Heads or Tails

At some point, we reach a place in life when we’re sure there will be no more surprises. The timing is different for everyone, but the feeling — a settling, a resignation — is the same. We know everyone we’re going to know. We may encounter new clients or neighbors, the kinds of people who come and go, the kind that don’t last. But eventually, we come to understand that the old flame is not going to return decades later, that no one truly revolutionary is going to cross our paths. Our people are our people. And when we reach that point, we inherently grasp that no one new will change us. No one will shake the foundation of our identity or imperil our most cherished relationships. No one will force us to make unthinkable choices. No one will crease a comfortable life and fold it into a wholly new shape, like an origami crane.

And then someone does.

It began, as seismic shifts often do, with a phone call.

“Meees Hillary,” Jorge said, pronouncing my name Eee-lar-eee, which I loved. “Telefono. For you.” He held the corded beige receiver out to me. Construction site offices were pretty analog.

I’d just returned to the trailer after getting my lunch. I plopped the paper bag containing my avocado tuna sandwich from the latest hipster shop on Divisadero Street onto my desk and smiled at Jorge.

“Gracias,” I replied, inwardly wincing at my own bad accent. I was eagerly anticipating next Monday’s start of the conversational Spanish class I’d signed up for at the JCC. Connecting with construction workers beyond just simple workplace instructions had become a personal goal of mine. More than simply describing, say, the painting schedule of an upcoming project, I wanted to talk to Jorge about things like whether his daughter was enjoying preschool. But my pitiful Spanish just wouldn’t do. So learning conversational Spanish had been one of my New Year’s resolutions. The other day I looked up and realized that it was already late October and I’d better get on that. When Jorge handed me the phone, I was on a five-day countdown to the JCC class.

I took a quick sip of my smoothie, as overpriced as my designer sandwich, before tossing off my thin down vest and taking the receiver from Jorge. It was that gorgeous, in-between season in San Francisco, when Indian Summer met the beginnings of early winter, when the sun shined bright at high noon as leaves swirled around your feet by two. I lowered myself into my desk chair gently, my hamstrings objecting due to the eight-mile run Jesse and I had done the night before.

Because the call came into the Curtis Construction line, I’d expected it to be about the latest architectural drawings we’d received for a potential project in Noe Valley or the plumbing issues we were working out on the current Alamo Square project. So I was surprised to hear an elderly, shaky voice ask, “Hilly?”

Instantly, I was back at boarding school in New Hampshire. My time at Egan Academy twenty-five years ago was when I was at my best. “My peak years,” I joked to Jesse, implying that he’d gotten stuck with the second-rate me. Everyone called me Hilly back then and whenever someone used that nickname, I was immediately enveloped in the profound sense of belonging I’d not experienced before or since. Perhaps I idealized it as the years passed, but not by much. My Egan classmates weren’t just friends or dorm mates. They were confidantes, nurses, therapists, style consultants and sisters. Strangely, it wasn’t until I entered boarding school at fourteen that I understood the force of family bonds, even though the people to whom I’d bonded were in no way related to me. Somehow, those Egan girls made me my best self. Confident. Compassionate. Centered. Focused. Self-aware. It was a self I still strived to return to.

“Hilly,” the caller repeated, “It’s Jean.”

But she didn’t need to identify herself. The age and shakiness in her voice revealed right away that she was Jean, the mother of Margot, my first Egan roommate, my best friend in the world. And for many years, Jean had been like a mom to me too, seeing that my own mother was not only geographically far away from our boarding school, but far away from me in so many other ways as well. When I was a teenager, Jean graciously welcomed me at her house when Egan had long holiday weekends, even weekends when her own daughter went to a boyfriend’s family home instead. She listened when Margot and I complained about our least favorite teachers or about how Linda Tag always got the lead in the spring musical even though you could barely hear her voice past the second row. Jean helped me decide which colleges I should apply to and which one I should attend. And almost twenty-five years ago, Jean had secretly helped me during the scariest point in my life, my biggest crossroads. I credited her clandestine assistance with putting me on the path that led me to where I was when she called: in a fulfilling career, avidly pursuing personal interests, in my marriage with Jesse. She’d truly earned her spot at the “family table” at my wedding reception.

Back at San Francisco’s Alamo Square, the site of the latest project for Curtis Construction, at which I served as general contractor, my heart nearly burned a hole through my t-shirt when I heard Jean’s voice grow weaker, either because of age, emotion or the Parkinson’s disease that had plagued her for the last five years.

“Margot’s in trouble.”

My posture stiffened. I put my palm to my forehead and leaned on my elbow, snapping my eyes shut. Jean explained that what had started out as a routine case of the baby blues had morphed into full-blown postpartum depression.

“She’s not eating. She sleeps all the time. But worse than that, she’s, um, she’s having trouble taking care of the baby.”

Having trouble taking care of a baby was something I could easily imagine. Which is precisely why I, along with Jesse, decided years ago not to have kids. We’d each grown up as only children and had exactly zero experience with babies. And in my case, at least, the parenting model I had was less than stellar. I wasn’t going to attempt something I was destined to fail at, especially something as important as raising a person. Jesse and I didn’t even feel fit to adopt a dog. We loved our little life, the solidarity in our coupledom, our shared hobbies, which were most decidedly not kid-friendly. But despite how I felt about having children, this certainly sounded in no way like my ambitious, capable Margot, who’d wanted that baby intensely.

“She’s eating so few calories that her milk dried up. The baby’s on formula now.” Jean sniffed. “That’s not what she’d planned. It’s too early.”

My shoulders crept towards my ears and the corners of my eyes moistened. Despite how close Margot and I were, despite the fact that we were each the first person the other called whenever something good or bad happened, it was tempting to ask why Jean was calling me. Margot’s postpartum crisis was happening in New York and I was all the way in California. But I knew that there were precious few others — if any — for Jean to call in a crisis. Margot wasn’t married. She’d gotten pregnant through a sperm donor not long after her fortieth birthday, just weeks after the huge getaway bash she’d thrown for herself and her five closest friends. Like me, Margot was an only child — one of the many things that connected us — and Jean was a widow.

As if reading my mind, Jean said, “I didn’t know who else to call.”

At that, I swelled with a shameful pride that Jean called me instead of Rebecca, one of our other core Egan friends. For decades Rebecca and I had a palpable but unspoken competition regarding Margot. We each believed that we were her closest friend. More than once, I pounded out on the treadmill my jealousy after hearing that Margot had taken the train to Boston to spend the day with Rebecca, who lived in Cambridge with her husband and two kids.

“Well, I’m happy to help,” I finally said, my pitch high and unnatural despite the fact that I would, indeed, do anything for Margot. “Should I call her?”

“No, no,” Jean commanded, surprising me with her vehemence. I raised my head, absurdly glancing around the construction office trailer to check if Jorge or anyone else had heard Jean’s unusual chiding tone. “Don’t call her. I’m afraid of what could happen next. I’m telling you, Hilly, Margot is
sick
.”

I shifted in my chair, trying to loosen my rigid muscles. A grey afternoon shadow draped over the trailer and I threaded my arms back into my vest. I wanted to reach through the phone and pull Jean towards me, to embrace her and comfort her the way she’d done for me back when I was eighteen and ashamed to face what I’d done.

“Please, Hilly,” she said before I could figure out what to say next. “Just come.”

I felt a magnetic pull. Whenever one of my friends, dorm mates, confidantes, therapists, whatever from that time needed me, I went. That was my motto, my creed.
Our
creed. Margot did it for me when I had an adult-onset bout of chicken pox on my thirty-fifth birthday. I did it for Rebecca when her brother was killed in a car accident and she needed help cleaning out his apartment so their parents wouldn’t have to. But despite how dear Margot was to me, I was wholly out of my league with this. Postpartum depression. A baby. How could my devotion to Margot overcome my utter inexperience — not to mention disinterest — with all things baby? It was like a dermatologist being asked to perform a heart transplant or a tax lawyer defending a capital murder trial.

But when friends are like family, sometimes you reach beyond what’s comfortable.

I placed the receiver down and looked around, hoping that something around me — the trails of sawdust and ribbons of extension cords along the floor or the blueprint drawings on my computer — might instruct me what to do. Even though I was physically in my element, everything seemed fuzzy and I’d lost my ability to think clearly.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Carrying a bag from the same trendy sandwich shop, the one with the seedy street guys loitering outside but with the pricey vegan/organic/gluten-free/fermented ingredients on the inside, Frank crept into our little work hut and sat down at the metal desk across from mine. Our workspaces couldn’t be any more different. His desk was beautified with fresh wild flowers and framed photos. Mine was sparse, devoid of sentimentality, a trait that I’d inherited or picked up by osmosis from my mother. She’d displayed not a single family photo in our home, let alone her office.

Frank pulled off a beanie, exposing his bald head. He’d been losing his hair for awhile and decided a few months ago to shave it all, to “cut off the offender,” as he put it. Hairless was definitely a look Frank could pull off. Unlike me, he was preternaturally cool.

Frank was also, everybody joked, my work husband. We’d been running Curtis Construction together for more than seven years, transforming it from a teeny firm handling basic bathroom remodels and simple backyard deck replacements to a profitable and, more importantly, respected construction and restoration company. Job by job, we’d enhanced our craftsmanship and our reputation. Bathroom jobs grew into kitchen remodels. In the last year, we’d completed complicated additions and exterior renovations for high-profile clients in increasingly upscale neighborhoods. In March, we wrapped a three-thousand square-foot expansion near Dolores Park for a venture capitalist. Two months before Jean’s call, we’d been written up in
7x7
Magazine
for landing the prestigious Painted Lady job we were working on at Alamo Square.

Frank handled the business side of Curtis while I served as general contractor, overseeing the entire construction operation, managing architects, subcontractors and engineers. We were a tremendous team. He had the charm to woo new clients, the business smarts to make shrewd financial decisions and I was an organized and thorough manager and, as evidenced by our nearly non-existent attrition rate, a decent boss. When I finally got more Spanish under my belt, I hoped to add “attentive and compassionate” to my list of leadership attributes. That Frank was considered by all to be my work husband was particularly funny considering that not only was I actually married to Jesse, but Frank last year married his longtime boyfriend Rod (the added hilarity of his gay husband’s name was not lost on anyone).

“Not really a ghost, but something just as disturbing.” We opened our respective sandwiches and I told Frank about Jean’s frantic call.

“Yikes,” he said, deconstructing his sandwich and wiping off the excess mayonnaise. “Sounds like you need to call the airlines.”

“I know,” I said, using my teeth to rip open a plastic pouch of mustard. “But how can I leave right now? This project is at a critical juncture.”

It was true. San Francisco’s Alamo Square was one of the city’s most recognizable landmarks, home to the famous row of Painted Ladies, a handful of Victorian-era houses descending Steiner Street whose photos donned countless postcards and calendars. Tourists flocked to the quintessentially San Francisco spot. Through sheer grit, a killer proposal and, Frank and I liked to joke, our charming personalities, we’d landed the plum job of restoring one of the iconic postcard row homes. Not only was it the biggest residential project we’d ever handled, but its historical and visual significance meant that every design and structural detail was overseen not only by the homeowner, but also by the city’s historic preservation office. That office could serve as a limitless source of future referrals, if all went well. For the first time since we took over Curtis, Frank and I sensed the company was on the cusp of irreversible success, making us impervious to inevitable economic swings. The success — or not — of the current Alamo Square project would no doubt serve as the deciding factor, the turning point.