Interstitial #3
“What happened,” he says, “is a fairly simple thing.” He pauses again, and she waits, confident that he’s going to keep going.
“What happened is that the afternoons and early evenings became insufferably long. Longer even than I’d ever imagined they
could be.” Jordan tries to absorb this. She can’t relate. She finds each day to be far shorter than she needs it to be. She
has dozens and dozens of things to fit into each day, especially during a work crisis, and by four o’clock in the afternoon
the thing is never to figure out how to fill the next six or seven hours but rather to decide which tasks to complete before
bed and which to push off to the next morning.
She’s never thought of this as a blessing. She thought it was just life. But here is her father, telling her something different.
Experiencing the opposite. She gives him an expression that she hopes conveys go on.
“I’d wake up every morning, alone. I’d try to stretch everything out as long as I could.
My coffee. The reading of the Berkshire Eagle.
I’d read every word. And as you probably know, very few people read every word of the Berkshire Eagle.
I’d do all that, and it would be only nine o’ clock, time to head in for my first class! I’d have twelve more hours to fill.”
“But you have work. You have friends! Where did all of your friends go? Don’t you still golf?” She knows her father was still
golfing after Theresa died because every Sunday, when they did their family FaceTime, one of the girls would ask, “Done any
golfing lately, Dad?” And the answer was always yes!
They thought he was doing okay, because he was golfing.
Calvin pauses to drink from his beer cup. “I have friends. Yes, yes, of course I do. I still golf. But friends and golfing
don’t fill every minute, especially when your friends have their spouses.” She’s quiet, taking this in, and eventually Calvin
continues. “I just . . .” He trails off. He seems like he’s thinking about what to say next. “Life was always so busy and
full, with you girls, and then when you went off into your own lives, we were busy then too. Working still, and traveling,
you know. Then your mom got sick, and there was no time to be lonely because there were appointments and treatments to arrange
and drive to, and meals to cook, and medications to track. So many medications, they were practically a full-time job. I never
thought of loneliness as a real affliction before. I suppose I should have, but I didn’t. I thought of it as a choice. Find
something to do to fill your time! I would have told a friend in my position: Volunteer! Work more! Work less! Go to the movies!
Get a dog, get a gerbil, learn a language. Get something!”
“But it’s not that easy,” says Jordan. She’s beginning to understand.
“It’s not that easy at all. You can do all of those things, and there are still so many hours in the day to fill.” He grows
quiet and pensive. “Still so many hours, and days, and weeks. Just sitting there empty, staring at you.”
Then, he explains, along came Kara.
(Along came a spider, thinks Jordan.)
When they bumped into each other at the Apple Squeeze, Calvin had been so happy to see her.
She’d been a part of the worst time of his life, but at the same time she felt like a link to an era when he’d been okay, because even though Theresa was so sick she was still alive, she was still there.
They chatted for, oh, maybe fifteen minutes or so, and then they’d exchanged phone numbers.
Kara had suggested that they do this, and it was Kara who then texted him to see if he wanted to meet for a drink at Brava.
“And the rest . . .”
“Is history?” says Jordan.
“The rest happened quickly, is what I was going to say. I’ll spare you the details.”
“Thank you,” says Jordan. “I accept your sparing.” Her beer is gone, and her father’s beer is too. They’re almost done with
their lobster rolls. Only the dregs of the chowder remain.
“I wanted you to hear all of this from me. You can be upset with me, you and your sisters. That’s your right. If I were in
your position I’d be upset with me too. I just want you to understand.”
Jordan nods.
“When you’re staring down the road of the rest of your life, and you don’t know how long or short that road is going to be,
and someone appears who you think you might be able to love, not in the same way you loved before, but in a new and different
way, and the afternoons no longer seem endless, and there’s someone to come home to, or someone to come home to you, well,
then, you don’t take that person lightly. You learn how to treasure that person. Even if it’s not the same person you thought
you’d be treasuring forever.”
Jordan sits with this and, okay, it starts to make sense to her, from her father’s point of view, that it’s possible to love two people consecutively, especially if you are loving each in a different way.
It’s possible to think everything good leaked out of your heart and then to discover that the fissure sealed itself up and you can grow more because love is a renewable resource. It’s possible to have hope.
“Wow,” she says finally. It might just be beautiful, everything Calvin has just said. Still, something isn’t clicking. “But
Kara . . .” she says. She can’t form the rest of the sentence because she’s not sure what she wants to ask, or, more accurately,
how to ask it.
But her father knows. Father knows best. “What’s in it for her?” Calvin supplies. Yes. That’s exactly the question. Jordan
nods slowly. “I’ve asked myself that many times. I’ve asked her that.”
“You have?”
“Of course. Any sane person would. Someone with her whole life ahead of her, and an old guy like me . . .”
“Oh, Dad. You know you’re young for being old.” This is true; she’s not merely flattering him. He’s a very young sixty-nine-year-old.
But still, he’s sixty-nine. So the question is a fair one. “But, yeah. I guess I’m wondering that. What is in it for Kara?
Not to be indelicate but she’s still working, right? This isn’t a Logan Roy situation, where you sort of see why the young
ladies . . .”
“Who’s Logan Roy?”
“The really rich guy on Succession,” she explains. “The patriarch.”
“Ah,” he says. “What’s Succession?”
“Never mind,” she says, waving her hand at him. “If you don’t know that much, you’re hopeless.”
He nods as if to say fair enough. “I suppose,” says Calvin, “if you really want to know the answer to that question you’ll have to ask Kara directly.”
“Yeah?” Jordan isn’t sure if he’s kidding or not.
“Kara knows that while I’m her second husband, I probably won’t be her last. Maybe not even her best.” He smiles wryly.
“Dad!” cries Jordan, shocked. “Don’t say that.”
Calvin chortles. “Why? It’s true. And I’m perfectly okay with it. I say it to Kara all the time.”
“You do not.” Calvin shrugs and smiles mysteriously. Maybe he does and maybe he doesn’t.
Things are really getting going at Petey’s now, as the height of lunchtime approaches. There are kids spilling out of cars
and dumping ice cream on themselves and pointing at the dozens of bright lobster buoys hanging from the sign and from the
railings. There are parents who look like they might just have one of the signature cocktails, because the children are driving
them crazy, and they’re on vacation, so why not? One young boy, most likely a new reader, is sounding out the words on the
sign that says LIVE LOBSTERS. He turns to his grown-up and says, with horror and wonder, “People eat alive lobsters?”
Calvin begins to gather their detritus, saying, “We should probably give up our spot.” Jordan helps him, stacking the plastic
cups, balling up her napkin to place it inside her chowder cup. She agrees that they should go, but she doesn’t want to leave
without asking one more question: “Why’d you decide to talk to me about this? And not Natalie?”
What she means is, Is it because I’ve been such a bitch?
Calvin doesn’t hesitate. “I thought you’d understand the most. I thought maybe if you got it then Natalie would too. Or that
maybe you’d help her understand.”
“I see.” She nods. “I think I do. I think I will.”
He’s being kind here, she can see that. It’s not so much that Jordan can help Natalie understand; it’s that Jordan has had
the hardest time with Kara.
It occurs to Jordan that Kara is not just Kara. She’s the symbol of all of Jordan’s erroneous judgment. If she has judged
Kara so wrong, what else has she judged wrong? Natalie? Mae? Bernadette?
No, not Bernadette. Definitely not Bernadette. But she’s willing to concede the others.
“Dad?”
“Yes, Jordan?”
“Does this make me the favorite daughter?”
The first rule of Favorite Daughter Status, they all know, is that you do not talk about Favorite Daughter Status. Her father
merely raises his eyebrows at her and grants her again that mysterious smile.
Natalie, Scarlett, and Kara meet a millworker from the 1800s, a shipbuilder from the 1700s, and a homemaker from 1950. They
visit all nine houses at Strawbery Banke that are open to the public. They admire the wallpaper in Governor Goodwin’s house;
the fireplace frieze in the Chase House, home to a successful Portsmouth merchant; and the tools that Samuel Kingsbury used
in the 1800s. They watch a cooking demonstration on an open hearth where a woman in a bonnet makes a meat pie.
I could rock an open hearth, Natalie thinks. I could kill this assignment.
They visit the 1940s general store, the tavern, the live demonstration of coopering (which, they learn, is the production
of casks and barrels). Each time Natalie thinks Scarlett will get bored she finds something else to marvel at. In the olden
days, last week, Natalie might have taken a video of Scarlett wandering through Strawbery Banke, hashtagged it with #homeschool,
and written a caption about every experience being a learning experience, even in summer. #yearroundeducation. She would have