Chapter 6: Abby

Abby finished washing the clothes and sat down at the table.  It had been a long day for her.  She put her head in her hands and closed her eyes. 

            She didn’t have very many friends in Vanceboro.  When they moved into town, the beginning of the school year was less than a three weeks away.  She had just enough time to move their furniture and everything into the house before she had to be at the elementary school developing her lesson plans and working on decorating her new classroom.

            There were young couples here and there that she met during her year in Vanceboro, most of them parents of her students.  Most of the time they would meet at the little grocery store or down at the Pat’s Soda Shop, but their conversations would be in passing. 

Most of her time during the week after school was spent at home.  She would get home at three thirty and would almost always set to grading assignments right away before Todd would get home.  It was a routine that she had begun when she was student teaching at College Park.  If he was home, she wanted to spend every minute with him.  She knew that the thought of spending all her waking time with him was somewhat juvenile and even sometimes a bit unpractical, but that was the way he made her feel.      

But lately, there was something about him.

Todd didn’t act any differently than he had in the 4 years since they had met.  If anything lately, he had acted more normal than usual.  He could be guaranteed to walk in the door at a quarter to six in the afternoon, walk over the refrigerator, pull out the carton of orange juice and sit down at the table and finish two glasses while reading the newspaper.  He would then ask Abby how her day had been and genuinely seem interested in everything that she had to say.  He would even volunteer to cook dinner every evening.  On the weekends, in between the football, basketball and baseball games in Greenville and the Sunday lunches in New Bern, he always found time to complete all of the honey do’s around the house that needed to be done.

            But somewhere in that normalcy, there was an underlying sadness.  She knew it was there when they decided to move into the old farmhouse.  But at the time, she figured it would wear off with time.

            It didn’t.

            She began walking through the house.  She loved the old place.  It was as picturesque as she could imagine a farmhouse being.  She loved the little kitchen and how it always kept the sweet smell of whatever Todd had been cooking the day before in the air.  She loved the bedrooms.  The children’s rooms were at one end of the house and shared a quaint light pink tiled bathroom.  Next to the master bedroom and in between the kitchen and the living room was the study.

            The study was really Todd’s office.  It was where he spent his late evening when he couldn’t fall asleep.  She could sometimes hear the quick tapping of his fingers on the computer keyboard.  Sometimes he would put on a CD and turn it almost all the way down.  She pushed play on the player and ever so quietly, she heard Hootie and the Blowfish’s Innocence stream from the speakers behind his desk.  She sat down in his chair and listened quietly.

What else can I do
When the tears have all been wasted
And the only voice you choose to hear
Sings the songs of our hearts breaking

She looked around the room at the knick knacks that Todd had started to collect as he made his way to various events that the magazines had him attend.  He had a penchant for picking up one useless object every time he was gone.

And I wanna feel innocence

            She closed her eyes and lay back farther in the chair.  Todd had always told her that their music had a seductive feel to it.  As the rest of the song played she slowly opened her eyes and looked around the room at the scattered pictures that Todd displayed.  There was the picture of the Dowdy-Ficklen stadium in Greenville, the large print of a Labrador retriever and lots of black and white prints of the ocean scattered around them. 

            She looked down at her watch and realized that Todd wouldn’t be home for another two hours so she needed to get working on grading the papers.  She turned off the music and was walking to the door, when she turned around to make sure the light was turned out when she noticed the drawing of Fort Macon on the wall directly behind his desk.

            She raised her right hand to her mouth, walked back to the desk and stood directly in front of the picture.  It took her a minute to remember where Todd had picked that particular print up.  It was different from the other beach scenes.  The other pictures were landscapes.  This one showed a battle, with what appeared to be smoke billowing from the small manholes built into the sides of the earth, stone and brick structure. 

And then she remembered.  He had picked this one up when they were at the Strawberry festival the summer before.  She looked at the picture for a long time and wondered what it was about the picture that attracted Todd to it.  She couldn’t figure it out.  When she finally walked away from it, she remembered that it was the afternoon of the Festival that she met the Clemmets.  They were a nice old couple.  It was a shame that they hadn’t been able to see them but once or twice since then.  She left the door open as she walked away from it.

            She slipped back out to the kitchen table and pulled out the children’s papers from the day that she needed to grade.  She worked on them quietly for thirty minutes; everyone once in a while looking up at the picture of Fort Macon hanging behind Todd’s desk.  The thought of him brought a smile to her face.  The feeling of sadness that she felt earlier was nearly forgotten.

            And then she remembered Ralph pointing out the resemblance of Todd’s widow’s peak to that of his grandfather. 

            She looked down at her watch again.  It was four thirty.  She rose out of her seat quickly, grabbed her purse off of the counter, walked to the garage and started the car. 

            She needed to talk to the Clemmets.  If for anything, to talk about the weather.  But she knew that if she engaged Ralph about Todd and his grandfather, that she would uncover more of what was effacing Todd’s normalcy.

            As she made the short drive to the Clemmet’s house, she began to remember the little things that Todd perhaps did to disguise his sadness.  The long walks in the fields together.  The late evenings spent rocking in the swing on the porch. 

            It had never really occurred to her before that when they walked through the fields of the farm in the late afternoons that anything other than work and their togetherness could be weighing on his mind. He seemed so content.  He would point out landmarks and explain what made them significant.  But maybe, he was trying to find a way explain in his mind why things happened to his grandparents the way that they did.

            The word that kept circulating through her mind was distance.  But distance really wasn’t the notion that she felt.  It was more like Todd was longing for something and that longing was making him drift ever so slightly away. 

            She walked up the two doorsteps to the house and rapped on the door. 

            No answer.

            She rapped on it again.

            No answer.

            From around the side of the house Ralph trotted.   Naturally he was surprised to see her.  He gave her a hug and they walked inside.  He began to holler down the hall to his wife but realized that she had left an hour earlier to go get groceries.   He offered her a glass of iced tea and then they walked into the den and sat down.