Chapter Three
The next morning, my phone rang at three minutes past seven. Though it was my new landline rather than my cell and did not display the caller, I knew who it was before I answered.
“It is seven o’clock,” I said.
“In the morning,” I added.
“I waited till after seven. Time to get up. How are you settling in? Have you made any friends yet?”
“Everyone’s still asleep.”
“I highly doubt that. Old people are early risers.”
“Because their children call them before dawn.”
“Dawn was half an hour ago.”
“Why is it so loud?” It sounded like she was at a party.
“I’m at a party,” Darcy said.
“Who throws a party at seven a.m. on a Wednesday?”
“I do. It’s a tailgate party. At the new Costco.”
I paused to let these words reorder. They did not.
“You’re throwing a tailgate party at the new Costco?”
“Well, in the parking lot.”
“Why?”
“There’s a new Costco! There’ll be press. Balloons. Boxes of dog treats bigger than the dog. Who knows what wonders await? So I invited a few friends. A couple dozen friends. I made three kinds of muffins.”
If you live long enough, sometimes customs change without your keeping up, and things you think are weird aren’t actually.
This was not one of those times.
“Couldn’t you just go inside and buy a giant variety pack of them?”
“They don’t open till ten.”
“That’s three hours from now.”
“I like to be early.” An understatement. Darcy likes to be early the way other people like oxygen. It’s not her fault, though. She’s a firstborn daughter.
“You didn’t meet anyone fun last night?” she asked, but that was not her question.
Her question was when could she stop feeling guilty about overreacting to a minor fender bender and colluding with her sister to declare me unfit to drive or live on my own any longer.
Her question was when would she be vindicated by the promise she’d made over and over the last three months that I would be so relieved to be rid of my old life and have this one instead—where I could engage new friends in new activities and not have to worry about weeding my flower beds or cleaning an extra bathroom—that I wouldn’t even miss my autonomy and independence.
“It was one night, Darcy. I ate with Max. We ordered pizza.”
“Then you better get a move on, Mom. Up and at ’em. Start making some friends.”
As if making friends was like making brownies.
“They have everything in that place,” she went on. “Go to an exercise class. I would kill to go to yoga this afternoon.”
As if we were talking between UN briefings on world peace negotiations rather than at a party in the Costco parking lot.
“It’s yoga in chairs,” I said.
“Sounds dreamy. Another kind of class? Hold on. I still have the brochure.” Darcy has never thrown out a document in her life. “There’s painting class, music class, baking—”
“I am not in kindergarten,” I interrupted.
“A club?” She read, “There’s puzzle club, chess club, Spanish club. Book club!”
I snorted. “Please.”
“Just because not everyone was an English teacher for a million years, Mother, doesn’t mean they can’t read and discuss a book with you.”
“Unfortunately, it does.” I am not a snob.
I just take books more seriously than other people and am bad at pretending otherwise.
Alice’s Brownie troop had had a moms’ book club that hadn’t cared how wrong they were about The Clan of the Cave Bear, even after I explained that I did this for a living.
When it was my month to pick, they didn’t even get as far as wrong about One Hundred Years of Solitude.
I find that book clubs are like garlic sauces: I like them, but they do not agree with me.
“You could hang out with Dad,” Darcy proposed.
I laughed and laughed.
“There’s a lecture series!” she said, triumphant because I couldn’t object without knowing what the topics were.
Darcy used to be a project manager for a bank. Now she manages me. Her husband, Edward, is “in finance.” This means he is often in London or Hong Kong or Singapore. It also means Darcy doesn’t have to work. Or doesn’t get to work. Or only gets to work on me.
Mostly to get her off the phone, I agreed to attend the lecture series, which was how I found myself in the multipurpose room later that morning awaiting the start of a talk called “Dirt: A History.”
I worried this would take some time.
Other residents filed in and filled the chairs all around me, chatting with each other, offering shy smiles to the new kid but saying nothing to me directly.
I was relieved but surprised they weren’t nosier.
You’d expect a new member of a closed community with a lot of time on its hands to draw unabashed stares and impolite questions, but I was coming to understand a simple fact: Turnover at Vista View had to be pretty high. They were used to new kids.
I knew from Darcy’s brochure that some residents were barely sixty, others at the beginnings of their second centuries.
The age range at a continuing-care facility has to be wider than in any other community you cloister with your whole life.
You don’t negotiate the drama of your kindergarten playground with people undergoing their midlife crises, nor room with sexagenarians in your campus dorm.
But as I looked around the lecture, that same forty-year age gap didn’t seem to be giving anyone any pause at all.
When the history of dirt started, it turned out to be about erosion and root systems and what grew well where, and it lasted only twenty minutes. Mind, I had just been forced to leave my yard and trees and garden behind, so, though unexpectedly brief, the lecture itself was not relevant.
The lecturer, in contrast, was.
I went up to him afterward. “Hi. Remember me?”
He lit up. “Hey, the shitty Jewish driver from Brooklyn! What’re you doing here?”
“You cut up my license,” I said. “I had to give up my car and my home and live here instead, and it’s all your fault.”
“You’re welcome!” He still wore the cowboy hat but was in lay clothes and seemed much younger than he had by the side of the road.
Maybe the priest collar ages a man or maybe proximity to the Vista View residents does the opposite, but it was clear I belonged and he did not.
He grinned and threw his arms wide. “Isn’t it great here? ”
“Not as great as it was at my house.”
“Did your house have scintillating-as-shit guest lectures you got to attend for free with all your friends?”
“I don’t know anyone here except my ex-husband,” I reported.
“Then you better get your ass in gear and mingle.” He held out his hand. “You can start with me. Father Frank.”
“Pepper.” We shook. “How’s your truck?”
“Fixed but filthy.”
“Ministering is dirty business?”
“That or gardening.”
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“Community service. Planting in the morning, interfaith service after lunch.”
“Community service?” I remembered the knife. “Were you convicted of a crime?”
“I’m a priest,” he said, spinning me around by the shoulders and pointing me toward the snack table. “Giving back to the community is part of my goddamn calling.”