6. Gus
Gus
It takes me three nights to find the right video, because I have to watch them to choose one, and I can only do a few at a time.
There are hundreds. Nora filmed everything, and I filmed her.
After she died I moved all of it to a drive and never opened the folder again.
Now I sit at my desk after bedtime with headphones on, going through them slowly, a few a night, because that’s all I can take.
Her laugh shows up in the third one and I have to stop for the night.
Wednesday I find the one I want and watch it four times.
Then I close the laptop and sit in the dark office for a while, not moving.
Thursday, after school, I put Teddy on the couch next to me.
“June says you had a question about Mom. About her voice.”
He goes very still, for Teddy. “I couldn’t find it,” he says. “In my head.”
“That’s okay. I keep it for you. That’s my job.” I open the laptop. “Want to hear her?”
He nods, both hands under his legs.
It’s from the old house. Nora is on the couch with Margot tucked under her arm, four years old, and Teddy a fat baby asleep on her chest. She’s reading the first girl-detective book to them, doing a different voice for the librarian.
Partway through she looks up at the camera, says, “Gus. Enough,” laughs, and goes back to the page.
Teddy watches the whole thing without blinking. When it ends he says, “Again,” so we watch it again. The third time through, he leans back against my arm.
“She sounds regular,” he says.
“She sounds exactly regular.”
“The baby is me.”
“The baby is you.”
He thinks about it. “Play the part where she says your name.”
We play the part where she says my name.
Out in the hallway, floorboards. Margot’s door, when I pass it later, is open an inch, and her light is off, and I don’t knock.
June has Teddy’s dinner going downstairs like this is any Thursday.
When Teddy pounds down and announces, “I heard Mom and she sounds regular,” she says, “That’s a good way to say it,” and hands him his fork.
Nothing in her face says the videos were her idea. They were her idea.
* * *
Saturday is the Foundation dinner, and the Foundation dinner is three hours of being Augustus Vaughn in a ballroom with Nora’s name on the screens.
Getting out the door takes all four of us. Teddy comes downstairs in his little jacket with his hair combed flat and announces, “I look like a waiter.”
“You look sharp,” I say.
“Waiters look sharp,” June says, straightening his collar. “Waiters are the sharpest people at any party. Go find your shoes.”
Margot comes down in the green dress with her hands already in the pockets, watching every face for a verdict. Nobody makes it a moment. June just says, “Good call on the pockets.” Margot says, “I know.” That’s all anybody says about the dress, which is exactly how Margot wanted it.
Then Margot looks at me and says, “Your tie is crooked.”
It isn’t, I’d swear it isn’t, but June sets down the shoe she’s holding, crosses over, and redoes it in about four seconds flat.
I spend all four of them looking at a point on the ceiling.
“There,” she says, already gone again. I decide not to think about it.
I think about it at every red light on the way downtown.
The kids come for the first hour — that’s tradition, the donors expect it, and Teddy considers it his event. Carol meets us at the doors, looks at the dress, and says, “It’s very simple.”
“She chose it,” June says, pleasant as anything, and that is somehow the end of the conversation.
For an hour I do the rounds with a kid on each side. Teddy charms a table of bankers by teaching them the rules of wall-ball, including the parts he knows are wrong.
“—and if it hits your head, you’re out of the whole recess,” he tells a man who runs half the banks in the Northwest.
“That seems harsh,” the man says.
“Wyatt made it up,” Teddy says. “We follow it anyway.” The table decides he’s the best thing at the party, which he is.
Margot stands with her hands in her pockets and shakes whatever gets offered, polite as a diplomat’s kid.
June stays one step outside every photograph and every circle, close enough that Margot never has to look for her.
When the crowd gets loud around the auction tables, Margot drifts to her, and June hands her the seating cards to guard, which gives her somewhere official to stand.
My daughter won’t take a hug from anyone alive, but she’ll take a job.
June knows that. The Foundation photographer works the tables, same as every year.
Two hundred people, Nora’s name on everything, my kids in the middle of it, and I do the thing I do.
I’m good at it. That used to be a fact I liked about myself.
At eight, Carol collects the kids — her privilege, her night too.
She claimed the drive home on Tuesday, over the phone, in a voice that wasn’t asking, and June’s job quietly became the first hour instead.
Teddy falls asleep against her shoulder in the coat line.
Which leaves June at the staff table for the speeches, because we came in one car and I’m her ride home.
“You could wait in the car,” I tell her on my way past. “This part runs long.”
“I’m fine. I have a book and unlimited rolls.” She holds up the book as evidence. “Go. They’re waving at you.”
She reads through the auction. She doesn’t perform interest, doesn’t check her phone, doesn’t watch me. Somehow that’s the most restful thing in the room.
Mitch finds me between courses with two glasses and hands me one. “Good crowd. You’re on after the auction.”
“I know the order, Mitch. I built the order.”
“You did.” He looks at me a moment too long, the way he’s been doing lately. “You sound better, you know. Since the summer.”
“I sleep now.”
“Whatever’s doing it,” he says, “protect it.” Then somebody in a tux needs him, because somebody in a tux always needs him, and he goes.
The speech is one I’ve given, in some version, three years running: Nora’s name, the ward we funded, the nurse whose salary the room is about to pay for, the ask.
I know where the laugh goes and where the pause goes.
I hit the laugh and I hit the pause. Two hundred people look at me the way they’ve looked at me for three years — like grief did something flattering to my face — and they give, which is the point.
It works. It always works. Somewhere in the middle I hear Nora saying Gus, enough.
I push the thought down and finish, and the pledge cards go around the room.
Afterward there’s the door line: every donor gets a hand, a name, a thank-you with something specific in it.
I’m the last thing they touch on the way out, and I make it worth the ticket.
Near the end of the line, a small woman in her eighties takes my hand in both of hers.
“My Walter watched every game you ever played.”
“Row K,” I say. “He liked the corner glass. I hope you bid on the trip, Eleanor.”
“I bid on two.” She pats my hand and goes out delighted. That one was real. It takes the same amount out of me anyway.
The whole line takes fifty minutes. By the end my face aches in the two spots it always aches. The event manager is crying a little, which happens every year, and the room is down to staff and stacked chairs.
June is standing by the doors with my coat over her arm and her book closed on one finger. She doesn’t say a word until we’re in the car.
The parking garage is quiet. The city goes by. I loosen my tie at the first red light, and it’s a long minute before she speaks.
“You have a different voice for the public stuff,” she says, looking out her window. “You used it all night in there. You’re not using it now.”
I look over at her. She’s watching the closed shops go past like they’re worth watching.
“Most people don’t hear a difference,” I say.
“Most people were at the party. I was working it. You watch different things from the staff table.” She lets that sit for half a block.
“Take the next left. There’s a drive-through burger place open till midnight, and you didn’t eat anything at your own dinner.
I was watching. You never once had a plate in front of you. ”
At the speaker box she leans across me like we’ve done this a hundred times. “Two cheeseburgers, a large fries, and a shake.” She looks at me. “Chocolate or vanilla?”
“I’m in a tuxedo.”
“He’ll have chocolate,” she tells the speaker.
So that’s how the Foundation’s biggest night of the year ends: a drive-through line, a tuxedo, a paper bag handed over by a teenager who doesn’t recognize me.
We eat in the parking lot with the engine off.
She takes the pickles off her burger and puts them on mine without asking. Neither of us mentions it.
The dome light is on. There’s salt on her lower lip and a curl come loose against her neck, and for exactly one second I look too long at both.
Forty-nine years old, in a tuxedo, in a parking lot, noticing that my kids’ nanny is beautiful.
I hand her the fries and put my eyes back on the windshield where they belong.
“It was a good speech,” she says, when the food is mostly gone. “The part about the nurse.”
“It’s a good speech three years running.”
“That’s not what I said.” She balls up the wrapper.
“Your speech is good. The fifty minutes at the door after — that’s the part that wears you down.
Anybody can see it, if they look at you for one entire evening instead of one handshake.
” She says it the way she’d report the garage light being out.
Then she gathers the trash, because she cannot sit still next to a mess.
“I’m not saying stop. It raised a lot of money for sick kids.
I’m just saying I saw what the whole night took out of you.
Somebody in your life should see that part. ”
I’ve been looked at my whole adult life. Being seen is a different thing, and I don’t know what to do with it, so I start the car.
She’s quiet the rest of the way, and there’s nothing uncomfortable in it.
At home she goes in ahead of me, hangs her coat on the far peg, does her last pass of the kitchen — stove off, back door locked, one light on over the sink — and goes up.
I do the doors and the headcount. Both kids down. Her light on, then off.
I sit at the kitchen counter for a while in my undone tie, and I count the people who have ever caught the difference between my voices.
Nora, who died with that knowledge. A stranger on the internet, once, who typed you sound tired tonight into a chat window in the middle of the night and was right.
And now the woman at the end of the upstairs hall, who heard it across a ballroom and then bought me a burger about it.
Three. Two of them I lost.
I turn off the kitchen light and go up, and I don’t look at the laptop at all.