He nodded. “I need to make amends,” he said.
“Oh, boy,” I telegraphed to Crawford, whose face had turned white.
“To you, Bobby,” Chick said, gesturing toward Crawford, who was now busy staring at a hole in a window screen at the back of the dining room, his hands shoved deep in his pockets. Why he hadn’t tackled that little home improvement job while he had been retired was anyone’s guess, opting instead for a plumbing project that was clearly beyond his skill set. “Look at me, man. I’m trying to say I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Crawford said quickly. “No need to apologize.”
“No, I want to, brother. I want to tell you how sorry I am that I never accepted you into the family. How I never thought you were good enough for my little sister. How I always thought you were kind of a big stiff.”
Max couldn’t resist another interjection. “He is kind of a big stiff,” she said. Fred, Crawford’s partner on the PD and his closest friend, glared down at her from his perch on the edge of the sideboard. “Well, he is…” She trailed off.
“Really, it’s fine,” Crawford said. He’s actually not a stiff, just what I would call “measured” in his response to things. If that made him a stiff, I was completely in. “Thanks for coming,” he said, moving toward Chick to usher him from the house.
“I’m not finished.”
Crawford froze.
“Alison, you seem like a very nice lady. I never saw this guy here,” he said, hooking a thumb in Crawford’s direction, “with a professor, but hey, life’s a funny thing, right?”
And getting funnier all the time, if Kevin’s stifled guffaw was any indication.
“I hope the two of you are very happy in your life together.”
“Thank you, Chick. It has been so nice having you,” I said, getting up and going over to give him a parting embrace. Before I got to him, he started again. Apparently, he wasn’t finished.
“Christine, I love you, sis. All the best to you and Tim,” he said, nodding toward Christine’s husband. Tim was kind of a stoic sort and so far seemed to have only one facial expression, a cross between concerned and confused. I was relieved to find that indeed he did have another expression, although fear wasn’t the one I would have chosen. Chick let out a huge exhale and threw his arms wide. “I’m back! And I’m happy to be here. So open your presents, girls!”
The girls looked at their father, still dumbstruck like the rest of us. Crawford nodded his assent, and they ripped into their envelopes, taking out identical cards and opening them up at the same time.
Meaghan was the first to speak, and what she said came out in a hoarse whisper. “It’s some money.” She had better manners than that, so I knew something had to be wrong.
Erin looked at her mother, and then her father, catching a hundred-dollar bill before it fluttered to the floor. “It’s not some money. It’s a lot of freaking money.”
Two
Five thousand dollars was a lot of money for one person to receive.
Times two, at ten thousand dollars, it was even more for someone to give away.
Ten thousand dollars, in one-hundred-dollar bills, bestowed upon two nineteen-year-old girls by an uncle they hadn’t seen in almost a decade. It was a bizarre capper to an even more bizarre get-together, the likes of which I hoped never to have to host—or endure—again.
Christine and Crawford had lobbied mightily for Chick to take the money back, but he refused. He was out the door before anyone could reason further with him. After he left, Crawford conferred with his ex, and they decided that we would keep the money here until one of them could convince Chick that a five-thousand-dollar gift was a little too generous for the girls on their nineteenth birthday.
Something else was niggling at Crawford, I could tell, but I didn’t have a chance to ask him what it was. I suspected it had something to do with the origins of the money, but don’t ask me how I knew that. All I gleaned from our evening together and subsequent conversation about it was that Chick had been gone for a long time. Maybe he had struck it rich while on a great adventure far away from his family.
Or maybe the truth was far more nefarious and that’s where Crawford’s mind was going. Either way, even if it hadn’t been stolen from an orphanage or been liberated from an offshore bank account, the money was going back.
I was in bed by the time Crawford returned from driving Meaghan, a sophomore at St. Thomas University, the school where I teach, back to campus. Erin had her mother’s spare car for the semester, and although she didn’t enjoy driving a 2000 Honda Odyssey that had seen its fair share of cheddar Goldfish and juice-box meals, she liked having her own transportation and the ability to come and go as she pleased. Where she went was anyone’s guess and, now that her mother had returned, something I didn’t have to worry about anymore. Her school was about an a hour and a half north, so she had set off fairly quickly after the Stepkowskis, promising to text as soon as she arrived back at her dorm. Meaghan’s and my school was about thirty minutes south, so Crawford made that journey, hoping that he could catch up with his older-by-a-minute daughter and find out what was going on at school and in her life.
Good luck with that, I thought. Although the girls were close to their dad, Meaghan and her father shared the same gene that allowed both of them to wall everything off from everyone else. I suspected the conversation would be an interrogation on Crawford’s part with few answers coming from Meaghan. Did that make them both “stiffs”? I didn’t think so, but apparently Chick was of a different mindset.
The party had been the most time I had ever spent with Christine, and despite her brother’s emotional unraveling after dinner and the behavior of the pack of wolves she called stepchildren, nieces, and nephews, my feelings about her were confirmed: I liked her. I could see why Crawford had fallen in love with her but understood, too, why they had broken up. They had married young, had two children soon after that, and had tried to endure the pressures of his very stressful job, all of which weighed heavy on their unstable union. They had drifted apart and, to their credit, in much less dramatic fashion than I had from my first, philandering, late husband. (God rest his soul.) She seemed incredibly happy with Tim, who seemed to be the yin to her yang, and while I didn’t think the four of us would go so far as to vacation together, dinners that revolved around Meaghan and Erin were certainly not out of the question in the future.
I was going to draw the line at the rest of la famille Stepkowski, though, and would be clear with Crawford on that.
It was close to ten when Crawford got home. I heard him greet the dog as he walked through the kitchen. He looked surprised to see me awake, tucked under the covers, a hardcover open on top of the quilt.
“Fun night!” I said.
“Not really,” he said.
“I was being facetious.”
“I wasn’t.” He pulled his belt out of its loops and took off his shirt. At almost six and a half feet, Crawford is what I call a “tall drink of water,” a formerly skin-and-bones bachelor who had put on a few pounds since we had gotten married, something that served his physique well. Before moving in with me, he had existed on a diet of bad Chinese food and beer, and despite that, had stayed almost gaunt. A few years with me and he had filled out around the middle, but not in an unattractive way. He stripped off his pants and jumped into bed next to me, and we nestled together. I was grateful for the warmth of his bare skin against mine.
“What was that all about?” he asked. I assumed he was referring to Chick’s outburst at dinner.
“You’re asking me?” I replied. “He’s your ex-brother-in-law.”
He leaned back and turned the light off on the nightstand on his side of the bed. We lay in the dark, holding each other. “It’s strange. I don’t know where it came from.”
“Obviously he feels pretty bad about the last several years. It seems clear to me.” I adjusted my arms so that I could hold him tight. “When exactly did he leave?”
&n
bsp; “He left one day in the fall of 2001. No one knows where he went.” He made a noise, and I wasn’t sure what it meant. “For days, we thought he was dead. He finally called and left Christine a message a week later saying that he was fine and not to look for him.”
“And she did that?”
“Not really,” he said. “She tried to find him but gave up after a while. Then he turned up a week or so ago.”
“What happened? Why did he leave?” There had to be a reason. No one just up and leaves his entire family, never to be heard of for years. At least no one in my family does that; my entire extended family still lives in Canada, my father being the only guy with a traveling jones—and even he didn’t get that far, settling about eight hours due south in New York State.
“From what we could piece together, things went sour quickly for Chick. Lost his job, divorced his wife, maybe other things?” I could feel Crawford shake his head. “Who knows? It was right after 9/11, so I really wasn’t all that concerned with where Chick Stepkowski had ended up. I was more concerned with…”
“Moving on?” I asked.
He remained silent. We had never spoken of that day, and I wondered if we ever would. He had spent time at Ground Zero, and aside from a comment every now and again, I had no details beyond the fact that he never wanted to speak of it in any detail ever.
“What was his business?” I asked.
Crawford chuckled. “You’ll never believe it.”
“Try me.”
“Porta-potties.”
“Really.”
“Really.” He shifted a little, moving his arm out from under my shoulder. “He married into the business and did okay for himself, but it was kind of a joke in the family.”
The click of nails on the hardwood floor announced Trixie’s arrival. She fell heavily on the floor next to Crawford’s side of the bed, letting out an odiferous exhale that smelled suspiciously of leftover chicken. I waited for a few minutes and thought that Crawford had fallen asleep, but he started talking again.
“I thought we’d never see him again. This is just weird.”
“And what is a Sassy?” I asked.
“The ex-wife.”
“Her name was Sassy?”
“Yep,” he said, but I could tell that he was drifting off and the conversation was ending.
It wasn’t the name I would choose for any of our maybe eventual children—the jury was still out on them after the kids that I had encountered that evening—or even any future pets, but I tended to go for the more mundane and Christian when it came to the naming of living beings. That’s how my first goldfish, won for me by my father at the annual fire department carnival, had ended up with the name Frances Xavier. Also how the turtle that I eventually killed through neglect had been called John the Baptist.
The silence stretched on, and this time I realized he had fallen asleep for good. I detached myself from his arms and turned toward the window, watching the rain pelt the screen, feeling the cool, moist air coat my face. I don’t know how long it took, but soon I was asleep, too, in a slumber that was dreamless, soundless, and devoid of the stress of the day.
* * *
The next morning, Crawford and I finished cleaning up the kitchen, still a mess from the night before. As soon as the last load of dirty dishes was loaded into the dishwasher, we headed to the backyard. It was a gorgeous autumn day, the sky blue, the air mild, the rain from the night before having taken with it the humidity that had lingered the previous week. Using the leftover vodka, somehow hidden from Chick and Paulie, I mixed up a pitcher of Bloody Marys and brought them to where Crawford had divided up the Sunday papers and left my favorite sections, the book review and Arts and Entertainment, on the chaise lounge beside his. I handed him a drink. “Where’re the chips?” I asked, the one item I had charged him with bringing outside.
He looked at me sheepishly. “Inside?”
I launched myself off the chaise and went back inside, muttering about having to do everything myself, sending a boy to do a man’s job, etc. I was just about to return to the comfort of the chaise when the phone rang.
To answer or not to answer? That was the question. I considered the phone, ringing away on the wall, and decided to ignore it. By the time I got outside, however, Crawford’s phone, always tucked into the front pocket of his jeans, was ringing, seconds after the house phone had stopped. When he answered, I knew it was Christine.
“Sure. Come by,” he said. “We’re just sitting here having a drink.”
Christine had moved to Connecticut upon her return to the States, so it didn’t take her long to get to our house in Westchester. She was alone when she arrived, looking sheepish about bothering us on a tranquil Sunday after the raucous goings-on of the night before.
I held up my half-empty glass. “Bloody Mary?” I asked.
“No, thanks. I’m on my way to take Meaghan for a mani/pedi. I promised both girls some quality time,” she said, taking a seat at the picnic table. “I just wanted to talk to you about the money.”
Crawford sat forward on the chaise lounge. “What about it?”
“Well, what to do with it,” she said. “I’m sorry I took off before we could really discuss it.”
Crawford shrugged. “Nothing to discuss. First chance I get, I’m bringing it back to Chick. Where’s he living exactly?”
She gave us an address in a not-very-desirable section of Mount Vernon, a small city a bit south of us. She sighed. “Of all my brothers, Chick was the one I thought would end up on the straight and narrow. The rest of them?” She looked at Crawford. “Now that’s a different story.”
“I remember,” he said. “Those guys were the embodiment of the Dead End Kids.”
She smiled. “So you know what I mean,” she said. “It seemed like things were going well until … well … you know.”
“He left.” It didn’t need to be said, but he said it anyway.
She looked down at the patio. “Yeah.”
“He was gone a long time,” Crawford said.
“Did he leave right after losing his job? After his marriage fell apart?” I asked. Christine and I shared Crawford, and in turn, he shared everything with me. I didn’t think it was impolite to let on that I knew what had gone on with her troubled brother.
“We guess he did, but we don’t know.” Anticipating my next question, she said, “He didn’t tell anyone where he was going or for how long. He was just gone.”
I didn’t intend to make a sound, but I did. In that sound was my disbelief that they had not seen him for over ten years, yet he had turned up all of a sudden, out of the blue, without any warning whatsoever, or any explanations.
“We looked for him,” Christine said, a little defensive, “but he was gone. We knew he was okay, so we didn’t pursue it. You can’t make someone come back. You can’t make them do something they don’t want to do.”
I looked at Crawford, incredulous. Did this sound as weird to him as it did to me? Or did everyone just expect that given whatever emotional state he had been in, Chick had left town and everything he had here with the intention of not returning? Maybe he didn’t want to be found, but it sounded like they hadn’t looked very hard, either. Maybe they hadn’t wanted to.
“You’re looking at me like you don’t agree with how we handled this,” Christine said.
I was going to try to be as tactful as possible, a strategy I would have to employ a lot more if it meant peace with my husband’s ex-wife. “I wasn’t in your position, Christine. I don’t know what I would have done.”
The damage was done; she was hurt. “Yes, you do. By the way you’re talking, you’re thinking that you would have moved heaven and earth to find him.” She shook her head. “Trust me. He didn’t want to be found.”
“Crawford said you got a call not long after he left. Did you hear from him at all after that?” I asked.
“One letter,” she said. She opened her purse, a soft leather satchel, and pulled out a worn
and tattered letter, one that she had obviously kept with her the entire time he was gone. She waved it toward Crawford. “You already saw this.”
He nodded.
“I just don’t want to rock the boat,” she said. “You know … about the money.”
“I’ll handle it, Christine. I know how happy you are that he’s back.” Crawford reached over and patted her leg with a familiarity that made me just a wee bit uncomfortable, but I let it go. They had a lot of history. That’s what I told myself.
She stood and looked up at the sky and then at me. “Life is really strange, you know?”
Did I know? I could write a book about my exploits that nobody would believe. I smiled to show her that I did know. I thought we were done, but she surprised me by bursting into tears. It was my turn to jump up and comfort her.
“This is not the family I would have chosen for myself,” she said. “Or for anyone, for that matter. But it’s the one I got.”
I didn’t have a family to speak of anymore, being an only child and having lost both of my parents far sooner than I should have. Before Crawford, Max had been my only family, and she had started out as my college roommate. Her family had adopted me, her father taking me under his wing particularly, and while I appreciated it, they weren’t blood. However, after the events of the previous night, I was starting to think that being on my own for so long was a bit of a blessing, despite the fact that I missed my parents every single day.
She broke from our embrace. “You laughed about it all those years,” she said to Crawford, “but it was never easy. It was never easy being from that family. Having those brothers.” She reached into her bag and took out a tissue, wiping under her eyes. “It’s just that they’re all I have, and I’m just stupid enough to try to make it work again.”
I felt for her; I really did. I was ready to put the Stepkowskis out of my head once and for all, though, and would be happy when the money was returned to Chick and Crawford and I could go back to pretending that our lives consisted of the two of us, Trixie, and the twins. It seemed like adding anyone else—even Max and Fred sometimes—disrupted the natural ebb and flow of our daily lives and our relationship. Then I thought of growing old, Crawford hopefully by my side, and no one else. No rambunctious kids, no doted-upon grandchildren, just us. Was that what I really wanted?
Extra Credit Page 2