The Art of Saying Goodbye - Ellyn Bache [71]
Andrea nodded, puzzled that Paisley was telling her all this. “He’d sneak away from Ginger to work on his computer, and then he had a picnic?”
“He said being outdoors helped him think. Then he said, ‘And how are you?’ And like I always do, I said, ‘Great! Great!’ It doesn’t mean anything. It comes out of my mouth before I have time to think about it. But that day, it seemed like such a lie. Such a lie.”
She studied the remains of her coffee cup. “So I burst into tears. Not polite tears. Big, sobby tears. What else could he do but put his arm around me and pat my back? But you know, I just kept crying. I didn’t feel bad about it. Finally he offered me his cup of iced tea. I drank it. I felt a little better.”
Her face had an odd, waxy cast now, quite the opposite of feeling “better,” and her tone grew even more detached. “I would have gone home if he’d asked me any questions. But he didn’t. All he did was give me half of his sandwich. I ate it, too. Then he told me about this web-based program he was working on.”
“The one he was hiding from Ginger?”
“He was developing it for elementary-school teachers, to make it easier for them to teach social studies. He said, ‘Kids spout baseball statistics, right? They learn them because it’s fun. If history were fun, they’d learn that, too.’ He sounded so . . . well, excited.”
At long last, Paisley looked Andrea in the eye. “I was pulled out of myself a little by that. You know what I mean?”
Andrea wasn’t sure she did, but she nodded her encouragement.
“I mean, the dark mood didn’t stop hanging over me, exactly, but it drifted a little to the side. Eddie was trying to think up a title for the program. We ran through a whole list of names. Educator’s Educator. Ten-Minute Tutor. We finally settled on the Teacher Toolshed. It made me feel . . . useful, I guess. I think I knew right then that the name would stick, that he’d do something with it. Or at least that he ought to.
“So I asked him, why don’t you go for it? And he said . . . well, you know the story. His father had died. He needed to run the store. He was supporting his mother as well as Ginger and the kids. Ginger’s good ideas had made the store more profitable, but she only worked there part-time because she was staying home with Rachel. He was stuck.
“He sounded so serious, and so sad. I guess I wanted to . . . I don’t know. All I know is, the minute he stopped talking, I told him I’d had a miscarriage and couldn’t have more children. I told him the whole sordid story.
“By the time I was finished, I was in tears again. But this time when Eddie put his arm around me, it felt like it belonged there.” She stopped. She didn’t look at Andrea, but at everything else, the table, the clock, her fingernails.
“What happened, Paisley? Did he hurt you?”
“No,” Paisley said, but went on in a mechanical way, detached, as if she hadn’t heard. “The afternoon was warm. It was a good day for a picnic. It was—” She stopped again and, after what seemed like an eternity, said, “We ended up having more than lunch.”
Andrea breathed in, thinking, Is that all?
“It was the only time Eddie ever touched me,” Paisley said, as if asking for absolution. “It was more an act of— I hardly know what to call it. We were both so unhappy. It had nothing to do with . . . Maybe we were trying to comfort each other, I don’t know. But it was horrible. Both of us were horrified even before we got up from the blanket. What if someone found out? We could hardly look at each other, much less speak. The only thing we said to each other was that we’d never say a word to anyone so as not to hurt our families.”
Andrea got up, moved around the table, set a hand on Paisley’s shoulder. “It happens,” Andrea said. “It’s over. It’s all right.”
Almost savagely, Paisley shucked her off. “It’s not all right!”
“But if no one . . .”
“Listen to me,” Paisley hissed in a fierce whisper.