“All right,” she repeated. She felt her knees buckling, but this time, Richard was there to catch her before her shoulders hit the beige wall. “Shh, shh,” he whispered and kissed her cheek. Then he led her down the hall for the last time, back to the island of couches and coffee tables, the out-of-date magazines, and the parents with tense, fearful faces. Her friends were waiting for her, sitting side by side on a couch, Becky in her cook’s black-and-white pants, Kelly twisting her rosary beads in her lap, Lia’s face in profile so stern and lovely that it belonged in a painting or on a coin. They looked at her with their faces upturned like flowers, their hands linked, like sisters. “It’s going to be all right.”
January
LIA
“Hi,” I said, smiling as I approached the two-top—an older couple, white-haired. Grandma and Grandpa out for a nice night on the town. “My name’s Lia, and I’ll be serving you this evening. Can I tell you about our specials?”
“Only if you tell us how much they cost,” said the woman, narrowing her eyes at me as if I’d tried to make off with her purse. “I despise it when servers tell you the specials and don’t tell you how much things cost. Then you’re surprised when you get the bill. Usually unpleasantly.”
I struggled to keep my smile in place. “Of course. Tonight, we have a ceviche—that’s raw fish marinated in lime juice . . .”
“I know what ceviche is,” the woman said, gesturing with her butter knife. “Don’t patronize me, darling.”
Whoa. Evil Granny. “Our ceviche tonight is salmon in a lime and blood-orange marinade, and it costs twelve dollars. We’re also offering an ancho-rubbed veal chop, served with a savory chipotle flan, for eighteen dollars. Our whole fish of the night, which is prepared brushed with olive oil, kosher salt, and pepper, is dorado.” I paused. The old woman raised her eyebrows. “Dorado is a firm-fleshed, mild . . .”
“I know.”
“I’m sorry. It’s served with plantains, and it’s twenty-two.”
“We’d like the pulled pork empanadas,” said the man.
“I do hope they aren’t greasy,” said the woman.
“Well, they are deep-fried,” I said.
Sarah slipped by me with a tray held aloft. I looked past her and saw the party at the table behind the one I was serving. My breath caught in my throat, and I reeled two steps backward without even thinking about it. “Excuse me,” I murmured.
“Excuse me,” said the old woman. “We weren’t finished!”
“I’ll be right back,” I said, and then I brushed past the first-daters at table eight, the three girls gossiping at table nine, and fled to the kitchen, where I pressed my hands against the stainless-steel serving counter and tried to catch my breath.
“Hey, are you all right?” asked Becky, hurrying past with a bowl full of beaten eggs.
I nodded and held up one finger.
“Seen a ghost?” she asked.
It was something like that, I thought.
“Hey,” I said to Dash the dishwasher. “Can I have some of your water?”
“Sure!” he said, handing me the bottle, looking dazzled. “Have it all!”
I took a long swallow. Then I poured some on a napkin and draped it over the back of my neck. My mother used to do that for me on hot summer days. There, isn’t that better? she’d ask, with her hand resting between my shoulders.
I straightened up, retucked my white shirt into my black pants with red trim at the ankles—toreador pants, I’d thought when I’d bought them, just right for waitressing at Mas—and peeked through the door. I hadn’t been wrong. It was Merrill, from Parents Together, the one who’d gone on and on about how the Make-a-Wish people had failed to provide her dying son with a visit from a porn star. She was with her husband, the man who’d patted her shoulder so ineffectually. Merrill and her husband and a little boy.
I dropped off the gossiping girls’ check and returned to Grumpy Grandma.
“Well!” said the old lady. “Look who’s here!” I was watching Merrill’s table out of the corner of my eye, watching as she leaned toward the little boy, smiling at something he’d said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Do you have any questions about the menu?”
The man shook his head. “I’d like the grilled shrimp, please.”
The woman pointed at one of the entrées. “Is the chili-crusted rack of lamb spicy?”
“Yes. Yes, it is.”
“Well, could they make it without the chili?”
Merrill’s little boy was maybe two or three. He climbed out of his booster seat, and his father helped him pull on a red wool coat.
“I could ask,” I said, knowing what Sarah would say—if they want plain old meat, let ’em go down the street to Smith & Wollensky.
“Do that for me, darling,” the woman said. Merrill stood up, setting the check folder back onto the table, and guiding the boy to the door. At Parents Together, she’d worn jeans and a sweatshirt—the international uniform of the brokenhearted, I sometimes thought. But tonight she was all dressed up, hair straight and shiny, mouth painted and eyes lined, in black pants of her own, a white blouse and a belt of gold links, and red-and-gold Chinese slippers. You wouldn’t look at her and think that anything was wrong. She looked like any other youngish mother, out for the night. I felt my knees start to sag, and I grabbed onto the back of the aged party’s chair to keep myself and my new toreador pants from sliding to the floor.
“Is there a problem?” Grandma demanded.
“Sorry,” I said. Merrill and her son and her husband pushed through the door and, without even thinking, I ran back to the kitchen. “Can you cover for me?” I asked Becky.
“What?”
“Cover for me,” I said, handing her my checks. “I’ve got seven, eight, and nine. The people at seven are miserable. I’ll be right back.” I ran out of the kitchen, through the restaurant, and followed Merrill and her family onto the street. “Hey!” I called. “Merrill!”
She turned around, looking at me. “Oh God, did I leave my credit card? I’m always doing that . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“It’s Lisa. From Parents Together.” I smoothed out my apron. It was freezing outside. I wished I’d thought to grab my mother’s blue coat. “I’m sorry to bother you, I just . . .”
“Honey.” Her husband took her arm. “The movie’s starting soon.”
“You two go ahead,” she told her husband, keeping her eyes on my face. “Lisa and I are going to get a cup of coffee.”
“I don’t want to keep you. I don’t want to ruin your night . . .”
“It’s okay,” she said. Her breath came in silvery puffs. She opened the door to the coffee shop on Nineteenth Street. I followed her inside.
“Is that . . .” I swallowed hard. “That little boy. Is that . . .”
“My son,” she said. “His name is Jared.”
“And you had him after . . .”
She nodded, taking a seat at one of the back tables. “After.” We both knew what After meant.
“How? That’s what I wanted to ask you. Can you tell me how?”
She nodded, and in that gesture I caught a glimpse of the furious woman I’d seen in Grief Group, the one who would not let herself be comforted and who still seemed to be in so much pain. “I thought that we wouldn’t. That we couldn’t. I thought we’d be one of those couples everyone knows—oh, they lost their son and their marriage couldn’t take it and they split up. But Ted—that’s my husband—was so good through the whole thing with Daniel that sometimes . . .” She ducked her head. Her voice was almost inaudible. “I got to the point where I could almost see it as a kind of a blessing, what happened to Daniel, because it let my husband show me how much he loved me. How I’d never have to doubt it. I know how that sounds, but . . .”
I pressed my hands against the table to keep them from shaking. I was remembering Sam—a glass passed across a bar, a straw wrapper slipped over my finger, a wedding dress lying on a hotel bed. L
et me be your family now.
“Ted asked me if I wanted to try again six months after Daniel died,” Merrill said. “I wasn’t ready then. I thought if I had another baby, another little boy, I’d be holding my breath his whole life just waiting for the leukemia to come back and finish the job. Ruin my whole family. Take everything I had, instead of just Daniel. I thought that every time he sneezed or got a bruise I’d be dragging him to the doctor’s . . . that I wouldn’t be able to just let him be a kid. I was too scared.”
“Is that how it was?”
“A little bit. Especially at first. I think mothers like us, mothers who’ve lost a child, we’re always holding our breath a little bit. But they grow up anyhow, and no matter how careful you want to be, they just want to be kids and do kid things. Ride a bike, play soccer, go outside in the rain . . .” She rubbed her hands together. “I’ve got a good husband,” she said. “That was probably three-quarters of it. The rest of it was just me. I decided that it was a choice. You know those people who say that happiness is a choice?”
I nodded. There’d been a great many of them in California.
“Hope is a choice, too. I know it sounds silly . . .”
I shook my head.
“I remember I was lying in bed the second night after Daniel died. Ted and I had to make the arrangements—that’s what they called it, make the arrangements, and what it meant was we had to pick out his coffin. My mother was with us, and she kept saying, ‘It’s not God’s plan for a parent to bury a child.’ All I could think was that I never knew there were coffins so small and that he wouldn’t have liked any of them. He had his whole room covered in posters and NASCAR stickers. He hated getting dressed up for church, and all the coffins were . . .” She shook her head. “They were just so wrong for an eleven-year-old boy. I went home that night and I was lying in bed. I hadn’t even taken my shoes off. I was just lying there in the dark, and I remember thinking to myself, You can live or you can die.”
“So you decided to live,” I said.
Merrill nodded. “I decided to hope. It was the hardest thing I ever did. The first year, a lot of days, just getting out of bed and getting dressed felt like more than I could handle . . . and there were days when I couldn’t even do that. But Ted was so good—he was so patient with me. Even my mother wasn’t so bad, after a while. Eventually, it got to the point where Daniel’s death wasn’t the first thing I thought of when I woke up. And I could look at other children—other boys—and not feel jealous or sad. They were just part of the landscape. And what happened with Daniel was a part of my history. An important part, a terrible part, but not something I was obsessing over every minute. It turned into something that had happened to me, not something that was still happening.” She tilted her head. “Does that make sense?”
I found that I couldn’t say anything, so I nodded instead.
“I would have told you this at group, if you’d stayed. Did I scare you away?”
“Oh, no, it wasn’t your fault,” I said. “I just wasn’t ready, I guess.” I looked at my watch. Twenty minutes. Shit. “I should go. My job . . . I’ve got to get back to my tables. Thank you,” I said, stumbling to my feet on shaky legs. “Thank you so much.”
“Call me,” Merrill said, writing down her number on a napkin. “Please. If you need anything, or if you just want to talk.”
I folded the napkin and ran back to Mas. Sarah was standing at the bar. “Hey, are you okay? Becky’s been taking care of your party at table seven, but you never entered their entrées. I’ve been sending out complimentary apps . . .”
Shit. “I’m so sorry,” I said. I collected my checks and my apron and hurried back to the table.
“Well,” said Grandma. “Look who’s reemerged.”
“I’m very, very sorry,” I said. I touched the napkin in my pocket, the one with Merrill’s phone number, hoping it would give me strength. The woman snorted.
“That’s enough, Judith,” said the old man.
The woman’s jaw gaped open. “I beg your pardon?”
“She’d like more water,” the man said.
I nodded. I went to the bar, poured the water, and went back to the kitchen again.
“Hey, if you’re gonna cry, don’t use a towel,” Dash said over my shoulder. “Becky’s all over me about the towels. Here.” He handed me a fistful of toilet paper. “Are you going to be all right? Do you need to go home?”
I shook my head, blew my nose, dabbed carefully underneath my eyes, the way one of the makeup artists I’d known in my previous life had shown me. I freshened my lipstick, combed my newly brown hair, and counted out enough crumpled bills from my pocket to pay for Grumpy Grandma’s lamb. Hope, I thought, remembering Ayinde’s face when she’d told us that Julian was going to be all right. In the kitchen, Becky was arranging frizzled leeks on top of someone’s steak. “Hey,” I said.
She looked up at me, grinning. “You okay?”
“I’m okay,” I said. I smoothed my hands along my apron. “I’m going to be outside for a minute. I’m not leaving or anything. I just need to make a phone call.”
KELLY
The Wee Ones Music Class met in a big, historic church on Pine Street that had stained-glass renderings of Christ over the altar and Alcoholics Anonymous posters in the basement where class was held. On Tuesday morning, Kelly pulled off Oliver’s snowsuit and hat and scarf and sat down on a carpet remnant with her husband beside her. Steve waved at Becky and Ayinde as Galina, the leader, started thumping on the elderly piano, launching into the opening chords of the “Welcome” song. “Hello, good morning, good morning to Nick. Hello, good morning, good morning to Oliver.” They sang to Cody and Dylan and Emma and Emma, to Nicolette and Ava and Julian and Jackson. “Hello, good morning to the mommies. Hello, good morning to the nannies,” Galina sang, pounding the keys. “Hello, good morning to the daddy . . .”
Steve bounced Oliver on his knee, waving his maraca to the beat as the group started singing. “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands!” Kelly stifled the urge to look at her BlackBerry. “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands!” She knew Elizabeth was still unhappy about the Wartz party. “If you’re happy and you know it and you really want to show it . . .” She slumped against the wall, feeling conflicted and displaced, and tired. Above and underneath it all, tired.
“Hey,” Steve whispered. “If you need to get going, the Big O and I are doing fine.”
“No, I’ll stay,” she whispered back. There were daddies who took their sons and daughters to music class, including a fiftysomething fellow who brought a three-year-old (Kelly had never been able to figure out whether it was his grandson or his child). Andrew had taken Ava more than once. Even Richard Towne, with a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, had shown up one Tuesday morning, steadfastly ignoring the stares of the other parents and the one mommy with a digital camera who’d surreptitiously snapped a shot of him with the baby in his arms, singing “The Farmer in the Dell.” But those daddies had jobs to return to, not just a job search. A so-called job search, she thought sadly, as Steve arranged Oliver’s fingers around a baby-sized tambourine and helped him to shake it.
Kelly looked at the poster and considered Step One of the Twelve Steps: We Realize That Our Lives Have Become Unmanageable, and We Turn Them Over to a Higher Power. Her life had become unmanageable. But where was the twelve-step group for overextended mothers married to men without jobs?
“Let’s play!” said Galina, unzipping a gym bag, sending a dozen rubber balls bouncing into the circle. The big kids—the two- and three-year-olds, the ones who could walk—screamed with delight and toddled toward the balls. Oliver gave a hiccupy gasp and started to cry as Steve put a red ball in his lap. “Shh, shh, it’s okay,” he said, showing Oliver the ball.
Kelly straightened Oliver’s sweater and thought of the phone call with her sisters the night before. “How’s Mr. Perfect?” Doreen had asked.
“Fine!” said Kelly. �
�We’re all fine! Everything’s fine!” After she hung up the phone, she sat at the kitchen table, writing checks. Steve came over and sheepishly handed her his credit-card bill. Eleven hundred dollars. “For what?” she asked, a little more sharply than she meant to.
Steve shrugged. “Dinner. Clothes. Oh, my mom’s birthday.” Kelly looked at the bill. Steve had spent three hundred dollars, probably for something useless to gather dust on her mother-in-law’s étagère. She’d felt sick as she’d written out the check.
“Why don’t you let me cash in some of our bonds?” he’d asked.
She shuddered. What would happen if they ran through their savings and Steve still wasn’t working? What would happen if they couldn’t pay their health insurance and one of them got sick? She knew how that story ended—bill collectors on the phone at seven in the morning. Used cars and hand-me-downs. No way. She’d worked too hard for Oliver to have to endure any of that.
“A lion looking for her food is walking through the grass,” Galina sang. Kelly sang, too. All of the mothers sang; all of the nannies sang. Steve sang, too, loudly enough so that Kelly couldn’t help but hear him. “Who knows another animal?”
“Cow!” called a nanny.
“And what does a cow do?”
The nanny got onto all fours as her charge—one of the Emmas, Kelly thought—giggled, knowing what was coming. “Moooooo!” she sang out. The children laughed and clapped and mooed.
“Does Daddy know an animal?” Galina asked, looking at Steve.
“Um,” he said, looking at Oliver. “Dog?”
“Dog! Doggie is good! And what noise does doggie make?”
Steve grinned gamely. “Ruff, ruff?”
“Bark louder, Daddy, louder!” Galina coaxed.
“Ruff, ruff,” Steve barked.
“And what does doggie do?”
“Wags his tail!” chorused Emma One and Two, Cody, Nicolette, and Dylan.
“Let’s see Daddy wag a tail!”
Across the circle, Ayinde was looking studiously down at the top of Julian’s head, and Becky was biting her lip. She knew better than to laugh, Kelly thought; Becky had been on Galina’s shit list ever since she’d used one of the toddler-sized xylophones to plink out the bass line of “Smoke on the Water” three weeks before.
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