by Emma Straub
“You don’t want it to be a bank. What do you think it should be?” Elliot asked.
“I’d like a really good Mexican restaurant, I guess. Or Japanese. But I’d settle for anything, as long as it wasn’t another diner.”
“We don’t need another diner,” Elliot said.
“We sure don’t,” Olympia said, and winked.
Elliot finished his coffee and sat. His meeting didn’t start for another half hour, and Wendy was in charge of getting the boys where they needed to go that afternoon. Traffic was moving normally outside. It was only hours ago, Barbara and the bus. Elliot watched the cars go around and around, himself with no particular place to go.
Chapter 6
The Big House
The Big House sounded impressive if you hadn’t seen it, but once you had, you understood that the name was a cutesy diminutive, like calling a house a pile of bricks, or a love shack. It was a three-story stone mansion built in 1890, one of dozens like it dotting the Hudson Valley from their perches high above the river. Because there were others like it, and they’d had the money, the house didn’t even seem so extraordinary when Astrid and Russell bought it in 1975. It was big enough for them, baby Elliot, and the siblings they imagined he would have. The acres-wide yard sloped all the way to the water, although the slope was only walkable for about a hundred feet, before the drop became precipitous. They had lost a lot of woebegone toys that way, seeing how far one could chuck a G.I. Joe, whether they could hear a splash. (They could never hear a splash.)
Astrid helped Cecelia to her room and then gave the girl some privacy, to settle in. Maybe that was part of the problem, how little space Cecelia had at home, how the three of them were always on top of one another like Charlie Bucket’s grandparents, all in one bed. Astrid padded back down to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. It had been so long since there was a child in the house, she had spent days shopping and baking and cooking. Cecelia’s nutrition was at stake, her energy. Astrid had baked zucchini muffins with walnuts, an enormous casserole of macaroni and cheese, turkey meatballs, chocolate chip cookies, granola bars studded with plump raisins. She’d bought eight bananas. There were enough tomatoes to can and freeze soup and pasta sauce for a whole winter. Peanut butter, almond butter, three kinds of jam. If Cecelia was anything like her father had been, or her aunt and uncle, she would somehow still open the fridge and the pantry doors and moan that there was nothing to eat. But Astrid had done her duty. The blessing of being a grandparent was knowing all the things that had to be done and having the time to do them. Some of her friends thought that extra patience came with age, but that wasn’t it, of course. Their calendars just weren’t as full. Astrid was clear-eyed about her position. Nicky hadn’t said, Oh, Mom, please talk to Cecelia about everything, please help. He’d said, Can she come? And the answer was yes. Astrid was an able body; she was a safe house. He was complimenting her ability to keep children alive, not her parenting skills. Astrid knew that out of all her children, Nicky trusted her decisions the least. She was not his first choice, and the situation had to be fairly dire for him to even have considered the notion.
* * *
—
Astrid wanted to call Bob Baker. She’d been there, after all, and had seen it happen. Wouldn’t he want to hear from her? Astrid hadn’t ever called him in her life. She should write a note, she should take a platter of baked chicken to his door. She would do that too. But while she was standing there, somehow no longer alone in her big house, all she could think of was Bob, newly alone in his. Astrid walked over to the telephone on the wall—oh, how Elliot mocked her for her rotary phone, cream-colored and heavy as a brick—and dialed. Bob answered right away, and when he did, she realized that she hadn’t imagined a scenario in which he would actually answer. It was today, after all, somehow still just today that it had happened, and Astrid knew from her own widowhood how many things would be on Bob’s immediate list, things he likely had never thought about: hospitals, morgues, funeral parlors, calling the rest of their family with the news. Astrid knew some people (organized women, all) with terminal cancer who had set up elaborate phone trees, exactly the way they’d done for unplanned school snow days before email, to tell everyone about their deaths when the time came. Bob didn’t have a phone tree. Somehow, he was at home. For a split second, Astrid worried that Bob didn’t know, and that she’d have to be the one to tell him.
“Hi there, Bob, it’s Astrid Strick.” She tried to remember the last time they’d actually exchanged anything more than a cursory nod. Maybe when she’d been behind him in line at Clapham Organic, or standing at neighboring pumps at the gas station? But even that was just polite small talk, no more than you’d have with an actual stranger. It had probably been thirty years since they’d really spoken, back in the time of dinosaurs, when she was still young enough to imagine age was a basis for a friendship.
“Hi there.” Bob waited. He didn’t sound surprised to hear from her. Of course. “I understand you were there when it happened.”
“I was, Bob.” Astrid wound the cord around her finger, watching her flesh pinken and bulge. “It was the damnedest thing, and I am so sorry. Barbara deserved better.”
“She did.” Bob was not a garrulous man.
“I’ve got my granddaughter here now, Bob, but I’d like to bring over some food in the next day or so, would that be all right? I’d drop off a dish, you know, something easy to warm up. Just to cross one thing off the list, is that all right?”
“Sure, Astrid.” Bob paused so long that Astrid thought he might have hung up. Then he inhaled long and hard, almost a snore. “Well, she was living over at her mother’s, these last few months. At Heron Meadows. So I’ve gotten pretty good at feeding myself. I’d still be happy for a dish, though, don’t get me wrong; I just wanted you to know.”
Astrid tilted her head to the left. “You don’t say. Well, a man’s got to eat. I’ll stop by. Thanks, Bob. So sorry, again. I’ve been there. It’s a horrible thing to have to go through, and I’m sorry.” Astrid hung up the phone with a decisive clunk and immediately doubled over with laughter, the source of which she was not quite sure. It bubbled up from her toes and roiled through her belly and came out her mouth like a gassy belch, and for a full few minutes, Astrid found that she couldn’t stop. Her eyes watered and then they, too, sprung leaks, and the world turned blurry, and Astrid made her way into the bathroom and shut the door behind herself, just in case Cecelia came down the stairs and happened upon her. Her own children had never seen her cry. She sat on the closed toilet lid and tried to take deep breaths. When Russell died, she followed his body to the funeral parlor and then picked up his shirts at the dry cleaner on her way home. Astrid’s greatest strength, as a person, had always been her iron tear ducts. When Russell died, she had reigned like a queen, or the dictator of a very small country. Everything was done on time, everything was handled. What happened to Barbara seemed too cruel to imagine: a woman who had finally decided to handle things on her own, as she wanted to. It could have been her, Astrid, who’d been caught by the bus’s bumper, or it could have been Birdie, and then what? They would have each mourned a friend. Astrid’s children would have limped on without her help. That pierced her too—the thought of her children, alone, none of the three of them quite adults, still, even now! When she was their age, she’d been ancient. It wasn’t funny, none of it was funny. Astrid felt like she had food poisoning, like whatever she had ingested was foul and bad and needed to get out of her body one way or the other. Astrid breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth, the way she did when there was turbulence on airplanes. When she was finally calm again, Astrid picked up the phone and called Birdie’s cellphone, not even giving her a chance to say hello.
“Birdie bird, you little snake, you didn’t tell me,” she said, and repeated what Bob had told her.
“You never asked! It was none of my business!” Birdie said. She
wasn’t a gossip, Astrid knew. Birdie probably saw all sorts of things at Heron Meadows, the many humiliations of age, and she never said a thing. Astrid was pierced with a sharp pang of desire—she wanted Birdie to come over, right now; she wanted to put her head in Birdie’s lap and cry or laugh or both. Was that romance or codependence, the overwhelming need for another person in order to properly function? Birdie was doing her weekly reorders at the salon and had offered to go with Astrid to the train station and then home, whatever she wanted, but Astrid had refused. They were still careful in public, but truly, not more careful than Astrid would have been with a man. She wasn’t into public displays of anything except irritation at those who didn’t follow rules, like drivers who made rolling stops or those who didn’t pick up their dogs’ mess. It was hard to keep a secret in a small town, but as Astrid had learned, everything was easier when you were a woman over fifty. That’s what made Astrid cry, she realized—Barbara had known that too.
Chapter 7
August in Purgatory
August sat in the back of his parents’ car. Like everything else they owned, it was purposefully old, as if existing for long enough gave things extra value instead of the opposite. They owned a vintage clothing and furniture store, Secondhand News, and so he supposed it was true, that they literally sold things for more money than they’d been worth, but it still seemed sort of like an outlandish idea. The car was special, though, the kind of thing that young people with beards and tinted sunglasses oohed and aahed over when it was parked on the street in Clapham. It was enormous, the size of an ocean liner, and as square as a pretend car made out of a cardboard box. They called it Harold. The air-conditioning was broken, and so August’s window was rolled all the way down, and the wind blew his hair around his face like a washing machine.
“Honey?” his mom said, turning her face toward the back seat. Her voice was barely audible over the wind, a signal through static.
“Mmm,” August said, keeping his eyes on the trees whipping by. They were halfway home, and soon they would stop for lunch in Great Barrington, as they always did on the way home from camp.
There was a week left before school started. The eighth grade. If camp had lasted until five minutes before school started, that’s what August would have wanted. School was full of people August spent every summer forgetting entirely, sometimes so well that he was surprised to see them in the fall, as if they’d died and come back from the dead. Not because they were all terrible people—only some of them were terrible, like the girls who always rode in the annual Harvest Parade, a new crop every year, girls who waved from elbow to wrist like Miss-Americas-in-training—they just weren’t his people, and it was nice not to have to take up space with things you didn’t need.
His parents didn’t see things that way. They were menders by nature, fixers, and thought that anything could be solved by talking it into the ground.
“Honey?” August’s mom said again. She motioned for him to roll up his window, which he reluctantly did, cutting off the noise of the road with a thunk.
“Yeah?” Now he could hear the music they were listening to in the front seat, Paul Simon, official soundtrack of liberal parents everywhere. Sometimes August wondered if there was a handbook that came with being a parent, full of the music and books and movies you were supposed to like (Aretha, Chabon, documentaries), and what kind of food to insist was delicious when clearly it was not (homemade hummus, lentil soup).
“Do you want to talk about it?” His dad swiveled around and cupped his hands around the headrest.
“Talk about what?” August tucked his hair behind his ears.
“You haven’t stopped crying since we picked you up.” His dad’s voice was soft. He meant well—they both did. It wasn’t their fault.
“I hadn’t noticed,” August said, which was true. Adults—even nice ones, like his parents, who understand that their children are autonomous human people and not robots created just to please them—couldn’t remember what it was like. Here is a brief list of what it (being alive) was like: Being a naked person in the middle of Times Square. Being a naked person in the middle of the cafeteria. Being a hermit crab scurrying along the ocean floor in search of a new shell. Being a baby turtle in the middle of a six-lane highway. That didn’t begin to cover all the ways August felt weird and strange and wrong every day.
“Oh,” said his mother. She reached back and put her hand on his knee. “Love you, sweetie.” Then August rolled his window down again and they left him alone until lunch.
* * *
—
If camp was heaven and home was hell, then Great Barrington was purgatory, a good place to stop to go to the bathroom. There were good sandwiches and a spot around the corner with better-than-good ice cream. August reluctantly ordered a waffle cone with mint chocolate chip and rainbow sprinkles, because no amount of sweetness could make him less sad, which was what he wanted, to stay sad for a while longer. They sat inside at a small square table, all six of their knees touching.
“You can still go back next year,” his mom said. There was an internal countdown. August had one more summer before aging out. Like a stuffed animal on a teenager’s bed, his days were numbered. They all tried not to talk about it, and this early mention of the ticking down of the clock from his mother felt like a breach of etiquette—he must have been crying a lot for her to resort to the promise of next summer already, before they were even two hours gone.
August’s mother, Ruth, had long brown hair and blunt bangs, like a 1970s teenager. She wore tight jeans and had charmingly unorthodontia’d teeth and had always, always been popular. August often watched her interact with people—ice-cream shop employees, friends, random strangers at the grocery store—and wondered what life would be like if he could be like her. Every year, she told him that it would be the year that he would finally find his people at school, not just at camp. He didn’t have the heart to tell her that it was about as likely as being struck by lightning while juggling bowling pins. There were people at school whom he could tolerate, people whom he could call for the homework assignments if he’d been out sick, but they weren’t friends. They were colleagues in the business of surviving junior high. In August’s best and dearest fantasies, he would get his GED by age fifteen and go straight to college in New York City or San Francisco and be a camp counselor in the summers and only come back to Clapham on holidays. But he couldn’t tell his mother that. She was under the mistaken impression that he was still a child.
“I know,” August said. His dad rubbed his beard.
The ice-cream parlor was packed, and their table sat right underneath a large community board covered with tacked-up homemade signs about dog-walking services and guitar lessons, photographs of cats that had gone missing.
“Ooh,” Ruth said, pointing to one about an estate sale. This was August’s whole childhood, trailing his parents around dank old houses filled with a dead person’s belongings.
“Absolutely,” John said. He’d fallen in love with Ruth first, then old things. When he’d gone to Clapham High, he’d been the captain of the tennis team, as preppy as they come, with hair that swooped like a cresting wave. Slowly, his mom had transformed his father’s closet of pastel staples into earlier versions of the same, and now he was just as bad as she was, in short-shorts that dads would have worn to pick up their children from camp in 1980. Somehow, even when his parents bought new clothing, it still looked old.
“Do you mind, honey?” Ruth asked. But she wasn’t really asking. This was what the Sullivans did. They bought old things by the bushel and, through their touch, transformed them into something desirable, something new. August wished that his parents could work their magic on him too.
* * *
—
The house was small, a sun-bleached blue, like a boat that had been sitting in salt water for decades. A few lookie-loos were standing outside the garage, but it was
n’t crazy the way it sometimes was, in fancier neighborhoods, with lots of pickers like his parents craning their necks to find expensive things to put in their shop windows. This was just a little house in a small town that had to empty itself out, one way or another. August followed his parents through the front door. He knew the drill.
They looked for furniture first, because it was worth the most, and something valuable (a midcentury credenza, antique mirrors, milk glass light fixtures) would sell fast. Then they looked for objects and clothes and art, in that order. You wouldn’t believe how much someone would pay for a hand-carved wooden duck. His parents split up, one upstairs, one down, their eyes trained at knee level. August followed his dad upstairs and ambled into one of the bedrooms.
August had described this process to his friends at camp, and they had unanimously pronounced it creepy AF. They loved to talk about it on the nights when bunks took camping trips, sitting around the fire, marshmallows on sticks.
“So, like, the people are dead, right?” his best friend, Emily, had asked.
“Super dead. At least I assume so. I mean, otherwise it would just be a garage sale, and they’d be sitting there with a fanny pack, telling you how much their juicer costs.”
“Why don’t their husbands or wives or kids do something with all their stuff? It just seems so sad, to open your doors and be, like, have at it.” Quinn shook her head.
“I think that is how they deal with it. And some people don’t have husbands or wives or kids, you know? Or maybe they live far away?” That settled everyone into a shared silent paralysis.