The Blessings (10 page)

“This is nuts,” Dave snaps, cutting Abby off midsentence.

Ann looks up quickly, her face a crushed pink moon. “Dave,” she says. Her eyes are wide, but her lips barely move.

“You've been here, what, honey?” Dave says to Abby. “One day? Less than a day?”

Abby looks at her knees, says under her breath, “Oh my God, get me out of here.”

“Dave,” Ann says louder, a notch of pleading in her voice.

“I mean, we're with her all the time, Ann,” Dave says. “There's no way.”

“It's kind of textbook, Dad,” Abby says. She adds that she knew some girls in college with eating disorders.
Eating disorder
—it's like a punch to the throat.

Ann is staring at the floor. She looks stunned, small, as if absorbing this has made her shrink. “Abby thinks she needs a therapist,” she says.

“I mean, I don't know,” Abby says. “A therapist, a nutritionist. I mean—” She looks at Ann. “This is why I didn't want to tell you. Should I have told you?”

“Yes,” Ann says. “Yes. Yes, of course.”

From outside, Dave hears a burst of honking up on Spry Boulevard. His brain is pounding, ears swarming with white noise. He needs to get out of there. He looks at the couch, the fuzzy nest of Meghan's blankets. His wife's face, flushed to bursting, his older daughter teary-eyed, pinching at the ripped hole in her jeans. The mug of hot cocoa Meghan made last night, still sitting full on the end table, powdery chocolate streaking down the sides like dried entrails. Then the honking comes into focus—three sharp, aggravated blasts. “That's my ride,” Dave says, and relief surges through his bones. He steps toward Abby, kisses the top of her head. “I love you, honey. Drive safely,” he says, and starts for the door.

“You're not leaving,” Ann says, but Dave keeps moving. He feels life returning to his limbs. “You're
leaving
?” she repeats, her voice rising abruptly, high and loose, almost a shriek. Dave continues through the foyer and onto the front porch, letting the front door slam behind him. He crosses the shaggy front lawn to where Dean and his Hummer sit chugging by the curb.

“Sorry,” Dave says, climbing in and shutting the door hard, but the car is too expensive to slam properly. It closes with a puny click.

“New car?” Dean says.

Dave's heart is banging in his chest. “What?”

“The Volkswagen,” Dean says, nodding at the driveway.

“Oh,” Dave says. “That's Abby's. My oldest. She's just home for a few days.”

Dean nods, a thick fold of pink flesh rolling over his shirt collar, as he puts the car in drive. “New England, right?”

“Brooklyn now.”

“These kids,” Dean says, shaking his head. “Who can keep track. They move around so much. It's goddamn nuts.”

“She's leaving tonight,” Dave adds, as Dean pulls away from the curb.

As they start their assigned loop, Spry up to Hastings, Dave's chest hurts. Blood pounds in his ears. He stares at the neighbors' houses breezing past the window, a long march of glowing porch lights, trimmed front lawns, and eyeballs on sticks. Dean is flipping through the radio channels, talking about how Jeremy, his younger boy, told them he wants to move to L.A. after high school. Try to make it as an actor. “I told him, I'll be damned,” Dean says. “You're staying here and getting a degree. I'm not going to let you fuck up your life on my watch.”

Dave lets out a choked laugh, but he's thinking that Dean is made for this patrol—a guy who's vigilant, who keeps his kids in line, keeps them from going down the wrong path. His throat is tightening, the pressure building in his chest. Then the dashboard emits a gentle ping. “That's you,” Dean says.

Dave blinks at him.

“Seat belt, partner.”

“Oh,” Dave breathes. “Righty-o, partner,” he adds, pulling the belt sharply across his middle, jamming it in the buckle. He balls his damp palms into fists. Dry heat is pouring silently from the vents. The Rolling Stones thrash faintly on the radio. The dashboard is shiny, wide as an airplane cockpit, and Dave feels a surge of anger—at the belt, the car, Dean himself.

“I told him, I don't care what your friends are doing or what bullshit you heard from the guidance counselor,” Dean is saying. Dave cranks his window down. His brow is filmed with sweat, his belted gut so tight it might implode. As Dean approaches the corner of Keene and Hastings, still inconceivably talking about his stupid son, Dave imagines bolting from the car, diving for the corner yard. The house on the corner is a colonial, brick, twice the size of his own. A tall, tidy hedge shields the lawn from the street. Dean is fiddling now with the heat, tweaking the glowing dials—“I try to get my wife to back me up, but she likes to let me do the dirty work,” he says—when Dave spots a shadow in the yard: a movement toward the back of the high hedge. Was it a person? He squints hard into the darkness. The house is unlit, except for a single window upstairs.

“Hold on,” Dave says, knocking one fist on the dashboard. “Stop it. Stop driving.”

“What?”

He slaps the dashboard with his palm. “Stop the car!”

“Jesus!” Dean says, jerking to a stop at the corner. “What's the problem?”

“I saw something.”

“Saw something?”

“In the bushes.” Dave points. “Over there.”

“What, like a robber?” Dean chuckles.

“Yeah,” Dave says, unbuckling his seat belt.

“Seriously?” Dean says, but there's a note of uncertainty in his voice. He glances in the rearview mirror. “So, what? Do we think we should call it in or something?”

“I'm going to have a look,” Dave says, thrusting the door open. The dashboard pings again in feeble protest.

“Seriously?” Dean repeats as Dave steps onto the sidewalk and slams the door. He inhales sharply, letting his lungs inflate. The night is colder, but the air smells fresh, like newly mown grass. As he strides across the neighbor's lawn, his breath comes in hard, clean puffs. Past the red eyeball staked in the clipped grass, past the long porch with its matching chairs and potted plants. Marching down the narrow path at the side of the house, Dave feels expansive, churning with adrenaline. The ground is slick with mud and he trips once, soaking his pants from the knees down, but clambers up and keeps going, swiping his palms on his jeans. When he emerges in the backyard, he finds it lit only by a single streetlamp. A newish Subaru is parked by the garage. The yard is empty except for the traces of a baseball game, a flung bat, some makeshift bases. There are no intruders here—none that Dave can see, at least. But a person could easily be crouched behind the car or lurking on the far side of the garage. Dave picks up the baseball bat—it's surprisingly light, near weightless—and stalks across the lawn. But when he steps within ten feet of the garage door, the sensor light blazes on, flooding the yard with light. He freezes, just as the back door slams.

“Hey!” shouts a voice from the porch. “What the fuck!”

The guy standing on the back porch looks younger than Dave, though not by much. His hair is still dark but starting to recede at the temples. He's wearing flip-flops, plaid pajama bottoms, a Temple Owls T-shirt.

“What the hell are you doing on my property?”

“It's okay,” Dave says, squinting in the sudden brightness, breaths heaving. “Take it easy—”

“Step away from my car.”

“I'm on Town Watch,” Dave says.

“Will you step the hell away from my car, please?”

“I'm Town Watch!” Dave shouts, but he takes a conciliatory step onto the grass. “I saw something,” he says. “In your yard.”

“You what?” The guy pauses, peering at him. The gold dome of the porch light shines above his head. “You saw something in my yard?”

“In that hedge,” Dave says, pointing, still sucking air. “I saw somebody.”

“Somebody?” the guy says. “Like what? A person?”

“Right.” Dave nods. “Yes.” He drops his hand to his side. His lungs are burning. Cold mud has seeped through his moccasins, oozed between his toes. In the glow of the porch, he can make out a pair of small pink sneakers, a hula hoop, a Little Mermaid backpack—a family younger than his, he thinks, and is hit with a blast of sadness.

The guy folds his arms across his chest. “What exactly did you see?”

Dave tries to focus, to call up the memory, but suddenly the details are deserting him. Was it an actual figure he saw moving in the bushes? Or just a shadow, a rustling of leaves? “I'm not sure,” he admits.

“Well, what did it look like?” the guy presses.

“I don't know,” Dave says. “It's hard to describe. I just—I had the sense of something.”

“The sense of something?”

Dave closes his eyes, but his mind is a vast blankness. He saw no intruder, he thinks. He saw nothing.
It's kind of textbook, Dad
—the line returns to him like a blow.

“You said you're with Town Watch?”

Dave opens his eyes to find the guy scrutinizing him again, more closely. He considers what he looks like—the soaked moccasins, the muddy jeans, the old sweatshirt at least a size too small. “Dave,” he tells him, straightening his glasses. “Townsend. I live at 258 Waverly—you can ask my partner. He's right out front in the Hummer—”

As if on cue, there's the sound of a branch snapping from the side of the house. Dean steps into the yard, wearing a broad, easy smile. “Everything okay back here?” He walks right up to the guy, hand extended. “Dean Kramer, 401 Trafalgar. Really sorry about all this.”

“Scott,” the guy says. “Cassidy.” He sounds less wary: Maybe it's Dean's collared shirt, maybe his address. “You're Town Watch, too?”

“Afraid so,” Dean says. “My partner here just went all gangbusters on me.”

They share a laugh together at Dave's expense: a laugh that seems united in its ease, its suburban normality.

“He saw something, but now he can't remember what it was,” Scott says, as if Dave isn't standing there. “Did you see it, too?”

“Afraid not,” Dean says, but allows, “I was driving, though.” He's standing on the bottom step, rocking on the balls of his feet. Scott squints into the middle distance, shaking his head slowly, in disappointment or disbelief. Talking together in the light of the porch, they look like actors on a stage.

Then, to Dave's surprise, Scott says, “If it's him again, I'll kill the punk.”

“Who's that?” Dean says with an appreciative laugh.

“My daughter's goddamn boyfriend.”

“Oh yeah?” Dean chuckles and slides his hands into his pockets, settling in. “How old?”

“Sixteen.”

“Uh-oh. He have a car?”

“Yeah. Luckily, he's too much of an idiot to pass the test,” Scott says. “He already failed twice. But it hasn't stopped him from sneaking her out of the house after curfew. Last week, they ran off to the 7-Eleven,” he says, still shaking his head. Then he returns his attention to Dave. “Did this thing you saw look sixteen?”

The two fathers are both looking at him now, arms folded across their chests, waiting for an answer. But Dave can't bring himself to speak. He is paralyzed with jealousy, with grief—a daughter breaking curfew, sneaking out to the 7-Eleven. It sounds like the best problem in the world.

“Hey, man,” Dean says, sounding startled. “Hey, partner. You okay?”

The yard has gone blurry. Dave realizes then that he's crying, his glasses two smeared pools of fog. He drops the baseball bat and it lands on the grass with a soft, almost soundless plunk.

“It's no big deal,” Dean says uncomfortably. “Honest mistake. Could have happened to either one of us.”

With shaky fingers, Dave fumbles his glasses off and drops them to the lawn. The porch light is dissolving, the yard swimming in his tears. “I need to go home,” he manages as his voice breaks, and he covers his face with both hands.

“No problem,” Dean says. “Whatever you say, partner.” His voice is touched with concern. But the two men stand on the porch a moment longer, eyes averted, because they're embarrassed for him, or want to preserve his dignity, or they just can't bear to look.

A
fter her son died of cancer at thirty-five, Helen decided she wasn't attending any more funerals. A year later, she told the family she was no longer making potato soup. In December, she wouldn't be baking her Christmas cookies but would pass along the recipes to anyone who was interested. After a lifetime of doing for others, she was done.

Her new address, Apartment 16D in St. Mary's Senior Living Community, is the place she's lived for the past two years and eight months, but it isn't her home. Her children did their best trying to replicate the house on Oxford Avenue, choosing her most meaningful possessions and compressing them into a quarter of the space. The twin brass lamps with the horses for bases. The blue couch and matching wingback chair that was John's, her husband's, favorite seat. The candy dish, cream and green, shaped like a four-leaf clover. The Sears portrait of her six grandchildren, taken seven years ago. Elena was a baby then, Max not yet born; a picture of him had since been tucked into the corner of the frame.

The apartment has an odd smell, synthetic, like hotel carpet. The walls are so thick that Helen hears nothing from outside. She knows this is meant to be a selling point—
Your privacy is our priority
, the brochure said—but Helen always liked to know what people were up to, to step out onto the stoop and chat with her neighbors, look out a window and see what's happening on the street. In 16D, the window is so high that all she can see is the roof of a Rite Aid, telephone wires, and clouds.

Her children had decided that she should move someplace smaller, which made sense after John, her husband, died. To pare down. Simplify.
It'll be easier
, they told her, and Helen trusted it was true. She'd raised her children right. But when the call came that the apartment was available, it was just nine months after John, her son—her
son
; it still made her heart stop—and Helen didn't want to move. She didn't want any more upheaval, any more loss or change, but the spot had opened up, and spots were hard to get, her children said, so she went.

It amazed her, how life went on. A birth, a death, and all without her husband there. People from the parish, from the old neighborhood. Their own son. After a lifetime experiencing everything together, now these things were hers alone. She took them in, found one more place to put them. Good news, bad. All with that hollowed-out place inside her, that deep emptiness that no one could see.

Helen remembers nothing about the move itself except the day her grandsons, Stevie and Alex and Joey, came to assemble the new bureau. Her old wooden one wouldn't fit through the bedroom door. While they worked, Helen cooked a feast—roast beef, twice-baked potatoes, a chocolate cake, a full meal in the middle of a Saturday—and when the dresser was upright, the three of them piled around her square table, smaller now without the leaf in the middle, wedged in the narrow space between her kitchen and TV. She loved having them there, elbows sprawling, knees banging. Joey ate three helpings of everything. A basketball star—he needed it. Helen wished she could have gone on feeding them forever. Before they left, she introduced them to her neighbors.
My
grandsons
, she said, beaming, Joey's long arm slung around her shoulders. Alex politely shaking their hands. Stevie nodding, shuffling his feet the way he always did. Good boys.

There had been other things to get used to at St. Mary's: the stove, which was electric, after forty years of adjustable blue flames. The refrigerator with the freezer on the bottom instead of the top, with a pullout handle, like a drawer. The faucet in the bathroom, two spouts instead of one. The sudden urgency of sirens flashing in front of the building in the middle of the night.

After John, her son, died, Helen devoted herself to his wife and children. She went to their house every afternoon. She made dinners and tidied the kitchen, fed Elena and read her stories, gave Max his bath. Her daughters, Ann and Margie, had cautioned her that her daughter-in-law could be hard to help—
sometimes you have to push it
, they said—but with Helen, Lauren was never that way. Helen simply showed up and started doing things, sliding a few chicken breasts in the oven or washing off the sticky place mats, folding a load of laundry and putting another in the machine.
Thank you
, Lauren said with a tired smile, at the end of each day. Helen could tell that it helped, having her there. And Helen liked to be in her son's house. It made her feel closer to him. She kissed Elena. She held the baby, saw his face.

Helen doesn't make a habit of remembering. To sit and dwell on sad things—she doesn't see the point. But sometimes she can't help returning to that afternoon John and Lauren showed up on her porch on Oxford Avenue. Her husband had died just nine months before.
We have something we need to tell you, Mom
, her son said, and Helen knew right away the news wasn't good. The set of his jaw, the absence of the children. Her first thought was Lauren—she looked so stunned as they sat beside each other on the couch, holding hands. Right here, on that same couch.

In Apartment 16D, the weeks feel formless. Easy to forget which day it is, even with the calendar on the closet door: a pumpkin patch, October, 1997. Helen keeps up with small things. Getting her hair done every other Wednesday, balancing her bankbook, going to the Rite Aid for M&M's to keep the candy dish filled in case one of the grandchildren comes. She goes to Lauren's only once a week now. Max is in kindergarten, Elena in second grade. They have their own life, their own family. Helen doesn't want to be in the way. She marks her visits on the calendar, so she doesn't lose track of when she's been there. On weekends, she's picked up and taken away—a birthday party, a school concert, one of Joey's games—but the weekdays are all the same: church in the morning, coffee and the paper. Cans of soup, cups of tea, a chocolate after dinner (one).
Jeopardy!
and
Wheel of Fortune
, the final minutes of the Phillies game, just to get the score. The first few minutes of the news. Phone calls from her daughters, both or sometimes just one. The rosary, and a fitful night's sleep. Then church again, coffee again, the paper.

One evening, a Wednesday, her granddaughter Meghan calls.
Gran? I have a favor.
A historical interview, a project for her social studies class. Could she come interview her this weekend? It seems improbable that Helen has anything interesting to say, but she'll do it, of course. Anything they ask.

They show up on Saturday afternoon, Ann and Meghan, who is clutching a little recorder in her hand. A pretty Irish girl, her freckled face pink from the cold. She hugs Helen, as she always does. “Can I fix you something?” Helen says, and wishes she'd made a late lunch, an early dinner. Her granddaughter looks thin.

Ann looks at Meghan, who shakes her head and folds herself into a ball on the couch, spreading one of Helen's afghans over her knees. “No thanks,” she says. “I'm not hungry.”

“Well,” Helen says. “At least have some candy.” She sets the bowl on the coffee table, then takes a seat in the blue chair.

Meghan slides the candy to the very corner of the table and unscrolls a long paper time line. All the important historical junctures in Helen's lifetime are marked with big black dots.
The Roaring Twenties. World War II. The Great Depression.
Helen tells her the year she was born, 1918, and Meghan marks it with a red star. Then she pushes the button on the recorder. “Give me some wisdom, Gran,” she says, a joke.

Helen looks at the recorder. “What should I say?”

“Anything,” Meghan says. “I mean, your whole life is history.”

“Is it?” Helen laughs.

“Why don't you tell her about a typical day,” Ann suggests. “Back in the old neighborhood.”

“It's nothing too interesting.”

“That's okay. Just your daily routine. Little things.”

Little things? That's all it was, little things. Cooking, cleaning, minding the babies. Dinner for six people, seven nights a week. The dinners weren't fancy, but they were good and warm. There was always a vegetable. And color—John liked color on a plate. They ate every bite, not a wasted mouthful. At this, Meghan laughs. “No wonder my family is so food-centric,” she says.

Food-centric?
Helen thinks.

Meghan begins picking at the M&M's as they talk of other things—clothes and music, the prices of eggs and milk and gasoline. It's easier than Helen expected, once she gets started, even though it's all a bunch of nothing—ordinary details, ordinary days. Her granddaughter takes notes with one hand, eats M&M's with the other. It isn't the way the boys eat them, in big handfuls. She ferries them to her mouth one by one like a little machine.

“What important things do you know now about life that you didn't when you were my age?” Meghan asks at the end, crunching candy. She is reading from her notes.

“Oh, well,” Helen says. What to say? The truth is that life in the end—even a long life, especially a long life—amounts to a handful of a very few things. The longer you live, the shorter the story.
Lived in Philadelphia her entire life. Moved twice: into the house on Oxford Avenue, out of the house on Oxford Avenue. Had seven grandchildren and four children. One died.

“At your age?” Helen says with a laugh. “That was a long time ago.”

Meghan says, “That's okay,” and clicks the recorder off. The candy dish is empty.

 “How about I make you some lunch?” Helen tries again, but Meghan shakes her head, rolling up her time line.

“Are you sure, Meg?” Ann says.

“I'm stuffed,” Meghan says. Then she goes into the bathroom, and when Helen turns to her daughter, she is startled by the look of concern on Ann's face—about what, Helen has no idea. She's always worried about Ann, her first child. Even as a girl, she was so quiet and contained. When Meghan emerges, Ann quickly packs their things, and Meghan gives Helen a hug good-bye. Helen stands in the doorway waving until they're out of sight.

In November—December?—Helen notices the spot in her eye. Small and hazy, like watching the news when one of the faces is blurred. At first she thinks it's a smudge on her glasses, an eyelash, something she can rub off the lens or blink away. She waits a few days for it to disappear, but every morning wakes to find it there, floating on her bedroom ceiling, in the same place.

She remembers the night Lauren called her, just before midnight.
John's asking for you
, she said.
He wants you to come now.
He wants you here.
They didn't want Helen driving herself so late, so she stood on her stoop, waiting to be picked up, aware of the precious minutes wasting as her son lay dying and she waited for a car she recognized. These were the longest, loneliest moments of her life. Finally, Margie's husband, Joe, appeared—he was driving too slowly, she remembers thinking, considering—and she hugged a sweater around her shoulders as she hurried down the steps. It was her white sweater—she knows this because she wore it for the next two days. When she arrived at the house, John was speaking to Elena. He told her that he loved her, and she was carried off to a neighbor's. Then her son got into bed and did not get back up again. He writhed in pain. The nurse arrived with morphine and for the next six hours, Ann and Margie and Patrick and Lauren sat around him, encircled him, hands on him. Watching him destroyed Helen, broke her forever. But in the moment she withstood it, wanting his final image of her to be of comfort, determined to be strong for her son.

She knows she should tell Patrick about the blur in her eye. Not only is he training to be a doctor, but an eye doctor. Silly that she hasn't asked. But Helen also knows that once she does, it will be out there. Could she be declared unfit to drive? To live on her own? St. Mary's is not a place for people who need assistance.
An active senior living community
, the brochure said. She's too afraid of what could happen next.

In December, there is gossip at St. Mary's: Two residents, Stan and Lila, have fallen in love. Both widowed, of course. They are now moving in together, consolidating their two small rooms into one. Helen is bothered. It isn't right, isn't fair, to their former spouses. It doesn't seem kind to the other residents, either, all of them people who lost their other halves. Helen says hello to them in the lounge, but that's it.

News comes. Abby, her oldest grandchild, has moved again—still Brooklyn, Ann explains, but a different part of Brooklyn.
Is it safe?
It's safe.

Patrick's wife, Kate, has a miscarriage. Helen hadn't known she was pregnant; the news breaks her heart.
It just wasn't meant to be
, Helen tells her, and Kate smiles lightly. Helen knows she doesn't agree. Kate isn't really Catholic—
raised Catholic
, is how she puts it. They've been doing fertility treatments, about which Helen keeps her mouth shut. “Thanks, Helen,” Kate says; it's a title that happened without discussion. The others call her Mrs. Blessing, which she prefers.

Christmas lights appear in the lobby, wreaths on apartment doors. There's a sing-along one afternoon in the lounge—
all your holiday favorites!
—that Helen avoids. She goes to the bank and counts out thirty dollars for each grandchild, puts the money in envelopes, and writes their names on the fronts. She'll give them to their parents to buy a gift and sign her name.