Love in the Present Tense

  I watch in silence, knowing how little I understood until just now.

  Leonard was never trying to be a Christ. He was trying to be a marker. He used the tattoo to transform himself into the only tangible proof that Pearl had lived and then died. He was her grave marker when she had no grave to mark.

  And now he’s finally found where to stand.

  I watch him for the longest time.

  I want to walk up behind him and throw my arms around his back, but I don’t want to disturb his delicate balance.

  I want to remind him—and myself—of the first time he showed me the tattoo. Standing in Jake and Mona’s garage in a beam of sun from the skylight, under the bare wings of his glider in progress. He told me he wasn’t going to live to be thirty.

  But he is thirty. Right now.

  And I don’t even have to ask if he regrets the tattoo, because I already know.

  After I’ve watched long enough, I hike out to the car and get the camp stove. So I can stoke it up and get some coffee going. Maybe breakfast for the kids.

  When I get back, the kids are awake. They’ve found their own way to their father, and they’re standing with him, still in their sleepers on the wet, muddy ground, each kid hugging one of his legs.

  So I decide that if they can do it without disturbing him, maybe I can, too.

  I think about Pearl, and how everything she did, whether it was right or wrong, caused Leonard’s life to intersect with mine the way it did. If she had done anything differently, not only would I not have had him but I wouldn’t have had my grandkids, either. And I think how much poorer I would have been without him, without all of them.

  Without all the things I’ve learned.

  Then I walk quietly up behind him and wrap my arms around him from behind, and he comes out of his marker position, his cross, and wraps his arms around my arms. I hope I didn’t make him stop before he was done.

  But that’s silly, I think. How could he stop before he was done? If he stopped, he was done.

  I silently congratulate him on being done, and he pats my arm.

  I think he hears and understands most of what I don’t say to him.

  I think he always has.

  CATHERINE RYAN HYDE

  Love

  in the

  Present

  Tense

  Catherine Ryan Hyde, an acclaimed novelist and award-winning short story writer, is the author of the story collection Earthquake Weather and of the novels Funerals for Horses, Electric God, Walter’s Purple Heart, Becoming Chloe, and Pay It Forward, which was named an ALA Book of the Year and made into a feature film. She lives in Cambria, California.

  Also by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  Funerals for Horses

  Earthquake Weather

  Pay It Forward

  Electric God

  Walter’s Purple Heart

  Becoming Chloe

  FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, JULY 2007

  Copyright © 2006 by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday/Flying Dolphin Press, an imprint of The Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2006.

  Vintage Books and colophon are registered trademarks and Vintage Contemporaries is a trademark

  of Random House, Inc.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales in entirely coincidental.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Doubleday/Flying Dolphin Press edition as follows:

  Hyde, Catherine Ryan.

  Love in the present tense : a novel / Catherine Ryan Hyde.

  p. cm.

  1. Racially mixed people—Fiction. 2. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

  PS3558.Y358L68 2006

  813'.54—dc22

  2005054760

  www.vintagebooks.com

  eISBN: 978-0-307-38689-2

  v3.0