Summer Friends Page 10

  Maggie walked toward the back of the store, past painted furniture and a display of jewelry made from sea glass and a collection of handmade wooden toys. None of it was of interest. What was of interest to her was Delphine’s strange decision to go home to Ogunquit all those years ago. It had seemed like a betrayal of their friendship. In a way, she had been heartbroken. And it had only made things worse that Delphine was so evasive and sometimes downright silent when Maggie tried to talk to her, to offer support or consolation. For a long time, Maggie had felt rejected and angry and sad. Delphine hadn’t seemed to care. Maggie had never let Delphine know just how upset she was. Pride had kept her silent on that score. Maybe it shouldn’t have.

  But eventually, inevitably, Maggie had stopped offering a shoulder to cry on. To be rejected time and again was humiliating. The demands of business school began to take precedence in her life and before long she had met a handsome, serious law student named Gregory Wilkes. Maggie felt her future opening up before her and it looked bright. She still thought about—and cared about—Delphine, but increasingly their relationship began to seem like a thing of the past. Maggie was a romantic, yes, but she was also Dorothy and Walter’s daughter. She had no intention of wallowing in a seemingly defunct past when an entire future lay ahead of her.

  She finished her MBA and landed the first of several good jobs in investment banking. She and Gregory got married. They had a daughter, and then, another one. Maggie’s mother was pleased. Gregory made partner. Maggie’s father was pleased. They bought a large house in Lexington, then a larger one, with an in-ground pool and media room. They traveled to Europe, skied out west, and soaked up the sun in Anguilla. On the occasion of their fifteenth wedding anniversary, Gregory gave Maggie a four-carat diamond ring, an upgrade of her original engagement ring. It was heavily insured. Just as the house and the cars and the art—their entire lives—were heavily insured against disaster from without.

  But sometimes trouble—if not exactly disaster—came from within. Because here I am, Maggie thought, looking blankly at a tall blown-glass vase that was selling for five hundred dollars, all these years later, trying once again to make a connection with a person who effectively abandoned me. She shouldn’t have told Delphine that she had kept her cards and letters. Not yet, at least. It had probably scared her away, like the too-early revelation of the trouble in her marriage. Delphine hadn’t answered a call she had made that morning. Maggie wondered if she would ever respond.

  “May I help you?”

  Maggie jumped a little and then smiled at the saleswoman at her side. “Oh, no, thanks,” she said. “I’m just looking.”

  The saleswoman smiled back politely. “Just let me know if you’d like to see anything in one of the cases,” she said.

  Maggie nodded and the saleswoman moved off to approach another customer. A moment later, Maggie left the store and stood on the busy corner at the center of town, at a complete loss about what to do with herself next.

  14

  1977

  “Hey,” Maggie said from the porch.

  Delphine clumped up the steps and threw herself into one of the white wicker chairs. “Hey.” Her greeting was accompanied by a scowl.

  Maggie raised an eyebrow. “Uh, something wrong?”

  Delphine was wearing a scratch–’n’–sniff T-shirt. On it were the words “American Pie.” Below the words was an image of a slice of pepperoni pizza. She’d been wearing it a lot, so the scent of the pepperoni was not as strong as it had been when she’d first got it for her birthday back in March. Maggie was wearing a thin, slightly crinkly cotton top embroidered with Indian designs. Both girls wore jeans. Delphine’s were patched at the knees with similar fabric to hide holes. Maggie’s were patched with stylized neon flowers, just for the fun of it.

  “What’s wrong,” Delphine said, “is that I can’t go to the concert.”

  Maggie shrieked. “What do you mean you can’t go? You bought your ticket already.”

  “I know,” Delphine said darkly. “It’s my mother. She changed her mind.”

  “What? No way. She can’t do that!”

  “Uh, yeah, she can and she did. And please stop shouting.”

  “Sorry. I mean, I don’t understand. What happened?”

  Delphine sighed. “What happened is that my mother was talking to one of her friends at church, and this lady told my mother about one of her friends whose son had gone to a Dream concert and said that everyone was doing drugs. So, my mother told me that I couldn’t go.”

  “But that’s crazy.” Maggie perched on the chair next to Delphine’s. “Not everyone does drugs. We don’t do drugs! Ugh.”

  “I told her that. But it didn’t make any difference.”

  “Does she know my dad is driving us down to Portsmouth and waiting for us outside the club? Does she know the concert isn’t even in a big arena?”

  “Yeah, she knows all that. But she says it doesn’t matter. People do drugs everywhere, she says.”

  Maggie abruptly stood and put her hands on her hips. “She doesn’t trust you.”

  “She says she does trust me. It’s that she doesn’t trust other people.”

  “I can’t believe this, Delphine. You worked all those extra shifts at the diner to pay for that ticket.”

  “I’m aware,” Delphine said dryly.

  “Look, do you want my mother or father to talk to her?”

  “No! I mean, thanks, but that would make everything worse, believe me.”

  “What does your father say about this?”

  Delphine sighed again. “Whatever my mother says.”

  Maggie sat back down again. “I can’t believe this is happening. We were so looking forward to this.”

  “Well, you can still go.”

  “Are you crazy? No way I’m going without you.”

  “Your brother will be there,” Delphine pointed out. “You can sit with him and his girlfriend.”

  “Uh-uh, no way. I’d have absolutely no fun without you.”

  “But what about your ticket?”

  Maggie shrugged. “Maybe one of Peter’s friends wants one. Or two. We could sell them.”

  “Isn’t that called scalping? I think that’s illegal.”

  “No, I think that’s only when you ask for more money than you paid. I’m pretty sure.”

  “Okay.” Delphine hesitated. “Look, are you sure you’re okay about this? Really, I wouldn’t be upset if you went to the concert without me.”

  Maggie rolled her eyes. “How many times do I have to remind you, dummy? We’re best friends. Best friends stick by each other through thick and thin. For better or worse.”

  “I think that’s supposed to be a marriage.”

  “Whatever. End of conversation. I’ll talk to Peter this afternoon, see if he can sell the tickets for us. Okay?”

  Delphine smiled. “Thanks, Maggie. I mean it. Thank you.”

  “You’d do the same for me. Hey, let’s go cheer ourselves up.”

  “Okay. With what?”

  “Ice-cream sandwiches? There are some in the back of the freezer. My father hides them back there hoping my mother won’t see them and yell at him.”

  Delphine smiled. “That sounds good. If your father won’t mind our stealing his ice cream.”

  “He can buy more. Come on. Oh, and Laverne & Shirley is on tonight. Want to watch it here?”

  “Sure,” Delphine said, following Maggie inside. She felt a little bit better already.

  15

  It was early Friday evening, about five-thirty, when Harry got to Delphine’s house.

  Harry Stringfellow, aged fifty-five, drove a truck for one of the largest building material suppliers in Maine. It was a good job in many ways, especially for Harry, who was too restless to last at a desk job.

  He was a few inches over six feet tall and slim, though middle age had deposited a layer of fat on his belly that no amount of hard work seemed able to remove. His hair was thick and brown and begin
ning to go grey, as was his beard, which he wore a bit too long for Delphine’s taste. His eyes were large and blue green. Recently, he had taken to wearing reading glasses, but like Delphine, his eyesight was generally good. Around his neck and hidden under his work shirt he wore a large silver cross on an old leather cord. The cross, he said, had belonged to his father, long dead. In the ten years Delphine had known Harry, he hadn’t once passed the threshold of a church, but the cross never left his body and if anyone asked, he considered himself a Christian.

  Delphine and Harry hadn’t seen each other in a few days, which wasn’t entirely unusual. Delphine was always busy. And Harry had filled in for a buddy whose wife had gone into early labor. Buck’s route had taken him all the way to Augusta. According to Harry, the wife and baby were doing well and Buck now owed him a favor.

  Harry put his empty lunch box on the coffee table. “I saw Ellen today,” he said.

  “Oh.” No matter how many years passed, the mention of Harry’s wife always came as something of an uncomfortable surprise. “How is she?” she asked.

  “The same. The nurse said she’d had a bad night, though.”

  “Did she recognize you?” Harry liked—needed—to imagine that Ellen was aware of his presence. It meant a lot to him. Sometimes, often, Delphine wished that it didn’t.

  Harry nodded. “I think she did. Her doctor would probably say no, but he doesn’t know Ellen like I do.”

  Delphine couldn’t argue that point. Maybe Harry did know more than Ellen’s doctors about the state of her comprehension. Even if he didn’t, he would never admit that. He hadn’t once been to a doctor in the ten years Delphine had known him, even when he’d sprained his wrist. Even when he’d had what anyone could see was pneumonia and spent almost three weeks wheezing and hacking. He could be distrustful of professionals. He could be stubborn.

  “So,” she said, “you’re still determined to keep things as they are, even though Ellen has no chance of a recovery that would allow her to live a normal life?”

  “If by ‘keep things as they are’ you mean am I determined to stay married to my wife and to visit her faithfully once a week, then yes. I am.”

  “But you say you love me, Harry.”

  “I do. Of course I do.” Harry sighed and rubbed his palm over his forehead. “Del, we’ve been through this. I’m not divorcing Ellen. I made a promise at the altar to love and cherish her until death do us part. I can only give you what you’ve already got of me. I’m sorry.”

  Delphine took a deep breath. She wondered what had made her bring this up again. She knew how Harry felt. And she wasn’t in the mood for a fight. Why again and why now?

  “I’m sorry, too,” she said, disappointed in herself. “I’ll get dinner together. Dave down at the Cove gave me a couple of haddock as payment for the sweater I knit for his daughter’s birthday.”

  But Harry didn’t respond. He was already sitting deeply in his favorite armchair, the Portland Press Herald open on his lap. Melchior was perched on top of the narrow freestanding bookcase, one eye open and directed down at the top of Harry’s head. Melchior was used to Harry by now, but that didn’t mean that he liked him.

  Delphine went into the kitchen to prepare dinner. While she got out the pans and bowls and knives she would need, she thought about how her romantic life had come to this . . . interesting state. The truth was that for a long time after Robert she had remained almost obstinately single. Though several men had pursued her, she had ignored them or turned them away. To any who asked—mainly, her sister and, for a while, Jemima—she said she didn’t have any interest in dating. She said she wasn’t lonely. She kept very busy, sometimes insanely busy, at the farm and at the diner. She was needed. She read voraciously and she learned to knit. Eventually, even Jackie stopped suggesting she go out on a date with one of the few local eligible bachelors. Jackie figured that her sister had her memories to keep her warm at night. You heard of such things, in old novels, women living on the fumes of a great love. And Jackie, perhaps rightly, had always assumed that Robert Evans had been her sister’s great love. Not that Delphine had ever admitted as much. On the subject of Robert Evans she had always been very quiet.

  And then, ten years ago, she had met Harry. As she cleaned and cut vegetables for the salad she thought about what had attracted her to Harry Stringfellow. She didn’t quite know, beyond the fact of his basic good nature and his ruggedly handsome face, which even a too-long beard couldn’t disguise. It was true that he was Robert’s antithesis. He hadn’t gone to college. He didn’t read anything but newspapers and the occasional spy thriller. He didn’t care about traveling farther than his brother’s house in Framingham, Massachusetts. He didn’t like “fancy food.” Sure, he didn’t challenge her intellectually, but she got enough of that through her reading and through the occasional conversation with Nancy, the town librarian. And he held old-fashioned, some would say ridiculous or even distorted, notions about honor and duty—hence his refusal to divorce the wife whom he saw as blameless in their mutual misfortune. Well, Delphine certainly agreed that Ellen was blameless. Car accidents happened to the best of drivers.

  She took the butter out of the fridge so that it wouldn’t be too hard when they sat down to eat. Harry liked his butter spreadable. She tried to remember if Robert had liked butter but couldn’t. Delphine felt oddly sad about this. She had never told Harry about Robert. There seemed to be no reason why he should know that as a twenty-one-year-old she had been engaged. And engaged to a man whom even Harry, with his narrow media choices, would probably know at least by name or by sight. There had been a profile in Time magazine a few years back. She had seen Harry flip through a discarded Time at Bessie’s diner once. It was entirely possible that he would recognize the name Robert Evans.

  The truth was that she feared Harry’s reaction. Rather, she feared how his reaction would make her feel. She imagined several ways in which Harry might take the news. He might be uncomfortable with the revelation, feel he didn’t measure up to her former fiancé. Or he might not care one little bit. He might even, she imagined, be incredulous. She could almost hear Harry saying, “What were you, of all people, doing with someone like this Evans fellow? What could you possibly have had in common?” He might even, she imagined, be unimpressed. She could almost hear him saying, “So? What’s the big deal? He puts his pants on one leg at a time just like any other man.”

  Dinner was ready. Harry joined her at the table in the kitchen after washing the newsprint from his hands. Delphine brought the salad to the table. She had lightly breaded the haddock with panko crumbs. Earlier, Jemima had dropped off a loaf of molasses bread fresh from her oven. For dessert, there were blueberries with heavy cream. Harry liked to sprinkle sugar on top of his berries and cream. With his coffee, he took three sugars.

  They ate in silence for a few minutes before Harry, having devoured his fish, said, “Oh, I’ve been meaning to ask, how are things going with that old friend of yours, the one from Massachusetts?”

  “Fine,” she said.

  “Good. I’m glad you’re having some fun. You work too hard, Delphine.”

  Delphine took a careful sip of her water. She hadn’t said that she was having fun with Maggie. All she had said was that things were fine. Harry had heard what he had wanted to hear. She took a breath and tried to calm herself. She reminded herself that most men, at least the ones she knew, were poor listeners. And Harry was a good guy. She believed he had heard what he had wanted to hear, which was that she was having a fun time with her old friend. He cared about her.

  And so did Maggie, Delphine suddenly realized. After all, Maggie had sought her out after all those years of non-communication. Her return to Ogunquit had to be due to more than mere curiosity, the desire to see up close and for herself how an old friend had fared. For better or worse, Maggie wanted to spend time with her. They might actually come to enjoy time in each other’s company. Stranger things had been known to happen.

  And,
right there at the dinner table, for the first time in years and years Delphine remembered in her gut what the friendship used to feel like—the intensity of the emotional bond, the excitement of it, and the deep comfort it afforded. It was a fleeting moment of visceral memory but a powerful one.

  She suddenly felt frightened. She suddenly felt liberated. Things—what things?—might actually change a little if she allowed them to change. If she wanted them to change, and she wasn’t sure that she did, but . . .

  Delphine took a bite of fish and chewed carefully. She hadn’t spoken to Maggie since they had met at the Old Village Inn two evenings earlier. She felt bad about not having returned her call. So what if Maggie was a little weird, holding on to every scrap of paper Delphine had ever given her? Some people were just pack rats. Some people were just hopelessly sentimental. That didn’t make them bad.

  Delphine cleared her throat. “I’m going to call Maggie after dinner,” she said. “We’ll probably get together tomorrow evening. Just so you know.”

  Harry nodded, engrossed now in buttering a thick slice of Jemima’s molasses bread. Delphine wondered if he had heard her.

  16

  “Thanks for suggesting this place,” Maggie said. “It’s fun.”

  Delphine had, in fact, called Maggie after Friday night’s haddock dinner and had asked her to meet her at Billy’s Chowder House in Wells the following evening. The sprawling restaurant wasn’t fancy, but as at the Cape Neddick Lobster Pound, the food was good, and the view of the surrounding marsh was magnificent whether the tide was coming in or going out.

  They sat at the bar rather than at a table, which was Delphine’s choice. She recognized many of the other customers, some locals from Ogunquit but mostly from Wells. It was a predominantly older crowd, with a few people well over eighty. Several large-screen televisions were mounted around the room, each one broadcasting a sports event. The bartender that evening, Kelly, was typical of all the bartenders at the restaurant—hardworking, friendly, and totally unflappable. Delphine suspected that half of Kelly’s male customers, young and old, were a little bit in love with her.