Chapter 13 Nancy and Clive
Hank
This year, I drove up alone.
Lesley had gone to Santa Fe to spend Christmas with her mother and her aunt.
She’d told me in a short text a week before, with the dates, and added that she’d have her phone if I needed to reach her about anything to do with the baby.
I’d replied that I hoped she had a good trip and that I’d be at my parents’.
I hadn’t asked her to come. I’d thought about it for two days and decided that asking would have been one more thing she had to say no to.
My mother had set the table for six.
I saw it as soon as I walked into the dining room. The good china, the red candles, the silver my grandmother had brought from Ohio. Six places. Mom, Dad, Randy, me. Randy’s girlfriend, Tess, whom I’d met twice. And one more place at my left, where Lesley always sat.
“Mom,” I said.
She came in from the kitchen with a basket of rolls and saw where I was looking. Something flickered across her face, and then she set the basket down briskly.
“I just thought,” she said. “In case.”
“She’s in Santa Fe.”
“I know, darling. I just thought.” She reached over and took the extra plate and the extra glass and silverware and carried them back into the kitchen without another word.
I found my father in his workshop before dinner, the way I always did. It was a converted barn behind the house that smelled of cedar and machine oil, lit by a single bare bulb over the workbench, and he was standing at the lathe in his reading glasses, turning something pale and smooth.
“Rocking horse,” he said, without looking up. “For the baby. Maple. It’ll take me till spring.” He blew sawdust off the piece and held it up to the light, a curved leg, still rough at one end. “Your mother says I’m being sentimental.”
“You are being sentimental.”
“I’m seventy years old. I’ve earned it.” He set the piece down. “How’s Lesley?”
“Eighteen weeks. In Santa Fe with her mother.”
He nodded slowly and didn’t ask anything else. That was my father. He’d always let silence do most of his talking.
When we came back into the house, my mother was in the kitchen arguing with the eggnog.
My father had made it the way he’d made it every year since 1983, with too much nutmeg and a bottle of bourbon he kept for exactly this purpose, and my mother tasted it and made a face and told him it was undrinkable, and he said she’d said that every Christmas for forty years and drunk two glasses every time, and she swatted him with a dish towel.
It was a small, old, well-worn exchange.
I’d watched it my whole life. For the first time, standing in the kitchen doorway, I noticed how carefully they each played their parts, and how much tenderness there was under the swatting, and how little of it either of them ever said out loud.
Dinner was fine for about forty minutes.
My father talked about his new snowblower.
Tess asked polite questions about the resort rebuild.
Randy told a story about a client at his landscape design firm who’d insisted on a koi pond in Castle Rock in January.
Nobody mentioned Lesley. It was like sitting in a room with a very large piece of furniture that everyone was carefully walking around.
Then my mother put down her fork.
“Have you talked to her?” she asked.
“We text. About the baby.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s what she’s asked for.”
My mother sighed. “Well, I called her, you know. Back in November. I just wanted to see how she was doing.”
“I know. She told me you called.” Lesley had mentioned it in one line, in a text about something else, with no comment attached. I hadn’t asked for details.
“She was very firm with me,” my mother said.
“I only suggested she might come home while you two worked things out. For her own sake, in her condition. And she told me it was between the two of you and she’d decide for herself.
” Mom touched her napkin to her lips. “Which is her right, of course. But Lesley has always been so independent. I think she just needs some time on her own, and then she’ll come around.
She always does. She’s a sensible girl.”
“Nancy,” my father said.
“What? I’m being supportive. I’m saying she’ll come back.”
“You’re saying she’s being unreasonable,” my father said, “and that Hank just has to wait her out.”
“I’m saying no such thing.”
“You are.” My father set down his wineglass.
He’d been quiet most of the evening, which wasn’t unusual.
My father had always been the quiet one, a retired civil engineer who spent his weekends in his workshop and communicated mostly by building things.
“You’ve been saying it since November. ‘She’s so independent.
She’ll come around.’ Like she’s a teenager who ran off to a friend’s house to make a point. ”
“Clive, that’s not fair.”
“It’s not fair to her.” He looked down the table at me. “Is it?”
I didn’t answer right away. Randy was watching me. Tess had become very interested in her green beans.
“Can I say something?” Randy asked.
“Please do,” my father said.
Randy put his napkin on the table. My little brother was three years younger than me and had always been the easygoing one, the one who didn’t care about money, who’d dropped out of an MBA program to design gardens. He wasn’t a person who picked fights.
“Every family thing for the last seven years,” he said, “Lesley showed up, and half the time she showed up alone. Thanksgiving three years ago, you were on the phone in Dad’s study for two hours about the Telluride permit, and she carved the turkey because Dad’s shoulder was bad.
Mom’s sixtieth birthday party, you got there after the toasts.
Last Christmas Eve, Priscilla called during dinner, and you left for two hours and came back right before church.
Lesley stayed. She helped Mom with the dishes.
She sat through midnight service next to your empty seat.
” He paused. “Every single time, she apologized for you. She’d say, ‘Hank’s so sorry, something came up.
’ And every single time, we all said, ‘Oh, that’s Hank, he’s so busy, he takes care of everybody. ’”
My mother’s face had gone pink.
“We did it too,” Randy said, more quietly. “Mom, when you needed a ride to the orthopedist, who’d you call?”
“I called Hank, because Hank was closer.”
“You called Hank because Hank always said yes,” Randy said. “And when you asked him if Lesley would mind, what did he say?”
My mother didn’t answer.
“He said, ‘Lesley won’t mind,’” Randy said. “I was there. And we all just accepted it. Because Lesley never made a fuss. So we all decided she didn’t need anything.”
The silence at the table was absolute. The candles flickered. Somewhere in the kitchen, the dishwasher clicked into its next cycle.
My father cleared his throat. “Hank,” he said. “I want to tell you something. I should have told you years ago.”
“Dad...”
“Let me finish.” He looked down at his hands.
“When you boys were growing up, I worked every weekend for ten years. The Highway 285 expansion. Then the dam project in Summit County. Your mother raised the two of you mostly by herself. She never complained. She was strong. That’s what everybody said about her.
Nancy’s so strong.” He glanced at my mother, and something passed between them that I’d never seen before.
“She told me more than once that she was lonely. I heard her. I said I’d do better.
And I did, for a while. Then there was always another project. ”
My mother had gone very still.
“She stayed,” my father said. “Thank God, she stayed. But I got lucky, son. I watched you do the same thing to Lesley, and I didn’t say a word, because I figured you’d get lucky too. I shouldn’t have assumed that.”
I looked at my parents. My mother with her eyes shining.
My father with his big engineer’s hands folded on the tablecloth.
For a moment I could see exactly how easy it would be to take what he was offering.
It was right there. A family pattern. A father who’d shown me how.
A generation of Cavanagh men who worked too hard and married strong women who stayed.
“Thank you for telling me that, Dad,” I said. “But that’s not why.”
He looked up.
“I’m forty-one,” I said. “I didn’t learn this from you.
Or if I did, I had plenty of time to unlearn it.
Lesley told me, clearly, over and over, for years.
She told me in words I couldn’t possibly misunderstand.
She told me exactly what would happen if I didn’t change.
I knew. I just kept deciding it could wait. ”
Nobody spoke.
“All of us did it,” I said, “but I did it most, and I’m the one who married her.
We all looked at Lesley and saw somebody so capable that she didn’t need anything from anyone.
We treated her competence like proof she’d be fine with less.
And I did it more than anybody at this table.
I did it every week.” My voice was steady, which surprised me.
“She’s not being unreasonable, Mom. She’s not waiting for me to come find her.
She left because she was done asking, and she had every right to be.
Whether she comes back or not isn’t up to any of us. It’s up to her.”
My mother pressed her napkin against her mouth. After a moment, she set it down.
“I’ve been telling everyone she’d come around,” she said quietly. “I’ve been saying it like it was a comfort. Like it was a certainty.” She looked at my father. “I think maybe I was saying it for myself.”
My father reached over and put his hand on hers. She didn’t pull away.
Randy caught my eye across the table and gave me a small nod.
After dinner, my mother found me in the kitchen, where I was washing the good china because it couldn’t go in the dishwasher and because I needed something to do with my hands. She stood beside me with a dish towel and dried in silence for a while.
“I have a present for her,” she said finally. “For Lesley. I bought it in October. A baby blanket. I knitted the edging myself.” She hesitated. “Do you think she’d want it? I don’t want to... I don’t want her to think I’m pushing.”
I thought about it. “I’ll ask her,” I said. “If she says yes, I’ll have it mailed. If she says no, you’ll have to be okay with that.”
“I will be,” my mother said. She folded the towel over her arm. “I owe her an apology, I think. For the phone call.”
“Then you should write her one,” I said. “Just an apology. Don’t ask her for anything in it.”
My mother looked at me for a long time. Then she reached up and put her hand against my cheek, the way she used to when I was small.
“When did you get so wise?” she asked.
“About six weeks too late,” I said.
Later, going to get my coat from the mudroom before church, I heard my parents’ voices on the other side of the half-open door to the back porch. I stopped before I meant to.
“You never told me you knew,” my mother was saying quietly. “All those years. I thought you had no idea.”
“I knew,” my father said. “I just didn’t do anything about it. I thought if I didn’t talk about it, it wasn’t happening.”
A long silence.
“Well,” my mother said. “It was happening.”
“I know, Nance. I’m sorry.”
I took my coat off the hook as quietly as I could and went back through the kitchen the long way. Whatever they were saying to each other out there, after forty-four years, it belonged to them.
Randy was on the front porch, leaning on the railing with his hands in his pockets, his breath fogging in the cold. Tess had gone to warm up the car. I stood beside him and looked out at the dark pines and the lights of Evergreen far below.
“I wasn’t trying to pile on,” he said, after a while. “At dinner.”
“You weren’t.”
“Tess told me in the car on the way up that somebody should say it to you who isn’t angry at you.” He shrugged. “I’m not angry at you. I just like Lesley a lot. I always have.”
“So do I,” I said.
He bumped my shoulder with his. “Tess says you’re going to be a good dad.”
“Tess has met me twice.”
“Tess is an excellent judge of character,” Randy said. “It’s why she’s with me.”
We stood there until Tess honked the horn, and then we all drove up the ridge to the stone chapel for midnight service, and I sat in the pew where Lesley had sat alone the year before, beside my mother, and didn’t hear a word of the sermon.
On Christmas morning, alone in the house in Washington Park, I texted Lesley.
Merry Christmas. I hope Santa Fe is beautiful and that the baby let you sleep.
My mom knitted something for the baby and asked me to find out if you’d like it.
No pressure either way. She also wanted me to tell you she’s sorry about the phone call in November.
She’s going to write you herself if that’s okay.
Her reply came an hour later.
Merry Christmas. Santa Fe is freezing and gorgeous. Mom made posole. I’d love the blanket. Please tell Nancy thank you, and that she can write whenever she wants.
Then, a minute later, a photograph. A long, narrow bedroom with pale pink adobe walls. Morning light coming through a small window. And in the foreground, a hand resting on a curve of stomach under a soft blue sweater. Visibly rounder than the last time I’d seen her.
18 weeks, she wrote. Kicking like crazy.
I sat on the edge of my bed in the empty house and looked at that photograph for a long, long time.