Authors: Callie Wright
“No,” said Anne. “But he wasn’t making it up, if that’s what you mean.”
Bob shook his head. That wasn’t what he’d meant. The truth was that neither one of them had expected him to outlive Joanie. There should have been more time, time for Bob to make peace with Joanie and, after he was gone, time for Anne to make peace with his memory.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have come down,” said Bob.
Anne sighed. “Are you hungry?” she asked. “We never had dinner.”
Bob admitted that he could eat.
Anne produced a frying pan for grilled-cheese sandwiches and Bob said, “With bacon, if you have it. That’s how your mother used to make them.” Harvard beets and Hershey pie, Italian spaghetti and deep sea casserole, tomato aspic and apricot Jell-O mold—he wondered if Anne had thought to save Joanie’s recipe box; she had been an excellent cook.
Anne rooted through the refrigerator, removing cheese, pickles, ketchup, mustard, and half a tomato, which had bled through its Saran wrap. Anne tossed the tomato into the sink, then returned to the freezer to hunt for bacon. A frosty vapor frothed around her head. She sat back on her haunches and held up a plastic bag. Ice-burned, it could’ve been anything.
“I’ll throw it in the microwave,” she said. “See what comes out.”
For three minutes, Bob watched the muted light of the microwave pulse in its black box. He was grateful for the white noise, for a few moments without having to make conversation. The smell of bacon filled the air and they exchanged a look, almost affectionately.
Across the island, Anne spread butter on four pieces of brown bread, scraping from a softened stick next to the stove. “How are you sleeping?” she asked. “Is the room okay?”
“It’s okay.” Bob stole a look at Anne. “I’m up a lot in the night.”
“Can’t Dr. Brash give you something?” she asked.
Bob sighed. He couldn’t say
diapers.
“He’s given me enough.”
Anne checked the meat in the microwave. The bacon was frozen solid in the center, with its edges cooked to sizzling.
“I don’t need it,” Bob assured her. “Too much salt.”
Anne dropped the bacon in the sink basin alongside the leaky tomato. It still took Bob by surprise how much she looked like Joanie: tall and thin with high cheekbones and a gentle smile. Bob was not often the recipient of the smile, but when he did catch sight of it, his heart happily raced.
Bob closed his eyes and pictured his daughter as a little girl. Forty years ago, he’d taught her to ski on Mount Otsego, helping her up the rope tow, then bracing her between his legs as they snowplowed down. Saturday mornings the two of them sat side by side in the front row of Smalley’s Theatre for the cartoon reels, eating tubs of popcorn designed to ruin their lunch. Bob could still see Anne next to him at the sink on Sunday mornings, lathering her smooth cheeks with his shaving brush before shaving sideburn to chin with a butter knife in an earnest pantomime of Bob’s routine. Back then she had let him help her, let him hold her, let him offer his hand.
“Anne,” he said carefully.
“Dad, please.”
She pressed the spatula into the sandwiches until the pan began to smoke.
“I just think—”
“I know what you think,” she said. “It all works out. But who does it work out for?” She lowered her voice and said, “Not the kids.”
Anne cut their sandwiches into identical triangle halves, then spooned bread-and-butter pickles onto their plates. Bob hadn’t realized how hungry he was until the sandwich was nearly in his hands, and he was about to take a bite when he looked up and saw tears gathered on Anne’s lower lids.
“Honey,” he said gently. It was Joanie’s word but Anne cleaved to it, sinking to the stool by Bob’s side.
“There might be a lawsuit,” said Anne. “A boy fell at the preschool.” She swiped at her cheeks but the tears were falling too fast to catch.
“What can I do?” asked Bob.
She shook her head. “I don’t want everyone in town to know.”
“No one’s going to know,” Bob soothed.
Anne stopped sniveling and looked at him.
“Do you really think that—that no one finds out?”
He could’ve excused himself. He could’ve pushed back from the counter and announced he was ready for bed. But she was his daughter, and her mother was gone; there was no one left to help her but him.
“I’m not sure,” said Bob slowly.
“Well, they do,” said Anne.
It had been the gossip that Joanie despised, too, the gossip that she’d wanted him to understand. He had made her the subject of dozens of whispered conversations at the grocery store, the hair salon, the post office, even church, and when
The Sex Cure
came out, it had been Bob’s turn to squirm: Joanie had collected every salacious morsel about the scandal that had almost touched him. But years later, when Bob had retired from the insurance agency and Joanie had culled her library to make room for his thousands of work files, Bob watched her throw out that scrapbook without even mentioning its role in their lives the decade before—forgotten, let go.
“Your mother and I were happy,” said Bob.
But she had kept the novel.
“Sometimes,” Anne agreed.
“Sometimes,” Bob said quietly, and Anne regarded him. Bob shrugged. “You were there,” he said.
She seemed to be waiting to see if he would take it back, but Anne could have it, the truth that had never really been hidden. “That book,” said Bob.
“The Sex Cure.”
Bob watched his daughter to gauge her reaction—he still believed it was she who had vandalized the author’s home. “Your mother kept it all those years, right under our mattress.”
“Under the mattress,” said Anne, “not at the kitchen table. She put it away.”
“Put it away? If you want to get rid of something, you throw it out. No, it was in our bedroom with us.” Bob shook his head. “Then yesterday, Julia came home from school with it.” He took a deep breath. “And she had all these questions.”
Had it changed the way people thought about one another? Bob recalled the cast lists and the newspaper articles that Joanie had saved, her copy left out for him to see and see and see. To Bob, his affairs hadn’t meant anything; to Joanie, they had meant a great deal. And as Julia had stood there waving the book at him, unearthing all the things he’d believed were long since put away, it had seemed to Bob that Joanie herself was reaching out across the grave, asking for the one thing he could never give her: time and all the nights he had already given to someone else.
“I don’t know what came over me,” said Bob. “I hit her.”
“You
hit
her?”
Bob felt sick to his stomach.
“Like?” Anne imitated his backhand, swinging her hand through the air.
He nodded. “I shouldn’t have done it,” he said.
“No,” said Anne. “Tell her that,” she advised.
Bob thought of the light-filled days, the warm hours, the cheerful minutes that Teddy and Julia had raced around 122 Chestnut Street, where he’d never once thought to lay a hand on either of them. If Bob’s marriage had not been perfect, at least he and Joanie had ended up in a better place than where they’d begun.
Anne slid his plate toward him and Bob picked up a sandwich half. He could almost picture Joanie at the counter with them, taking a bite from the points of her triangle, wiping the crumbs from her mouth. At her funeral, he hadn’t been able to cry. He hadn’t been able to hear the words that were spoken. He’d shifted anxiously, like a child, until Anne had slipped her hand into his and held on.
“Tell me something,” said Bob. “That Halloween.”
Anne took a bite of her sandwich and watched him while she chewed.
“Was it you?” asked Bob.
“Not me,” said Anne, meeting his gaze. “I was just a kid.”
12
Sometimes at night Sam and Carl and I would go down to Council Rock to stare at the lake, at Sleeping Lion Mountain overlooking the Susquehanna Valley, at Kingfisher Tower looming like a grandfather clock over Three Mile Point. And if it was winter, we’d test the ice and slush out as far as we dared, which was usually only a step or two before we heard the frozen water creaking under our feet and shoe-skated back to shore. But tonight, in spite of my dad telling me not to, I went alone, pulled by a tide of shame toward Carl: the note I’d written was looping through my mind on repeat, and the only way I knew to stop it was to confess.
The rooftop outside my bedroom window was slick and I scaled cautiously, one hand palming the shingles, the other jutted out for balance. At the front of the house, I lowered myself onto the metal porch roof, then knelt and slid a leg over until my toe found the railing. Silently, I dropped down, still holding the rain gutter, then jumped back into the grass and wiped my hands on the legs of my jeans.
Moonlight filtered through the tree leaves, crosshatching the front lawn. The only sound was of the wind blowing the porch swing, the right chain whining over a knot it couldn’t work out. Sam and Carl and I had abused that swing.
The humid night air had draped itself over my neighbors’ lawns, dampening the sidewalks and beading on my hair. I knew every step of this sidewalk, the squares that rose over tree roots and the squares that circumnavigated their trunks; the cracked, the crumbling, and the brand-new squares with handprints and initials stick-etched in. Susquehanna Avenue. On a trip down to Philadelphia, we’d seen what the creek behind our house would become before dumping into the Atlantic, hundreds of miles away, and I’d thought about Teddy and me learning to spell the name of the river, that rhythmic lullaby,
ESSuESS, QUEuEEE, H-a-n-n-A.
At the curb in front of Carl’s house, I brushed a handful of gravel into my palm, then carried it up the driveway to a place just below Carl’s window. Maybe I didn’t want to wake him: I picked the smallest stones and threw them one by one, hitting first the window frame, then the rain gutter, the drainpipe, the roof. I spent another few seconds reluctantly peppering his house and was about to head home when I heard the back door open.
Carl’s mom, ghostly in her white nightgown, leaned out into the night.
“Julia?” she said in her lilting accent. “Is that you, love?”
Her strawberry-brown hair hung in a braid over her left shoulder and she wore fuzzy slippers, but her ankles and calves were bare.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “Do you need Carl for something?”
“Sort of,” I said.
“I can get him for you.”
What other mother? I looked carefully at her and saw Carl’s eyes, his freckled nose. I couldn’t help but think that I had sabotaged his mother, his whole world, his only family, and I knew right then that I couldn’t tell Carl.
“That’s okay,” I said. She waited, like she expected me to say more, but there was nothing more to say.
“Do you want to come inside?” she asked after a moment.
I shrugged and she held the door for me. The green light from the VCR clock blinked 12:56. No TV, no music, no lights, but the house didn’t seem scary. Just dark.
I sat on the couch by the window, stepping out of my shoes and tucking my feet under a blanket while Carl’s mom settled in a rocking chair a few feet away. My eyes adjusted and I saw her pale lips and her long, thick hair. When she didn’t braid it, her hair reached all the way down her back, and I wondered if she’d cut it since Carl’s dad had died.
“Carl said the two of you are playing a match against each other tomorrow.”
For the first time, I let myself wonder who would win. Carl and I typically split sets, but tomorrow, with an audience, I didn’t know what would happen.
“I think he’s a little nervous,” she offered. “He says if he wins, you’re off the team.”
I rested my head on a pillow. “I wasn’t even on it to begin with.”
Outside the clouds raced one another across the sky, mottling the moonlight. There were a hundred clouds ahead of the moon and a hundred more just behind, and I watched them chase on, sailing over Cooperstown and beyond the hills, and thought how strange it would be to leave this place one day.
“My dad asked Coach Klawson to give me the exhibition match,” I admitted. “It should’ve been Carl’s, but I took it anyway.”
She rocked forward and joined me on the couch, pulling my feet onto her lap so that the blanket covered both of us. I curled my body close to hers and soon tears were pooling on my neck.
Of all our mothers, she was the most like us. When she’d caught Sam and Carl and me smoking behind the oak tree in her backyard, she’d taken the pack but left us to finish our OPs, and when she said goodbye to us at night, she told us to get home mayhi safe.
I knew that if the note about her turned up, I would never admit to having written it, which was the worst kind of shame, the kind you cannot even own up to, and the regret I felt then, not only for what I’d done but for the kind of person I was, racked my stomach and squeezed my throat.
“You’ve had a hard couple of weeks,” said Carl’s mom, hugging me tight, and she meant Nonz, of course, but what had begun with Nonz was snowballing through my life, no end in sight.
“My dad kissed a woman,” I said, testing it out.
Carl’s mom was quiet. Backlit, she appeared as a shadow, almost otherworldly. A part of her had died with Carl’s dad, which was the kind of love that ruined your life, like the kind of love my parents had would ruin ours.
“There are some things you can’t control,” she said. “You can’t control your parents.” She squeezed my feet again. “But you and Sam and Carl take good care of one another.”
I couldn’t tell if it was an observation or a warning, and I wanted to promise her that we always had and always would, but it wasn’t true. We were already shifting away from one another, elbowing for more room.
* * *
Back home, I fell asleep sometime after two, armed and ready to dream. Dad was living in Cherry Valley; Mom had pushed Poppy down the stairs. I arrived at CHS with my backpack in hand, but Carl had court papers saying I couldn’t come inside and Sam pretended not to see me, standing with Megan V’d between his knees. I chased the note about Carl’s mom across every page of the night, but while I was looking for it Carl had already found it, and, even though no one was speaking to me, I still had an exhibition match to play.