Chapter 10
HANK
Family weekend was the tenth of October, and I didn't put it on the calendar.
That sounds like a small thing. It isn't, for me.
Six weeks earlier I'd have had the hotel booked in August, the route printed, a table booked for seven o'clock Saturday, plus a plan for parking that got us around the stadium traffic.
It's the only way I've ever known how to love anybody.
Look at the future, find the problems in it, solve them before they get here.
Instead I waited until the Sunday before. She was in the kitchen grading — she brings home the health forms, she's not a teacher, but she brings the forms home. I said, "Do you want me to come to Owen's thing?"
She looked up.
"Say that again."
"Do you want me to come."
"I do."
"Okay." I stood there. "You want me to book anything?"
"There's a Hampton on the north side of campus. Two nights. Get the one with the parking, not the cheap one."
"Done."
Forty seconds, the whole conversation. I'd been standing in that doorway working up to it for ten minutes.
I drove up Friday after the Kelleher job. Colleen slept most of the way, which she never does in a car, and which told me more about her first six weeks of school than anything she'd said out loud.
The Hampton had a breakfast room with a waffle machine that beeped, and Saturday morning she stood in front of it for a while watching a man in a college sweatshirt figure out the batter cup.
She said, "Meg would have that thing running in ten seconds.
" Then she made herself one, ate about half, and left the rest.
I didn't make an itinerary. That morning I asked her what she wanted to do, and she said she wanted to see his room, then walk around, then sit somewhere with a coffee for a while without talking to anybody. So that's what we did, in that order, for four hours.
His room's a disaster. Two plates on the windowsill. The gray blanket was on the bed, though — folded wrong, but on the bed.
Colleen didn't clean anything. I watched her want to. She stood in the middle of that room with her hands in her jacket pockets, asked him where he keeps his laundry money, and left it alone.
We walked. There was something on the quad with tables, a band that was too loud, and I could see him steering us wide around it, embarrassed by it, so I let him steer.
He took us the long way past the library to show us a vending machine that dispenses ramen in a cup with the hot water already in it, which he called the greatest achievement of the last hundred years.
Colleen asked what it cost. He said two dollars.
She said that was robbery. He said it's two dollars at two in the morning, Mom, there's no other store.
A kid went by on the path with a longboard under his arm, said hey to Owen, and Owen said hey back.
Colleen looked at me. She didn't have to say it, because I'd done the same arithmetic she had — six weeks in, and there are already people in this town who say hey to my son.
At two o'clock she sat down on a bench outside the science building in the sun. "I'm going to sit here for twenty minutes," she said. Owen said okay, so the two of us went and got coffee while she sat there by herself with her eyes closed.
I didn't ask if she was all right. I brought her the coffee, sat down at the other end of the bench, and said nothing for the rest of her twenty minutes. Eventually she reached over and put her hand on my knee for a second. That was the best part of the weekend.
Dinner Saturday was a barbecue place with paper on the tables, because that's where Owen wanted to go, because they give you something free if you finish the big sandwich. He didn't finish the big sandwich.
Halfway through, with his mouth full, he said, "Oh — hey. When's the big camper trip?"
Colleen's fork stopped about an inch off her plate.
He didn't know. He's eighteen. He'd heard about a camper back in August in a group text from a neighbor's kid, filed it under things his parents were doing, and brought it up on a Saturday because he was making conversation.
I could feel her not looking at me.
"There's no camper," I said. "I cancelled it."
"Wait, seriously? Why?"
"Because I planned six weeks of your mother's life without asking her." I picked up a napkin. "So there's no trip. There isn't going to be one until she plans it." I wiped my hands. "I retired from travel-agenting this family."
Owen laughed. He thought it was a bit, which was fine.
Then he said, "So what, you're just going to sit in the house?"
I felt it come up my throat — the joke, the out, something like your mother's got me on a short leash now, bud. It would have put me and my son on one side of that table with our thumbs up, my wife on the other side holding the actual thing. Twenty-six years I've gotten out of rooms that way.
"No," I said. "I'm going where she says. She's already got one booked."
"Where?"
"Rock Harbor," Colleen said. "Four days over break."
"Is that the place with the blue door? The one you always?—"
"That's the one."
"Nice," Owen said. He reached across me for the other half of my cornbread, and that was the end of it.
I didn't say another word about the camper. A man who tells the story of his own mistake at a table, out loud, in a funny voice, is asking everybody at that table to agree it's over.
We left Sunday at eleven. He hugged his mother a long time in the parking lot, longer than he meant to, I think. Then he hugged me and said "drive safe," which is a thing he's heard me say a thousand times, and which came out of him sounding almost like a man.
She cried for four miles on the interstate. I didn't try to fix it. I put my hand on her leg, took it back to shift, put it back.
Around Exit 41 she said, "Meg's not answering me."
"She's busy."
"She's not busy. She's four hours away with a fiancé, a whole life of her own, and I get every third text now." She said it without any drama, which is how she says the bad ones. "That's how it goes. That's normal."
"You want me to call her?"
She turned her head and looked at me like I'd spoken French.
"You've never called Meg in your life."
That's not true. I've called Meg. I called her when her car died in Delaware. I call her on her birthday most years, in the evening, after Colleen reminds me at breakfast.
But I knew what she meant, and I sat with it for about thirty miles.
Everything I know about my kids came to me because a woman told me.
Every single thing I've ever known about my daughter's inner life arrived secondhand, at the sink, at the end of a day, from Colleen.
She was the switchboard. Both of them called her, she carried it to me, and I got to feel close to people I wasn't actually talking to.
Then the switchboard went quiet in September. I didn't know one thing about my own children for three weeks, and it took me until Exit 41 to work out why.
She fell asleep again outside of Millville, head against the window, mouth open a little, the sun going down orange over the median.
I drove.
At the light in Sheldon I got my phone off the console and did two things.
First was a text to Meg. Hey kid. It's Dad. Call your mother this week, she's had a stretch. Not a big thing. Just call her.
She came back in about ninety seconds. is she ok??
Yes. Call her anyway.
ok. weird but ok. love you
I sent the same thing to Owen, shorter, because he doesn't read anything over one line.
It's turned into a Sunday habit. Not a system — I didn't build anything.
It's a thing I do most Sundays now, putting gas in the truck or standing out in the driveway.
Two texts. I don't tell them what to feel, I don't tell them to say anything in particular.
I just move the reminder off her desk onto mine.
She carried it alone for twenty-four years, and the fact that nobody ever handed it to her doesn't mean she wasn't carrying it.
The second thing I did at that light was open the thread with my brother.
I haven't been able to look at it since Labor Day without my stomach turning over. It's all still there. I thought about deleting it, and then I thought that deleting it would be one more thing I did quietly, by myself, without telling anybody.
I typed: Countdown's over. Turns out I was marking off the wrong days.
He sent back a thumbs up. Then, a minute later: You good?
Getting there.
I put the phone face down in the console. The radio was on low, some station out of the county seat playing songs from when we were first married, and I turned it down until it was gone.
My wife slept beside me another forty minutes. I drove the rest of the way home in a quiet I didn't have to fill.