What I’d like to do is share why I was Saying Hello in this living room in Seattle. Maybe before Christmas the time for words and more pictures will present itself.

Meanwhile, may your days shine, or if they’re dullish, may there be reflections (which often hold more depth, longer, as the times of our goodbyes and griefs often do).

If you’ve known me a while, you’ll be familiar, perhaps, with my sometimes grittier style. If you think of me as a bit sheltered, or innocent, you may be surprised to learn more of my story. This piece of the tale came out fairly true to the way things felt back then. Back when an invitation to go skydiving appealed in a got-nothing-to-lose way.

Maybe it was essential to see how stupid I could be, back when I was young. Old and stupid I’ve been, too, but more accepting of truth, perhaps. More thankful than before, certainly, for the story and the dancing.

Tim was in the Navy long ago, when we were first married. I’ve written another online-accepted piece, this one inspired by events during our first married year, in a land not-so-far away but that might as well have been the moon, with two creatures alien to one another trying to navigate its craters.

You can read the tale here, at Long Story Short, where apparently it fits their Valentine sensibilities.

Sorrows and blessings we’re asked
to ponder. Hers, the sorrow
of a sixteenth birthday weekend.
Helping her mother at the junior high church retreat. Her
father out on the road with the college quartet.
Her older brother on his way, riding
with friends from the U of O, where he finished
his freshman year.

Mom and her best friends helped serve dinner, then
they escaped. A carnival in coastal Florence.
Bright eyes, flushed cheeks. Returning
to church camp to be scolded. “You snuck off,
we didn’t know where. We’ll deal with you
tomorrow.”

Next thing she knew, a flashlight shown,
she and her mother awakened on the sleeping porch.
Her mother’s dear friend: “Nelle, a sheriff’s here. He
has to tell you something, dear Nelle.”
Mom can still hear her mother sobbing beside her.
John, in the river. His friends survived the crash. He
couldn’t swim.

Someone offered to take them home. Nelle insisted
they drive along the Umpqua, and so they came upon
emergency workers, still dragging for his body.
John’s friends remained, waiting, dazed,
shivering. Mom watched her mother step from
the car and go to them. She comforted, telling them,
do not fear. Her John was this moment in
heaven.

My favorite aspects of the book have to do with Gary’s humility. Reflective and honest, he doesn’t assign blame on a whim, and yet he comes across as genuine. So yeah, I like the book. I’ve corresponded a bit with Gary and find him very approachable. Today I got to see him in action. A reading is up that he did of his first, short chapter, so if you’d like to hear it, straight from the author’s mouth, here you go.

At least, I think, Tim is waiting. When I sought to lessen tension earlier by giving him an opening to tease—“I suppose I’ll come home a swollen-headed blob”—Tim merely nodded, his gaze all sincere and not really helpful.

He brought me to the dentist’s office in the Falcon and is now prepared to spend hours of his free day on a waiting room chair on my account, when otherwise he’d get to be on base in the auto hobby shop setting weird pieces on parts like heads and gaskets in the process of renewing my Mustang’s damaged engine.

As I shift my bottom and wonder when the dentist will appear, a musical strain rises above machine-driven air sounds. The building PA system plays local radio station pop tunes. This one is unfamiliar, but lovely. I can rarely resist a man’s high voice crooning.

Sailing, the new voice sings, takes me away to where I’ve always heard it could be…My shoulders lower into the cushioned chair.

“All set?” the dentist says, breezing in.

I jump. “Uh, sure.”

“All right.” He nods to the hygienist as she returns. “Let’s get those wisdom teeth out of your way.”

“I don’t suppose you’d let me keep one or two, so I don’t become foolish?”

He chuckles, shaking his head. “This’ll be easy. Now, you chose to have the gas?”

“Yeah, I think…”

His hygienist clamps a small device over my nose.

“Breathe deep,” the dentist says. “It’ll start working instantly.” He pulls a tray of instruments near.

He’s right. I feel…a bit disconnected from my eyes. Easier, now, to exist in this place that reminds me of a dark blue sailor dress (why is everything nautical today?), my shiny black shoes on much smaller feet rising above my head as a bushy-browed, stern-faced man leans me back, continually commanding, “Open wider.” Finally, he’s thoroughly disgusted when I miss the ceramic bowl and instead spew rinse water down my little-girl front. “Ah, see? You’ve messed up your pretty outfit.”

My mommy, anyway, didn’t scold me on our way home. She gave me glances of sympathy, kind of like Tim’s on our way here today…

I drift to scenes of Tim telling puns to my mom. It’s our second month dating, and he’s helping us take down our Christmas tree. I hear his deep voice, “Bet this really needles you.” To Mom’s laughter I take in this muscular guy, who the night before whispered, “You make me feel so good, Deanna.” He’s not exactly the one I’d have guessed I’d call my man. He’s four years older. In the Navy and likely to be reassigned across the country soon (I won’t think about that; about making it to the end of my senior year alone). He’s not what you’d call an excessive romantic. I didn’t expect to find someone with whom “our” song would be from an Alan Parson’s Project album.

But the more I appraise him, the more everything he is fits me. Can I hope he’ll want to make our relationship permanent? Not unless I’m opting for stupidity, like girls in my classes who pined long after their boyfriends broke things off—some, I’ve heard on the outside of whispering circles, got rides to their doctors. At least abortion’s legal now.

I won’t end up pregnant by Tim. Sure, he and I get pretty intense. I mean, chaperoning died out eons ago, and now it’s do your own thing, and our things get pretty heated, though never in Tim’s Falcon—I mean, bucket seats, really, and you’d have to jump in the back, as singers croon about sometimes, but neither of us is smooth enough for that, so we go to his travel trailer, parked between Tim’s shore-duty base in Seattle and my house in Tacoma.

But Tim’s dad is a minister. My father is, too. Other guys stopped with me at hickeys and such, likely paused by vestiges of a fear that you violate a preacher’s daughter and a special room in hell is being spiffed up for your enjoyment, but Tim never has worried that way, knowing we aren’t special. He just believes getting me preggers would be wrong. And what a mess. For all his greasy work on car engines, Tim doesn’t like messes…

“All right, that’ll do it,” the dentist is saying. My chair’s back is lifting, and they’re removing instruments from my mouth and nose.

My eyebrows rise. I gesture to the back of my mouth, saying, “Aagh?” and holding up four fingers.

The dentist smiles. “We got all four. Popped right out. You can go see your husband now.”

“Yes, scoot on out there,” the hygienist says, undoing my bib. “That man looks worried about you.”

I’ve sure lately fallen down in that area.

“Thank you, God,” I pray, my hands folded and my eyes closed. “Thank you for Tim. For my job (help me not lose it). Our neighbors. Take care of the Painters, please.”

Darkness envelops me on the driveway. Inside the Falcon I shiver. I depress the lock button by reaching behind me to the end of the long driver’s-side door. Beneath me the broad seat is covered by a vinyl protector, its color nearly matching the car’s shade: Tahoe Turquoise. Tim probably learned that precise varietal name from his car repair friend back in New York.

I miss the ribbon of orangey-pink sunrise and how a few weeks ago it strengthened Charleston’s horizon along my way. Now November’s shroud is pierced only by the halogen headlights, a pair of Tim’s most modern acquisitions for his trusty vehicle.

At least we rarely have to deal with rain.

Far to the west most people are blissful in their last hours of sleep, except possibly for my dad. He’s been known to rise at 3:00 a.m. and exercise or pray. Then he drives across Tacoma in the latest small extra vehicle he’s purchased; if I remember right this one’s a Toyota pickup. Yellow, I think. The Datsun before it was green. Likely his wiper blades swipe a cheery rhythm.

Dad will step inside Roosevelt Heights Christian Church’s side door, flick a light switch, and make his way into the chilly, cramped office. Stalwartly lining the walls, his musty companions will include King James, a Cotton Patch New Testament, and Robert H. Schuller beaming positively.

I picture Mom still sound asleep at home, her clock radio not close to coming on yet. She’ll rise the very last moment she has to and gather her materials for school. My youngest brother, Richard, might catch a ride with her as far as his junior high. Our brother Dan will be on his way to classes by bus or car, unfazed by late practice last night for his leading role in a comedy—or was it a musical?

I turn left at the signal and cross four lanes of muttering traffic. Light lifts the farthest edge of eastern sky as I park behind Krispy Kreme. Head down, I go inside.

Behind the counter stands a new woman. Wispy-haired and watery-eyed, she glances at me with a vague smile.

“This is Velma,” says Alice. “She trained during afternoon shifts last week.”

I smooth my smock. “Hello.”

“I’m showing her the morning ropes,” Alice goes on, “before I head back to work on that big order. She’ll help you keep up.”

I fill my first cups of coffee smiling, grateful that Velma wasn’t brought in to replace me. Of course I recognize a few minutes later that she may indeed have been hired for that purpose.

In any case, it’s show time.

Taking on the register, I greet dozens of shipyard men whose faces are becoming familiar. Their names are harder to access, despite being sewn into ovals on their coveralls. Though a few of them never look directly at me when they order, I’ve learned to smile at one short man who jokes expansively with the others, gesturing broadly as he specifies which doughnuts he needs. Another man, tall and awkward, I like just as well because he is that way.

By slow-down hour for us, Alice has gone back to join Pat, one of the owner’s sons, at the conveyor. They’ll put up hundreds of boxes of glazed before switching to another room where with the aid of machines they’ll pump filling into fancy, puff-shaped doughnuts.

Velma asks, “Where are more napkins?”

“There,” I say. “Beneath the counter, on the left.”

She twists her neck, searching, while holding a nearly empty pot.

“Time to refill coffee,” I remind her. Empathy flutters in my stomach at her lost glances, but I keep moving, grabbing Mr. Bentier’s order and extricating myself from him quickly, taking a powdered sugar cake and fresh cup to a woman whose usual order I remember as she walks in.

More customers enter. “I better buzz for help,” Velma says.

“Wait,” I say. Too late. Velma has pushed the square black button far under the register that signals the back room of an urgent need out front.

“Help this woman over here,” I say, nudging Velma beyond the counter to remove her from my path. Then I scoop up coffee pot in one hand, three doughnuts in the other. I crook a pinky around a mug. I’ve just settled the new customers when Alice appears. “We’re all right,” I say. “Sorry to bother you.”

Alice raises an eyebrow. I brush past her to aid Velma in counting change. Alice nods and pushes back through double doors with plastic windows, into the rooms where machinery hums.

Kelly, who directs community programs at Rhett Avenue Christian, appraises me with a nod as I hold up my Krispy Kreme uniform. She calls over her shoulder to Tim and one of many church members setting up long tables in the fellowship hall, “Guys, move it more to the left. That space is reserved for the graveyard walkway and zombie chamber.”

Kelly sets me to work with an older woman stringing cottony spider webs and applying strategic plastic spiders. “All right, everybody!” she calls, an hour before showtime. “Get your rears in gear. We want those kiddos choosing our haunted house over the Baptist’s trick-or-treat ghoulie down the block!”

Face-up on one of the arranged tables, I wear black pants, my smock, and a latex mask with a doltish expression. Kelly in a lab coat and safety goggles cackles above my head, reaching into a bag beneath the table for “brains” every time another burst arrives from the parade of Charleston children enjoying our display.

Through the mask’s eye openings black light and the occasional strobe effect pattern the ceiling. Organ music reams the building – a different sort than on Sunday mornings. I think it might have been more fun jumping out beside Tim from a dark corner whenever kids came through. At least here I can breathe deeply, moaning from time to time as Kelly lifts plastic-wrapped sausages off my gut area and shouts, “We’re dying to operate on you children, too!”

Everything is transformed again for the morning service after Halloween. Tim and I take our places in the choir loft, seats enclosed by a wooden half-partition, across from Reverend Scott’s pulpit. I’m an alto; Tim’s in the bass section. Our director, Mrs. John, gestures vehemently at the men so they’ll remember to sing out and try to match the strength of women’s quavering voices in the front row.

In brilliant sunshine we greet people outside the sanctuary after noon. My stomach is a snare drum reverberating hunger. Mr. Bentier approaches as my dress billows. Smiling, he takes my hand. I smile-grimace at Tim, who reaches out with his. Mr. Bentier gives me a briefer squeeze than his usual at the doughnut shop. He shakes with Tim.

“This woman is special. You need to take good care of her,” he says at high volume.

Tim says, “Yes.” He finishes the pleasantries, doesn’t look my way.

Mr. Bentier shuffles on toward a middle-aged woman, whose hand he grasps, smiling broadly.

“I want to know what you were thinking,” I say at home, after supper. Tim crouches on the carpet, sorting cassette tapes from rectangular cases that hold his music for listening to in the car. I’ve been lying on my stomach near him, reading an article in Cosmopolitan.

“Hn?” Tim’s back is to me.

“What did you think when Mr. Bentier said I’m wonderful, or however he put it.”

Tim continues sorting.

“I mean,” I say, “you sounded like you agreed with him, and I wouldn’t mind hearing it from you once in a while.”

“Oh.” Tim lifts a tall stack of cassettes carefully, almost lovingly, and sets them up on the stereo.

“Well?” I say.

“Well, what?”

I stand up, sighing loudly. “Never mind.” I start for the kitchen, but Tim has his gaze on me at last so I stop.

“What is the problem?” Irritation might lurk at the back of his throat.

“Could we take more time to spend doing things…together?”

Puzzlement is his expression.

“So, I know we’re together right now. But I feel like you’re far away. So many nights you’re really gone, and when you’re around I’d like you to focus on me.”

He sets the cassette holder back on the shelf. “What you need,” Tim says, “is to get out and make girlfriends.”

Emotion jabs, dissecting my midsection like a wafted spear. I sink near the sofa, my face away from this man, this unfathomable creature I’ve joined my life with. He can’t mean what he uttered. If he does, I’m the freak in his mind, a woman who can’t find buddies. I’m a clinging fool to him, a misfit.

He’s noticed the tears spilling over and has moved closer, the stereotypical male confused by a hysterical woman. I jump up, go in the kitchen, and slam dishes. A perfectly domestic response.

“How ‘bout I drive the Mustang tomorrow. Need to change the oil,” Tim tells me later, in bed, where I huddle on a corner of the mattress. He makes eye contact, reaches to caress my shoulder. His apology for the unknown offense.

I recall the Bible verse that says, “Don’t let the sun go down on your anger.” I reacted stupidly, and I wish I could change it. Awkwardly I reach for him, too. “You,” I say. “You’re—so—doggone…” Playfully I poke his chest, clavicle, temple. Oops.

“Ow!”

I’ve poked Tim in the eye. “Sorry, sorry.” I rise to my knees, hover.

He grasps his face, glares at me from the other eye.

“Bleh,” I say, dropping to my pillow, turning my head.

“I think I’ll live,” Tim says. “But could you stop trying to blind me?”

The next day he stops in at Krispy Kreme. I’m surprised to see him; I’m behind with customers. Things might be going south here, like they did at Louie’s restaurant, and now my husband needs to tell me something.

“I was out on North Charleston Avenue, and the engine made a huge CRACK!”

I glance over at customers. The cool-lipped man who drinks black coffee offers a bemused grin. “Hubby’s here,” he remarks to Alice, who’s resetting the coffee pot and jerking her head so I’ll know to get over there quick.

“You’re okay?” I say to Tim.

“Yeah, but I think a valve or something broke in the Mustang. Had to call a tow truck, and now Dillman from the sub is driving me in. They’ll tow the car to the auto hobby shop; I’ll see what I can do with it tomorrow. But you’ll have to pick me up after duty.”

I nod, try to give him an encouraging, sympathetic look, and rush back to hand a woman two chocolate cake doughnuts.

I hate to think what towing costs.

“Young lady, more coffee here!”

Anyway, no time to worry.

After work Alice pauses beside me at the shop exit. “Try to move faster, Deanna.” She’s serious but kind. “You’re holding things up, and starting tomorrow you’ll be out front alone a lot while I work in back with Pat on that huge order.”

“I’m trying,” I say.

My shoulders sag as I trudge from the Falcon up the steps to our door. Fumbling in my purse, the truth dawns. I left my front door key on the Mustang’s keyring, so Tim, on duty in the rear of the submarine, has my way inside tucked snug in his jeans pocket.

Though briefly the notion of tossing my purse over the roof while screeching like an orangutan sounds good, I settle for going next door.

Mrs. Painter, despite her grief-stricken status, is as always willing to help.

I explain. “I have my back door key with me. But our dang alarm is hooked to that door, so I really don’t want to open it. Do you have any ideas as far as breaking in a window goes?”

“Hm, let’s go look,” she says.

Our windows are louvered jobs that open outward as you wind a crank. The two of us examine them. We find no method we can fathom for lifting off a single pane.

“Not even Tina could wriggle through that space,” concludes Mrs. Painter. “And you don’t want to break anything when you don’t ha
ve to. You’re welcome to spend the night with us, of course.”

“Thanks, but I’m a mess. I need my clean smock for the morning. Anyway…” I’m amazed by this woman, in her situation, offering to treat me as a guest. “I just have to open the other door. Go home and plug your ears.”

“Maybe I can help you turn off the alarm.”

We both take deep breaths before I pull the back door toward me. Our fire-siren bell rings out lustily. I dash in and grab the stool from near the washer. Tim hooked this alarm disc above the door; I reach high for it, releasing its chain. “Can’t pull it off the wall,” I shout to Mrs. Painter.

“How long does it run?” she asks.

“Don’t know. Long time.” I twist and strain, attempting to turn back the wound part and reset it. Brrrriiiiiinnnnngggggg. It’s stubborn. The phone rings, a dissonant tone to our main feature.

Tim. He’s called to tell me details about the Mustang’s shattered engine. Regarding the alarm resounding in the background he says, “You should have crawled in a window.”

Now I know why people say damn.

I take pity on Mrs. Painter and follow her suggestion to wait at her house till it’s over. I’d rather keep trying to stop this, flapping my wings and bleating at the ceiling.

Tina arrives from school saying, “Mama, there’s a god awful noise…”

My tears leak. I swipe with my palms, annoyed that I’m becoming a huge baby. As a high-schooler I rarely cried. Maybe it’s hormones—the birth control pills.

But Tina grins. And her mama puts a hand on my shoulder, and suddenly we’re embracing, Tina, too. The alarm keeps ringing next door.

“Had to slip out for a smoke,” she says, apologetic. Pupils tight and irises red-rimmed. Blue eyeliner. “Thank you both so much for coming.”

We step inside.

“Oh, hey,” Tina says, barely audible.

Rick comes to Tim, encircles his shoulders with his arms, eyes squeezed shut. “Glad you’re here, man.”

Tim acknowledges both teens, his expression halting.

“I, um.” I grasp for meaningful words. “I wish I’d have known your dad longer.”

Tina says, “I do, too.” Head down, she moves away, out the door.

Rick smiles, lifts his hands, follows her.

“Do her good to get some air,” Mrs. Painter says. “I don’t know but it hasn’t been right for her to be in on all these decisions about arrangements. We’re just, both of us, unacquainted with such matters.”

We stay beside Mrs. Painter, glancing at the form in the casket, until another friend of hers arrives. On our way out Tina and Rick appear down a quiet hallway. He’s offering her tissues, and she’s a whisp of cloud.

Later, inside our front door Tim says, “Guess I’ll finish greasing the Fairlane heads.” His coat’s off and he’s squatted in front of the engine parts on the floor.

I slide my back down the wall to sit near him. Legs outstretched; my ankles waggle my feet side to side. “What was it like during the ice storm?” I ask.

Tim wrote to me about it. He sent pictures. In January Charleston seized up under freezing rain. Powerlines snapped. Tim invited the Painters over to use his gas stove, and they camped in the living room watching his three-inch battery powered TV.

Tim had lived here a month before the storm. If it would have been me, I wouldn’t have met them yet.

He says, “we lined up the sleeping bags and brought in extra blankets. Tina brought over her Twister game. We were trying anything to keep warm.”

“What was Mr. Painter like then?”

“Fine.”

“You and he could talk about stuff?”

“Yep.”

“I’m sorry he’s gone.” I wish I knew what else to say. Mostly I don’t mind Tim taking his time with the greasing job.

“I met a man in Maryland, when I was at nuclear training school,” Tim says, using his rag on the metal. “His daughter and her boyfriend were on their CBs a lot – that’s how I got to know them. We met up at her dad’s house, and it turned out he was semi-retired. Fixed up old cars and sold them.”

“Ah,” I say. “Like Fords?”

“Fords, Chevys, Plymouths. Anyway, I asked him about the carburetor on the Falcon, if he had ideas why it kept seizing up. He showed me how to take it apart, clean off the idler arms, and get it going. Then I watched him take off valve covers and adjust them.”

“Oh, you learned a lot.” I can’t decide whether I’m grateful to the man or not. But I can tell he was important to this man in front of me. If only I’d meet someone who could take Tim’s valve covers off, show me what to do…

“Anyway, right before I finished school, word came over the CB. The man who taught me engines died of a heart attack. That, uh, sucked.”

Quite a few people show up at Mr. Painter’s funeral. In my skirt on the mortuary’s folding chair I watch my husband’s face. I remember services my dad led in his gentle manner over the years.

My sophomore high school year, my parents and brothers and I sat, numb, at an Episcopal funeral for Debbie, who’d drowned. She was 11. Her brother and mine were best friends. Debbie and I got along well; she spent the night once in my double bed when their parents were out of town. During her service I thought about how she’d never shaved her legs.

Now Tina is weeping beside her mother. We glimpse them behind a screen. Rick sits there, too, his arms around both women.

Afterward there’s pie and a fruit salad. Tina laughs when Rick makes a face over coconut protruding strangely from an orange.

“Hey,” Rick says as Tim and I carry our empty paper plates to the trash. “Wanta ditch this joint?”

We pile in the Falcon. Tim finds streets leading to the Battery, near Old Town. Out across the water is Fort Sumter. Tina stumbles hopping across sidewalk to flowing lawn at the park. “Gotta get back soon to Mama,” she says. The breeze is soft but chill.

Rick steadies her. She gazes at his face; her wide, pretty mouth smiles.

Men of higher status than the shipyard workers dally each morning at the coffee counter, relaxing on swivel chairs, stirring steaming brew before an open newspaper, lifting a doughnut between thumb and middle finger.

I smooth my green smock, hefting a full pot, moving opposite a casual-suited, graying patron who glances over his half-moon glasses and raises an eyebrow.

“More coffee?” I say.

“Will it be any better than the last cup?” He snorts and turns a page.

I don’t know if he’s joking. “Uh, sure.”

“Oh, darlin’, bring that wonderful coffee over here next, will you?” Mr. Bentier, who goes to the same church Tim and I do, speaks at a high pitch, smooths his snowy hair as I finish pouring the first man’s black cup.

I remember to bring lots of cream for Mr. Bentier.

After I serve him he takes my free hand in both of his. Pats my wrist, smiles until I blush.

“All right, Mr. Bentier, let her go,” says Alice, breezing past us with a tray of fresh raised glazed for the front cupboard. “A customer over there’s waiting, Deanna.”

Grateful for her nod, her kind smile, and the release, I move past the man of black coffee and cool words to serve a woman on the end. The man makes eye contact. His stare doesn’t let up through my delivery of the woman’s plain cake and coffee with sugar.

“Let’s see that rock on your finger,” the man says.

I present my white-gold rings. The man inspects without pawing me.

Tim’s voice over the phone hinted secretive pleasure this last May after confirming he’d ordered the wedding set.

“What shape’s the diamond?” I asked. I’d told him I liked oval and marquee.

“Diamond shaped,” he said.

Five days before our wedding Tim held my hand and slid on the engagement ring. A quarter karat marquee. I inhaled, amazed, then ran to show my father.

The cool customer whistles so loud everyone turns to look. “I can pawn it for you,” he says. “Any time money gets too tight, or you’d just like to ditch the guy, let me know.” His appraisal switches from the ring to me.

“My husband and I are doing fine,” I tell him. “Today’s our ten week anniversary.”

“Incredible! Living on love.” The man’s attention returns to his newspaper.

“Love and doughnuts,” I say.

“Ha, ha!” His smile at the paper looks genuine. I’m off for more coffee. “Love and doughnuts,” he says, quiet, behind me.

Tim picks me up at 1:30 in the Mustang. Its dull gold paint job reflects wan sun. Today’s Tim’s day off. Less heat billows from pavement than on recent days, but humidity creeps under my white pants and smock.

“I fixed the brakes,” he says.

“I can drive it now?”

He nods. “This’ll be your car.”

I reach to pat his arm. “We may not eat much ever, but at least I can get to work.”

Tina Painter steps from her porch when we reach our mobile home. “My daddy,” she says. “He’s in the hospital. Mama’s supposed to call or send someone to get me.”

“We’ll take you,” I say. Tim nods. I run in to change and use the bathroom before we speed to the ancient healthcare building downtown.