by Mae Wood
Me: You’re parent on duty.
Bert: Cool. I’ll be at a food conference in a few weeks. Weekend only, so Grady plans should be the same.
I thought about texting him back a picture of a cartoon kitten giving a thumbs up. Because stupid kitten images made me happy. But then I heard Dad and Grady laugh, and sitting on a boat in the middle of Long Island Sound with my men and New Orleans in my future, I had all the happiness I needed.
28
Thomas
The Drake. Laurie and I stayed here our wedding night and we’d brought the kids a time or two when we’d visited the city. I met Laurie while interviewing at a Chicagoland hospital during business school. I was lost, trying to wind my way through the hospital, and she took pity on me and delivered me to the Human Resources department. In the five minutes we were together, I’d asked for her number and secured a date for that night. Pizza. I smiled at the thought, as the kids and I walked past the hotel on our way to our fancy dinner on Oak Street.
The Drake may be the granddaddy of all Chicago hotels, but it wasn’t chic enough for Cassie or hip enough for Claire. When pressed, Miller said that anything was fine with him, and reminded me that he was only going to be in Chicago for twenty-two hours, flying back before fireworks started. I hoped it was the woman he didn’t feel like discussing with me rather than his work that was calling him back to Boston.
I’d booked two adjoining rooms in a hotel whose greatest attribute, based upon Cassie and Claire’s texts, was the retractable rooftop bar. But I knew the subtext to those texts. We were staying there so they could have brag-worthy pictures for their social media accounts. And, based upon the minimalistic decor of the restaurant the girls picked, our one family dinner had also been selected to be photographed.
As I ordered my very dirty martini, I gazed up the live olive trees growing in the middle of the space. Miller was having a beer. My daughters flashed fake IDs to order some overly complicated cocktails, and I turned a blind eye because they were turning twenty-one in a couple of months and I didn’t want to fight with them tonight. I wanted to enjoy my kids. My three babies. All grown up and chatting with each other. I was a bystander. A bystander who was footing the bill, but still a bystander.
A hostess led us to our table, and once we settled in, I raised my glass. “A toast,” I said. My children raised theirs, their mother’s light hair and my blue eyes. “Knock knock.”
“Dad,” Claire groaned. Cassie looked around to see who might have heard me begin a knock knock joke. Miller just shook his head and rolled his eyes.
“No, stay with me here. This place is Fig & Olive, right? So, again, from the top. Knock Knock.”
“Who’s there?” they all mumbled in union.
“Olive,” I said, a smile on my face as I set up the punchline.
“Olive who?” they asked, their faces pleading that I speed this up.
“Olive you. I love you,” I enunciated, if they hadn’t gotten my terrible pun. “Cheers. Happy Fourth.”
“Happy Fourth,” they all repeated, clinking glasses. I washed down the rest of my martini and munched on the last olive. It was good. Fresh.
“Think they grow these olives here?” I said, waggling my empty cocktail pick toward the tops of the trees peaking up through the center of the restaurant.
“Please, please, don’t ask,” Cassie begged.
“Dad,” groaned Claire again.
“All right, all right,” I said holding up my hands. “What’s our agenda for tomorrow?” The clock was ticking and over the meal, we came up with a game plan. Under the pretense of it being educational, we were headed to Barney’s for Cassie, followed by the Museum of Contemporary Art for Claire.
“What about lunch at that pizza place we always used to go to when we visited? The place with the weird name?” suggested Miller.
“Pequod’s?” I was surprised they remembered. “Yeah, we can do that if it’s still open. It’s not really near anything else you want to do, but sure.”
“Is that the whale pizza place?” asked Claire.
“The pizza place Mom liked with whales on the table,” explained Cassie as she whipped out her phone and tapped away. “It’s open. And they serve lunch. So, shopping, I mean, my educational field trip,” she said with a saucy smile. “Then pizza, art, put Miller on his plane and look at fireworks?”
“Sounds like a plan,” said Miller, nodding at the server that we were ready to order.
As we ate our beautiful meals, I thanked the girls for picking a place with good food as well as style. “Want some trivia?” I asked my kids, over a dessert sampler and coffees.
“Is this another olive joke?” Cassie cautioned.
“Because we’ve heard olive them,” said Miller.
“Two points for Gryffindor! Good one, Miller,” I said with a smile. “But it’s not an olive joke.”
“Yeah, he’s moved on to figs and just fig-ured out a new one,” he said, laughing at his own joke.
“No, this is legit Popov family trivia that you should know by now,” I said. “Pequod was where I took your mom on our first date. Canadian bacon, green peppers and mushrooms.”
“You hate mushrooms,” said Claire, confusion spreading on her face.
“But I liked your mom.” Looking at each of my children in turn, I continued. “I will always love your mother. I hope you know that.”
“We know that. And we’ve talked,” said Claire looking at her mirror image across the square table. Cassie nodded back and Claire continued. “We want you to be happy. Truly.”
“And we’d like to meet her,” said Miller. “I mean, assuming you continue to hang out with her, one of us would like to meet her at some point.”
“Like a consigliere?” The idea of my children forming their own mafia organization made me smile and I held back a chuckle. It would be the worst mafia family ever. The Keystone Cops of mafia families. The three of them conspiring in a dark basement. Miller barking out orders to end some poor schmuck who had crossed a line and brought dishonor to the Popovs. Claire questioning everything and her kindness undercutting her brother’s ruthlessness. But when you say swim with the fishes, do you mean drown him or can we like send him on a dive trip somewhere far, far away. Like the Great Barrier Reef? He can’t do much from there. And Cassie getting excited at the prospect of outfitting someone for a dive trip. Oh, aviator sunglasses are making a huge comeback. Wayfarers are totally out. And in last month’s Vogue there were these red and white striped board shorts. Not quite an awning stripe, but really bold . . .
“Listen, no horse heads will be put in anyone’s bed. There will be no sleeping with fishes,” said Miller, scraping the last of the chocolate pot de crème onto his spoon. And my smile broadened as I replayed the idea of my kids planning a mob hit.
“Actually, she might find that fun,” I mused. The kids looked at me like I was crazy. “Amy likes mob movies.”
“She likes mob movies?” asked Cassie, an eyebrow dipping in disbelief.
“She does. Donnie Brasco is her favorite.”
“Isn’t that the one where they dismember the guy in the tub?” said Claire, going pale at the memory of the brutal scene.
“Yeah. We saw Blood Bonds opening weekend. It was okay.”
“Please say that wasn’t your first date,” said Cassie, wide-eyed and shaking her head with me in disappointment.
“It wasn’t our first date,” I said, not sure if I wanted to explain our unplanned breakfast date to my kids and all that breakfast would imply.
“Dad,” she continued. “Really. Pizza with Mom and a mob movie with this woman? You plan terrible dates.”
“Actually, the pizza thing sounds good to me,” said Claire.
“No,” said Cassie. “Dates should require effort. He needs to show her that he likes her by making an effort.”
“But he ate mushrooms for Mom,” Claire said in my defense.
“But there’s no way Mom knew he hated mushrooms
when he ate them. She wouldn’t have suggested mushrooms if she knew he hated them. For it to count, she has to know that you’re making an effort.”
“Claire Bear, does this mean that you’re really okay with me seeing Amy?”
“You promise she’s nice to you?” she asked.
“She is. I swear,” I answered.
“Then, I’m good.”
At her words, I felt a million times lighter. Even though the kids had given me their blessing over the phone, seeing it spill from their lips and seeing their not-unhappy faces while saying it was okay that I was dating, that was what I needed. And I wanted to tell them about Amy. “What would you guys say if I told you I was taking Amy to New Orleans next weekend?”
“Oh, that’s great, Dad!” said Cassie, genuine happiness spreading across her face. Miller nodded in agreement.
“It is,” said Claire, and I wasn’t so sure she meant it, but she’d given me her acceptance and I was going to take it at face value.
“And, Cassie Lassie, you want to help me? Amy’s birthday is coming up and I don’t know what to get her.”
“Well,” she said, “Thank God that you’re taking me on this educational field trip to Barney’s tomorrow. I’ll set you up. Now tell me what she likes.”
29
Amy
I hated New Orleans in late summer. There was no escaping the bayou feeling, the hot air heavy with humidity, which meant you didn’t want to do anything but sit in some shade and drink. Apropos for New Orleans.
We wound through the Garden District, holding hands and admiring the old homes and their meticulously maintained front gardens tucked behind wrought iron fences. At a corner, I tugged him to the left. “Mind if we go this way? There’s a house I haven’t seen since before Katrina and though I know the Garden District didn’t flood, I’d like to see it again.”
“Sure. What house is it?”
“It’s my ex’s grandparents’ house,” I confessed. “It’s very cool, as long as you don’t think about the slave quarters in the back too much.”
“I thought your ex was from Memphis,” said Thomas.
“He is, but his grandmother was from New Orleans. The house was in the family, and I can’t imagine they’ve sold it.”
“So that’s what it’s like being married to the one percent?” he teased, as we milled down another row of mansions.
“Ha,” I said. “Not quite one percent, at least I don’t think, and I don’t complain about it. His family took good care of us. His trustee looked the other way when Bert turned down a grad school program at Georgetown and considered our place in Denver part of his living expenses for education, which is why Bert ended up in culinary school.”
“Memphis wasn’t in your plans?” he asked. I could see the wheels turn in his head as he realized just how much having Grady at twenty-one had altered the course of my life.
“Not even on my radar. My plan was to go back to Connecticut and practice with my dad. He’s a dentist.”
“You’re close with your dad?” I nodded a yes to his question and reached for a way to steer the conversation away from me.
“So that’s what my life looked like when I graduated college. What did your life look like at twenty?” I asked him, wanting to know. How he went from Iowa, to Penn, to a wife and three kids and running hospitals. To be frank, if there was a salacious unauthorized biography about his life, I would have devoured it. I was hungry for his story. And yet, I wasn’t ready to give him my own. Dole it out in bits and pieces, sure. But all at once? It felt too heavy and I didn’t want to talk about my mom.
“I grew up on a farm.”
I cut my eyes to him. I couldn’t tell if he was pulling my leg. “For real?”
“For real,” he confirmed. “We raised hogs. But we lost it in the ’80s with the farming crisis. I was about to start college and told my dad I’d stay and work and that we couldn’t afford school. He flat out refused me. So it was student loans and scholarships and work-study with the school’s grounds department. My dad got a job in Davenport in a hospital’s maintenance department and, being the friendly guy he was, knew everyone in the place. That’s how I got my first hospital job. My dad bragging about his son with the economics degree from the fancy school. I worked there for a couple of years before business school in Chicago.”
“So, you run hospitals and not a hog farm?”
“Both involve dealing with massive amounts of shit,” he said, grinning at his own joke. My funny guy.
“This is it.” I paused in front of the impressive peach Italianate house with its opulent green wrought iron railings and balconies.
“No kidding,” he said, turning his head to marvel at it.
“No kidding,” I answered. I gazed at the house, and thought of the time six-year-old Grady had decided to climb the decorative ironwork. I caught him as he approached a second-floor balcony, and instead of freezing until I could call for a ladder as I’d ordered him to do, Bert’s grandfather had stepped outside with his cocktail in hand, ordering Grady to keep climbing and directing Bert to go upstairs and haul him over the railing. “Don’t worry,” he’d said, turning to me with a wink. “I think nearly all Forsythe men have scaled this house. It’s an attractive nuisance. But the most attractive nuisance was Meredith,” he said naming his wife. “I was eighteen, drunk, and it was the dead of night. Grady’ll be all right.”
I turned from the memories, and tugged at Thomas’s hand. “Come on, Commander’s is just around the corner and then a few blocks. It’s nearly noon and I think we’re going to get ticketed for being sober tourists at this hour.”
We walked, continuing to hold hands, and the big turquoise and white restaurant came into view.
There’s a saying that America only has three cities—New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. And everything else is Cleveland. I think it was Mark Twain or someone. And I was worried that New Orleans might have become Cleveland after Katrina, so I hadn’t visited often even though I loved it. Partly because I wasn’t brave enough to hang out in New Orleans alone. And partly because my only time in New Orleans had been spent with Bert or his family and it felt like something I needed to leave behind after the divorce.
But a day into my visit and I knew I was wrong. Bert didn’t have a claim to this city. Yes, by ancient blood he might, but I wasn’t going to cede this ground to him anymore. Even if the weather meant my hair was huger than huge. Even though I got a sunburn just stepping outside. I loved it. The architecture. The chicory coffee. The music and the accents. Even the stupid amounts of powdered sugar poured upon hot beignets. Not to mention the endless cocktails.
We sat at the bar in Commander’s, enjoying the relative coolness of the restaurant. When I caught sight of myself in the mirror behind the bar, I winced. “I’ll be back,” I said, patting his thigh before hopping off my stool. “Order me something that will help me forget the heat.”
In the bathroom, I ran my wrists under a stream of cool water in the sink, breathing deeply and looking at my bright pink cheeks and frizzy hair. I dried my hands, feeling a million degrees cooler, and fished around in my cross-body bag for a hair tie. As best I could, I twisted it into a braid. It wasn’t pretty, but the air flowed across the back of my shoulders and I felt better.
Back in the bar, I watched Thomas from a distance as he chatted with the black and white uniformed bartender. His casual, comfortable way. Like he belonged here. Like he was a regular. The bartender set the drinks at our places and Thomas’s laugh rumbled out. Deep and joyous.
He said something back to the bartender and it was his turn to laugh before turning to help another day drinker.
“What’s so funny?” I asked, hopping back on my stool.
“Honestly, he was probably just humoring me, but I told him my favorite bar joke.”
“You have a favorite bar joke?”
“Well, I am a duly licensed father of three.”
“Try me,” I said as I took a sip of my
cocktail. The ice-cold gin and lime felt so divine.
“I’ve got one just for you. A girl walks into a bar, and she says to the bartender, ‘Give me a double entendre!’ So he gave it to her.”
I snorted. “Considering you just told me to ‘try you,” he said with a wink. Lifting his glass, he spoke, “Les Bon Temps Roulez. Or is that gauche outside of Mardi Gras season?”
“Don’t know and don’t care. Cheers,” I said tipping my glass to meet his. “Whatcha got there? Sazerac?”
“Yes, ma’am. When in New Orleans, be in New Orleans.”
“The gimlet is just perfect,” I said, smacking my lips at the taste of bright lime and cool gin.
“Thank you. And when you are done with that, I will get you another.”
“Got a naughty little plan to get me all liquored up?” I was quickly warming up to the idea of a drunken, lazy, and very naked afternoon back at the bed and breakfast.
“Well, it’s very naughty and isn’t little in the least. And I’m going to start by tugging that braid out of your hair,” he whispered, leaning close so that I could smell the booze on his breath.
I reached into my purse, pulled out two twenties, tossed them on the bar and downed the rest of my gimlet. “Let’s go,” I said to Thomas, flicking his nearly full old fashioned glass with my nails. “Don’t want to be liquored up for this.”
30
Thomas
Bottle of gin, pitcher of lemonade snagged from the B&B’s guest fridge, and a tub of ice. The ceiling fan slowly spinning above us. The shutters were closed and the air conditioned chugged, but there was no doubt it was July in New Orleans.
Amy had been good to her word. And good to my word, I tugged that braid out of her hair, letting her curls spill around her shoulders in a mess as I shucked her out of her sundress, bra, and panties. Luscious. There wasn’t another word for her. Cute was childish. Beautiful too generic. Gorgeous felt made up and wasn’t right for Amy’s honesty. She was luscious and I wanted to get lost in her. And that’s what I did. I got lost in her.