Chapter 34
NOW
Mornings at my apartment in the city are gray and hollow.
The sun doesn’t come through my window until late afternoon, when I am almost always at work.
Mornings at Birdsong, on the other hand, are sleepy and cheerful.
There’s a gentle feeling to the house. The birds sing enthusiastically outside every window, white boats speckle the horizon, and there’s the promise of all things bright and beautiful that hangs in the air.
Sometimes back in the day, somebody would have made or picked up breakfast, even if it was just a hunk of cheese with some crackers and grapes.
The smell of coffee was always in the air.
I loved it. There was always the sense of someone else taking care of things, which, by the time I was fifteen, I’d already come to appreciate.
Now, even with Babe gone—though still present, god help us—it’s the same.
I’m not even at the bottom of the staircase when I can smell the everything bagels, and I gravitate right to the happy yellow box from Holey Cheese and breathe in the scent.
I know New York is famous for its bagels, and they’re great, really they are, but there’s nothing like waking up and having Holey Cheese bagels already picked up and waiting for you.
Matt is on the back porch reading a ratty old book, but no one else seems to be around.
I pull myself an espresso, and while I wait, I look at the cookbooks. I recognize the spines so well. Eat, Drink, and Be Chinaberry, The Joy of Cooking, The New Moosewood Cookbook, Hot Sour Salty Sweet. But I zero in on the green journal beside them all.
I pull it off the shelf and its water-warped pages fall open.
My eyes prick at the sight of my mother’s scrawling handwriting.
Unlike me, she was always a very loose chef.
No recipes. No measuring. Just tasting it as she went along and essentially playing by ear.
On occasion, she would write down the bones of something, and this was where she did it. I’d completely forgotten.
When people die, they leave behind hundreds of things we don’t know what to do with.
Shoes and half-used face creams and their own personal memorabilia in the form of ticket stubs, playbills, other unknowable objects.
Loved ones are tasked with removing clothes from hangers and drawers and deciding which items remind them, personally, most of the deceased, usually donating the rest. We all end up with strange trinkets or shirts we’ll never wear, all because we need something to hang on to. Some proof of life.
When my grandparents died, my mother had gone through this process, Birdsong housing most of the things she kept, from sets of china to glassware, records and books. And of course, the house itself had already been filled mostly with their things.
When my father died, his neutral effect on the world was reflected in how impersonal his belongings were.
He had a collection of austere history books, toiletries, a closet of beige.
In the days after his death, his wife had offered me the chance to take anything that I wanted.
She’d keep the rest or otherwise deal with it.
I had walked through the house I grew up in feeling sad, not only because he was gone, but because it almost seemed like he may as well have never been here at all.
What was there to remember? It was this sort of thing that made me the saddest. A man born for middle management, capable of only as much love as seemed legally necessary when it came to his children.
I only kept one thing of my father’s, in the end.
A fringed leather jacket I never once saw him wear.
I was fascinated by it. Was it part of who he used to be, when Babe met him?
Evidence of who he wanted to be? I couldn’t picture him wearing it at all.
Maybe it was part of a costume, but even that felt impossible to imagine.
I kept it, and never remembered to ask Babe about it. And now I’ll never know.
What Babe left behind is yet to be determined. A house we most likely, realistically, cannot keep. Its contents we will thusly never be able to store. But this, what I hold in my hand now, this is the most of my mother I could even imagine holding on to.
If you are lucky enough to grow up with a mother who can cook—or even scrape by in the kitchen—you will know that her food holds a special place in your stomach and heart.
Like an asshole, she hadn’t written down measurements, not anywhere in this journal, but it’s as if she left clues.
Like half of a cryptex, and I was the only person alive who might hold the other half—the taste memory and the skill to bring her food back to life.
Only problem being I have absolutely no idea what the hell she wrote. Her writing is impossible to read.
I take my espresso, a sweet onion bagel smeared with whipped scallion cream cheese and topped with Maldon salt, and the journal outside to the porch where Matt is reading.
“Hey,” I say. “Mind if I sit?”
He laughs like this is a silly question. “Of course.”
Using his foot, he scoots the chair closest to him.
I sit down with a big sigh. “This is so bizarre.”
“I know. But I’m kind of loving the break, if I’m honest. I haven’t had a single day off since I graduated.”
“I know the feeling.”
“I don’t think I would have bet on the two of us to be the workaholics,” he says with a smile.
“Not back then anyway, back then we thought we might be Broadway stars.”
He winces. “Don’t remind me. I can’t even think about the fedora I wore to prom without wanting to die.”
“Neither can I.”
He lightly kicks me under the table. “Hey, it’s worse for you, you were my date.”
“Proudly,” I say.
Austin and I were on shaky ground then, but he still planned to take me to prom. He would have, too, if it hadn’t fallen on the same weekend as the tournament that was about to put him on everyone’s radar.
While I was drinking Hi-C punch in a dress from the sale rack at Nordstrom, dancing to an ancient Usher song, he was in France playing in a grueling tournament.
I saw videos after. Red clay, ads for Perrier and other luxury brands plastered around him, that smile.
Our lives were starting to feel really different.
“Is Austin at the athletic club again?” I ask now.
“Mm-hmm. And Sammie has Nora down there.” He motions toward the beach.
“Oh.” I look out. From here, it looks like a toddler and a teenager. The sight of her, looking so young, with a kid … it gives me chills.
“She’s so good with her,” says Matt.
“Hey—yesterday you said that thing about now not being a good time to ask you about being happy in your marriage.” I wonder why I think now might be, and then ask, “Is everything okay?”
“In my marriage?”
“Or … whatever, homelife stuff. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
Matt takes off his sunglasses—Gregory Peck–worthy tortoiseshell—and leans back in his chair, rubbing his eyes. “My life is kind of a mess, actually.”
“Your life? Your life?”
He’s the only one I can stalk online, and his life looks great. I know the internet on the whole is a complete lie, but how much can it pretend?
“Beau and I didn’t used to fight much, but when we would, it was always like, one fight would cause another, then another, and we’d go through these bouts where we’d be in a new fight every day for like two weeks. Then it would stop. And lately, it’s just … not stopping.”
“Do you know why?”
“I do.” He looks out toward the beach. “He didn’t want a kid.”
“Oh my god. That’s … huge.” My heart pangs for Nora, and I hope she never, ever finds out. I know, firsthand, the pain of knowing.
“Yeah. I did. He thought he’d come around, and he knew how much I wanted us to have a kid. He loves her, obviously. Who wouldn’t?”
“Who wouldn’t?” I agree.
“But he’s just not really clocked in as a dad. Which is a really big problem, because I’m the one at work all the time.”
“What does he do?”
“He was a lawyer, too, but his firm fell apart a couple years ago, and then we had just gotten a surrogate for Nora. We decided he would take some time off. He hates it, hates being a stay-at-home dad. He’s visibly resentful when I come home from work.
Which then means I can’t complain about work, and he’s showing his irritation to her, and it just kicks off the cycle. Every day is a trigger.”
“Well … the structure of your life itself seems like a trigger,” I venture.
He taps his nose and points at me. “Bingo.”
“So … what do you think you want to do?”
He shakes his head. “To be honest, it didn’t really hit me until I got down here. I’m so busy all the time. I’ve basically been lurching from one thing to the next and just coping in between.”
I nod. “I know that feeling too. Only it’s just me I have to worry about.”
“Yeah. Suddenly I’m a workaholic with a bad marriage and a kid caught in the middle and—” He stops and gives a sorry laugh. “Wow. I sound like my own father, if he’d gone to therapy.”
“Oh, god.”
“You’re right, there wasn’t enough god in it for my dad.”
This makes me laugh, remembering how sanctimonious his parents could be. How they’d hidden their fears behind religion.
“What do they think of you and Beau?”
“Complete denial.” He leans forward for his coffee. “We haven’t been able to talk politics in over a decade, they treat Nora like a kid I’m watching over, instead of their actual granddaughter, and they introduce Beau as my friend when we visit.”
“That’s so fucked.”
“Yup.”
“I’m really sorry.”
“Me too,” he says. Then: “You know, Nora spent a fair amount of time with Babe. Not in the last year, so much. But she knew her. She remembers her.”
We both look out in Nora’s direction. She’s packing a plastic green pail and Sammie is dribbling wet sand onto a turret.
“So strange. If I ever had a kid, they’d have nobody. No grandparents at all.”
“That’s not true, there will be another person involved, probably. They might have parents. They could suck, like mine, but he might have them.”
This makes me laugh. “Yeah. I don’t know. I’m not going to have kids anyway. Probably. I don’t know. I can’t even see myself dating, much less getting that far along in a relationship.”
“What about old Killjoy?” He gives me an impish grin.
“Austin? Pfft. You’re joking.”
“You’re joking if you think the chemistry between you two isn’t palpable.”
“It is not.”
“Oh, it is. Could cut it with a knife. What’s wrong with Austin? He’s a good guy.”
I give him a look. “I think we’ve learned that is not necessarily the case.”
He hesitates. “You know, I know that you saw him a couple years ago.”
His words squeeze my heart and momentarily stop it beating. “How?”
“He told me.”
“Everything?”
Matt shakes his head. “No. He said he was going to see you. Then he never brought it back up and I got the sense I shouldn’t ask.”
“Ah.” I pick up a poppy seed and rub it between my fingers. “I keep forgetting you all kept in touch.”
“Not enough that I ever heard what happened.”
I shift my gaze to his without moving my head. “I suppose you want to know?”
“Please, I haven’t seen a celebrity gossip post in days now. I’m dying over here.”
I almost tell him it’s nothing. I almost keep it all to myself, like I did back then. I told almost nobody about what happened that week that I saw him. Only Babe. I had to sit with the anger and the hurt all alone for all this time.
I take a sip of my coffee, take a deep breath, and tell my old friend the real reason I will never again fall for Austin James.