Short Story / Late Season

“Did you love me when you were with her?”

She spoke to the man sitting beside her on the wooden bench. He wore dark gray suit pants and a light blue dress shirt that was cleanly pressed. His body was softer than it was the last time they spoke so openly. His back hung more. His skin was looser and the coloring less even. But his face was familiar and warm, even if she hadn’t been there to see the lines and wrinkles sink into the features she once knew well.

“Part of me might have. Maybe that’s another reason it didn’t work.”

The trees in the park were fiery with the dying light of a late September afternoon.

A few apples still hung on one tree, though most had fallen to the ground, the rotten sides face down against the earth. The grass was green, healthy, and long. It swayed peacefully in the cool breeze, its memory not long enough to remember what followed autumn winds.

He spoke to the elderly woman with the black shawl.

“Rachael was a good wife. She was a patient woman. But we had too many differences, and when the kids finally left, that’s all there was. Differences.”

The aged eyes focused on a place beyond the trees. For a moment, he thought about something that wasn’t there. Something that wasn’t her.

His jaw began to move and he came back to the woman beside him. She ignored the absence. She knew it herself.

“Did you love me when you were with him?”

“No.”

“Good. I’m glad for you. It’s better that way.”

The raised, light blue veins of his hand covered her own.

There was a thin scar on her forearm that he didn’t recognize. There had to be others, too – cuts and bruises and bites from young children and pulled muscles and strained joints and burns from cooking meals for a family for several decades – and he could never know them all. Just as she knew the chicken-pox scar on the inside of his wrist, but she didn’t know that the thin line across the back of his thumb was where he cut himself carving a turkey twenty-three Thanksgivings ago, or that the scar on his shin was where his young son accidentally scraped him with the back of a hammer, or a hundred other tiny nicks and scrapes his body had endured and every story behind them.

She’d never know them all. She couldn’t. She hadn’t been there. And the time to relearn each other, to know each other intimately, did not stretch to the infinities beyond the horizon as it once had.

“Almost sixty years I haven’t know you,” he said.

An orange leaf slid across the sidewalk on its curled points, drawing a long, warm scratching sound as it scraped over thousands of tiny bumps in the concrete. It gave them both a heavy smile. Smiling at the sad finality it brought, though a beautiful and enjoyable one.

“We’re together now.”

“Yes,” he said, choking a little on the word. “We’re together now.”

The veins shifted a bit as he gave her hand a squeeze. Most of his seventy-eight years he’d spent without her. His strength was gone. His joints were gone. His heart was going. The mighty man he once was, the protector, the provider – he could offer her none of those things. He could not build her a future. Both had already made their own and lived it.

But in the tired shell of a near 80-year-old body, she had found something to love.

“I’m not the person I was back then,” he said. “I want you to know that.”

“Good. There were things about him I didn’t like.” She winked and kissed him softly on the cheek.

“I know I hurt you so long ago,” she said. “I don’t remember why. I don’t remember my reasons. It’s silly now, and doesn’t mean much, but I never should have.”

Menopause. Hysterectomy. That didn’t matter now. She was not a young girl with a ticking biological clock. She had already made her children. John crafted them with her, raised them with her, and gave them a comfortable surrounding to grow up in. The children had their own lives now; they had their own children. They lived elsewhere but called often.

“I never expected to be a widow,” she said. “John was a good man. I can’t regret everything.”

She held the hand of the man she had loved a lifetime ago, when they were young and single and the world was unknown and magnificent because of it.

“There aren’t many of us left who understand that time. Who understand what we grew up with,” she said. “You are my youth. My hopes. My dreams. You are a link to that past. You knew me before I was all the things I became, and all the things I never became. With you I still have those hopes.”

The old man nodded his quiet understanding.

She searched his eyes before he looked away. She thought she saw pain. He swallowed hard.

She hoped she hadn’t offended or hurt him in some way. Not again. Not after everything.

“Do you feel robbed, dear?” she asked of the old man. “Do you feel slighted that we lived our lives separate, that we are only together now, at the end? When it’s too late for a life together?”

He looked down at the thin gray hair of the woman he had almost eloped with in an age before most of the world’s inhabitants were born, wondering how, sixty years later, she looked exactly the same.

“I lived a full life,” he said. She lifted her face and saw only the hint of tear in one eye. “I loved you once, a long time ago. If we weren’t both so stubborn, we might have loved each other longer. I don’t know for sure. I can’t know for sure. But here, at the end, your hand is in mine. I can’t think to be anything but grateful.”

She responded by placing a hand on his knee and laying her head against him. He put his heavy arm around her and remembered that yesterday he was eighteen, and his arm had been around her.

The wind picked up. She pulled her shawl tightly around her shoulders. He held her tightly to him.

“I am, too,” she said.

“Are what?”

“Grateful.”

The breeze flapped over his light blue sleeves and the corners of her shawl, the coolness that it brought drawing them closer together. The tall grass bent under the heavy flowing of air, still unaware of winter’s coming finality, while apples and dried, colorful leaves paraded in front of the wooden bench in a procession of magnificent possibilities.

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