“Coffee?”
“No thanks. Got any Coke?”
Kate gestured to the refrigerator as she piled pancakes on the plates. He pulled out a soda and cocked the tab, then took out milk for Emily’s sippy cup. He did it naturally, as if they spent time in one another’s kitchens every day, the way the women in their playgroup had behaved in one another’s homes. They exchanged small talk as the kids played on the other side of the room. Maybe this would be fine.
“Do you see the playgroup families much?” Kate asked.
He took a long drink from the can and rested it on the counter. “Sometimes. But as far as regular playdates go, the group had kind of dissolved already.” They both understood already to refer to the time before Elizabeth died. “You know, with kindergarten and preschool there are plenty of other activities going on. But we just had a cookout last month with Regan and Brittain.”
Brittain. Hearing the name was like a wake-up call; Kate should telephone and check in. Just before Brittain had her second child a few years before, she’d found out her husband was involved with a woman at his office. She had been miserable, swollen and ready to burst in every way, but still keeping up appearances. Kate would never have known if it hadn’t been for something odd in her expression watching Elizabeth and Dave banter warmly at the margarita party, a look both envious and sad. Later in the living room, while Kate was nursing the baby and Brittain was resting her legs and making snide observations about Elizabeth’s security system, Kate had asked the most basic question. Is everything okay? And Brittain had cracked. Her relief had been palpable, as if she were just waiting for someone to ask.
Snap. There were flashes of light from the sofa where the kids were playing, James taking pictures of Jonah and Anna.
“Careful with that, James,” Kate called. “That’s our good camera.”
“I know how to use it,” he said, and zoomed in to take a photo of Jonah’s tongue.
Emily whined, and Dave pulled a spatula and measuring spoons from the drying rack and handed them to her. “You talk to Chris lately?” he asked Kate.
“A few days ago, just a quick call while he had cell connection at the airport in Jakarta.”
“So he’s in Jakarta.”
She thought she heard relief in his voice. Kate cut a plate of pancakes into tic-tac-toe lines and glanced at him to see if he’d say more. He took a piece of pancake for Emily and crouched to offer it to her. She turned the bit in pudgy hands, considering it.
“How’s your nanny working out?” Kate asked.
“You know, she’s pretty great.” He stood and leaned against the kitchen island. “The kids love her. She’s just out of college and has tons of energy, and she comes with a whole backpack of crafts and stuff. She has dinner going when I get home, and if I have to work late she gives the kids their baths. It makes everything more or less manageable.”
Kate delivered plates of pancakes to the children at the table, and put one in front of him as well. “It sounds like that agency got you a good match. I’ve heard that doesn’t always happen with the first try.”
She sipped her coffee and leaned back against the counter opposite him. What would it be like to be a young woman working for a recently widowed dad, she wondered, moving all day through a house filled with pictures of the mother of the children she cared for daily. Hugging her children, disciplining them. She imagined Dave coming home at dinnertime and stepping into the kitchen, where the kids were eating their chicken nuggets, Hi family, I’m home. There must be awkward moments working in the intimacy of a house, brushing against one another accidentally in the small kitchen. Oh, sorry, they’d both say politely, backing apart and busying themselves with the children. Would she think of him as just an employer, or could she not help seeing him as a single man? The fact that he was a widower might make him untouchable, or it might have the opposite effect, the potent loss so poignant, irresistible.
A bright flash snapped in Kate’s face. “Cheese!” said James.
“Okay, that’s enough with the camera,” Kate said. “Here. I’ll pack it to bring with us today.”
“Are we going to the beach?” Piper asked.
“Sure. Everyone have their suits?”
“Yes!” said Anna. “I have a pink one with a skirt.”
“I have pictures of sandals and ice-cream sundaes on mine,” said Piper.
“Actually, now you have real ice cream on it too,” Kate said. “You dropped your cone on it yesterday and we haven’t washed it yet.”
“Well, now, that’s no matter,” Dave said, his Georgia creeping in. “It’s all going in the drink one way or another.”
The late-afternoon sun came through the high trees and striped the lawn like a game board. Kate sat on the porch step molding hamburger patties as she watched the children play croquet, already dressed in pajamas for the long drive. Emily followed behind them on the grass like a small fairy in a pink nightgown, pulling up wickets and trying to make off with the bright balls.
Dave lit the grill, then sat beside her on the steps. He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees watching the kids in the yard. Sea salt dusted his forearms and clung to his dark hair. Dense freckles overlapped one upon the other, making him appear even more tanned than he was.
“That’s a disaster waiting to happen.”
“What’s that?” Kate plopped a rounded patty on the tray.
“When the kids notice that Emily’s stealing their balls and messing up the course all hell’s gonna break loose.”
“Maybe.” She picked up another handful of meat. “Or maybe she’ll get bored with it. I have some books in the house for her to read. Well, to look at.”
He winced as Jonah swung his mallet and narrowly missed Anna’s shin. “Reading. Man, that’s something I haven’t done in a while. I stopped reading the newspapers and magazines last fall because they depressed me to no end, and I never got back in the habit. I should probably pick up some biography to stretch my brain, something besides watching TV every night.”
“I know. I have a whole stack of books I brought out here that I haven’t even cracked open.”
The moment it was out of her mouth she regretted it. The reason she hadn’t read any books was that she’d been consumed with other reading.
“I forgot the rolls. Would you like a beer or something while I’m up?”
He nodded. She walked through the patio doors into the house, trying to remember whether there were, in fact, a few bottles still in the refrigerator. On her way into the kitchen she noticed her cell phone, which she’d forgotten to bring to the beach. There was a message.
“Hey, hon. I just wanted to call so you wouldn’t worry. That bombing in Bali was nowhere near us. We were out by the beaches. Anyway, we’re all done here. I’m connecting through Seoul tonight and should be back tomorrow night. And then I’m not gonna leave the beach for the whole last week we’re there. Give the kids kisses for me.”
Bombing? She reached for the edge of the counter. She hadn’t turned on the TV or radio all day. Maybe that’s why Dave had acted oddly when he’d asked if she’d talked to Chris lately, and was relieved when she’d said he was in Jakarta. Ten days he’d been gone, but it felt like months. She hadn’t even known he’d left Jakarta for Bali.
Let it go, she told herself. It’s over, he’s on his way home. She took two bottles of beer from the refrigerator, popped off their lids, and put one against the side of her neck. The cool penetrated her skin like an epidural.
When she returned to the porch, Dave was on the lawn showing Piper the way to hold a croquet mallet. He stood behind her, holding her arms so that the mallet swung forward and back cleanly between her ankles. Kate picked up the camera from the patio table and focused the lens on them, a pendulum of large and small limbs. They sent the yellow ball a smooth seven feet or so to rest against the next wicket, and Piper’s eyes widened in disbelief. Dave gave her a thumbs-up. Then he took a step backward and swung the mallet broadl
y, a pantomime of a slow-motion drive in miniature.
Kate had never seen him play golf. But she could imagine it in his stance, feet planted slightly apart as he held the mallet like a club, and in his muscular swing, free and easy as an afterthought. There was a smooth confidence in the way he moved, and she wondered whether he’d always been that graceful, or if grace came with being a professional athlete, years of practicing something tied to the performance of the body, and then years more of doing it in front of crowds and cameras. She could probably make a pie crust in her sleep, but even on her best days, there was nothing physically grand about the rolling of dough. She had never before thought of golf as elegant. But watching Dave on the lawn she could see that it was.
Farther down the playing field James knocked his ball through the wicket, a long shot hit with a confident whack.
“Yes!” Dave called out, taking three long paces toward him with his arm raised for a high five. “And Spenser comes through with the birdie shot he needs to reclaim the lead.” Their palms met in midair with a clap.
Elizabeth’s description of him with his niece and nephew long ago had been an apt one. He was like a camp counselor of an uncle. His skin is thicker, he’s got more patience, he smiles more. At the time she wrote that, Elizabeth had struggled with two children; all day, here on the island, Kate had watched him fairly untroubled by three. Though perhaps by the time Elizabeth had had Emily, she had hit her stride too. She certainly had appeared to. Kate remembered meeting Elizabeth in New York a few months after Emily was born. Kate was up for a culinary affair, and they’d met in the city for some fancy kids’ concert. When Jonah and Anna were horsing around, Elizabeth slid expertly between them without visible irritation. When they’d continued to be truly disruptive, she’d finally gotten up and ushered them out, one hand on the back of each of their heads, the baby across her chest in a sling carrier. She’d cast a breezy oh-well smile over her shoulder at Kate, and Kate remembered how unflappable she’d seemed. Kate had not yet reached those later years in the journals to know whether that was an accurate perception.
Dave returned to the step and took a long drink from the beer she’d placed on the stair.
“Do you miss golf?” she asked.
He hesitated a moment before answering, and she thought he’d sidestep the question with a blasé reply. I still work in golf.
“Yes and no. I love the game, no doubt about it. But it’s like that was the life of another person. What I did before, and what I did after. Act one, act two.”
He didn’t qualify his before. Most befores referred to Elizabeth’s death, but this could have meant prior to the break-in, before he quit the tour.
“I don’t know much about golf, but you were on a pretty good roll there when you left, weren’t you?”
“I was doing all right,” he said lightly, flicking at the label on his bottle with his fingernail. “Higher on the leaderboard, the money was better. But it takes over your whole world. I was never home. And when certain things happen in your life … I wasn’t really being much of a dad. Or a husband, probably. So it was time to find something else.” He stood, took the tray of patties from her, and began lining them on the grill like a dealer laying cards. “But yeah, it was hard to walk away from the tour. I worked hard to get there.”
It didn’t seem to bother him, talking about golf. She had expected it to be a forbidden topic. Maybe that had been true at the time. Or maybe that was just the way he and Elizabeth were with one another, locked in their disappointments. Too much vested in a certain version of the other to allow for variation, or weakness.
“It was hard for Elizabeth to stop working too,” Kate asked.
Dave paused, spatula in hand. “Yeah, to some extent.” He pressed down on a burger, and it sizzled. “The work had been dwindling for some time, but it was after Anna was born that she decided not to renew the contract.”
“Elizabeth ‘decided’?”
He looked at her sharply. Flames leaped as the fat from the burgers dripped below. As soon as she said it she wished she could take it back.
“Things were so busy with two kids,” he said. “It became more of a pressure.”
He did not look back at her a second time. But she felt that even if he had, she would not be able to read in his face whether he believed it himself.
Ice cream ran down their arms, and chocolate drippings stained their pajamas. The kids were silent with joy as the sunlight faded in the yard.
“I am going to miss this lawn when we go back to D.C.,” Kate said, licking her own cone. “It’s the best babysitter going. Just open the door and out they go, noise and fighting cut in half immediately.”
“We live in ours,” Dave said. “As long as it’s not pouring, we’re out there. We hardly ever go anywhere else. People come to us.” He pried open a plastic tub of blueberries and placed a few in front of Emily. “How many years you been coming here, this house?”
“This is our tenth. I love this place. There’s a reading room at the top where the attic would be, this little nook. I’m up there all the time.”
Dave toyed with one of the blueberries, hiding it beneath his palm while his daughter pried up his fingers, one by one. “Sounds like a pretty good place to read the journals.”
Kate hesitated, then bit off a chunk of fudge in the ice cream. “It is. Up there at night, when no one needs me. It’s nice to look out over the water in the dark, see the lights on the boats.”
He held his beer bottle in front of him in both hands and rolled it between his palms. Emily pressed blueberries flat with her finger against the table, then drew in juice on her pajamas.
“Kate, I know you take it seriously, these notebooks.”
A line of ice cream slid down her cone to her finger, and she licked it slowly. The chocolate felt like lard between her teeth. He paused as if he expected her to interject.
“So now you’re gonna do whatever you think is the noble thing, store the trunk in your basement or set it aside for the kids, or whatever you’re deciding is what she would have wanted. But she was not herself last summer and I’m not sure that’s a call she would have made at another time, giving them to someone outside the family.” He had been looking out over the yard as he spoke, but now he looked at her pointedly. “I have a right to know, and I’m not just talking about last summer. So you can have your read, but I think we both know where those books should be.”
His eye contact was disconcerting. There was nothing about his body language that should register menace, but on some level she felt it: an implicit promise that no matter where she lived or where she went, or however long it took for her to get to the end of the journals, he would be there, waiting.
He put the bottle down on the table, which seemed to indicate that he’d had his say and would not belabor the point. He was more straightforward than she’d thought him capable of being and much more self-possessed, and the way he looked at her contradicted all she’d thought about him. Either she’d misjudged him, or he’d changed.
Under his look, she felt confidence pooling back in and filling the ruts. He wanted her to say okay, but she wouldn’t. Instead she murmured, “Mm hmm.”
He nodded and sat still on the step beside her. She didn’t elaborate, and he didn’t ask. After a moment, he stood.
“Kids, we have to leave in ten minutes,” he called across the lawn. He picked up Emily’s sippy cup and swept her crumbs into his palm, then spoke over his shoulder to Kate. “Do you mind if I take a quick shower while you watch Emily? I’d like to rinse off before the drive.”
His tone was stiff but not unfriendly. There’d be no ill will when he left, because they understood one another. This was always where the situation would bring them, and there was nothing left to say.
“Of course,” she said. “The outdoor shower is great. It’s right around the side of the house.”
“Do you mind if I go inside instead?”
That was surprising. Modesty? L
uxury? She wouldn’t have expected either from him.
“Use the bathroom in our bedroom. Through the kitchen and to the right. The spare towels are under the sink.”
She watched him walk toward the house, and he no longer looked diminished or tired, or as if he had lost weight. His tanned shoulders were buoyant, and as he crossed the patio he came off the balls of his feet with a levity that belied the gravity of what he’d said. I watched him walk away toward the corner with a rolling gait that bounces off the balls of his feet, heavy and solid like a draft horse, but light like a very contented one. He looks like he could carry you a thousand miles if he had to.
TWENTY-FOUR
September 13, 1999
Jonah started preschool today. A morning program for three-year-olds, three days a week. I dressed him in a little white collared shirt and tamed his curls with a spray bottle of water, and he marched in the door clutching his Winnie the Pooh lunchbox like a little man with his briefcase, big meetings await. Brought tears to my eyes. When I picked him up he didn’t want to come to me (which I guess is a good thing) as I stood in the doorway with Anna on my hip, grinning my big proud “So how was it??” dorky smile. Maybe he didn’t want to come to me because I looked like such an idiot.
It all passes so fast. I know it’s just preschool, but here we are in the realm of school already. All those days when I felt suffocated by being so needed, but at that moment he didn’t want to come home, it’s true, I wanted to be needed like that again. It really feels like just yesterday he was a newborn in the crib and I was scraping mercury off his nursery floor with the hazmat guys.
November 18, 1999
Can’t believe I pulled an all-nighter for a preschool auction catalog. Sitting up at 2 a.m. designing page after page of descriptions of sports and spa packages with grinning monkey icons in the corners.
It’s taking longer than it should. I keep being distracted by the small card on my desk I can’t bring myself to throw away. A simple note, three lines of sympathy for the loss of my father. He read it in the newspaper. My stupid mind reads into the familiar handwriting and imagines him more emotional, more eloquent, more mature. I try to look at it and see fatter and balder. “Love, Michael.” Where does he get off? What love, Michael?
The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D Page 21