CHAPTER 2 #5
“She kept all of it. Handkerchiefs, belts, Rotary bulletins.”
I lay back on the bed, my head beside my tiny overnight bag. “It’s too much.”
“I want to scream at her, but she’s dead. She’s old and she’s dead.”
“Listen to me. Remember when I said you should take a trip with Bea? Start planning it now. Call the service that comes and takes it all away. Have them come three days from now. Spend three days going through things, and if you don’t look at all of it, well, you don’t.
Otherwise you’re going to go out of your mind. ”
“Oh, too late for that. Everything in my bedroom is still there, all the stuff in the desk drawers, the closet, under the bed. It’s like Pompeii. I feel like I’m going to get stuck here, like I’m going to fall into the past and it’s never going to let go of me.”
How interesting to think of two married people falling into their own separate pasts so far away from one another but at the same time. “Where does Bea want to go? Rome? Prague?”
“Norway,” he said.
I closed my eyes. I saw my husband and his sister on a ship looking out over the fjords. I told him I loved him.
“I love you, too,” he said. “I love you so much that I’m glad you’re not here. Have you called Eddie Triplett?”
“Not yet.”
“You should call him. He’s probably waiting to hear from you.”
“Probably,” I said. Lying had never felt like such an act of kindness. Jonathan didn’t need one more thing to worry about, especially when there was nothing to worry about.
After we got off the phone, I found the shoes I’d bought for the retirement party, stashed away in their box.
They were both sparkly and low to the ground.
I gathered up the makeup I never wore and tossed that in as well.
Once I had everything together, I locked up the house and walked to the train station.
My nephew Henry ate the second half of a meatball hero while his mother ran a flat iron through my hair.
Her plan was to curl my straightened hair and pin it up, a complex grooming skill acquired from her daughters.
I was wearing Leda’s bathrobe at the kitchen table.
When she finished, I would step right into my dress without messing up her work.
“I never thought about the discrepancy of the days,” Leda said when I laid out the order of events between her appendectomy and Eddie’s banishment.
“So let me get this straight,” Henry said, licking his fingers. “When the two of you were little kids, Grandma had this wonderful husband you were both in love with, then she divorced him for no reason.”
“Well, there must have been a reason,” Leda said.
“No reason you know of,” Henry said.
I clarified. “She told me it was because he had almost killed me in a car accident, but he didn’t almost kill me.” Henry was a beautiful kid who had his mother’s empathetic nature and his father’s head for math. Whenever Henry was in the room, I believed in the survival of our species.
“And she married Mr. Positive after that?”
We nodded, newly mystified by a fact that had stymied us decades before.
“So Eddie isn’t your stepfather. Mr. Positive is your stepfather.”
Leda shook her head. “Eddie Triplett is our stepfather, ‘stepfather’ being an honorific bestowed or withheld by the stepchild.”
“Did you just make that up?” Henry asked his mother.
“I did,” she said, “but I’m also right.”
“She’s right,” I said.
“So do you think Eddie had an affair with one of the nurses in the hospital?” Leda asked.
“Either that or Grandma found out he was a spy,” Henry said, finishing off his sandwich.
I turned my head to smile at him and barely missed getting my ear burned off with the flat iron. “That’s what I said.”
“Hold still,” my sister said.
Steve leaned into the doorframe of the kitchen. “Is there time for me to go for a run?”
“Sure,” Leda said. “Plenty of time.”
“I don’t want to miss him,” Steve said.
“It’s early. You won’t miss him,” Leda said. “Run away.”
Henry pushed back from the table and patted his stomach. “I’ll go with you.”
“After eating a hero?” I asked.
He shrugged. Leda told him to put his plate in the dishwasher.
Steve paused for a moment to look at my hair. “She does good work,” he said. The compliment was for his wife, not for me. Steve Ha could not care less about my hair.
“Go,” Leda said. When they were gone, she asked me how I planned to manage this.
“I don’t think it’s going to be complicated. I’ll wait and see if Eddie tells me, and if he doesn’t tell me, I’ll ask him. I’d rather hear his version before I talk to Mom. Whatever happened, I’m pretty sure he did it, though. He seems to carry a lot of guilt.”
“But then so do you, and so do I, and I’m pretty sure we didn’t do anything.”
Which was why she was Dr. Ha, “Your Therapist.”
My dress was jade green with a rounded neck and half sleeves, fitted waist and full skirt, though not too full, appropriate for any formal retirement party, anniversary party, or wedding.
With my hair done up, you could still see the trace of the scar that ran along the side of my face, but like everything else, it had, with time, faded to insignificance.
Steve and Henry came back from their run and got cleaned up.
Leda put a silk blouse on with her jeans.
When the doorman called to say that Mr. Triplett had arrived, the four of us went down the hall to wait in front of the elevator.
“This is sort of ridiculous,” Henry said. He was seventeen.
“You think it’s ridiculous because you’ve never known the fleeting pleasure of having a decent stepfather,” Leda said to her son.
“There are a lot of cultural experiences you miss out on when your parents stay married,” Steve said.
“You’ve deprived me of everything,” Henry said. Then the doors opened and the elevator presented Eddie Triplett in a tuxedo holding a small vase of lilies of the valley.
He raised his free hand and covered his mouth to stare at the four of us while we smiled like fools. His eyes blinked hard behind his tortoiseshell glasses. “Look at you,” he said.
“Hi, Eddie,” Leda said.
“Look how beautiful you are, all of you.” There was a woman with him in the elevator, her Pomeranian on a leash. He turned to her. “Have you ever seen such a beautiful family?”
“I have not,” the woman said generously.
I held out my hand, as if he were standing outside in the rain. “Come on.”
He shook his head. “It’s too much.”
“That’s true,” Leda said. “But you can’t stay in the elevator forever, and I will only hug you in the hall.”
“Go on,” the woman said, maybe hoping to get to her own floor but not wanting to rush the moment.
Eddie stepped forward then, straight into Leda’s arms. He gave her the flowers, and when she introduced her son and husband, he hugged them as well.
Where had this happiness been? Not with our father in his apartment near the docks, and not with our mother and the exceedingly positive Lucas Ekker.
The joy of childhood had come in moments with Leda and in moments with Eddie Triplett, who had been with us for such a short time.
We walked to the Has’ apartment as a family, all of us touching him.
“Heavens, would you look at this?” Eddie said, going to the long bank of windows to take in the view of the park.
“It never gets old,” Steve said.
“You live in the city?” Henry asked.
“Downtown,” he said. “Chelsea.”
“That’s fashionable of you,” I said.
“Trust me, it was not always the case, but I bided my time. I waited for fashion to find me.”
“These flowers are beautiful,” Leda said, holding them up to the light. “And what a beautiful vase.”
“The vase is the present,” Eddie said. “It belonged to my mother.”
Let’s say Leda was never surprised, but in that moment she looked at him with absolute wonder. “Oh, Eddie,” she said.
“I have a present for you, too,” he said to me. “I’m giving it to you later.”
“Thank you. Thank you in advance.”
“I didn’t know what kind of flowers you liked. Lily of the valley were your mother’s favorite.”
I leaned in to my sister to smell the small bouquet. They smelled like our mother, the way she had smelled when we were children. I remembered almost nothing. Eddie remembered everything.
Eddie asked Henry about high school. He asked Steve about finance. Leda had made cheese puffs and brought them out with some nuts and a bottle of Chardonnay.
“Perfect timing,” Eddie said. “Perfect everything.”
“Whose anniversary is it?” Steve asked.
“Skip and Polly Hotalling, college sweethearts.” He raised his glass in acknowledgment of the long union of Polly and Skip.
“Which college?” Henry asked. He was a rising senior. He was interested in colleges.
“Yale,” Eddie said. “We went to Yale. Well, Polly went to Pine Manor. Yale was only men when we started out, which tells you how old I am.”
“I didn’t know you went to Yale,” I said.
Eddie nodded, chewed his cheese puff. “You did. You’ve just forgotten, and you’ve forgotten because it is not an interesting fact. These are wonderful,” he said to Leda.
Had I known where Eddie went to school? Had I known where he grew up or if he had a sister of his own? “So you’ve been friends since college?”
“Skip was my roommate. He and Polly met at our graduation dance. We had one foot out the door, and there she was, a freshman bused in for the evening. She was the size of a teaspoon. Skip liked to say he had to wait for her to grow up before he could marry her, like Elvis and Priscilla.”
I crossed my legs beneath the stiff skirt of my dress.
If I told my students that once upon a time girls dressed up to be bused to dances in hopes of finding husbands, they would call me a heretic.
They would demand that security escort me off campus.
Steve got up to refill Eddie’s glass, but Eddie shook his head.
“There will be many toasts this evening. I must pace myself.”
“Are you making a toast?” Leda asked.
“Friends, Romans, countrymen,” he said.