Family Reunion

by Caroline B. Cooney

  “It doesn't seem to be set up like a surprise party,” I said, waving at the cars parked for blocks and the people dancing in the backyard and the side yard, on the driveway and over the grass.

  “Once everybody found out that the Major Character was skipping,” explained Carolyn, “they said they were coming when they felt like it instead of hiding out until the signal was given. So they're all here hours early, and my mother is a wreck.”

  “She should rejoice because her party is going to be such a success even without Daddy.”

  “Not my mother. She likes things to follow her master plan.”

  I was only fourteen, and nobody had followed my master plan yet.

  The back steps led down to a deck, where groups of people stood among long tables of food the caterer had brought, while way out beyond the pool, Uncle Todd supervised a huge grill, where he was cooking hamburgers and hot dogs and barbecued ribs. I threaded my way among huge open coolers filled with ice and drinks in cans.

  Carolyn darted off into the grass to greet somebody who immediately shouted about how tall she had gotten. The most boring thing about reunions is that everybody has to comment on how tall you have gotten.

  I found a little step at the utility room door where I could stand high and survey the territory.

  Angus was circulating. He had a notebook with him and was attacking each guest with pencil poised. I didn't cringe. I didn't want to abandon the party, and I didn't want to break his pencil or his head in half. It was Angus's project, not mine. For the very first time in my life as older sister, I didn't panic that people would point to me and say, “She's related to him. She's probably weird too.”

  I had been living through Angus for months. Maybe since Mommy left. I had been letting Angus do everything that took daring. I had been laughing at Angus's antics instead of coming up with my own. I had thought about Angus so I wouldn't have to think about me. Angus was my movie rental; I played him over and over instead of making my own film.

  Time to make my film, I thought. Angus can direct his movie; I'll direct mine.

  I would be beautiful and always wear my hair dramatically, like this, with each side different, and wild earrings that accentuated my long neck. Toby would be in the film, of course, and I'd have fast cars and dancing. Angus would not have a part. He was just a little boy. I was going to be a young woman wearing my grandmother's engagement necklace to formal events.

  I walked off the deck and into the yard and approached a pair of total strangers and introduced myself. Lifetime first.

  They were delighted to meet me. They were great fans of Charlie. “Is that your brother over there?” said the man, laughing. “He's the kid with the toilet paper at the ball game, huh? I laughed so hard. He's been collecting autographs all over town today. Is he Charlie Wollcott's kid or what? Walks up to complete strangers: 'Can I have your autograph?' and they say, 'But I'm nobody,' and the kid says, 'It's for my father. You aren't nobody to him. He'll want everybody's autograph since he can't be here himself.' Bet the kid's got a couple hundred autographs in that notebook so far to give to Charlie.”

  “That's adorable,” said the wife.

  “Charlie probably pays the kid to be different,” said the husband.

  I circulated.

  I even considered modeling myself after Aunt Maggie, who was definitely the queen of circulating at parties. She laughed and kissed and laughed and waved and laughed and chattered.

  If you're a late bloomer like me, you think a lot about age and whether people match their own ages. Aunt Maggie was a middle-aged body with a high school girl inside. You would not be surprised if she started talking about classes and boys and whether she really did eat nutritious stuff from the cafeteria or just had potato chips. Is that why she's on the school board? I wondered. To stay a teenager?

  The menu was basically everything. If the catering people had brought it, it was beautifully presented. But most people hung out where Uncle Todd was: at the grill.

  The dessert table was removed from the rest of the food. It was about ten feet long with a double row of cakes and pastries and tarts—anything you ever needed with butter, eggs and cream.

  “Do I have to eat any real food,” asked Angus, “or can I go straight to desserts?”

  Angus was being passed from guest to guest like an appetizer so they could all exclaim, “Oh, this has to be Charlie's son!”

  They knew I was Charlie's daughter and Annette was Charlie's wife, but the two of us together weren't half as exciting as Charlie's son.

  I couldn't decide what to eat. There were too many choices. I stood in the corner of the yard where the edge of the yellow awning was brushed by the lowest branch of the great maple tree. In the lowering sun I was just another gold-edged shadow.

  A teasing voice said, “Now, how many wives is it so far? What number is Charlie up to? Five? Six?”

  Aunt Maggie giggled, sounding like Joanna. “Shhh,” said my aunt. “The children are very defensive. Don't let them hear you.”

  Somebody came up behind me. Toby, I thought. He changed his mind.

  But it was Annette and Angus. “Has anybody on earth really had five or six wives?” muttered Angus.

  “Henry the Eighth of England,” said Annette. “He was always getting married again. Sometimes he divorced the old one, but mostly he just cut off her head.”

  Angus was awestruck. “Why would anybody marry him after that? I bet the girls were nervous about marrying a guy that cut off three or four heads in a row.”

  Annette said that was one of the mysteries of history.

  Angus thought he would bail on the party, take his dessert selections inside and go look up Henry the Eighth on the Internet. Then he changed his mind. He would start a new autograph collection. He would ask every man at this party exactly how many wives he had had and see whether or not our father came in with the highest score.

  Annette said perhaps Angus would like her to cut off his head.

  I cheered, but of course that was the only sentence Aunt Maggie heard, and she was shocked to find Annette threatening death by axe blade.

  “And I want you to meet Charlie's new wife, Annette,” she said, in the tone you would use if your brother had married a potential murderer, “and his son, Angus, and his daughter Shelley. My other niece, Joanna, I'm sorry to say, is in France, staying with the children's mother. It's one of these…”Aunt Maggie paused.

  Broken family situations, I thought.

  Annette flushed, and Angus flipped to a new page in his notebook.

  I wanted to talk back to Aunt Maggie. Daddy didn't trust you with the truth about Toby, I thought. Or else he forgot about you and just didn't bother.

  “And these are Joel and Beth Schmidt,” Aunt Maggie finished the introduction. “Beth dated your father in high school.”

  “Pre-Celeste?” said Angus, interested.

  Everybody laughed. “Very pre-Celeste,” agreed Beth.

  I looked at her with fascination. She wore many rings on each hand, around which the flesh bulged with fat. Her hair was partly gray and held down with bobby pins, and she was still pretending to be a size twelve and wearing the dress she had bought when she was a size twelve, and she looked awful. I bet Daddy wouldn't recognize her. I bet they would have to introduce him to Beth, and he would certainly rejoice in his decision to stop dating her.

  Beth leaned back against Joel's equally large stomach. “We were such good friends with your real mother, Shelley. And of course I hope we'll be such good friends with your stepmother, too.” She smiled brightly.

  For a minute I wanted to kick her in her fat shins. But only for a minute.

  No doubt about it: When a man marries three times, it's awkward for the old friends and the family. So I forgave the woman, because at least she was saying she liked my mother. But then Aunt Maggie said to Beth, “They have a hard time dealing with being a broken family. You have to be understanding.”

  Annette grabbed Angus's wrist
, which was a good move, because sharp pencils can be as bad as axes.

  Maybe people from stable families can be understanding. Maybe all those backyards naturally make you understanding. I wouldn't know. I'm new to backyards. “We are not broken, Aunt Maggie. Plates get broken. Glasses get broken. Legs get broken. Families do not get broken.” Angus pantomimed that we would be happy to break legs or plates. “And if anything is broken around here, it's your family,” I said. “And you're too cowardly to admit it.”

  Aunt Maggie gasped.

  Beth and Joel said hastily that perhaps they would just go and refill their drinks.

  Last year, when we were renting a place in Vermont, before we bought our own cottage, the lawn mower flicked a pebble against the dining room sliding glass door. For a moment, it was just a hole with a few little cuts radiating off it. But as we watched, the cuts grew. Shatter lines laced across the glass and linked up with each other, and slowly the entire huge door became a sea of glassy cracks. It didn't fall apart. But you couldn't see through it anymore.

  That was me. Shattered. When Mommy left Daddy to go with Jean-Paul, the cuts grew and connected until I was all one frosty collection of splinters.

  We were broken.

  At last, I could admit it. But families have strong glue. I'd been repaired. Just this summer. Just this day.

  There we stood: Aunt Maggie, Annette, Angus and me.

  “You're right, Shelley,” whispered my aunt. “I'm sorry for saying that. I know I get overbearing. I guess I'm still hoping we haven't actually broken—Brett and I.” Aunt Maggie held out her arms to me.

  For a long minute I stared at her empty arms. I could hardly tell whose they were: Aunt Maggie's or my mother's. I stepped inside the circle of her arms and she closed them around me, and our hug was a rocking hug, a dancing hug. A good hug.

  “Maggie!” called Uncle Todd. “Ellen is here!”

  Aunt Maggie let me go. She walked toward her husband thickly, as if she were swimming.

  “Guess what, Annette!” I said, wanting to share the good news with her. I felt bright from the inside out. I knew that my eyes were shining, and my hair was shining, and my heart. “I'm going to visit Mommy after all, Annette, this very summer. What do you think? Isn't that great? My own mother! I'm okay about it now!”

  Annette burst into tears.

  People's emotions are always lying there, waiting for you to step on them and muddy them up and squash them beneath your feet.

  “Annette, stop crying,” I said, shoving her into the house. “People will see you; they'll think there's something wrong. They already don't understand about Daddy because of Toby and because of Angus being weird.” I herded Annette to the safety of the back hall, where we wouldn't run into anybody.

  “I thought you and I were getting along so well,” Annette said, weeping. “Who's Toby?”

  “Toby is not Daddy's son,” I reassured her. “And we are getting along so well. That's the whole point. So I'm calling her Mommy again.”

  Annette said if he didn't get here soon, she was going to have a complete and total nervous breakdown.

  “If who doesn't get here soon?” I asked. “Toby?”

  “Who is Toby?” exclaimed Annette. “Why would I care about this Toby? Your father, of course! And what made you suddenly want to visit France? You won't even get on the phone with your mother.”

  “I know, but I'm the prodigal daughter. Or she's the prodigal mother. We're going to party. I can tell. I'm ready.”

  “I thought you were the stable one,” said Annette gloomily. “Are you just starting a mental collapse, Shelley, or are you well into it?”

  “You thought I was the stable one?”

  Angus joined us.

  “Go away,” I said to him.

  “No. Why is Annette crying? Do you want to see my autograph collection?”

  “Angus, did you ask anybody how many wives they've had?” I demanded.

  “No, what do you think, that I'm weird or something?”

  Annette began laughing insanely.

  “Don't laugh like that, Annette,” said Angus. “People will think you're weird.”

  “People would be right. I'm going to wash my face.”

  Annette headed for the stairs and the bathroom least likely to be occupied, but a pack of guests who had been touring the house were coming down. She headed for the family room, but a pack of guests who were sick of the mosquitoes outside had filled it up.

  My grandmother emerged from the formal living room. My aunt and uncle have one of these houses where nobody ever uses the living room. You look in the door, as if you're at a historical house with velvet ropes to block passage, but you never go in. “Annette, darling,” said Grandma, “come sit with me for a minute. You look a little strung out.”

  We all went into the living room. Delicately, because Aunt Maggie would be able to see our footprints in the nap of the carpet.

  Grandma said she had been crying herself just a little bit. “People always cry at reunions,” she said. “Like weddings. Or funerals. There's something very painful and very beautiful about your very own family.”

  Annette turned her face to the wall.

  It's not her very own family, I thought. There's nothing beautiful here for her. All she has is trouble.

  Annette turned back to face us again, and somehow she had gotten strength from checking out the wallpaper. Maybe we should take a roll of it home. “I'm just frazzled from the plane flight,” she said. We let it pass.

  Angus said he wanted to know what stable meant, anyhow.It seemed to be the most important word in Barrington conversations.

  “It means you are not affected by change,” said Grandma. “In physics it means the atoms don't decay. They just go on and on, always the same.”

  “How boring,” said my brother. “And here I thought it was good to be stable. You mean all stable is, is that every morning you wake up and there's nothing new? But I like change.”

  Grandma looked as if she wanted to take all three of us, one by one, including Annette, onto her lap for snuggling. Annette just looked as if she wanted the next flight out. “Who is Toby, anyhow?” Annette said. “And what do you mean, he isn't your father's son?”

  I told them everything.

  Angus, with the same interest he had shown in Vermont, namely very little, said, “That was pretty nice of Dad, huh?” Annette said, “Yes, he's like that.”

  And I said, “But why was it a secret when it's so nice? I thought you only kept bad things secret.”

  “Barrington gave your father a pain in the neck, just the way it did Celeste,” said Grandma, laughing. “Just the way it did me. Why do you think I moved to Arizona? Everybody in Barrington always has to be knowing things.”

  At last Angus was fascinated. “You mean you lied when you said you moved because the winters here are so hard?”

  “The winters are hard, but eighty years in Barrington were enough. For your father, sixteen years were enough. He liked to keep his life to himself. You can't do that in a small town.”

  Grandma forgave him, I thought. He ran away all those years ago and had divorces and troubles and gave her grief, and she doesn't care. “Does Aunt Maggie know about Toby?” I asked.

  “We all know about Toby. He's spent every summer of his life here with his grandparents, and half of it on my front porch.”

  “Drinking lemonade.” I nodded, envying Toby.

  “But I doubt if Maggie knew your father supported Toby and Celeste for several years. Your father didn't think it was anybody's business. I don't think he would consider it a secret, just something in the past between him and Celeste.” Grandma looked soft and sad.

  “Are you crying, Grandma?” I said.

  “Yes, honey. I'm proud of your father.”

  “He's pretty great, huh, Annette?” Angus said.

  Annette shrugged.

  “Just because you have to party without him,” said Angus, “is no reason to get mad at him.
”

  “She's upset because I'm going to visit Mom after all,” I said. “But how come, Annette? Why aren't you glad?”

  She shrugged.

  “Love isn't flat, like a freshly ironed sheet, Shelley,” said my grandmother. But it was Annette's hand that her gnarled fingers took and held. “Love is a tangle. Hair that's never been brushed.”

  Annette said, “I thought I was more important. I guess in spite of all my best intentions about keeping my perspective, I decided I came first.”

  Angus explained to her that stepmothers never came first.

  She nodded. “I know.”

  “But you come in second,” Angus told her. “Second is pretty high, when you consider the population of the United States.”

  Out in the yard we heard a tremendous hullabaloo.

  People were shouting, yelling, cheering.

  “What's that?” said Angus, obviously hoping for a fire or an explosion to liven things up. He leaped away, grateful for an excuse to abandon all these emotional women cluttering up the place, and raced out.

  Grandma stood up, taking my arm for support. “Might as well see what all the commotion is about,” she said.

  Annette followed without enthusiasm, as if any commotion Barrington might rustle up was assuredly not going to be worth the trip.

  Aunt Maggie, who must have been showing off bedroom décor, came hurtling down the stairs. She was horrified by the idea that yet another major catastrophe had happened at her party. All of us hit the back door together.

  “Surprise!” shouted my father.

  He stood at the edge of the yard, tall and heavy and laughing. He shouted out the names of all those old friends and yelled hello to his sister Maggie and bellowed with joy at the sight of the dessert table and the welcome-home icing on the big sheet cake.

  Angus threw himself on Daddy. “You lied,” said Angus. “You said you weren't coming for days.”

  “Are you kidding? Ruin your aunt Maggie's surprise party? I just had to add a little extra excitement to the event.”

  “You were coming all along?” cried Angus joyfully. “You were just giving your own sister a hard time? Like a real brother and sister?” He and Daddy laughed and socked each other.