Jack:
It is true, that if we are free to be good then we are also free to be bad. Yet this choice is what makes possible the love and joy and goodness worth savoring.
Joy:
Free to be bad. Oh, how I’d like to argue with God about this choice. But how could I? When I choose it all the time, and when I want the choice to be mine to make.
How odd, I thought as I descended the stairs to the front door, that Renee and I had both married alcoholics. And now she was running to me for safety, when she’d always been set forth as the example of the “good one”—a yardstick my mother had used to measure my inadequacies as a young girl when Renee lived with us.
Davy and Douglas had already opened the front door, and I stood in the entryway, shivering and running my hands up and down my arms. Snow fell in a haze of fat white flakes, luminescent. Bill was bundled in his long black coat, looking gallant as he eased the luggage from the back of the car and placed it on the snow-covered driveway. Renee leaned in to place her hand on my husband’s and say something I couldn’t hear. She smiled; he laughed. Indeed he was charming, and at his best, kind.
When they reached the base of the steps, Renee’s gaze caught mine, and she smiled so widely and gratefully that I almost ran through the snow in my socks. This was my cousin, my blood, and my dear friend. Davy and Douglas stood behind me, quiet and watching.
She rushed up the steps and we hugged. I brushed the snow from the soft shoulders of her coat. “Get in here,” I said. “I’m so happy to see you.”
“Oh, Joy, how can I ever thank you?” She placed one hand gently on top of each child’s head. I looked down at them. Bobby with cropped brown hair squashed under a cap speckled in snow. Rosemary, a dark-haired child with wide eyes, dressed as if for church, her patent leather shoes so shiny I saw a brief reflection of the porch light.
“Get inside, Joy,” Bill said as he stepped onto the porch, stomping the snow from his boots and weighed down by luggage. “It’s bitter out here.”
“Come in, come in,” I said. And then I felt it as a tremor under my ribs: the subtle shift beneath the foundation of our home, the change that arrived with these three stranded souls.
We settled around the table in the warm kitchen, and I served them tea and grilled cheese sandwiches. I fussed over them and made small talk. Renee had draped her woolen coat over the ladder-back chair, and she pulled pins from her hair, unfastening the snow-sprinkled hat and placing it on the sideboard. Her tweed dress had crept up, and I caught a glimpse of the black nylons covering her legs. Sitting beside her, I was a reverse image in my men’s corduroy pants and a button-down shirt.
I looked at my cousin’s familiar face, nearing thirty-five but with something close to ancient clouding her eyes. It was pain one should only carry after war, an agony I saw in my husband’s eyes. Yet there she was, a woman on the run, and her cat’s-eye liner and mascara were intact: the perfect image of the fifties housewife in an Electrolux advertisement. She’d always pulsed with an inclination toward beauty, and in spite of whatever battles she’d fought, that hadn’t left her. I tucked a stray hair into my bun and started chattering self-consciously.
The children stared quietly at one another, their shy looks flitting from one to the other like confused butterflies. As soon as they were full of food and thoroughly warm, they ran off to the playroom, Douglas at the forefront with his game ideas and unquenchable desire for more fun.
Jack:
The stories of your life: your cousin’s arrival, your animals, and the farm amuse both Warnie and me. Oh, and Davy trying to catch a wild snake to keep as a pet. Please keep sharing with us.
Joy:
I doubt I could stop now.
Later, upstairs, Renee and I were finally alone, and I told her. “We’ll share a bedroom,” I said. “Just like the old days.”
“You don’t sleep with Bill?” She dropped her large black purse onto the wooden dresser and turned to me with wide eyes. “Even when things were at their worst at home, Claude would’ve never permitted me to sleep in another room.”
“Well, that’s the difference,” I said. “Bill doesn’t permit or not permit me anything. His last foray with another woman almost did me in.” I wiped my hand through the air. “And look at you—you didn’t just leave Claude’s bed; you left him!” I winked at her.
Renee sighed as if she’d been holding her breath for years and sat on the single bed across from mine. “Thank you so much for letting us come here,” she said. “I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t. I promise not to be a bother. I’ll pull my weight.”