Chapter 8

Better late than never? There's a twist in this chapter if that helps :-)

Note: For those of you still out there following along, as always, thank you. I obviously took a break from the project, and I’ll address that in the next podcast, if you’re interested. It may help to go back and re-read at least some of Chapters 1 through 7, which you’ll find by pointing your browser to this link:

Chapters 1 - 8 on my writing web site keithkindred.com

Chapter 8

“You went away for a while there,” said Justin.

I’d stopped talking and he had the discipline to see if I was finished speaking.  His words served as a kind of wake up call and I turned in his direction and studied his expression without worrying if he would find it awkward.  The corners of his mouth were turned downward, not in some kind of frown, but more like to say, hey, it happens.

“Sorry about that,” I said.  “That’s what you get for sitting with an old man on a park bench.”

We both smiled and he nodded his head.

“No,” he said. “This is exactly the kind of thing I had in mind with this project.  There were a couple times I wanted to ask a question or whatever, but I didn’t want to interrupt the flow.”

He looked at his feet again, a sign I’d already come to know meant he had something to say he considered important.

“I could see you going back in time,” he added.

I rubbed my chin as if I still had a beard, which I had worn for most of the time I was married to Lauren.  I decided to shave it off the day after her funeral as if to signify a new phase of my life had started, but old habits die hard and I still went to fidget with it in times of thought or reflection.

“Yeah,” I said, “I think I told you earlier, it’s not that often anymore, but I still do think of her sometimes.  And when I do, if I’m alone and it feels safe, I let myself relive it …the good, sure, but also the bad sometimes.”

He looked up from his feet and our eyes met.

“She’s still in me,” I said.  “For better or worse.”

What sixteen year old knows how to respond to such a statement?  How would anyone know what to say? I recognized it was my job to fill the void and keep the ball rolling.

“How long have we been here?” I asked, looking at my watch.  I knew the answer - 50 minutes - but I wanted to see if he did.

He picked up his phone and looked at it.

“About an hour,” he said.  “Maybe a little less.”

“You need to go?” I asked.

He shook his head and set the phone next to him on the bench.

“No,” he said.  “Our family doesn’t really eat dinner together or anything like that and I already texted a friend I was maybe going to meet later that I wouldn’t be coming.”

 “I hadn’t even noticed,” I said.

He shrugged his shoulders but didn’t speak.

“If you have to go,” I said, “I can just skip to the end and summarize.”

“No,” he said, “I want to hear it the way you want to tell it, and if I had something important going on, I’d tell you.  But I am getting a little curious, if I’m being honest.”

His expression was a confident one.

“How so?’ I asked.

“I keep remembering,” he said, “how you said the relationship ends abruptly or something like that, you know, when you were telling me about what it feels like to have your heart broken.”

“Yeah?” I said, “and you want me to get to that already?”

He picked up his phone and, from what I could tell, checked to see if he had any texts or something like that, and then looked at me.

“I guess you could say that,” he said.

I smiled and nodded.

“Yeah,” he added, “like I said before, I’ve been curious about it since you brought it up..”

******

Like I was saying before, she was in her car this one day reading something while I waited for her and I went back in the house.  Eventually I walked back out to the porch and saw that she was already halfway up the driveway, carrying a couple of paper grocery bags. 

“Hey, baby,” she said. “What’s up?” 

I never knew if she was toying with me, teasing me about her lateness, or whether she was just that unaware of time and how that lateness impacted others. And she never said, as I think most people do, hey, sorry I’m late, but …you know, offer some kind of explanation for it.  And I mean never, not even once.

“Hey,” I said, refusing to play the role of bad guy, the one making too big a deal out of her being late again. 

          I also decided not to ask her about why she was in the driveway in her car for ten minutes reading.  That was the thing about Nica, if you asked why she was late or what she was reading in the car she would gaslight you in a way about asking, suggest you were a control freak or something.  There wasn’t anyone else I knew that, if they were almost an hour late, wouldn’t offer some, if not apology, explanation unprompted.  It’s like a social norm or something, but not Nica.

“Is that dinner?” I asked, reaching over to take one of the bags from her.

She handed me both bags and moved to put her purse down by her shoes, which she had kicked off by the door.

“Yeah,” she said, “I thought we’d have a kale salad with some grilled salmon on top.”

“Yum,” I said, “Thanks for stopping by the store to get that.”

“Of course, baby,” she said.  “What have you been doing all day?”

I hesitated because I knew a laundry list of tasks would be boring for both of us, but it was also becoming more unusual for her to actually ask about my day, to express a curiosity about the farm, about me. When we first started dating we spent a lot of time talking about what we might do in the world, especially together but now about a year and half into our relationship, that almost never happened.  Slowly, gradually, in a way I didn’t notice and then all of the sudden I did, Nica was drifting away. Or we were drifting away from each other, I don’t know, but I thought I should give her some details or she might think I didn’t care if she showed an interest.

“Nothing special,” I said.  “You know, just stuff around the farm.  The big thing I did was work on recruiting new members.  We’re losing people and I’m not really sure why. You can’t really do community supported agriculture without community support, you know?”

That was my way of inviting Nica to help me speculate about that issue, discuss it, maybe help me figure out some solutions.

“Yeah,” she said.  “Well that’s good you did that.”

It’s funny how we expect our partners, our friends and family, to know what we want and need but don’t tell them.  I should have asked her if she could help me process the issue a little, talk with me about it, that I was anxious and doing that would help me.  And that I wanted us to play that role for each other, that this is what partner’s do.  But I didn’t.  Instead, I offered more hints.

“Yeah,” I said.  “I’m a little worried about it.”

She had been unpacking the groceries on the counter, but stopped to look up at me.

“Can you help me get ready for dinner by chopping the vegetables?” she asked.

I looked into her pretty green eyes, the same ones I gazed into at the lake that day, but I felt something different this time.

“Sure,” I said, reaching for the vegetables.

“You know what?” she said. “On second thought, you do a better job cooking the salmon than I do.  Can you do it on the grill pan the way you do? You know, with the lemon pepper spice thing.”

I went into the living room to turn on the radio for some music and then we essentially switched places in the kitchen so I could reach the pans and things I’d need to grill the salmon.  She, in turn, brought out the cutting board and knives she would need to prepare the salad and then we both went to work.

“So what did you do with your day?” I asked.

She looked up excitedly from her task and said, “I had a really productive day!”

She then proceeded to tell me about her activities, but the thing with Nica by then is, I could never tell exactly what she had done or where her efforts were leading.  From what I could decipher she spent a lot of time with her friend Lisa, who she had become close to since we came to New York and the farm.  She spent a lot of time running errands.  And she was applying for jobs or heard of various opportunities and explored those, though I was never really sure of what exactly they were, nor did they lead to anything concrete.  

She was running me through her day in this way while we each worked on our part for dinner.  I was doing my best to follow her when I noticed she was moving around a lot to the music playing from the radio in the living room, but I had turned the volume up loud so we could hear it in the kitchen, a little too loud, it turns out. 

Nica said something I couldn’t hear during the chorus of Duran Duran’s song Hungry Like the Wolf and so I leaned over, resting my hand on the counter so I could ask her to repeat what she had said.

And that’s when it happened.

The funny thing is, I don’t think she understood what she’d done until I held my hand up and she could see the blood squirting out. Strangely enough, it didn’t really hurt and I didn’t realize she’d cut off my pinky finger until I saw it resting in a larger piece of kale, like a lettuce taco or something. Thinking about it later, as I have done so many times, I was surprised and I have to say a little proud that I didn’t panic.  But I was also wondering why she wasn’t freaking out when I could tell she didn’t see what she had done and that my reaction offered no clue. 

Or that’s what I thought, anyway.

“Nica,” I said calmly but in a breathy way, “we have to go to the hospital.”

“I know,” she said.  “Let’s put it in ice and then maybe they can reattach it.”

She looked into my eyes and I hers.  I saw no sign of panic, no freaking out, for sure.  Instead, I saw something I could not identify.  My eyes moved from hers to the rest of her face …her mouth, her cheeks, her neck.  All were soft, for lack of a better word.  No tension anywhere.  No strained muscles.  

I had been calm, but her calmness confused me, made me anxious.  Shouldn’t she be acting a certain way, I thought?  Not that I wanted her to feel bad, because it could happen to anyone, but still. I was further unnerved by the amount of blood on the counter, the sink, the floor.

Still, she remained calm and even took the lead, grabbing a dishcloth from the sink and wrapping it around the wound.  I worried about bacteria or germs or something leading to an infection but I was the one in shock now.  She led me to her car, opened the passenger door for me and it closed it after I was seated.  She started the engine, thrust it into reverse and proceeded in an exaggerated form of her herky jerk driving to the hospital emergency room.

The rest of it is a blur to me, but they couldn’t reattach it.  Didn’t even try, actually.  They told me almost immediately that it wasn't possible.

******

We were on the park bench as we had been for the last hour, but I wasn’t looking at Justin when I told him this last part of the story and I’m not sure why. There was a kind of emotional intimacy to that event where I thought eye contact would make the situation…weird for him.  

Occasionally, people would ask about my finger when they noticed it was missing, which wasn’t as often as you might think.  To those people, I would just say it was from an accident when I was a kid and usually that was the end of it. Other times, I can see them notice it but they have the social grace to not ask about it.  I suppose I’ve also learned to hide it, though I don’t think about doing that consciously.  But you keep your hand in your pocket, you hide it behind a bag you’re carrying, even just roll your other fingers over the scar by making a fist.  You feel ashamed, even subconsciously, and you learn to hide the source of that shame. We all do it, whether it’s something about our bodies or some experience deep inside us. Or both.

In all our time together, Justin hadn’t noticed it either, and I had my hand - it’s my right hand, though I’m left handed - out and exposed several times.  Now I looked at him and, to my surprise, he wasn’t looking at his shoes or the ground, but straight into my eyes.  I could practically see him willing himself to not look down at my hands, which made me smile.

“I can show it to you,” I said. “It’s not gross or anything,” I added.  “Most people don’t even notice.”

He raised his eyebrows as if to say, why not? And then he said, “Sure, why not?”

We both laughed and then I raised my right hand, which was the one closest to him, but I made sure not to move it too close.  He glanced at it quickly and then looked at me and shrugged his shoulders, again, as if to say something.  Not a big deal, is how I read the gesture.

“Yeah, that’s no big deal,” he said.  “But, still …” he added.  “That’s such a terrible way for a relationship to end, I would think.  Most people break up or get divorced or whatever.”

I noticed he was looking at his shoes again now.

   “And I know I’m young, but I get that it can be messy,” he said.  “People have affairs, they grow apart.  Sometimes I think my own parents can’t stand each other.  It’s one of the things that made me think of doing this project, actually, but I can’t imagine you can get much closure or whatever when it ends that way, you know, be able to say we just didn’t work together and move on.”

He looked up from his shoes and I smiled for him.

“It didn’t end that way,” I said.  “We stayed together for another six months after that.”

I understood the confused look on his face.  I expected it, of course.

“That’s not the dramatic way it ended?” he asked.

It was my turn to look down at my shoes and then look up again.

“I wish,” I said.  “This,” I said, holding up my hand with the missing pinky finger, “this and her reaction to it was only a prelude.”