Shade of Avocado - Part 40
No Place Like It (Avery)
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It took another three days to return to Santa Fe at our unhurried pace. Besides sightseeing, writing, and reading, Piper and I spent a lot of time exchanging ideas and sharing emotions. For two people who had been leery of intimate relationships, Piper and I summoned increased courage on a physical level. With everything we’d been through in the thirty-one days of July, we accumulated an equivalent of several years of experience together.
And there would be much more to come. My sister Josie and her partner Tracy set a date to return in mid-October for their wedding. Part of my gift to them included a stay at the Eldorado Hotel in downtown Santa Fe. Piper would serve as the couple’s second witness.
During the next two and a half months, it did not take long for Piper and me to settle into a natural rhythm together. We picked up with “playing house” seamlessly as we had as children, cooking, cleaning up, food shopping, and added things we hadn’t anticipated as kids, like yard work or unsticking a stubborn bathroom faucet.
Both of us were inspired to progress on our respective fiction books. Of course, I had my consulting work to resume also. Sometimes we wrote together on our separate projects, encouraging without speaking. We also collaborated on ideas for the stories of Pyx and Alfi while they were fresh in our minds. We agreed their last adventure needed a better ending than the one we’d created thirty years ago.
One afternoon, Piper was mashing up a batch of guacamole. She picked up one of the avocado pits and asked me, “Do avocado trees grow here, Avery?”
I thought for a moment. “It may be too cold for them in the winter right here. Further south in New Mexico, at lower elevations. Indoors, perhaps?”
We suspended the pit on toothpicks over the mouth of a mason jar filled with water to see if it would root.
“Speaking of winter, how cold and snowy were the winters in Georgia?” I asked Piper.
“Oh, we only got snow every few years and it didn’t stick around long. Temperatures dropped below freezing overnight though. We’d have ice on the roads sometimes.”
“You know, Piper. We can have a whole week go by when the temperature doesn’t go above freezing.”
She smiled at me with her topaz eyes. “What a sweetie! Are you actually thinking about having me hang around here with you in the winter? We’ve barely started August!”
I couldn’t hide the enormous smile coming from inside me. “I’m thinking of…contingency plans. Like, do you have the right jacket for it?”
“I’m sure it could be worked out,” Piper said as she put her arms around my neck. “But it's not even autumn yet, dear.”
Some days, Piper and I would talk about how fast our relationship was moving. On the calendar, it had only been six weeks or so since we started our romance. We shared so much in the two years since our chance meeting in the park, discussing the most important parts of our lives, our beliefs, our emotions. Thirty years in the past, we had been best of friends through childhood and adolescence when we lived two doors apart. It seemed impossible, but Piper and I had never stopped loving each other.
I looked at my calendar one morning – then double checked – and realized the next day would be the second anniversary of our reunion at the picnic in the park. I went out on my own later that day to buy some flowers and kept them hidden in the garage overnight. When Piper got up the next morning, she asked what the bouquet on the dining room table was about.
“Those are so beautiful!” Piper exclaimed. “When did you start decorating with flowers, Avery?”
“Where were you, two years ago?” I asked her.
“Um…two years? Getting my lesson plans ready. Two years? Oh, I guess I must have been bringing Erin to college.”
“Almost. Exactly two years ago, you went to a high school reunion picnic.”
“Today? You remembered the exact day? Oh, Avery, that is too….” With her hand to her mouth, Piper tried to come up with an adjective. It must have been poignant enough if I prevented an experienced English teacher from accomplishing such a simple task. Instead, we hugged a couple of minutes until she led me back into the bedroom.
Early one morning, I wrote down a detailed account of the SME1 under the avocado tree. I also included a description of the argument between Piper and me after the van broke down. In particular, what were uncharacteristic emotions for me, to express feelings to Piper the way I never could during my marriage to Miranda. I sent this document off to Ayane so she would have it before my appointment coming up with her.
I walked out of my office to find Piper sitting on the sofa, a pile of tissues wadded up next to her, along with several that tumbled on the floor.
“School started today,” Piper muttered. “Some other teacher is introducing themselves to my kids this morning.”
“I’m sure you miss it. You needed to escape everything that frustrated you about it though. You can always go back to teaching again. Somewhere it is a lot less frustrating. A district around here.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt most any district would hire me in a hot minute,” said Piper. “Just because I miss the students it doesn’t mean I wish I was still teaching. This is part of my mourning process, I think. A couple days after I left on my trip, I crossed the state border. I pulled over into a rest stop and I cried for like eight hours. Afterwards, I knew I’d done the right thing leaving. I had to have my feelings. You understand, Avery? Later today, I’ll realize I’m doing what I’m supposed to do.”
“Yeah, Piper. I do understand. The only way out of grief is through it.”
In mid-September, I invited Piper on a drive south of town and a hike up a scrubby hillside in the late afternoon. It was a calm day in the low 70s with only benign high clouds to the southwest.
I stood on the slope and pointed to a mostly dead piñon pine tree. It was not completely dead because a few green sprouts grew out of its gnarled trunk. “That tree took the worst of my lightning strike.”
“This is where you got hit?” she asked. “You’re okay coming back up here?”
“It wasn’t the worst event in my life.” I looked up at blue sky above. “I don’t think we’re in any danger today.”
“Wow, okay. What are we up here for? What did you want to do here?”
“I thought we might enjoy the sunset. It should be a lovely one.”
“Sure.”
I spread out the car blanket I had carried up. The two of us sat down, turned toward the western sky.
“Today is Miranda’s birthday, Piper. We used to have this thing where we viewed sunsets together. There was one last sunset in Heaven, then she sent me home to learn more about love.”
“Oh. I would have thought you’d want to have this time alone. To remember her?”
I shook my head and smiled. “No, I’m glad to have you with me for this. I wanted to show her maybe I have learned more since then. I don’t mean, like I’m being vindictive, to show her. I think she’d be happy that I could love again…even after the End of the World.”
“I see,” she said as she held my hand. “I’m glad you didn’t have one of those ugly divorces.”
“Me, too. But we still didn’t resolve everything until we talked in Heaven, and it took these last two years to unpack it all. ‘A time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance.’ I feel comfortable about where I am with Miranda now and how I’ve been able to live on.”
“You know what, Avery? I’m really glad I can be happy for both of you. It shows me I’ve been able to live on, too. I had an ugly divorce though we never exchanged another word since Skip walked out on us. Since we came back from our road trip, I recognized an important distinction between distrust and mistrust. I understand I had excellent reasons to distrust my ex-husband and my father, based on their behaviors. I recognized I mistrusted you only because are a man, and that was my instinct. It was terribly unfair, and you never behaved toward me in any way that I should distrust you. Sometimes teachers have new lessons to learn.”
“It was well worth waiting for you to get there,” I said. “Hey, you said you never saw the guy again. What was it made the divorce so ugly for you?”
"The same things that made the marriage ugly. I had to be the one to make sure everything that needed doing got done. A few years later, when the private investigator finally tracked him down, he was in some place like East Buttfuck, Alabama, I think. When they served him the final decree from the court, the only acknowledgement I had was his signature scribbled on the receipt. You’d think at least he’d wish me, ‘Have a nice life, bitch!’”
“Sounds like you’ve almost moved on,” I said.
Piper giggled self-consciously. “Almost. They told me I had to make sure he got the final decree so I could legally marry again. I didn’t think it was such an important detail to take care of. All those years, I couldn’t imagine committing to something like that again.”
“One day, Piper, perhaps you’ll be glad you wrapped up the detail.”
The disk of the sun dipped below the crests of the distant mountains. The clouds lighted up in orange and red until they deepened into purples. We stood holding hands together, in the timelessness between sunset and twilight.
Before dark, we made our way back down the hill and headed home. We had a wedding to prepare for. Josie and Tracy’s wedding was a few short weeks away.
Shared Metaphysical Experience