Chapter 16 Deal Breaker
Deal Breaker
Pam is seeing someone, but she’s not talking about it.
Of course, her friends know, but she has not told her parents or her sister, Wendy.
She would tell her father, Charles, because he doesn’t pry—but then he would tell her mother, Helen.
As for Wendy, she can’t keep a secret from anyone—Helen least of all.
If Helen knew, she would pry and pester and pass judgment—so Pam is keeping John from her.
She’s done being judged. Well, almost done. She’s working on it.
John is not Jewish. For Helen that’s a deal breaker—but this isn’t Helen’s deal to break!
He is not young, but, at fifty-six, Pam is not young either.
He is mostly bald. His knees are bad. He’s heavy and he has a little twitch when he is nervous, a slight blink of his left eye.
He’s shy, soft-spoken, and divorced, which is, in Helen’s mind, a moral failing.
Helen would never say it, but Pam knows what she thinks.
Helen, who has the most solicitous husband in the world, believes that divorced people give up easily.
For these reasons, Pam does not even mention John on the phone and her mother assumes that she is single.
You know your mother worries, Charles tells Pam, and she feels a little guilty, but not enough to change the status quo, which is that she and John spend nearly every weekend together, either at her place in Providence or his in Jamaica Plain.
He doesn’t twitch at all when they’re together.
In fact, his eyes are wonderfully green.
Like Pam, he is a lawyer, but he is a sole practitioner specializing in wills and trusts.
Like Pam, he enjoys black coffee and good jazz.
But those are surface details. More importantly, he is openhearted.
He loves animals. His ginger, Taffy, passed recently, and he keeps her picture on his dresser.
He does not think it strange that Pam still mourns her own cat, Shadow.
John is big, and his bulk comforts Pam, because she is so small.
He is effusive, while Pam is more reserved.
When he embraces her, he lifts her off the ground.
He has a warmth about him, like an oven radiating heat.
Pam warms her feet on him in bed. The first time, she said, “I’m sorry my feet are cold.
” And he said, “I don’t mind. I like it. ”
They have been seeing each other for six months when he says he wants her to meet his daughter. Isabella is his only child, and he is careful with her. He does not rush to introduce her to people he is dating.
“Who else have you dated?” Pam asks, because he has only been divorced a year.
“Well, just you,” says John. They are walking in the Arnold Arboretum on a clear October day. They take a path over gentle hills, and John says, “I want to introduce you because I think you’ll really like each other.”
“Oh!” Pam’s heart jumps. She knows all about Isabella, although she has not met her yet.
John’s daughter is fourteen and she attends The Winsor School and sings.
Pam has watched videos of Bella in choir—although it’s hard to see which one she is.
Isabella is a wonderful student. John keeps all her essays in a folder.
And her math tests! She is good at math as well.
She is gifted, John tells Pam, and she recognizes his partiality.
She has other friends with children, and they are all loving, but those with just one child are lovesick, their attention undivided.
An only child must be everything at once.
Student, athlete, artist. Pam used to laugh about this, but when John praises his daughter, she looks at him with tenderness.
Isabella is a writer and a mathematician and an artist and why not?
At John’s house, Pam gazes at Bella’s acrylic paintings and says, “She’s so talented!
” Her portrait of her father looks just like him.
The green eyes, the smooth dome of his head.
As they walk through the trees, John’s cheeks are ruddy in the fresh crisp air. “I thought the three of us could go somewhere together.”
He says it near a hemlock. All the trees in the arboretum are labeled with metal tags, and Pam takes note because she is going to remember this moment. “We could meet for lunch,” she says.
“Maybe it would be better to do something,” John suggests.
Pam tries to think. What’s a good thing to do with a fourteen-year-old girl? Movies? Canoeing on the Charles? She hates canoeing. Trampolines? Not with John’s knees. “How about a museum?” She is thinking of Isabella’s art. “The MFA. Or what about the Gardner?”
“I haven’t been there in years,” John says.
“Me either,” Pam says, but the memories rush in on her.
The Italian palace right in Boston. The museum’s courtyard like a fairy tale as you step inside.
Walls pale pink like the inside of a shell, a glass roof far above, and at the courtyard’s center an enchanted garden with a mosaic floor and fountain, delicate flowering vines.
“The Gardner is a great idea,” John says.
“And you know what? She can get in for free,” Pam tells him.
“What do you mean?”
“If your name is Isabella you can always get in free.”
“Really?”
“In college I had a friend named Isabel, and it didn’t count. You can’t be Isabel or Izzy. You have to be Isabella like Isabella Stuart Gardner.”
“Is that still true?”
“Look it up.”
While he checks his phone, she hovers at his shoulder, and they laugh with pleasure because it’s still true, just as Pam says. They are standing near the hemlock with its green and golden leaves, and everything seems meant to be.
However, they can’t get to the museum right away.
They need to wait for one of John’s weekends, and even then, Isabella is busy.
She’s not just a singer and a painter. She plays soccer every Saturday.
Pam knows the schedule, because John can’t see her when Bella has a game.
He’s got to drive and watch and cheer. During the season there’s hardly any time, and then it’s Thanksgiving, which he and his ex-wife, Alison, choreograph to maximize relatives on both sides of the family.
John takes Bella to his parents’ in Winchester for dinner and then Bella and her mother and her aunts run in the Turkey Trot on Friday morning, and they all go to J.P. Licks for ice cream afterward.
“That’s right near my parents’ house,” Pam says while they are eating breakfast at her place.
“Not the one in Brookline. The original J.P. Licks,” John says, meaning the one in Jamaica Plain on Centre Street.
“But that’s close too,” says Pam.
John looks puzzled, as if to say, What are you suggesting? And for the first time she feels uncertain—trapped in a kind of Catch-22. She might be close. She is close, but she can’t join him and his family, because she hasn’t even met his daughter.
“I just wish,” she says.
“Wish what?” he asks.
“That we could be together more.”
“We will be.” He kisses her, and uncertainty evaporates.
There is something about the way he holds her face in his hands.
When she was young the guys she’d loved had been charming, confident, a little mean.
John is none of those things. When he takes her in his arms she wants to be with him forever.
She wants everyone to know that they’re together, everyone except her mother.
—
Thanksgiving is desolate with freezing rain. Pam drives to her parents’ but her sister can’t come because Jill is working on the holiday.
“What about Aunt Sylvia and Uncle Lew?” Pam asks when she arrives.
Her father shakes his head.
“They’re just twenty minutes away.” Pam shakes out her umbrella in the entryway.
“Leave it on the porch,” her mother calls out from the kitchen. She can sense a wet umbrella without seeing it.
“Do you even know what Sylvia did?” Pam whispers to her dad.
“Your mother was very hurt,” Charles tells her, as he always does.
“Hurt, or took offense?”
Charles shrugs as if to say, Is there a difference? Does it really matter?
Pam knows about taking offense. Like Sylvia, Pam’s dog is not invited to Thanksgiving.
The last time Pam brought her to the house, Rosie rampaged through the garden, trampling the flowers, and now she remains home with a sitter in Providence.
So, it’s just Pam and her parents and the secret Pam is keeping.
Such a big secret that she nearly sets a fourth place at the table.
“This is a lot of food,” Pam says when they sit down.
“I can always freeze the leftovers,” says Helen.
Pam glances at her father, who will be eating turkey sandwiches and cornbread stuffing and roasted Brussels sprouts forever. “What about the Metzgers?”
“All the usual suspects are in Boca,” says Charles.
“The Metzgers are in West Palm,” Helen corrects him.
“Do you ever think about going down there?” Pam asks.
“Occasionally, in moments of weakness,” Charles says. “But—”
Helen finishes his sentence. “We hate it there.”
Pam says, “I hate to see you isolated.”
“We aren’t isolated.” Charles refills Pam’s glass.
“You seem that way.” Pam’s face is hot. She was a diver as a girl, and she recognizes the feeling. Flushed excitement, climbing the ladder. “You seem bored and lonely.”
“I am never bored,” Helen declares, as though Pam has accused her of a mortal sin. Laziness. Superficiality.
“I worry about you guys,” says Pam.
“You don’t have to worry about us,” her father says.
“I worry that you’re lonely,” Helen tells Pam.
“Why?” She realizes how absurd this is—fighting about who’s lonelier at a three-person Thanksgiving dinner.
“You’ve been single for a long time,” Charles says in his gentle doctor’s voice, courteous and at the same time chiding.
“How do you know I’m single?” Pam shoots back.
Helen turns on her. “You’re seeing somebody!”
“I am.” Suddenly, she’s done it. The secret’s out.
“Really!” Charles sets down his fork.