Mrs. Kimble

by Jennifer Haigh

  She did cool things. She was an amazing skier, fast and ballsy, if you could call a girl that. She could play tennis; she had a huge garden. She insisted on making everything herself—bread, ice cream, yogurt, things other people just bought at the store. Sometimes she went overboard—she squeezed orange juice every morning and wouldn’t let Brendan drink soda, which she said was full of chemicals—but she was a great cook. He would rather eat at his own house than at any restaurant in the world.

  Compared to other mothers she was pretty. “Your mom is hot,” his friend Guthrie said once when she took them to the pool and swam laps in her bathing suit. It was the last time they went to the pool with Brendan’s mother.

  He liked her best when she was going about her own business: rolling pie crust, canning tomatoes from the garden. The rest of the time she asked too many questions. Every night at dinner he was supposed to talk about his day at school. He said as little as possible, which made her mad. She didn’t understand that talking about school was like adding minutes to his school day. Brendan couldn’t think of anything worse.

  He could sometimes avoid her questions by barging in while she was busy cooking. Then she’d put a knife in his hand and make him chop things. Later, when they sat down to dinner, she’d forget to ask about school; they’d talk about other things, as if she’d forgotten he was her son. Sometimes she talked about culinary school, dishes she’d made when she worked in a restaurant a long time ago.

  When his father was home she didn’t talk about anything; she just listened to the old man go on and on about his business deals. Luckily, his father worked late most nights; but once in a while his mom put her foot down. Then Brendan would hear them fighting through their bedroom door.

  “Your son hasn’t seen you in a week.” Always in a whisper, as if Brendan couldn’t hear them that way.

  “What do you want me to do? Leave the office at five and sit in traffic all evening?” That was always his father’s line, that by coming home at nine o’clock he was beating the traffic. This argument never got him anywhere.

  “Yes,” she would whisper. “That’s exactly what I want you to do.”

  Then, for a week or two, his father would appear at dinner, usually just as she was taking something out of the oven. They’d make a big show of kissing—on the cheek, like married people on TV. Brendan would have to turn his head. He hated seeing his parents kiss.

  At dinner his mother would be especially annoying, asking a million questions about his day. His father would sit there chewing his brussels sprouts, his mouth not quite closed. That was the other problem: his father was always on a diet. He loved terrible food: spinach, lima beans, always without cheese or butter. Worse, he watched everything Brendan ate, made him feel like a pig if he took seconds of anything. It drove him crazy to have a fat son. This made Brendan want to eat more and more.

  The house was silent Thanksgiving morning: no alarm clocks, no slapping sneakers on the treadmill. Ken slept deeply, hands folded across his chest, his heart pumping silently beneath them. Dinah crept out of bed and dressed in the dark. Dawn had broken; gray daylight peered from beneath the blind.

  In the kitchen the massive turkey thawed in the sink. Dinah cut open the plastic and rubbed the skin with butter, the dimpled flesh cool beneath her hands. She hadn’t cooked Thanksgiving dinner in ten years. Usually Ken booked them a table at a restaurant downtown. The traditional meal was too heavy for him; he hated the endless leftovers.

  She chopped onion and celery and scraped them into a pan; in a moment the kitchen smelled of browned butter. Guilt nudged her; these were foods he wouldn’t be able to eat. She thought of clots, lipids, the narrow passages to his heart.

  You’re just feeling guilty, Wayne had told her. As if guilt meant nothing, as if it weren’t a feeling she’d earned and deserved. Three weeks had passed since she’d broken off their affair. She’d forbidden him to call; yet each time the phone rang her heart quickened, as though defibrillated. Meanwhile she brought Ken newspapers and drove him to the doctor’s, filled his prescriptions and served his meals on a tray. Sometimes she caught a glimpse of herself—her reflection in the kitchen window as she counted out his pills—and wanted to laugh. A casual observer would call her a model wife; yet she’d betrayed him a hundred times over. She had watched the seasons change through Wayne’s bedroom window. Five seasons: more than a year.

  Ken’s heart attack had changed everything. She was disgusted by how cynical her life had become. As if she were a spectator she saw herself waiting: for her time alone with Wayne, for the day Brendan went away to college and she could be truly free. Meanwhile, sleeping next to Ken each night, letting him touch her (not often, but still). The picture repulsed her.

  She blamed herself for his hardening arteries, his heart starved of blood. Early in their marriage she’d cooked to his specifications—salads, steamed vegetables, dry chicken breasts. She’d tried to eat as he did but left the table hungry. Soon she was pregnant and ravenous; at night, after he went to bed, she devoured piles of pasta, mashed potatoes with gravy, grilled cheese sandwiches browned in butter. Her belly swelled; her breasts grew to the size of grapefruits. After Brendan was born, she cooked as she pleased. In recent years she and Ken seldom ate together. He worked late; most nights he assembled his own meal and heated it in the microwave. At restaurants he gave the waiters meticulous instructions: no oil, butter, egg yolks, or salt. His fastidiousness irritated her; it took all the pleasure out of eating. She dismissed as neurotic his fear of gaining weight. There had been nothing to suggest his concern was more than vanity, that he was worried about his heart.

  “How did this happen?” she’d asked his doctor the one time they’d crossed paths at the hospital. “He takes such good care of himself. How could he have a heart attack?”

  “Familial hypercholesterolemia,” said the doctor. “I’m guessing, of course. In his parents’ day nobody monitored cholesterol levels, so it’s impossible to say for certain. But when a patient is this lean and this conscientious about his diet, and his numbers are still elevated, it usually indicates a genetic predisposition.”

  Later, when she confronted him, Ken seemed irritated by her concern. “Genetic tendency, my ass,” he said. “My parents ate like field hands. There was nothing wrong with them that a little discipline couldn’t have prevented.”

  His doctor recommended an angioplasty; the hospital sent him home the day after the procedure. For two weeks he’d moped around the house, complaining about the weather and the garbage on TV. He bought a blood pressure monitor and checked himself twice a day, announcing the results at lunch and dinner. The numbers never deviated from normal, but Ken kept checking; his health was his only hobby. Dinah suggested movies, drives in the country. Nothing interested him. All he wanted was to go back to work. Five years ago he’d sold his agency and started the Homes Project; he spent his days negotiating with loan officers and arguing with contractors, wheedling donations out of lumberyards and hardware stores. In between he fought downtown traffic, driving from one devastated neighborhood to the next. He’d been robbed twice, once at gunpoint. Still, he drove his Lincoln Town Car south of Pennsylvania Avenue, through the wasted streets of Anacostia. “I have to,” he often said. “That’s where the houses are.”

  She counted out six sweet potatoes, one per person: Jody and her boyfriend, Charlie and his girlfriend, herself and Brendan. (Ken was careful with his starches.) He’d been stunned when she told him she’d invited his children to Thanksgiving dinner.

  “You did what?”

  “Charlie and Jody. I called and invited them.”

  His voice was oddly calm. “How did you find them?”

  “I found Jody’s address in your wallet.” She chose her words carefully. “You never told me she wrote to you.”

  “Oh, that. A few years ago she sent me a birthday card at the office.” Casually, as though it were a regular occurrence. “I thought I told you. I guess I forgot.”


  Dinah tore at a loaf of bread, a stale baguette she’d saved for the stuffing. She assumed he had regrets. They’d been babies when he left: Charlie six years old, Jody still in diapers. Dinah had known this from the beginning, but it hadn’t seemed so bad then, before she had a child of her own. Before she knew what a six-year-old boy was: the sudden command of language, the stubborn independence that dissolved in a moment’s fright. When Brendan was six he’d run off in a shopping mall. He was sobbing when she found him, clinging to the leg of a security guard. He’d shadowed her for days afterward, followed her from room to room. He wouldn’t go to sleep unless she sat with him.

  She broke an egg over the bread crumbs and added the onions and celery. She imagined Ken’s remorse a tentacled thing, squeezing tight around his aging heart.

  She heard footsteps on the stairs, the scuff of slippers.

  “Ken?” she called out. “Is that you?”

  He shuffled into the kitchen in his robe and pajamas. His fine hair stood out like a halo; his chin bristled with silver.

  “How did you sleep?” she asked.

  “Goddamn blood pressure pills. They give me nightmares.” He eyed the turkey. “Jesus Christ, that thing’s enormous. Who’s going to eat all that? As if I didn’t know.”

  “Don’t start,” she said. “It’s Thanksgiving. He can eat as much as he wants.”

  Ken grunted. “When is everybody coming?”

  “I told Jody noon. Charlie and his girlfriend might be a little late.” She rinsed the potatoes under the faucet. “Can I get you some breakfast?”

  “Make me some coffee,” he said, shuffling toward the living room. “I’m saving my appetite.”

  In the next room the television came on.

  DINAH KNOCKED at Brendan’s bedroom door.

  “Can I come in?” she called out.

  “I guess,” he said.

  The room was cool and dim, the navy blue curtains drawn across the windows, blocking the sunlight. Brendan lay on the comforter in jeans and a T-shirt, his back braced with pillows. The smell of roasting turkey seeped through the floorboards.

  “Everybody will be here soon,” said Dinah. “I wanted to make sure you were dressed.”

  “I’m dressed.”

  She glanced around. Piles of clothes everywhere, stacks of magazines near the computer. She sat on the bed.

  “This has to be confusing for you,” she said. “It is for me too.”

  “So why did you invite them?” He looked at her with her own eyes, clear gray flecked with green.

  “For your father,” she said. “Besides, they’re your half brother and half sister. Don’t you want to get to know them?”

  “What for? They’re his kids. Let him get to know them.”

  Amen to that, she thought. “That’s the whole point,” she said. She ran her hand across a section of bedspread, ironing the paisley pattern. There was a hole the size of a pencil eraser at the edge.

  “Your dad has missed out on a lot,” she said. “Charlie and Jody are adults now. He didn’t get to see them grow up.”

  “Why not?” He stared at her. “Max’s parents are divorced. He sees his dad all the time.”

  Dinah looked up at the ceiling. Years before, when he was little, she and Brendan had covered it with

  glow-in-the-dark stars.

  “Times have changed,” she said. “Back then fathers had very few legal rights in a divorce. Your dad and his first wife couldn’t come to an agreement, so he lost out. It’s sad, but that’s what happened.” It was the explanation she’d rehearsed, whether or not it was true.

  His brow furrowed, a mannerism of his father’s. “How come he never talks about them? I’ve never even seen a picture of them.”

  Dinah hesitated. For weeks she’d defended Ken to their son, tried to explain away things that didn’t make sense to her either. She could tell from Brendan’s face that he wasn’t buying any of it. She rose to go.

  “It’s complicated,” she said. “I don’t understand it very well myself. But this is important for your dad.”

  Brendan frowned. She resisted the urge to touch his hair, smooth his forehead like she had when he was small.

  “He’s different since his heart attack,” she said, in a tone she hoped was convincing. “Doesn’t he seem different?”

  Brendan leaned back into the nest of cushions. He placed a pillow over his face.

  “No.” His voice was muffled. “He’s exactly the same.”

  Charlie hadn’t seen Ken Kimble in twenty years, not since the night he and Jody had crept out of the house in Florida and ridden the Greyhound bus back to Virginia. The details of that trip—the stops in Atlanta and Charleston and Wilmington, North Carolina; the long walk from the bus depot to their mother’s house—remained vivid in his memory, like a dream that lingers through the morning, shadowing everything.

  He’d always known he’d see his father again. It was part of the structure of his life, the knowledge that Ken Kimble was somewhere in the world. Once, in college, he’d spent a spring break in Florida with some buddies. All that week he’d looked over his shoulder, waiting for the man to appear. Then, a few years ago, his sister Jody had seen Kimble’s photo in the metro section of the Post. Apparently the man was living in Washington, a big-shot real estate developer. Charlie was a photographer for the Baltimore Sun, sent on assignments all over Maryland and northern Virginia. It seemed inevitable that their paths would cross. It was just a matter of time.

  A thousand times he’d imagined their meeting. Always in a public place, always with an audience: he wanted the world to know what Kimble had done. He knew exactly what he’d say when the man introduced himself. What a coincidence. My father was named Ken Kimble too. He abandoned my mother with two kids and never paid a dime of child support. He imagined the man speechless, mute with shame.

  He’d been working in his darkroom when the phone rang.

  “This is Dinah Kimble,” said a woman’s voice. “Your father’s wife.”

  Buzzing in his ears, an industrial sound. He saw that everything in his life had led to this moment.

  “Are you still there?” she asked.

  “I’m here,” he said.

  “Your sister gave me this number.” She hesitated. “I’m sorry to bother you. I thought you’d want to know.” There was a long pause. “He’s had a heart attack.”

  He could have cut her off then. I don’t care, he could have said. I don’t want to see him. Something stopped him. Only later did he realize what it was.

  Ken Kimble was getting old. If he didn’t see the man now, he might not get another chance.

  THEY DROVE to Great Falls on Thanksgiving morning, Charlie and his girlfriend Anne-Sophie. He fumbled in his pocket for a cigarette.

  “Charlie!” she cried. “What’s wrong with you?” He hadn’t smoked in a year. He’d bought a pack just for the occasion.

  She rolled down her window. “You were doing so well.”

  They rode in silence. Once, twice, he glanced across the seat at her. That summer they’d gone to visit her parents in France. She’d been a different person there, gesturing, laughing, her mouth moving in a strange way. It explained certain things about her face, the way her lips always appeared to be pursed, even when she was asleep. He’d fallen in love with the shape of her mouth. Now he knew that half the women in France had it too.

  “You never kept in contact with him?” she asked.

  “I haven’t seen him since I was eleven years old.”

  She frowned. “How did he find you?”

  “His wife tracked down Jody. I didn’t get the details.”

  “He has married again?”

  Charlie laughed. “He’s always married. This is the third wife that I know of. There may have been others I didn’t hear about.”

  The exits flew past.

  “It’s a special situation,” said Anne-Sophie. She’d never quite grasped the English usage of the word.

  “Very spec
ial,” said Charlie.

  “Does your mother know you are seeing him?”

  “Good Christ, no. You can’t mention his name in her presence.” He inhaled deeply. There was a pleasant tingling around his mouth, a familiar jolt to the nerves along his spine.

  “But they are divorced a long time,” said Anne-Sophie.

  “You don’t know my mother.” He signaled to change lanes. “She fell to pieces when he left. She never recovered from it.”

  “Is that why you hate him so much?”

  “It’s on the list.” He tossed his cigarette out the window. “My mother had no business raising kids on her own. She’s like a child herself. He was married to her for eight years; he must have known that. He left us with her anyway.”

  Anne-Sophie watched him. “Is this the reason you don’t want to get married?”

  “Do we have to discuss that now?”

  She stared out the window.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s not a good time.”

  “It’s never a good time,” she said.

  GREAT FALLS was a money town. Charlie had gone there once to photograph a disgraced fed, a corrupt cabinet secretary indicted for taking bribes. He remembered the massive new houses crowded together, the wide dead-end streets, the green lawns reeking of herbicide.

  This is a terrible mistake, he thought. Years before, he’d been flying home from an assignment in California when the plane made an emergency landing in a field of onions. Time slowed; he spoke softly to the hysterical grandmother sitting next to him and helped her assume the crash position. Before, he’d wondered how he’d behave in the face of death, whether he’d panic or pray. That day he discovered that his deepest instinct was to be pleasant.