[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.This was a stage, she was discovering, she could handle.Moreover—and this was a point that mattered to her—she was doing this for her dad.“How does that make you feel?”“I feel terrible, of course.And that’s the lesson here,” she said, as her mother and Mr.Holland surrounded Lorelea Roberts.“We are inflicting a lot of pain on a lot of animals.And what for? Do we need deerskins for clothing anymore? I don’t think so.Do we need to eat deer meat? No way.I mean, my parents’ freezer at home has got all kinds of imitation meat that tastes just fine.They even make imitation chicken fingers now, and—as we all know—chickens don’t even have fingers.Am I making sense?”“You’ll have to leave,” Mr.Holland snapped, unwilling to hide his annoyance with the reporter.Normally, he was a pretty good-natured guy, especially since her mom was one of his teachers.“You didn’t check in at the front office and—”“I’m an alumna,” the reporter said, smiling.“My mother is an alumna.My grandmother was an alumna.Lorelea Roberts.” Now she offered her hand to Mr.Holland.“You arrived five or six years after I graduated, but I’ve read in the alumnae magazine about the terrific work you’re doing here.I’m sorry we haven’t met.”“You still should have checked in at the office, Ms.Roberts.”She spread her hands palms up in a gesture that was a little like an apology and a lot like a dismissal.Charlotte saw the eyes of the other two adults land squarely on the small recorder.“And you have to turn that thing off,” her mother said.“Right this second.”“No, it’s okay,” she told her mom, surprising herself.“Charlotte?”“Really, I know what I’m doing and I know what I want to say,” she went on.Then she reached for Lorelea’s hand with the recorder and actually steered it toward her face.“There’s one more thing I want to add.Actually, it’s two.Can I?”She could tell that her mother and the headmaster wanted to stop her, but either they didn’t want to make a scene in front of this reporter—who happened to be what Grandmother Seton liked to call a Brearley girl herself—or they trusted her just enough that they were going to let her plow ahead.When they remained silent, Lorelea said to her, “Looks to me like you’re good to go.”“Okay, here we are.I think the company that made the gun should make it really obvious when the darn thing is loaded.It would have been nice to know, thank you very much, that there was a bullet in the rifle when I picked it up.Second, I made a huge mistake that night, the biggest one I will ever make in my life.At least I hope it was the worst mistake: I hate to think what worse shi—” She caught herself before she had finished the word, then resumed as if nothing had happened, “Anyway, I love my dad.I love him a ton.I would give anything in the world to be able to go back in time and give him back his right arm.Okay?”Lorelea looked at her and seemed to be considering this.Then she nodded and clicked off the recorder.“Good.Let’s go home, Mom,” she said, taking her mother’s long fingers in hers.With her free hand she gave the headmaster a small salute and then walked with her mother down the hall.Three words formed in her head in the almost old-fashioned courier font from her Secret Garden script, and the image in her mind made her smile:Exit, stage right.THAT EVENING Nan Seton had dinner alone with her dog in her dining room.Across the wide expanse of park the three McCulloughs ate with their new dog, the cats watching warily from different perches on a living room couch.Far to the north the Setons ate at an Italian restaurant near the airport in South Burlington: Sara and Willow and baby Patrick had met John there, and they all had agreed they were far too hungry to wait till they were home to dine.Patrick ate Cheerios one by one from a restaurant high chair and sucked on a bottle of milk.None of the Setons or the McCulloughs was feeling particularly celebratory, but they all felt relieved.Three hundred miles apart the grown men both brought up the missing casing, and each time their wives told them—gently—to drop it.Just shut up (please) and drop it.The two girls thought of the vegetable garden in New Hampshire, and—again, similarly—hoped their parents would not get the notion into their midlife-addled brains that it could possibly be worth the effort to try once again next year.Charlotte liked the gardens the students were building for her stage play, especially the hedges.They were constructed entirely from green paper cocktail napkins and walls of mesh screen.They looked real enough, and they demanded no serious care.But the girls also knew instinctively that they would never be alone in New Hampshire with their grandmother again.It wasn’t that Grandmother couldn’t manage them: Good Lord, she probably managed them better than their own parents.Rather, it was their sense that their parents, pure and simple, were going to want them with them.Not because of their dalliance with underage drinking and dope, but because they loved them and did the best that they could.This attention might grow tiring.Still, it was reassuring.Some of the people ate meat that evening and some did not, but those who did were aware of the flesh on their plates.They told themselves, however, that there was enough in their small worlds about which they could feel guilty—myriad, endless failings and whole catalogs of disappointments they heaped on others—and so they chewed and smiled and swallowed.And Spencer, at least for the moment, looked the other way.He looked only at his wife and his daughter, grateful, grasping his Good Grips easy-to-hold fork, and hoisted chickpeas and artichoke hearts across the great divide that separated his dinner plate from his mouth.THE GIRLS WERE CORRECT when they surmised they would never again be alone in New Hampshire with their grandmother: That night the old woman died.Even so vigorous a heart was not immune to the unsubtle havoc wrought by time.Besides, some hearts are better than others, and though Nan’s was generous, it was weak.Had she not been so vigorous, she might have died a decade sooner.And though it would have been simpler for everyone if she had lived another five years—even five months—she lasted just long enough.She made it by hours.The boys had reconciled in the morning, and she passed away in her sleep a mere half spin of the Earth later.And so while John and Catherine and Spencer were devastated, they were devastated together.Sara helped them all, the therapist in her surprised by the depth of her own sadness, as did Nan’s granddaughters.The girls’ presence was comforting, because they seemed so very grown up.Nan died dreaming of a woodpecker in one of the trees that ringed her house, the drumming in actuality the last beats of her heart before it spasmed, then stopped.The sudden spike of pain woke her body, but Nan was never conscious of what the pain was or that she was dying.Her eyes opened reflexively, then shut, and she was gone.It was all very similar to the way her friend Walter Durnip had died in the country that summer, except she had her dog with her at the end instead of her spouse.The animal, much to everyone’s surprise, actually outlived her.He spent his last days with the Setons of Vermont.Nan was buried in the cemetery in New Hampshire, with a service beforehand at the homestead.The afternoon was raw but bearable, and the family stood together with Nan’s friends near the dead stalks of the cutting garden, the rented trellis exactly the one Sara had seen in her mind when the days had been long in July.Then they all sang a hymn and went out—but they sang only one, and it was short.Thirty-fiveThe clouds were moving like whitewater, streaming in lines to the south [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.This was a stage, she was discovering, she could handle.Moreover—and this was a point that mattered to her—she was doing this for her dad.“How does that make you feel?”“I feel terrible, of course.And that’s the lesson here,” she said, as her mother and Mr.Holland surrounded Lorelea Roberts.“We are inflicting a lot of pain on a lot of animals.And what for? Do we need deerskins for clothing anymore? I don’t think so.Do we need to eat deer meat? No way.I mean, my parents’ freezer at home has got all kinds of imitation meat that tastes just fine.They even make imitation chicken fingers now, and—as we all know—chickens don’t even have fingers.Am I making sense?”“You’ll have to leave,” Mr.Holland snapped, unwilling to hide his annoyance with the reporter.Normally, he was a pretty good-natured guy, especially since her mom was one of his teachers.“You didn’t check in at the front office and—”“I’m an alumna,” the reporter said, smiling.“My mother is an alumna.My grandmother was an alumna.Lorelea Roberts.” Now she offered her hand to Mr.Holland.“You arrived five or six years after I graduated, but I’ve read in the alumnae magazine about the terrific work you’re doing here.I’m sorry we haven’t met.”“You still should have checked in at the office, Ms.Roberts.”She spread her hands palms up in a gesture that was a little like an apology and a lot like a dismissal.Charlotte saw the eyes of the other two adults land squarely on the small recorder.“And you have to turn that thing off,” her mother said.“Right this second.”“No, it’s okay,” she told her mom, surprising herself.“Charlotte?”“Really, I know what I’m doing and I know what I want to say,” she went on.Then she reached for Lorelea’s hand with the recorder and actually steered it toward her face.“There’s one more thing I want to add.Actually, it’s two.Can I?”She could tell that her mother and the headmaster wanted to stop her, but either they didn’t want to make a scene in front of this reporter—who happened to be what Grandmother Seton liked to call a Brearley girl herself—or they trusted her just enough that they were going to let her plow ahead.When they remained silent, Lorelea said to her, “Looks to me like you’re good to go.”“Okay, here we are.I think the company that made the gun should make it really obvious when the darn thing is loaded.It would have been nice to know, thank you very much, that there was a bullet in the rifle when I picked it up.Second, I made a huge mistake that night, the biggest one I will ever make in my life.At least I hope it was the worst mistake: I hate to think what worse shi—” She caught herself before she had finished the word, then resumed as if nothing had happened, “Anyway, I love my dad.I love him a ton.I would give anything in the world to be able to go back in time and give him back his right arm.Okay?”Lorelea looked at her and seemed to be considering this.Then she nodded and clicked off the recorder.“Good.Let’s go home, Mom,” she said, taking her mother’s long fingers in hers.With her free hand she gave the headmaster a small salute and then walked with her mother down the hall.Three words formed in her head in the almost old-fashioned courier font from her Secret Garden script, and the image in her mind made her smile:Exit, stage right.THAT EVENING Nan Seton had dinner alone with her dog in her dining room.Across the wide expanse of park the three McCulloughs ate with their new dog, the cats watching warily from different perches on a living room couch.Far to the north the Setons ate at an Italian restaurant near the airport in South Burlington: Sara and Willow and baby Patrick had met John there, and they all had agreed they were far too hungry to wait till they were home to dine.Patrick ate Cheerios one by one from a restaurant high chair and sucked on a bottle of milk.None of the Setons or the McCulloughs was feeling particularly celebratory, but they all felt relieved.Three hundred miles apart the grown men both brought up the missing casing, and each time their wives told them—gently—to drop it.Just shut up (please) and drop it.The two girls thought of the vegetable garden in New Hampshire, and—again, similarly—hoped their parents would not get the notion into their midlife-addled brains that it could possibly be worth the effort to try once again next year.Charlotte liked the gardens the students were building for her stage play, especially the hedges.They were constructed entirely from green paper cocktail napkins and walls of mesh screen.They looked real enough, and they demanded no serious care.But the girls also knew instinctively that they would never be alone in New Hampshire with their grandmother again.It wasn’t that Grandmother couldn’t manage them: Good Lord, she probably managed them better than their own parents.Rather, it was their sense that their parents, pure and simple, were going to want them with them.Not because of their dalliance with underage drinking and dope, but because they loved them and did the best that they could.This attention might grow tiring.Still, it was reassuring.Some of the people ate meat that evening and some did not, but those who did were aware of the flesh on their plates.They told themselves, however, that there was enough in their small worlds about which they could feel guilty—myriad, endless failings and whole catalogs of disappointments they heaped on others—and so they chewed and smiled and swallowed.And Spencer, at least for the moment, looked the other way.He looked only at his wife and his daughter, grateful, grasping his Good Grips easy-to-hold fork, and hoisted chickpeas and artichoke hearts across the great divide that separated his dinner plate from his mouth.THE GIRLS WERE CORRECT when they surmised they would never again be alone in New Hampshire with their grandmother: That night the old woman died.Even so vigorous a heart was not immune to the unsubtle havoc wrought by time.Besides, some hearts are better than others, and though Nan’s was generous, it was weak.Had she not been so vigorous, she might have died a decade sooner.And though it would have been simpler for everyone if she had lived another five years—even five months—she lasted just long enough.She made it by hours.The boys had reconciled in the morning, and she passed away in her sleep a mere half spin of the Earth later.And so while John and Catherine and Spencer were devastated, they were devastated together.Sara helped them all, the therapist in her surprised by the depth of her own sadness, as did Nan’s granddaughters.The girls’ presence was comforting, because they seemed so very grown up.Nan died dreaming of a woodpecker in one of the trees that ringed her house, the drumming in actuality the last beats of her heart before it spasmed, then stopped.The sudden spike of pain woke her body, but Nan was never conscious of what the pain was or that she was dying.Her eyes opened reflexively, then shut, and she was gone.It was all very similar to the way her friend Walter Durnip had died in the country that summer, except she had her dog with her at the end instead of her spouse.The animal, much to everyone’s surprise, actually outlived her.He spent his last days with the Setons of Vermont.Nan was buried in the cemetery in New Hampshire, with a service beforehand at the homestead.The afternoon was raw but bearable, and the family stood together with Nan’s friends near the dead stalks of the cutting garden, the rented trellis exactly the one Sara had seen in her mind when the days had been long in July.Then they all sang a hymn and went out—but they sang only one, and it was short.Thirty-fiveThe clouds were moving like whitewater, streaming in lines to the south [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]