The Year That Follows

by Scott Lasser

  Tonya is worried about the wrinkles around her eyes. “You don’t have any,” she tells Cat, “but I’m starting to look like I’m eighty years old.” She wants to have her eyes “done.” When they were girls Cat wouldn’t have known what that meant, and now she counsels against it, tells Tonya that she looks fine, that she doesn’t want to end up like Lisa Knight, whom Cat just saw at Krogers: not a wrinkle on her face, but her actual eyes seemed recessed in her head, as if she were staring out through a mask.

  “You look great to me,” Cat tells her, the truth, which is to say that she looks the same, same round eyes, same slightly upturned nose, same puckered lips and tiny chin. Tonya’s hair is blonder now—as a teenager it had brownish strands, especially in winter—but hair has always been the most mutable part of her appearance.

  “Brian barely looks at me anymore. Familiarity breeds contempt, or something like that.”

  “He’s a good guy.”

  “Yeah, he’s getting the girls dinner while I’m here. I could hire someone to do that, right?”

  Tonya is married to a faithful man who looks after their children, has a good job, does nothing to excess. Cat points this out. “That’s what every woman wants. It’s the dream.”

  “Right,” says Tonya.

  Out of the bath, Cat stands at the mirror wrapped in a towel, and puts on her face.

  “So,” Tonya says, “you gonna tell me what he’s like?”

  “Tommy?”

  “He’s why I’m here, right?”

  They are repeating, Cat realizes, a scene that’s happened dozens of times and a quarter century before: Cat getting ready for Tommy, Tonya coaching, involved and a little envious.

  “He’s a man now, calmer, more sure of himself.”

  “What’s he look like?” Tonya stands, grabs a lipstick off the sink, tries it on.

  “Good,” Cat says. “Thicker, I guess—he’s put on a little weight. Still has most of his hair. He’s a cardiologist.”

  “A doctor of the heart.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  Tonya studies her face. “This color is better for you.” She wipes her lips on a tissue, leaving a reddish smear the color of viscera. “Do you feel like you know him?”

  Cat has to think about this. “Not really. Maybe.”

  Ten minutes later Tonya is scolding her for her choice of panties and bra. “They don’t match.”

  “So what?” Cat asks.

  “And the bra’s too plain. What if you sleep with him?”

  “I’m not going to sleep with him.”

  “What if he wants to?”

  “I’m not going to on a first date,” Cat says, a rule she has lived by, mostly.

  “First date? You used to sleep with this guy all the time.”

  “It’s a first date,” Cat says, but she changes to a bra with black lace. I’ll feel better this way, she tells herself, looking in the mirror. This is for me.

  Tonya takes a seat at the end of the bed while Cat goes to her closet, a tiny thing just big enough to walk in. Here, then, are the decisions. She didn’t wake up early enough today, thus she ran a third of her normal time, hardly a run at all, and she’s feeling fat and bloated, and that rules out the jeans she wanted to wear, and the pair she tries makes her feel she’s stuffing herself into them the way a butcher stuffs pork into a sausage. So she tries a third pair—better, but still she can feel herself spilling out the top, and what if he puts his arm around her and feels the fat riding right there, atop her jeans?

  “What are you doing in there?” calls Tonya.

  Cat tries a skirt but can’t get it to sit right on her hips, then a dress, which is fine except that it makes her look like she’s trying too hard, and besides, it’s sleeveless and her arms aren’t really there, not like she’d like them to be, not like they were before she had Connor.

  “Come out here,” Tonya yells.

  Cat appears.

  “Nice,” Tonya says.

  “It looks like I’m trying too hard.”

  “He’ll appreciate the effort.”

  Cat hasn’t been this stressed about a date since Michael—there haven’t been many, a couple of losers and then Chris, the young guy is how she thinks of him, and now she’s going all the way back to her youth for a date and yet she is just not young, there’s no denying it, a lot of time has passed and extracted its fee.

  “What is it?” Tonya asks.

  “I was remembering when …”

  “When what?”

  “I taught Kyle how to kiss a girl.”

  “Your brother?”

  “I was trying to teach him to be subtle, but strong. What to do with his tongue. Not to be sloppy. There’s nothing grosser than that. No girl wants to feel she’d been through a car wash.”

  “Did you have him kiss you?”

  “I did.”

  Tonya sits up.

  “He was too nervous,” Cat says. “It wasn’t good. But he thanked me. He was fifteen.”

  “Funny thing,” says Tonya. “I don’t remember him ever saying a word.”

  “He hardly did.”

  “What about Tommy? How does he kiss?”

  “Like a champ,” Cat says.

  “And the rest?”

  Cat turns and goes back into the closet, settles on that third pair of jeans and a black T-shirt that has thick fabric (thin would show too much), and a linen blazer that dresses it all up.

  “Better fix the mascara,” Tonya says. “I don’t know why you’re so nervous,” she adds as Cat makes her way to the bathroom. “I mean, you’ve already slept with this guy.”

  They’ve been at the table for twenty minutes, her glass of wine already half-drunk, when Cat asks Tommy about his marriage, about who left whom.

  “I think she left,” he says, “but I was really already gone, or dead, or whatever. It had been bad for years. I was forty, a doctor with a wife and a big house and a kid and four or five tons of Teutonic steel in a two-car garage, and I seemed like a cliché even to myself. I’m not going to stick up for her, but I don’t blame her, either.”

  She’s finally finding she can relax; listening to this story of his failed marriage, looking at him, has that effect on her. He sips his wine and she thinks she can feel what he’s feeling, or felt: the pain of being in the wrong situation, unsure of how you got there and how to get out. It was perhaps a bit forward to ask about his marriage, but there are things she wants to know.

  “I almost looked you up,” he says.

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I heard you were married.”

  The restaurant is dark and upscale, with walls of pastel fabric and piped-in jazz music. Kyle, she thinks, would know who’s playing. She looks at Tommy. He’s wearing a black button-down pressed shirt. It’s the pressing that matters, a sign that he made an effort. The thing she really likes, that she’s always liked about him, is that he looks right back at her. So many men have a hard time with that, looking in a woman’s eyes.

  The waiter clears their plates, offers coffee, dessert, and Tommy cajoles her into sharing a piece of chocolate cake, saying after the waiter leaves, “I know you like chocolate,” though really it’s something he knew, he knows almost nothing now. Not that a taste for chocolate is something you lose, though what changes, what remains, she can’t say. She knew Tommy at seventeen, eighteen, and this puts her at ease. Most men wouldn’t want a woman to know their teenage selves, but he has confidence enough for that. He is still broad-shouldered, athletic in his movements. His eyes, she thinks, are lighter now, still expressive. As a boy he was almost beautiful, but he’s evolved into something more … She searches for the words, what she’ll tell Tonya. Hearty. Masculine. Cat can see a tiny bit of chest hair just above the top button of his shirt. He had very little in 1976. She is curious. Aroused, even.

  “What?” he asks.

  She shakes her head.

  “You’re blushing,” he says.

  “I don’t blush.”
Even she knows this is a lie.

  He laughs. “Uh-huh,” he says.

  “You’re flirting with me.”

  “Trying,” he says.

  Later, after the cake and the coffee and the carefree way he pays the check, she walks with him down the streets of Birmingham. The air is soft and humid, warm.

  “I should be going,” she says.

  “Get another drink with me.”

  “Sure, but not tonight.”

  “Even for a middle-aged couple, it’s not that late,” he says.

  “Don’t put it like that.”

  They walk on in silence.

  “At least let me walk you to your car,” he offers.

  She wants this, but doesn’t. She drives a beat-up Ford Focus, and she doesn’t want him to see it, but she relents. It’s five blocks to her car.

  “You could have just put it in the lot,” he says, not understanding that she wasn’t about to throw away the seven bucks.

  With a block to go she can think only if he will kiss her. She wants him to. She can’t say she really remembers what it is like to kiss him, but she wants to know again. She feels maybe it could change everything, that kiss.

  “Still driving Fords,” he says when they reach her car. “Like your old man. How is he, by the way?”

  “Good, I guess.” Do men ask about your father and then try to kiss you? Apparently not. She unlocks her car and he opens the door for her. She takes a moment to stand very still, but he moves no closer, and so she ducks into the car before she makes a complete fool of herself.

  “Thank you, Cat,” he says, holding on to the door. “I had a great time.”

  “I did, too,” she admits.

  “That address in the phone book, is it correct?”

  “Why, are you planning on stalking me?” “I might,” he says. “It’s correct,” she tells him.

  “Thanks for being easy,” he says, smiling. Then he shuts the door. Easy? She doesn’t know what to think.

  She sleeps till nine, an eternity for her, then lies in bed reading magazines before stumbling out to her kitchen for coffee. She sits at the computer and looks for Siobhan with no real expectation of finding her, and sure enough there are only strangers in today’s “Portraits of Grief,” five more, part of this endless parade of misfortune. She jogs, especially difficult and laborious on this morning, then showers, dresses in sweats, and calls Tonya.

  “Did you sleep with him?” Tonya asks, as if she is expecting a yes answer.

  “No.”

  “Too bad.”

  “Tonya.”

  “An old boyfriend? It’s like a freebie, right? Anyway, how was the kiss?”

  “He didn’t kiss me.”

  “Oh.”

  The disappointment in the air is heavy, the first sentiment of the day that they share.

  Her buzzer rings, an odd thing at eleven in the morning on a Saturday. She tells Tonya she has to go. At the door is a delivery man with a dozen red roses. “It’s wonderful to have you back in my life,” reads the note. “I’ll call—T.”

  The delivery man smiles, then leaves. She feels wobbly. He sent flowers, she thinks. She hadn’t known till this moment that this is exactly what she wanted him to do, to treat her as a new woman, one he wants to impress. She has to move to her couch, where she sits with the flowers, fragrant in her lap, while she wipes the tears from her eyes.

  It’s a little after three—she’s just returned home with Connor—when Tommy calls. “I’d like to buy you another meal,” he says.

  “I might let you.”

  “How ’bout Monday?”

  “I have Connor, and it’s a tough night for a sitter. Besides, isn’t there a preseason game on?”

  He chuckles. “There is. When do you get him back, tomorrow?”

  “I have him now.”

  “And tomorrow?” Tommy asks.

  Which is how the next day she drives to a ball field in Birmingham so that their boys can play baseball together. “Can he throw and catch?” Tommy asked of Connor, somehow knowing to address Cat’s fear that her son needs more male influence. The truth is that Connor can throw and catch, though not well; when it occurs to Michael to do so, he works with him.

  She stands next to Tommy on a dusty infield of red dirt as he throws first to Jonathan, then to Connor. Next to the field is a Catholic church, its lot crowded with cars. From inside, she can hear singing.

  “You want to go over there, it’s okay,” Tommy says. “I’ll pray right here.” He throws one to Connor. Cat realizes that his throws to Connor are easier, softer, than what he tosses to his son, who is older by twenty months, and at least twice the baseball player.

  “Why would I want to go over there?” she says.

  “To repent?”

  “What makes you think I have anything to repent for?”

  “I was hoping,” he says.

  She feels her blood rise. She sees a rivulet of sweat descend the back of his neck. She is standing close enough that she thinks she can smell him, perhaps something she remembers.

  He throws to Jonathan, who catches the ball and does a little step before throwing the ball back. She comments on it.

  “That’s called a crow hop,” he says. “Helps you set your feet in the correct position.”

  She’s forgotten that he played baseball, too. It never seemed as important as football. He’s instructing Connor now on how to throw, telling him to turn his body sideways, to push off his back foot. She turns herself, trying to mimic the footwork, this subtle male dance. It’s hot on the field, but perhaps she understands the game’s appeal, which seems very much wrapped up in being outside on a summer day. Watching Tommy with Connor is almost a surreal experience, her son with the man who should have been his father. That’s how she looks at it. It’s a leap, but the truth, she thinks. Tommy walks forward, stands next to Connor now, showing him the motion, and showing Jonathan, too, so Connor doesn’t feel self-conscious.

  “All right,” he says, walking back to her. “Connor, let me have it.” Connor throws him the ball. “That’s it! Just like that, every time.”

  He looks at her. “Nice outfit,” he says.

  Oh God, she thinks. Black tights, untucked T-shirt, running shoes, small earrings, a little eyeliner, sunglasses. She has no idea what to wear to a baseball field.

  “Relax,” he whispers. “I’m not kidding.”

  Later, he takes them to White Castle for lunch, then Baskin-Robbins. He sits at a table with her while the boys, having finished their ice creams, roam the store with Jonathan in the lead, Connor following step by step behind the older boy.

  “Lean forward,” Tommy tells her.

  She does as she’s told, thinking he wants to say something that can’t be overheard, but instead he kisses her. It’s no peck, but the real thing, warm, passionate, totally surprising and cut short.

  His alarm makes her look immediately for the boys. He says, “C’mon, they just went out the door.”

  By the time she gets out there he’s got each of them under his arm, and is telling them that they can’t just leave a store and go out on a sidewalk by themselves. Knowing Connor is safe, she feels herself breathe, then thinks of that kiss, that she’d very much like to try it again, and take her time.

  XI

  Monday afternoon Sam checks messages on his home phone machine and finds the voice of the New York lawyer, Josh Schwager, whom Sam has hired to untangle the mess of Kyle’s estate. Kyle had no will. Why would he? He was forty-one, had never been to war, had no wife, no children, and no plan to die.

  Still, he’d been worth a lot of money, with his unfathomable salary and his disinclination to spend. It was last January that Sam flew to New York to meet with Schwager, who was Cat’s age, but seemed more substantial. Sitting in Schwager’s wood-paneled office, Sam tried to put his finger on it. The suit, the hair flecked with gray, the law books, even that he was a man all had something to with it, but Sam suspected something more: dealing w
ith death. Estates were all Schwager handled. Sam asked about it.

  “My father did this. Still does, a little. Also, my grandfather. It’s the family business,” Schwager said.

  “My father was a jobber,” Sam said. “I didn’t follow. Also, he would have killed me if I had. Do you have a son?”

  “Two daughters.” Schwager sat up in his chair at their mention. A siren reached them, eighteen floors above the city. Schwager said, “I can see Kyle was a fine man.”

  “Can you?” Sam understood Schwager was pandering, but he didn’t mind.

  “He was organized.”

  “He didn’t have a will.”

  “In the envelope you sent me I found a detailed plan of how he intended to save. The plan ended in 2005.I guess he planned to retire then.”

  “And do what?” Sam asked.

  Now Sam returns Schwager’s call. In past conversations Schwager has said he wants all the money to go to Cat and Connor, which Sam knows is smart from the tax angle—Sam doesn’t need it, he’s told this to Schwager, and anything that comes to Sam will likely soon get taxed again, with Sam’s estate—but Sam would like Cat to be older. She stills seems a bit unformed. Am I imagining this? he wonders. Do I want to see her make it first, as her younger brother did? Sam distrusts inherited money, maybe because he never got any himself.

  “Sam,” says the lawyer. “How are you?”

  “I feel like a million bucks,” Sam says. He suspects that Schwager has come to like him.

  “Not worth what it used to be,” Schwager says.

  “For such insight I’m paying three hundred an hour?”

  “Three and a quarter,” says Schwager. “But this call is off the clock. Bottom line, this is still a mess. I’m just letting you know. I told you I thought we’d have it wrapped up by the anniversary, and I was wrong.”

  “So when?”

  “God knows.”

  “You called to tell me that?”

  “And to say that we really ought to get something down on paper as to how you want it to go. The courts are backed up, as you can imagine, and if they have direction from the family, they’ll likely follow it.”

  “Give half of it to Cat. She’s going to get it anyway. The other half, put in a trust for the little boy.”