Chapter 7 #2
He did appear relieved by my words. “I don’t want to be at odds with my daughter,” he told me.
“You have several others who still like you and respect you, at least somewhat. You could ask them to lunch instead,” I suggested. “Maybe Juliet will even name her son Frank in your honor.”
His face lit up. “She’s having a boy?”
He had always wanted a son himself, although it hadn’t worked out so well since my brother hated him.
“There you are,” I said. “There are other children who can make you happy.” I never had, and he was probably right.
They should have called things quits after having the twins, Patrick and Juliet. “Goodbye,” I told him.
I drove for a while until I really had to stop, and I was pretty close to where I’d been aiming.
But I wasn’t quite ready to go inside even though these shorts really had been the wrong choice.
I sat on one of the benches overlooking the man-made lake, where the fountain was now turned off for the season and which was totally empty of the unpleasant geese.
I felt a lot like one of those birds myself at this moment, angry and blustery.
“Grace? I saw you from the window,” Regina called as she approached. “Brr, it’s cold out here!” She stamped her feet as she stopped next to the bench. “Pinar and I just happened to look outside.”
“Were you checking on the ophthalmologists having sex in the other building?” I asked.
“I was checking to see if had started to sleet. Pinar was the one looking at them doing it against the glass, which I have to think is unsafe and also would be chilly on bare skin.” She stamped her feet again. “Did you come to say hello or to do more tank maintenance?”
“The fish should be fine until tomorrow,” I answered. “That’s the day that I put in my phone calendar to come in and check on them.” I was pretty sure of that, but I was also pretty sure that my phone was under a pile of old hunting magazines back at the cabin.
“So you’re here to visit?” She hesitated. “Wearing shorts in November?”
“These are Dr. Winter’s,” I explained, using the name that Regina felt most comfortable with even though he’d asked her many times to call him Theo. “He gave them to me after I fell into a puddle at his house.” I had never actually given them back.
She nodded as if that made a lot of sense. “He’s very generous.”
“I think he had women’s clothes in his dresser.”
“Wait, what?”
“Not for himself,” I clarified. “I think that after the first time I fell into the puddle there, he bought a pair of sweatpants that would fit me and some socks with fish on them, just in case I happened to get into another accident.”
She beamed. “That’s him all over,” she told me. “Do you know where he is right now?”
No, and I hadn’t been able to check because I couldn’t find my phone. “In the office?”
“He drove over to a patient’s house,” she said.
“She’s there alone and worried, and he wanted to go in person.
” Her happiness had faded. “That’s not something that Dr. McGonagle would have done.
Honestly, I’m not sure about it, either.
I think he should have boundaries—what are we doing outside, Grace?
” A sharp wind had picked up, scattering the last of the dead leaves and making her shiver.
“I had an upsetting lunch with my dad and I guess I feel better here,” I answered. “I would have gone to the cabin but I ran out of gas, too. That’s something everyone always warns me about and I should have been paying better attention, I know that. I’m sorry.”
First, Regina wanted me to come inside, and then she and Pinar helped devise a plan for how I could get a can of gas and put some into my tank. I meant the tank in my car, obviously, and not the one for the fish because that would have been deadly. Incidentally, they were doing just fine.
Next, they wanted to talk about my lunch today, but they didn’t have much time before their own break was over so they kept telling me to talk faster. “Quickly, why did you walk out of the Coney Island? Quickly,” Pinar reminded me.
“Because my father wants me to say that I think it’s ok that he was cheating on my mom so that he can go off with the other woman who’s his assistant and they can live happily ever after with clean gutters and no worries about the past and also so that I won’t tell my mother and her attorney could use it against him since the divorce has dragged on forever because Mom fights him over every detail and also so that he won’t have to give her more money because he probably needs it for a nice new ladder to reach the gutters since he left his former ladder in his former garage which now belongs to his soon-to-be ex-wife.
” I stopped, and took a sip of the tea that they’d given me. It was tasty and warming.
“Holy shit,” Pinar said. She picked up her phone and checked the time. “That was really good fast talking and we still have six minutes.”
“It was too fast for me. I’m confused,” Regina told us, and now Pinar gave her interpretation of the story.
My father had been unfaithful to my mother with his assistant.
He wanted to be absolved of any guilt over his affair.
He was also afraid that I’d tell on him and he’d be on the hook for more alimony.
“Is that right?” she confirmed with me, and I nodded. She should have said it from the beginning because she’d done a great job.
“But why is he only talking to you about it?” Regina wondered. “Why is this in your lap?”
“I’m the only one in the family who knows about his affair.”
“And you never told your mother?” Her eyes bulged. “Grace, if you were my child and you betrayed me like that…” She shook her head. “I would kill my husband, of course, but I would be so hurt that my daughter didn’t share that information with me.”
“My mother is different from you,” I tried to explain. “I don’t think she would have believed me since my only proof was the gutters.”
“That part lost me,” Pinar admitted. “In my summary of what you said, I ignored the part about ladders, too.”
“People show that they love each other in so many ways. Like how you said that your boyfriend always takes off his shoes,” I pointed out to her.
At first, she didn’t understand, but after a second or two, she nodded.
“I get you. I had to bitch at him about wearing his boots in my house, but once he understood how much it bothered me, he started taking them off and leaving them on my porch. For Christmas, I’m getting him a pair of fuzzy slippers. ”
“Good idea!” Regina complimented. “You always give great gifts.”
“That’s another thing that’s bothering me,” I said. “I went to work today because I was going to use the cash for my Christmas gift for Brenna so she wouldn’t get another box of leaves, and I hated it so much.”
They both stared. “You lost me again,” Pinar said and then Regina checked the time and slapped the table with her hand, saying that they had to get to work.
“Sorry, Grace,” she told me, but I understood that she was a stickler for the rules and that was to help Theo, after all, so I said I would go get gas. Pinar gave me scrub pants to wear under my shorts and I set off.
Eventually, I made my way up to the cabin but I didn’t seem to have a ton of get-up-and-go energy at the moment, maybe due to the miles I’d had to walk to figure out my car problem.
Instead of working on my latest project, the wallpaper in the dining room, I went to my bed and curled up under all the blankets I’d spread over it.
The next thing that I was aware of was Theo knocking on my door and saying my name.
“Yes. It’s me,” I answered, and he came in.
“What are you doing in here?” he asked. “Are you feeling ok?”
“Yes,” I said again. “Mostly.”
“Regina and Pinar said that you stopped by the office and they told me to ask you about your day. They both went like this.” He widened his eyes, raised his dark brows, and stared at me for a moment without speaking. “It’s obviously significant that I ask you.”
“I had a bad day,” I answered, and his eyes widened again.
“Are you crying? What happened?”
“Did you have dinner yet?” I asked, and he shook his head.
“Did you?”
No, and when I thought about it, I hadn’t had lunch, either. I’d left the Coney Island before all that delicious stuff had time to arrive, so I’d missed out. “Let’s eat,” I told him, and we went into the kitchen and back to our familiar friends, white takeout boxes and the microwave.
“Keon will be here tomorrow,” I remarked comfortingly, because that was the day that Nicola had set up.
I was supposed to meet him and if he had time, Theo was going to try to be here as well.
I didn’t hold out a lot of hope for that, though, because as far as I’d seen, he was most interested in helping other people instead of himself.
He nodded as he removed a chunk of plaster from his chair and for some reason, it made me angry.
“You know, I think you would have lived in here for years,” I remarked.
The microwave dinged and I stomped over to it because when I heard the sound, my stomach growled.
It reminded me of something Sophie had told me about a dog that dripped spit at the sound of a bell.
I’d noticed a similar trend at the animal shelter around feeding time, and I was just the same as they were.
“I hope to live in this cabin for the rest of my life,” Theo answered. “Be careful, because those noodles are very hot.”
“I mean, I think you would have lived in the mess of it all. You spent your lunch today driving over to someone’s house and I bet you didn’t eat and you stayed for a long time and put off other work, so now you’ll stay up late.
Because…” I threw up my hands, too hungry to think of the right word and so frustrated that it was hard to speak.