They ate in silence for a few minutes. The lunch crowd was starting to pick up, and a few guys seated themselves at the other end of their table.
“Look at that! Men wearing baseball caps indoors!” Lou exclaimed, in a voice just slightly too loud. His green Tyrolean was neatly stowed on the unoccupied seat next to him. A bulky man with a Rangers cap on backward flicked an irritated glance their way. “Grown men with hats at the dinner table!” her father crowed. “Cary Grant loses,
Hee-Haw
wins.”
“Dad!” she said.
He leaned forward, eyes round. “What?” he asked in a discreetly low voice that he unfortunately hadn’t employed while he was insulting the diners surrounding them.
“Nothing.” She didn’t want to say anything that might lead to him loudly defending his belief that Neanderthals had won the style battle. That guy in the Rangers cap looked beefy enough to take Lou out with one slug.
After they had finished eating, they went back to the car. Grace put in a Percy Grainger CD and proceeded to make their customary loop through town, past the incredible white stone Bell County Courthouse. When she passed it, her father leaned against the window. “That’s nice,” he said.
She tightened her grip on the steering wheel and kept driving. He couldn’t have said anything that could have made her feel worse.
Nice?
While they had been restoring the courthouse, he had wanted to take her by every time she visited. Now he acted as though it was something he’d never seen before, a mildly interesting curio.
Gloom descended on her. This was how it worked, wasn’t it? Things would slip away. What mattered one day wouldn’t matter the next. Memory disappeared, leaving simple sensation. The writer Iris Murdoch had ended her days watching
Teletubbies.
He’s going downhill . . .
That was what Steven had said.
But it wasn’t true. He just had bad days sometimes.
Her father happily hummed along with “Country Gardens” as she accelerated onto the interstate, but nothing could dispel the tension she felt. The miles that had flown on the way up dragged now. She watched the exits—Salado, the Jerrell turnoff, Georgetown—wondering if they would ever get home.
Her father looked at her anxiously. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Was it something that happened back there?” he asked. “You didn’t like your lunch?”
“Lunch was fine.”
Stiff silence made the car feel claustrophobic. “It was something I did,” he guessed, depressed. “I missed something. I made a mistake.”
The forlorn tone in his voice tore at her. “Don’t angst, Dad. It’s just that all that food I ate has made me sleepy.”
At the Round Rock exit, she pulled off at a gas station.
“Aren’t we almost home?” he asked, confused.
“I need a cup of coffee,” she said, grabbing her purse. “Do you want anything?”
“No, I’ll stay here.”
She hesitated, worrying he would get out of the car while she was gone. She envisioned him somehow managing to toddle onto the interstate and walk along the shoulder with his cane. In her imagination, cars whipped past him, missing him by inches.
“I’ll be
fine,
” he said. “I’m not a child.”
She nodded, shut the door behind her, and went inside the service station, glancing back often through the plate-glass windows to make sure the car doors remained closed. The coffeepot on the counter looked as if it had been sitting on its hot plate since morning, cooking down the contents to a couple of inches of bitter caffeine sludge. Grace turned to the refrigerator cases, searching for something a little more appetizing. After passing over the million kinds of flavored waters and fruit juices, she scanned the sodas, Red Bull-type liquid jolts, and bottled coffee drinks. She finally grabbed a Coke, paid, and headed back out to the car.
At first she was relieved to see her dad sitting quietly, reading. All her worrying was for nothing; he hadn’t wandered off. But when she lowered herself into the driver seat, an odd tension hung in the air. Lou was flipping through one of Muriel’s brochures.
“Assisted living.”
When his gaze swung toward her, she could barely look him in the eye without flinching. “What are these doing here? You’ve had enough of living at home, so now you’ve decided that I should be stowed away somewhere?”
“No.” She could feel her face turn red.
“I didn’t even want
your
assistance.”
“I know that,” she said. “Someone gave those to me.” She couldn’t bring herself to say Steven’s name. She didn’t want her dad to think that his children had formed a cabal against him.
“Why would people think that I should be put away already?” he asked. “Was it the house fire? That was just a mistake—months ago! Since then, just little things.”
She repeated, “I know.”
He slammed the brochure shut and tossed the pile onto the mat at his feet.
She started the car and pulled out of the station’s parking lot, heading toward the freeway ramp.
“Assisted living,” he muttered, watching the scenery go by. It was the same beautiful day that had lifted their spirits on the way to Belton, but it didn’t do the trick now. “They might as well call them death houses, because that’s what happens in them. People go to those places as a last stop on the way to dying.”
His eyes squinted at the glare of the sun through the windshield.
“You don’t even need me, most of the time,” she said, thinking aloud. At least, he didn’t need her at home, all of the time. He hadn’t done so well today, but today she’d taken him away from his world. But half the time he seemed his old sharp self. And he could still beat her at chess. That had to mean something.
She was relieved to get back to Austin and pull into the driveway of the old house. Apparently her father was too, because he got out even before she’d turned off the engine. Unlike his usual meticulously neat habits, he left the barbecue doggy bag container behind. Grace leaned over to pick it up and the brochures.
A door slammed from the direction of the West house and Grace looked up, hoping for a glimpse of Ray. Which was ridiculous, since it was the middle of the afternoon. He’d be at work.
It was Crawford who came crashing out of the West house. His head was down as he cut straight across Lou’s yard.
“Hey there!” she called out. “Is something wrong?”
He stopped. His Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat before he finally came out with, “
Everything
is wrong!”
He steamed across the lawn to his own house.
Frowning, Grace bumped the driver door shut with her hip and headed inside. Iago danced around her feet as she came in the door. Her father obviously hadn’t taken the time to let him out. Upstairs, Wagner boomed. A few minutes later, as she was storing the leftovers in the fridge, a trumpet blast sounded next door from Crawford’s house and for the next hour she was treated to an overpracticed UIL trumpet solo dirge coming from next door competing with Valkyries overhead.
Maybe she had Ray on the brain, but times like these, she longed for that sympathetic glance of his. Or even just a glimpse from those dark brown eyes that telegraphed the understanding that life didn’t always turn out the way you wanted it to.
29
A Y
EAR
W
ITHOUT
S
QUEEZIES
F
rom the moment Lily climbed out of bed that morning, something felt different. She couldn’t put a name to the unsettled feeling, and if there was one thing that bugged her, it was not having a word for something.
She could only think it was nerves about the dance. The spring dance was in April, and lots of girls at school had already been asked to it. Crawford wasn’t taking hints very well. She’d mentioned the dance several times, and from what she could fathom, he planned on going. At least, he never seemed completely bored by the topic, like a boy who had no intention of attending would have been. And she knew he had no girlfriend already because he never talked about one.
So he was probably going, and he knew she wanted to go, but he hadn’t asked her yet. Maybe he never would. How was she going to handle that?
She shuffled to the bathroom, pulled her hair back off her shoulders, and looked in the mirror. Which she could only really do once she put on her glasses.
Ugh.
A blemish (she couldn’t stand the word
pimple)
had cropped up overnight on her chin. Life was so unfair. She wouldn’t have minded adolescence so much if she could have gotten breasts
and
pimples. But where was the justice in having cramps and oily skin when you were still encased in a body with the sex appeal of a twelve-year-old Romanian gymnast?
She sighed, scrubbed her face with cleanser, and slapped on a fresh coat of Clearasil. Maybe she should stay away from the professor’s house today. If Crawford saw Mount Vesuvius on her chin, he would never invite her to the dance.
Occasionally she thought about just going ahead and asking him herself, but that would never work. If he said yes, she’d always wonder if he had just said yes so he wouldn’t hurt her feelings. If he said no, she would want to curl up like a caterpillar being poked with a stick.
She dressed and went downstairs, where she was surprised to find not only Dominic but Jordan sitting at the breakfast table. Jordan hadn’t gotten up early on a Saturday morning since her class ended back in the fall. Today she looked almost normal. Her hair was still a peach-and-black nightmare, but this morning she had it pulled back in an almost tidy fashion. Dominic was shoveling spoonfuls of cereal into his mouth, but he wore a clean, unwrinkled navy blue polo shirt. The sight of the two of them sitting there calmly, almost expectantly, made her nervous.
“What?” she asked when they looked up at her.
“Nothing,” they said.
Uneasy now, Lily put a piece of bread in the toaster and poured herself a glass of orange juice. After she situated herself at the table and Jordan was sitting there staring blandly at her, arms folded across her chest, Lily asked, “What are you
doing?
”
“Sitting,” she replied. “Is that a crime?”
Before they could start sniping, Dominic piped up, “We’re waiting to see if Dad comes back.”
“Dad?” Lily had just assumed he was in his study.
“He went out earlier,” Dominic said. “In a suit.”
Lily frowned. “Why?”
Jordan’s expression straddled between astonishment and disgust. “You really don’t remember, do you?”
“What?”
Lily asked.
Dominic gulped a spoonful of sugar-drenched bran flakes. “It’s been a year.”
Lily froze. She had forgotten. A year ago, her mom and Nina had died.
How could she have forgotten? Maybe because the accident had happened during Spring Break. But Spring Break fell later this year. Or maybe she’d just become preoccupied.
She put her toast down, suddenly not hungry at all. How could she have woken up today of all days thinking about Crawford and the stupid dance?
“Are you okay?” Dominic asked.
“Of course she’s not okay,” Jordan said, surprising her by sounding almost sympathetic.
Dominic sighed and sat back. “Me neither. I wish we didn’t have to remember.”
“You don’t want to forget Mom and Nina, do you?” Lily asked. She felt terrible for forgetting them this morning.
“I
won’t
forget them,” Dominic said. “But having this day to remember makes me feel awful for me, not for them. I keep thinking of all the things I miss about them, and I feel selfish.”
“What do you miss?” Jordan asked.
Dominic blinked, as if it was impossible to know where to begin.
There were a million things, big and small. “Nina’s brownies,” Lily said. “She’d make them so that the centers were undercooked and gooey.”
“Right,” Jordan said, “and we’d start taking squares out from the center, so that in the end there was just a crusty brownie frame left in the pan.”
“I miss hearing a stupid song Mom sang sometimes,” Dominic said. “Do y’all remember? The one about Carmen the Chameleon?”
Jordan burst out laughing.
“What?” Dominic said.
“It’s ‘
Karma
Chameleon.’ ”
Dominic frowned. “What’s that?”
“That’s the song.” She sang a few bars. “It’s from the eighties. You can You Tube it if you don’t believe me.”
Dominic looked down at his cereal bowl, disappointed. “Oh—I thought it was about a chameleon named Carmen. That’s what it sounded like when Mom sang it.”
“Mom was a really awful singer,” Lily said.
Dominic sighed. “I miss that Mom and Nina weren’t the only ones who gave squeezies.”
Both Lily and Jordan stared at him, uncomprehending. “What’s a squeezie?” Jordan asked.
“It’s when someone hugs you so tight that you feel like you’re going to have all the air squeezed out of you. Remember how they both used to do that?” he asked. “Nobody else does that.”
Lily did remember. She hadn’t ever thought about that till now. But Dominic was right. Their mom had possessed an internal radar that sensed when one of them was feeling down. Lily could recall trying to hide how bad she felt one time when she was being tormented in gym class by a group of girls who burst out laughing whenever she said anything, or even if she just looked at them. She’d thought she’d been doing a good job of carrying on as if nothing had happened until her mom came up to her before bedtime one night and gave her a hug that nearly shut out the awful memories, in addition to cutting off her circulation. Without words, her mom had known something was wrong.
Nina was like that, too. But Nina was so affectionate, she would also give you a hug or swing you around for no reason at all. And everyone always talked about Nina as if she was perfect, but she could be unpredictable, too. Lily remembered one time when she was little and she and Nina had been raking leaves. They had raked for two hours until they were achy and exhausted and all the leaves were in neat piles. And then Nina got a gleam in her eye and started tearing around the yard, plowing through the piles and kicking up leaves. For a moment Lily had stared at her, stunned, and then she had let out a banshee yell and followed suit. The two of them had gone crazy, but it was Nina, so it was fun crazy. Not crazy crazy, like Jordan.
“Sometimes I’ve felt like no one wants to touch me at all,” Jordan said. “Or even look at me.”
Lily took a bite of her toast and forced herself to chew.
She
hadn’t wanted to look at Jordan sometimes. Most of the time. They were so different, it was hard to believe they were of the same species, never mind the same family. Especially now that Nina wasn’t here. Nina had been their missing link.
“You see?” Dominic asked. “This is the problem. I’m just thinking about me. That’s not what we’re supposed to be doing, is it?”
“I’m not sure anyone knows what we’re supposed to do,” Jordan said. “There’s no rule book, Nickel.”
“Well, if there was, it wouldn’t include feeling sorry for yourself,” he said. “I’m pretty sure that’s a sin or something, isn’t it?”
Jordan bit her lip. “I’m not the person to ask about that.”
They were interrupted by their dad, who came in abruptly. As Jordan and Dominic had said, he was dressed in a dark gray suit. “Do you all want to go with me?”
Nobody asked where. They just got up and filed out to the car. They didn’t argue over where to sit, either. Jordan got in the front, Lily and Dominic in the back. The drive out to the cemetery took about ten minutes in the light Saturday-morning traffic.
Their dad parked on the roadway not far from the graves. He and Dominic carried the big potted azaleas he must have bought while they were eating breakfast. They laid them down, first at their mother’s grave, then at Nina’s. Lily wondered if maybe Dominic was right. All year she’d felt grief—first painful, then slowly dulling to a persistent ache that flared up into occasional crying jags. But now . . . She was filled with the unbearable, wrenching misery she hadn’t felt since the funeral last year. Especially when she looked at Nina’s flat grave. She just couldn’t believe Nina was there. Nina
wasn’t
there. Not her Nina.
Her Nina had always been active, bursting with ideas for things to do. The rest of them complained about being bored all the time, but Nina, never. She’d played sports and always had some other weird project going on, like when she’d put on a puppet show for Dominic when he was five. Only, it wasn’t just any old lame puppet show. Nina had tried to replicate the movie
The Little Mermaid
with sock puppets. If she’d had a fault, it was that she’d been impatient with people who didn’t approach life with the same zeal she did. Her criticism could be more withering than Jordan’s if you crossed her path.
A sharp guilt pierced Lily. She shouldn’t think bad things about Nina. Not today. But she still refused to think Nina was here. If anything, Nina was up in heaven somewhere, shaking her head at them.
Just look at them all!
she was probably thinking.
Wasting this gorgeous day moping around a cemetery. . . .
For a moment, Lily could feel her sister’s presence so clearly that holding herself together was hard. She looked around to see if anyone else felt it, too. Jordan stood across from her, her face white. She appeared trembly but almost stoic next to Dominic, whose arms were rigid at his sides. He cried openly, tears streaming down his cheeks and dropping onto his shirt, creating damp streaks. Lily glanced around for their dad, and she found him still kneeling next to their mom’s azalea. He’d never moved.
A wretched feeling swept over her, like a fever. All this time, she’d been thinking about how much she missed her mom and Nina, and about Dominic and his squeezies. She’d even spared a moment for Jordan and feeling guilty for disliking her so much. But she hadn’t given a thought to how her father must ache, remembering their mom. About what a chore getting through every day must have seemed to him, too, this past year. Kneeling there, her father looked like the loneliest man in the world.
It was probably a dumb thing for them to be out in public, considering how gloomy they all felt. But on the way back from the cemetery, they stopped and ate. For most of the time nobody said anything beyond
pass the salt, how’s your food?
and
fine
until dessert, which Dominic wanted but nobody else did. But nobody seemed to want to go home, either.
When Dominic was just starting on his cake, their dad made an announcement. “I’m thinking about putting the house on the market,” he said.
“What?”
Jordan asked.
He shifted. “Well, the house is . . . it’s so big . . .”
“No!” Lily exclaimed, unexpectedly loudly. She couldn’t help it. She thought about the few
good
things that had happened in the year—knowing Grace, and the professor, and Crawford. If her dad sold their house, she’d lose all that too. “We can’t move!”
“You’d sell Mom’s house?” Dominic gasped.
Their dad seemed shocked by their reactions. “I wasn’t thinking of it that way.”
“If we moved, how would I ever be able to see the professor and Grace?” Dominic asked. “Or walk Iago?”
His frown deepened. “It’s just an idea I’ve been kicking around in my head.”
“It’s an idea that stinks,” Jordan said.
Lily hoped it was an idea that he would soon discard.
Silence fell around the table.
Then, just as they were all calming down again, Jordan had to start talking. Naturally. “Have you given any thought to me going to California this summer?” she asked their dad.
“It’s a long way to go and be all by yourself,” he said.
“I’m seventeen now. I’m going to college next year, and you won’t care if I go to the University of Timbuktu then. San Francisco now, Timbuktu U next year—what’s the big diff?”
He shifted uncomfortably and worked his jaw side to side as he crunched an ice cube—anyone with half a brain could tell that he was fishing for the most diplomatic way to say no. “I work with people in California,” he said. “I guess I could ask them if they’ve heard of the program.”