The Blessings (20 page)

And it hadn't bothered him then that Kate hated cooking, but this feels different now, too. He's forty-four. He's tired. He works long hours and comes home wiped out at the end of the day. Sometimes he just wants a warm meal on a plate—the kind of life his father had. The life his mother made. Roast beef, green beans, twice-baked potatoes. But if he voiced this to Kate, there would be hell to pay. Sixteen years and two kids later, his wife still associates cooking with a domestic role she finds reductive, as if the minute she makes a turkey on Thanksgiving, she's compromised in some fundamental way (a graduate of Bryn Mawr—Patrick had underestimated this, too).

You said you didn't want that kind of marriage
, Kate reminds him.

But was he still accountable for something he said twenty years ago? It might have been a moment of rebellion, of being blinded by his libido, by Kate's willingness to have sex in public places. A life that was different from his family's—hell, why not? Who doesn't want that at twenty-five?

Patrick has learned this, too: The older you get, the more you revert to what you came from.

Once they've fought their way across the Walt Whitman, the road widens, and the congestion lightens. A half hour later, the sky is a lazy blue, the city smog burned off behind them. After exiting the Garden State Parkway heading toward Ocean City, Patrick swerves into the parking lot of Jerzee Freeze.

“Hey!” Hayley demands, sitting up straight. “Where are we going?”

“Detour,” Patrick says.

“What detour?”

“Ice cream,” he says, jerking the car into a spot. “Best in the world.”

She frowns. “Does Mom know?”

Christ, he thinks. But she isn't wrong; Kate doesn't like the kids having too much sugar. “Mom doesn't need to know,” he says with a pinch of guilt, but he proceeds, getting out and opening the child-locked back door. “It's our little secret, Hay. You and me.”

He takes her hand as she jumps down from the car. The air is still warm but less humid, tinged with salt; the ocean is getting close. As they head across the parking lot, the proximity to ice cream makes her complicit. “Do they have strawberry?” she says, keeping her hand in his.

“You bet,” Patrick says. “World-class strawberry.”

They stand in line, cars turning into the traffic circle behind them. He can feel Hayley's alertness, concentrating on her order. When she gets to the counter, she speaks in a single breath: “One strawberry ice cream that's all please thank you.”

“Aw, how cute!” says the ice-cream girl, leaning over the counter. She has the tan of a kid who's worked at the shore all summer, a shiny brown ponytail and frosted pink lips, the striped straps of her bathing suit peeking beneath her Jerzee Freeze T-shirt. “Are you a clown?” she says, smiling at Hayley's painted face.

“No,” Hayley replies. She looks suddenly embarrassed. Maybe it's being singled out, or singled out by a cool older girl. “I'm a puppy,” she says.

“Oh, a puppy!” The girl nods faux seriously. “I have a Doberman.”

“Well, I'm a husky.”

“A husky!” She laughs, grabbing a scooper.

Hayley adds, “I want to get a puppy, actually, but my mom won't let me.”

“Oh, really? That's too bad.” She smiles, glancing at Patrick as she digs into the strawberry carton. “She's adorable.”

“Shameless, too,” Patrick says. “Playing the puppy sympathy card just to get an extra scoop.”

Laughing, the girl hands Hayley a massive cone. She takes it carefully in two hands. “What about you, Dad?”

“Chocolate with sprinkles. Rainbow, please.”

“Rainbow sprinkles coming right up,” she says.

The ice-cream girl looks nothing like Louise—in fact, she is much prettier and certainly sexier—but they have something in common. It's the laughing, Patrick thinks. Louise is always laughing. It's part of why he likes to be around her, because she thinks he's funny—talking to her, Patrick
is
funny. As if she taps into some shut-down part of himself, his old sense of humor coming back to life.

“Eight oh two,” the girl says.

Patrick checks his thoughts, feeling guilty again. He smiles and pays, jamming the change in the tip jar. Then he and Hayley walk over to a picnic table and sit side by side on one of the peeling red benches, her feet dangling an inch above the hot cement.

“Good, huh?”

She nods, focusing intently on catching the drips with her tongue as they roll down the sides. They sit in silence, facing the traffic circle, licking their cones. Patrick watches the shore-bound cars slow down before them, wending their way into the on-deck circle and waiting for their opening. He lets his mind wander back to Louise, to their conversation this afternoon as he was leaving. Patrick has wondered sometimes if Louise flirts with him (somehow the accent makes it harder to tell), but today he was almost sure.
And don't think I'm not jealous
, she'd said, sighing.
Think of me back here in Philly, melting in my flat.

No A/C?

Uh-uh
, she'd said. When she smiled, her cheeks bunched and softened like plums.
I would kill to be at the beach.

Patrick had paused in the doorway.
To be honest with you, Louise, I sort of wish I wasn't going.

Why's that?

I need a break from my life.

Her face had registered surprise, but she'd recovered quickly and leaned forward slightly, the cross around her neck dipping forward, voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper.
Shall I call you back with a work emergency, then?

He'd grinned at her and whispered back,
Please do.

It had all happened so quickly, glibly. Surely they had just been kidding—hadn't they? Patrick stares at the rotary, the sun beating on his brow. Either way, it wasn't appropriate. He shouldn't have implied there were any problems in his personal life, betrayed any hint of his unhappiness at home—was
unhappiness
even the word?

Patrick hears the buzz of a text message. He pulls his phone from his shirt pocket. Kate, as if sensing his thoughts.

R u close?

He squints at the phone, then looks at Hayley, who is working her way studiously around the lip of her cone. He drops the phone back in his pocket as guilt needles him again. Guilt: It is his baseline.

When they were at home in Philadelphia, he and John lived largely independent lives—in school, they were a critical four years apart—but they were inseparable at the shore. They spent all day on the beach together, playing paddleball and building elaborate castles, digging holes to China and burying each other in the sand. In the ocean, they played a game where they named the waves after different creatures, depending on their size and strength.
A cheetah! No, a lion! A T. rex!
They rode the waves, arms straight out and heads down, salt water rushing up their mouths and noses, tossing them on the sand. As the afternoon softened and purpled into evening—for Patrick, the most unbearable part of each day—they started the long trudge back to their rental, six blocks from the beach. Their bedroom in the rental wasn't much smaller than the one they shared at home, but somehow the novelty of bunk beds made them stay up late talking, stifling laughter in their pillows. John would drift off eventually, but Patrick lay awake, watching the dip in the mattress moving, squeaking faintly as his brother breathed.

In the months after John died, Patrick worried that what got his brother would get him, too. He felt pains and aches. He woke at night drenched in sweat. He worried it was cancer, worried it was other things. He was in his third year of med school, clinical rotations. Disease was everywhere. And his paranoia felt justified, because if John had been checked sooner, might not things have turned out differently? Patrick resolved to be less stubborn. To extract some wisdom.
What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. God has a plan.
But if he said these things to Kate, she raised an eyebrow, so he started keeping them to himself. He started taking Lexapro, too, which helped his nerves but killed his sex drive. He felt flattened all the time—drugs? grief? After a while, it was hard to say.

Now, Patrick is no longer afraid of dying. He feels the pressure of being alive. To do right by his family. Be a good father, a good husband, a good uncle to John's children. To be responsible and right. He wonders sometimes if his anxiety simmers elsewhere in the family—did John wrestle with it, too? Patrick doubts it, though sometimes he considers asking Lauren. Back when his brother started dating her—it seems like a million years ago—Patrick thought Lauren was a little boring, a little plain. But over the years he's come to admire her more and more. The way she keeps her house, the way she puts her kids first. She's actually become prettier with age; it looks natural on her, not as forced as lots of Kate's Main Line friends. And her loyalty to their family has never wavered. After their mother fell and broke her arm, she lived at Lauren's for almost a year—longer than any of them had expected—but Lauren never once complained. Patrick doesn't want to know what Kate would have said if put in that position but their house, for all its tricks, didn't have a full bath on the first floor, so thankfully, it never came up.

Patrick can see the shore approaching, the top of the Ferris wheel emerging from the haze. The Phillies are up two in the fourth, with a man on. Suddenly he feels a blast of wind from the backseat. “Smell the ocean!” Hayley yells.

Ninth Street Bridge. Patrick hadn't even been paying attention. He feels the rumble under their wheels, the whine of the metal grid.

“Dad!” Hayley shouts, leaning her face out the window. “Smell the ocean!”

“Good girl, Hay,” he says with a laugh. “Beat me to it.” It makes him smile, makes him ache—his daughter and these old traditions, passed down.

The bridge ends, and they are coasting down Ninth Street. He tastes salt on his lips. They drive past people pedaling bikes slowly down the sidewalk, wearing bathing suits, towels slung over shoulders. Past the Food Mart, the cheap turquoise motel, the subpar Italian restaurant they loved when they were kids.

“What time is the barbecue?” Hayley is asking. She is sitting forward now, bouncing with excitement or sugar.

“Soon.”

“Who's staying?”

“Let's see,” Patrick says. “Joey and Amy and the baby, I think.” It's one of the advantages of having such a big house—between the three extra bedrooms and the covered porch, there's room for people to stay overnight. Joey can't afford his own rental, especially now, with the baby. Patrick is sure this bugs Kate, but it makes him feel better: Their house may be obscene, but at least they can share it with the family.

They pull onto Third Street, heading toward the ocean, and the roof of their house comes into view. It's the biggest, most ostentatious house on the block, a modern behemoth at the end of a row of old, gently worn duplexes with rainbow wind socks and Phillies flags flying from their porches. Patrick winces as he pulls into the driveway, little stones crunching beneath his wheels. The moment he turns the engine off, Hayley flings open the door and goes running inside. For a long minute, Patrick just sits there, his hands on the wheel. As kids, he and John always envied the people with houses right on the beach. Dragging themselves home in the evenings, they would loiter in the shaggy grass of the dunes just beyond the big picture windows, squinting to make out the people inside. Patrick would be briefly impressed, then distracted by hunger or mosquitoes or some sudden, paralyzing nostalgia for the day that was ending, but John would regard those houses like a problem to solve, a skill to master:
Who do you think lives in places like those?

Patrick closes his eyes and draws a deep breath of ocean, lets the salt air flood his lungs. When he looks again at his house, he reminds himself: Money doesn't buy happiness. That one's easy, but still it feels surprising every time, how deeply true it is.

He steps out of the car and into the cool breeze. Slowly he collects the suitcases and the pottery bowl and crunches across the small white stones. The deck is stocked and ready for a party—coolers of ice, cases of soda, top-of-the-line grill—but when Patrick steps inside, the place is chaos. The living room floor is covered with Tate's toys, the kitchen counter a mess of potato-chip bags and soda bottles, torn-open packages of cookies and store-bought cupcakes—and a few puddles of jewelry, pearls and pendants that Kate must have tried on and discarded.

Then his wife strides into the kitchen, looking perfect: sunglasses, hair, nails. She is wearing a red bathing suit under a silky flowered cover-up. “Are you late?”

“Hello to you, too,” Patrick replies, setting Hayley's bowl on the counter. “The drive was fine, thanks.”

“Hi, Dad!” Tate yells from the next room, where he's parked in front of the TV.

“Hey, bud,” Patrick says. At least someone is happy to see him. “What are you watching on television on this beautiful summer evening?”

“
SpongeBob
,” he replies as Kate scoops the jewelry off the counter and into her palm.

“I was expecting you an hour ago, wasn't I?” she says.

“We hit traffic,” Patrick replies, and heads for the stairs, carrying the suitcases.

“Oh?” She trails him, sounding skeptical. Maybe she's already seen Hayley's face, the evidence of strawberry on her mouth.

“And we stopped for ten minutes,” he adds. “We got ice cream.”

“Ice cream? Didn't she have a sugar infusion at the party?”

“I don't know what she had at the party.”

“You didn't ask?”

“We were driving to the shore, Kate,” he says, dumping Hayley's suitcase inside her bedroom doorway. “The ice-cream place was there. She was bored. I was nostalgic. We had a moment.” Patrick turns into their bedroom and tosses his duffel on the bed.