Free The Last First Day by Carrie Brown Page A

been married for so long, over half a century?
    He would never see her, she thought, but she waved anyway.
    Surprisingly, his gaze found her. He lifted a hand and came toward her.
    • • •
    Peter had left the house early that morning, having been awake and restless, she knew, since before five a.m. For years in their marriage it had been Ruth who’d had trouble sleeping. Now she couldn’t seem to sleep enough. Peter, however, seemed more and more often to be awake in the middle of the night. Occasionally, he went downstairs and had a glass of milk and some cookies; she was aware sometimes, waking in the middle of the night herself, of the smell of Oreos on his breath.
    Last night, coming briefly out of sleep in the darkness, she had sensed him awake beside her.
    She had rolled over to face him. What’s the matter?
    His eyes had been open. He had reached over to pat her hair, his big hand resting heavily on her head.
    But she hadn’t been able to stay awake. Before she’d heard his answer, she was gone again, tugged back down into sleep.
    When she’d opened her eyes this morning, he’d been gone, the bedroom full of explosive light.
    Is anything wrong? she had asked him a few days before. Is everything all right at school?
    Never better, he had said, but he’d busied himself with something or other, and she’d thought he was withholding.
    She knew that she was sometimes unhelpful when difficulties presented themselves at the school. She was made easily angry on his behalf, full of righteous indignation and frustration, suggestions about what he should or shouldn’t do. She’d had to remind herself—especially when she was younger and less patient—just to listen sometimes, not to weary him with tirades, however sympathetic their origins.
    Once, complaining to Dr. Wenning about Peter’s tendency toward ponderousness, his quiet method of reaching decisions—How can I help him if he doesn’t tell me anything? she had protested—Dr. Wenning had said to her: Not everyone likes to talk so much as you and I do, Ruth. Maybe a little silence is nice sometimes. Good for the marriage.
    Peter made his way toward her now, moving against the tide of boys, parting them as he came. Some of them came up only to his waist. He held his hands over their heads, elbows up, like someone pushing through deep water.
    When he bent to kiss her, she put her hand on his cheek. Under her fingertips she felt a patch of bristles, a place he’d missed, shaving.
    You’ve had a long day, she said. You all right?
    Then a boy, practically bouncing with urgency, was beside them. Dr. van Dusen? he said. Can we—
    Peter turned from her, his hand falling from her arm. In a moment he was gone from her side, pulled back into the crowd.
    She stood for a minute, waiting.
    The bell in the chapel began to ring. Everybody would want Peter for one thing or another tonight, she thought. No point in waiting.
    She turned away and went on without him.
    She walked alone down the path toward the chapel. The world, so solemn and aloof in the growing darkness, looked like a painting or an engraving, she thought. The big motionless shapes of the oak trees with their heavy crowns standing at a distance on the lawn; beyond the trees, the palisade of wrought-ironstreetlamps. Along the road, a row of parked cars, silver-backed in the moonlight. The light at the horizon had faded, and overhead now the sky was a deep, humbling blue.
    Ruth had studied languages at Smith. In the Old High German she knew, the word for
blue
was
blau
, which meant
shining
.
    It was a shining kind of night.
    The world was everywhere a mess, she thought, countries all over the globe being torn to pieces, it seemed, by flood or fire or poverty or hate. And sometimes she had so many complaints about even her own small safe corner of it. But how dazzling it could be.
    At the end of the path where the trees parted, the white steeple of the chapel stood out against the sky. At the steeple’s