Page 54 of Good Days Bad Days

Greg

Harry’s Antique Haven

Lake Geneva, Wisconsin

“Good afternoon,” Harry’s gruff voice calls out to a customer entering the shop.

Hours into a piano rehab project, I don’t leave the small work area off to the right of the main showroom.

I rarely work the counter. Harry’s better with the browsing tourists, the small talk and sales part of the job.

He should be. Harry’s worked at this store since his parents ran it as a general store back when the train still dumped tourists in Lake Geneva on a regular schedule.

I find solace in the workroom’s solitude and in checking price tags and arranging the displays.

When I’m not in the shop, I’m on the road, searching estate sales, garage sales, and auctions for inventory.

Harry, the father of one of my brother’s friends who died in Vietnam a few months after Jim in ’68, says I’ve gotten good at identifying a find.

I study The Complete Antiques Price List and have learned how to negotiate.

In this job, my reserved nature works more in my favor than against it.

When we make a big sale to one of the rich people from the big houses on the lake, I get a rush.

Unlike the dread and terror that comes with war journalism, this is a fulfilling rush, wholesome, like I felt behind the camera in my early days at WQRX, chasing storms with Martha or on Janesville Presents . . . or even Betty’s show.

I haven’t picked up a camera since I got home three months ago.

By home, I mean, back in country, because nothing really feels like home anymore.

In my twenty-one months overseas a lot of things took on a sense of unrealness.

Maybe it was because I watched the world through a lens for a little too long and surrendered to fantasy a little too fully.

When KSTP pulled out their crew permanently after the Paris Peace Accords, I had no choice but to return to the States.

Well, that’s not entirely true. A few weeks ago, CBS offered me a new position that included the option to return to my self-appointed mission in Vietnam.

If CBS had made the offer while I was still there—while I was still staring at the black-and-white picture of my fake wife, still used to the early morning helicopter rides, smoke-filled rooms of frustrated reporters begging for the truth every night—I probably would have taken it.

But once I said yes to Harry’s offer of a job and the room above his store and felt the magic of objects that were once treasured by people who are no longer in this world—I quickly found I preferred looking through this dusty, backward-facing lens.

I stay away from television in general right now.

It’s too hard to watch images from the war I just left behind, a war that’s taken too much from our nation and continues to consume us hungrily.

I close the lid of the upright piano I’ve been working on and pull a chair up to the keys to check my handiwork.

My thumbs meet over the worn ivory of middle C, and I consider what to play.

My mom’s favorite song comes to mind: “Que Sera, Sera.” After my dad died, she’d spend most of her nights listening to Doris Day’s record as she caught up on her mending next to the fire.

It seemed to be a way to comfort herself, convincing herself that she was a passenger in her life, that she needed only to close her eyes and let the stream take her wherever it may.

I think Jim’s death made her open her eyes, and she didn’t like where the current had taken her. So she made the first strong-willed decision of her life. My fingers falter when I reach the chorus for a second time and close the key cover, reaching for an off-white price tag and wax pencil.

“I love that song,” a woman’s voice says from behind me. “How much?” I finish writing numbers on the tag and then tie it to the music stand.

“Fifty,” I say, which is a lot. I got it for ten, but Harry taught me to start high to leave room for negotiation.

“Do you deliver?”

“Depends on where,” I say, wiping off a missed patch of dust, hoping she didn’t see it.

“Janesville,” she says with a familiar smile in her voice.

I spin around, an immediate brightness lifting the gloom left behind by the memory of my mother.

There she stands, in an oversized pea-green coat buttoned at her throat and a large white purse clasped in front of her, hair pinned up in a tight twist, her lips red as the day I first met her.

“Betty?” I exclaim, stunned at her miraculous appearance in my workroom. “How did you . . .”

“Mark told me. My last letter came back, and I was worried sick that something happened to you. Then, you didn’t come to Mark’s wedding, and I know how close you both were, so I had to ask.”

“I . . . I had to work.” It’s the same lie I told Mark, claiming I was out of town searching for new inventory at a big auction.

The truth was, I chose to leave town that weekend to avoid seeing everyone from WQRX again, particularly Don and Betty together.

It was selfish. Mark had been such a steady friend and now he was finally settling down, but I wasn’t ready.

I planned to never see Betty again, to count her as something I sacrificed in Vietnam.

“Yeah, that’s what he said. You always said Mark and Lucy were right for each other. Thought you’d be there to gloat.”

“Believe me, I’ve gloated plenty.”

“You doing all right?” she asks, looking me up and down, probably noticing how baggy my pants are and how the buttoned sleeves of my shirt are loose on my wrists.

“I’m adapting,” I say, not mentioning the panic attacks and the light I keep on in the corner of my room to quell my new fear of the dark. “And you? You doing all right? Marriage all it’s cracked up to be?”

She shrugs. “Not exactly, but things rarely are.”

It’s a nebulous response, perhaps meant to goad me into asking more, but I don’t.

My new negotiation skills are keeping me steady.

Even if she’s miserable with Don, there’s nothing I can do about it.

She’s married to him, she chose him; I can’t be the opium that dulls her pain, not when it hurts so much to do so.

“That’s true,” I say simply. Betty cocks her head like she can’t make sense of my withdrawn responses. Perhaps I’m not all she thought I’d be, either.

“So, do you think you might come back?”

“To WQRX?” I chuckle a little at an idea that seems so audacious to me now. “No.”

“We sure could use you. Things have been kinda tough since you left.” Her forehead ripples with an emotion I can’t identify.

Mark already told me about some of the problems—money is tight, tempers are flaring, and Don is no longer the golden boy.

He said Betty will soon have to choose to stay with the station and her show or leave the station with her husband.

“I’ve moved on from Janesville,” I say. I’ll never set foot in that town again no matter who offers the invitation.

Her lips twitch, and I think about the last time we were alone together—a memory that kept me brave when bombs, bullets, and troop movements were the terrible truths of my every day. I focus on a spot over her head where an old cuckoo clock leans against a wall waiting for a new set of weights.

“Greg, why didn’t you tell me you were back?”

I keep my gaze fixed above her. All I’ll see in her bright eyes is disappointment and all I’ll see on her left hand is another man’s ring. I’ve come to terms with this loss, but that doesn’t mean I like seeing her standing in front of me while she’s wearing Don’s ring and carrying his last name.

“I didn’t think it was a good idea. Letters are one thing, but .

. .” I shrug, leaving the rest of the sentence for her to finish.

She nods as if she understands exactly what we’ve been doing the past two years, what grew between us, though unintended at first, and what we stoked with our kiss and our communiqués.

I love her more now than when I flew halfway around the world to escape my feelings for her.

I love the person she shared with me through hundreds of pages of stories, thoughts, and memories.

I love the real Betty, and she knows it.

It’s cruel to expect me to stand by and watch.

A part of me wants to call her on it, but the more rational side knows it’d only serve to hurt us both.

“I don’t know how to not write to you anymore. These past months, I feel like a piece of me is missing,” she says, a sorrowful vibrato at the end of her sentence causing a sense of panic to rise inside of me.

“Me too,” I reply, and I mean it. I let myself look at her, a lump forming in my throat. This is the end, the final curtain, the cherry on top of the melted sundae.

“Mm-hmm,” she hums in response. She senses it, too. But what else could she expect? “Well, I should go,” she says with a sigh. “I’m meeting one of my girlfriends for lunch. I thought I’d stop by and check on you, but you seem fine.”

“I am.” It’s not one hundred percent true, but it’s all she needs to know. If I let her into my heart at all, I won’t be able to let her walk out that door without begging to see her again, settling for half a life.

“I’ll see the man at the counter about the piano, then?”

“Yup. Actually, bring him this.” I retrieve the tag.

She takes it, gripping the stiff paper as I hold on to the tag longer than I should.

She’s so close I could lean down and kiss her, and by the needy look in her eyes, I think she’d let me.

My God, I want to hold her again, let the desire swell between us, see what happens when two years of yearning are realized.

But then the purse she’s been holding in front of her slips down her wrist, leaving her midsection uncovered, snapping me out of the trance.

My eyesight blurs and then focuses. I release the ticket, striding away to the opposite side of the workroom like I remembered an important project, running my hands through my hair.

I’m not sure if she says goodbye, because I’m overwhelmed by what nearly happened.

It would’ve been so easy to forget my resolve if she hadn’t dropped her purse, because what I saw there changed everything—more than the ring or a wedding or the label of Mrs. Don Hollinger.

Betty is pregnant.