Family Reunion (10 page)

And a drugstore. And inside it, an ice cream parlor.

It wasn't exactly what I remembered, but then, neither was Brett. At least this was sunny and bright with little glass tables and little round-bottomed chairs and zinnia bouquets on each table. The zinnias sold me. I fished in my jeans pocket to see how much money I had.

The ice cream choices were written on a blackboard in colored chalk. I could have pumpkin-pie ice cream or pink
peppermint or mocha cream peanut butter. Somebody else came into the ice cream parlor and stood right behind me, then shifted next to me. I half looked. Old jeans into whose pockets were jammed big masculine hands. Old T-shirt. Big elbows.

I'll have chocolate, I thought, the way I always do. I looked a little more closely at the person in the old T-shirt and the old jeans.

It was Toby.

Here's why I don't like to ask questions.

It's not because I'm afraid of the answers.

I just don't think there should be any questions to start with. Your father should be your father; he should be married to your mother; you should all live happily ever after. And that's that.

“Hi, Shelley,” said Toby eagerly.

He was as handsome as he had been the afternoon before. “Let's share a table,” he said. “Come on.” He nudged me forward. The waitress followed us, envious of me. I ordered a chocolate sundae, and he ordered butterscotch on
vanilla. We were obviously not the kind to experiment with important things like ice cream. Toby got straight to the point. Looking anxious, because it mattered, he said, “Does your father ever talk about me?” He dipped his spoon into his sundae and had an enormous butterscotch-dripping mouthful of vanilla.

I could not really breathe.

Breathing is essential to speech. I clung to my small paper napkin and ran out of air.

“I've always wanted to meet Charlie,” said Toby, looking up from his ice cream and into my eyes. What was he looking there for? Blood ties? You wouldn't think, under the circumstances, that his attention could be so evenly divided between the topic of discussion and the ice cream.

“I owe him a lot,” Toby added.

I wanted to run. Like Angus. The whole way home, to Vermont or New York City. I understood Angus, slamming a door, hiding out.

Families and divorce and secrets are like history-class discussions of World War III or nuclear bombs. Everybody gets extremely intense for forty-five minutes and says profound things and considers the doom of mankind. But then the bell rings, and you have important things to consider, like whether to lend your best friend those silver-and-turquoise earrings, whether to go to the game with your buddies or to the library and start the research paper due tomorrow, which you should have started a month ago.

A month ago Angus had handed me a bomb, and when I thought about it, I was afraid and sweaty and angry. But mostly I didn't think about it. You can't think about a bomb any more than you can think about your own parents' divorce until it's there and it's in your lap, which is filling with tears.

I could use a bomb shelter right now, I thought. Because I think old Toby here is about to drop a bomb. “You owe him a lot?” I repeated, trying to be calm and ordinary. I paid close attention to how I held my spoon. I kept control over the corners of my mouth, which were trying to tremble.

Like, what was owed? Life? Breath? Genes?

Joanna and I had giggled and teased on the phone when we considered a hidden half brother. She was rather thrilled by it. But it was not thrilling. It was sick and terrible.

Can I still love Daddy if he's really bad? I thought. If he couldn't be a father to Toby at all, then is he a good father? Even to me?

“If your father hadn't paid the bills,” said Toby, “I don't know where we'd be now. I mean… ”

Toby said “I mean” as if it were a whole sentence, as if nobody, including Toby, could possibly know what he meant.

“You read about terrible divorces and horrible betrayals,” said Toby, “or if you like talk shows, the kind where they do relationships, you listen to people who hate the person they once loved, and they trick them and spit on them.”

No. I didn't read about them. I didn't listen to them. I didn't watch them. Who needed reading material when she could just live through it?

“And your father,” said Toby.

Toby's technique of using short little phrases as if they were long, detailed explanations was giving me a headache. “Well, he's your father,” said Toby. “But he paid for me.” “Paid for you?” I echoed stupidly.

Toby looked at me oddly. And then he seemed as upset as I was. “You don't know anything?”

“He's never even mentioned you,” I said. “I don't know a single thing.”

Toby stared down into his ice cream. He gave a funny little laugh. “I don't know whether to feel rotten about that or not.”

“I feel rotten,” I said. My tears dropped with surprising weight, not blending into my ice cream, but lying in tiny tear puddles on top.

“Don't cry,” whispered Toby, appalled. “It's not your fault.”

“But it's terrible! He should have told us about you.”

“It's not that terrible,” protested Toby.

“Not to tell us that he has another son?”

Toby's jaw grew slack. Then he rolled his eyes. “Carolyn and Brett been getting back at you for all the times you conned them in New York? Shelley, your father isn't my father.
I'm not your brother. The only son he has is Angus. Which, from what I've heard about Angus, is a good thing.”

“You're not my brother?”

“How could I be your brother?”

“Angus said Daddy had a son named Toby.”

“Oh. Angus probably overheard something and got it wrong, like half this dumb, gossipy town. My mother and your father hardly even got married before they separated. They were only sixteen, remember. Back then you had to quit high school if you were married, and so they couldn't go to school, and they weren't earning any money, and the dishes got dirty, and the car ran out of gas, and my mother went to live with her aunt in Chicago, and your father hitchhiked to New York. And they each went back to school and finished college, and the funny thing was, they stayed in love, even though they couldn't stand living together, or dealing with Barrington gossip and relatives. I mean, Shelley, you just can't imagine gossip in a small town. Me from Chicago and you from New York—we don't know gossip, not the way our parents do.” He drank some Coke. “Celeste and Charlie were the focus of the town's attention, because she was the girl everybody had expected to go out and be a stunning female success, and your father was the boy who should have founded a major corporation or become president.”

For a moment I could see them: my father, golden
and blurred—only two years older than I am now—overcome by Celeste's lovesick eyes; two kids running away to find perfection and landing in pain. “Don't stop,” I ordered Toby. “

Tell me the rest.”

“You never heard any of this?” He was amazed and definitely hurt.

“Daddy never talks about Celeste. We only know about her from family gossip.”

Toby nodded, but it was the kind of nod of somebody who doesn't understand. He wanted Daddy to have talked about it, I thought. Toby was sure he was special enough for my father to share him with us.

I stirred my tears into the ice cream and wondered if it would taste different.

Perhaps there is no time when a secret is a good thing. Perhaps for every person you protect, you damage another one. But who could know that? Who could weigh whether protection or exposure matters more?

“They used to telephone each other whenever one of them had enough money for the long-distance phone bill,” said Toby, half laughing, abbreviating a beloved story he had heard a hundred times. “Your father and my mother. They just didn't know what to do. My mother says they were afraid to meet each other again. On the phone, they could be kind and affectionate, because she was in Chicago and he was in New York. They were afraid that if they both went to
Barrington, or visited each other, or met in the middle, they'd fight again.”

I tried to imagine them, hundreds of miles of phone line between them, separate apartments and lives, but I couldn't do it this time; the images didn't appear. I could see Daddy only as the man I knew, a bear who laughed at everything and charged right on.

“I guess they were really just kids,” said Toby dubiously.

I crossed Daddy and Angus in my mind. If I made Angus taller and older, locked into marriage, which was surely a lot scarier than a backyard bomb shelter, I could half see Daddy. I knew he'd put himself through NYU going nights. I knew that by the time I was born, he was already a success. But I had not known he saved money for a phone call to the high school sweetheart who wore his ring but lived in another state. If e-mail had existed back then, they could have talked for free. Maybe they would have settled their differences, communicating all day and all night.

“But then they each fell in love again,” said Toby. “Your father fell in love with your mother, and my mother fell in love with my father. By then they'd been apart for years. Their divorce made them sad. I think they felt that instead of marrying other people, they should have remarried each other and tried again. But they didn't.”

“Just as well. We wouldn't exist.”

Toby finished his sundae and looked longingly at the
bottom of the dish, as if hoping it would spontaneously regenerate a second helping. “Anyway, when I was very little, my father got killed in a car accident, just after he had sunk every cent into a new business. There was nothing left. Not a dollar. And instead of turning to relatives in Barrington, who would know all, tell all and remember all for generations, my mother asked your father for money. She thought he would lend her a little to keep her and me going until she could figure out what to do next.”

I was starting to cry again. “And did he?”

“I can't believe you don't know any of this.”

“Believe it. And tell me everything.”

“He supported us the whole time my mother was in law school. Three years. Mom says if it hadn't been for Charlie, she would have been in some office pool, entering data or processing checks or something. We'd be on food stamps instead of skiing in Europe.”

I knew that all my life I would remember this table in this drugstore. The way Toby folded his napkin into a dinosaur. The way his hands looked—large, nervous hands, playing with paper and spoons to keep occupied. The way my hands looked—rigid, because I was afraid that instead of playing with spoons I would grab Toby's hands and hold them permanently.

“You going to finish your ice cream or not?” Toby said. Boys can always concentrate on the important things, like food.

“Not.”

“How come?”

“I'm too nervous to swallow.”

Toby thought about this. Nothing, including the final bomb and the end of humanity, would stop a boy from eating.

“You eat it,” I said.

“You sure?”

“I'm sure. Just keep talking.”

He was obedient. Aunt Maggie would not have approved of his table manners. He drank, spooned and talked at the same time. It was a very chocolatey recital. “Your father, Shelley, sent money for no reason except that they had loved each other once. He wrote that if they'd had a kid, he would have loved that kid, and he would love any child of hers, and he was glad to help. Mom still has the letter.”

Toby, the child my father had loved, sat across from me, having my ice cream. I said, “Toby, I can't help it. I'm going to cry. A whole lot.”

Toby looked alarmed. “In here? Noisily? Attracting attention?”

“Or we could go outside.”

“You can't stop yourself?”

“I don't have a Delete Emotion button.”

“Sure you do. Everybody does. Come on. There's a dinky little traveling fair around the corner. I'll take you on the roller coaster.”

“I hate roller coasters. If you think it's bad when I'm trying not to cry, meet me when I'm trying not to throw up.”

“Nah, this is really dinky, for three-year-olds and their five-year-old big brothers.” Toby put money on the table to pay for both of us and stood up and took my hand. It was where my hand had wanted to be for a while now.

Toby said, “Barrington somehow found out that your father was sending Celeste child support. They figured it meant I'm his kid, which I am not. You are. Angus is. What's her name is. But my father was named Richard Donnelly, and I look like him and everything.” Toby grinned, throwing in a little visual proof. Then he tightened his grip on my hand, partly because we were crossing the street and he seemed unsure that I possessed this skill, and partly because it was punctuation for his sentences. “My mother says there isn't much in Barrington but corn, relatives and rumors. So of course for the big reunion party, all of Barrington is talking, because I'm visiting my grandparents, who were once your father's in-laws, and I'm invited to the party, and they're not. But that's because my mother, Celeste, felt that it was asking an awful lot of Charlie to face every single person he knew in high school, and all his relatives, and her son, and the ex-in-laws. Plus she figured your stepmother, who she says is a lucky woman to be married to Charlie, deserved some kind of break.”

Outside, summer was as strong as a hurricane. In New York summer means gasping for breath and hoping there
will be no blackout to knock out the air-conditioning. In Vermont summer means the lake, and the deep green forest, and quiet. But in Barrington summer is a living thing, the burnished brilliance of sun and sky, a heat so great it lives on you and in you, ruling your body and your thoughts. I wanted to embrace summer if I could not embrace Toby The heat was enough to bake away care, and broil off worry.

“I've always wanted to meet Charlie,” said Toby. “When my mother talks about him, it's not the way anybody else talks about an ex-husband. She still loves him. Not getting-married type love. Not in-love type love. But…well… love.”