. And he would never see her again.
He would get back into his coffin. He would pull the lid down himself. He supposed, after a few years, he might even grow to like it again.
There was an old hi-fi near the sofa and chairs, the kind with a stacking bar so you could put on four or five records in a row. They had turned on the lights in the kitchen and one of the lamps, so she could make coffee while he riffled through the albums. Some of them were probably old enough to qualify as antiques. Lots of mellow fifties jazz and classic American pop. He put on Louis Armstrong.
“Here you go.” She handed him a mug. “Hot and sweet, just the way you like it.”
“Except I’m usually not drinking it at eleven o’clock at night.” He put the mug on the coffee table. “Dance with me.”
She smiled a little. Put her own coffee down. Went into his arms. Her head fit neatly beneath his chin.
“Give me a kiss to build a dream on,” Louis sang as they swayed back and forth, “and my imagination will thrive upon that kiss.”
They were sitting on the sofa staring at the fire across the room. The fifth album was playing quietly. Mel Torme.
“Your turn,” he said.
“Okay. Um… sometimes I floss my teeth while watching TV.”
“Everybody does that.”
“Really? Huh. Well, it still counts as something you didn’t know about me. Your turn.”
“Okay. I once had jungle rot on my feet.”
“Eugh! Gross! I don’t
“In Nam. I went for five weeks without a change of socks in the rainy season. To this day I still compulsively sprinkle Gold Bond powder before I put anything on my feet.”
“You were right. This is true love.”
“Hmm? Why?”
“Because even with that disgusting image in my head, I still find you irresistible.”
They were spooned on the sofa, her back on his chest, his arm around her. The lights were off again. The music had ended. He could hear the hiss of the fire in the woodstove and the silence of falling snow all around them.
“I want to tell you something I’ve never told anyone,” he said.
“All right.”
“You know how I said I was drafted? I wasn’t. I enlisted.”
“What?” She shifted around so they were facing each other. “You’re pulling my leg.”
“I swear.”
“In 1970? You enlisted during the height of the Vietnam War? And then lied about it?”
“Technically, 1968 was the height of the war-”
She laid a finger across his lips. “Russ.”
“I was desperate to get away from home, but I felt like my mom needed me to be the man of the house after my dad died.” He rubbed his fingers along the curve of her waist. “I was eighteen years old, and I could see my whole life playing out in front of me. A job at the mill. Living with my mother until I married one of the girls from my class and then moving next door. Going to the Dew Drop Inn every Friday and to Mom’s for dinner ever Sunday. I thought I’d rather go out in a blaze of glory than that.” He smiled, fond and rueful of the idiot kid he had been.
“But-the Selective Service office-there must have been a paper trail! How did you keep it a secret?”
“More by luck than design. I paid a visit to the local draft board president. Old Harry McNeil. Used to be the chief of police in my grandparents’ day, if you can believe that. Looking back, I’m amazed he went along with it. He did ask me, at one point, if I was sure I’d rather face the VC than my mother.” He grinned.
“I know your mother. That’s a tough call.”
“I guess he sympathized with a young man who wanted to get as far away from Millers Kill as he could. He gave me an official notice to show my mom-they were just form letters, with the info typed in-and I took the bus to Saratoga and enlisted the same day.”
“And no one ever found out?”
“Mr. McNeil died before I left. My mother didn’t start kicking up until after I was through basic and got my orders. If anybody else from the draft board ever checked the records, I guess they must have assumed old Mr. McNeil’s mind had wandered and he had misplaced my paperwork.”
“That draft notice turned your mom into an activist. You changed her whole life.”
“That’s one of the reasons I’ve never told anybody before. Who wants to find out her reason for living was based on a lie?”
She traced the outlines of his face with her thumb. “I’m glad you told me.”
He measured himself. He felt… lighter. And why not? She was helping him carry the secret now.
The fire was low. No words now. He framed her face in his hands, stroking her hair, her cheekbones, the line of her jaw. If he were a young man, he might believe he would never forget her skin, or her smile, or the strength of her. But he had learned that the mind didn’t always hold on to what the heart demanded.
