by Abby Bardi
“I was thinking of getting one.”
She didn’t respond. She was definitely off her game.
Star woke up and started crying again. I sat next to her and found myself launching into a speech about how this was the best hospital in America, maybe the world, and they could do all kinds of amazing things nowadays, and there was no reason to worry, and everything would be fine, fine, fine. I couldn’t tell if this helped, but finally she stopped crying and we just sat together, not saying anything, and after a while, Norma moved over and sat down next to me. I don’t know how long the three of us waited in those hard plastic chairs. Time stopped, and while we waited for it to start up again, I breathed in and out, feeling lucky I could do it. Air was like a cocktail, and we all went on sipping it day after day, without thinking about it. I considered giving up on food service and opening an oxygen bar. I had heard there was such a thing. I couldn’t imagine how I could ever cook anything that tasted as good as O2 (its nickname). Or maybe I’d open an apple farm, where I could work outdoors. Or maybe I’d become a sky diver. I snacked on air, a sip here, a gulp there, appreciating every juicy breath, no ventilator or tubes in my nose, straight up, no chaser.
We must have all been drunk on air, because when the doctor came and told us Ricky’s operation had been a success, the three of us screamed and threw our arms around each other, jumping up and down in a crazy group hug, and if Norma ever disliked Star after that and thought she wasn’t family, she never showed any sign of it.
Life on Earth
XXI
Ricky was furious when he found out he had slept through the whole holiday season, so Pam came up with the idea of celebrating Christmas anyway, and he was all for it. We had spent so many hours watching him breathe, waiting for a sign of anything we could do for him, that if he had wanted a team of Elvis impersonators in Santa suits, we would have found them. Luckily, he just wanted a big family dinner and our old decorations: the inflatable reindeer, flashing icicle lights, and a tree that wasn’t fake—the whole nine yards.
Milo found a little pine somewhere, and when we propped it up in the living room, it smelled like Christmas, though it was an unseasonably warm March day. Time was out of joint, Milo said, but Pam said that was our new normal. When Ricky saw the tree, he smiled with the part of his face that still worked and said, “Perfect.” His speech was slurred because he was still on heavy drugs for pain, but the doctors said the burns were healing well, and he could walk a little, with help. We were already used to the way he looked, though people in Target gasped and looked away when we wheeled him around in there, and the doctors said they were going to try to fix the scars when he was strong enough. He had lost a couple of fingers, but he could still work a TV remote like nobody’s business. Things were definitely not perfect, but they could have been a lot worse, and we knew it. We thought every day about exactly how much worse they could have been.
One day, I got up just after noon as usual, came downstairs, and found Pam and Star on the couch, hugging and crying. Panic flooded me.
“Amazing news!” Pam said in her fake-happy voice, a weird look on her face. “Star is pregnant!”
I ran over and joined their hug. At the same time as I was screaming and cheering and even crying a little, I was privately wondering how the hell Star and Ricky were planning to deal with this.
“How did it happen?” I asked Pam later. She gave me her “you moron” look like she was about to explain the birds and bees. “You know what I mean.”
“They don’t believe in birth control.”
“Not natural?”
“Right. So she takes wild yam pills.”
“Does that work?”
She gave me the “you moron” look again.
“What are they going to do?”
She said Star didn’t want an abortion. “Not natural?” I guessed.
“She wouldn’t even talk about it. She started crying, and I started crying, and that was the end of it. Ricky’s going to be a dad.”
As Pam and I drove to Babies R Us for some spring-Christmas shopping, I was thinking how fucking weird it was the way things had turned out. Not even Madame Rosa could have predicted it, not that she was any good at predicting. “You know, life. Everything. It’s just so—” I couldn’t figure out how to finish my sentence.
“Yeah,” Pam said. She knew what I meant.
***
Pam wanted me to plan our Christmas dinner, but I hadn’t even used a microwave since my restaurant closed. Whenever I thought about cooking, the beautiful plates at Falling Water floated in my mind with colors and tastes blending into paintings, and I would slam the fridge shut and order takeout for all of us. The people at Fast Wok on Route 40 knew my voice when I called.
At first, I just said yeah, sure, whatever, to the menu items Pam suggested, but finally one day, she crossed the line with green bean casserole.
“Hell no.”
“But it’s yummy,” she said.
“Hello! Campbell’s soup? That’s just embarrassing.”
“Then what do you suggest?”
“I don’t care. Just not that.”
But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. A cream sauce with gorgonzola and a little sherry began to bubble in my imagination. Soon I was in the produce aisle at Safeway with a shopping list that had started out in Pam’s handwriting but was now covered with mine.
***
I was on my way to check on Ricky when Star handed me the phone. There was no one I felt like talking to, so I never picked up the landline when it rang, but she chatted away with anyone who called: telemarketers, bill collectors, it didn’t matter. When I said hello, I heard, “Hi, Julie, it’s Julia Fallingwater. Your mother’s old friend,” she added, in case I didn’t remember.
“Oh, right,” I said, like I had just placed her. “Hi.”
“I was just in town and I thought I’d call and see how you all were getting on.”
“Fine, thanks.”
“Your sister-in-law tells me your brother is doing really well.”
I didn’t bother to explain that Star and Ricky weren’t married, a fact that drove Norma crazy. “He’s hanging in there.”
“I’m so glad to hear that. She told me he’s just about fully recovered.”
Another raving optimist. “Well, I don’t know if I’d go that far.” I told her about the wheelchair, and the damage to his hand and face, and the way his burns were healing. She seemed so interested that I even found myself telling her about the pregnancy, and she congratulated all of us. I asked her how her sister was, and she said she had passed away.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. People were supposed to say hopeful things about death at that point, but I couldn’t.
“I’ve been staying at her place, packing boxes,” she said.
I remembered how we had tried to clear out everything in our house before we gave up. “That’s hard.”
“It really is,” she said. “I keep finding things that bring back memories. Anyway,” she said in a brighter tone, “I thought of you and wondered how you were keeping.”
I told her more about Ricky, about his physical therapy, and all the new things he was able to do every day. She kept asking questions, so I just went on jabbering, telling her how excited we were about the baby, and about our plans for Christmas dinner.
“What a great idea,” she said. “It’s just the kind of thing your mother would have wanted you to do.”
“Is it?” I don’t know if it was the mention of my mother that did it, or that she was such a good listener, but I heard myself inviting her to dinner. There was an awkward silence, like she thought that might be kind of weird, and I was already thinking that, too, but then she said if she was in town, she would try to make it, and we left it at that.
The next day, we were all in the kitchen going over our menu when I casually mentioned that I had invited Julia Fallingwater to our holiday dinner.
“Who?” Norma asked.
&n
bsp; “Mom’s friend?” I said, like she was an idiot for not knowing.
Pam caught my eye and mouthed, “What the fuck?” When everyone else had left, she stood in front of me with her arms folded.
I didn’t have an explanation, so I shrugged and said, “The more the merrier, right?”
“I’m sure she’s very nice, Julie.” I didn’t say anything. She shot me a gimlet-eye that was scarily like our mother’s. “She’s not your father.”
“Duh,” I said.
XXII
“Ricky wants blueberry pie,” Norma said. She was wearing an old flower-pattern apron of our mother’s.
“That’s not very Christmassy.”
“I’ll call the bakery.” She picked up the phone and spoke, then I heard her giving someone a tongue-lashing and slamming down the phone. “The pies won’t be ready till four. You can go pick them up.”
“Me?” I thought of explaining that I didn’t do Main Street any more, but I was too tired to argue. I put it off as long as I could, then drove into town and parked outside the Wild Hare. It was packed, probably with my old customers. Madame Rosa’s blue neon sign was on, and I was afraid she might see me through the window. As I ducked to avoid her, and the giant bubbles floating down the street, I wondered what it would be like to live in a town that still had a grocery store.
The pies weren’t ready yet. The cute guy behind the bakery counter offered me some free coffee, but I didn’t want any. I just wanted to go home. “Didn’t you have that restaurant that—” he said.
“Yeah.”
“I saw you on the news.”
“You want my autograph?”
“Just when you pay.” He smiled like he was flirting with me. I imagined him asking me out, us falling in love, and then him leaving me for someone else, or getting cancer and dying. There was no point to anything.
As I headed down the street with a warm stack of pies, I tried hard not to let my eyes wander across the street, but I made the mistake of looking up and saw that my building was completely gone. The insurance company had told me something about this, but I wasn’t listening, and now I was staring at a sign saying, “Danger, Keep Out,” and behind it, a giant crater. Someone told me that during the fire, the firefighters tried to aim their water cannons at the back of the building, where the fire was, but couldn’t get a good shot because the creek was in the way. If only they could have reached it, they said, my restaurant could have been saved. The creek that ran under my house, that I had sailed plastic forks on, had screwed me.
By the time I got home, I was so anxious I was panting. I was trying to decide if I needed to go take some asthma medicine or maybe some Valium when I heard Ricky calling me, saying he had to go to the bathroom.
“Dude, I’m on my way,” I said, and I didn’t think about my building after that.
XXIII
Tim and his friend Alex burst in the front door like celebrities, tan and shiny as if they had just been at the beach. Tim had been in and out of town for months, but Alex hadn’t seen Ricky since the accident, as we called it, and he stopped short and stared, and for a moment I thought he was going to cry. If Tim was upset at the way our brother looked now, he managed not to show it. He kneeled down next to the wheelchair and took Ricky’s good hand carefully and held it. I stared at their hands.
“Who wants eggnog?” Norma trilled. She was carrying a tray of Santa mugs. We each took one.
“Merry Rickmas,” Pam said, clicking her mug against Tim’s.
“I hope Rickmas is better than Christmas,” Tim said, draining his cup. He probably thought it had alcohol in it, but Norma wouldn’t let me put any in. “That fucking sucked.”
“Rickmas will be awesome,” Star said, massaging Ricky’s shoulders from behind the wheelchair. “We should celebrate it every year.”
“Every day,” Pam said.
“Oh, come on, you guys,” Ricky laughed. His hair had started growing back and made a halo of curls around his new crooked smile. “Not every day.” He tried to downplay it, but it was obvious he loved having his own holiday.
Milo came in the front door carrying a big flat box and handed it to me. He had driven down to the Eastern Shore to get oysters like Frank used to do. I set the box down on the kitchen counter and took out a gnarly shell, pried it open with an oyster knife I found in a drawer, and tilted it to my lips. Something about its cold, astringent juice made me so sad I could hardly see.
“Did you know you can get a terrible illness from eating those things raw?” Pam asked.
“Yep,” I said, slurping another one.
“That’s right,” Milo said. “Vibrio vulnificus.”
“Live fast, die young,” I said.
“Yeah, you’re living so fast,” Pam said.
“You think I don’t live fast?” I popped open another oyster.
“You never leave the house. When’s the last time you went anywhere?”
“I went down Main Street to get the pies.”
“I mean for fun. Picking up Ricky’s medicine at Rite Aid doesn’t count.”
“Well, what do you want me to do about it?”
“I don’t know. Nothing. Never mind.”
“Julie, do you ever think about the phoenix?” Milo asked. He was standing next to Pam and frowning at me like they were my parents.
“Hell no, their food is terrible.”
“No, not the bar. The bird. The one that rises from its own ashes.”
“What about it?” I didn’t know what bird he was talking about and I didn’t care.
He paused, like he was trying to find the right words. I already knew what he was trying to say. “The thing is, Julie, you might find that if you opened another—”
“No fucking way.” I cut him off before he wasted any more breath.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—” Poor Milo.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said, slurping down another oyster. I knew he meant well, but there was no way in hell I would do that to myself. It was the same reason I had never tried to get married again—what was the point? You let yourself care about something and then boom, it’s gone, or it’s cheating on you with your best friend. As much as I had loved Brandon, or thought I had, I had loved my restaurant way, way more. I had been drunk on its colors, its tastes and smells, in the most intoxicating romance of my life. Now all I could taste and smell was the kind of thick, black smoke you can’t get out of your nostrils.
***
I was about to put pepper in the batter for the French toast (another of Ricky’s requests) when Pam grabbed my wrist. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Putting in the pepper.”
“That’s disgusting! She never did that.”
“Mm, pepper.” I shook in more than I normally would have. “Trust me.”
“Pepper?”
“Who’s the chef here?”
“No one is a chef. No one wants to be a chef.”
“Fair enough,” I said.
“I give up.” She made the familiar washing motion with her hands.
“Wait and see,” I said.
French toast with pepper has a mysterious zing, like a secret. Even Pam had to admit it was amazing. After breakfast, we gathered around the tree for presents, the way we always had, mostly stuff for the baby. Somehow, holding a pair of tiny socks made it real, and we laughed about how he or she was going to pop out with little dreadlocks and some piercings. The dogs were prancing around like it was a special canine holiday. When we were nearly done, Pam handed me a box wrapped in weird green foil with buffalos on it.
“Buffalo giftwrap?” My voice was casual, like it hadn’t kind of freaked me out.
“It’s from Buffalos R Us,” she said, adding, “ha ha.”
I tore off the wrapping paper.
“Hold it up so everyone can see,” Norma said.
“What’s that, a spittoon?” Tim asked.
“It’s a hand-hammered copper Ruffoni stockpot,” Pam snapped.
>
It was. It was the most incredible pot I had ever seen. It was huge and round, at least seven quarts, I was guessing, and looked like it was made of pure gold. On its top was a fancy ornament, a little sculpture of an artichoke. The copper was so clean and new I could see my reflection in it.
“It’s wicked,” Star said.
“It is.” I ran my hand along its smooth, perfect rim. I could hardly breathe. “It truly is wicked.”
“I knew you’d love it,” Pam said.
“It’s a fucking pot,” Tim said.
Before anyone else could get their dirty fingerprints on it, I carried it up to my room and set it carefully on my dresser next to my row of pictures, one of Donny, one of my mother and Frank, and one of the Arizona desert.
***
The doorbell rang, and I heard Bob’s voice yell hello, then goodbye. I looked over at Norma and saw her wipe her eyes just before Bobby and Billy burst into the room with the dogs right behind them. She smothered them with kisses they didn’t want, then pounded avocados for red and green guacamole while B&B yakked about all the fun weekend-dad stuff Bob had done with them.
When the doorbell rang again a while later, I knew who it had to be, and I ran to get it. It was Julia Fallingwater in a navy blue jacket, her salt-and-pepper hair combed to one side with a silver barrette. It was an old-fashioned look, but it worked for her. “I’m so glad you could come,” I greeted her, though actually seeing her made me nervous, since I didn’t want to have to explain to anyone—especially Norma or Tim—what the story was with her. “Come in and meet the gang,” I said, hoping I sounded more comfortable than I felt as I led her into the living room.
As I made the necessary introductions as briefly as possible, she looked moved, even shaken, at the sight of everyone gathered around the tree: Ricky in his chair, Star attached to him like a barnacle, Tim and Alex on the couch sucking down dirty martinis that Pam had poured into their Santa mugs. It had to be weird for Julia, I thought, to be here with my mother’s family now that she was gone. It was hard enough for us, and we were used to it.