Untethered

by Julie Lawson Timmer

  She had been trying not to think about it, her future with this child. It was all so uncertain, given Lindy’s vacillations on the subject over the past few days. Maybe Allie would be here for five more months, until her sophomore year ended. Maybe she would stay another two and a half years, until she graduated high school. Maybe Lindy would want her in California next week.

  One minute, Char was a wife, a stepmom, one third of a family. The next, she was nothing. From three important roles to none in the course of a single day. She was a balloon on Monday morning—filled, floating. A broken piece of rubber by Monday night—airless, useless. Her contents hadn’t been released gradually, either, but had instead rushed out in a violent, sudden whoosh. From full to empty in the final blink of a taillight.

  All morning, people had been telling her they were sorry for her loss. But they only meant Bradley. Her brilliant, funny, perfectionist Bradley. And yes, she had lost him, and God, how it hurt. It seared right down into her core, hollowed her out so completely that she was certain she would never be able to feel anything, ever again, for any man.

  She hadn’t simply gone from married to widowed, though. She hadn’t only lost her husband. Fate had snatched Bradley’s last breath from US-127 and in that same instant the law had taken away Char’s family. The girl who Char had lived with for the past five years, had treated like a daughter, had loved like a daughter—wasn’t.

  Char was the mother figure in Allie’s life. She was the one who had been there day to day for the past five years, helping with homework, packing lunches, buying the girl her first bra, her first box of tampons. All of that effort had welded a solid emotional bond between them, but none of it had affected Char’s legal rights to the child—she still had none. While Lindy, who had never wanted to be anything more than temporary hostess during Allie’s brief visits to California, now had sole rights.

  Because Lindy was the woman whose name was on the girl’s birth certificate. And Char was merely the woman who was married to Allie’s father for a while.

  Four

  Lindy’s Saturday dinner with friends bled into Sunday brunch, after a few of them received word that their flights wouldn’t be getting out of Lansing until Sunday afternoon. “But I’ll come straight over after that, and we can have a late lunch,” she told Allie over the phone on Sunday morning. “I figured you’d still be in bed until then anyway. Teenagers.”

  Allie reported this to Char and Will from her seat on a barstool at the kitchen counter as the adult siblings jostled for position at the stove. Char glanced at the clock—it was ten—and back to Allie. An early riser all her life, the girl had been up, showered, and dressed for two hours.

  “No problem,” Char said, walking to the table and removing the fourth place setting. “I don’t really have a plan for lunch, but we’ll come up with something. Maybe just order in.”

  “I’m not sure she’ll like anything we have here,” Allie said. “She’s more about wheatgrass shakes than hot wings, you know?”

  “Oh, right,” Char said, tapping her chin. “Let’s just think. . . .”

  She ran through the list of takeout possibilities in her mind. It was a short list, and would be unacceptable to Lindy. “I could go to the grocery store and pick something up,” she said. She pictured the inside of their biggest, newest store: no fresh-squeezed-juice bar, no kale smoothies, not even much of an organic section. “Or . . .”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” Allie said. “She’ll probably only drink water anyway. I think she might still be doing her weekend fast thing. Or her weekend cleanse thing, maybe . . .” She closed her eyes as though trying to recall the schedule of her mother’s various nutritional schemes.

  “Or something. Whatever it is, it likely doesn’t allow her to eat a regular lunch. Or any of this stuff.” She waved her hand toward the stove, where Char was scrambling eggs and Will was tending to two frying pans, one filled with bacon, the other with sliced potatoes and onions. “It’s just as well she’s tied up this morning.”

  “We’d better clean up all the evidence before she gets here,” Will said. He winked at Allie. “Don’t want to get you in trouble.” Looking at his sister, he added, “Or you.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Char said. “Lindy’s never been one to push her agenda on us.”

  “Yeah,” Allie said. “She tries to get me to drink all her gross health shakes when I’m at her place, but she always says that she knows as soon as I’m home, I’ll be back to, well, this. She once told me she hasn’t eaten a hamburger, or a single French fry, since she left. Can you believe it? Not one single fry.”

  “Hmm,” Will said, popping a piece of potato into his mouth. “She and I really have much more in common than I thought, then. I haven’t had a single French fry in”—he took another bite—“twenty-four hours. No, thirty-six.” He patted his round belly. “She may exercise a little more than I do, though.”

  “A little more?” Char asked. “So, what, like, twice a year?”

  “Watch it”—he aimed his spatula at her—“or there’ll be no fried potatoes for you.”

  Char looked down at her own soft belly. Like her brother, she had never been disciplined about nutrition or exercise. Bradley wasn’t any more health conscious than Char, but he had been blessed with a metabolism that let him get away with it. Mostly, anyway. He wasn’t exactly svelte, either.

  They had never spoken critically in front of Allie about Lindy’s extreme health consciousness, though, even if some of her schemes had sounded over-the-top. They had never spoken critically about her in front of Allie at all, in fact, and she had, for the most part, reciprocated.

  Bradley and his ex-wife had uttered some particularly hateful things to each other in the eight years since Lindy announced she was leaving him and their daughter, and their “Godforsaken nothing little town,” for California. But they had made a pact to never let their bitterness bleed over into the things they said to Allie. For all of Lindy’s exasperating quirks, she had honored her end of this bargain as well as anyone could have hoped. For that, Char couldn’t help but respect the woman. And she had willingly signed on to the deal herself.

  “Your mother is certainly in much better shape than we are,” Char said to Allie. “So, if she wants black coffee for lunch, or a glass of water, I say she gets it. Let me just make sure we have a lemon. . . .” She opened the fridge and bent to peer into the crisper.

  Seconds later, she stood, a thumb and finger pinching her nose shut. “Maybe don’t let her look inside our fridge. It doesn’t exactly give off the impression that I’m doing a good job taking care of you. If we have any hope of her letting you stay till the end of the school year”—she tilted her head toward the fridge—“then that needs to be off-limits.”

  Allie’s top teeth pressed into her lower lip, and Char regretted having reminded the girl about the elephant that had been pacing through the house since late Monday night.

  “Anyway,” Char said, trying to correct her mistake, “let’s eat!” She carried the pan of scrambled eggs to the table and slid one third onto each of their plates. Will followed behind with the potatoes and Allie jumped up to get the bacon.

  “I’d offer juice,” Char said, “but I’m kind of afraid to check the expiration date.”

  “You want me to clear out that fridge and do a grocery run to reload it?” Will asked his sister. “If you don’t mind packing up those boxes in the office, I could do a quick trip to the store before I have to leave for Lansing. I’d better not push it, though—last I checked, my flight’s scheduled to leave on time.”

  He reached his hand across the table toward Char’s and she took it. “I’ve been wishing it would get delayed,” he said. “I’m not ready to leave you two yet. If I could stay another week . . .”

  “Don’t worry about us, professor,” Char said. “We’ll be fine here without you. We’ve got our moldy o
range juice and fuzzy cheese. You need to get back to your students.”

  Like his sister, Will was an academic. Unlike her, though, he hadn’t scaled down his career to take on a new spouse and stepchild. A professor of engineering at Clemson University, he had already pressed his luck getting graduate students to take over his classes for the prior week.

  Char had been a professor, too—of journalism, at American University in Washington, D.C. It was her dream career. On the side, she did some freelance editing—mostly nonfiction pieces for magazines and professional journals, but she had started taking on fiction as well, in the form of novels and short stories.

  It was the perfect setup, and she never had a moment’s thought about making a change. Until one night, when she and her friend Ruth stepped into a crowded bar on 14th Street and found themselves sitting beside an automotive engineer from Michigan, in town for some hush-hush meeting with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Ruth thought the man was perfectly nice—a fine companion for the duration of their glasses of merlot. Char thought he was perfect—period.

  Later, she would tell Ruth she found it impossible to pinpoint the exact thing about him that drew her in so quickly. Hair, eyes, physique: his were all arranged in the usual way. There was nothing crowd-stopping about him, objectively speaking, and age had added lines and pounds that he hadn’t been able, or perhaps inclined, to fight off.

  But he was funny, and self-deprecating, and he had a way of leaning toward Char as she spoke as though he didn’t want to miss a single word. The men she had dated in the past had been so eager for her to be impressed with them that they always seemed impatient for her to finish her sentence, so they could steer the conversation back to themselves.

  Char had been telling Ruth for years that she would rather be single forever than settle for someone like that. In the bar on 14th Street, talking to this man from Michigan who seemed to feel no need to amaze her, she was glad she hadn’t settled. This was what she had been holding out for.

  “There was something in the air in that bar,” Ruth would say later. “It was like being caught in an electrical storm.” And the charge had made Char morph (at approximately the speed of light, Ruth teased) from hard-charging professor out for a drink with a colleague to smitten schoolgirl hoping the boy would offer to carry her books and ask for her number.

  Char had the same effect on Bradley, and exactly one year later, Ruth and Will stood up for Char in Bradley’s backyard. Bradley’s priest from St. John’s and his nine-year-old daughter, Allie, were the only other guests.

  After that, Char didn’t take a big step downward, career-wise—she took a giant leap. “Actually, more like a free fall,” she told her brother, though she never said this to Bradley. She flipped her teaching/editing ratio and became a freelance editor with a part-time adjunct instructor position on the side. Every Thursday, she spent the day at Central Michigan University in Mount Pleasant, teaching journalism classes and advising for the school’s print and online newspapers.

  “What files are you packing up?” Allie asked.

  “Ugh,” Char said. “Something for your dad’s office. They called last week, very apologetic, saying they needed some things he keeps here. They offered to drive up and collect it all, but Will volunteered to meet up with them in Lansing before his flight. I think it’s all in one of the stacks on his desk. I just need to go through everything and figure out what they need. I’ve been putting it off, but my time is up.”

  “I still say I should shove everything into a couple of boxes and let them go through it,” Will said.

  “I hate to disturb too much in there,” Char said.

  “Disturb away,” Allie said. “Or at least, don’t leave it all there for me. If it’s up to me, I say you let Uncle Will clear the entire thing off, so you can take it over. Aren’t you tired of working from this table, or the couch? I’ve been telling Dad for a while that you should be the one using the office. I mean, he’s always at work so late. It’s not like he doesn’t get everything done before he leaves the plant.”

  She set down her fork and bowed her head. “Was. He was always at work so late. He used to always get all of his work done before he left the plant. When am I going to stop talking about him in present tense?”

  “I do the same thing,” Char said. “I think that’s normal.”

  “Is it normal to call his cell phone, to hear his voice?” Allie asked, still looking down.

  “I hope so,” Char said, “because I’ve been doing that, too.”

  Allie raised her eyes to Char’s and smiled, though it took her quivering lips two attempts to position themselves correctly. She sniffed and pressed a fist against one eye, then the other. “What about this?” she said. She shifted sideways in her chair and lifted a leg high into the air. On her foot was a men’s polka-dotted dress sock.

  “Jesus,” Will said. “You are . . .”

  Allie lowered her leg quickly, her face reddening. “Stupid, I know,” she said, her eyes filling.

  “No,” he said, shooting a hand out to grab her arm. “That’s not what I meant.” He looked at Char for help.

  “If I do that move, I’ll fall over,” Char said, standing. She walked to Allie’s side of the table and planted her feet, wiggling her toes so Allie would look down and see what she was wearing. Men’s paisley dress socks.

  Allie attempted another smile but failed, and her eyes overflowed. “I miss him,” she cried. “So much.”

  Char fell to her knees and wrapped her arms around the girl’s waist. “Of course you do. I do, too. You don’t have to be in there when I go through the things on his desk. And I won’t have Will clear it all off. It’s way too soon.”

  “No,” Allie said. “It’s fine. It’s not the desk that made me . . .” She gestured to her wet eyes. “It’s just . . .” Her voice broke and she shrugged, giving up.

  “It’s just the whole thing,” Char finished. “The voice mail and the socks and the past tense and the fact that we’re sitting here right now, talking about any of it. About which parts are normal. Because none of it seems normal. Life, without him, will never feel normal.”

  Allie sniffed. “Exactly.”

  “Well, like I said, you don’t need to be part of it.” Char gestured to Bradley’s office, which sat fifteen feet away, on the other side of the family room. The back of the house was open concept, with the kitchen, eating area, and family room one large, connected space. Only the office had a door.

  “No, I’m fine,” Allie said, standing. She lifted her plate and Will’s and carried them to the sink, then came back for Char’s. “And I don’t want to miss out on any of Uncle Will’s last day here.”

  “You’re welcome to anything in there, of course,” Char said, pointing again to the office. “Anything”—she moved her arm in an arc, taking in the entire house—“anywhere. All the pairs of socks you want. Only, maybe leave me the paisleys.”

  “I’ll take dots, you keep paisleys,” Allie said, finally able to smile on the first try. “You want stripes, Uncle Will?”

  “I think I’m good on socks,” he said. “You two knock yourselves out.”

  “I might want a few things,” Allie told Char. “And I should maybe figure it out fast, so I can let my mom know. She’s ordering custom shelving in the guest room—well, in my room, I guess. And anything that doesn’t fit precisely on a shelf? It won’t be moving into her place.”

  She turned to Will. “You think my dad was anal about things? You should see my mom’s condo. Nothing is out of place. Nothing. It’s sort of frightening to be there, actually. All the furniture’s white. Pink pillows, of course. Pink flowers, pink dishes even. But the stuff you can mess up? Carpets, couches, chairs? All white. I eat standing over the sink, in case a single crumb falls.”

  “I’m guessing that’s a bit of an exaggeration,” Char said, standing to clea
r her coffee cup and Will’s. “Your mom likes things to be a certain way, but I’m sure if you dropped a crumb or two, you wouldn’t be shipped back up here forever.”

  The instant the words left her mouth, she froze. But she made herself start moving again, and in the kitchen, she busied herself rinsing the cups and putting them in the dishwasher, so the others couldn’t see her face. Or read her thoughts.

  Five

  Not to be gross about it,” Allie said, “but did Dad have life insurance?” They were in Bradley’s office, Char behind the desk, Allie on the other side of it, near the door. Behind Allie, Will was kneeling on the floor, putting boxes together. “I mean, are we going to be in trouble? Are you? I think my mom has plenty of—”

  “Oh, no,” Char said. “We’re fine. Yes, your dad had life insurance, and no, it’s not a gross thing to talk about, given the circumstances.” Not surprisingly, Bradley had been meticulous about his accounts, leaving behind a neatly labeled binder of financial statements, usernames, and passwords. Char had heard about people taking months to track down that kind of information. She had merely looked in her husband’s desk drawer, found the “Life Insurance” and “Investments” files, and handed them to the lawyer.

  She lowered her hand and ran her palm over the surface of Bradley’s desk. It was an antique, an enormous piece made of rich cherry, with hand-carved legs and intricate handles. Lifting her hand from the wood, Char touched a finger to each of the paperweights anchoring tidy stacks of journals—Automotive News, SAE International, International Journal of Six Sigma and Competitive Advantage—and PowerPoint presentations with Bradley’s red handwriting in the columns. She held the PowerPoints out to her brother and he set them into one of the boxes.