Where the River Ends - Charles Martin [26]
On the outside, everything had been taken. Abbie’s professional life, her beauty, the welcoming softness of her bosom, the rounded curves, the confident smile. But that was just the external stuff. We could live without that. What about the stuff you couldn’t see? Her unbridled passion for life, her intimate desire for me, her childlike hope in pretty much anything, her incomparable dreams. Abbie was a shell of her former self. A feeble skeleton dressed in a ghost’s clothing. The only thing left was time.
I’m no sage. I don’t pretend to have this all figured out, but I know this: some live well, some die well, but few love well. Why? I don’t know if I can answer that. We all live, we all die—there is no get-out-of-jail-free card, but it’s the part in between that matters. To love well…that’s something else. It’s a choosing—something done again and again and again. No matter what. And in my experience, if you so choose, you better be willing to suffer hell.
I didn’t look back and wouldn’t look ahead. So I stared at Abbie, sunk the paddle in the water and pulled.
7
I woke up hungry, face tender and one eye swollen completely shut. My lip was busted and looked out of proportion to the rest of my face. Somewhere along my right rib cage, a knifing pain told me that I’d either broken a rib or bruised it rather severely.
I put on some water to make some Raman noodles, when I heard a tap at the door. I pulled some jeans over my boxer shorts and opened the door.
It was her.
I stood there like a deer in the headlights.
She looked up and down the street, then without invitation, stepped past me and into my studio. She was wearing a baseball cap, sweatshirt and jeans and looked sort of like one of those Hollywood A-listers who’s shopping in the mall and trying not to be noticed. I stuck my head out the door, looked up and down the street and then back at her. She motioned to the door, which I shut, and then moved toward the back, near the boiling water, and out of the streetlight.
Hands in pockets, she looked around, taking in what little there was to take in. When she looked up, there were tears in her eyes. “I didn’t get to thank you. I just ran and…” She wiped her face on her shirtsleeve.
“Would you like some tea?”
She smiled. “Yes.”
I might not have had much, but tea I had. I reached into a drawer stuffed with tea bags and she started laughing. “You like tea?”
I shrugged. “I umm…I steal it from work. A bag or two a night. Sometimes three. It’s easier than stealing coffee.”
She laughed again. I poured two mugs of tea and pointed to a chair in the corner. Since I didn’t have a table, I often ate in that chair with my dinner on my lap. She sat and I leaned against the wall, the tea bag string draped across one finger. She sipped and eyed the hundreds of pieces of my work either leaning or hanging around my studio. She stared up at the loft. “You stay busy.”
I picked a dirty T-shirt off the floor, turned it right side out and pushed my head and arms through it. As soon as I did, I realized my mistake. Somewhere in the last week, I’d run out of deodorant and since then, I’d apparently worn that T-shirt. I held out a stop-sign hand and said, “I’ll be right back.” I hobbled up the stairs, put on a clean T-shirt, washed my underarms with a rag, sprayed them with cheap aftershave, then came back down and resumed my tea-steeping dip with the tea bag. She pointed and said, “You forgot…one thing.”
I looked down and found my zipper wide open. While I fumbled with it, she set down her tea and began studying my art. Slowly, she eyed each piece. Really taking them in. I sat quietly. After the third or fourth piece, she stopped and looked around. “Where’s the piece of the Gullah woman?”
“What?”
She pointed to an interior wall. “It used to lean over there. She was working at the slave market, weaving a wiregrass basket.”
Somewhere in my first week at school, I was walking through the market, getting my bearings, when I came upon this woman. She looked mid-seventies. She was