The Most Fun We Ever Had (17 page)

The ginkgo’s trunk itself was too smooth to climb, so David set up the ladder against it. He felt young and nimble, the same physical confidence he used to experience when arranging Marilyn’s elaborate Halloween decorations on the high eaves of the garage, his wife standing in the driveway below and watching him with admiration.

“Your butt looks really cute from this angle,” she’d call up to him, if the kids weren’t around.

He continued his ascent, the pruning shears tucked beneath his arm. When he reached the sturdiest-looking low branch he straddled it as though on horseback and paused for a minute, observing the backyard from fifteen feet up.

The dog paced restlessly across the ground beneath him. He held a leaf in his palm, half a dull green, the other half whitish; both sides mottled with tiny black dots. A woodpecker sounded from a neighboring oak. He massaged his shoulder, which was rebelling against his recent foray into elevated landscaping. He leaned his back against the trunk and sighed.

He found the notion of mindfulness irritating. Work made life make sense; it gave it shape and order. And then suddenly you were sixty-four years old, a doctor of medicine, climbing trees like a boy, obsessed with slugs and peculiar strains of mold. It didn’t seem fair, this abrupt reversal of his station in life. There should be some sort of middle ground between gainful employment and DiagnoseYourDecidua.com. He’d sent the webmaster an email—the gratuitous
M.D.
punctuating his signature made him feel a spark of pride—pointing out the egregious linguistic error, that
decidua
had, in fact, nothing to do with
deciduous,
that it in fact referred to the uterine lining expelled with the placenta after human delivery. He’d been proud of the email, which contained a patient explanation of the Latin root
decidere,
translatable either to “to cut off” or “to fall off,” the latter of which could be applicable, if used loosely, to describe both the shedding of leaves on trees and the shedding of the endometrium formed during pregnancy.

Actually: he’d been proud of the email at the time, but within twenty minutes the pride had turned to shame, shame for the fact that last year he’d been
delivering
uterine linings but now he was schooling an anonymous dime-store dendrologist on Latin root words.

Mindfulness was bullshit. The trim on the house needed painting but Marilyn was adamant that he not do it himself. Perhaps he would remind her that he was a grown man, a once-respected man, a man whose
catlike reflexes
she had previously praised (in bed, albeit, but nobody could argue with the fact that he was fairly coordinated).
I realize this is a cliché,
he would say to her,
but it feels like the world has left me behind
.

He felt an odd moment of vertigo. And then, out of the corner of his eye: something golden. Sprouting from the trunk above him, a cluster of waxy yellow discs, like clamshells. A chill ran up his spine. He’d always hated things like that—corals or sea anemones that the girls would ooh and ahh over when they went to the Shedd, porous, abundant things with lobes growing like cancer.

“Sonofabitch,” he breathed.

“Love?”

He startled, grabbed at the branch between his thighs as the pruning shears tumbled to the ground.
“Jesus.”

Marilyn was standing beneath the tree, squinting up at him into the sun. Her hand flew to her chest. “Oh, David, I’m so sorry.”

“Trying to kill me, kid?”

“Sweetheart. I’m a menace. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me that I might scare you.”

The irritation returned, a twinge: “You didn’t
scare
me. I just didn’t know you were home.”

She paused, and he knew she was deciding whether or not to engage with his impertinence. “Here I am,” she said, and her voice was effortful, but instead she smiled up at him, her big green eyes creased at the corners but still strikingly bright.

“There you are,” he replied. “Honey fungus.”

Marilyn cocked her head, bemused. “Sweetie pie.”

“No, it’s—honey fungus. See on the left there?” He was trying not to betray how upsetting he found this. He’d read enough to know that honey fungus meant the tree was a goner. “If it’s on the trunk, there’s a good chance it’s taken hold in the roots,” he said.

“Then what?”

“Then the tree dies. And the fungus can spread to neighboring trees.”

“Oh, David.” She arched her back and looked upward. “Oh, the poor thing.” His wife, who could find it in her heart to have compassion for anyone, anything. “Come on down, love.” She held her hands upward as if to spot him. “I haven’t kissed anyone all day.”

Suddenly eager to embrace her, he descended carefully, so as not to make her nervous.

—

V
iolet had begun to view the world, lately, as a nuanced gradient of the degrees to which she wanted to physically harm her sister. If she were measuring murderousness on the one-to-ten pain scale her father had taught them when they were young, she would have given Wendy’s latest escapade—inviting her to coffee and then bailing fifteen minutes before, citing a philanthropic emergency, and sending Jonah in her stead—a 7.5. It was not quite the level that Wendy had reached by springing Jonah on her in the first place—that had been an 11; there had only ever been one other eleventh-level cruelty committed between them, and that one had been Violet’s doing—but it still infuriated her.

She didn’t particularly
want
to hang out with him; that was one of many shameful admissions. She knew she was
supposed
to hang out with him, and to derive pleasure from doing so, from being in his company, from studying the intricacies of his being, from learning who he was, what he wanted from the world, whether there was hope for him yet, despite all the ways in which she and the universe had failed him. Her parents were fascinated by him. Wendy behaved as though she’d known him forever. Violet was deeply uncomfortable with everything he stirred within her, and surely he could sense this. Matt was, understandably, suspicious of him, and keenly aware of the potential ripple effects he could cause, and so she had decided not to tell him about Wendy’s last-minute bait and switch.

Wendy had chosen a Starbucks near her house, and Violet hoped it would be annoying enough, atmospherically, to prevent them from staying long. Of course it was awful that she was itching to get away from him before she’d even arrived. But it was true: he made her nervous. She conceded, to herself, angling into a hard-won parking spot on Delaware, that she was kind of a shitty person, but at least she was self-aware in her shittiness.

Jonah was already there, standing outside the Starbucks with a big sweatshirt, hood up, that read, across the front,
WE HAVE THE FACTS AND WE’RE VOTING YES
, and she stayed in her car for an extra moment to watch him, undetected and objective. He was a normal teenage kid. Bad posture, a nose—not hers—that was still a little too big for his face, a nearly visceral self-consciousness. She fed her meter and crossed the street.

“Sorry I’m late,” she called, and she and Jonah both flinched at the high splash of her voice. She lowered her volume. “Have you been waiting long?”

“Uh-huh.” Neither yes nor no.

“It’s nice to see you. Should we—coffee?”

He shrugged, and she led the way inside.

“Good day so far?” she asked him in line, and when he simply grunted, she said, “Have you ever tried to see how far you can get through the day without using any actual words?” She’d meant it as a joke, but nobody had ever skewed her off her game like this and she felt somehow not fully in control of her own output.

He just stared at her. Then: “It’s our turn to order.”

“Oh. Right, I— Hi. I’ll do a half-caf cappuccino. Whole milk, but very dry.” She turned to Jonah, who was smirking. “What?”

“Wendy and I were just talking about how we hate when people say
I’ll do
instead of
I’ll have
. It makes it sound like you’re, like, boning your coffee.”

She reddened. “Well, Wendy’s known for her lofty conversation. What would you like?”

“Espresso,” he said to the barista.

“Wait,” Violet said. “Aren’t you a little young to be drinking caffeine?”

Jonah laughed. The barista looked at them expectantly.

“It stunts your growth,” Violet said. “It’s such a silly thing to become addicted to so young, when your body doesn’t
need
it.” She’d already read the books on adolescent development, though Eli was still in Pull-Ups. She was nothing if not a good student.

“I’ve smoked cigarettes since I was thirteen,” Jonah said.

If she wasn’t mistaken, the barista was fighting a smile.

“Fine,” she said. “An espresso. But a single.” She paid without looking at him.

At their table, she tried to reset the conversation. “How was dinner with my parents?”

“You were there,” he said flatly.

“I meant how was it for you. My mom and dad really like you.”

“They’re nice.”

She smiled, waiting foolishly for him to say more. When this inevitably did not happen, she went on. “So is summer off to a good start? You enjoying being in the city?”

Everything involving this kid is going to lead to something else,
Matt had said.

“It’s fine.” Jonah pounded his espresso in one sip and she tried not to wince. It pleased her, sadistically, to see that he was trying to hide a grimace of his own.

“What have you been up to?”

“Whatever. Netflix. Wandering around. I’m doing this Israeli street-fighting thing.”

“
Excuse
me?”

“Wendy signed me up for it.”

“For— This is an organized activity?”

“It’s called Krav Maga. It’s how they train the Israel Defense Forces.”

“Wendy signed you up for Israeli military training?”

“They teach it at her gym.”

She relaxed, but only slightly. “Is this like—jujitsu?”

“It’s actually pronounced ju
jutsu
.
Jitsu
’s a westernization. And no, it’s totally different. It’s a lot more—like, intense.”

“Intense how?”

He shrugged again, cagily this time.

“Are things going well? With Wendy?”

He seemed to perk up at this. “Yeah, Wendy’s awesome.”

She wasn’t sure whether to feel pleased or wounded. “That’s great to hear. I hoped you two would hit it off.” Hadn’t she? Didn’t she? Her cappuccino wasn’t dry enough. “I realize I haven’t been quite as—
available
as Wendy, but I’ve got the—” She swallowed. “The kids, and they’re—definitely a full-time job.” She tried to laugh. “But I’m— Just so you know, I’m available to you in terms of—you know, if you have questions, or things you need.”

“Can you tell me about my dad?”

She felt her stomach drop, quickly and heavily, a free-falling elevator car. She remembered, distantly, a lecture from one of her college English classes about Aristotelian poetics, about things being at once
surprising and inevitable
. This was precisely the question she didn’t want him to ask, so of course he’d asked it. And he had every right to ask it, so why was she, sitting across from him at a chain coffee shop in the Gold Coast, fighting the impulse to slap him across the face? Though it was hard to describe the latter as
surprising,
exactly.

She must’ve looked awful because Jonah surprised her again, this time by backtracking. “I just meant—like it’s weird that I…”

“No, it’s—just probably a conversation for a different time?”
Are you free in 2094,
she did not ask. “Things are—complicated, Jonah.” He continued to stare at her evenly, not offering an inch, eyes mailbox-blue and unblinking. “We’ve all got enough on our plates as it is, don’t you think? I’m not going to be going anywhere anytime soon. You and I will have plenty of opportunities to discuss this in the future.”

The startled relief that crossed his face lasted for only a second, but she caught it, and she wondered, with an increasingly heavy heart, if it had something to do with her offhanded and unintentional promise of longevity, if by saying what she’d said—
in the future
—she had given him the permanence Hanna had begged her for.

This kid across the table from her: once the baby who kept her company. Who made her feel kindly toward the world, if only for a while. To whom she used to whisper at night, this hostage and too-young confidant, her hands on her belly—
Everyone thinks I know what I’m doing but I actually have no idea what I’m doing and that’s the cruelest trick the universe plays on people who have their shit together, little one; the people who seem like they have it together are the most overlooked, because everyone thinks those people never need anything, but everyone needs things; I need things; thanks for listening; I’ll eat more protein tomorrow.
She was horrified to feel tears in her eyes.

“Oh, I hoped you guys would still be here.”

She had never been so happy to see Wendy.

“Jesus, it’s like a fucking sauna outside.” Wendy slid into the chair between them. “My meeting got out early. Inquiring minds, we decided on the Krug over the ’ninety-eight Dom. Sorry, did I interrupt?”

“Not at all,” Violet said. She let Wendy’s presence wash over her like a poisonous salve. “We were discussing jujitsu.”

“It’s actually ju
jutsu,
” Wendy corrected her. A couple of peas in a goddamn pod, these two. “Yeah, J’s started taking Krav Maga at my health club. He’s like a fucking acrobat. It actually seems pretty cool. It’s all about situational awareness and channeling aggression. And it’s
great
exercise. Show her your triceps, J.”

It was a relief to Violet that Jonah seemed to find this instruction as weird as she did, part stage mom and part Mrs. Robinson.

“I’m thinking about taking it up myself,” Wendy said. “Core barre’s getting a little monotonous.”

“Straight from the horse’s mouth,” Violet muttered.

“I feel like I interrupted.”