Only the Good

Danny was not the great love of my life. He wasn't even a good friend, just someone who had worked in Paul's department for a while. We had never had meaningful conversations, just idle small talk at an office party or a few remarks on the weather at that Labor Day picnic when it rained. Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing scandalous, nothing at all, really. Nothing more than polite discourse with another of my husband's coworkers. I was far too much in love with Paul to consider squandering my affection on anything or anyone else.

I didn't like the way Danny smiled at me in my black lace that afternoon at the church. It was too knowing a smile for someone he barely knew, too intimate for a place of worship, and much too sensual for a day of mourning. One of that smile's thousand secrets whispered that I was too young to wear black, and it smiled me all the way up to Danny's hotel room before I thought to look back.

Casey was with Grandma Ruth that day, not at the church. Paul's mother said a funeral was no place for a child, her eyes begging me to understand what she couldn't say.

"I know, Ruth, I know," I murmured, stroking her withered hands and wincing as my words scratched where they meant to soothe. "Paul would understand." She couldn't say goodbye, not yet, and only my little Casey could provide a reason the outside world would understand. A funeral is no place for a child, or a mother, or a lost girl too young to wear black.

Danny wasn't an exceptional lover. He had the equipment and the stamina, but his style suffered from a severe lack of imagination. The sex was nice, but conventional and soon monotonous. Without realizing it I grew distracted, noticing the sounds and colors of the room with an acuity they did not deserve.

The walls were taupe, the commonest hotel color due to its unwarranted reputation as a relaxing hue. Taupe makes me nervous. The red fabric flowers on the kitchenette table looked real and thirsty. I stared at them for a while, hoping to somehow discover the key to imitating the appearance of life, but those flowers were better than I at keeping secrets. The wall clock was ticking wildly, and so was my heart.

Danny's hands surprised me. For someone so docile and refined, they were surprisingly hard and clumsy, with cracked palms and fingers more like leather than flesh. Asbestos hands, my father would have called them.

I asked why, and he told me he was a farm boy once, milking and mowing and plowing at daybreak to keep food in the mouths of five younger siblings and a bed-ridden father. His story was strange, almost funny, coming from someone I knew only as a cubicle drone, whose most immediate health concern was carpal tunnel syndrome from long hours spent tapping at a Macintosh keyboard. Yet he told me he had once tasted life outside those walls.

Paul never did. Paul's hands were slender and pale with tapered fingers, the instruments of a painter or a surgeon, perhaps, but never the rough tools of a common laborer. Paul was made of finer stuff than that, less sinew, but more thought. His spirit was gentler, but fiercer, than a common man's. And his imagination was boundless.

Danny's breathing was heavy and sweet, like a thunderstorm in the spring, when he said he loved me. He said I was too beautiful to be a widow, too good to be alone. He said he had wanted me when Paul was alive, since the first time he saw me standing by the punch bowl at the Christmas party in the blue sequin shoes. He said he couldn't bear to think of Casey growing up without a father. Danny said so many things I didn't want to hear, and as he spoke his calloused fingers swept the stray hairs from my face.

"I'm sorry, Paul," I repeated like a Vedist mantra with every breath on the cab ride home. Casey was already in bed with Kito the stuffed leopard, and Ruth was sitting at the kitchen table in the dark, leaning over a cup of lukewarm coffee with her head in her hands as soft tears splattered on a dingy plaid placemat. I poured myself a cup and sat across from her in silence for a while, staring at my ragged fingernails. She kissed my forehead before she went to bed, and her warm tears trickled through my hair and tickled my neck. I told Paul I was sorry a hundred times before falling asleep that night, instead of praying.

Danny's voice was as thin as a worn-out cotton sheet when he called the next morning. He spoke quickly and stumbled often, as if he were reading scribbled notes from an index card. He couldn't stop thinking about me and Casey, alone now against the world. He wanted to help us, to take care of us. For Paul, he said. Paul would want someone to take care of us.

I bit my lip hard, muttered some noises of gratitude, and hung up. I couldn't listen anymore. The unfamiliar sounds of Danny's affection were already dripping down my throat and burning cigarette circles in my heart.

"What did we do wrong?" I asked Ruth over orange juice and burnt toast. It was still early Sunday morning, and Casey was still asleep. I had stopped running to the bedroom door at every lull in the rhythm of little snores, but the impulse remained strong.

Reaching across the table, Paul's mother took my hand and looked deep into my eyes. Her hair was disheveled, her nightgown wrinkled and tearstained, and red spiderwebs crept across the corners of her pale green eyes. But her trembling hands, her thin, pale hands so much like his, held the strength of a sleeping lion. I wanted to curl up inside them.

"Nothing, my dearest," she said, her voice gentle but firm. "No one can understand the ways of God on earth, but David tells us in the Psalms that He is always present in the midst of our darkest trials. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea."

Her feeble smile was like the sun breaking through purple thunderclouds. "It's okay to be angry, to ask for comfort. Saint… Saint Paul promises that if we petition with thanksgiving, the Lord will send the peace which transcends all understand to guard our hearts and minds."

I asked what we had left to give thanks for. Softly, she reminded me that Paul had lived well, that he knew at the end that he had been good to his family and his world. She said, "His Father has taken him home on eagles' wings, whispering, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant.'"

I wanted to ask how she knew, how she could be sure Paul's last moments weren't filled with fear and regret, how she kept from wondering if his final breath was spent on a desperate "if only" or an unheeded "not yet." But Ruth's eyes were bright and her voice steady when she spoke the words that kept the tower of her spirit from crumbling, and I bit my lip and swallowed the bile rising in my throat.

"Yes, Mom," I whispered, defeated by her steadfast faith. "Paul lived very well."

So did I. My mother always said I was born wanting to be better. I said the rosary every night with the beads she gave me, and every night it sounded new. I went to mass and confession every week, though there was never much to confess. I was the first girl in my class to be confirmed. I always gave up television and chocolate for Lent, and I almost never prayed for myself. I never smoked or hemmed my uniform above the knee or drank more than a glass of wine at Sunday dinner.

I married a good man inside the faith, and I was a virgin on my wedding night. I respected and appreciated my husband and gave him a peaceful home and a beautiful baby. I cut my teeth on the principles of faith, hope, and charity I learned in Sunday School, and I built my life on those foundations.

Now it was all dust in the wind. The house of cards had collapsed with a flash of headlights and I stood naked in the dark with the wolves closing in. Ashes, ashes, all fall down.

"Hi, Danny? It's me. I was wondering if it's not too late to start this whole thing over. I think I need a friend, at least for now, until I can get some truth."

"I'll give you mine," he said. I couldn't tell if it was Danny's voice or the line breaking up.

I closed my eyes, felt his smile, and took a breath of air that tasted new. "Thank you," I said, really meaning it. "But whatever's out there to find, I think it's time for me to try to find it on my own."

Casey was awake now, wanting pancakes, so I said goodbye to Danny and went to the kitchen to start the day.