by Scott Lasser
It was the first day of football, and so Tommy was busy. Cat slept late, then went to Tonya’s house, where they lay by the pool and worked on filling in the tan lines on their backs. The pool was a cotton-candy blue, and it would have been nice to jump in and cool off, but when Cat thought about dealing with her hair she decided just to lie on her stomach and bake. Mostly she and Tonya talked about whom Tonya should date. In a high school of fifteen hundred kids, there were surprisingly few suitable candidates. Cat went home feeling drained, lazy, and lethargic from the sun. She wanted to go to her room to hide in the coolness there and wait for Tommy to call. When she opened her front door she found her mother waiting for her. “I need to talk to you,” her mother said. Cat knew that tone. It wasn’t good.
Cat followed her to the living room, all white furniture and light carpet, a room never used except when company came over, a rare occurrence in the Miller household. Cat wondered about Kyle. He was usually around for living-room conversations. Their father, too.
A moment passed—it felt like a week—with Cat’s mother just looking at her. She’d been sleeping with Tommy for six months. She thought that word in her mind, sleeping, but it was an odd word to use, as it was hardly restful, and it almost never happened in a bed. Had she let something slip? Had he? What had her mother found out?
“Your father and I are splitting up,” her mother said.
Cat hadn’t expected this. They were fixed in her mind. Mother and Father. Mom and Dad. She felt something move inside of her, but she couldn’t name it. Uncertainty, maybe. What are you talking about? she wanted to say.
Her mother was crying, or almost crying. Her eyes filled with tears, and now and then one spilled out and rolled down her cheek. “I’m really sorry,” she said. “It’s your last year at home and I’m really sorry you have to deal with this. I never wanted it to—” She stopped talking, just like that. Cat felt there was something she should do, but she didn’t know what. She sat still, watching her mother.
“Where’s Dad?” Cat asked, finally.
“At work.”
This was normal.
“We’re going to tell you and Kyle tonight. He’s moving out. He’s got an apartment.” Cat felt almost as if she weren’t in the room, as if her mother were talking to someone else. “I had to tell you first,” her mother said.
“Why?” Cat asked.
“You’re my firstborn. I just had to.”
Cat waited for her to explain how two people who’d been together almost twenty years could suddenly stand it no longer, but apparently her mother had nothing more to say. Instead, she cried. Cat watched her shoulders shake, heard the breaths she took, awful sniffling sounds, like she was drowning. Cat reached out to her, but her mother put up her hand and then ran from the room. Cat stared for a moment at the spot on the couch where her mother sat, at the indentation still there, and then she left the white room for her own.
She lay on her bed, and stared at the framed poster across her room, a cartoon depiction of Yosemite with hundreds of little figures partaking in hiking and climbing, taking pictures and picnicking, all the activities of the place. Her mother bought it for her on a family trip they took back in the sixties, and sometimes still mentioned that vacation, how magnificent the mountains were, how she loved the air. Cat couldn’t remember it, though she’d been staring at the poster for years.
There was a knocking at her door, and then the door opened. It was her mother, again, still teary-eyed, the skin under her eyes puffy and dark. She sat on the edge of Cat’s bed and Cat had a memory of this, that it had happened before, every night till she was twelve, when she told her mother she could put herself to bed.
“Are you using protection?” her mother asked.
At first she didn’t understand—protection from what?—and then she felt her bowel slacken. “Oh God, Mom.”
“It changes everything, when you have a child.” Her mother stared at her, and she felt nothing but dread. What did the woman know? Cat wondered. What?
“Like when I had you,” her mother said.
Cat took a breath, drew the air in through her nose quietly, so her mother wouldn’t notice. She didn’t want to talk about her origins. She didn’t want to talk about birth control. She just wanted to lie on her bed.
“I wasn’t married,” her mother said.
Cat sat up. Dad? she thought. Dad, the fastidious navy man? “Dad got you pregnant before you were married?”
“Not Dad.”
“What does that mean, Mom?”
“I got pregnant. It wasn’t your father. A stranger, really.”
Not my father?
“He’s dead, this man. So now you know. He died when you were still quite young. A car accident. He was drinking. Did it to himself.”
“My father?”
“Your biological father.”
Cat glanced again at the Yosemite poster. Her throat felt swollen. It was almost impossible to speak. “I don’t remember him. What are you saying?”
“Of course you don’t remember him. You never knew him. He came and saw you once, but he was never involved in your life. Your father was, the father you know. He met you when you were less than a year old.”
“What about Kyle?”
“Your father and I had Kyle together.”
Things are one way, Cat thought, and then you find out they’re not. Everything was different, and the same. I’m still me, Cat told herself. She had to think it again: Still me.
“When he died—Tarver was his name—it no longer seemed an urgent thing to tell you,” her mother said. “It wasn’t like you could go and look him up. Your father and I talked about it from time to time. We meant to tell you.”
“And so now you’re telling me?”
“I just think you should know,” her mother said. “I’m tired of secrets.” She put her hands up and rubbed her eyes, and Cat saw the wedding ring there, a diamond sticking out of it like a blossom. “You were so cute when you were a baby,” she said. “I had this black woman who looked after you three days a week, and Grandma did it the other two. I’d come home from work every day as soon as I could, and there you’d be. I’d sit you in my lap and bounce you, and you’d laugh. Bounce was one of your first words. We were okay together, you and me. And then your father came along. A war hero. Also, a handsome man. I was very taken with him, and he didn’t seem to mind that I already had a child. It was a miracle. You don’t know what it was like back then. That was a big deal. A really big deal. And he made me a promise, you see, and now he’s broken that promise.”
Cat found herself again looking at the Yosemite poster. She wished she could remember that trip. She wished she could just remember more. My father is not my father, she thought. Still, he was the only father she knew. She used to climb into his lap and he would call her Precious. If she wanted his attention, all she had to say was “Daddy,” and she would have it. Nothing else in the world came that easily. He let her do things her mother wouldn’t. When she was little he let her push the cart in the grocery store (this was on those rare Saturday mornings when he would go shopping because there was something he wanted that wasn’t in the house), or he allowed her to steer the car while sitting on his lap. He tried to teach her things. She knew the capital of Finland, for instance, because he had been there. And then there was World War II. Older than the fathers of her friends, he’d fought in it, and he taught her the names of places that meant something: Okinawa and Iwo Jima, Sicily and Normandy, Stalingrad and Moscow. Also names like Auschwitz and Treblinka. These were things other girls, her friends, didn’t know. It was history at school, but at home it was life. He treated her like a person, not a kid, and now he wasn’t what she thought at all. How could he keep a secret like that? How could he dare, when there was somebody else?
“Mom, can you tell me about this guy, Carver?”
“Tarver. Tom Tarver.”
“What did he do? What was he?”
“He was a, you know,
a blue-collar guy. A construction foreman. Lots of fun, and not very responsible. It was silly of me, but I got you out of the deal. So I thank God for Tom Tarver.”
Her mother seemed calmer now. I’m a mistake, Cat thought. I’m a mistake my mother made. For the first time in a long time, Cat felt she could talk to the woman.
“Am I like him at all?” Cat asked.
Her mother smiled. “Well, he was tall, and so are you, and you look a little like him, I think. He was a very physical guy, actually, a presence. He liked to laugh.”
No one would say that about me, Cat thought.
“Do you know where he’s buried?” she asked.
Her mother sighed. “I do.”
Cat looked at her, asking without speaking.
“I’ll take you,” her mother promised.
She never did. She died two months later, from an overdose of Valium and gin, though neither Cat nor anyone else was ever able to determine if it were intentional. For a long time Cat wanted to know, and then realized she never would. Her mother and her biological father were lost and unknowable. And now Kyle is gone. But there’s his boy, still out there, just a little farther up this road.
XV
He wants to buy her jewelry. All the time he’s known her, he’s never bought her jewelry. He has worried she might take it the wrong way, as some kind of promise, but eighty-year-olds don’t need to worry about long-term commitments. “I would like to buy a necklace for my girlfriend,” he tells the salesgirl. She smiles at him. Young people, he has noticed, get a kick out of him saying that, as if old men are not supposed to have girlfriends, as if romance is supposed to end at some predetermined age. As if old people aren’t really alive. He sends her off with a price range that seems to make her happy, and she flits among the various shiny cases with something like purpose. She’s young and pretty, a girl who should be working on commission.
In fact, Sam probably shouldn’t have given her a price range at all, but not worrying about money is something he’s never really learned. He’s had all the money he’s needed for a quarter century. His portion of the proceeds from the sale of Goodman’s company came to Sam in the form of Ford stock certificates, important-looking pieces of paper that felt like cloth. It was 1982, a good time to get Ford stock. Any stock. Interest rates were as high on government bonds as they’d been since the Napoleonic Wars, the economy was a shambles, the Israelis were in Lebanon, the Europeans were marching by the millions against American nuclear weapons. This last item irked Sam, given all the Americans buried there, GIs who hadn’t gotten old enough to protest anything. Still, he was smiling. He had pictures to prove it, Polaroids of him holding up the certificates, taken in his living room. His girlfriend had the camera. Her name was either Katie or Kelly or Karmen or the Knish—Goodman’s nickname for her—a dark-haired beauty almost twenty years his junior. She didn’t remember World War II. It wasn’t going to work. Soon after the pictures were taken he got rid of her, and the stock, too. There were other women, and other stocks. His money doubled in less than five years. He decided it was time to sell. He knew little about the markets, but he figured he knew a thing or two about human nature. His PaineWebber broker, Larry Something, begged him to “stay the course.” Larry had been in the business ten years. This made him a veteran, not that he experienced 1974, or, for that matter, ’32.
Sam tried to explain his thinking to Larry. “Precisely because everyone loves it: that’s why I want out. I have more money than I ever thought I’d have, more than I need. I’d like to keep it that way.”
In October, after the crash, Sam bought back in with the money he’d raised from the sales, and he knew money would never be a problem. A navy buddy called him out of the blue and told him that the captain from their ship, Higginbotham, had died. Kramer, the buddy, lived in California and invited Sam for a visit. When Sam smelled the ocean, he felt something inside him move. Longing and fear all at once, the conditions he knew best. He stared at the water and thought, This is where I ought to be.
Back at home Sam hears a knock. He can count on one hand the number of times in a year he gets a knock on his door. Usually it is some stripe of soul saver, Jehovah’s Witness or Mormon, the kind of Bible-thumpers who tend to inflame the ire of other Christians. Go figure. Most of his life he closed the door in their faces, but lately he’s listened, then asked, “Are we not all children of God? And does this God really care more what we believe than how we act?” He cares about both, is always the answer. “Then I’ll leave the believing to you,” Sam answers, and gently closes the door.
Today, though, it’s Phyllis, with a look on her face that is close to terror.
“What is it?” he asks.
“I thought you were dead,” she says and moves into him, almost knocking him down. In her embrace he can feel how much she cares for him, that he is not merely a convenience, someone to keep her company, but something more. She is not the type of woman (as most are, he thinks) to keep him just to have someone around.
“I called four times.”
“Three,” he says.
“I left three messages.”
“I fell asleep.”
“I thought you were dead,” she says again. She is wiping tears from her eyes. He is moved. He walks to the bureau, fetches the felt-covered, bow-wrapped box that contains pearls hanging from a gold chain, and gives it to her.
“Oh my God, it’s beautiful.” Smiling at him all the while, she tries it on. “Beautiful, Sam.”
“What if I told you,” he says, “that I thought we should live together?”
“I think you should tell me you love me first.”
When was the last time he told a woman he loved her? He can’t remember. It has always gotten him in trouble. Always. What the hell, he thinks, I’m eighty.
“I love you,” he says.
“Say it like you mean it.”
“I love you.”
“Kiss me, then.”
He obeys.
“I would tell you it’s about time,” she says.
XVI
There is, she thinks, not much town to Yorktown, just some strip malls and fast-food joints and gas stations with large convenience-store operations. At least the sky has cleared slightly, letting in the late summer sun and showing off the large trees that have survived the path of commerce. She takes it all in while following the MapQuest printout, which the Hertz guy gave her with some reluctance, as if York-town had secrets best kept from outsiders.
She finds herself in a neighborhood of modest homes, simple two-story rectangular boxes and ranch houses, the type of neighborhood her father used to drive her and Kyle through when they were kids so they could look for gold stars. “There,” her father would say. “The people who live in that house lost a son in the war.” Cat would picture a dark home with tearful older people moving about in silence. One day they saw two homes with two stars, four dead, unknown sons. Her father said, “When I fought, everyone went. Now it’s just kids from this neighborhood. The ones who have less sacrifice more. Remember that.” And she has.
She finds the address and parks in front of a modest ranch house, an Oldsmobile with New York plates in the driveway, a large oak towering over the front yard, a yellow ribbon tied around it, just like the old song. Actually, the ribbon appears to be plastic, like police tape. Who is in the military? Cat wonders. She glances up to the top of the tree and sees there a light wisp of rust, the first hint of fall. The hedges are clipped, the lawn thin but cut. A bit sad, she thinks, but a house and a yard. More than I have. She feels for her phone. Perhaps she should call. Her visit will shake them up. No, she decides, best to ring the doorbell. It’s harder to turn someone away who is standing before you, in the flesh. She checks her face and adds some lipstick, a little color to her cheeks, but not too much, then takes a deep breath. She gets out of the car and stands, waiting for her legs to steady.
Her heels clack on the cement of the front walk, and then a large animal—a groundh
og, she thinks—runs in front of her, pursued by a dog. No, she realizes, it’s a coyote, its coat thick and lustrous, glowing in the afternoon sun. The groundhog turns right and runs behind the house; the coyote closes. She stares at the empty space they left, waiting for the sound of the groundhog’s demise, but nothing comes.
“Mrs. Boyle?” Cat asks when a women opens the door. The woman has dark hair and lined eyes, a quilted upper lip, but she’s still younger than Cat expected.
“Yes.”
“My name is Catherine Miller. I’m here about Siobhan and her little boy.”
“Are you with the government?” Mrs. Boyle has stepped back almost behind the door, holding it as if it were a shield.
“No, it’s about my brother. I’m fairly certain he’s the boy’s father.”
“How do you know that?” she asks, letting the door open slightly.
“Almost a year ago my brother learned Siobhan had a boy. He thought he was probably the father.”
“So, where is he?”
“He died on September eleventh.”
Mrs. Boyle considers this. Cat lifts her hand, feels the urge to bite a fingernail, but stops herself by holding both hands behind her back. She has no idea what Mrs.
Boyle will do next, can’t guess if she will be invited in or turned away. “Come in,” Mrs. Boyle says at last, as if she’s still making up her mind. Slowly, she opens the door and steps back, giving Cat a glimpse down a dark hallway.
In the living room, Cat sees the boy. He’s standing in a large playpen, one little fist grabbing on to the top of the railing before he lets go and wobbles, hands free, to the other side. He lets out a squeal of glee. “He just learned to walk a couple of days ago,” said Mrs. Boyle. “A late bloomer, and a bit unsteady. Have a seat.”
Cat sits. The boy looks over and smiles at her. He’s towheaded, with big crimson cheeks and a handful of little teeth. “He’s beautiful,” Cat says.
“Yes,” says Mrs. Boyle. “Everyone says so. I’m going to call my husband.”