Daughters for a Time

by Handford, Jennifer

  “So you still like Green Bay, huh?” I said, pointing to his sweatshirt.

  “It’s too hard to be a Redskins fan,” he said, offering a small smile. “How’s Claire?”

  “Good. Married with a daughter.”

  “I saw her once at Home Depot. She didn’t see me and I didn’t say anything.”

  “Yeah, that wouldn’t have ended well.”

  “What about you? Are you a mom?” He leaned against the doorframe, popped his knuckles.

  “No,” I said, and then added, “Not yet.”

  “Do you want to come in?”

  “I’ve got to go.”

  “Helen,” he said. “Why’d you come?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Are you sure you don’t know?”

  I turned my head, looked across the road to the park. I thought about the reasons why I was there, whether I understood for sure myself.

  “Helen,” he said again. “It’s been a long time. Tell me why you’re here.”

  “I miss Mom,” I said plainly. “I was just wondering, don’t you miss her, too?”

  “I do,” he said.

  “Claire never wants to talk about her.”

  “Come in, Helen,” he said. “Just for a minute.”

  I stepped over the threshold and into the front room: blue tweed recliner, leather sofa, television on a stand, a childhood photo of Claire and me at Christmas in red flannel nightgowns. Larry walked to the easy chair in the corner of the room and signaled in the direction of the couch for me to sit. I did.

  “I miss her, too,” Larry said softly.

  “I can’t believe that she’s been gone for so long,” I said. “I can barely remember being fourteen, but I remember every detail about Mom like it was yesterday.”

  Larry nodded, sitting back and crossing his legs. “Did your mother ever tell you how we met?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Let me get us something to drink,” he said, going to the refrigerator and cracking open two bottles of Sam Adams. “It was our first semester of college,” Larry said, handing me a cold beer. “I don’t know how we found each other in that sea of students, but somehow she and I sat down next to each other in history class. She grew up in Baltimore, right in the city. And of course, I was in West Virginia, out in the country. We were an odd match, but we hit it off right away and started dating.”

  I imagined Mom and Larry when they were young: a city girl and a country boy. The two of them wanting to be with each other; the two of them considering each other like a found treasure.

  “Your mother and I had three things in common. One, I was the first in my family to go to college and she was the first in hers. Two, we both had rocky upbringings, both with our fathers. Maybe you never knew that.” Larry clenched his fist, spread his fingers, clenched his fist again. “And three, we both wanted a family of our own so that we could do things right.”

  I thought about that, how they wanted to raise their children differently than how they themselves had been raised.

  Larry went on. “We dated, got married during Christmas break. Your mother was pregnant with Claire soon after that. She decided to drop out of school. I always felt bad about that. But she wanted to. Nobody was going to take care of her baby but her. When I graduated, I went to work for MetLife. A year or so later, we tried to have another baby, but we had a hard time.”

  “She once told me about a miscarriage she had after Claire.”

  Larry nodded. “Five years later, you came along. Your mother was so happy to have another baby. She really wanted a sibling for Claire. We lived in a small apartment and money was tight, but during those early years, I can say that we were truly happy. For a number of years, I worked in the afternoon and evening, sitting down with folks around their kitchen tables, showing them how much insurance they needed. It wasn’t so bad and I got to be home in the mornings with you girls. Your mother had gone back to work part-time. Those mornings with you kids were some of the happiest times in my life.” His mouth twitched, and then he looked away.

  “We were happy for a lot of years,” he said. “Then I went and screwed it all up. I had an affair.”

  “Why’d you have the affair?” I asked. I took a swig of beer, savored the bitter malt and sweet caramel, felt it travel down my chest and into my stomach.

  “There’s no reason. None that makes sense. I was just a fool. The woman made me feel like I was young and wanted.”

  “And Mom?”

  “She was devastated, but didn’t want a divorce.”

  “Always a good Catholic,” I said.

  “That’s about the size of it,” Larry said. “She said that she wouldn’t disgrace her children by getting a divorce. So we stayed married, but she also stayed mad. I was at a loss to make things better. Then, Met was looking for a group of guys to go open an office in Philadelphia. I’d be gone for a couple of months. I took it, thinking that I was doing something good for your mother—giving her some space. What I should have done was stay home and work harder at our marriage. At the time, I thought I was making the right decision.”

  “Then what?” I asked.

  “By the time I got home, your mother had lost faith in me—on many levels. Looked at me like I was less than the man she had married. I guess, after that, I met her halfway by becoming less and less, until she no longer remembered that I was ever anything more.”

  Larry’s face twisted. His hands formed into fists, the white of his knuckles popping like X-ray images.

  “Then she got sick,” he said. “And that was that.”

  I watched Larry’s eyes well up, and then he shook his head.

  I nodded. The emotion was rising in me like milk warming on the stove. I figured I had about five seconds to get the hell out of there before I bubbled over, making a mess that would be hard to clean up.

  “I’ve got to go,” I said, putting down the beer bottle on the coaster. “Thanks.”

  “Helen,” he said, following me to the door. “I’m glad you came.”

  I nodded, looked at him for a split second, wondered whether it was my wet eyes that made his look wet, too, and then ran to my car.

  Once upon a time, I thought as I drove away, we were just an average family—a mom and dad, two daughters. Then my father left and my mother died and my sister and I were heavy with grief. Maybe those things were average, too. Maybe heartache was more normal than the absence of it.

  Chapter Seven

  The phone was ringing when I walked through the door. It was Davis and Delia, Tim’s parents, who were always both on the line when they called. And who were both always in the most cheerful moods.

  “How are you, darling?” Delia asked.

  “Good. I just walked through the door. I’ve been at Harvest for most of the day.”

  “And Tim?” she asked.

  “Busy! As usual. He’s still at the restaurant. I won’t see him for a few more hours.”

  “We just wanted to check in on you, dear.”

  “We’re good,” I said. “Really good.”

  “And the adoption? Is everything going okay?”

  “Yeah, as far as I know, it looks good.”

  “When you and Tim get back from China, we’ll come up and help you out.”

  “That would be great,” I said, thinking that all this talk of China meant that it was getting closer by the day.

  “Let us know when you have a date,” she said. “We’ll book a room.”

  “No you will not. You’ll stay with us. No arguing!” This was our obligatory back-and-forth every time they visited.

  “We don’t want to burden you, dear,” Delia said. “We want to help.”

  “Burden us? We love it when you’re here. End of discussion.”

  Many people loathed their in-laws. I adored mine. Davis Francis was the retired CEO of a string of manufacturing companies. With broad shoulders and a thick wave of black hair, à la Michael Douglas as Gordon Gecko in Wall Street
, Davis was a towering man with an equally towering presence.

  Tim’s mother, Delia, was as petite as Davis was tall, and her presence as mild as Davis’s was imposing. A size four with tight brown curls, Delia had a way of looking at me that made my throat tighten and tears pool in my eyes. “You are so special,” Delia had said to me at the end of our first dinner together. She placed her petite hand on my cheek and added, “Cancer took my mother, too.” I fought for the breath that was stuck in my throat, but it was a lost cause; Delia’s words undid me. I cried that night—hysterically, cathartically, painfully—on the quilted down of Delia’s four-poster bed. She held me and I remembered thinking how long it had been since I’d found comfort in a mother’s arms, how uniquely curative they were, like a warm spoonful of chicken noodle soup on a rainy day.

  Davis and Delia regarded each other like fine wine—with reverence and adoration. I watched them in wonder as if I were observing exotic animals at the zoo. What is this creature called “loving husband and father,” I’d think. How did Davis grow into this caring human being who valued family more than anything, when my father had been overcome by husband-hood and fatherhood?

  Of course, there were no answers, and I didn’t really care; I was just so thrilled to be part of a family who loved so deeply and with such loyalty. “God’s smiling on us today,” Davis said to Tim and me on our wedding day. Davis then walked me down the aisle, and at the altar, he lifted my veil and kissed me on the cheek, his eyes filled with tears. He squeezed my hands and whispered the word daughter sweetly in my ear just as I looked up to the back of the church to see Larry, standing in the corner, decked out in a three-piece suit. Against Claire’s advice, I had sent him an invitation to our wedding. At the reception, Larry sat awkwardly at a table with some of Tim’s relatives. At one point, I saw Claire talking to him in a corner, though when I asked her about it later, she waved it away as nothing. As the night went on, Larry stayed inconspicuously out of sight, blending into the background during the toasts, cake cutting, and first dances. When he said good-bye, he took an awkward step forward as if he wanted to hug me but stopped short and settled for a quick hand on my shoulder. He shook Tim’s hand, gave us a wedding card along with his congratulations, and left. That was seven years ago, the last time I had seen my father before this evening.

  Davis and Delia’s generous manner and easy lifestyle had yielded a wonderful son, albeit one who was a tad naive. Tim believed that there was goodness in every person. I wasn’t convinced—a belief bred not of pessimism or cynicism, but pragmatism. Most people had been hurt at some point. Most people had had their faith—in humankind as well as anything divine—tested. But Tim’s private-school, loving-and-doting-parents, always-in-a-safe-environment upbringing had left his belief intact.

  I recalled one evening in late August when Tim and I were dating, having recently returned from our travels abroad. We sat poolside at Tim’s parents’ estate, our feet dangling in the cool water, a bottle of Riesling sitting empty between us.

  “What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?” I asked. Though Tim and I had been together for four years, there was a feeling of newness to our relationship now that we were stateside.

  Tim thought, looking up at the marbled sky, as though he wanted to come up with something good. “I once invested in this IPO that went sour the next day…”

  “No!” I protested, punching him in the arm. “I’m not talking about business. What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?” I considered helping him out, filling in the blanks, offering suggestions. Hurt by someone you loved? Father left? Death in the family? Heart broken? Hadn’t he ever been devastated by something, someone? Hadn’t he ever felt the earth shift beneath him? Hadn’t he ever felt utterly alone?

  “I’ve had a nice life,” Tim said with a shrug, rubbing my thigh in a way that told me that he knew I hadn’t navigated my first twenty-seven years with a similar ease.

  I was dumfounded and yet pleased by my new boyfriend’s purity. Yes, next to pristine Tim, I felt so marred, so seasoned, yet I was right where I wanted to be—planted firmly in the middle of a family devoid of chaos, absent of hurt. I only hoped that by association I, too, would be purified.

  Tim slipped through the front door at midnight. Tonight I was wide awake and eager to see him. He kissed me, said hello, and then headed to the bathroom to take his shower.

  I stood on my vanity chair and peered over the top of the shower. The damp steam billowed onto my face. “How was the dinner crowd?”

  “Busy—we served two hundred,” Tim said, scrubbing his body with a loofah.

  Tim’s back was lobster red from the heat. He rubbed the bar of soap under his arms, down his back. I used to do this all the time—talk to Tim as he took his after-work shower. I smiled at the familiarity of it.

  “But we ran out of the veal,” Tim said. “I underestimated how many would want it.”

  “Did you substitute pork or take it from the menu?”

  “I subbed pork,” he said. “It worked okay.”

  “What else went on? Any juicy gossip from Sondra or Philippe?”

  Sondra was our knockout hostess, a stunning twenty-five-year-old brunette with high, sculpted cheekbones and pillowy, ruby lips. We’d hired her when we were getting ready to open the doors to Harvest and she was newly graduated with a degree in hotel management. In the space of a few short years, she had grown into a beautiful woman who radiated confidence like she held a thunderbolt.

  “You tell me,” Tim said. “You talk to Sondra more than I do.”

  “She told me that she broke up with another boyfriend. I told her that she needs to date a guy her age.”

  “She likes the guys with thick wallets.”

  “What about Philippe?”

  “Nothing much,” Tim said. “He’s really learning a lot, though. In a few years I can definitely see letting him run the show.”

  “You said that a couple of years ago,” I reminded him.

  “What about you? What’s new?”

  “Well,” I said, a smile stretching across my face, “I went shopping tonight. Got all sorts of stuff for our trip. Whether we, or the baby, happen to have constipation, diarrhea, bug bites, rashes, a cold, or a fever, I’ve got us covered.”

  “Great.”

  “And I got us money belts, and passport holders, and airplane pillows.”

  “Somehow you and I made it all around the world without all that stuff,” Tim said, smiling.

  “Yeah, but we were just twentysomethings. Now we’re going to be parents. We need to be prepared. No ‘winging it’ allowed.”

  “Listen to you.”

  “I’m getting really excited about this,” I said. “And I talked to your parents tonight, too. They’re going to come up to help us out when we get back from China.”

  It was always easier talking to Tim when he was in the shower. The glass wall of the stall cut the tension between us, as if it were a confessional. I hadn’t knelt in a real confessional since the month before Mom died, hoping that offering up my sins would somehow open me up to some good fortune. But Mom died, anyway—her faith intact, mine spent.

  “That’s great, Helen,” Tim said.

  “There’s more!” I said, an uneasy chuckle tumbling from my mouth. I peered at Tim through the steam. “I saw my father tonight. Larry. I walked up to his door and actually talked to him.”

  Tim was silent for a moment, wiped the water from his eyes. “Why’d you do that?”

  “Because he’s my father” was the only answer that came to mind.

  “And…”

  “And when we were applying for the adoption, the social worker—Elle Reese—asked all about him and I didn’t have a clue what to tell her. Did you see what she ultimately wrote in the home study? She wrote, ‘Father estranged.’”

  Tim turned off the shower, reached for his towel, and nodded his head in consideration.

  “I don’t want him to be estranged a
nymore,” I said. “Especially if we’re getting a baby.”

  “Especially since we’re getting a baby,” Tim corrected.

  “I just feel that he deserves another chance. Doesn’t everyone deserve a second chance?”

  “Helen, I think it’s great. I’m all for you reconciling with your father. What will Claire say?”

  “She’ll say that I’m nuts. Our memories of Larry are very different. I was so much younger. I didn’t see the half of it. She dealt with all the grown-up stuff. Mom confided in her, so I’m sure that tainted Claire’s feelings, knowing what Mom was going through. So whatever she says, I won’t be able to blame her. I just remember good times. Right or wrong, I always liked being around Dad.”

  Claire and I are separated by six years and our mother treated us very differently because of it. Claire was her confidant, and Mom leaned on her as she would a best friend. Claire once told me that Mom—only days before she died—had apologized to her, saying that she knew all along that it wasn’t right to ask her daughter to shoulder her worries, but that Claire was just so capable.

  For as much as Mom relied on Claire to act older than her age, she relied on me to act younger than mine. I was her baby, the daughter she could cuddle, a talisman of the early years before her husband and body had betrayed her. Except that, when Mom got sick, I got mad, and because there was no one else to blame, I blamed her. So instead of being pliable and cuddly and childlike, as she needed me to be, I became snotty and hurtful and blasphemous, sprinkling my thirteen-year-old language with Goddamn this and Jesus Christ that, those deities who seemed solidly in cahoots with cancer to take my mom away from me, those deities to whom Mom seemed to be giving a pass.

  After Tim got out of the shower, we locked up the house and then crawled into bed together. I pulled out the stack of letters that Claire had given me, and snuggled up against Tim.

  “Do you remember where this was?” I asked Tim, showing him the front of a card, a simple sketch of cobblestoned streets, a town square, and mighty church in the middle.

  “That could basically be any city in Europe,” he said.