Fourteen
Fourteen
We need to talk.”
Ellie drops her book bag on the kitchen table across from where her mother sits and stares out the window at the spring sun that has slowly started to set.
“Did you remember the creamer?” Bunny asks.
“No, Mom. I’ve been pretty ... preoccupied today.” Ellie looks around for Frank. “Where’s Dad?”
Bunny sighs, her breath as heavy as the dark cardigan she still wears. “I don’t know.” Her gaze is set someplace outside. “It’s not my job to keep tabs on him anymore. He’s on his own now.” She waves a dismissive hand at the air, lowers her voice. “Not that he’ll have a clue how.”
“I need to ask you an important question.” Ellie sits across from her mother, produces her ID from her jeans pocket, and slaps it down. “What is this?”
Bunny leans forward, her entire face scrunched up, as if even her cheeks need to strain in order for her to see anything clearly. She pulls her readers from the neckline of her blouse, shaking them away from her cross necklace. After she slides them on, she takes a peek, then raises her chin and looks up at Ellie. “What are you talking about?” She looks like she’s just eaten something incredibly sour. “It’s your driver’s license.”
“Right,” Ellie agrees, the laminated rectangle set between them. The whole drive home, Ellie thought more about last night. In her life, she’s wished for so many things. For her and Jonah to stay happy forever. And later, for the fighting to stop. For Maggie to remain young and innocent and in need of her for eternity. “And you don’t notice anything unusual about it?”
Bunny fiddles with her palm tree pin, her eyes narrowing as she takes in the too-tiny text. “Nothing,” she says, which is what Ellie expects. “Except that you’ve self-elected to be an organ donor.” She shudders. “Do you really want someone to cut up your body like that?”
“Did she buy the creamer?” Behind Ellie, Frank steps into the room, his reading glasses hugging the tip of his nose. He wears more comfortable clothing now—cotton pants, a pair of well-worn slippers. His hair, she can see, is freshly washed, the thinning strands neatly combed. Beneath his arm, he carries a set of Ellie’s bedsheets.
“Why are you carrying around my bedsheets, Dad?” Ellie squeezes her temples as the kitchen fills with shadows. This day—this illogical, enigmatic day—is beginning to taper.
“I’m putting them on the couch for when I go to sleep.” He looks to his wife, but her gaze is lost out the window again. “I’m not letting your mother stay here without me.” He cuts across the kitchen, pulls the undesirable creamer from the fridge, and takes a quick sniff.
Ellie drops her face into her palms. “Let me get this straight.” She looks back up. “The two of you are getting divorced ... but for some incomprehensible reason, you’re both here ... and staying ... together ... in my house?”
“Your mother is in her eighties,” Frank adds, as if he himself is not a member of this same age bracket. He squints through his glasses, peers at the container’s small font, then catches Ellie’s attention. Don’t worry, Frank silently mouths to his daughter while Bunny stares off in the other direction. “She’ll never go through with this,” he adds quietly so that Bunny can’t hear him. He pours the perfectly fine creamer down the drain.
Ellie sighs, unclear if her father is simply humoring Bunny or what. “You two really are not very good at splitting up.” She tugs away her hair tie—her honey mane still partially damp—and looks at her parents, trying to figure out how one of her own choices has so deeply altered life for them. “I need to ask you both something. And I need you to answer me very clearly.” Bunny turns and folds her hands in a neat pile, like an obedient schoolgirl. Frank tosses the empty container and sits at the table next to his soon-to-be-not-wife. “When was the last time either of you set foot on a plane?”
“Oh, good Lord,” Bunny starts and then unfolds her hands. “What kind of ridiculous—”
“No, no,” Ellie interrupts. “Just answer the question, Mom.”
Bunny’s nostrils flare as she exhales her annoyance. “I don’t know, Ellie. Four, maybe five years ago.” She looks to Frank, as if to compare notes. “It was that long weekend your father and I took when he bought me my pin.” She points at her colorful accessory. “Why are you asking us this?”
A recollection: the night, roughly seventeen years earlier, right here in this house. Maggie in her high chair with her teensy, cut-up pieces of meatballs. The four adults gathered around the table as Frank told Ellie and Jonah the news about the house. For years, whenever Ellie has thought back on the event, this is the part of the story her brain has always zoomed in on: the fact that her parents were bequeathing her this home she loved so much. It’s only now that Ellie recalls another part of the conversation.
After dinner, the buzz of the announcement beginning to die down, Jonah took Maggie upstairs for a diaper change while Bunny began to clear the plates and bring out fresh ones for dessert. Ellie and Frank were alone at the table, stacking up dishes and serving platters.
“You know, sweetheart,” Frank said as he shook out a cloth napkin, “this is all your doing.”
A young, thirtysomething Ellie looked up, her mother’s favorite salad bowl in her hands. “What do you mean?”
Frank, who seemed old to Ellie back then, even though he’d only recently stepped into his sixties, set down the table linen. “This,” he said as he looked fondly around the room. “This whole night. Everything with Mom and me. Our retirement. Me finally selling the deli. The move. Just ... all of it.”
Ellie’s brows revealed her confusion. Frank gestured at their dining chairs, an invitation for them to both sit.
“Your mother and I have wanted to do this forever, Ellie,” Frank explained. Tufts of soft coffee-colored hair, which would fade to silver in several years, framed his newly aged face. “But we knew we never would unless you were happy and settled into your own life.” Frank’s eyes, concealed behind the reading glasses he’d recently started to wear with greater frequency, began to mist over with emotion.
“Dad, you still would have—”
“This life you’ve built for yourself, Ellie,” he continued, “it’s a good one. I know it seems simple sometimes, choosing to stay at home for your family. But your choices have made a world of difference, not only in Jonah’s and Maggie’s lives, but in ours.” From beneath his crisp shirt, Frank’s chest rippled with emotion. “We’ll miss seeing the three of you every day.” He inhaled deeply in an effort to hide the shaky quality that had started to weave its way into his voice. “But we know you’ll be okay, that you won’t be alone, that you’ll be here and happy with your own family. Your own purpose.” He smiled, deepening the lines that hugged his mouth. “We know you don’t need us the way you once did anymore.”
Now, Ellie picks up her photo ID and takes another look at her name. “The two of you never retired to Florida, did you?” She taps her license on the tabletop and meets her parents’ confused stares. “You always talked about it—I remember from when I was younger—but you never actually did it.” She sets the ID down. “Why?”
“Oh, stop.” Bunny looks away. “You know I’d never leave you to live up here by yourself.”
Frank huffs at this comment. “Yes, Bunny,” he says, a new, atypical gruffness in his voice. The skin around his eyes wrinkles. “But we all already knew that.”
Bunny waves a hand at the air, exhales an annoyed breath.
Ellie glances back and forth between them and begins to assemble all the pieces in her mind. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle that once seemed impossible but now, with the edges finally in place, has begun to take shape. She’s starting to understand. In no small way, her parents have stayed put here, steeped in their own unhappiness, because of their only daughter, the one whom they believed would eventually grow up, move on, and form a family of her own, but did not.
“And, Dad, you never sold the deli, right? Because you didn’t need to.” She pauses, allowing her words to sink in like a heavy cream. “You knew your employees could run it most days, so you could finally slow down,” she goes on, “but you didn’t need to get rid of it, since you’d be here—not moving away—and available to keep a regular eye on things.” Frank is looking down at his clean fingernails. “Am I—”
Frank nods at his hands—all marked with brown spots—his signal that her story adds up. “Yes,” he sighs.
Ellie peers through the window, the sun almost fully gone. Out there, the world, the one she never played a huge part in—never discovered another planet, never founded a movement, never rose in the ranks at some important company—is mostly the same. Though inside this simple house, everything is different.
Ellie thinks about the book she once skimmed, and the idea of choices, as well as the ripples that result from each of them. She wonders about her life, this strange, edited version of it, and the decisions she has or has not made, as well as their consequences.
“Neither of you traveled very far to get here this morning, did you?” Ellie asks. “Your condo, it’s right here in town, isn’t it?”
“Ellie, cut it out.” Bunny wraps her cardigan tighter around her shoulders. “I know this is a surprise, this news about Dad and me. But I assure you—”
“Why did you both give me the house if you never moved away?” Ellie asks, and suddenly, like her mother did earlier, she feels a chill run through her. “Why didn’t you stay?” Already, her heart hurts, like some invisible force has kicked her square in her chest and bruised this most vital muscle.
Frank hasn’t looked up. Whatever is happening—or is about to happen between them—Ellie can see Bunny is the one in the driver’s seat, that Frank is unwillingly along for this ride.
“The house got to be too big for us, Ellie.” Bunny redirects her gaze to the kitchen’s black-and-white floor, the words she’s preparing to deliver about to unravel the delicate tapestry of everything. “And that’s the truth.”
“But not all of it,” Frank admits, so low Ellie isn’t sure he even meant for anyone else in the room to hear him.
Bunny peers at Frank, unpleased by this verbal betrayal. He absently touches his thinning hair with a frail hand, one that just days earlier—and in another place—looked younger and healthier, a touch sun kissed.
For perhaps the first time in her adult life—the one she’s recently felt has not mattered much—Ellie finally begins to see she was wrong. Her choices have mattered. They have had an impact. And here—wherever and whenever she is—her choice not to make this her life has mattered, too.
“Mom?” Ellie presses.
“We—” Bunny fills her lungs with air. She releases it long and slow. “We just thought by now you’d, well—” She stops, pushes away her readers, and closes her eyes. “We had assumed—hoped—you’d—”
“Be married,” Ellie interjects to spare her mother from having to say it herself.
Bunny opens her eyes again, looks at her daughter. “Yes,” she sighs.