When I reached Summer Acres, flashing my pass at the man in the gatehouse, an extreme sense of calm washed over me. My phone rang. Alice. Well, there went my calm.
“Good morning!” I trilled.
“Mom? Where are you? The doors are locked and it’s so dark in here.” She paused and gasped. “And some of your stuff is gone!”
“How about you get Meredith on the line?” I asked, pulling over into the fitness center parking lot so I wasn’t talking while driving. I wasn’t taking any chances. At eighty years old, they will take your license if you so much as sneeze behind the wheel.
Alice sighed. “Mom, you’re scaring me.”
“Honey, everything is just fine. Can you add your sister to this call so I can tell you what’s going on?”
A few silent seconds passed. “Mom?” Alice asked.
“I’m here.”
“Meredith?”
“Present and accounted for!”
“Oh, good. Well, girls, I have some news I didn’t want to share until it was all settled, but you should know… I’ve moved to Summer Acres. Today.”
“What?” they shouted in perfect unison.
“It felt like the right time, and I didn’t want to bother either of you with the decision.”
Dead silence.
“Okay, sweethearts. I hope you’ll come visit soon, but I need to go direct the movers.”
“How could you move and not even consult us?” Alice interrupted.
Always needing to one-up her twin, Meredith said, “I knew you were thinking about moving, but Mom, this is a hair brash.”
“Mom, are you feeling okay?” Alice asked.
They constantly thought I had dementia. My leg hurt: dementia. I had a new cavity: dementia. I didn’t want to go to church with them: dementia.
“I told you she looked tired last week,” Meredith said.
“Well, you might have said that, Meredith,” Alice snapped, “but tired isn’t going off the deep end and moving without telling your children.”
Since I was basically out of the conversation now, I just hung up the phone, started the car, and resumed driving. If prior experience had taught me anything, it would take them a good ten minutes to realize I wasn’t on the line. I whistled as I drove.
Although by the time they realized I had hung up, they would, no doubt, question whether I had dementia.
As I approached the front porch of my new home, I noticed a man sitting in one of the rockers. These movers are slackers, I thought. But then I realized the man had on khakis and a blue checked oxford shirt, not the Summer Acres T-shirt the movers wore, and he wasn’t a mover at all—instead, he was my liaison and long-lost camp buddy. My heart raced at the sight of him, and I wondered at my good fortune. I had pictured my Summer Acres buddy to be an old woman with a walker who bossed everyone around, not the beautiful boy I had met decades earlier at summer camp. I shook my head, getting myself back together. I couldn’t be daydreaming about having a boyfriend, for heaven’s sake. How pathetic and cliché. Old woman moves to a nursing home and takes up with someone who isn’t her husband? Nope. Not for me. I would never complicate my children’s lives or disregard my husband’s memory in that way.
As he opened my car door, though, helped me out and gave me a hug, he smelled so nice, so familiar. His arms felt so strong. I didn’t have to play by the rules all the time, did I? And what was wrong with being friends with a member of the opposite sex?
“Are all the liaisons this attentive to their charges?” I quipped, raising an eyebrow.
“I’d venture to say that not all liaisons have spent the past fifty-plus years pining for their charges, so I’d say that’s highly doubtful.”
“Miles!” I scolded as I took his arm.
Well, maybe not friends, exactly.
“You sure travel light these days,” he said.
I shrugged. “With the wonders of the internet I figured why not have everything delivered right here? It’s time for a fresh start.”
“You can say that again,” he said, squeezing my hand, which I’d placed in the crook of his arm as he helped me inside.
I looked up into his hazel eyes and that face that time had changed but also made more the same. When we were camp counselors—Miles at the boys’ camp, me at the girls’—we saw each other in the mess hall every day. We had a few opportunities to sneak off together for walks, but between sessions when the campers were gone, we’d make ourselves comfortable on the riverbank for our nightly talks, my left knee touching his right.
I was with Reid then. I had met him my junior year of high school. He was the senior basketball star for our rival team, and I, in my skirt and curls, was the cheer captain. Before every free throw and after every basket, he’d turned to look at me, as if he were playing just for me. And, little by little, we began seeing each other. We were all but engaged. But in my day a woman didn’t go steady until there was a ring on her finger. So I saw other boys. My camaraderie with Miles wasn’t a betrayal in so many words: we never did much more than talk. Even still, I knew it wouldn’t have thrilled Reid.
But now, standing in the foyer of my new town home, I realized that Miles and I had a second chance to be friends… or, as we might have been many years ago, something more. But I knew I couldn’t explore that. I could never be disloyal to my husband. “Miles, how in the world did fate conspire to bring us here, to let you be my buddy?”
He smiled. “Well, it was a little bit fate. And a little bit my seeing your name as a prospective new member on the board meeting roster. I wasn’t sure if it was you, but I had to know.”
I laughed. “You knew?”
He nodded. “Barbara, the thought of seeing your pretty smile again was the only thing in the world that could make me actually sign up to be a liaison.” He paused. “All these years, we weren’t that far apart, you know. I’ve spent the last twenty-five years, since my wife died, just up the road in New Bern.”
“Oh, Miles,” I said, truly sorry for him. “Twenty-five years alone?”
He nodded. I led him out to the tiny screened-in back porch where the day was beginning to warm. We each sat in one of the standard issue plastic rocking chairs that I would soon be replacing.
“What about you? How long has Reid been gone?”
“Fourteen months,” I whispered. Then I looked up at him and said what I had never revealed to anyone else. “After he died beside me in bed, my house terrified me. I didn’t know how I was ever going to be able to live there again without being afraid.”
He nodded. “I’ve lived with Myra’s ghost for all these years. She follows me wherever I go.”
“What happened?” I whispered.
He looked down at his feet, ashamed. “Suicide,” he said quietly. Then he looked back over at me, his eyes full of pain. “Barbara, I didn’t even know anything was wrong. I’ve been living with the guilt a long time.”
I took his hand and looked out at the lagoon, rocking slightly. It was almost as if we were back on that riverbank at camp all those years ago.
Sitting on the back porch of my new life, holding the hand of a man who wasn’t new to me at all, I realized that, even after all these years, there was still something there. I was too old to play games, too old not to take a second chance if I had one available to me. I turned toward Miles and smiled. He smiled back. “Oh, Barbara.”