Free The Weekend: A Novel by Peter Cameron Page B

it’s not. But there’s nothing—I mean, it should be awkward. It’s perfectly O.K. for it to be awkward.”
    “I don’t see what’s so awkward,” said Lyle.
    “You don’t?” asked Marian. She turned around. “Really, you don’t?”
    Lyle stood with a fistful of crumbs, observing them carefully and idiotically. “No,” he said.
    “Do you know what this week is?” she asked.
    “No,” said Lyle. “What?”
    “The anniversary. Tony died a year ago this week.”
    “I know that,” said Lyle. “Of course I know that. But every day is an anniversary of his death.”
    “Perhaps I’m just sentimental,” said Marian.
    “We’re all sentimental,” said Lyle. “I’m sentimental.”
    “Well, it just seems odd, that you would do this.”
    “Do what?”
    “Oh, I don’t know,” said Marian, thinking: I’m not going to pursue this. It will only create more trouble. But then she thought not pursuing it, not speaking, would be false, and the weekend, and her life together with Lyle, would continue as a charade. “No, I do,” she said. “And so do you. What’s odd is this: for you to not come all summer, and then come this weekend, and bring someone.”
    “But you know I’ve been busy this summer,” said Lyle. “And we agreed on this weekend over a month ago. And then I met Robert. And I wanted to bring him. I thought it might, just possibly, make me happy—or happier—to bring Robert with me this weekend. It seemed possible. Do you think I shouldn’t have?”
    “No,” said Marian. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean that. I don’t know what I mean. I mean, I don’t know what I mean in any well-thought-out way. I’m just … I’m fumbling.” She paused for a moment, and then continued. “It’s just difficult for me. I know it’s ten million times more difficult for you, and I don’t want to make it more difficult for you, or trivialize your difficulty. But I’m not going to pretend that this isn’t difficult for me. It is awkward. Not to acknowledge that would be faking. It would be dishonest.”
    Lyle threw the crumbs into the trash. He wiped his hands back and forth, but he didn’t say anything. He sat at the table.
    Marian looked at him. “And now I feel awful,” she said. “Now I feel as if I shouldn’t have said anything. But I couldn’t have not
said anything, because I know you too well. We’ve been through too much. You’re my best friend.” She stood behind him and put her hands, tentatively, on his shoulders. “And I love you too much,” she said.
    She stood like that, for a long moment, in the hot kitchen. Lyle had covered his eyes with one hand, even though she could not see him. She could see only the top of his head, his scalp through the thinning hair. He appeared, from this angle, old and frighteningly vulnerable. The eggshell of his scalp. She wanted to kiss it or lay her cheek against it but she did neither of these things. She squeezed gently at his shoulders. “I love you too much,” she repeated. He took his right hand away from his eyes and reached back and patted her hand, and then laced his fingers through hers. And they were like that—having said nothing more, not crying, just Lyle sitting and Marian standing behind him and their hands pressed together on Lyle’s shoulder—when Robert returned with the vegetables from the garden.

9
    LYLE WAS SITTING IN an Adirondack chair in the shade. Robert was lying on the grass near him, in the sun, reading—or leafing through—a magazine. John was in the garden.
    The back door opened and Marian appeared on the steps. She had gone inside to put Roland down for his nap. She walked across the lawn toward her guests, clutching some things in her hands.
    “Come sit with us,” said Lyle.
    “No,” she said, displaying what she held: the paint set Lyle had brought for Roland, and a pad, and a tumbler full of water. “I’m going to paint a while. I want to try to do a sketch of the house from down near the