Falling Together Read Online Free PDF Page B

known was effusive and playful, hardwired for flirting. “Buckets of love,” Cat would have written. “Aeons, oceans, and mountains of love forever and ever.” “I need you,” though, that sounded like Cat.
    The e-mail was pinned next to a poem that Kara had given him, left for him to find there on the bulletin board, when they had first started dating. “I Knew a Woman” by Theodore Roethke. Funny, Will had thought at the time, for his girlfriend to give him a love poem in the voice of a man worshipping a woman. “This is what I want,” the gift suggested. “Love me like this.”
    Will liked the poem for its rhymes and because it didn’t praise the usual body parts—eyes, lips, et cetera—but the woman’s body in action, her specific way of moving or of holding still. After Kara had gone, moved out without ever having entirely moved in, Will had left the poem where it was. In his mind, it had never had all that much to do with Kara, who was pretty and smart, but not exactly graceful, a fact she freely acknowledged. Still, when the man in the poem asserts, parenthetically, more to himself than to anyone else, “(I measure time by how a body sways.),” Will had always known exactly what he meant.
    “‘I’m sorry for everything,’” Cat had written in the e-mail. Why should you be sorry? Will thought, and looked out the window again to see, not Cat or Pen, but his mother, in the flesh and saluting the sun. Even though she had been this woman for almost five years, Will still felt amazed at the sight of her, sturdy, lean, and clear-eyed. She traced arcs in the air with her arms; her gray hair flashed. Abruptly, she broke her posture to wildly shoo a fly away, hands flapping, elbows stabbing the air. When she gave the retreating fly the finger, Will grinned.
    He remembered the conversation they’d had on the first anniversary of her sobriety. They were celebrating at the summerhouse where his mother had lived year-round since the divorce. His sister, Tully, was upstairs napping with her new baby; his brother, Philip, and Tully’s husband, Max, had driven into town for lobsters, corn, tomatoes, and blueberry pies. Will had been working at his computer on the porch. He liked it out there, even though it was smotheringly hot and breezeless that day, the wind chimes hanging, listless, in the sticky air. His mother had come up behind him and pressed a cold glass of iced tea against the back of his neck. When he reached around for the glass, she’d given his hand a little slap.
    “Talk to me,” she had ordered, “or no drink for you.”
    Will had laughed, closed his laptop, jumped up, and pulled out a chair for her, into which she settled like a cat, tucking her feet underneath her, leaning forward, and eyeing him determinedly.
    “Oh, man, what are you up to now?” Will said warily.
    “I asked Philip and now I’m asking you.”
    “Uh-oh.”
    “It’s just this: I’ve done a lot of changing this past year, and I’m wondering how you feel about it all.”
    Her eyes were hazel, like Will’s, coppery brown near the pupils, shading to amber and ending with rims of dark green, and they were looking at him with a combination of patience and insistence. We will have this conversation, the look said, if it takes a hundred years .
    “Good,” answered Will. “I feel good.”
    The eyes waited, unblinking.
    “Proud of you,” he went on. “Relieved. Uh, happy at how happy you are. I’m glad you’re painting.”
    “Thank you,” said his mother. “All very nice. What else?”
    “Else?”
    “Yup.”
    He slapped his neck. “Mosquitoes.”
    “William.”
    “What was Philip’s answer?”
    “William.”
    Will thought for a few seconds, looking out at the wide lawn, the blue-purple hydrangeas and thick, leaning stands of black-eyed Susans, the blown-glass hummingbird feeders hanging from the trees, and, yards away, the vegetable garden looking like a tiny campground, with its stakes and bean teepees. He