The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [153]
“Paul will come,” Bree said now, looking up. “It was his idea, after all.”
“That’s true,” Norah said. “But he’s in love. I just hope he remembers.”
The air was hot and dry. Norah closed her eyes, thinking back to the late-April day when Paul had surprised her at the office, home for a few hours between one gig and another. Tall and still lanky, he sat on the edge of her desk, tossing her paperweight from one hand to the other as he described his plans for a summer tour of Europe, with a full six weeks in Spain to study with guitarists there. She and Frederic had scheduled a trip to France, and when Paul discovered that they’d be in Paris on the same day, he grabbed a pen from her desk and scrawled LOUVRE on the wall calendar in Norah’s office: Five o’clock, July 21. Meet me in the garden, and I’ll take you out to dinner.
He’d left for Europe a few weeks later, calling her now and then from rustic pensions or tiny hotels by the sea. He was in love with a flautist, the weather was great, the beer in Germany spectacular. Norah listened; she tried not to worry or ask too many questions. Paul was grown now, after all, six feet tall, with David’s dark coloring. She imagined him walking barefoot on the beach, leaning to whisper something to his girlfriend, his breath like a touch on her ear.
She was so discreet she’d never even asked him for an itinerary, so when Bree called from the hospital in Lexington she had not known how to reach him with the shocking news: David, running in the arboretum, had been stricken with a massive heart attack and died.
She opened her eyes. The world was both vivid and hazy in the late-afternoon summer heat, leaves shimmering against the blue sky. She had flown home alone, waking on the plane from uneasy dreams of searching for Paul. Bree helped her through the funeral, and wouldn’t let her return to Paris alone.
“Don’t worry,” Bree said. “He’ll come.”
“He missed the funeral,” Norah said. “I’ll always feel awful about that. They never really resolved things, David and Paul. I don’t think Paul ever got over David’s leaving.”
“And you did?”
Norah looked at Bree, her short spiky hair and clear skin, her green eyes, calm and penetrating. She looked away.
“That sounds like something Ben would ask. I think maybe you’ve been spending too much time with ministers.”
Bree laughed, but she didn’t let it go. “Ben’s not asking,” she said. “I am.”
“I don’t know,” Norah replied slowly, thinking of David the last time she’d seen him, sitting on the porch with a glass of iced tea after a run. They had been divorced for six years and married for eighteen before that: she had known him twenty-five years, a quarter of a century, more than half her lifetime. When Bree had called with news of his death, she simply could not believe it. Impossible to imagine the world without David. It was only later, after the funeral, that grief had caught up with her. “There are so many things I wish I’d said to him. But at least we did talk. Sometimes he just stopped by: to fix something, to say hello. He was lonely, I think.”
“Did he know about Frederic?”
“No. I tried to tell him once, but he didn’t seem to take it in.”
“That sounds like David,” Bree observed. “He and Frederic are so different.”
“Yes. Yes, they are.”
An image of Frederic in Lexington, standing outside in the shadowy dusk, tapping ash into the dirt around her rhododendrons, rushed through her. They had met just over a year ago on another drought-stricken day, in another park. The