A White Picket Fence

by Laura Branchflower

  “Because I don’t care. It was a wrong number.”

  “Doesn’t that seem a little odd to you?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose, but why does it matter?” He was lying back against his pillow, his head turned in her direction.

  “It’s just strange.”

  “It was just a wrong number, Lina. It’s late. Let’s go to sleep.”

  When Lina entered the kitchen the following morning, Megan was at the table eating yogurt and looking down at her cell phone. “I took the last yogurt. Would you make sure you get more?”

  “Would you make pancakes?” Logan asked as he came in from the family room, his dark hair tousled and his eyes puffy from sleep.

  “Sure.” Lina combed her fingers back through his hair as she kissed his cheek. “Don’t forget the paper. Your dad’s on his way down.” It was Logan’s responsibility to bring in the paper that was left at the end of the driveway.

  “Good morning.” Phil, dressed in his running clothes, entered the kitchen and joined Megan at the table.

  Lina set a container of creamer and sugar on the table before him. “Coffee will be ready in a minute and Logan’s getting the paper. What would you like for breakfast? Pancakes? Egg-white omelet?” She rubbed his shoulder.

  “I’ll have an omelet.”

  “Are you going to Baltimore to run?” Megan asked.

  “No.”

  “If I had known I wouldn’t have made plans with Amanda. I’d rather run with you.”

  “We can go after church tomorrow,” Phil said.

  “Do you want more to eat?” Lina asked Megan.

  “No, I’m going shopping with Amanda. I have to buy a dress for the after-prom party. I have to leave in a minute.”

  “A dress for the after-prom party? You just spent a ridiculous amount on a prom dress. I’m sure you have a dress in your closet you could wear,” Lina said.

  “No! Everyone gets a new dress. This is my senior prom.”

  “You don’t need a new dress.”

  “Dad?” Megan turned to Phil. “Talk to her. She’s being ridiculous. I only have one senior prom!”

  “Lina, it is her senior prom.”

  “We bought her a dress for her senior prom. If it’s so important for her to have a dress for the after party, she can spend her own money.”

  “That’s not fair. This is like a school event. I shouldn’t have to spend my own money.”

  Phil pressed his index finger over his lips, raising his eyebrows at Megan before coming to his feet. Seconds later he led Lina into the dining room. “What’s the big deal?”

  “She probably has twenty dresses.”

  “So she’ll have twenty-one.”

  “You’re spoiling her.”

  “She deserves it. Her scholarship alone is going to save us eighty thousand over the course of her four years in college.”

  “Fine,” she sighed.

  “Don’t say that unless you mean it.”

  “It’s fine.” She patted his chest before going back into the kitchen. This was an argument she knew she wouldn’t win. Even if Megan had to use her own money, Phil would figure out a way to reimburse her. Last time Lina insisted Megan purchase her own concert tickets, Phil had paid her a hundred dollars to wash his car.

  Katie arrived a few minutes later with earbuds in place and, after pouring herself a bowl of cereal, dropped down at the table across from Phil and beside Logan, who had returned with the paper.

  “Take out the earbuds and join the conversation,” Phil said to Katie. When she didn’t respond he reached out, tapping the table in front of her and then motioning for her to remove her earbuds.

  “What?” She scowled as she pulled them from her ears.

  “Be part of the family. No music at the table.”

  “I read that listening to music just thirty minutes a day through earbuds could reduce your hearing by twenty percent by the time you’re forty,” Megan said. “You shouldn’t be using them at all.”

  Katie’s gaze shifted to Megan. “Did you know that some people consider unsolicited advice an act of hostility?”

  “Fine.” Megan shrugged as she pushed back her chair. “Go deaf.”

  “I want to get my license,” Katie announced moments after Megan left. “And I don’t want to drive any of the ostentatious cars in the driveway.”

  “Ostentatious, huh?” Phil raised his eyebrows, and Lina could tell he was fighting hard not to smile. “What do you suggest?”

  “A used car. Something older that didn’t cost a lot when it was new.”

  “And who is going to pay for this used car?” When she didn’t reply immediately, he continued. “You expect me to spend money on a used car because you don’t want to drive any of the cars we currently own? That sounds profligate.”

  “I don’t know that word,” she said.

  “Wasteful, decadent, reckless,” he said. “You have a thirty-minute commute to school. You’re going to drive a safe, reliable car. A car I choose, unless you have some money I don’t know about.”

  “That’s not fair,” Katie complained. “You’re punishing me for not being pretentious like the rest of you. I shouldn’t be punished for being different.”

  This time he did laugh out loud. “I assure you I can afford everything I own, so there’s nothing pretentious about me. Now if you feel strongly about this and feel unauthentic driving one of the cars your mother and I so generously provide, you can take the school bus. How does that sound? Nothing pretentious about that.”

  “Except for the name of my twenty-five-thousand-dollar-a-year school displayed on the side of the bus.”

  Lina went about the task of preparing breakfast, keenly aware that Phil and Katie were having an actual conversation. Katie continued to throw out insults about what she perceived as his materialism, and he defended himself as masterfully as any lawyer, mostly by turning her words back on her, but Lina knew he was trying to connect with her, and for some reason, maybe because Megan wasn’t around monopolizing the conversation or because Katie was in a good mood from her night out, she appeared to be cooperating.

  Logan eventually switched the conversation to gossip about one of the neighbor kids, but Katie continued to participate, and as Lina stirred pancake batter and cut up vegetables for the omelet, she believed for the first time in a very long time that Katie was going to be okay.

  “You’re not going to hurt it,” Alice Rayburn said as she approached Lina, who was carefully pruning an azalea bush. “Your technique is fine. You can go twice as fast.”

  “Is it already noon?” Lina turned from the bush, wiping her hands on her shorts as she faced her mother.

  “No. I’m a few minutes early.”

  “Where are you taking her?” For the past several months her mother had been taking Katie out for lunch on Saturdays. Even during Katie’s darkest period, when she went days without speaking to Lina and Phil, she never shut out her grandmother.

  “I don’t know. It’s her turn to choose.” Tall and thin, with long, dark hair sprinkled with strands of gray, piercing hazel eyes her daughters and grandchildren often believed could see right into their souls and a tan complexion earned from hours in the sun tending to her vegetable garden, Alice looked like a throwback from the sixties. “She wants to spend the night.”

  “You know that can’t happen,” Lina said.

  “Why can’t it happen? It’s been over twenty years, for heaven’s sake.”

  “Don’t.” Lina shook her head. “Just drop it, please. Phil’s coming over to your place after Logan’s game to fix your faucet, so he can bring her home.”

  To Lina’s surprise, Alice didn’t belabor the point, instead launching into a discourse on the astrological compatibility of Adele and her ex-boyfriend. “They had three trines and two sextiles. If she really wanted a relationship it could have worked. She may regret letting him go.”

  Lina began pruning again, only half listening as her mother used her forty-five y
ears of astrological experience to theorize on Adele’s inability to stay committed to a man, pointing out specific aspects in her chart that would have to be overcome if she were interested in having a long-term relationship.

  “Wait—could you repeat that?” Lina asked several minutes later when she realized Alice was no longer talking about Adele.

  “I said your chart shows a heightened risk of infidelity for the next year, so you need to keep your guard up.”

  “Heightened risk of infidelity for who?” The phone calls from the previous night flashed through her mind. “Were you looking at me or Phil?” She didn’t normally give any weight to astrology, but every now and then her mother’s rambling struck a chord, and she hated the part of her that still believed.

  “You. I’m not saying you’re going to act on it, but your chart shows a new love interest. Your moon is in Jupiter, and there’s opposition in your seventh house, which is you and Phil, so be on guard.”

  Lina rolled her eyes. “Okay, I’ll be on guard.”

  “Just because something is in your chart doesn’t mean you’ll act on it. It just shows you’ll have the opportunity.”

  “I’m not cheating on Phil, Mom!”

  “You don’t have to get defensive.”

  “Well, it’s ridiculous.”

  “I’m just telling you what I see.”

  “Can we talk about something else, please? I don’t want to waste another second on something that’s never going to happen.”

  “Oh, I’ve been meaning to ask you. Did you remember to invite your father to Megan’s graduation?”

  “Of course not. Why would I do that?”

  “Well she is his oldest grandchild.”

  Lina raised her eyebrows at the sheer ludicrousness of her mother’s comment. “You know he’s never met her, right? And that I haven’t spoken to him in over twenty years?”

  “Well then all the more reason to invite him.”

  “No. It would never have crossed my mind to invite him.”

  Lina was still gardening when Phil and Logan returned home from the lacrosse game. “How was the game?” she called out.

  “Good,” Logan answered before disappearing into the house.

  “Torture,” Phil answered after greeting her with a kiss. “Next time you can take him.”

  “Okay.” He always threatened not to go when he didn’t feel Logan played well.

  “I don’t get him—he backs off when he should be going forward. And when he gets the ball, he acts like it’s a grenade. He just wants to get rid of it.”

  “You’re expecting too much of him. He’s only fourteen.”

  “When I was fourteen, I was being recruited by colleges.”

  “He isn’t you, Phil,” Lina said, not for the first time. “I hope you weren’t hard on him.”

  “No, I wasn’t hard on your precious boy.”

  “He is precious and sensitive, unlike you, so you have to be careful with him.”

  “I’m trying to raise him to be a man, Lina, not a woman.”

  “Religion is a decisive force in this world,” Katie fumed the following morning from the back seat, glaring at the back of Phil’s head as they drove to church. “I shouldn’t have to be a Catholic just because you are.”

  “I think the word you’re looking for is ‘divisive,’” Phil said. “Not ‘decisive.’”

  “Whatever.”

  They had been going back and forth since Katie announced at breakfast she didn’t want to go to church anymore. Lina stared out the window only half listening, her head aching from too little sleep, her thoughts, like they had been most of the night, still preoccupied with Friday night’s phone calls.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Phil said. “When you’re supporting yourself and living on your own, you can choose whatever religion you want, but until then you’re a Catholic.”

  “Just like that? I have no say in it?”

  “That’s correct. Whether you like it or not, you’re a member of this family, and this family is Catholic.”

  Katie folded her arms over her chest, staring out the window. “You can make me go to church, but you can’t make me listen to what they’re saying.”

  The sanctity of marriage and family was the subject of the homily, and as the priest espoused the importance of fidelity, Lina stole a sideways glance at Phil, searching without success for a discernible reaction to the words. Halfway through, he reached for her hand, bringing it to rest on his thigh, his thumb moving in a circular motion over the sensitive skin along the inside of her wrist. As she focused on their hands, an image of his hand touching the skin of another woman flashed in her mind.

  5

  Lina looked up from her magazine as Phil closed the parenting book, tossing it along with his reading glasses onto the bedside stand several nights later. “You’re not done, are you? Not even you read that fast.” She’d been bugging him to read the book for two days, and he’d picked it up less than thirty minutes earlier. “It took me four hours.”

  “I’ve read enough.” He turned out his light. “That book is exactly what’s wrong with the kids of this generation. Parents aren’t parenting anymore. Apparently our only role is to provide food and shelter—it’s insanity.”

  “The book isn’t saying we shouldn’t guide them. It’s saying we shouldn’t control them to the point where they lose their own inner direction.”

  “You want her to follow her own inner direction? Isn’t that what got us here in the first place? Do you know why you like this book so much? It strikes a nostalgic chord in you. This is your mother’s parenting style.”

  She laughed. “That isn’t true. You’re just seeing what you want to see. The book talks extensively about setting boundaries and having rules, which we both know my childhood lacked. This is more about not telling them what to think.”

  “Someone’s going to. Do you want television and their friends to tell them what to think? They aren’t old enough to decipher the bullshit. And the section on adolescent boys—Jesus Christ. The author has no clue. All this touchy-feely crap.” He snorted in disgust. “That’s not how you raise a man.”

  “You’re impossible.”

  “Am I?” He took the magazine from her hands and tossed it to the floor. “Am I impossible?” He pushed her back against the mattress. “Do you wish I was more delicate?” He pinned her body beneath his, one of his legs moving between hers. “I don’t think my sensitive side is what attracted you to me,” he growled against her ear. “Is it?” He pushed his lower body into hers. “Do you want me to talk more, baby?” He began to grind his hips into hers, his breath warm against her ear. “Share my feelings—cry a little maybe?”

  “Shut up,” she whispered.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “This book was Mom’s,” Katie said, holding up a book on palmistry. “It says her name inside the front cover.” After lunch at Alice’s favorite vegan restaurant, they’d gone back to her house for the afternoon.

  “Oh, your mother dabbled in everything back in the day.” Alice continued flipping through a beginner’s book on astrology.

  Katie’s eyes widened when she saw a witchcraft book entitled The Book of Spells. She pulled it off the shelf. “Do they really work?” She carefully ran her fingers over the raised letters of the title. She couldn’t imagine they did, but what if she was wrong? What if she could actually—

  “It all depends on what you believe. Your aunts had a lot of fun with that if memory serves me correctly. Maybe even your mom.”

  “What made Mom stop believing in this stuff?”

  “Joining the Catholic Church.” Her grandma held out the astrology book. “This will be a good one to start with. See if it speaks to you.”

  “You’re not Catholic?”

  “Oh, heavens no. I don’t believe in organized religion.” Alice pulled another book off the shelf. “Here’s another good one. Read these two and then we’ll decide where to go from there.”
/>   “How did Mom become a Catholic? Her dad?”

  “No, your dad. She joined his church.”

  “Why?” Katie couldn’t imagine willingly going to church.

  Alice hesitated, and Katie thought she saw a flicker of sadness in her eyes. “That’s a question for your mom to answer.”

  “Have you done my chart?” Katie asked.

  “Of course.” Alice tossed her hand towards the opposite wall, which was covered in file cabinets. “Just look under H.”

  Katie pulled out a folder with her name on it and then noticed one for Phillip Hunter. “You did Dad’s?” She looked into his folder, trying to make sense of all the different colored lines and triangles.

  “I did your father’s within the first week of meeting him. I wanted to see if it was more than sex between them. They were like bunnies.”

  “Grandma!” Katie pulled back her lip in disgust and put her hands over her ears.

  Alice raised her eyebrows. “How do you think you came about?”

  “I don’t want to think about it.”

  “Your parents are cosmic soulmates. The only pair I’ve ever found.” Alice laid Phil’s and Lina’s charts side by side on her desk and began pointing out all the trines and sextiles to Katie. “They’re halves of a whole, bound together for all eternity. They couldn’t part even if they wanted to. The universe would never allow it. They only feel complete with each other.”

  “Wow.” Katie stared at the charts, her thoughts shifting to Matt as she wondered if he was her cosmic soulmate. “Does everyone have one?”

  “Only very advanced souls. Your parents probably lived dozens of lives before they found each other. It’s really something to behold.” Alice stared down at the charts as if captivated by them anew. “Your father is very powerful, psychically, which makes his disbelief in anything occult related all the more puzzling.”

  “Does that mean he knows what I’m thinking?” Katie wondered if she could stop thinking in front of him.

  “It’s possible, but I think it’s more centered on your mom. If she needs him, he knows it. No speaking necessary.”