The Reticent Storyteller Read online

  Yes, there it was again! Lilly was slipping into that throaty storyteller's mode. The gabled roof under construction runs sixty by forty feet so, figuring five pounds of nails per square foot…

  "Are you listening?" Lilly tapped him gently on the shoulder.

  "Yes, of course."

  "But you were snoring."

  "No, I'm awake now."

  "Anyway," Lilly shifted on her side, a forearm draped across his chest. "The husband decides to travel back to County Cork, to find his wife's missing child and…"

  On Wednesday when the crew broke for lunch after installing the fascia trim on the new construction, Rick, asked, "How come you never say shit about Lilly?"

  "What exactly did you want to hear?"

  "I don't know… does she make you happy?"

  "Yeah, she's good," Parker offered guardedly.

  "Sometimes she acts like a deaf mute."

  "Yes, that's true."

  Rick gave him a tortured look. "Thelma's a freakin' talkaholic. She never shuts up. That's why I left… cause of her god-awful motor mouth. She don't never hardly give it a rest. Twenty-four-seven….blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like Chinese water torture." Rick inched closer. "I told Thelma she gotta put a rag in it or I'm gonna file papers… put an end to this farce-of-a-marriage once and for all."

  Parker took a swig of ice tea and bit into a roast beef sandwich. He didn't hold out much hope that Rick's wife would 'put a sock in it' or much of anything else. Their marriage was doomed. But then, more people than Parker cared to admit confabulated, spewing their noxious, verbal diarrhea in a dozen different directions. They bullshitted you half to death - offered up a potpourri of half-truths, verisimilitude and misinformation - wasting time and grey matter.

  "In the bedroom my wife's a goddamn prude." the carpenter was thinking out loud. "Thelma don't like to experiment - take liberties, if you know what I mean." Parker nodded and took another bite from the sandwich. "Nothing kinky… won't watch skin flicks. No nothing."

  "That's too bad." Parker rose to his feet rather abruptly even though a slightly overripe banana lay nestled under a paper towel in his lunch box. "Gotta get back."

  "One more question." Rick sounded like a frantic tourist, who had fallen overboard on a cruise ship and was watching the vessel laze off into the sunset. "Do you love Lilly?"

  Parker grunted something unintelligible and shook his head up and down.

  "Can you picture yourself living apart?"

  "No, not hardly." He grabbed his steel-shank, Estwing framing hammer off the ground.

  Rick flashed him a tortured look. "Lucky you!"

  A year passed. Parker Salisbury slipped a felt ring box from his pants pocket, held the silver cube chest high, but didn't bother to show his future mother-in-law the modest stone. "I want to marry your daughter."

  Edith Truman didn’t rush forward to embrace him. Rather, the fair-skinned woman with the curly brown hair streaked with gray cleared her throat and observed, "She isn't like other girls. You'll have to accept Lilly on her own peculiar terms… just as her father and I have over the past twenty-six years." Mr. Truman had passed away a year earlier.

  “I’ve dated my share of women since high school," Parker replied. "Lilly doesn't resemble much of anyone in the universe."

  Most parents might have taken such a remark as a rebuff - a back-handed compliment if not flagrant affront - but Mrs. Truman only stared at him with genuine sympathy. Only now did her normally stoic features ease into a pleased expression. "And when were you planning to ask her?"

  "Tonight, at dinner." They had been dating a year now. Parker was taking Lilly into Boston to celebrate. The girl would probably sleep over his apartment. "I'm at a distinct disadvantage," Parker confided.

  "How so?"

  "What I feel for your daughter far exceeds anything Lilly could ever experience for me." He scrupulously avoided the 'L' word. The first time he told Lilly how he felt she observed, "I'm sure Thelma and Rick loved each other once and now look at them."

  "That's pretty damn cynical," he grumbled.

  "Words come cheap," she replied harshly. "Treat me decent. That's all that matters."

  A moment later the front door burst open and Lilly rushed in. "Traffic was awful," she explained, slipping off her jacket and scarf. "I'll just be a moment." She hurried upstairs to change out of her work clothes.

  Mrs. Truman led him into the den that doubled as a family library. "Good luck tonight and, for what it's worth, I'd be honored to welcome you into our family." Hugging him briefly, she left the room.

  An avid reader, Lilly's father installed floor-to-ceiling, mahogany shelves along three walls. Once when Parker asked Mrs. Truman, which of the hundreds of books in the library her daughter had read, the woman replied cryptically, "It might be easier to say which Lilly hasn't read."

  Parker's future bride didn't so much read books as she devoured them, cannibalized the hardcover classics. As he perused the titles, several authors jumped out at him. There was a clever tale about a simple-minded servant with a parrot by Flaubert. Lilly served up the bittersweet story like an hors d’oeuvre before their last debauched lovemaking. And Guy de Maupassant - Parker vaguely recalled a tale about a prostitute who outfoxed a sadistic Nazi officer during the French occupation. On a shelf slightly above eye level he spied Candide. Voltaire, according to Lilly, wrote like a zonked-out hippy from the psychedelic sixties. Or at least that’s how it seemed when she described the main character's hallucinogenic romp across sixteenth-century Europe.

  On the far wall was a collection by Willa Cather. Did it contain Neighbor Rosiky? Lilly recounted that brief character sketch between strings in a duckpin bowling alley off route one in North Attleboro. A few rows down, Edith Wharton had been misfiled. Parker moved the nineteenth-century socialite to the opposite end of the collection, where she rightfully belonged. George Elliot - her novels ran a thousand pages or more. Lilly Parker ignored Silas Marner in favor of vignettes - some comical, others painfully sad - from each of Elliot's major works. And Turgenev, the Russian…

  "I'm ready now." Decked out in the same stunning dress she wore their first date, Lilly floated into the room.

  Reaching into his pocket, Parker rubbed a thumb reassuringly over the fuzzy surface of the ring box. "Come in and close the door. There's something I want to show you, darling."