“Cuter,” Meg said. She finished constructing her sandwich, grasping the knife again and cutting the sandwich smoothly.
“I never would’ve pictured him with a professional surfer. Have you ever heard of her? My god, it says she’s twenty-two! And he’s, what? Forty?”
A professional surfer? Meg hardly knew there was such a career, particularly for women. “Not yet—he’s thirty-nine until November.” Her own thirty-ninth was coming up in late June.
“Wonder what they’ll do for his fortieth. Probably rent an island for a party and invite their hundred closest friends.”
As Kara was saying this, an image of Carson on the old tire swing came to Meg; he was sitting with his legs through it, holding on to the thick rope they’d used to suspend it from a high branch of the oak near the swimming lake. He leaned back and, with bare feet, pushed himself in a lazy circle, while she watched from the shady base of the tree. “For your fortieth birthday,” he said, “I’m taking you to Africa on safari.”
“Are you, now?” she asked, more interested in watching his naked back than in considering anything that might happen more than twenty years in the future.
He said, “Yep. Count on it.”
“What about for your fortieth?” she said.
“Thailand,” he answered, “for lemongrass shrimp.” He let the tire sway then, peering into the oak leaves like their future was painted there, episodes of their life-to-be displayed for preview on each toothy leaf.
Kara laughed. “God. Seventeen years.”
For a second Meg thought Kara was talking about how long it had been since that day. Not seventeen years, she thought. Twenty—no, twenty-one. And then she realized Kara was calculating the age difference between Carson and his fiancée. No wonder they were calling him a cradle robber; his bride-to-be was probably just learning to walk when he’d made his safari promise.
“Whatever makes him happy,” Meg said, wanting to be done with the topic. “Now tell me, how go your plans for the plant nursery?”
“Do I detect a change-of-subject attempt here? I mean, c’mon Meggie, you had your shot and you let him go.”
“True,” Meg said. Neither she nor her parents had ever told Kara or Beth or the youngest, Julianne, the whole truth about why she and Carson broke up.
Kara sighed. “Jesus, if I’d known he was going to get famous, I would have snagged him, for God’s sake. Nothing against Todd.”
“Of course.”
“Well, I guess we both fucked up where old Car’s concerned—gotta live with it. But life is good, right? I mean, I have Todd and the boys, you have Brian and Savannah—you wouldn’t trade her for the world, even to have a kid of Carson’s.”
“Nope,” Meg agreed, though of course it was fully possible that the two children Kara was referencing—Savannah and a theoretical child of Carson’s—were in fact one in the same. But Kara had no clue that Savannah might not be Brian’s. No clue that Meg had seen Carson the day of her wedding and that she had not been nearly as successful at closing the door behind her as she thought she’d be.
“Are you doing okay? You sound cranky. Maybe get a nap in. God, I wish I could steal time for a nap! You should see my kitchen counters—do you think Keiffer and Evan could get their lunch plates past the clay mockup of Mt. Doom and into the sink? Anyhow, I better go; I hear Tony screaming about something, and Todd’s out in the garage.”
Meg smiled at the happy disorder of her sister’s home. “I’m glad you called.”
“Tell Dad to call me. Kisses to all,” Kara said, and they hung up.
Meg simply stood there holding her phone for a minute afterward, wistfulness and loss washing over her. She missed Kara and Beth and Julianne, but they, at least, were still walking the Earth. They, at least, were accessible by a half-day’s airplane journey. But their mother, snatched away so suddenly that Meg still sometimes picked up the phone to call her before remembering, was lost to her, to them, forever. How was a girl—all right, a woman—supposed to manage without her mother? The notebook diaries gave her windows through which to view her mother in their past, but what of today, when she needed a supportive arm around her shoulders?
“Oh, Mom,” she sighed. “Is this as good as it gets?”
THE DARK QUIET OF THE SCREENED PORCH, LATE THAT NIGHT, SOOTHED Meg only a little as she sat on a chaise and sipped gin, straight. Brian and Savannah both had been asleep for hours, but she had yet to even feel like closing her eyes. She was tired—so tired she couldn’t even calculate how many hours it had been since she’d slept. But her thoughts swirled and tumbled like river rapids, making sleep impossible.
Her mother, she knew, had lived with turmoil most of her life—she was the youngest of eight kids whose father died in Normandy. Then she married into it; Meg’s father was always launching some half-planned scheme that inevitably failed. The first was a citrus farm like the McKays’, with thousands of young trees that were killed in the second year by some blight he hadn’t known to look for. Next he bought the land that would later become their horse farm and built a huge greenhouse, for the supposedly easier job of growing rare orchids to sell to collectors. Yet neither he nor her mother, who by then was also tending her, could master the expensive, sensitive plants, which died off steadily while the debt blossomed.
Just after Kara’s birth, when Meg was five, he gave up that particular dream; they sold off all the orchid paraphernalia at a loss and built stables, with the goal of not just boarding Thoroughbreds but also breeding them. Her father was sure his powers of persuasion wouldn’t be lost on the horses or the people who liked to buy them. He succeeded just often enough to encourage him to sink more money into the venture, and by the time Julianne was born nine years after Meg, the family was firmly shackled to what would become her father’s most enduring obsession.
She remembered many times—whole seasons, in fact, when all she and her sisters ate for lunch was bread and jam, or eggs from the noisy, skittish chickens they raised. They wore shoes from the thrift store and clothes bought at Saturday-morning yard sales. They learned early how to answer the phone and politely tell the bill collectors that their parents were busy, but could they please take a message? She had coached her sisters, the three of them standing in front of her looking like uneven stair steps, each taking a practice turn with the phone. She’d been twelve, maybe thirteen. “Show them all,” her mother had directed. “You know how Julianne likes to run for the phone.” Julianne, at three, was easiest to train—she was happy to imitate, to earn Meg’s praise, while Beth and Kara had asked questions Meg couldn’t answer and knew better than to forward to their parents:
“Why do the people keep calling, Meggie?”
“Why won’t Mommy or Daddy answer the phone?”
Only when some large man or another showed up—always in an ill-fitting suit—did her father deal with matters himself. From her bedroom window she would watch the men leave, her father putting them into their nondescript sedans with a smile and a handshake. Making dubious promises that had, a few years later, led to one of her own.
Her affluent adult life could hardly compare with the craziness her mother endured for so many years, but she liked that they shared a steady temperament. For as far back as she could remember, she too had weathered what crises came by trusting that solutions would present themselves—always with the help of the Blessed Virgin, of course, or so her mother wanted her to believe. Meg endured, too busy minding her sisters, or feeding the chickens, or currying the succession of horses her father always insisted were Triple-Crown winners in the making, to do anything else.
Tonight the low chirping of crickets outside the porch spoke of good luck, something she felt sorely short of just now. Yet as quickly as this self-pity reared up, she pushed it down; she had no right to feel sorry for herself, none, and she buried the urge by remembering that, short of the unstoppable medical crises she’d faced now and then as a doctor, she was responsible for everything in her life, good and
bad.
Responsible: that was the trait that made her rescue her parents from looming foreclosure and allow her sisters to finish growing up there on the farm, instead of crammed into some tiny, roach-infested apartment. That was the trait that kept her from seeking out a definitive answer to Savannah’s paternity. The trait made her a popular, respected doctor—and tempered her guilt when things went wrong even after she’d done everything right. She was always careful, responsible, even when she didn’t want to be. Almost always.
But in the same way her mother could not, despite valiant efforts, save the family from the ruin that seemed sure until Meg married Brian, Meg’s effort had not been able to save the Langs’ baby. Nor had it secured the satisfying life she’d rationalized would follow her marriage in due time. You could work hard, stick to all the rules, and still fail.
Which made her wonder why, then, she bothered to be so damn careful.
The sweet, musky smell of aging honeysuckle blooms drifted to Meg on the warm night’s breeze. She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, putting aside the heavy thoughts, her worry about her arm, the guilt she felt over losing the Langs’ baby, and the odd lack of guilt she felt for having encouraged Clay’s attentions. Putting them aside and simply filling herself with nature’s sensual buffet. A warm spring night. Sweetly scented flowers. Damp soil. The smell of wild mint and freshly mowed grass.
The grass brought her back, for a moment, to something Brian said earlier. She’d told him about the stillbirth, and he was, of course, sympathetic. “Jesus, Meg, how awful for them,” he said. But then he added, “I don’t mean to sound insensitive, but do you think Lang will still do our lawn?”
Ever practical.
A mockingbird, apparently confused about the hour, began its litany of calls someplace off on the east side of their property, a three-acre estate in a community of similar ones. Meg turned in the direction of the sound, as if it was possible to see the bird at three AM. She saw the silhouettes of towering pines and oaks and magnolias and wondered if maybe the bird, too, was trying to shake off a bad day: some offense by its mate, or a wound inflicted by too zealous a flight. She thought maybe she ought to sing too, despite the hour; singing worked for Savannah. It worked, she supposed, for Carson.
She drew her bare legs up and wrapped her arms around them—both arms behaving just the way they should, go figure. Resting her chin on her knees, she let herself be distracted by thoughts of Carson and the news that he was about to be married.
Probably she should just satisfy her curiosity and go read the details—maybe even plan to send them a gift. Whoever Valerie Haas was, she would have to be very impressive, considering how long Carson had been single, and how eligible he was.
Probably she should get the details about his wedding and his bride so that she wouldn’t be distracted any further, so that she could close that chapter of her life—hadn’t it been open for far too long as it was?
Carson, married. In love—a good thing, even if the thought of it gave her a pang of possessiveness that hurt. Even if imagining him permanently joined to anyone else brought pain like a sharp stone being pressed into her heart.
Thirteen
MEG TOOK ONE OF THE NOTEBOOK DIARIES WITH HER TO WORK MONDAY, reading it in her office during her lunch break.
December 5, 1987
Carolyn and I were talking about the kids today, over to the co-op. Carson’s thinking of buying Meggie a ring for Christmas. He hasn’t told Meggie. Nothing could be more natural than the two of them married. Caro thinks he means to have an April wedding, since Meggie loves springtime. To be purely honest, the timing couldn’t be better for her moving in with Carson, because if things keep up like they are, we’ll lose the whole farm by May.
But of course it hadn’t gone like that. It was Brian who proposed—in a sense—two weeks before Christmas, a time when she couldn’t fail to see the romance in his gesture.
He hadn’t been her supervisor for several months, but she saw him often. Back in early fall he’d told her that the reason he’d moved himself out of front-end management and into Investments was because he hoped to date her. He wasn’t pushy about it, and he assured her that her job was in no way affected by her firm refusals to do anything more than have a platonic lunch with him now and then. She never let him pay.
This lunch, though, was unlike any that had come before.
They went to Margot’s, a café she couldn’t afford to eat at on her own, by way, he said, of a “Christmas bonus—my treat.” The place was done up for the holidays, with swags of fresh holly and twinkling white lights and deep red velvet ribbon hanging above every doorway. Brian sat across from her at an intimate, white-draped table and told her he had an outrageous proposition. Would she just listen and promise to give it some thought?
“Meg,” he said, “I heard something impressive a while back, one Friday when you weren’t at the Trough. I usually don’t listen much to gossip, but—well, here’s what I heard: Vicki was telling Mark how you give your whole paycheck to your parents to help pay their bills, that you’ve been doing it since you started with us.”
Her cheeks burned; Vicky wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about that—and especially not when someone like Brian could overhear. Her family’s difficulties embarrassed her, made her look bad by association. She said, “Yeah, well, they’ve had some money problems. One of the stallions fractured a leg, and—”
“Oh, don’t get me wrong—I think you’re amazing. That’s so generous. So loyal. What kid is willing to sacrifice their own agenda to help their parents these days?”
Meg shrugged. “I have to help if I can.” The choice was simple to her, automatic as breathing.
“And, you’ve been loyal to the bank, working here, what?—over two years now? Then there’s your loyalty to your boyfriend—which I’m not so crazy about.” He laughed.
She shrugged again, embarrassed but flattered, too, which she feared was disloyal, and her face grew even hotter.
He reached over and took her hand in his cool, smooth ones, white-collar hands. “I admire you, and you know I really like you, Meg. You work hard, you take care of your family—and Jesus, you’re so pretty. We’ve known each other for a while, right? We worked well together, we get along—and, I know this sounds crazy, but, I…I want to help you out. You have to give me a shot, Meg; you owe it to yourself to see if you think we’re as compatible as I already know we are. And if you do, I want you to consider marrying me.”
She was sure she heard him wrong. “You want what?”
“If you agreed to marry me, well, Dad and I would be in a position to help your parents with their mortgage.” He held up one hand to stop her protest. “I know, it sounds like a bribe, but think of it as an incentive. A bonus.”
“How do you know about their mortgage?” Even she knew little about the details of her parents’ finances.
“We hold it,” Brian said. “They refinanced with us a couple years ago. I’ve had Dad delay the foreclosure proceedings until after I talked to you today.” He leaned closer, looked into her eyes. “Look, Meg, I’m not a crazy person; I’m just a man who knows his mind. We could be really good together, I’m sure of it. Maybe you think you love Carson, and maybe you do love him, in a way. But what is that? Adolescent love, which never lasts. He’s been your escape from a stressful, crazy life, but you won’t need that—him—anymore; you’ll be able to solve your family’s problems. You’ll be the hero.”
Then he kissed her, and she was too astonished to object. “Say you’ll think about it.”
She hated to, but how could she not?
She couldn’t tell Carson, Brian said; no one could know, because of the “creative financing” that would take place if things worked out. She didn’t exactly want to tell Carson anyway; the whole situation felt outrageous, unseemly—and yet, it could be a lightning strike of good fortune for her family. Maybe even fate.
She had to save her family if she could. It was the right cho
ice. The moral choice. By choosing Brian, she could save her sisters from a family reputation even lower than it was already. She could lift them up to a higher social plateau, where they’d have a chance to be popular at school and never have to give up their free time just to keep the family in bread and milk. Without the overwhelming debt, her parents would have money for extras: Kara wanted to go with the high school’s Spanish Club to Mexico City; Beth wanted to take piano lessons; Julianne wanted riding boots and an English saddle and regulation jump bars to practice with so that she might compete. The girls could dress better.
As much as any of those things, Meg wanted her mother to be able to sleep nights instead of wandering the house like a restless spirit. So how could she selfishly hold on to Carson and watch the rest of them spiral into misery, deprived of the land that gave them, if nothing else, room to own a piece of sky, a shaggy oak, a footpath to a shallow pond where beautiful, if mostly barren, horses stood in the morning to drink?
So she’d gone along with it, meaning to give Brian a fair try. There was truth in what he said about adolescent love; she couldn’t argue with this even now, on its theoretical basis. But in her nontheoretical life, the answer that had seemed so clean and obvious to her at the time of Brian’s proposal became murkier as time passed. She liked Brian, liked the new work schedule that allowed her to commute to Gainesville three days a week for school, liked the places she got to go with him: New York, Puerto Rico, Washington, D.C. But she missed Carson like she’d miss her right hand if she woke up to find it suddenly gone. Though there was no real choice but to marry Brian, she felt so guilty about her decision that she literally ached, as though her heart had weakened but was forced to keep beating. She just could not understand why what was supposed to be right felt so wrong.
Well, she understood better now.
Leaving her sandwich untouched, she read her mother’s entry from the day she married Brian.
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