"Are you planning to dress up our room at the Drake?"
"Uh, no. I have one last stop before we head into the city. If it's okay with you, I'd like to put this stuff on my mother's grave."
"Of course it's okay." I felt honored that he felt comfortable taking me there.
"I don't get to Chicago often, but when I do I like to at least pay my respects." He gestured toward the backseat and the fall flora. "She loved this kind of stuff. We always had cornstalks in the yard and lots of pumpkins."
We pulled into a cemetery. The sign at the entrance said "Woodlawn Memorial Park". It was actually quite a pretty place with gentle hills still covered with green lawns and a nice scattering of mature trees.
"I don't even remember the funeral. I know I went. Years later, I asked my father and he told me that I had been to the service." He pulled over to the side of the drive and we got out. Tristan gathered the autumn flowers and handed me the paper bag that held the corn and the gourds. "I really don't like the idea of being buried. I'm going to go with cremation myself."
I followed a pace behind. "I agree," I said. "It seems like a waste of space and money."
"That's not my reason at all. It used to terrify me that my mother was buried in a box here. Part of me had visions of her waking up, alone and six feet underground."
"Yikes, what a scary thought!"
"I think it's a pretty common childish notion. Now that I'm older, though, it comforts me a little to come here. It's my way of knowing that I didn't imagine her." He stopped by a simple headstone with an angel standing watch at the top. "Maryann Katherine King" was inscribed on one side with her dates of birth and death and the other side was blank. "It's a double plot. Someday my father will have the other half. He'll never remarry. Whatever I might say about him, I know that he loved my mother fiercely. She may be the only person he ever did love."
He put the pot of flowers at the foot of the headstone. "You arrange that stuff. I'm inept at that sort of thing." I took the fall corn and the colorful collection of gourds and put them as artfully as I could around and against the terracotta planter. As I arranged them, Tristan watched me from a nearby bench. The sun was dipping below the tallest trees and cast a soft ochre light amongst the long shadows.
When I was satisfied with the display I wandered around a bit on the paths that wound through the park. The avenues of the dead lined up in silent rows. I thought of Elsa and her snowy grave, unmarked somewhere in Italy. I wondered if Tristan thought of her, too, as he sat quietly on his bench under the oaks.
I didn't walk far away and when I saw him rise, I took that as my signal to go back. He smiled at me and held out his hand to walk me back to the car.
"Thanks for doing that." I didn't know if he meant the gourds or giving him time alone so I just said, "You're welcome," and left it at that.
We drove back into Chicago as sunset approached. The light behind us to the west cast the buildings rising from the lake's shore in gaudy shades of pink and orange. As the colors faded, the buildings began to light from within and the skyline sparkled against the inky violet dusk.
Back in our room, Tristan opened a bottle of wine from the bar and we toasted the rising half moon that came up over the lake. "To Maryann King," he said as his glass clinked into mine. "She would have loved you, Raina."
What about you, Tristan? Can you love? Can you love me? I understood more about him, but as I had feared, it did nothing to erase the nagging questions I wasn't asking. I simply said, "To your mother," and left it at that.
We decided to have dinner at the hotel. The car was parked, the wind had picked up and we had traveled enough that day. The seafood restaurant in the hotel was quite good and the atmosphere very much the same old school elegance of the rest of the building. We talked mostly about the day and my own childhood. I described what it was like growing up in my parents' Park Slope home.
"I had my own version of a wonderful childhood," I told him. "But mine is only now just ending. I think my parents would have kept me at home forever if they could."
"I noticed that Marjorie seemed a wee bit upset when you told her about the apartment that goes with your new job."
"It had to happen someday. I can't live in my parents' house forever." Tristan nodded in agreement. "They've been great. I know how much they sacrificed for me--for all three of us. I'm the only one who got a four-year degree and even though I got some scholarship money and a couple of loans, they still paid more for me to go to school than either of my sisters."
"Your sisters didn't go to college?"
"Olivia dropped out after two years. She spent the next two years getting ready to marry Ben. Ben's done very well and Olivia has played the supportive junior league wife to his successful small-town attorney. They have two children. A perfect set of one boy and one girl. Of course, the boy is the first born. Olivia wouldn't have it any other way."
"Do I detect disapproval? Even disdain?"
"A little," I admitted. "Olivia is smart and she's beautiful. I love Ben and the kids. It just seems like such a . . . calculated existence. She had a plan and she executed it with surgical precision. There's nothing spontaneous or unpredictable about my oldest sister's life."
"You, on the other hand, do spontaneous quite well."
"Trust me, that's a newly acquired trait."
"What about your other sister. Amy?"
"Amy is the sweetest person in the entire universe. She wasn't the academic type and neither was her husband Phil. She worked for several years as a warehouse clerk for a heating and air conditioning company right out of high school. She met Phil there. He had come to make his fortune in New York. When his father died he left Phil his hardware store in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. He asked Amy to marry him and the two of them run the store now. Phil also has a pretty lucrative handyman service going."
"Children?"
"They haven't had any luck conceiving."
"I think it would be very hard to want a child and not be able to have one."
"It is hard on them. They've been married for four years and . . . nothing. They've kind of stopped talking about it."
"What about adoption?"
"I don't know how they feel about it."
"If I wanted a child and couldn't have one, I would adopt. For sure."
"I asked you once before if you wanted to have children. Do you remember?"