A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [109]
Agnes laid her napkin on the table. It might have been a gauntlet. “It was a lovely wedding, Bridget. I mean that truly. I think you’re a brave, beautiful woman, and I wish you a happy life. Many, many years of a happy life with Bill.”
Agnes glanced at Harrison and then over at Rob. She would not see them again. She could say good-bye, but the evening had already had more than its share of drama. She pushed her chair into the table.
Tomorrow morning she would wake and pack her orange duffel bag and get into her car and return to Maine. The drive would be long, and already Agnes dreaded it. The trip would be entirely different from the one she’d made just yesterday. Yesterday, she had had a life. She had had hope. She had neither now.
When Bill and Bridget left the table, Harrison stood. He said good night to Rob and Josh and Jerry, the only ones who remained, Agnes’s pronouncement and exit having effectively ended the evening. Possibly, the men would move into the library for a nightcap, though Harrison had no intention of joining them.
Harrison pushed through the door at the far end of the private dining room, the door through which Nora had disappeared. He found himself, not unexpectedly, in the kitchen. Judy, who looked up from a small plantation of mismatched cream pitchers, seemed surprised.
“Where’s Nora?” Harrison asked without preamble.
“I don’t know,” Judy said, perhaps taken aback by Harrison’s abrupt manner.
“She came through here,” Harrison said.
“Came and went,” Judy said.
With his jacket hooked over his shoulder, Harrison searched the public rooms of the inn—the library, the sitting room, another room in which a wedding reception seemed to be in progress—but he couldn’t find Nora. It was conceivable she had already doubled back and was in one of the rooms he’d just passed through, but he took a chance and headed for the long corridor that led to Nora’s suite. When he turned the corner, he noted that Nora’s door was half open, as if she’d dashed back to her desk to fetch a list or a bill.
Harrison pushed the door further open. Nora was seated in an armchair facing the double doors that led to the private veranda.
Harrison tossed his jacket onto the foot of the bed.
“You wanted a story?” he asked.
His question was brusque, rhetorical.
Nora said nothing.
“All right,” Harrison said, ignoring her silence. “I’ll tell you a story.”
He stood with his hands on his hips confronting the woman in the chair, aware that his posture and his voice were full of anger. After a few seconds, however, he couldn’t look at Nora as she sat with her legs crossed, holding her shawl closed at her collarbone, staring at the various rectangles of glass. He walked toward the double doors, putting his back to her. In the crenellated reflection, he could just make out the features of her face.
“So I’ll skip the part,” Harrison began, “where I spend most of my junior year and all of my senior year watching this girl—this girl I’ve had a crush on since that fateful day in October—from a distance. And then up close and personal when I discover, much to my surprise, that she’s the girlfriend of my putative best friend, Stephen Otis.”
Harrison paused.
“‘Crush,’ I think, is not an entirely accurate word in this case,” he continued. “I could use the phrase ‘in love,’ couldn’t I? But you’d doubt me because you’d think that to love someone, one must have at least the barest beginnings of a relationship. But since this is my story, we’ll dispense with semantics and just take it on faith that I was, indeed, in love with this girl, from a distance as I’ve said, and then rather up close, though not, sadly, close enough to touch, because she was, again as I have mentioned, the girlfriend—true love?—of my roommate.”
Harrison crossed his arms over his chest.
“So we’ll skip that whole part,” he said, “and go directly to that night on the beach, which, if memory serves, was the third Saturday in May. A night when the water temperature would have been forty degrees, which—and you may not know this—will cause a man