by Ilana Masad
Which, whether Maggie likes it or not, is something that her mother clearly instilled in her. Maggie has taken vacation days to travel to California but always for short stints, often arranged around long weekends. She has a bunch of accumulated days off that she’s likely using now, since the bereavement leave only covered Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. It’s a double-edged sword—on the one hand, having a set work schedule allows her to use it as an excuse if there’s something she doesn’t want to do. “Oh, I have to get up early tomorrow for work,” she’ll say, or “I’ve gotta stay a bit late at the office today. Sorry, guys.” On the other hand, she tends to take her job a bit too seriously, always going in even when she really shouldn’t, like the time she didn’t notice she had a fever until Simon pointed out that she was sweating while everyone else was lobbying to turn off the A/C. Maybe her mother just couldn’t let loose that world, like Maggie can’t. Or maybe, she thinks, Iris used it as an excuse to stay away from them.
“I don’t have kids,” Maggie mutters to herself. “I’m not hurting anyone.” She misses a turn and waits for the phone’s GPS to recalibrate.
It’s almost six in the evening. A couple of hours ago, her eyes beginning to droop, she stopped at a gas station and napped in the car’s back seat for a while. She hadn’t slept enough the night before and knew it would be stupid to keep driving. See, Mom, I am responsible, she thought as she tossed a flannel shirt over her shoulders to keep the sun from burning her. Sometimes, it seems like everything she’s done since leaving home—going to college, graduating, buying a good used car, getting a straight job, actually liking it—could be viewed through this lens. As if she’s been trying to prove that, despite the weed and the molly and the boots and the androgynous clothes and the haircut and the lesbianism, all the things her mother disapproved of, she’s still capable of being an adult, of being responsible. That she’s still doing it, not only years after leaving home but now that her mother isn’t here to witness it—it’s painful, it’s pathetic.
Maggie’s mouth tastes like the cinnamon gum she bought at the gas station along with a limp chicken sandwich, and she wonders if she should stop somewhere to check out how she looks. But no—this isn’t a date. She’s just delivering something, isn’t she?
She isn’t certain what she’ll do when she gets there. The streets get smaller and wind tighter around her as she enters the city proper, until she reaches another residential neighborhood that looks, if she’s honest, no different from Oxnard. Everywhere is the same, she thinks. Just houses and houses and lawns and commercial districts dotted in between them. She’s never lived in a city where buildings are tall and crowd around her, but she’s often wondered if that’s where she should end up eventually; she doesn’t like the lawns, the false aesthetic that feels and looks like all suburbia in movies and television shows.
When her phone bleats out, “Your destination is on the right,” she parks and stares at the house. It’s bland, a one-story, painted a kind of grayish green above a brick foundation. A little smaller than the houses on either side, and the lawn has been pulled up and replaced by a rock garden with a few dry shrubs and a couple cacti breaking up the pale gray stones. There are lights on inside, peeking through blinds that are mostly shut. The letters, which have been sitting on the passenger seat next to her like a talisman while she drove, seem impossible to look at now. Her hands quiver as she shuts off the car and reaches toward them.
Abraham K. Okafor. This is where he lives. She didn’t start out that long ago, but it feels like her journey has been endless already and she’s immensely tired.
What am I even doing? she wonders, staring at the house. Someone lives here, someone whose life has nothing to do with hers. She should probably just leave the letter in the mailbox out front, a novelty one shaped like a pig whose curly tail is the handle. She imagines the mailman who comes by here every day, how resentful putting letters in this piglet’s ass must make him.
“Just do it,” she tells herself. “Fucking coward.” She snatches the letter, grabs her phone and grips it tightly in her hand, and makes sure she has her legal-carry knife in her jeans pocket—because what if her mother really does owe some kind of gambling debt or is involved in other shady activity? It’s not likely, no, but she can’t rule anything out yet—and slams the door to Peter’s car behind her. She walks up the path to the house with what she hopes is confidence and determination. Not that there’s anyone watching. It’s quiet in that way residential streets are in the evening, when everyone has gotten home from their nine-to-fives.
In movies, people always hesitate and turn around and come back and do this several times before they actually knock on the damn door. Maggie won’t let herself be this cliché. When she gets to the entrance, heart pounding, palms sweating, she presses the doorbell.
Silence. No ringing sound from inside that she can detect, though she does hear voices. Should she knock? She tries the doorbell again and knocks three times for good measure. The voices inside lower and halt and someone stomps toward the door. She could run, she could leave now—
“Yeah? Hi?” A broad-shouldered black man—no, a boy, she realizes after a moment, a teenager probably—opens the door. He’s wearing an oversized T-shirt but his bottom half is clad in what she’s pretty sure are those weird tight white pants that baseball players wear.
“Hi,” Maggie says, her voice trembling. “I’m looking for Abraham Okafor?”
“That’s me,” he says.
“Seriously?” she asks, now confused. He draws back a little, like he’s nervous. Of course. Of course he would be, she realizes. Some white lady he’s never met before at his door asking for him by name? But how could this kid be at all connected to her mother?
“Hey, what’s going on—” Another man reaches the door. He’s taller than the youth, rail-thin, absent any muscles at all it seems, dressed in what she can only think of as professorial gear: khaki slacks belted to his narrow frame and a black turtleneck sweater that seems too warm for the weather. A delicate salt-and-pepper mustache frames his upper lip. “Can I help you?” he says, shimmying in front of the boy, as if he might need to shield him from something.
“My name is Maggie Krause,” she says, and the older man’s eyes widen. “I’m looking for Abraham K. Okafor—I have a letter for him?” She holds up the envelope and the man’s gaze fixes on it.
“Oh, that’s you, Dad,” the kid says. He seems relieved.
After another awkward pause which is likely only momentary but feels longer, she adds, “It’s from Iris? Iris Krause?”
“Right. I’m Abe,” he tells Maggie. “Junior, can you go check on the sauce?” The youth looks between his dad and her, and his mouth purses. He blinks slowly, and she notices he has incredibly long, beautiful eyelashes. Feminine, almost. But he glares at her, a warning, she thinks, which is sweet, really. Protective. “Junior,” Abe repeats, his voice quiet but commanding.
“Yeah, yeah,” the kid, Junior, grumbles. He lets go of the door and turns inside.
“Um,” Maggie says. “So.”
“So,” Abe says, crosses his arms. “Is this a joke of some kind?”
Fury rises in her, an anger that feels violent. A joke? “No,” she says. “My mom, Iris, is dead. She died Sunday. She left some letters. She left one for you. I want to give it to you, but I want to know how you knew my mom.”
Abe’s lips part, his eyebrows knit—he looks stricken. “Dead? I . . . Lord. Was she sick?”
“No,” Maggie says, and swallows hard. “It was an accident.”
“And you’re her daughter? I’m so sorry for your loss. Please, come in,” he adds, stepping back.
Maggie steps inside. The ceilings are a bit low in the foyer, making the space look dank at first, but Abe leads her into an airier living room, and she’s a little stunned by the art everywhere. Colorful framed paintings and masks in a range of styles hang
on the walls, with a long row of hanging bookshelves above them, and stone or clay statues sit on end tables. She wishes Lucia were here to comment on the decor—would she find it intimidatingly classy, like Maggie does, or cluttered? More books lie on the ground in corners, apparently waiting for more shelf space. It smells incredible, and Maggie sees Junior stirring something on the stove—there’s a wide window cut into the wall between the living room and a small kitchen nested in the middle of the house. The boy’s eyes are glued to what must be a TV or some other screen and she can hear the fast-paced talk of a sports broadcaster.
“Sit, sit,” Abe says. His hands are clutched together, making a kind of washing motion. He seems as nervous as she feels. “Can I get you anything? Coffee, tea, water? A beer, maybe?”
“A beer would be great, actually,” she says.
“Great,” he says, and then hesitates. “You’re . . . you’re twenty-one, right?”
She smiles. She gets the feeling this man is a bit of a dork. “Twenty-seven,” she says.
“Good, good,” he mutters. He takes a while in the kitchen, and she can hear him murmuring under the noise of the game. Junior’s deeper voice says something that sounds like “But Dad!” and then hushes, along with the broadcaster. She hears footsteps retreating to the back of the house, where another TV switches on and then a door shuts. When Abe comes back out of the kitchen, he snaps the light in there off.
“I interrupted your dinner,” Maggie says, realizing that they were cooking and now they’re not.
“No, it’s all right, it’s simmering, don’t worry,” Abe says. He hands her a Heineken, but hasn’t taken one for himself.
“Oh, if you’re not having one, I’m okay—” Maggie tries to give back the beer but he shakes his head.
“It’s fine, please, drink.” He sits in an armchair across from her, his long legs spread apart and his elbows resting on his knees.
“Okay,” she says, but she doesn’t have a bottle opener and she doesn’t want to ask for one, so she just holds the cold glass in her hands, rolling it between them.
“So what does the letter say,” Abe says, staring at his feet.
“I didn’t read it.” The letter lays in her lap. She still hasn’t given it to him.
“What?” Abe’s head snaps up. “You didn’t?”
“I—yeah, no.”
He smiles. “Very respectful,” he says, though she’s not sure if it’s with approval, exactly. Maybe she’s naive, but Maggie never thought that reading the letters was a possibility. It’d be like finding her mother’s journal, or her father’s for that matter, and those at least make sense to read after someone’s dead—they were writing to themselves, after all.
But Maggie was always taught to respect privacy, and she knows for a fact that, no matter what she and her mother disagreed over, Iris never went through Maggie’s things. So when Maggie found these letters, she never thought of opening them, especially since they’re addressed to other people, a communication Maggie has no right to infringe on. But she could, she realizes. She could just leave now, and take the letters with her to a motel and smoke up and read them and see what this is all about.
But she doesn’t want to. At least, not yet. She wants to hear what Abe has to say.
“Here,” she says, and hands him the envelope finally. “I just . . . Can you tell me how you know her? I’ve never heard of you before,” she adds. And then, “Should I have?”
He takes the letter from her and turns it around and around in his hands. “No, I guess not,” he says.
Maggie waits. The shaking is back. She isn’t sure she really wants to hear whatever he’s about to say. But she also can’t leave, not now that she’s gotten here, not now that she’s met him. “So . . .” she says, and this seems like enough prompting.
“I met Iris about, wow, I guess it must be almost ten years ago. My wife—my ex-wife and I had just gotten divorced. My son, you saw him, he used to live with both of us, alternating, but my ex got a job on the East Coast and he didn’t want to move, so he stayed with me full-time.” Abe pauses, and Maggie wonders what his son has to do with meeting her mother. “The last time I saw Iris was when I told her that we wouldn’t be able to see each other anymore, because I didn’t want to confuse Junior. That was probably about five years ago now.” He stares behind Maggie’s shoulder, unfocused, and sighs. “I can’t believe she’s dead.”
“See each other?” Maggie says. The words roll around in her mouth. She is seeing Lucia. Ariel is seeing Leona. Dating. Fucking. Impossible—her parents’ marriage is perfect, was perfect, they were the most loving people she’s ever met. Look at how Peter is grieving; that doesn’t happen when someone is cheating. Right? Her heart is racing, and she wants to throw the bottle clutched between her hands, to see it shatter against a wall. And yet, a part of her is calmly thinking what she’s kept herself from acknowledging since she found the letters. I knew it.
Abe heaves a sigh and she notices his eyes are wet. “I don’t know if I should talk about this . . .”
“She left the letters she wanted to send at home,” Maggie snaps. “She could have left them with the fucking lawyer. She didn’t. Which means—” Maggie feels her voice rising, but she can’t help it, she’s livid. “Which means that she didn’t fucking even think about whether my brother or I would have questions, she just didn’t care, and my dad is sitting at home barely moving because he’s so depressed that his beloved wife is dead and you’re telling me you were fucking her?!” She doesn’t know when she stood up, but she’s on her feet. Abe isn’t. He’s still sitting, and doesn’t look alarmed so much as sad.
“Yes,” he says, so calmly that Maggie instantly feels scolded and sits back down. “That’s pretty much right.”
She waits, refusing to look away from his face, her jaw aching with how hard she’s clenching it to keep herself from angry-sobbing. Eventually he starts talking again.
“Look, Iris was a complicated person. She was on Ashley Madison, you know that site? Anyway, I’d made an account when I found out my wife had one, because I was mad. Then, after we divorced, I kept checking it occasionally. One day, I got a message from her. She said she was looking for someone she could talk to and be intimate with. She wasn’t looking for a one-night stand, she said, though she wouldn’t begrudge me if that’s what ended up happening. We started talking. She was fascinated with my work—I’m an astrobiologist.” He pauses, and since Maggie is pretty sure her expression betrays that she has no idea what that is, he adds, with the practiced tone of someone who needs to explain his job a lot, “I basically use real and simulated climates and landscapes to consider and test the viability of life elsewhere in the universe—” Maggie has a moment of thinking, Whoa, cool, before she focuses again. “—and she flattered me by taking an interest, asking me lots of questions. She came to town a little while after we started talking, and we had lunch and hit it off.”
“And, what, you were just okay with her cheating on her husband? A husband she had kids with? You were okay with being the other man? The home-wrecker?” Maggie grips the beer bottle so tightly that her bones begin to ache.
Abe looks at her with something akin to pity. “I was very lonely,” he says. “Iris was extremely special.” He shrugs. “She had rules, though.”
“That’s rich,” Maggie says. “She was already breaking the rules just by being with you.”
“Well, rules for me, I should say. I wasn’t allowed to ask anything about, well, about any of you. She told me she’d tell me when and if it was relevant, but that she wanted to keep her family life separate from anything she had with me. She said she had a road life and a home life and that she wasn’t going to ever mix the two.”
Maggie tries to digest this. Iris had secrets, obviously, but more than that, she wanted to keep them secret. Compartmentalized. Something is nagging at her. “When did you say you met
?”
“About ten years ago. I think it was 2007? Fall, probably, or late summer, something like that.”
There’s something infuriating about his vagueness. She does the math. “Jesus,” she says. “Was it in September of 2007 by any chance?”
Abe’s eyes squint as he tries to remember. “I think that’s right, yes.” He looks down at the letter in his hands and runs his fingers over his name. “Mind if I open it?”
“Go ahead,” Maggie says, and leans back. She really wants the beer right now. Remembering she has a lighter in her pocket, she gets it out, snaps the beer cap off, and takes a long swig, which isn’t as refreshing as she’d like since it’s warmed considerably in her grasp.
Iris may have wanted to keep her family life and dating life separate, Maggie thinks, but she met Abe when she was taking Maggie on that trip to see Sacramento State. And maybe that was the real reason she wanted to go in the first place. It wasn’t a job, and it certainly wasn’t wanting to spend time with her daughter.
Maggie pulls herself out of this mire of thoughts to watch Abe’s face as he reads the letter. It’s three pages long, handwritten. She takes another swig of her beer, thinks of her own infidelity. It was never this way, never so . . . calculated, is the only word she can come up with. When she cheated, it was, at least in hindsight, deliberate, but it was also spontaneous in the moment, not planned. It was a way to create a confrontation she didn’t know how to start otherwise, meaning it was never a well-kept secret. And none of her flings ever looked at her the way Abe is looking at this damn letter, that’s for sure.
“Did you love her?” she asks, interrupting him.
When he glances up, his eyes are definitely wet and his voice is thick when he says, “Yes. Yes, I did. It wasn’t easy, and I never saw her very often, but yes, I loved her very much. That’s why I ended it. She wouldn’t leave your father, you see. She told me that from the very beginning, but as time went on, I started to hope. And my son was hitting puberty and I needed to focus on him. If I could have, I would have asked her to marry me and come live with us. But that wasn’t going to happen.” He looks back at the letter and continues reading.