She called Ann sometimes to catch up, but Ann’s voice sounded clipped, businesslike. “Have you contacted a Realtor yet? St. Vincent’s will pick up furniture if you call them. A coat of paint will work wonders.” She cut Poppy off whenever she asked about the missing will and the distribution of her parents’ assets.
There was so much distance between them. If it weren’t for Noah and real estate, would they have anything to talk about?
She was lonely. She thought about calling some old friends from high school, but she’d been gone too long to casually reconnect. The people who stayed in Milwaukee had kids and busy, purposeful lives.
Desperate for company, she took a few Anusara yoga classes, because the focus of Anusara was on celebrating the heart, goodness, and worthiness, and she really wanted to believe in those things again. The classes were in Cedarburg, a quaint old mill town half an hour north of the city where the main street was lined with ice-cream parlors, antiques stores, and a coffee shop where ladies her mother would have been friends with met to quilt together. Everyone seemed to know each other there, which made Poppy feel even more alone. She was a strange species in the Midwest: a single woman in her thirties without kids or a job. She rolled up her mat and took off as soon as class was over. She wanted to avoid conversations so that people wouldn’t ask about her life story.
She put everything into her practice, hopeful that something, anything could help her work through the grief she felt over her parents and her confusion about what she should do next with her own life.
After one class, the instructor walked up to Poppy and said, “I know I tell you to open your ribs, but you need to keep them a little tighter. I can see you give too much of yourself away in your poses. Careful, or you’ll end up empty.” Poppy broke into tears and never went back.
One day, almost three weeks since her return to Milwaukee, she was doing yoga alone in the living room, surrounded by piles of books and her parents’ worn Scandinavian-style furniture, working on poses that were supposed to help with depression. She tried to quiet her mind and rebalance her sympathetic nervous system. Nothing worked. She’d listen to Habib Koité, do a hundred sun salutations, and go into wheel pose, only to collapse on the floor. She screamed out loud to the ceiling and whatever higher power was above it, “I’m opening my fucking heart and it’s not helping!”
That was when she met Brad. He was standing in the entrance to the living room holding two beers. “Maybe this’ll help?”
“Yeah,” she said, embarrassed. A beer sounded perfect, almost as perfect as the hard stuff she’d sworn off a few years ago.
“Brad Sobatka. You don’t remember me, do you?”
Brad Sobatka, Brad Sobatka. She studied his face, his cropped copper hair. Nothing clicked. “I don’t. I’m sorry, I’ve been gone a long time.”
“We were at Riverside together. I was in your class.”
“I’m surprised I don’t recognize you. You’re so good-looking.” She wasn’t flirting. He was good-looking, even if he wasn’t the kind of guy she was usually drawn to. His hair was beginning to recede, and he didn’t have a surfer’s lithe, athletic frame. Brad was more a part of the land. He was tall but stout, a little thick in his neck and gut. His nose was straight and blunt, and his chin and jaw were covered in coppery razor stubble. He had perfect teeth.
He held up the stiff fabric of his heavy twill work pants to reveal the rubber lift on his big, black shitkicker of a shoe. “I have a club foot. Kids could be pretty brutal about it. By the time I got to high school I learned how to make myself invisible. That’s probably why you don’t remember me. I was that guy in the back row.”
“High school was a long time ago, and my last year there was, you know, a bit of a blur.”
“You partook,” he said, pretending he was inhaling a joint.
Poppy smiled. “Yes. I partook.”
Her eyes traveled back up his leg to his broad, square chest. His coat was partially open, and on one side she could see the clips where the tan Carhartt bib overalls attached. Overalls, a leather tool belt, and oil under his fingernails: this guy was the real deal. “You remember me?”
“Sure I do.”
Poppy smiled at his awkwardness. She was used to attention from men, but Brad’s interest seemed more straightforward and sincere. She pretended to be distracted by the sanitation truck that rumbled down the street, and the dog barking in the neighbor’s yard.
Brad said, “I can get my stuff out of here as soon as you need me to leave. I don’t want to be in your way. I know this is a hard time.”
“Ann tells me I’m supposed to get the house ready to sell.”
Brad shook his head. “Ann is a force of nature.”
When Poppy thought of forces of nature, she thought of hurricanes, tsunamis. The kind of power that could cause complete destruction. “She is.”
“I spent some time with her after, you know, helping her with some of the arrangements. She’s tough. Tougher than I was. I told her I could move out but she wanted me to stay, keep an eye on things.”
“She didn’t even tell me about you. I think she’s pretty pissed that I haven’t been around much. At all, actually.”
“What were you supposed to do? She wasn’t here that long, anyway. Just long enough to take care of logistics, look for the will, talk to lawyers, meet with the judge. She seemed like she was in an awful big hurry.”
Poppy looked around the living room. “There’s so much stuff to get rid of, and this is just one of the houses we have to clear out. I don’t know what I ever thought about death. I thought it would be neater, like everything just goes poof! Gone. But there’s so much. And what’s the deal with the bathroom upstairs?”
Brad said, “I was helping your dad with that renovation project. It was sweet, actually. Your parents—” He blushed and looked down.
“What about them?”
“Well, they liked to take baths together.”
Poppy put her hand over her mouth and laughed. “Oh, God. That’s so them.”
“Your dad wanted a bigger tub, and he had the space for it. We’d just gotten started with the demo when he, when they—”
“A bigger bathtub. I’m not at all surprised.”
“I loved your parents. He was my favorite teacher. We were in a Dylan cover band at Linneman’s, and we bowled together. And your mom, she was the best. We’d shoot the shit for hours. She knew something about everything. Aristotle, the special biscuits they made for Cold War fallout shelters. It’s funny what she could still remember.”
She wanted to ask—still remember? But there was too much to focus on, like the way his hair curled over the top of his ear, and his green eyes, like the unbroken green waves she’d have to paddle out to surf.
“Anyway, I can take off if you want, or if I stick around, I can help you get the house cleaned up, finish the big sextub. That’s what your dad called it.” He smiled. “I’ve held off because I wasn’t sure what you’d want done, and I got busy with my welding—I own a welding shop, it’s more like a hobby but whatever. The shop is slow right now. So I guess I’m trying to say I’ve got the time and I work for free in exchange for lodging.”
“Yes! God, yes. I’m so glad you offered. This place is like the Land of Unfinished Projects.”
“This is a great house. I’ve thought of buying it myself if I can make it work. They don’t make ’em like this anymore. I love these old Victorians.”
“I’m up for selling it to you. I’d give you a good price. I don’t plan to be here long.”
“Where to next?”
“The Cape house. One last summer.” She wanted to get there soon, while the winds were still good, before the swells disappeared. “I thought about moving in there, but Ann wants to sell that house, too, and I’m not in a position to do much about it.”
“Then what?”
“Oh God, I don’t know. There’s always someplace to go to,” she said, although she was so weary from winter a
nd grief that the thought of going back to her old lifestyle exhausted her. “Ann says I need to start investing in my future.”
Brad laughed. “Sounds like Ann.”
“I tell her she needs to learn how to live in the present.”
Brad said, “The present is a hard place to be sometimes.”
In her yoga classes she’d tell her students in warrior two not to reach for the future or the past. Finally, her advice made sense, even to herself. The future? She really had no idea what was in store for her. And the past? Well, that was complicated. For Poppy, the present was all she had.
Brad said, “I don’t mean this in a creepy way or anything, but would it be OK if I just, like, gave you a hug? You seem like you need one and I guess I could use one, too. It’s been really lonely here without your parents.”
Poppy nodded yes. She did need some human connection, he was right. She felt his warmth, and also something else, an electric jolt. She buried her face in his coat. It smelled like snow, metal, and musk. He smelled real.
TWENTY-FOUR
Ann
The Shaws’ Marblehead house was eerily familiar to Ann. That fateful summer she’d worked for them on Cape Cod, Maureen had hired a Wellfleet artist to paint a portrait of the house based on a professional photograph. Ann couldn’t understand why someone would pay good money to turn their house into art they hung inside of the place they went to escape their house.
The portrait reminded Ann of the home in The Amityville Horror, a cold-looking barnlike structure with a grand porch set atop large red stones, and winking eyebrow windows peeking out of the slate roof. But Maureen had loved that painting—she loved anything that made things seem better than they were.
Shortly after her parents died, Ann drove up to the Marblehead house and saw it for herself for the first time. She was focused and strangely calm after all the anticipation and anxiety she’d felt about Anthony over the years. That anxiety had been replaced with a loneliness that became more obvious to her now that she couldn’t call her mom twice a day or go for walks with her dad when they visited her in Boston, or when she and Noah spent long weekends with them in Milwaukee. It was strange how losing her parents made her brave. Her grief was without end; what more could happen to her now?
The cement walk that led to the front door was covered in cracks and patches of ice, and dead ivy snaked up the stone walls. When she walked up the steps of the massive porch, she noticed that the slate-blue paint on the stairs was peeling in broad strips, and had worn down entirely in the centers of the treads. A pile of yellowed newspapers sat in a corner, and a faded cushion had fallen off the porch swing. If it weren’t for the name SHAW on the mailbox, she might have thought the family didn’t live there anymore.
She steadied her nerves with a single thought: Noah. Just the thought of him gave her strength. She wanted to be able to sign him up for classes and camps. She wanted Noah to feel special and exceptional the way Toby and Brooks had. Why shouldn’t he get to go to whatever college he wanted without worrying about student loans? As for herself, she wanted a bigger apartment in Boston, and she had her own student loans to pay back. She didn’t worry about Anthony’s threats anymore. She wasn’t a scared teenager. Now she was a scared adult.
She walked to the big door, painted a cheerful yellow. What would Anthony look like now? In Boston, she thought she saw him standing on every corner. She did a double take at every businessman walking down the street with a leather attaché case, every homeless guy picking through garbage in the South End. She imagined him sitting at the restaurant table next to her or taking up a seat in the same Brookline movie theater. All these years she and Noah had lived in such horrifying proximity to this man who had changed her life forever, a man she wondered if she would even recognize. Was he fat and bald or fit? Was he repentant for what he’d done, or still smugly protective of his personal empire? Would he want to meet Noah? And what about Maureen?
Oh, man. Maureen. She would be deeply hurt. Devastated.
But Ann had been hurt. Devastated.
She’d survived.
She peeked through the thick glass window into the foyer and saw an enormous pair of cheap, plastic sandals under the bench, the kind you might buy at the CVS. Anthony’s? No, no. Anthony wasn’t the kind of person to wear cheap plastic shoes, and Maureen wasn’t the kind of person to buy them. Perhaps Maureen had divorced and taken up with someone simpler—Ann wished that were true. Maybe they belonged to Toby or Brooks, grown now.
She knocked on the thick door with a shaking hand.
She knocked again, this time harder. Nobody answered.
What was she thinking? She looked up at the wainscoting on the ceiling of the big old porch. The light fixture holding the yellow lightbulb was covered in spiderwebs and dead bugs. Ann found some relief that nobody was home. She’d come back another day, figure something else out. She’d turned around and begun to descend the stairs when she heard the lock click, and the giant door opened with a loud, spooky creak, as if the door hadn’t been opened in years.
Maureen.
The first thing Ann noticed was that she was wearing jeans. Jeans! And a loose-fitting Smith College sweatshirt. Her auburn hair was rusty gray, and pulled back into a ponytail. Given the condition of the house, Ann half expected to see her stumble out in a housedress with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in the pocket, curlers, and fluffy slippers. Instead, Maureen’s lack of upkeep wasn’t a fall from grace but a slip into a more comfortable, casual life.
“Ann? Ann Gordon? I can’t believe it! You haven’t changed a bit.”
Ann couldn’t help but smile. Maureen made her feel young and special again.
“Good Lord, it’s been ages. You’re all grown up. Just look. Come here!” Ann slowly walked back up the steps. “Don’t be shy.”
Maureen’s warmth startled Ann. She put her hands on Ann’s shoulders and looked her in the eyes. “What on earth brings you to this neck of the woods? I’ve wondered about you all these years, how many, ten? No, twelve? Fourteen? Good Lord, my whole life is a blur. How are your wonderful parents? Did you know I used to send them notes? I was so embarrassed when you quit, all because I’d had too much to drink. I was positively mortified!”
Ann, trying hard to stay focused, stiffly leaned into Maureen’s hug. Already she was overwhelmed. Her parents never told her about Maureen’s notes. Anthony said she’d quit because Maureen had been drunk? It wasn’t bad enough to do what he did; he had to embarrass his wife, too.
“I’m sorry, I thought I’d—”
“Tell me, how is Michael?”
Michael’s name had been off-limits for so long that it sounded forbidden. “We’ve lost touch.”
“But you were so close. I don’t understand. He was so dear, and the hardest worker I’d ever met. He’d finish the day covered from head to toe in dirt.”
“We’re estranged now.” Ann’s voice was clipped. She didn’t want to invite any more questions.
“I’m sorry to hear that, I really am. I found him, and you, remarkable. Although if you want to know, he never paid us back the money we’d loaned him for college. That’s always surprised me.”
This was new. “You loaned him money for college?”
“Well, Anthony did. Anthony has always been one for large gestures. He saw a bit of himself in Michael. Wanted to help him out.”
So, Ann thought. Another story. “I’m not surprised he never repaid you,” she said.
“Funny we should speak of Michael. Just this morning I was rehearsing a monologue for Duchess of Padua.” She put her hand to her chest and looked off into an imaginary audience. “Here’s how it goes: ‘I read love’s meaning, everything you said touched my dumb soul to music, and you seemed fair as that young Saint Michael on the wall in Santa Croce, where we go and pray.…’ Saint Michael indeed! Let me get you something to drink. Come in, come in.”
Ann followed Maureen inside the home, so classic and elegant compared to their house in
Wellfleet. The living room was stuffed with deep, masculine leather chairs, a fat couch, and antique side tables. Yet the cashmere throw was left in a heap on the hardwood floor, the bouquet had gone limp in the vase, and dead blossoms littered the coffee table, along with piles of mail and take-out containers. Maureen said, “As you can see, this place isn’t fit for company.”
“You weren’t expecting me, it’s fine.”
“No, but I’ve always felt a home should be guest-ready when nice surprises like this spring up. You’ve graduated from iced tea to something stronger, I hope? I’ve got a fridge full of beer from the cast party last week.”
Ann couldn’t drink, much as she would have liked to. Her nerves were jangled, and she was disarmed by Maureen’s sweetness.
“I joined a community theater and the members are an absolute riot! We had a party here last week. It was a wonderful time. Do you remember I started acting that summer you worked for us? It saved me, Ann. I couldn’t tell you then, but I’d reached a dark period in my life. I needed a new direction. It all started because of you, do you know that? I never could have snuck away to take those classes in Provincetown. I wouldn’t have left just anyone alone with the boys. The boys! Can you believe how big they are?” She pointed at a framed photo on her kitchen counter. Brooks and Toby stood next to each other in matching sports jackets, their ties loose, khakis wrinkled. “That was at Toby’s wedding last summer in Bar Harbor. His wife Celia is a nurse. She’s a keeper.”
Toby? Married? “What about Brooks?”
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