Happily Never After

His voice broke, and at the sound Kelly’s heart stopped.

“—tell you about Dolly. You see, Dolly was in an accident. She—she’s dead.”

TOM HAD BEEN LOOKING for Jacob more than an hour before it occurred to him to check the cemetery.

It was a beautiful Saturday morning, still warm but with a crisp hint of fall. After the funeral, Jacob had asked Tom to stay in Cathedral Cove a few days. Jacob didn’t need to be alone right now, and since Tom wasn’t eager to get back to the whole stupid Coach O’Toole mess—not to mention the phone messages that would be waiting from an injured Darlene—he’d said yes.

He’d let his office know he was taking a week of vacation time, which hadn’t gone down well with Bailey, but so what? Every vacation Tom had taken for the past five years had been a working trip, schmoozing some potential client or attending some business conference. They owed him.

Besides, there wasn’t really any such thing as “getting away” if you had a cell phone and a laptop.

Yesterday, Jacob had slept late, so Tom had spent all morning answering e-mails, issuing instructions to his paralegal and hand-holding a couple of clients who wanted to know why you had to notify everyone on the planet before you set a court date for a hearing.

He assumed today would be the same. This morning, though, by the time he got off the phone, Jacob was gone. And he’d left his cell phone behind, which seemed to hint that he’d like to be alone.

It had been a sticky moment. Tom didn’t want to crowd Jacob, who was free to go wherever he wanted. Tom wasn’t exactly the prison warden. But still…though Jacob seemed to be pulling himself together a little, it had been only a week since his wife had died. He was still fragile enough that Tom would rather keep an eye on him.

Finally, just when Tom was starting to admit he was worried, he spotted Jacob’s car. It was pulled off the road, near the entrance to Edgewater Memorial Gardens.

Great. Just perfect. Tom felt for Jacob, really he did. Losing Lillith had put the man through sheer hell. But to tell the truth, Tom had endured all the hair-tearing and teeth-gnashing he could take for a while.

This definitely wasn’t how he handled his own challenges. His personal recipe for emotional recovery was a fourteen-hour workday followed by a run of maybe ten miles, or fifteen, or whatever it took to wear out every muscle and brain cell he had.

Cemeteries were for wallowing, and he didn’t wallow. His own parents, who had died when he was in college, had been cremated and scattered at sea. Clean and sensible. No desolate angels clinging to crosses, no granite effigies, no gut-wrenching epitaphs. No tilted, weed-covered tombstones and withered flowers to remind you that, in the end, even love gets tired of grief and forgets to mourn.

But what could he do? He couldn’t exactly call Jacob’s friend Joe and say, Hey, could you go get him? He’s in the cemetery, and I don’t do cemeteries.

So, indulging himself in one heavy sigh, he parked his car and began walking around, looking for Jacob.

This particular cemetery was a pleasant surprise. It was restrained, with no marble explosions of showy grief. Just neat rows of well-tended headstones, and comfortable benches under apple trees and spreading oaks.

For a cemetery, it seemed strangely full of life. The trees were restless with chattering squirrels and noisy birds, and ahead of him on the path a young couple walked slowly hand in hand, as if this were just another pretty park.

Off to his right, toward the river, a funeral service was in progress. A soft blue tent held a dozen mourners and a priest. The priest smiled at him as he passed. Smiling back seemed strange, so Tom merely nodded and walked on.

To his left, where the cemetery blended comfortably into a neighborhood of old, charming, well-kept houses, Tom saw three little girls, maybe ten or eleven years old, playing among the trees. One girl had a sword made of an apple branch, and the other two wore crowns of tinfoil and Shasta daisies.

Jacob sat on a bench very near the children, though he faced the other direction. Tom braced himself, took another deep breath, sat on the bench beside him.

“Hey, buddy,” he said. “You had me a little worried there.”

Jacob looked over at him. Just as Tom had feared, Jacob had been crying. But for the moment, at least, his red eyes were dry.

“Sorry,” Jacob said. “I just felt like I had to come see her.”

Tom glanced over at the lawn. Though he could tell where the freshly dug grave was, he saw no headstone. Of course not, he thought. It wasn’t ready yet.

“I haven’t even decided what it should say.” Jacob had followed Tom’s glance. “We never talked about it. You don’t think of things like that, not at our age.”

“No,” Tom said. “Of course you don’t.”

“We had wills, of course,” Jacob went on. “We were lawyers. We took care of that. We thought of everything. But we didn’t for a minute think we’d ever need them.”

“No,” Tom said. For an uncomfortable moment, he imagined his own neatly typed will, duly notarized and filed. Everything went to charity. Everything, right down to the pictures on his walls and the ties on his rack. It was the will of a completely unencumbered man.

But here, next to Jacob’s aching grief, in the presence of all these dearly departed, Tom realized how pathetic his will would sound when it was read. Like the antiseptic record of a thoroughly unlived life.

Maybe, he thought impulsively, he’d go back and change it. Maybe he’d leave a few things to Jacob, who was the closest thing to a real friend he’d had since elementary school. Tom also had a painting of a red-haired girl standing on a hillside. It was worth a great deal of money, but he knew he’d bought it only because it reminded him of Kelly. Maybe he’d go back and write in a clause leaving it to her. She’d be pretty shocked, wouldn’t she?

“I wish I had fixed the damn brakes myself,” Jacob said suddenly.

Tom looked over at him. “What?”

“Lillith’s brakes. She needed to have the whole system fixed. Everything was leaking. She had to put brake fluid in every few days. I was always carping at her, telling her to just bite the bullet and get it taken care of.”

“But she didn’t?”

Jacob shook his head. “She hated stuff like that. Boring stuff. I knew she hated it. All that time I spent, bitching about how she was letting it go. Why didn’t I just do it?”

Tom didn’t answer. He knew Jacob didn’t expect him to. There was no answer. Jacob hadn’t fixed Lillith’s brakes, and he was just going to have to live with that.

The fact that Lillith would undoubtedly be happy to forgive him didn’t make much difference. Jacob had to learn to forgive himself. If he could.

Sometimes, Tom knew, you couldn’t. Sometimes life’s lemons just couldn’t be turned into lemonade, no matter how hard you tried to squeeze the facts.

Oh, yeah. Tom knew all about that.

The sound of the girls squealing and laughing was closer now. Apparently they were in the middle of a war, with pinecones for cannonballs. One of them had just ricocheted off the branch above Tom’s head, and suddenly another came sailing over and caught Jacob in the shoulder.

“Oh,” the young, high voices said, still giggling, “oh, shit!”

Two of the children disappeared behind tree trunks, but the girl who had thrown the pinecone came over, dragging her sword behind her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I am Sir Lancelot, and I’m trying to rescue Guinevere. I’m not very accurate.”

Jacob smiled. “That’s okay. You throw good and hard. When you fix your aim, you’ll be lethal.”

She smiled at him, retrieved her pinecone, and ran back down the hill toward her buddies. Their daisy crowns could just be seen peeking around the edges of the massive trees.

Jacob looked at Tom. He almost smiled. Then he looked down at his hands.

“I would have liked to have children,” he said.

“I know.” Tom wondered if he should add the conventional statements, like you would make a terrific father, or you will someday. But all those things sounded hollow. Jacob had lost so much. Tom’s instincts told him not to try to minimize that loss.

“What about you?” Jacob glanced up at Tom briefly, then went back to staring at his hands.

“Me? What about me?”

“Don’t you ever want to get married? Don’t you want to have kids?”