Chapter 3
It was never my grand plan to live with my late husband’s parents indefinitely.
But then it also hadn’t been my plan to be a grieving, pregnant widow on the eve of a global pandemic.
And yet here Lucy and I still were, safely and lovingly cocooned in Rebecca and William’s guesthouse on their expansive property, complete with a tennis court and swimming pool, and all the perks of having doting grandparents a stone’s throw away.
Now, as I watched Lucy run around the tennis court swinging her sparkly pink racquet, her tiny face scrunched in concentration, Harper’s drastic ultimatum continued playing on a loop.
A timer was suddenly ticking on my writing dreams. Next Friday. As in, seven days from now.
“Can I be done? I’m tired.” Lucy’s full-length shimmery purple Rapunzel princess dress seemed to swallow her slumping body.
William mouthed “Thank you” to me, his face bright with exhilaration, and I couldn’t keep the hint of a smile from escaping. William was sort of like the entire family’s teddy bear. Making him happy sometimes felt like winning a book award.
I walked back to the fence and settled into the hypnotic rhythm of picking up balls with the hopper.
If Sam hadn’t died, things would be so different now.
The three of us would probably have just arrived home for winter training before heading to Australia for some warm-up tournaments before the first Grand Slam of the year.
Call of the Void would have been published already, and probably still on the shelves at the very same bookstore where I’d had a minor panic attack yesterday.
Maybe there would have been a third book on the way.
And perhaps a sibling for Lucy? I wouldn’t have needed an ultimatum to keep writing, that was for sure.
After dumping a hopper of balls into Coach Martin’s basket, I returned to my sideline post.
“I think that’s enough for today,” Coach Martin said, interrupting my mental journey of what-ifs and if-onlys. “Good work, Lucy.”
Then they high-fived. Or more like Lucy jumped and repeatedly tried to reach his hand before dissolving into giggles and then running into her grandpa’s waiting arms. William swung her around and peppered her face with kisses, his blue eyes crinkling as he smiled.
Although Lucy would never be twirled and kissed by her daddy, she was deeply loved by William, Rebecca, my best friend, Frannie, and me.
In fact, for the first year of Lucy’s life, we were the only four adults who held her, after my own parents sadly failed to rise to the occasion.
Though they’d both been by my side for Sam’s funeral and my mom had even suggested that I move back home to Berkeley, when I later shared that I was pregnant with their first grandchild, and it was a girl, each of them instantly found a long list of excuses to pull back.
Given the central event of my childhood—the death of my older sister, Callie, in a freak accident when she was fourteen and I was twelve—their reaction was more disappointing than surprising.
My parents had announced they were getting divorced right after my high school graduation.
Before the ink was dry on their divorce decree, my dad moved to the East Coast. With a new job, a new wife, and a new stepson’s busy sports schedule, his visits to LA were infrequent before Sam died.
After Lucy, they were nonexistent, although he did occasionally request a photo and never failed to let slip how much she reminded him of Callie at the same age.
As for my mom, the minute she learned she was going to be a grandmother, she had the epiphany that her condo was not set up for children.
The pandemic was her next, and probably best, excuse.
She couldn’t bear the idea of risking Lucy’s health until everyone had been vaccinated.
The caution was understandable, but it still stung.
And then, when that excuse had long expired, she still rarely visited.
As a hyperfocused mathematics professor at UC Berkeley, she always seemed to put her work and her students first.
I got it. I really did. I’d spent most of my life trying not to miss Callie—and failing.
Followed by trying not to miss Sam—and failing at that, too.
But despite the fact that my own family of origin was more than a little broken, I was managing my grief in a healthier way than my parents.
As a consequence, my daughter was thriving in spite of all the people she was missing from her life—a deceased dad and aunt, and two alive but disengaged grandparents—and I hoped that would always be the case.
Now, as I watched Lucy beam at William, my heart swelled.
It wasn’t everything, but it was definitely something.
An hour later, Lucy and I padded into the kitchen in our bathing suits and cover-ups for Friday-night dinner.
Before Sam died, before there was a Lucy, Friday-night dinners were served in the dining room, and we all made an effort to wear clean, nonathletic clothing.
But after Sam died, none of us could bear the emptiness of the dining room table without him in his designated chair.
It was too painful a reminder of all that we’d lost. Sam was serious when he needed to be, but he was also the glue that held the family together with his sunny outlook and good-natured humor.
He could always be counted on to loosen up his mom after an intense workweek at the agency, even occasionally causing Rebecca to dissolve into fits of hysterical laughter that were contagious, precisely because it was as though you could see the transformation taking place within her in real time as she cast off her more formal work persona.
It was like watching a Polaroid picture develop.
These days we frequently dined together in the cozy breakfast nook, often in swimwear, and the dining room had become a relic of another era, the sort of room one walked by quickly without even thinking to look in.
Fortunately for all of us, though, as Lucy’s personality blossomed, she’d unwittingly begun to assume her dad’s role in the family as the one who could make us all laugh.
William walked into the kitchen wearing a short-sleeve navy polo with a pink beach towel wrapped around his waist. He closed in on Rebecca, who was at the island, still in her chic work ensemble, dressing the salad; pulled back her long, expensively highlighted brown hair; and kissed his statuesque wife on the cheek.
Her posture at sixty was better than mine at twenty-nine, and a constant reminder to straighten my back.
Then he plucked a cucumber from the bowl and popped it in his mouth. “What’s for dinner?”
“Maria prepared roasted chicken, smashed sweet potatoes, and a green salad,” Rebecca said, carrying the wooden salad bowl over to the table.
William lifted an eyebrow at me behind Rebecca’s back, and I stifled a giggle.
This was the third chicken dinner that Rebecca’s latest housekeeper had prepared this week.
And William wasn’t a fan. Her cooking didn’t hold a candle to the meals that were once expertly whipped up by Rosa, who we all still missed terribly for so many reasons and hadn’t heard from even once since the day of Sam’s funeral.
Even through our own heavy grief, it had been obvious to us all how broken up Rosa was about Sam’s death in the days between the accident and the funeral.
But none of us expected her to walk away forever.
On the morning of the funeral, Rosa had taken Rebecca aside and asked for some time off to visit her family in Guatemala, to figure out how to come to terms with losing “our Sammy.” Then, not only had she never come back, she’d vanished from our lives.
To this day I still wondered if Rosa might have returned had she known I was carrying Sam’s baby.
Her departure had been so abrupt I never got the chance to tell her.
In fact, in the days of despair that followed Sam’s accident, I found myself unable to tell anyone about the pregnancy for fear that saying the words out loud might somehow jeopardize the baby—my last piece of Sam.
By the time I’d worked up the courage to tell Rebecca and William they were going to be grandparents, Rosa was long gone.
The instant we all took our seats, Lucy asked, “Can I have some ranch for my veggies? Please?”
At the magic word, I hopped up to pour some dressing into a ceramic ramekin.
We may have settled into a more casual dining style, but I stuck to the “no plastic containers on the table” rule that had once seemed so important to Rebecca.
When I returned to the table, I noticed Lucy was pitched forward at an odd angle with her right arm behind her back, awkwardly trying to stab her mac and cheese with her yellow plastic fork in her left hand, missing each time.
“Whatcha doing?” I asked, setting the small dish in front of Lucy.
“Grandpa says I have to use this hand.” She waved her left hand and fork at me.
“Why does Grandpa want you to use that hand?” I asked in a singsong voice.
Lucy shifted her bright-blue eyes to her beloved grandpa. “To be a good tennis player?”
“Um, I seem to recall you were both at her three-year-old checkup, when the pediatrician said you shouldn’t try to influence which is her dominant hand,” I chided William and Rebecca.
“Come on, Thea,” William said, making a goofy face at Lucy. “Nadal wasn’t a natural lefty and he turned out fine.”
“It’s not like it’s hurting her,” Rebecca said, rushing to her husband’s defense. “It’s a fun game, right, Lucy?”
“I love games,” Lucy said through a mouthful of mac and cheese. Having dropped her fork on the floor, she’d shoveled it in with her hand. But it was her left hand, which was probably the only reason Rebecca was letting Lucy’s atrocious table manners slide.