by Ruthie Knox
“Imagine you asking me that.”
“Whenever Beatrice spilled gravy at dinner or wore a dress you didn’t approve of, you criticized me. Did I do such a terrible job?”
“You did a fine job. Just look at Beatrice. She’s lovely.”
“She could be lovely in spite of me.”
“No.”
“It’s only that it always seemed easy for you to accept everything Beatrice did, forgive her every flaw. It was harder for me.”
“You’re her mother. If you’re interested in loving a child and having it be easy, try being a grandmother. Being a grandmother is delightful.”
Rosemary found it was better to weep flat on her back. The tears ran off into her hair and her ears. She felt appropriately prostrate with grief. “So you think I did all right?”
Evita made a clucking noise. “You did your best, and it worked out in the end. Anything that hasn’t worked out yet will in time. It’s not as though Winston and Neville have been thrilled with my performance every moment of their lives, but they still come around on the holidays, so that’s all right.”
“How do you know when you’re doing a good job and when you’re fu—messing it up?”
“You don’t.”
“That’s discouraging.”
“Darling, you’ve only ever gone wrong in one way,” Evita said. “You’re not so very creative. You and Winston didn’t love each other. You both looked for love outside your marriage. Winston had the office, and you had the house and charity work. You sought my approval because you didn’t know where else to look for it. That’s not how it is when a marriage is working. Richard and I love each other, and we find love and approval in our marriage. We do what we want to do in the world because we both know the love is there. Or look at Neville and Mary Catherine, or Winston with this Allie. They have the right idea.”
Rosemary dried her temple with her wrist. “That’s what I was doing with the climbing? Asking the world to love me?”
“Of course. What did you think you were doing?”
“Finding my best self.”
Evita made a noise, half choked, half laughing. “Honestly. If you’ve met someone you love, try not doing what you did last time. I think you’ll be pleased with the result.”
“That sounds like good advice.”
“I only give good advice.”
“I seem to remember you giving Winston bad advice on more than one occasion.”
“He’s my child, Rosemary. All a mother ever wants is for her children to be happy and thrive in the world. When we see our children suffering, that’s when we meddle and get ourselves into trouble. You want Beatrice to be happy. She wants to be happy, and to know you love her. When she needs you, she’ll tell you, and she’ll make it clear what you’re meant to do. Give her money, or maternal advice, or be her best friend or her mentor. It’s actually quite simple if you’re not determined to make it complicated.”
There was a rustling on the phone line, and then Evita’s voice, muffled. “That’s just Richard,” she said. “We need to head to dinner. I trust you can sort through the rest of this on your own?”
“I guess. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
A pause followed, the sort of pause in which Rosemary would have once felt obligated to tell Evita she loved her, although she’d never done so. She’d always let the guilty pause pass. “I love you, Evita.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Rosemary, pull yourself together. Find a strong cup of tea. Call me in a week or so to let me know how things have turned out.”
“I’ll do that.”
“Ta.”
The call disconnected. Rosemary let her arm flop to the side. She laid on top of a picnic table soaking up the sunlight and thought about whether she’d made everything more complicated than it had to be.
Whether all she had to do was love her daughter, and love Kal, and let her love be the center of everything.
It sounded worth a shot.
Chapter 26
Kal didn’t know where to go.
He didn’t know what the fuck he was doing in Wisconsin. Nursing a broken heart was an activity best handled alone, at home, where he could be sullen with his family and nobody would care. But his mom was off baby-showering some obscure cousin with Jigme, and Rosemary had the car. So that was that.
When he couldn’t stand sitting in the living room anymore, batting away offers of food and drink from a nice lady he barely knew and dealing with Bea giving him the fish eye, he took a walk.
At the back of the property, the lawn ended in a neat line at somebody’s field. The field was too muddy to explore in these shoes. He almost did it anyway, but then he noticed the door to the garage workshop was open and went in there instead.
It was quiet. Neat rows of workbenches and pegboards with tools filled one whole wall. He didn’t see Bill around. The light filtered through the windows, both garage bays closed.
He could breathe in here.
Kal leaned against a worktable and scrubbed his hands over his face.
A throat cleared. Chair legs scraped over concrete. Bill Fredericks stepped into view from an alcove Kal hadn’t seen behind a tall pile of cardboard boxes.
“Hello,” Kal said.
“I was dozing,” Bill replied. “Didn’t hear you come in, or I would’ve said something.”
“It’s fine. You want me to leave?”
“ ’Course not. Listen, you want something to do? I could use help packing supplies. I want to get this shipment ready before the kids descend on us.”
“I guess.”
Behind the cardboard boxes, all along the back wall of the garage, there were plastic tables covered with supplies. Bill showed him the drill. All he had to do was follow the list, put however many of each thing it said into each box. Cans of infant formula. Medical stuff, like gauze and bandages, syringes, sterile boxes of gloves. Diapers.
“Where’s this going?” he asked after a while.
“It’s for the Syrians.”
“Here in the States?”
“Naw, it goes to Greece.”
Kal guessed Bill was the one who was responsible for the ‘Black Lives Matter’ sign in the Fredericks’s front window.
“These done?”
“Yeah, tape them up.” Bill handed him a tape gun. Kal worked his way down the line. When he got to the end, Bill brought him ten more boxes to fill.
“You want to talk about it?” Bill asked.
“I don’t think so.”
Bill nodded as though that was the answer he’d expected, or wanted. “I only asked because you seem like you’re not having your best day, and I know Nancy’s kind of fretting about you and Rosemary. She liked meeting your mom. Told me all about it after. Told me about you, too, what she’d gathered from Bea and research on the Internet.”
Kal hefted a box of formula cans onto the table, lifted them out and stacked them one by one.
“I got thinking about what would bring someone like you to my house, and what would happen that meant you were having the kind of day looks like you’re having, so I just thought. You know. If you wanted to talk.”
He handed Kal a can of formula to complete his box.
“Thanks.”
Then the only noise in the garage was the sound of supplies going into cardboard boxes, the tape gun zipping, one box hefted on top of the next.
“It’s your anniversary,” Kal said.
“Last fall. We’re only just now getting around to having the party because things blew up kind of spectacularly right around the day itself.” Bill glanced at him. “In a good way. Eventually.”
“I think my life is blowing up in the regular way.”
“The bad way.”
“Well, with Rosemary. We just met. In Nepal, after the avalanche on Everest. You know about that from Bea.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“We’ve been hanging out all week and got pretty close, but it doesn’t look like
it’s going to work out. We’re on different trajectories, you know? She’s got her book, her whole life in England. I’ve got…stuff I need to get back to. Some projects in Nepal. It’s too hard.”
“Sure.”
Kal waited for Bill to say something else, maybe some kind of sage advice, but he just said, “You don’t want to stack them more than four high.”
“Over here?”
“Yeah, that’s perfect.”
Kal moved the boxes where Bill told him to. He started to wish he hadn’t said anything.
He remembered getting boxes like this as a kid. Not formula and diapers, but the equivalent. Powdered milk. Food pantry cheese and peanut butter.
They kept working. It was a relief to have work to do, even if it was the kind of Samaritan work that didn’t make a difference.
“Feels sometimes like I’m packing up a bunch of garbage, you know?” Bill said.
The old white man could read his mind. Creepy. “Diapers and formula makes a difference, though, for people who need them.”
“I stick with the lists from the NGOs of what they need the most. Even so. Castoff clothes and canned formula, when I see pictures online of those kids in Aleppo. Hospitals attacked with chemical weapons. Hospitals.” Bill shook his head. “I have this way I think about it, though, like a philosophy. You have a philosophy?”
“Not really.”
“Well, I’ve got one.” Bill taped a box shut and handed it to Kal. “It’s from years ago, before Allie was born. Allie’s not my kid. Biologically. Her mom, she worked with this artist for years. You heard about that, the movie Bea’s making?”
“Some.” Kal was starting to feel uncomfortable about being the audience for whatever Bill was about to tell him.
“Yeah, so she worked with this artist, Justice, who was in love with her. Is still in love with her, probably—at least he thinks he is. One time she went off to New York and came back pregnant with Allie. We were married. May was a baby.” Bill made eye contact. “Tell me if this is getting too weird.”
It was.
“No, it’s okay.”
Bill chuckled. “I’m going to tell you anyway. It won’t hurt anything, I don’t think. So Nancy’s pregnant, and it’s not my baby. I’m sure you can imagine, it was bad. I was pissed off, sorry for myself, crazy in love with her, hated her so much I couldn’t look at her, everything you’d think—but all at once, you know? I wanted to kick her out and beg her never to leave me. Marry her all over again and fly to New York City so I could murder that bastard. Just a real swamp. Uncomfortable.
“It went on like that for weeks. Nancy and me fighting, making up, having conversations that lasted for hours and hours and both of us crying or one of us yelling. I started to think that was going to be my life, one way or the other. Some swamp of feelings I couldn’t escape. But then one morning we were eating breakfast, May at the table in her high chair with Nancy feeding her out of a jar, and I just thought, Can I love her, or can’t I? Can I love this baby she’s carrying—this baby who’s going to end up looking like my wife, maybe smiling like my wife, or she’s got my wife’s eyes—or can’t I? And it wasn’t even a choice. I already loved Nancy, already loved May. Probably I already loved this baby. So what was I gonna do, walk out on them? See my daughter Wednesday nights and every other weekend and bicker with Nancy over alimony and how much school supplies cost, because the world says that’s what you do when your wife cheats on you and has another man’s kid?”
Bill sat down on top of the box he’d just packed and rubbed his hands over his knees. Kal kept working so he wouldn’t have to deal with the vulnerable openness of Bill’s face.
He didn’t want this. Didn’t want to be listening, shoving feelings about what Bill had gone through on top of all the feelings he already couldn’t handle.
Nothing to do, though.
“The thing was, if I did that, I’d still love her. I’d spend the rest of my life watching this baby grow up who could’ve been mine—my wife’s baby—and all because I decided I couldn’t love them even though I did. It wasn’t some decision to make.”
He crossed his arms, looked straight at Kal. “So I decided just to do what I wanted to do, which was love my wife even when she made mistakes, even when it was uncomfortable and hard. Love my kids, and be glad to get to do that. I knew once I decided, there was no turning back. I couldn’t decide three years down the road to get pissed off and resentful all over again. It was real simple.”
Bill wiped his palms over his knees one more time and stood up. “Anyway. That’s my philosophy.”
He took the tape gun off the table and started taping up the last set of boxes. Displaced, Kal wandered over to the box Bill had just gotten up from and sank down onto it.
“All this stuff,” Bill said, “is just what happened when I watched the news and figured out how much I love the world. Humanity. I ask myself, Can I love these people in Aleppo or not? There’s not a choice. I already do. So what can I do for them, what can I give them, how can I show up every day for them? I figure, maybe they unpack these boxes and it just looks like junk, like, ‘Don’t send us any more diapers, Bill, jeez.’ But if they tell me that, I’ll send them cash, or baby strollers, or whatever they say they need. It’s what I can do.”
Bill finished taping. He started carrying them to the front of the garage and opened the overhead door on one of the bays, presumably to load the boxes into his truck later.
Kal was grateful he didn’t seem to need him to say anything, because his head was a swirling mess.
He would have figured Bill was listening to conservative talk radio out here. Smoking cigars. Being irrelevant. But no. He was a garage philosopher, dishing out perspective while he packed up his Syria donations. Making Kal ask himself questions he didn’t want to think about, because Bill knew what he was saying—he’d been through some shit. He knew what it looked like when there wasn’t any decision to make because you’d already made it.
Kal was going to love Rosemary Chamberlain for the rest of his life.
He already loved her. He’d never met anybody he wanted to be around like he wanted to be around her, and it wasn’t going to stop. She’d go back to England and write her book, and he’d walk into the bookstore when it came out, pick up a copy, moon over her author photo on the back cover. He’d stream Bea’s movie on Netflix or YouTube or download some new app he’d never heard of that was the only place he could get ahold of it, watch it furtively in the dark, thinking about Rosemary, wiping away pathetic tears.
He was never going to stop thinking about Nepal. He loved Nepal. He wanted to ship his ridiculous love for Nepal to Base Camp in flimsy cardboard boxes—always had, and always would.
Bill Fredericks and his philosophy were inconvenient, uncomfortable, and intensely fucking annoying. But he wasn’t wrong.
Kal didn’t have a decision to make. Not really.
“Well, shit,” Bill said.
A white van pulled into the driveway, the name of a restaurant emblazoned on its side. The name seemed familiar; Kal was pretty sure there was a place in Queens called the same thing. It pulled to a stop, and Allie tumbled out the passenger door, all smiles and hair. “Daddy-o!”
Bill stepped toward her, wiping his hands on a rag hanging from the waistband of his work pants. “Did I lose track of the time, or are you guys early?”
Allie beamed. “Me and May didn’t want to miss out on anything interesting, so we made Ben release his death grip on the restaurant.”
Bill hugged his daughter. “It’s good to see you, hon.” As she pulled him down the drive to the van, he looked back and winked at Kal.
“Buckle up.”
Chapter 27
Kal couldn’t get Rosemary to look at him.
She sat directly across from him at the dining room table, the two of them smack-dab in the middle, Bill and Nancy at either end, Ben and May finishing up plating dinner in the kitchen, Winston and Beatrice to his left, Allie bouncing b
ack and forth with salad and drinks.
The whole bustling scene was both familiar and foreign—a lot like his own family’s busy celebrations, but with a foreign set of customs and behaviors.
If Kal could manage to work things out with Rosemary, he might find himself at this table again. Part of this family, if only peripherally.
It wasn’t such a bad prospect. The Fredericks seemed to have a pretty good handle on the important stuff.
“Mojito?”
Allie extended a silver tumbler with a sprig of mint on the rim. Kal accepted it, glad to have something to hang onto amidst the chaos that had descended on the Fredericks home.
“Ben made it,” Allie said, “so I can’t guarantee it’s not completely weird. He does that—he’s a chef, so he has to, I guess, and sometimes his food is completely transcendent, like this one time he gave me an apple when I was sad? You’d think, it’s just an apple, how can it be transcendent, but it was a Ben apple, so you’d think wrong. But other times he hands you a plate of, like, pork belly with pineapple and capers or something, and you just want to ask him what’s actually wrong with him, and why does he hate you?”
“I can hear every word you’re saying,” Ben said from the kitchen.
“I’m not afraid of you,” Allie replied. “I only speak the truth.”
Kal sipped the drink. It was weird—some kind of melon flavor, and something bitter happening on the back end—but it was also stiff, which was a blessing. His mental state was somewhere between revved up to a thousand with excitement and teetering on the verge of collapse. The stakes were high. Like, entire-lifetime-potential-for-happiness high.
Look at me, princess. Look at me, look at me.
“You’re really sure about this Ben fella?” Allie asked her sister. “You haven’t had any second thoughts, like, Maybe I should fall in love with someone who isn’t perpetually one step away from mass murder?”
“I like this Ben fella,” May said. “He has his charms.”
“They are invisible,” Allie replied, drawing the word out.
Rosemary raised an eyebrow at her ex-husband, who sat beside her.