by Toby Devens
“That’s better. Now I know you.”
A few uncomfortable beats went by. The colonel had been a marksman in Iraq and he was staring, eyes narrowed. In the shimmering sun, I shivered, feeling he had me in his sights.
Finally, he said, “You look good, Nora.”
“Thanks, you too. And you too, whatever your name is, fella. He is a fella, right?” I bent down to the dog, which was nuzzling my knees.
“He is definitely a he. Of course, you haven’t been formally introduced. Nora, Sarge. Sarge, Nora.”
“Nice to meet you, Sarge.” I offered the dog the back of my hand. Sarge sniffed, licked, and rubbed his ear against my arm.
“I think you just found yourself a new friend. He likes you and he’s got great instincts. He hasn’t steered me wrong yet, and we’ve been through some tough times together.”
Speaking of tough times, I was about to ask after Bunny and her mother when his cell phone rang. He slipped it from his pocket and eyed the screen. “Sorry. Have to take this.” He said, “Goddard,” while Sarge, now that we were pals, allowed me to scratch his ruff and thanked me with a low growl of pleasure. Thirty seconds later, Scott signed off with, “On my way.”
He tugged the leash and gave me an apologetic half smile. “Duty calls. They need me at the VFW booth. Someone’s asking questions the old guy covering can’t answer.” He rested a hand just above my wrist, raising fresh goose bumps. “Hey, Nora, I’m really glad we ran into each other. It was good seeing you. Two years. Time . . . Actually, I was going to say time flies, but sometimes it doesn’t—you know what I mean?”
I did and thought, But now it’s whizzing by too fast. I managed, “Good seeing you too. Maybe . . .” We both blurted “maybe” at the same time. His hand flew off my wrist.
When I flourished a “You first,” he laughed.
“Right. I was going to say, it’s a small town and a long summer, so maybe we’ll catch up again. I know Sarge would like that.”
Sarge would. I gave my canine fan a final pat on the head. “Sure,” I said. “Well, send my best to Bunny.”
That seemed to give the colonel a jolt, snap him to attention. “Right, I’ll send it.” And then, in a display of more Tuckahoe magic—beach woo-woo, Margo would have called it—Scott Goddard and his huge German Shepherd disappeared. Vanished. Into thick air.
That night I baked the fruit cobbler. Not for Lon. I wasn’t that delusional, although a truly sane person might have wondered if I’d conjured up Colonel Goddard and his string beans, given how he’d evaporated so thoroughly, so inexplicably, after we’d exchanged good-byes. Totally irrational, I’d gone looking for him, not having the slightest idea what I’d do if I found him. I passed the VFW tent twice, checking out a couple of eighty-somethings holding down the fort. I walked the entire market, telling myself I was searching for the perfect blackberries, though I’d never used them in the cobbler.
In fact, the events of the day had dulled my taste for dessert. I left the cobbler, still warm, crust intact, on the kitchen counter with a serving spoon propped against the baking pan for Jack.
When I got down to the kitchen Sunday morning, it was exactly where it had been the night before, untouched.
chapter eight
I was worried about Jack. He’d left for the Coneheads reunion Friday night in high spirits and was still buoyant Saturday morning, downing a whoppingly big breakfast from what was left of Margo’s welcome gift before heading off to the first dog run of the day. But by midafternoon I noticed his mood had flagged, and when he’d left for his evening shift at the ice-cream shop, he was as grumpy as a four-year-old who’d skipped his nap. When I asked if he was okay, he said, “Hanging.” I wasn’t up when he got home, but he’d slept behind a firmly closed door and when he emerged at nine on Sunday, he had to hustle to get to the dogs.
“See you at the Manolises’. Party starts at two,” I’d reminded him as he rushed around grabbing the Frisbee, the ball chucker, and plastic puppy poop bags.
“Maybe.”
“What do you mean, maybe?” I dodged into his path as he moved toward the front door. I was his mother, for God’s sake. He was living under my roof, for God’s sake. He wasn’t yet twenty-one and I didn’t like his tone.
“I mean I may show or I may not. Depends.”
“On what, Jack?”
“Mom, stop busting my chops, okay? And don’t give me that line about hurting the Manolises’ feelings. They’ll have a hundred people swarming over their place and thirty guys lined up to play in the game. They won’t miss me, believe me. And please”—his deep voice was not begging; it was commanding—“spare me the lecture about tradition. I am so freaking fed up with tradition, the thought of it makes me gag.”
The gag reference cut awfully close to the Father’s Day cobbler, which sat on the counter uncut, as pristine as a virgin. That part really hurt.
“I’m late already. Really, I’ve gotta get going.”
So I moved out of his way. Which was, I told myself, what moms have to do sometimes. Except most moms didn’t have another pseudo parent, an unknown quantity, waiting in the wings.
I turned to watch him leave as he patted his pocket to make sure the iPhone was in place to receive the call or the text or the email that obviously hadn’t been dispatched by DD at the first notice from the donor bank. I didn’t know whether to be grateful for that respite or protectively angry. Jack had hurried by me, shaking his head as if I were a mosquito buzzing by his ear.
Now it was past three, the Manolises’ Father’s Day party was in full swing, and he hadn’t shown up yet. At least, I hadn’t spotted him.
Margo’s stare was trained on another target and she was wearing an expression I’d first seen when she’d played Shaw’s Saint Joan off-off-Broadway—self-righteous and ready to go to war.
“Look at him. Ugh, my husband is such a putz!” she said as she whipped out an arm to hook a glass of pinot grigio off a passing waiter’s tray.
She continued to scowl at the copse of trees at the far end of their lawn, where Pete, half hidden behind a loblolly pine, was doing something nefarious with his cell phone. It looked like texting to me.
Emine, at my elbow, gave me a nudge.
“See, this is what I mean. Something’s going on,” Margo said. Her gaze shifted toward a circle of laughing middle-aged men. “Half the Oriole lineup from his glory days are here trading war stories. Nothing makes Pete hotter than reliving his prime-time past. So where is he? Off playing with his damn cell phone.” An even darker emotion passed like a thundercloud over her face as she gazed at Pete pacing in the trees. “Maybe he’s found something hotter. Maybe it’s sex on the cell. I’ll bet he’s sexting.” She slugged her wine.
“Sexting. Only teenagers do that, yes?” Em said. “And politicians who think they can get away with anything.”
“I rest my case on both counts.” Margo drained her glass and was scanning for a waiter with fresh drinks when a woman all in pink wedged herself between Emine and me. Her voice, gravelly enough to pave a driveway, croaked, “Divine party, Margo.” She kissed the air around my friend’s cheek. “So thrilled to be invited.” She allowed a brief, indifferent smile at our introduction. Then, with a neat twist of her grip, Lily Something tugged Margo into a one-on-one out of hearing distance. Which left me with Emine, happy enough to sip our drinks in silence and watch the party in action.
Sixty-some guests milled around the back lawn studded with green-and-white-striped awnings sheltering tables loaded with Maryland seafood and Jewish delicacies flown in from New York. At Pete’s insistence, there was a vegetarian tent. Two bars were busy keeping the finest flowing, and next to a barbecue station, a huge grill turned out burgers and hot dogs. On a stage erected in front of the Manolises’ wraparound screen porch, a quartet called Summer Breeze played show tunes and light rock. The temperature hovered in
the low eighties; the skies, for the moment, showed a milky sun with a drift of thin clouds. The predicted thundershowers hadn’t panned out, and there was no sign of them on the horizon. A perfect day. An almost perfect day.
As I was considering my next step—possibly texting Jack; better not—our hostess reappeared. “This you’ve got to hear. You’ll never guess where Lily, that awful gossip, saw my husband, that sneaky bastard.”
Her hand flew to her mouth to gnaw on her perfect manicure. I couldn’t imagine what Pete had done to make her chew her gel tips.
“Let’s see. On The Block making a deal with a hooker? Staggering out of a Cherry Hill crack house?” I suggested.
“Not funny, Nora. Just as bad. Lily was sitting in Montgomery Wu’s waiting room when she saw Pete exiting the examining suite.”
“This is bad?” Emine asked.
Margo explained, “Montgomery Wu is a plastic surgeon, famous for his ‘never leave slack or crack’ face-lifts. The Full Monty.”
She was seething, pacing. “Another secret Pete’s keeping from me. A full face-lift. Incredible! Even I haven’t had a full. And that Montgomery Wu is a butcher. His patients look like they got caught in a wind tunnel. But I suppose that’s what Pete’s after. The fountain of youth.” She placed a palm against each cheek and pulled the skin as tight as a quarter-bouncing bedsheet. “Translation: much older man/much younger woman affair.” When she peeled her hands away, and not a lot of skin drooped, she inhaled a deep, obviously noncleansing breath and flashed Pete-in-the-pines a fiery glance. “Okay, that does it. Now I’m gonna go kill Captain Underpants.”
Peter Constantine Manolis had earned a different nickname in his prime. The Greek Icon, the press had dubbed him. But he was no haloed icon, if you were to believe his wife, and no match for her in her role as Saint Joan. He was still walking and talking into his cell phone, oblivious. And Margo, gripping the glass of merlot she’d hijacked from me, glossy blond hair swinging, was marching into battle.
Pete had been a foregone conclusion for Margo from the day he’d sidled up to her at a fund-raiser for Broadway Battles AIDS. She’d been waiting for him ever since she’d fallen in love with a Greek statue in the Brooklyn Museum. She had told me that story on one of those snowy city afternoons that elicits reflection (we were sitting cross-legged on her bed at the NYU dorm, passing a pint bottle of gin back and forth) in a way that sounded as predestined as a prophecy issued by the Oracle at Delphi.
It had all started with her gloomy parents: Paulette, the Holocaust researcher, and Bernard—“Bernie the Attorney,” in Margo’s shorthand—who’d spent his career wresting back property from the inheritors of Nazi plunder. “They were freaking Batman and Robin in orthopedic shoes,” their only child said. “Partners in righting wrongs and reversing injustice.”
Their brownstone on Prospect Park South was airless, joyless, and not designed for an exuberant, essentially happy child whose genes had leapt generations from a great-great-grandmother who’d coupled with a fiery Gypsy boy on a moonlit night in the Carpathian Mountains. This was Margo’s fantasy explanation for being so misplaced in her parents’ world.
The family’s weekly visits to the Brooklyn Museum for concerts in the atrium provided the opportunity for escape. One day, she’d slipped away from the music and wandered off. What stopped her was a hall lined with larger-than-life Greek statues. All naked.
She skipped the women. She knew basically what they looked like from her own body with its budding breasts. Plus the Greeks sculpted females totally smooth down there, with all the interesting parts tucked in, so they were a major yawn. But she was amazed, fixated on the statues of the naked men with humongous wieners hanging between their colossal legs, and their testicles looking like onions in the net bags her mother brought home from Gristedes. Did men really carry all that around between their thighs? How did they walk without smacking themselves black-and-blue?
When her mother found her staring up at the stone crotch of some marble guy from the fifth century BCE, Paulette whisked her away to the boring Impressionists room. From then on, Margo hated the wishy-washy passionless Monet, but, boy, did she like Greek statues. On school trips and on her parents’ Sunday afternoon concert outings at the museum, she’d excuse herself to go to the restroom and wind up standing in front of some marble Greek, his gigantic schlong at half-mast. Until she was fifteen and saw the real thing, pink, vermicular, and disappointingly small, attached to her first boyfriend, she thought all men were constructed like the statues.
When she finally found one who was, and Greek to boot, she didn’t let go. Her mother had been appalled. Margo wanting to marry a non-Jewish boy was disappointing enough, but a baseball player? Heresy.
Margo had been secretly thrilled by their response, and when her parents wondered aloud how they could ever accept a son-in-law who played his life away, she knew she’d hit the jackpot.
As she stood by Pete’s side in the judge’s chambers and repeated “for better, for worse,” she prayed, Please, God, let me play my life away. And let there be light.
Pete was the living embodiment of light, and for that alone Margo adored him. So when, five years into her marriage, she was confronted with the eye-opening truth that he wasn’t a statue of perfect marble but a man made of flawed flesh and dark secrets, she was almost destroyed.
Back in Manhattan, I’d listened to her daily lamentations in the aftermath of his original sin. The hotel charges on the Visa bills, the condoms she’d dug out of his briefcase, the trips to the shrink and to the lawyers. Margo loved her lawyers.
I’d been in my twenties then. I was forty-six now—I didn’t have the strength to go through it again. That’s what I said to Emine between bites of grilled sausage, as we sat at a table on the lawn while the party throbbed around us.
Em said, “With Margo always she jumps to the conclusion. Love and tragedy. Romeo and Juliet. I hope she doesn’t poison Pete.”
Margo’s problems must have seemed puny to Emine, who had real trouble on her hands. I looked around for Merry.
“Ahh. She is helping Adnan out at the dessert tent this afternoon. Not as family; as an employee. She will be paid so he can order her to cover that awful haircut with a Herons baseball cap. He agreed to a little eye makeup and lipstick. It will only be three hours she needs to obey him. She calls him Boss, with a little bow. This is sarcasm, but he doesn’t understand that.”
She speared a mushroom and took a sip of orange juice. “Anyway, let him deal with her. I am off duty for the complete weekend. Yesterday, I didn’t go in to work. I had my hair colored. I shopped. These are new shoes. I had the whole day for myself. It was a luxury.”
“Good for you,” I said. “You needed it. And you look gorgeous.”
She didn’t bother with cosmetics at the café, but now her dark eyes, lined with kohl and smudged with shadow, were huge and shining. She’d brushed on a summer glow with bronzer. Dark curls in exotic spirals dusted her bare shoulders. She wore a thin-strapped frock of . . . what else? Turquoise gauze, filmy leaves of it as delicate as the layers of her baklava. Its scoop neckline laid bare a smooth background for a curve of silver necklace set with turquoise stones. She looked stunning.
“I needed some time away. Meryem and I are like chalk and cheese, oil and water. I get on her nerves by breathing the same air she does.”
“That’s the mother-daughter thing,” I said. “I hear it all the time from my sister-in-law. My niece is adorable, but she’s thirteen, with the fresh mouth and the slammed doors, and her mother says she understands why some animals eat their young.” What came next slipped through my censor. I’d planned on sharing with her and Margo. But later. Eventually. Not now.
I said, “The mother-son thing is no picnic either.”
Emine gave me a quizzical look. She’d gone to boarding school in England, but sometimes the American idioms escaped her.
/> “Picnic. Not easy,” I said. It lost something in the translation.
“Where is Jack? I haven’t seen him. He is usually with Pete and the baseball players.”
Just then a train of clouds began to chug across the sun. Not poetically. One minute we were sitting in a pool of yellow light, the next in blue shadow. Which cast the perfect mood for telling Em everything, starting with Jack contacting the fertility clinic and ending with our face-off in the hall that morning.
“Margo knows?” she asked when I’d finished unloading.
“You’re the first. I wasn’t sure if this was anything to worry about. Because it’s possible Sixteen fifty-nine”—I fumbled, unable to bring myself to say “DD”—“won’t get back to him. I still don’t know how this will turn out. But now I’ve decided that’s not the point. The point”—the one that stabbed me in the heart—“is how eagerly Jack’s going after this. Him.”
“But you seemed fine with it last year,” Emine said. “And suddenly you are so concerned. Why is this?”
I had to push the words past my reluctance to say them because saying them would give them life. “I guess because now it’s happening. I didn’t know that it would feel like Jack is leapfrogging Lon’s memory to get to this new guy. And I’m scared. Who knows what this Donor Dude has in mind for my son? He could turn Jack’s life upside down. Kidnap him emotionally.” I felt myself beginning to lose it. Quivering lip, moistening mascara, the works. I swallowed back tears.
Emine reached over, propped a finger under my chin, and lifted it so I couldn’t help but stare into her eyes. “Now who’s jumping to the conclusions?” she asked. “Take it day by day. You may like this man. Jack has his genes, so how bad can he be?”
We’d been following Margo as she bobbed and weaved her way to Pete, waving hellos here, squeezing hands there, but never losing track of her mission to yank Pete the ultimate wedgie with his new underpants. But now, finally, she’d been stopped by an irresistible force—the press. On hand to cover the softball game, they always featured the children’s inning, in which retired Orioles players pitched to the kids.