Chapter 4
four
TROY
My parents do Sunday lunch. They’ve done it since before I could walk, and the fact that I’m thirty-eight with my own house down the road has never entered into it.
That’s a lie, actually. My mother would tell you she’s completely flexible about Sundays, and she’d tell you that while setting a table for eleven.
Leon came. That started when Colby was born and nobody negotiated it. My father-in-law and my father have built an entire relationship out of standing near a grill saying almost nothing. It appears to be deeply satisfying for both of them.
“He’s got a grip,” Leon said, holding out a finger for my son to strangle. “Feel that. That’s a grip.”
I laughed. “He’s four months old, Leon.”
“Doesn’t matter. You can tell.”
“You’re going to have him serving by Christmas.”
“Not serving,” my father-in-law said, entirely serious. “Tracking. You want them tracking early.”
My father came out with a plate of something charred and put it down like a man delivering good news.
“Brad, look here,” Leon said. “He’s tracking.”
“Of course he is.” Dad leaned over and made a noise at his grandson that no adult should make in public. “Look at him. He’s clocking the whole yard.”
My father sold industrial flooring for thirty-one years and retired at sixty-two.
He’s never had a single opinion about my career, and as far as I’m concerned that makes him the greatest man alive.
He watched me lose an Oscar once and said, on the way to the car, that other guy can’t even do some of his own stunts, and asked if I wanted a burger.
My mother?
Francis Newman has been unfailingly, genuinely kind to my wife for seventeen years and has never managed to say anything about her career that didn’t have a small hole in the bottom of it.
It’s never malice. That’s what makes it impossible to raise with her. She adores Phoebe. She’s watched every final Phoebe ever played, in person where she could get to them, and she cried at the retirement press conference harder than even Leon did.
And then she says something like what she said over the salad.
“It must be such a relief,” she said, “not to have all that pressure anymore.”
Phoebe didn’t even put her fork down.
“It really wasn’t pressure, Francis. It was a job. And I loved it.”
“Well, of course you did, sweetheart. But the traveling. And the injuries. And everybody watching every single?—”
“I liked being watched.” Phoebe lifted a shoulder and took a precise bite of her food. “That was one of the better parts.”
“You always were brave about it.”
“Mom,” I said.
“What? I said brave. That’s a compliment.”
“It is a compliment,” Phoebe said, before I could get anywhere. “Francis, it’s a lovely compliment and I’m keeping it. Thank you.” And she smiled at my mother with enormous warmth and said, “I wasn’t brave, I was just extremely well paid.”
My father laughed so hard he had to put his glass down. It went around the table and the whole conversation dissolved.
That’s what she does. She never lets it become a moment. She takes whatever’s been handed to her, turns it over, hands it back as a joke, and everybody at that table went away thinking Sunday lunch had gone beautifully.
It had gone beautifully. That’s the trouble with my mother. It always has.
Jeremy texted me twice during lunch, which he knows I hate, and then a third time, which he knows I hate even more.
Ellis needs an answer this week
I know
Troy. This week.
I put the phone face down next to my plate. My mother looked at it, then at me, and said nothing at all, which is her most effective move and she knows it.
Later I found Leon out on the deck with Colby asleep on his shoulder, doing the sway that all of them do without being taught, and I stood there for a second before he noticed me.
“You know what she was,” he said.
“I do know what she was, Leon. I was there.”
“You got the last fifteen years.” He kept swaying. “I had her from six.”
“Is this a competition?”
“Everything’s a competition. That’s how I got her.” He adjusted my son without breaking rhythm. “She’s all right, you know. I keep waiting for her not to be. Kept waiting the whole first year and she just kept being all right.”
“She’s better than all right.” I won’t tell him how I know that or what I mean when I say that because I don’t think he’d appreciate the entendre about his own daughter.
“Mm,” Leon said.
“And?”
“There isn’t a rest of it.”
“Leon.”
He looked out at the water for a while. My son made a small sound against his shoulder and Leon adjusted him without looking down.
“I coached her from six years old,” he said. “I taught her how to lose. That’s the whole job, everything else is drills. And I sat in that press conference and watched my daughter quit at thirty-four with her body still working and I thought, well. She’s finally beaten me at something.”
“That’s not what she did.”
“I know it isn’t.” He shrugged the shoulder that didn’t have a baby on it. “It took me about a year to figure it out.”
And that’s Leon. He’ll hand you an entire confession and then ask if you want a coffee.
Here’s the part I don’t say at Sunday lunch.
My mother was clumsy about what she said to Phoebe in the way she’s been clumsy about it for seventeen years, and I sat there and corrected her with my eyebrows and made a joke about the wine.
And I agreed with her.
Not with the relief. Not with the pressure. But underneath what my mother was fumbling toward there’s something real, and it’s this. My wife was one of maybe five people alive who could do what she did. She stopped. The world adjusted in about two weeks and moved on.
I watched it happen. I watched the machine turn its head. Six months after her last match somebody at a party asked me if she was still playing. I said no. They said oh, that’s a shame. Then they asked me about a film.
That’s a shame. Filed, done, next.
Phoebe was standing right there and heard the whole exchange and didn’t react at all, because she genuinely, actually, didn’t care.
And I’ve carried it around ever since.
We got home and she was lit up.
I don’t mean cheerful. Phoebe is cheerful the way other people are tall—it’s just the height she comes in at. I mean lit. Moving faster. Two conversations ahead of me. She unpacked the car in about forty seconds and then reorganized a cabinet nobody had asked her to reorganize.
“Good day?” I said.
“Great day.” She kissed me on the way past with a stack of bowls in her hands. “Your mother’s a menace and I love her.”
“She is definitely a menace.”
“And Colby slept the whole way home!”
“He did.”
“That’s twice this week.”
So I stood in the kitchen watching my wife be happier than she’d been in a month, and I thought: there it is. She’s getting her feet under her. The fog’s lifting. Four months in and she’s coming back up.
I didn’t ask her why, and that was a mistake.
There was a moment on the drive home when I nearly asked.
She had her feet up on the dash, which she isn’t supposed to do and does anyway. She was scrolling something with her thumb and smiling at it. And I opened my mouth to say what’s got into you?
Then Colby made a noise in the back and she twisted around to check on him. By the time she’d settled again I’d put the question down somewhere and couldn’t find it.
That happens about nine times a day in a house with a baby in it. Everybody knows that. It’s the most ordinary thing in the world and I’ve used it as an excuse more times than I’m going to count.
She called her father while I was loading the dishwasher, and the kitchen door was open, and I wasn’t listening until I was.
“—no, in eleven weeks. Eleven. I know.” A pause. “Dad. Dad. I know what my abs are doing, I live here, you know.”
I stopped with a plate in my hand.
“Because he asked me why and nobody’s asked me why in two years.” She laughed at something. “He’s a nightmare. He was always a nightmare.”
Another pause, longer.
“I haven’t decided anything,” my wife said. “I told them no. I’m allowed to have told them no and still be thinking about it. Right?”
And I stood in my kitchen holding a plate and worked out three things in about a second and a half.
That somebody had asked her to play. That she’d told them no on her own, days ago, without a word to me.
And that she’d told her father before she told her husband.