The Return Part 3
This is the third and concluding part of "The Return."
“All right, Zelda. It’s as good as it’s gonna get. Stop eating the sunflowers,” I snapped, shooing the cat off the hall table. “I don’t need you hacking them all up at dinner. This is gonna be hard enough.” I looked around. The place was clean. I had put my wrenches, my true crime books and my gun, cuffs and police baton away. Scattered a few vases with flowers around. Straightened out the photos on the book shelf. Hopefully, the home- of- a -serial- killer look has dissipated a little.
The doorbell rang and my breath stopped. Why I was so nervous, I didn’t know. I had lived with this woman for four years. What could she do to me?
I opened the door and Blair ploughed right in. “Hi, the pizza is still warm. Let’s put it in the oven, shall we? I brought some nice Pinot Grigio from the wine store on Elm. They had a very good selection; I was pleasantly surprised. Now, I know what you’re thinking, wine with pizza? But it works; trust me. We did it in Italy all the time.”
“Um, hi.” I relieved her of her packages. “Make yourself at home.”
“Oh is that your cat? Zelda, isn’t it ? She’s pretty.”
“She‘s shy,” I warned, expecting the animal to flee at the sight of guests, as she normally did. “She doesn't like strangers. Hell, she barely tolerates me.”
Zelda immediately curled around Blair's legs, purring loudly. Blair reached down to stroke her and the cat uttered this bizarre trilling sound of pleasure.
I stared at my pet. “Traitor,” I muttered.
“Chalk it up to my natural charm,” Blair laughed. “Whoops, just a second.” She turned back to the door, and waved goodbye to the car in the driveway. It pulled away.
“Who was that?”
“Manny’s Car Service. I didn’t want to worry about driving back to the Inn after some wine, so I took a cab. You know Manny, don’t you? So accommodating. He said just to call when I was ready to go back. Tonight, tomorrow morning, whenever. He said he hadn’t picked up any-- what did he call them-- ladies from here in a while. He seemed pleased that I was joining you. Apparently, I’m a lot more attractive than the last fare he dropped off here. Something about tattoos, piercings and being a bad tipper. Manny’s sweet, isn’t he?” The blonde added, in a faux innocent tone.
“Manny‘s a dead man.”
She laughed again, causing a strange warmth to spread through my chest. I couldn’t believe how glad I was to have her here.
I told myself to stop staring. “I‘ll open the wine and get the hors d’oeuvres,” I added hastily, to break the spell.
“Hors d’oeuvres? So classy. Who would have thought?”
“Hey, I’m a trained caterer, remember? It’s nothing fancy. Just some cucumbers from my garden.”
“It sounds lovely. So this is the Bat Cave. What was Nat talking about? It’s really nice. Look at that view,” she exclaimed, noticing the picture window that faced the river.
I went into the adjoining kitchen area, put the pizza in the oven, brought out the cukes and poured the wine. “It’s home. Small, but enough for me. And the cat.”
“Manny said that you border on an estate. That this is the caretaker’s cottage.
“Manny is just a font of information, isn’t he? Yeah. I’m next door to Windermere Farm, one of the homes of the Domestic Diva,” referring to America’s Favorite Homemaking Guru.
“Really? Have you met her?”
“A few times. She’s not here that often. It’s one of her, what does she say, ‘lesser properties.’ But it’s really nice. This great house built in the thirties, pool, tennis court, stables. It’s a shame that it’s empty so much. Though I think it’s why she likes renting this place to a cop.”
“What’s she like?” Blair asked.
“Rich, egocentric, purports to be a blonde. She reminds me of someone, but I can’t think who.”
“Tres amusant, Jo. Cheers,” she said, taking the wine I offered and lifting her glass. “To old friends.”
“Yeah, to old friends.” I paused. “So, you had this wine in Italy. Do you and Cliff go there much?”
“We used to,” Blair said shortly. “Oh, look at those pictures.” She walked over to the bookcase. “Oh my Lord, here we all are; the baby fat; it’s chilling.” She showed me the photo of the pair of us, with Nat and Tootie, all in our Eastland uniforms, smiling at the camera, with our arms around each other and Mrs. G. It was my favorite.
“And what’s this?” she asked, pointing to another frame. “It looks like a bunch of hairy thugs lifting Natalie in a chair above their heads.”
“That’s pretty much right. Nat and Snake had their wedding reception at this biker bar near Woodstock. That’s a picture of the hora dance. What a party. The rabbi got trashed. There was a big fight. Tootie and Jeff got caught doing it under the pool table. It was great. You should’ve been there.” I meant it casually, just something you say, but Blair’s face turned to granite.
“Yes, I should have.” There was a pause. “There was this medical conference that Cliff had to attend and he really wanted…” she trailed off but then seemed to gather herself. “Oh well, c’est la vie. Anyway, I want the whole tour. Nat says I should be sure to ask about the bodies in the basement.”
************************************
“That was delicious,” Blair declared, as she reclined against the pillows of the couch. “There’s nothing like pizza from Peekskill. The stuff we get in Dallas just doesn’t compare.”
“Yeah, it’s still pretty great. You must be glad some things haven’t changed.”
Blair smiled. “I am. Excuse me for a second. I need to use the facilities. Through the bedroom, right?” She stood up and left the room.
I leaned back, took another sip of wine and looked at my cat, who, perched on the armchair across from us, had been staring and purring at Blair throughout dinner.
“What is with you?” I inquired. “Could you be any more obvious?” Zelda looked at me and uttered one of her rusty hinge meows.
I sighed. “I know. What’re we going to do when she leaves again?”
Blair came back, holding an object. “I’m sorry, I saw this on your dresser, and couldn’t resist. Is this the rock?”
“The rock?”
“The rock that Mrs. Garrett gave you for graduation. What did she say, tough on the outside but, on the inside, all sorts of marvelous things going on.”
“Yeah, it’s my geode. Do you still have your sweater?”
“I do. It’s not cold enough in Dallas to wear it much and it’s a little big on me now, but I still have it. Stored away.” She fell silent
As I watched my ex-roommate turn my geode in her hands, with a sad look on her face, Tootie’s theory kept running through my head. Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore.
“Blair, are you dying or something?”
She recoiled. “What!?”
“What is it? You can tell me. Cancer, AIDS, a brain tumor?”
“Jo! Why would you say such a horrible thing?” she asked, in a shocked tone
“Because you’ve come back after all this time and you’re being so being so, I dunno, nice. Bringing me pizza and wine, complementing my cucumbers and my house, petting my cat. And you haven't been babbling about your fancy husband or money or country clubs-- or anything. It just seems, you know, strange. Like you’re in shock or something.”
Blair stared at me, slack jawed. “I see. Just because I’m not acting like a spoiled adolescent. Just because I have a modicum of manners; just because I know how to behave when I am a guest in someone’s home, you think that I’m suffering from some fatal brain disease. That’s very complementary, Jo. Thanks so much.” She sounded annoyed. “No, I’m not dying. I’m perfectly healthy. I suppose the idea that I actually might have matured a little in the past ten years never occurred to you?”
“I guess not,” I muttered, embarrassed. “Sorry. Anyway, it was Tootie’s idea,” I added defensively.
Blair rolled her eyes. “As you may have noticed, Tootie has a tendency to over-dramatize.”
“Yeah, I know, but still, I just have to ask. Why did you come back? And, more to the point, why ‘d you stay away so long?”
She was silent for a moment. “All right. I suppose I should explain. You have a right to know.” She sat down on the couch and turned to face me with a serious look.
“Jo, when we were together at school, what did I want most out of life?”
Whoa. I blanked. “Um, Chad Broxton’s fraternity pin?”
“Ha ha. No, really.”
“I don’t know. I don’t think I thought about it much.”
“I wanted a stable family life,” Blair said. “Something that neither you nor I had.”
“I guess that’s right. I can see that.”
“And what did I fear the most?” she asked.
“Um, my wrath?” I supplied
“Oh please. Nothing made my day more than getting you mad. No, what I feared the most was ending up like my mother- moving from man to man, a serial divorcee. So when Cliff asked me to marry him, I thought, well this is it. I can start to make that family-to get what I’d dreamed about.”
“OK.” For some reason I wanted to reassure her. “There was nothing wrong with that.”
“No, there wasn’t, although I know you thought I was too young. Anyway, I told myself that if I was going to do this, I was going to be the best wife in the history of the planet. So that became my goal. My life’s work. And I succeeded. I devoted myself to Cliff, his career, our home. I did a very good job.”
“Blair, I’m sure that’s true,” I replied. I couldn’t stop there though. “But there was no reason to cut us off, like you did. I mean, you could’ve stayed in touch.”
She shook her head. “No, I couldn’t; it was too hard.”
“Too hard?”
“Yes. I’d loved it here too much. Being with you, with everyone, it was my whole life. I just thought a clean break would be better. Like tearing off a Band-Aid.”
“A Band-Aid?" I sputtered. “That’s what we were to you? Me, Nat, Tootie, Mrs. G.? A Band-Aid?”
“Jo, I truly believed it couldn’t work otherwise. I though I had to start totally afresh with Cliff. I was an idiot. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”
Her apologies always turned me to mush. “All right, I guess I understand. So you needed to get away. To put Peekskill in the past. So what’s changed? Why are you here now?”
She looked at me and then took another sip of wine, draining her glass, as if for courage. “Well, at the beginning of the year, Cliff finally got the promotion at the hospital we’d been working for all this time and we started talking about having children. And I suddenly realized that I didn’t want to do it anymore. That I couldn’t spend the rest of my life as Dr. Cliff Winfield’s wife. And that if I didn’t leave now, I never would, because, if we had kids, I wouldn’t put them through that.”
My heart started to pound. “You’re getting a divorce?”
She gave me a rueful look. “Like mother, like daughter, I guess. It became final two weeks ago.”
“Oh Blair, I’m so sorry.” And I meant it. It had to hurt her.
“Thank you. I am too. But Cliffie and I are still friends. In some ways, he wasn’t that surprised.”
“Really? Had you been fighting?”
“No. We never fought. That was part of the problem. He thought I was perfect.”
I snorted. “And you objected to that?”
She smiled. “It is ironic, isn’t it? But for some reason, I don’t like it when people just assume I’m flawless, which of course I am. I like to have to convince them. Like I convinced you.”
“You never convinced me of any such thing,” I protested.
“Didn’t I?”
We stared at each other. What the hell? In for a dollar, in for a doughnut. Waving my career goodbye, Heiress Assaulted by Lesbo Cop-I could see the Post headline now-- I leaned over and kissed her. It was like liquid fire.
I waited for the scream, the slap to the face, the knee to the private parts, but it never happened. She moaned a little but didn’t pull away. In fact she reciprocated, or at least I think she did-- where else did that tongue come from?
I started to draw back but she pulled me in again. “Don’t stop,” she whispered.
“OK.” I paused. “Wait, did you mean ‘don’t stop’ or ‘don’t’ period, ‘stop’ period?”
She glared at me. “You’re debating punctuation at a time like this?” She pushed me back against the cushions and kissed me again.
Sweet Jesus.
“We need to go to bed,” Blair said softly, her lips pressed against my throat. “And, to be clear, since you seem particularly dense at the moment, I mean go to bed together.”
“OK,” I repeated, running my hands up and down her back, as my insides turned to molten lava. “If you’re sure.”
“Jo, trust me; I’m sure. I’ve thinking about this for a long time. Nine years, five months and ten days to be exact.”
“You thought about me?” I gasped.
“Almost every night, sometimes even when Cliff and I were…..”
“I thought about you! All the time!” Naturally, I started to leak; I swear, someday I’m getting these tear ducts surgically removed.
She put her hands on the sides of my face, and gently thumbed the moisture away. “Well, I guess it’s finally time for us to live the fantasy, Polniaczek. Fasten your seat belt. It’s going to be a wild ride.”
*****************************
The sun finally dropped over the horizon. I leant back in the porch swing, smiling at the memory. What a night. It was so amazing that I didn’t even feel bad for all the lost years. Nearly a decade as a married woman had given Blair a lot of skills. We finally crawled out of bed late the next afternoon, barely making it on time for dinner at Antoine’s. When we walked into the restaurant, both sporting enormous hickeys, Natalie took one look and erupted into applause and laughter, while Tootie gasped and burst into tears of joy. Sounding like Moses, she pronounced that the tribe was finally whole again. Like it was always supposed to be.
The porch door opened and Blair sat down next to me. “Hey. Dinner should be ready in about forty-five minutes. The Coq Au Vin smells divine, if I do say so myself.”
I put my arm around her shoulders and pulled her close. “Thanks. I’ll do burgers tomorrow. So, do you want to go into Manhattan this weekend?” I was always careful to offer chances for us to get out of Peekskill. It had been a month since she’d come back, and I didn’t want her to get bored with the town. So far, that didn't appear to be a problem.
Blair had simply stayed on after that first weekend. Keeping her room at the Inn but spending most nights, and a lot of fun afternoons, at the Bat Cave. It had been the best month of my life. And I wasn’t the only fan of the new arrangement. Natalie was totally psyched, happy for me and thrilled that Blair's purchasing habits had increased the town's sales tax revenues by twenty percent. Tootie seemed to be floating on air, her dream of the four of us all living in each others’ pockets finally realized. And Mrs. G was beside herself, giving us goofy grins whenever she saw Blair and me together. She’d even offered Blair a job, teaching English and Art at Eastland, which, to my amazement, Blair accepted, on the condition that she have time to take classes at Langley to finish her degree. No, it was working out great. I was happy before. Now, I was alive.
"Let’s just stay here,” Blair interjected, stopping my reverie. “I have a lot to do. I have to finish some shopping on Saturday and go over my lesson plan for World Literature.”
“Finish shopping? When have you ever really finished shopping?”
“Yes, well this is something I hope you’ll like.”
“Sexy lingerie?” I asked hopefully.
“No. Windermere Farm.”
“What?!? You bought the estate next door?!?”
“Now Jo, don’t get mad. I can’t stay at the Inn forever. There’s not enough room for my clothes. And, I love being here, but I need more entertainment space. For the student teas and all. And you can come up whenever you want and keep your tools in the mechanic’s shed and there’s a nice greenhouse for your plants and …”
“Blair,” I pressed my fingers to her lips. “I’m not mad. I’ve grown up a little bit too. My sexy girlfriend buys a fantastic mansion, right next door, with a pool and a tennis court. Really, what’s not to like? Though I am surprised the Domestic Diva wanted to sell.”
“IRS problems. I got a good deal. Anyway, it‘ll be fun. We can play ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover.’ You know, brooding caretaker comes to visit the mistress of the estate to offer ‘services’.”
“Oh geez. I hope this isn’t the kind of stuff you plan to teach in your literature class.”
“Of course not. We’re starting with the Odyssey.”
“Really? I remember studying that with you in Mrs. Nelson’s class. We had a fight about it.”
“We fought about the Odyssey?” Blair asked.
“We fought about everything.”
“This is true. So what was the argument?”
“I said it was an adventure story. You know, wars, shipwrecks, Cyclops. You said it was a love story. That it was really about Ulysses and Penelope being reunited. A classic romance.”
“Hmm. Interesting.”
“You know, Blair, I just thought of something. You’re Ulysses.”
“I’m Ulysses?”
“Yeah. You were away and now you’re back. And I waited for you.”
“You’re Penelope?”
“Yeah.”
Blair paused. “Well, that’s very romantic, Jo, but I really don’t see you as Penelope. She was patient; you’re not. And there’s no loom.”
“Loom?”
“Yes, Penelope had a loom. She wove. You wouldn’t know what to do with a loom.”
“I could handle a loom.”
“You could not handle a loom. Face it, you aren’t the weaving type.”
“I could handle a loom, Blair,” I snapped. “I’m very manually dexterous. After all, how hard….” I stopped. “Are we really arguing about this?”
“We are.” She put her arms around my neck and gave me a radiant smile. “Isn’t it great?” She kissed me and then started undoing the top button of my shirt. “OK, Penny, I’ll give. We have forty five minutes until dinner. So, about that manual dexterity…”
The End