“If you get hungry later, we can just heat it up.”
She was fiddling with her fork, building little structures with the pasta, watching the emerging patterns with great concentration. She didn’t look up as she said, “I didn’t know there were men like you.”
He studied his fingernails, saw a hangnail on his thumb, and frowned. He didn’t look up either, just said, “What does that mean?”
“Well, you live in a beautiful house, and I can’t see a speck of mess or dust. In other words, you’re not a pig. But that’s just extraneous stuff, important, sure, but not a deal breaker. You have a big heart, Dillon. And you’re a great cook.”
“Sherlock, I’ve lived alone for five years. Man cannot live by pizza at Dizzy Dan’s alone. Also, I don’t like squalor. There are lots of men like me. Quinlan, for example. Ask Sally, she’ll say his heart is bigger than the Montana sky.”
“What do you mean you lived alone for five years? You didn’t live alone before that?”
“Your FBI training in action. Very good. I was married once upon a time.”
“Somehow I can’t see you married. You seem so self-sufficient. Are you divorced?”
“No, Claire didn’t divorce me. She died of leukemia.” “I’m sorry, Dillon.”
“It’s been even more than five years now. I’m just sorry that Claire never got to live in this wonderful house. She died three months before my grandmother.” “How long were you together?”
“Four years. She was only twenty-seven when she died. It was strange what happened. She’d just read that old book by Erich Segal-Love Story. She was diagnosed with leukemia just weeks later. There was a certain irony in that, I suppose, only I didn’t recognize it for a very long time. I’ve watched the movie several times over the years. Claire’s death wasn’t serene and poignantly tragic like the young wife’s death in the movie or the book, believe me. She fought with everything in her. It just wasn’t enough. Nothing was enough.”
Jesus, he hadn’t spoken of Claire this much since her death. It rocked him. He rose abruptly and walked over to the fireplace, leaning his shoulders against the mantel. “I’m sorry.” “Yes.”
“Do you still miss her?”
He looked toward one of his grandmother’s paintings, given to him on his graduation from MIT, an acrylic of a bent old man haggling in a French market, in the small village near Cannes where his grandmother had lived for several years back in the sixties. Then he looked at Lacey, his expression faintly puzzled. “It’s odd, but you know, I can’t quite picture Claire’s face in my mind anymore. It’s all blurry and faded, like a very old photograph. I know the pain is there, but it’s soft now, far away, and I can’t really grasp it. Yes, I miss her. Sometimes I’ll still look up from reading a book and start to say something to her, or expect her to yell at me when I go nuts over a football play. She was an ice skater. Very good, but she never made the cut to the Olympics.”
“That’s how Belinda is now to me. At first I never wanted the pain to lessen, but it did anyway, without my permission. It’s almost as if Belinda wanted me to let her go. When I see a photo of her now, it seems like she was someone I knew and loved in another place, another time, maybe the person who loved her was another me as well. Sometimes when I’m in a crowd, I think I hear her call out to me. She’s never there, of course.”
He swallowed, feeling tears of bittersweet memory he hadn’t felt in years. Maybe the tears were for both of them.
Her eyes were clear and calm as she said, “You know, I’d fight too. Never would I go quietly into that good night, just sort of winking out and isn’t that too bad, and wasn’t she a nice person? No, I’d be kicking and yelling all the way.”
He laughed, then immediately sobered. Guilt because he’d spoken about Claire, then laughed? Suddenly, he laughed again. “I would too. Thanks, Sherlock.”