Friday Evening
After dinner, the children helped Jane with the dishes and then put on their coats and mittens and went out to walk around town.
That left Jane alone with Brick Three. Her husband had retreated to the family room where he sat staring at a football game on TV.
Jane sat on the end of the sofa nearest his armchair. “Brick Three, can we talk?”
Brick Three waited until a commercial came on. “You know what, Jane? I’d be really happy not to talk.”
“I know. I know.” Jane reached over and held his hand. “But I need to talk with you.”
“Can’t it wait until tomorrow?” Brick Three squeezed her hand, a sign that that was all he was capable of communicating at the moment.
“Touchdown!” The referee on television was holding his arms up in the air and everyone at the stadium was screaming.
Brick Three muttered, “Well, that’s one good thing that happened today.”
Jane took a deep breath. “Okay, I guess I’ll take a walk around town by myself.”
Brick Three mumbled, “Okay.”
Jane sighed loudly, left the family room, and headed to the front hall for her coat.
Brick Three heard the front door slam and sighed in relief.
He didn’t want to be unpleasant, but his brain was all in a muddle.
So many changes. Lydia had brought home a Finn.
And Florie was getting married? And leaving the East Coast to live out in the wilderness with Daniel, who was, well, wasn’t it weird that the man was a poet?
For God’s sake! Whoever had a job as a poet?
What kind of health insurance could a poet get?
He was going to teach at the university, but would it be full-time?
And how could he pay into Social Security?
And Lucas…he couldn’t think about his son right at this moment.
The more he contemplated his family, the more worked up Brick Three got, until he felt his heart thumping and wondered if he was going to be the Brick Parsons who had a heart attack.
But no. He was fine. Worried, even angry, but basically fine.
It was his father he was concerned about.
Brick Three remembered when his father had been fit and robust, running around in white shorts on the tennis court, slamming balls back over the net.
In his seventies, Brick Jr. had swum in the ocean every day in the summer and a few times with his group of crazy-ass friends in the polar bear club on January 1, retreating into a warm SUV to toss back whiskey to warm them up.
It was only natural that as his father aged up to seventy and then a few years more, his various body parts began to fail.
Brick Jr.’s spine had gone wonky and now he was three entire inches shorter than he had been when he was sixty.
He still walked a lot, but he no longer played tennis because his balance, while mostly okay, could tip him sideways now and then, so he always held the railing when he went down any stairs, even when someone was watching.
His face was brown and wrinkled, but in a good honest way, like a man who’d spent a lot of time fishing and sailing and swimming.
It was his father’s hair that made Brick Three sad.
Brick Jr. still had some hair, but it was white and crinkly and so thin his bald spots showed through.
Brick Three’s own hair was turning silver along the sides, which was okay, he could live with that, it would make his clients feel that he was older and wiser.
He was surprised his hair hadn’t all fallen out in shock from his son’s totally unexpected announcement.
He wouldn’t show it—he shouldn’t show it—but Lucas had broken his heart.
Over the years, Brick Three had developed a way to compartmentalize his emotions.
He had to, partly because of his children—how scared he’d been when Florie, as an infant, had had colic and screamed all the time—and partly because of his job.
There were times in his work when someone met with a truly horrible disaster.
A house burned down. A car accident. Even gale force winds hurling rain through a window and ruining Jan Meister’s valuable collection of European paintings.
As head of the insurance company on the isolated island with a year-round population of around twenty thousand, Brick Three, like his father before him, had to bear witness to tragic losses and help his clients get decent remuneration, although money could never make up for a devastated life.
Now Beatrice thought she was in charge of Brick Jr. And in a way, Brick Jr. belonged to her more than he belonged to his own son. In the same way, Lydia and Florie and Lucas were in charge of their own lives now.
And Brick Three and Jane were going to have a baby.
It was almost unthinkable. Impossible. A little frightening.
Suddenly, the memories rushed in.
When Lydia, their first baby, saw her first Christmas tree, her eyes had gone wide.
She’d waved her arms and legs like a bird trying to fly.
The next Christmas, Lydia sat on the floor flapping the foil wrapping paper torn from a present while Jane sat snuggled in an armchair, nursing Florie.
Then Jane had gotten pregnant with Lucas, even though some people said women couldn’t get pregnant while nursing, and by the next Christmas, Jane and Brick Three were too tired to put up a big tree, which was just fine because Lydia was two and wobbling through the house and Florie was one and teething and putting anything she could grab in her mouth and Lucas had colic and a hideous rash and screamed constantly.
Jane and Brick Three had been so tired.
Evangeline and Brick Jr. had saved the holiday.
They realized that it would take a U-Haul to bring the three little ones and all the paraphernalia required over to their house, so they brought Christmas to Brick Three’s family.
Evangeline gave each of the two girls a box full of brightly colored wrapping paper.
The girls sat on the living room floor, ripping the paper and waving it and laughing so much that Florie occasionally fell over backward and had to be set upright.
Brick Three sat in his armchair holding his inconsolable infant son to his shoulder and patting him gently on his back while saying, “There, there. It’s not so bad.
” Amazingly, Lucas fell asleep and Brick Jr. poured the two men tumblers of Chivas Regal, which they clicked in celebration.
Evangeline had brought over the Christmas dinner and was warming it up and setting the table while Jane enjoyed the best gift she could receive, thirty minutes to lie flat out on her bed in their quiet bedroom.
When Evangeline called her to dinner, Jane came downstairs looking twenty years younger.
Christmas had always been the best day of the year for the family.
The kids loved the beach and swimming and building sandcastles, and birthdays were always chaotic fun, but the day of Christmas when they were all together, wide-eyed and gleeful with their new Legos or dolls or bikes or scooters—and then their computers and phones and video games—those days had been the golden prize of the family calendar.
My God, Brick Three thought, by next Christmas he and Jane would have a new infant to laugh and babble at the sight of the tree.