Second Chances Read Online Free

about Freddy, I mean. And I guess it is sort of embarrassing to poor old Edward, these days. All those years in the closet and then there’s his lover out carrying placards. Heading Harvey Milk parades.” Dudley sighs, mostly out of sympathy for Edward but also for Freddy, of whom she is fond. And she admires his recent stand.
    “Poor old Edward.” Sam’s chuckle is affectionate; he too is very fond of Edward, and of Freddy.
    Their voices, Sam’s and Dudley’s, both in tone and accent present extraordinary contrasts. Being so used to each other, to years of private conversations, this is not something of which they are conscious, but another person hearing them would be aware of an odd antiphony. Dudley’s voice is both higher and softer, a sweet voice, really, more so than her somewhat weathered exterior would suggest. She sounds considerably younger than she is, and so Bostonian—still. Whereas Sam’s voice is closer to what his appearance would suggest, the deep, raspy voice of a very large, aging man. His deep-Southern accent is as slow and courtly as Dudley’s is pure Yankee.
    “Oh dear,” now quite suddenly says Dudley. “I’m doing exactly what I accused both Edward and me of doing this afternoon. I’m sounding so smug, I’m taking such pleasure in worrying over Edward.”
    “I think you’re what Catholics call scrupulous.” Indulgent Sam.
    “Well, that can’t be the worst thing to be.” In a pleased way Dudley bridles; she likes this sort of teasing attention from Sam. And then, with a certain bravado, she tells him, “He and I were worrying over Celeste, naturally.”
    Sam’s answering sound is wholly ambiguous.
    “More of the same about ‘Bill.’ ” Dudley telegraphs, meaning: None of us can understand what’s going on, if anything. Who is this Bill?
    “I guess we’ll meet him sometime.” Sam’s voice is even vaguer than his words.
    “Or maybe not? Maybe there isn’t any Bill? Edward and I both thought of that.”
    Sam laughs at her. “You do make mysteries sometimes.”
    “Oh, that’s just what I accused Edward of doing.”
    We are getting along better than usual, is one of the things that Dudley is thinking as they talk. We’re in a good phase, she thinks. But is any phase, ever, final? She bears scars still from some of their worst old times, from horrifying words voiced violently between them, ugly drunken scenes. Dudley sometimes recalls all that with genuine fear, which is not exactly to say that she chooses to dwell on an ugly past (as Sam might say if he knew how often she thinks about all that); it is simply hard for her to believe that they are home free, as it were, that they have finally settled into a peaceful old age, as people are supposed to do. (Sam probably believes that they have. Of a happier disposition, generally, than Dudley is, he does not tend to “borrow trouble”; he even forgets that things ever have been bad.)
    Neither Dudley nor Sam is drawn to explicit conversations about the nature of their “relationship” (a word that neither of them would ever use); their temperaments, though quite unlike, their early training and the fact of their generation all conspire to prevent confrontations—and just as well, either of them might easily say. Dudley would never, even now, for example, ask Sam: Well, were you and So-and-So ever actually lovers?—although she would surely have been interested in a true response. But, temperament and habit aside, several sound reasons argue against such a question. First, Sam would be genuinely shocked. And, second, if he did in fact have affairs with any of the women they both knew (which was highly possible, during or just previous to one of their many impassioned, horrendous separations), Sam would still say that he had not, his code being Southern-chivalric, at least in part.
    Even, sometimes, with her own particular black self-torturing logic, Dudley has imagined that Sam and Celeste were lovers, in the olddays,