Going to Bend: A Novel by Diane Hammond

Author:Diane Hammond
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780385512541
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2004-01-20T04:55:40.786261+00:00

NADINE SAT in her car at the Sawyer airfield and chewed a hangnail. Gordon was supposed to have arrived already, and in the rain, of course; the coastal rain she’d come to take personally, dripping and blowing without end like a bad cold. He had been gone for five days, and good God, how she’d missed him. In his absence she saw them as they truly were: a forty-one-year-old woman who fifty years earlier would have been called a spinster lady, and a forty-one-year-old bachelor known for keeping to himself except on the rare occasions when he was seen with attractive young men in the city.

Ten years ago each of them had had a good life, a life each had every reason to expect would last forever. Nadine, with her master’s in English literature, managed a bookstore, a small shop specializing in important literature and select first editions. She had few friends, but those she did have, she loved. Gordon had just met Johnny and when they were together the two of them glowed like the sunrise. Shy Gordon, shy Johnny, avowed lovers for keeps, lovers forever, only who knew that forever could possibly end so soon? It was still a good time to be a gay man in love. No one was dying, no one had died, no one feared the prospect of death. Old age still meant your seventies, not your thirties. It seemed like such an impossibly long time ago. Nadine and Gordon, smart and kind and to whom the easy way never seemed to apply. Johnny would die in Gordon’s arms, just as Gordon would one day die in Nadine’s. And here they were, waiting, brother and sister clinging together in the hell-blast of terminal illness and irrelevant dreams.

The airplane appeared at last, a tiny thing fighting its way free of clouds as sticky as cotton candy. As Nadine watched, the plane seemed to be simultaneously blown sideways and down, making heart-stopping contact with the runway. Nadine whispered quiet thanks to whatever deity might be listening inside her car and turned up the heat.

When the airplane door opened, Gordon didn’t so much step out of the plane as bore his way into the solid face of oncoming rain and wind. Nadine dashed out to meet him, wrapped a raincoat around him and hurried him back to the car. She hurled his bag into the trunk and, panting, the two of them slammed their doors in unison.

“Jesus,” Gordon said. “Did it stop raining at all while I was gone?”

Nadine shot him a baleful look.

“Did you know that it’s actually not raining someplace in the world?” Gordon extended a bag of bagels, the single thing she’d asked him to bring back from Los Angeles.

“I’ve heard, but I don’t believe it.” Nadine dug into the bagel bag as she swung out onto the coastal highway. “Tell me everything.”

There had been movies and sunshine and good food eaten in the presence of pleasant company. There were the greetings extended to her by acquaintances and former neighbors.

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