by Deb Caletti
“Elizabeth is Elizabeth Bennett, Barry’s high school girlfriend,” Frances Lee said. “Mom’s sure of it. She said it was always, ‘I should have just stayed with Elizabeth and saved myself a lot of trouble.’ Elizabeth this, Elizabeth that…Love of his life bullshit. Supposedly they dated throughout high school and she left him when she went away to college where he met Mom not long after.”
“Okay,” I said. I made a pace-loop around my room. Sprout sat on the floor in my room, arms around her knees, rocking back and forth. Mom and Aunt Annie were at work, but Grandma was in the office, and I was nervous about getting caught. Sprout’s back-and-forth was as irritating as some wide-load truck driving fifteen miles an hour in front of you when you’re already late.
“Apparently she’s a writer or something. Lives in Vancouver, Canada, last time Mom heard. Barry visited her once when he was still married to Mom, so this is something she has a pretty good memory of.”
“Vancouver,” I said. I threw a pillow at Sprout and she stopped.
“Right.”
“Okay.” Three hours north of here, while Portland was three hours south. The thing about starting things is that you never know how big they’ll get once you do.
“Mom didn’t know who Olivia Thornton was. Her knowledge of his romantic life post your Mom is pretty hazy, so she’s guessing this was sometime after her. But I did some checking, and there’s a Dr. Olivia Thornton in Seattle. Orthopedics, and Barry had that back thing from performing.”
I didn’t know about his “back thing.” I didn’t know that there was a “love of his life.”
“That’s probably her, then,” I said. I thought about the objects and their owners—Joelle’s painting, Abigail Renfrew’s bust, Brie’s glass statue. A clock, a vase, a mask. I thought about all of the other objects in that room—an Oriental carpet, a footstool that was needlepointed with a hunting scene. A music box, an old Victrola, an antique black phone with a dial, a Royal typewriter with ivory keys, a globe. Was one of these things Mom’s? Did they all belong to women with broken hearts?
“No luck with ‘Jane, age six,’” Frances Lee said. “So, for now, how about we pick up the stuff in Portland, swing back here to give Mom her painting. We’ll pick up Jake to take him to his gig, head to Vancouver to see Elizabeth Bennett. Down to Seattle for Olivia Thornton. Back to Portland for the Cheese and Abigail Renfrew, voilà. The whole thing is done in four-five days, and we can rest in our good deeds.”
“Great,” I said. Four or five days. Sprout and I were going to have to go on a “trip with Dad.” I tried not to show my panic. I was still nervous with Frances Lee. Riding along with her ideas was a bit like getting into a rubber boat and riding down rapids. I just held on and tried not to seem afraid.
“Too bad about ‘Jane, age six,’” she said. “Maybe your Mom knows.”
“I’ll find out,” I lied.
“Perfect,” she said. “Over and out.”
The lies were accumulating, same as the Warning! items on Mom’s list. After dinner that night, Sprout and I joined Mom outside in the warm, summery night; Mom stabbed the point of a gardening shovel into the spiky stem of a dandelion and pulled, tossing it onto a pile of already limp weeds that lay on the walkway toward the door. A game of kickball was going on down the street. The mean boys, Sprout called them. You could hear the yells of “Move in! Move in! Easy out!” which might have proved her right. Ivar sprawled on his side on the lawn, his tongue lolling out. One ear was flipped back accidentally, and the whole picture made him look sort of crazy and incapable and not fit for regular society.
Sprout was laying it on too thick before we’d even opened our mouths—she’d hauled the garden hose over to a small hibiscus that Mom had just planted, watering without asking, then offered to get Mom some iced tea. When I told Mom about the trip, her shovel froze midway. She stopped kneeling, set the shovel down, sat flat on her butt on the grass. Ivar took this as his cue to come over and smell her garden gloves. “You’re kidding,” she said.
“This is a good thing, Mom,” I said.
She shook her head, did a little eye roll that meant You have no idea. “This really concerns me,” she said. “I hate to say it.” Which is something people say when they don’t hate to say it at all.
“There’s nothing to be concerned about,” I said. “We’ll be fine.”
“We’ll be fine,” Sprout said. She was drowning that plant.
“I can just see you both wandering around lost while he’s on the pirate ride,” Mom said. “Honey, that’s enough water.”
Sprout moved the hose to a juniper, stood above it, and let the water spill on top. She stopped a minute to water her own knees and her feet in her sandals. “We’re not going to be wandering around lost,” I said. “We’ll stick together.”
“I need to call him and discuss this,” she said.
“No!” I thought fast. I faked outrage. Maybe I really did feel a little outrage, for me and for Sprout and for Dad and the trip we might have taken if he had wanted to. Which, of course, he hadn’t. “I can handle this. I’m almost seventeen. In a year I’ll be going to college.” Might be going to college. If I could find a way to pay for it.
“Charlotte is not seventeen,” Mom said.
Sprout stopped watering her toes. “I’m not a baby,” she said.
“He’s our father,” I said. “He just wants to take us on a trip. He didn’t exactly get to do that when we were little.”
I could feel it, the slide down a steep, gravelly trail, the way your shoes start to skitter and then you have to run, even if you don’t want to run. Sometimes when you ran, you ended up safely at the bottom, but sometimes your feet came out from under you and you landed hard.
Mom didn’t say anything. I could almost read all of her possible responses right there, in the throbbing of that muscle in her cheek. A physical Morse code—throb, stop. Stop, throb, throb.
“I always wanted to go to Disneyland,” Sprout said. “Bad.”
Mom’s jaw tightened. “It’s a shame I always had to work all the time to keep the family going, or else I could have taken you,” she said.
I felt the clawing of guilt for this imaginary trip, and for the real Dad-bounty of Xboxes and a house on the river and dinners out; I felt the push/pull, light/heavy, play/serious of Dad versus Mom, which I knew did come in part because Mom was the one with all of the responsibilities (basically, the word “responsibilities” meant Sprout and me). I knew that, I did. I knew it was easy to play for a weekend but not for days at a time, when you had to make sure Sprout got her math facts learned and we needed plates and cups for the orchestra party and the emergency forms needed to be filled out and the yard needed to be cleaned of dandelions. I knew that—I’m not stupid. But I just didn’t want to be reminded of it all the time, because there was nothing I could do about it, and it wasn’t my fault to begin with. The funny thing about divorced parents is, they’ll be the first to tell you it isn’t your fault and the first to make you feel like a lot of it is your fault.
Sprout just kept watering that juniper, and I know that it (and probably most junipers of the world) never got that kind of attention before. I followed a crack in the cement with the tip of my tennis shoe, and then did it over again.
Aunt Annie came down the steps, hurried past us in her heels and tight jeans. “Late, late for a very important date,” she said.
“You, Quentin, and the private investigator?” Mom said.
“I was being stupid. I completely trust Quentin. I’m a lucky woman.”
“Have fun,” I said.
Annie got in her car, beeped us a cheery horn good-bye. Mom sighed. “Look guys,” she said. “I’m sorry, okay? This is just a bit of a surprise. I can understand you want to go.” Mom’s knees were still bumpy from sidewalk impressions. “God, okay. Fine. A few days, right? It’s a few days. Nothing disastrous can happen in a few days, right?”
“We’ll have our phones,” I said. This always
seemed to reassure her, which was kind of funny when you thought about it. That phone could be anywhere, for all she knew—a mountaintop, another state entirely—but if you had it, she felt better.
“You’ll have to get me all the information. A full itinerary.”
“No problem,” I said. That could be a problem.
Sprout, like me, had almost seemed to forget we weren’t actually going. “Teacup ride, teacup ride,” she said, and spun the water from the garden hose in a circle.
“She’s going to dump him. I give her three weeks,” Zaney said, and sipped her slushy iced coffee. Zaney, Liv, and me had just gone to the movies and were now squished around a table for two at Starbucks. The movie was one of those where the man and woman seem to hate each other, which supposedly means they’re actually in love. These were rival news anchors, and after doing every backstabbing thing possible, hurling every insult and plotting every evil, they fell into bed and discovered they belonged together. But Zaney wasn’t talking about the characters in the movie. She was talking about Daniel and his new girlfriend, whom we saw on the way out of the theater. They’d been sitting behind us the whole time, and now I imagined both of their eyes on me in the darkness as I shoved popcorn into my face, or did other humiliating things I would have been careful about had I known they were there. It was amazing, when you thought about it, how much of love, before and after, was about avoiding humiliation.
“Two to three weeks,” Liv agreed. “You can always tell who has the power by what movies they go to. If we’d seen them in some exploding bus thing, I’d have said he had a chance.”
“Did you see what she was wearing? Very dominatrix,” Zaney said. She took off the lid of her cup and stirred the slush with her straw. “A black laced-up vest?”
“Daniel plus slut equals bad combination. His parents will have a heart attack and have to give more money to the church,” Liv said. “God, we fucked up. Here we take you to a movie to get your mind off Daniel, and he’s right there sitting behind us.”
“How could he do that?” I said. “Just move on to someone else without so much as a good-bye?” I said. I was finding out something: You could feel jealous even if you didn’t even really like the guy.
“Someone shoves laced-up tits in your face, who has time for good-bye?” Zaney said.
“He doesn’t seem like the same person,” I said. Which was true. Which was maybe what happened after you broke up. Maybe he was the person he’d been all along and you never saw, or maybe he was becoming a new someone else, but either way, he was a stranger.
“How do you ever really know someone?” Liv said. She was eating the center out of a cinnamon roll and leaving the hard outside on her napkin, which just showed how smart she was.
“I hate that question,” Zaney said. “It makes me totally paranoid.”
“You’re supposed to trust, but how are you supposed to trust if you don’t know if someone’s trustworthy?” Liv said.
“Maybe there’s another way to get a full picture,” I said.
“Hire a private detective, like your aunt?” Liv said.
“Your aunt’s hiring a private detective? Cool,” Zaney said.
“Maybe the only way to get a full picture is to ask around.” I was working my way toward confessing to them about my dad. “Ask a lot of people who know him.”
“Then, bam, someone still surprises you out of nowhere. You never know what’s in someone’s head,” Zaney said. “He could be secretly waiting for the right moment to steal your underwear. Or your mother’s underwear.” She’d made herself shiver. She was right—the question did make her paranoid.
“Trust should be used sparingly, like salt,” Liv said.
“I like salt,” Zaney said.
I waited for a nice pause that meant a topic change was allowed, but it never came. So I launched right in. “I never told you guys,” I said. “I’m going on a trip. For my father.” For my father—it sounded like I was doing him a favor.
“Don’t tell me you’re all going camping or something,” Liv said. Now she shivered. Camping was one of her worst fears.
“We’re not going on a trip with him. We’re going on a trip about him,” I said.
“Childhood home, all that shit,” Zaney said. “My father made us go back to his old house in Michigan which is now a Dunkin’ Donuts. He kept walking around by the apple fritters trying to figure out where his bed used to be.”
“I’m going with my half sister to meet the women Dad’s had in his life.”
Liv set down her cup, hard. Since it was only cardboard, this didn’t have a very dramatic effect. More like a little plick. “What?”
“To meet the women in his life,” I said. There in Starbucks it did sound shocking. Like I’d just told them something dramatic and improbable—I was going to Hollywood to become an actress. I was actually the child of Romanian royalty.
“What half sister?” Zaney said. “I didn’t know you had a half sister.”
“What’s been going on that you haven’t told me about?” Liv said.
I told them about the objects. About Frances Lee. About our trip to “Disneyland.”
“I know this is your father, Quinn, but what kind of guy steals something from all these women he’s loved? It’s kind of sick,” Zaney said.
“There’s got to be some kind of explanation,” I said. “There’s got to be. I want to know what it is.”
“Why does there have to be an explanation?” Liv said. “Maybe he was just pissed. Post-breakup pissed. I kept a couple of CDs from Travis that I knew were his, and I didn’t even like the music.”
“I guess you’re right. My mother has all these family photos that are my Dad’s. What does she care about his German great-grandmother in front of a piece of farm equipment?” Zaney said.
“I just want to understand,” I said.
“Sure you do,” Liv said. “But maybe you should just ask?”
“Truth is slippery,” I said. And Zaney clicked her cup against mine in agreement.
ANNIE HOFFMAN:
Just after college—this guy, Tony. Can’t remember his last name. Starts with a T. He was really handsome in a crispy, news-guy sort of way. Those anchormen. You know, that smooth hair and Ken-doll face? He was funny, easygoing. Great job, liked to travel. He’d just gotten back from Italy, some sort of cooking trip he’d gone on with friends. But something felt off, you know? I couldn’t put my finger on it. I thought I was being too critical, maybe. Maybe no one would ever satisfy me. Yeah, it must be me, right? He went to church every Sunday, maybe that was bugging me. I’ve never been very religious. He kept wanting me to go with him, though. I’d try to joke him out of it. Is that a crucifix in your pocket, or are you just happy to save me? Ha-ha. I finally gave in. He said I should take communion because it was Jesus’s actual body. I mean, there’s no way it’s his actual body. We know it’s not his actual body when those wafers are made in some factory in Wisconsin. I felt forced, and I’ve never liked feeling forced, so I spit the cracker into a napkin after, when he wasn’t looking, which I’m thinking is the religious equivalent of not inhaling.
Anyway, one day he tells me he’ll be a little late because he’s going to confession. He goes to confession, like, three days a week. What in freaking hell is someone doing going to confession three days a week? Who even does that much wrong to confess? I didn’t even know people still went to confession.
I started to realize that maybe something was seriously wrong, here. My hesitation was for a reason. I kept trying to talk myself out of my second thoughts when they were trying to help me. My advice? When it comes to relationships, second thoughts should be promoted.
“Look at you,” Sprout said. “Awkward phase.” She held up a photo of me when I was about eight, that year when your teeth suddenly look too big for your face. She handed it over for Grandma to see. They were both sitting on the couch, two boxes of photos between them. Grandma had a little stack of pictures tucked under her
leg.
“You grew into those teeth just fine,” she said.
“Right. My breathtaking beauty would come later,” I said. Sprout made gagging noises. She was right. No one would look at me and use a word other than “okay.” “What are you two doing?”
“Taking a trip down memory lane,” Grandma said. “Now this I like.” She moved the glasses that she wore on a chain around her neck to the end of her nose for a better look. She peered through them as if she were appraising some fine piece of art. “Mmm-hmm,” she said. “Very nice.”
“Who is it?” Sprout said.
“Let me see,” I said, but Grandma was too engrossed to show me, or else she was losing her hearing. I leaned over her and looked. “Aunt Annie. Glamour Shot. I think she got it for some boyfriend for Valentine’s Day.”
“No way that’s Aunt Annie,” Sprout said.
“Love the feathers,” I said. “And what’s swirling around her? Fake fog?” But Grandma just looked down the length of her nose and then tucked it with the others under the leg of her sweatpants. Maybe she was making a scrapbook.
Grandma breezed through various school photos of mine, Sprout as a baby, Ivar and me before Sprout was born, she and Mom and Annie when we all drove down to the Oregon Coast. She stopped, though, at a photo of Annie taken on some beach. “Well, this is a good one,” she said. There went the glasses again, the head tilting, as she looked at it from various angles.
“Back in the days of string bikinis,” I said. Annie was wearing a tiny, shiny orange bathing suit made out of small triangles of wet-look leather. “Why bother with clothes.”
“She might as well have stuck on a few cheese Doritos,” Sprout said.
Grandma set it aside with the others. “Who’s this?” I asked. It was one of those really old photos that are sepia toned and serious. A man and a woman stood in front of a heavy, velvety curtain.
“Some dead relative,” Grandma said without really looking.
“Look at Mom and Dad,” Sprout said. They stood on the steps outside a church, Dad in a suit, Mom in her wedding dress with her white veil back over her head. Her smile was wide. They gripped hands. Gram was off to the side, holding me, I guessed. I was about a year and a half old when Mom and Dad finally got married—I wore a little pink dress and black shoes. Behind Mom and Dad, I recognized Grandma Yvette, Dad’s mom, who wore an elaborate hat. She had her hand on the shoulder of a girl in a dress that looked like it was made from sewn-together bandanas. I looked closely. Small round glasses. Braids. Willful eyes.