Chapter Five
Palisades, New York
2009
Three days after her thirty-eighth birthday, Ruth came in from work and was unbuckling her heels by the door when her phone rang. She sighed, glancing at her watch. A call at this time usually meant that Thomas was going to be late to pick up the kids from after-school care, so could she please do it this evening, and he’d make it up to her tomorrow? She had to dig around in her purse to find the phone, and sure enough, it was her husband.
“Let me guess,” she said.
Except it wasn’t Thomas. There was an unfamiliar voice on her husband’s phone.
“Hi, is this Thomas Hayes’s wife?”
“Um.” Ruth pulled the phone briefly away from her ear to double-check the screen, an attempt to relieve her confusion. “Yes,” she said. “Who’s this?”
“My name’s Travis, I’m the manager at Future Fitness.” It took Ruth a moment to remember that was the name of Thomas’s gym. “I’m sorry to say this, but your husband is on the way to Nyack Hospital.”
“Wait,” she said, because that was always Ruth’s first word in a crisis, a plea against time. Wait. Then, “How… why do you have his phone?”
A stupid question, precipitated by her first wave of assumptions: a sprained ankle, a torn ACL, a concussion, none of which might explain this stranger’s voice on Thomas’s phone.
“I’ll bring the phone with me and meet you at the hospital,” the stranger said. “I’m following the ambulance.”
Ruth’s capacity for language dried up at the word ambulance , which did its job of escorting her brain in the correct direction. She didn’t respond, didn’t ask what happened. She grabbed her keys from the bowl by the front door where she’d tossed them not one minute earlier, and slipped her feet back into the recently abandoned heels. She didn’t need to ask questions anyway, as she pulled the front door closed behind her and realized she’d forgotten her coat. Travis was still talking.
“He collapsed on the treadmill,” the man said. “We called 911 immediately, and the paramedics were there within minutes.”
Ruth could hear a strain in this man’s voice now, the things he was hesitant to say. She could hear the hard pulsing of his adrenaline through the phone line.
“I did CPR until the paramedics arrived.”
Ruth made it to Nyack Hospital in just under nine minutes, but it didn’t matter. Thomas was dead before the ambulance arrived, before they needlessly unloaded his stretcher into the emergency room. He was dead before his forehead bounced off the end of the treadmill, even, before his body was flung away from the machine and into the wall behind. Thomas was dead almost a full second before his collapse.
“A brain aneurysm,” the medical examiner later explained. “Not a heart attack after all.” There seemed to be some suggestion that this information might be a comfort to Ruth. She couldn’t imagine why.
When she called her mother from the emergency room to ask her to pick the kids up from after-school care and bring them home, Ruth could not bring herself to say why. She was not yet able to form the nightmare words, Thomas is dead .
“Please, Mama,” she said instead. “I’m at the hospital with Thomas. Can you get the kids home and feed them dinner?”
When Ruth arrived home alone, her mother was in the kitchen with the boys, and Daisy was in the bath. Mama took one look at Ruth’s face and whisked the boys into the family room to watch some unprecedented school-night cartoons. The flowers Thomas had bought for Ruth’s birthday three days ago were still in their vase on the counter. They hadn’t yet started to wilt. Ruth knew that technically the flowers were already dead when Thomas presented them to her in all their raucous colors on the evening of her birthday. She knew, despite the brightness of their scent and the springy resilience of their petals, that the flowers were dead the moment they were separated from their roots and cut from the soil. Of course, none of this had occurred to her until Thomas was also dead, and then it seemed impossible to reconcile the two discordant truths. Her mother returned to the kitchen, and Ruth crumpled into a silent howl in her mama’s arms. It lasted a very long time, or so it seemed to both Ruth and her mother. And during the moments when Ruth thought she might get ahold of herself, when she dried her face and took some breaths, it was then that she’d catch sight of those fucking flowers, and lose it all over again. She could not come to terms with the sheer audacity of them, being dead but still here, fragrant and vivid. Some derailed and broken part of Ruth’s brain kept trying to swap one death for the other, to bring Thomas back. There grew a kind of grinding in her ears, and the panic was like nothing she’d ever known. It had the quality of falling and falling without landing, a constantly renewing cycle, the insistent terror of waiting for an impact that had, in fact, already arrived.
Vic was almost eleven. Daisy was eight. And five-year-old Charlie was just small enough that he still requested “uppy” when he didn’t want to walk, but plenty big enough that the clinging weight of meeting this request was difficult for Ruth when she was wearing heels. The children didn’t understand that Thomas wasn’t coming back. Even Vic, who was perhaps old enough to perceive the fundamental permanence of death, didn’t seem to grasp the finality of their new family circumstances. So those first few days also had a surprising condition, a kind of cottony ease. It was awful, and Ruth was besieged by the constant rumble of horror, but the children were more manageable than she would have expected. Through the funeral and burial, the kids barely cried. In fact they smiled and laughed and played with their friends. Daisy wore a little crown of flowers at the church and a navy-blue dress, which Ruth had never seen before. She didn’t know where it came from, who had dressed her daughter that morning. Charlie squeezed Ruth’s hand and swung her arm while they followed Thomas’s casket down the same aisle where she’d walked in her wedding gown just thirteen years ago. Yes, the kids held up well, even in the moments when Ruth did not.
Right up until those birthday flowers began to droop, until they turned brittle in their vase and fuzzy along their stems. Ruth couldn’t bring herself to throw them away, of course, even as the scent of rot crept out of the vase and permeated the kitchen. Throwing them out would mean accepting the time that had elapsed since Thomas had drawn his last breath. These were the last flowers her husband would ever give her.
“These flowers stink, Mom,” Vic told her one afternoon while he sat at the kitchen counter with his math notebook in front of him. She’d taken a leave of absence from work, but she had yet to learn all the harrowing new things she’d need to learn in Thomas’s sudden absence. The 401(k)s, oil changes, how to work the pressure washer, when and why to work the pressure washer. Ruth’s inner feminist was aghast at how much she’d left to her husband, how much she hadn’t even noticed she’d left to her husband. Thomas had also been the one to tackle math with the kids. Vic reached out and touched one of the dried flower petals, which quietly clattered to the counter in a small shower of pollen. Even this minor disruption amplified the odor.
“I know, sweetie,” Ruth said.
“So why don’t you throw them out?” He swiveled on his stool.
“Let’s just focus on your fractions.”
Of course, the suspended nature of her children’s grief did not last, and when the dam did burst, no one was spared. There was Vic on his knees beside the open dishwasher, both sobbing and somehow refusing to cry all at once, the scene infused with the sour-milk stink of the dirty dishes. There was Charlie breaking the binding on his favorite storybook, rending the sewn pages from their spine and whipping them across the room against the wall. And there was little Daisy standing stock-still in the grocery store with a box of cereal in her hand, her tears making tiny, star-shaped splats on the linoleum, her pink sneakers frozen in place. Ruth’s own grief was a marathon, characterized mostly by filthy sweatpants and a grueling, shuddering exhaustion.
In time, Ruth learned to mold herself into a vessel both steely and soft, learned to cleave open her own heart so her children could throw in their sorrows. She learned about the 401(k)s and how to check the oil in her own car. She sold the pressure washer to a neighbor who promised to loan it back if she ever needed it again. Why would she ever need it again? Some things Ruth had no desire to learn.
There was a small life insurance policy that Thomas had insisted they buy.
“We don’t need life insurance because you’re not allowed to die,” she’d told him when he first suggested it.
“Ah, you’d miss me,” he said.
“Of course! Plus I’d never be able to quit my job if you were dead.”
“Joke’s on you, missus,” he answered. “You can’t quit your job anyway!”
They’d laughed then, the two comfortable idiots they’d been. The policy payout wasn’t nearly enough. Ruth and Thomas had both made decent money, and Ruth had inherited a good sum from her aunt when she was still in college too. But they’d spent most of that on a house they otherwise could never have afforded, in the best school district, right on the banks of the Hudson River, with the property taxes to match. They even had a boat dock where they tied up kayaks in the summertime. If Ruth and Thomas had lived almost anywhere else in the country on their salaries, they’d have been rich. But here in the barely suburbs of New York City, the money went as fast as it came, so their lifestyle was much the same as any other fortunate family with two working parents, a steep mortgage, and three kids: mostly great with a solid undercurrent of constant worry.
When she started The Widow’s Kitchen , Ruth hadn’t intended for it to generate income. After all, she was no longer a woman who could afford to indulge impractical ideas, even if she’d previously been inclined to that sort of thing, which she had not. And now, if she hoped to successfully raise three kids on her own, she’d have to be intentional and pragmatic in all of her goals. Goal number one was to keep their life and their home intact. Ruth would have to invest the life insurance payout perfectly. She’d have to reach for and earn every possible promotion at work. She’d have to budget and scrimp—no more organic veggies, no more ordering in on Friday nights, no more piano lessons or vacations. And she’d have to have lots of help at home.
Mama moved in to Charlie’s old room without even pretending there were other alternatives. Just for a year, they said, until Ruth could find a new rhythm, like learning how to run with one leg. Mama would be her prosthesis. They bought bunk beds for Vic’s room, which then became the boys’ room, even though Charlie never slept there because he climbed into Ruth’s bed every night, often even before she got there herself. She’d come in to find him sweating beneath the covers in his footed pajamas, radiating heat into Thomas’s side of the bed. She would rearrange his limbs and stroke his hair away from his sticky forehead, and Charlie wouldn’t stir. She never carried him back to his new bunk bed.
The year went by, and then another two. They found their rhythm. The kids learned to eat Mama’s cooking without complaint, and Ruth helped by doing whatever meal prep she could on weekends. At work, Ruth wondered if she got the first promotion because they felt sorry for her, but when she got the second one she knew she’d earned it, and perhaps she wouldn’t have earned it if Thomas were still alive. Perhaps she wouldn’t have worked so vigorously and with as much purpose. She brought that same level of energy to their domestic life, where she budgeted and saved and managed and planned while Mama flew around behind the scenes like the energetic new wife she’d never been when she had actually been a new wife. But Ruth didn’t know that then. What she knew was just boundless gratitude to Mama, for doing all the invisible work that made it possible for Ruth to earn those increasing paychecks.
During that time when Mama lived with them, The Widow’s Kitchen was only for weekends. It was their together time, when the kids were still small, and it helped Ruth cope with the amnesia of grief, the fact that she could no longer recall her husband’s flaws, the way he left his whiskers in the sink after shaving or used his knife to ferry crumbs into the butter. On his worst days, Thomas had refused to articulate his emotions, which did nothing to impede the actual existence of those emotions, which then presented themselves in all sorts of subtle physical cues, ones Ruth had to interpret like some kind of magical diviner. A slammed cabinet might mean it was his deceased alcoholic father’s birthday. An extra intense session at the gym might mean something had gone wrong at work. The one time she’d suggested he might benefit from therapy, to talk about his difficult childhood, Thomas rolled his eyes and called her a real American as if the word were a slur. Yes, sometimes this marriage had been exhausting, exasperating, but now that it was over, all Ruth could remember was the love.
So she would bake or build or paint or meal prep with her mama and her kids, all five of them together, and Ruth would document their projects in photographs she uploaded online. The pictures were artful, beautiful, and anonymous. She never showed her children’s faces, but there might be a dimpled hand stealing a warm cookie off one edge of a cooling rack. Or the curve of Daisy’s ear with a tendril of hair hanging down might frame a shot of some charred tomatoes with a brick of fresh mozzarella by a rainy windowpane. Or five colorful aprons hanging on their hooks by the paneled pantry, the sixth hook, Thomas’s hook, always empty. The empty placeholder became their trademark, a reminder of why the beauty they were seeking together was so important. A spare plate, an empty seat at the table, a single dry paintbrush amid the splashes of color.
For Ruth, The Widow’s Kitchen became a kind of Instagram meditation, a rumination on absence, a way to document the dynamic nature of their grief, how it changed and expanded and contracted and made room for new adventures, but never ever disappeared. She didn’t dream that a project that felt so intimate and personal to her would develop a following, that it would mean anything to anyone else. Ruth wanted only to identify beauty in their lives, to insist on it, to remind herself and her children that beauty was still possible after annihilation. Sometimes she was so good at this artistry that the kids barely recognized their own experiences when they looked back at Ruth’s photos.
“But wasn’t that the day the smoke alarm went off?” Daisy would ask, confused by the loveliness of her mother’s posts. “Wasn’t that the morning Charlie threw up in my cleats?”
This was a sentiment that would become more strident and pointed as Daisy grew older and more critical of Ruth, but in those early days it presented mostly as bafflement. Still, the enterprise wasn’t artificial. It was simply that the force of Ruth’s need for beauty created a whole new and separate reality from the one in which they were living (and sometimes barfing). In the photographs, nothing was ever stained or streaked or smeared. The sink was never piled with dishes, Ruth never skipped a shower. Vic never burned the flat of his arm taking a tray of homemade croutons out of the oven, never dropped the tray, never sent breadcrumbs scattering to the four corners of the kitchen, beneath the fridge and the range, attracting a family of mice that would take weeks to evict. On Instagram, Ruth never cried or sighed or became irritated when her children didn’t follow simple instructions. She never said shit or damn in front of them. In The Widow’s Kitchen , everything was perfect. Ripe, juicy, colorful, clean.
When she reached a hundred thousand followers, Ruth was amazed. When she ticked over four hundred thousand, she started to wonder if this crazy little project might have some staying power. The day she reached a million, she and the kids made and photographed a whole row of little white cakes with fireworks on top sculpted from colored sugar, and then ate them for dinner with their hands.
Eventually, Ruth would understand the mostly wonderful reality that her online life had become more lucrative than her full-time job. She would study how best to negotiate with vendors and advertisers, how to use analytics to increase her engagement, how to navigate the minefield of being beholden to a fickle public for her livelihood. Where once she shot video whenever and however the mood struck, Ruth would now spend time developing creatives . She’d learn to use the word creative not only as a noun, but as a noun that was not a person. She would weigh the benefits of being her own boss, setting her own schedule, working from home, and making more money, against the fearful prospect of giving up a steady paycheck and good healthcare benefits at the same moment when her three kids were losing interest in participating in The Widow’s Kitchen . She would opt for the hustle, remain fluid and attentive. She would have lean years and flush years, but would work relentlessly, adapt relentlessly, and never lose sight of the risk. Mostly, it would pay off.
While her unexpected fan base grew, so did the kids. Charlie went on being Charlie, though he did eventually stop demanding “uppy,” which Ruth did not miss at all, despite Mama’s predictions to the contrary. He devoted himself to tiaras, pirouettes, and glitter. When he and Daisy broke into Ruth’s makeup cabinet, Daisy went for the corals and nudes while Charlie slathered on the brightest colors he could find. He’d emerge from the bathroom like a full Pegasus, and he never met a rhinestone he didn’t love.
Charlie never came out to his family because he didn’t have to; it was always clear who he was, from those earliest diapering days. But he did rebrand himself in the seventh grade, during his middle school production of Beauty and the Beast . The night before the final dress rehearsal, Charlie brought home the program, and in the space just to the right of his character Lumiere, instead of Charlie Hayes, he was listed as “Carlos Hayes-Acuna.”
Ruth was sitting at the kitchen counter with the program opened in front of her, staring at her son’s modified name, not only the latinized first name, but also the addition of her mother’s maiden name, tacked onto the end like a vestigial tail. Charlie leaned on his elbows across from her, looking from her face to the paper and back, trying to gauge her reaction while she adjusted her glasses and cleared her throat. As was often the case, Ruth found herself stalling for time while she tried to craft an appropriate reaction to her youngest child. She had no idea what to make of this.
“Well?” Charlie grinned. “What do you think?”
Ruth cleared her throat again, an unconscious signal of her displeasure that caused both Daisy and Vic, who usually only feigned interest in Charlie’s plays, to come peer over her shoulder. Ruth thought she was being subtle with her bewilderment, but her kids always let her know when she was wrong, which was pretty much all the time.
Vic looked down at the program and then clapped Charlie on the shoulder. “?Ayyy, Carlitos!” her oldest child said approvingly.
It was true that they called Charlie Carlitos sometimes, and when he cried: Bendito Carlitos; and when they thought he was being an annoying little shit: Pendejito Carlitos; and when all the teachers immediately fell in love with him: Guapito Carlitos; and when time was of the essence, sometimes they called him just Lito. But more often they called him Charlie. Never Charles, and certainly never Carlos. So, as monikers go, Ruth thought it was a stretch. She took a noisy breath, a sigh she performed at least a dozen times a day, and which could indicate pleasure, irritation, hunger, or exhaustion. Her kids called this sigh El Suspiro, and they were forever lampooning it.
Vic nudged Daisy and nodded at their mother. “El Suspiro!” he whispered.
They leaned in.
“But don’t you want people to know it’s you who’s playing Lumiere?” Ruth asked carefully.
“Everybody knows it’s me,” Charlie said. He did a little jazz dance with invisible top hat and cane. Then he shrugged. “Anyway, I’ve always been Carlitos.”
It was true.
“Yes, but Carlos?”
He shrugged again. “Sounds more grown-up.”
Was it silly for her to feel slightly abandoned by this? What Ruth’s kids didn’t know (because not even Ruth herself knew) was that, when her parents got divorced in the Midwest in 1982, there had been endless grown-up discussions about what to do with Mama’s name.
For Ruth’s mother, the married last name would’ve been infinitely harder to part with than the man. When they first got engaged, Rafaela had balked at the idea of trading her family names for Brennan. She’d never known a woman who’d changed her name after marriage—that just wasn’t a thing women did in Puerto Rico. But her groom had insisted, so after lengthy conversations about why this was so important to Peter, they reached a compromise wherein Rafaela and their future children would have Peter’s name, but would also retain Papamío’s. In legal documentation then, Rafaela and her children became Brennan y Acuna. But in St. Louis, because the second surname was unconventional, because it confused and sometimes alarmed people, they’d fallen out of the habit of using it. In St. Louis they became the Brennans. And then after the divorce, Rafaela had wanted to carry on sharing her children’s name, but more than that, she knew because she’d witnessed it: the name Brennan provided all of them with a small measure of protection against prejudice, or at least it bought them some time. So after deep consideration, Mama had chosen not to return to her maiden names. They all remained Brennan.
Then in college, Ruth had briefly considered resurrecting the family name she’d left behind in Puerto Rico when she was six years old, the name she’d been born into. In her angsty, romantic youth, she toyed with the idea of reclaiming the lost Acuna half. But then she met and married Thomas anyway, and swapped the whole messy business for Hayes, and she did so without any of the cultural dissonance her mother had endured. In fact she did it without much deliberation at all. And yet, Hayes was a name Ruth had felt ambivalent about until Thomas died. In her grief, though, she wore her husband’s name like a devotion, a talisman. She would never take it off.
So seeing it hyphenated there in a theater program for a middle school production of Beauty and the Beast , shoehorned between “Carlos” and “Acuna,” in such a way that the reader would have almost no choice but to mispronounce Hayes as “Ay-ez,” caused a little ribbon of alarm to unfurl itself across the back of Ruth’s neck. It felt like a minor sacrilege. She couldn’t explain this properly to Charlie because she wasn’t fully aware of it herself. She knew only that it made her uncomfortable. She slid the program back across the counter to her son and tried to shake some bright energy into her voice.
“Whatever makes you happy,” she said.
Charlie looked back at her blankly, and Ruth knew she had failed some test she’d been unaware she was taking. She reviewed her previous statement. Whatever makes you happy . Supportive. Innocuous. What had she missed?
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
Charlie scrunched up his mouth and forehead. “Just, it seems like you don’t understand.”
He was right, Ruth did not understand.
The lesson motherhood was now teaching her was that it was no longer enough to placate your kid, even though when she was Charlie’s age, no adult in her life would’ve dreamed of placating her. Ruth grew up, as all previous generations had done for the breadth of human history, at a time when kids were expected to appease their parents. But then, when it was her turn to be the parent, she discovered that in the space of a few years, the balance had tipped entirely; her kids were not interested in appeasing her in the least. For Ruth and her peers, it was never going to be their turn. And worse, she realized it wasn’t enough that she’d mastered the art of mollifying her own children. Now she had to do it convincingly, internally. It wasn’t enough to say what they wanted to hear. She was required to believe it.
“It’s my heritage,” Charlie said simply.
His heritage! Ruth was aware of an unreasonable internal voice suggesting, Your heritage is contemporary, suburban self-indulgence! She knew that voice was unfair. She muzzled it, duct-taped it, kicked it in the ribs, and threw it off a cliff. She reached for a more reasonable voice instead. She would’ve liked to invoke Thomas, the miraculous joy of choosing baby names together, the lilt of his voice the day he first said Charlie . But that memory was so sacred Ruth couldn’t quite call the words into her mouth.
“It’s just, changing your name is a big deal,” she said instead.
“It’s really not,” Charlie said flatly. “Lots of kids do it nowadays.”
Ruth shook her head, her mouth barely open, empty of anything reasonable to say. What a humiliating time in the world to be a parent—when, after millennia of value, generational wisdom was suddenly meaningless.
Her son picked up the program and read his new-and-improved name out loud, Carlos Hayes-Acuna . The sound of it produced a tiny flare of anger in Ruth, which surprised her. She couldn’t fully interpret that feeling, but here was an ember: she had lost Acuna at a time when she had no choice. It was a name that meant something to her, and not only because it was Papamío’s, but also because in a single mouthful it contained all the music of Puerto Rico, of home. She’d lost it or it had been taken from her, but in any case, the name was gone. So what right did Charlie have to take it up so carelessly, to try it on as if it were a costume?
“I’m proud of it, Mom,” he said. “It’s cool to be Puerto Rican.”
Which struck Ruth as such a confounding non sequitur that she was unable to respond at all. Charlie took advantage of her silence to seal the conversation shut.
“Anyway, the program’s already printed.”