The Sweetheart Deal

by Polly Dugan

  But now, looking at the picture so many years later, the only quote I could attribute to myself was I’m following her too. Though that wouldn’t have been remotely close to what I said that day, it was the only thing I could think of now.

  It was a good picture, and I was happy to find the captured moment of the two of us alone from that day. But it was funny, too, in a sad way. Its composition was one that today you could just as easily have Photoshopped from two separate photographs, as incongruous as Audrey’s and my presences are to the other’s—like two witnesses’ disparate accounts of the same accident. She is so very present and happy and comfortably tucked close to me—who is not the groom—and I, though unaware of the camera, am happy too, like a man in the stands at the Derby, offering cheers to a friend because our horse has just won. I didn’t return the photo to the album and kept turning the pages until I was past the wedding ones and came to the next series, which was of a trip my parents had taken to Monaco with two other couples the same year. I stopped there, took the picture of Audrey and me into one of my father’s guest rooms, put it on the nightstand next to the bed, and went to sleep.

  The next morning I took my father’s car and drove to the cemetery where my mother was buried. When I was twelve I found out she had been married before—Only for about ten minutes, she’d said, as if that was all I or anyone needed to know in the way of the story. The parents of a classmate, not a friend, were splitting up, and although I didn’t know any details, my thoughts about it had a dark hue of stigma. She’d told me about her first marriage, I thought, not so much to normalize divorce, but to cast it within the normalcy of human experience, even among Catholics. The man’s name was Daniel, and his name and the mystery of his existence in my mother’s life had jarred me in the same way seeing a teacher outside the classroom did: you knew teachers didn’t live and sleep at school, but seeing them on the street or in a store or at the movies disrupted your sense of them and where they belonged. You didn’t want to see them in a life outside the one you knew any more than you wanted to walk in on them undressing.

  So I had asked my mother why, because I’d had to get a handle on reconciling this new information with the woman I’d known my mother to be five minutes earlier.

  “Why what, honey?” she’d asked. “Why did I marry him or why did I divorce him?”

  “Both,” I’d said.

  She’d responded to me in the way that people say something they’ve known or at least told themselves for a long time, unspoken to all but a few people, if even that. “Well, I was twenty-one and we’d gone together a long time and thought we loved each other. Why else would we have stayed together for so long?” she’d said. “And that’s what you were supposed to do, or what many of us thought we were supposed to do. It’s what people did. So many of us, anyway.” She stopped and I thought she was finished before she said more, as if she had to balance the failure of those expectations with a quota of redemption. “For people who are still together, it was the right person and the right time. For them.”

  “But what happened?” I’d asked. “Wasn’t he nice to you?”

  She’d smiled and run her fingers through my hair. “No, no. He was nice,” she’d said. “He was a very nice man. There wasn’t a thing wrong with him, except that we were both too young and we didn’t really even know who the other person was. I didn’t even really know who I was, and as I—and we—started to figure that out, we realized we had no business being married to each other at all.”

  I’d nodded like I understood, but I was baffled. I couldn’t picture my mother having meals with or raking leaves with or vacationing with anyone other than my father and Kate and me. I didn’t begrudge her being married before and I didn’t have a judgment about it either way, but what made me feel curious and strange was that she’d been another person, with another husband, in a life other people in the world had witnessed. She’d inhabited that place, and then only later became the version of her that I knew, and part of the bedrock of the history that included me and that my own history was built on.

  “So,” she’d said, as if concluding the whole ten minutes of being married, “we got an annulment and I was a single woman for three years before I met your father. I was twenty-five, so old.” She’d laughed. “Not old at all, not by a long shot, but for back then. But I was closer to who I really was than who I’d been at twenty-one, so the second time it was right. So much more right than the first.”

  In my naïveté, and considering all this, I’d said, “Does Dad know?”

  And with utter equanimity, she’d looked directly into my face and said, “Yes, love, he most certainly does.”

  But I’d remained startled that sharing a passing detail about someone in my class, while significant for them, had resulted in uncovering one of my mother’s own secrets, and I worried about what others lurked, and might be revealed another day during a conversation about something that seemingly didn’t have a thing to do with us. And worse, would what had happened once happen again—would she again think she wasn’t really who she was and leave all of us, ultimately for a third husband?

  It might have been then, timed perfectly or imperfectly with my teetering pubescence, that I’d decided I too could be cagey and withholding, given the lesson I’d learned from my mother, my first teacher. Nobody had to know everything about me, starting with my family. What an alluring and marvelous chance it offered, to live not as an open book with the very people you existed alongside every day.

  Standing next to her grave, I missed her in a new way since Leo had died. I wanted to walk with her, with her arm linked through mine, telling her what I was up against with Audrey, what had happened between us, to talk about Leo, how much I missed him, how I surely couldn’t have thought his request had been serious back then, could I?

  My mother had been a funny and wise woman and a good friend to me my whole life, even when I wasn’t one to her. She had always taken my withholdings in stride, waited for me to come around in time, addressing my revelations only when I shared them, not prying for them prematurely. It was something I’d realized in hindsight, not at the time, and I’d never thanked her for it. For adjusting to my temperament on its own terms, never lamenting I didn’t do things the way Kate did or begrudging that I didn’t operate according to my sister and mother’s system for the mutual exchange of information. It was a fresh sorrow to want so badly to feel the weight of her arm on mine, to feel her free hand pat mine at intervals while I spilled my confusion to her. What would you say, Mom? I squatted, then sat cross-legged next to her headstone and tried to imagine. “Life is short”? “Nothing risked, nothing gained”? My mother never spoke or advised in clichés, yet whatever she shared always seemed as universal and applicable as those overused expressions, like, why hadn’t anyone else ever thought of what my mother just said? You always knew how to get the girl, Garrett, but you’ve never wanted to keep one, so yes, this would be new.

  As I sat and imagined her strong, well self, the woman she’d been before she was sick and so reduced, the one I’d played golf with and swam with in the Atlantic Ocean, the one who’d let me grow from a boy into a man—perhaps differently from how she’d hoped—who’d let me traipse off to Europe and be in school and school again and more school, and with woman after woman, some of whom she’d met and most of whom she hadn’t. I thought, as we would have walked, after she’d listened, she would have been funny, but not unkind. She may have said, You and Leo, always in it together, aren’t you, for better or for worse? Then, Are you happy? Or she may have just looked at me and smiled and shaken her head: I haven’t seen Audrey in such a long time. Tell me all about her over lunch. Where shall we have lunch?

  When we had all been in Radnor for Christmas the year Leo and Audrey were married, they had come to my parents’ on Christmas Eve. The three of us stood in the kitchen while my mother poured us drinks. She handed everyone their glasses, then put her arms around my waist and rested her head against my
chest. “Well, Audrey, you got Leo off the street. What are we going to do about this one?” All of us laughed. I let myself be the butt of the joke to amplify Leo’s good fortune, and, taking it as far as he could, he embraced Audrey in both arms and said, “Celeste, I’ve found my bride. Garrett’s on his own.”

  Audrey had basked and blushed while Leo gloated, and my mother squeezed me and kissed my cheek before she let go. In response to them all, I’d raised my glass and said, “Well, you can’t fix lucky.”

  Staring at her headstone, I missed her and her advice and comfort more than I’d expected I would when I pulled the car into the cemetery’s lot. I felt like a child again: I want my mother. And yet, if I had what I wanted, if she were alive and hadn’t died, I knew I wouldn’t revere her like I did her memory. I might have withheld all that had happened, or revealed only small, select parts. I would have had the luxury to reject and dismiss and undermine: Never mind, Mom, you don’t understand. It’s hard to explain, forget it. What I would have given for the chance to be so careless, so off hand; for the ordinary indulgence of confiding in my mother and the gift of rejecting her response, like lobbing a ball back to her side of the court, half-assed. Oh, now, you can do better than that, she’d say, knowing I wasn’t in the mood to play, that I’d changed my mind the instant I walked on the court—brought up the topic—but not letting me get off that easy. Mom, can we talk about it later? I wanted her now and I wanted her later. What an enviable thing to have possible between you and another person—a later.

  The entire time I was in Radnor, I fought the urge to call and visit Leo’s parents. I knew that in spite of how much I wanted to see them, and surely them me, I couldn’t truthfully answer the questions they’d ask me, and I couldn’t lie either.

  When I returned to Boston, I finalized things with my landlord and checked in with Rob and Morgan to say goodbye for good. They had repotted my plant, which I didn’t recognize until they pointed it out, and asked me if I wanted it back, which I didn’t. I met their baby, Mia. I rented a U-Haul that had a hitch for the Prius, and Rob and I loaded the truck. When my apartment was empty and the truck was full, I closed the driver’s-side door for the last time, tucked the picture of Audrey and me in the pocket on the sun visor, got on I-90, and drove west.

  After three nights on the road, putting one state line after another behind me, drinking beers in hotel bars just off the interstates and, predictably, getting a speeding ticket in Wyoming, I drove the last sixteen-hour leg straight through and followed I-84 into Oregon. I stopped in Hood River for a break. I drank coffee and watched the windsurfers put in that August morning. It had been less than two weeks since I’d left Portland, but it felt like months since I’d been here. It was, after all, still summer. The Columbia was a shimmering wild thing—a river with waves—that people were out there riding, each in their own rodeo, so unlike the tempered, manageable Charles and its refined rowing and sailing. I sat on the beach until I finished my coffee, then I drove parallel with the Columbia as long as I could until the highway bent south and away from the water and into Portland.

  Audrey

  I wasn’t alone, of course, but after Garrett left, an invisible, unwelcome solitude came and mocked me, took up residence in my house and stayed. No Leo. No Garrett, it taunted with its arms spread wide. It’s just you and me. It was a new kind of mourning, and it made me furious. I was not a woman who had never been alone before—I knew women who had never been, and though I didn’t mean to, I felt superior to them that I hadn’t left my parents’ house and a block away and five minutes later walked into my own marriage. I’d moved across the country alone, had landed a great job, been the creator of my own happiness. Years ago, I had a neighbor who became a dear friend, who had never been alone. Selfishly, because it’s what I’d have done, I thought she should be alone for a time between her divorce from her husband, whom she’d been with since she was eighteen and married six years later, and the first guy she took up with, who she lived with first, right away, then married. How could she ever know who she was or what she was made of if she never took the time to find out by herself? I couldn’t say any of that to her, of course, so all I could say was “Is your life better with him or without him?” The guy moving in seemed to answer the question. We tried to stay friends but didn’t, not because of her choice; the guy drew her into his circle of friends and together they cultivated new ones, away from me, and during their first year together, they moved out of the neighborhood.

  So I made room for the loneliness but refused to indulge it, refused to let it get comfortable. School was starting soon, and Chris and Brian would both be in high school—I needed to gear up for that. Andrew was better, a little more each day like the kind and generous boy he’d always been.

  I was compulsive for days, checking my email and phone after Garrett left, always to find nothing from him, and I was angry that he hadn’t let me know that he had made it home safely. He’d said he would. Be careful what you ask for, the solitude gloated, from the couch where it stretched out, from half of the bed it hoarded, from the corner of the kitchen where it lurked. You told him to go.

  Every time I stood in the kitchen, I gazed through the plastic at the unfinished room. At least once a day I’d sweep it aside and sit on the floor in the middle of the addition, such as it was, abandoned for the second time, and look at all that had been done and at what was still unfinished. I wanted the room finished. I wanted Garrett back to finish it. I wanted Garrett back. So I called my mother and told her I needed her and asked her if she would please come, and two days later she did.

  She was here for a week, and if I pretended it was a different year, it wasn’t unlike the visits she alone or she and my father together typically made. Summer was when they came, and it was summer. But nothing else was the same.

  My mother and I were good friends, not best friends, but close and real with each other; there was a surplus of love. Yet Leo and I had been married for so long that my role as her daughter had been replaced or at least overshadowed by the years I’d spent being a wife and the mother of her grandsons. So, even though we’d talked several times a week since Leo’s death, she had no idea how much in need of her help her daughter was.

  The day after she arrived, we drove over to Northwest Twenty-Third for lunch at Papa Haydn, one of her favorite places to eat when she was in town. The street was crowded as always, more so in the summer, and traffic was slow and parking was scarce. When we drove by the Rams Head—I hadn’t been over here since that day Garrett and I had had lunch—I looked at the table where we’d sat. Two men sat there now, drinking beers.

  The next, we drove to Manzanita for the day and walked the beach. It was very windy so there were only handfuls of other walkers, but it was a good day for the three kite boarders skimming the top of ocean, as in command of the waves beneath them as Olympic skaters were of ice.

  “It shouldn’t have happened this way,” she said. “This terrible thing. I haven’t known what to pray for except for God to take care of you. I’m so far away. Daddy and I both should have been gone, and been gone for years, before you ever lost Leo.”

  I came right out and told her only as much as she needed to know about what had happened between Garrett and me, and about what Leo had asked of Garrett. How furious I was about all that time that Garrett had known what I hadn’t. How angry I was at Leo. How he had done something I couldn’t understand. I told my mother if I’d been asked about the hypothetical possibility of him doing such a thing, I would have, with mistaken confidence, answered the question wrong one hundred times out of a hundred. Every time I would have laughed and said, No, Leo would never do something like that.

  “Oh, my love,” my mother said. “No wonder.”

  “No wonder what?” I said.

  “Well, I could never figure out why he up and left everything in Boston,” she said. “Why he just came out and stayed.”

  “I know,” I said. “Wasn’t it a reckless thing for a
grown man to do? Just because someone else asked or suggested it—I don’t care if it was Leo. Along with everything else, I’ve lost a lot of respect for him.”

  She stopped walking, so I stopped too. “What did you say, sweetie?” she said. She put her hands on my shoulders and peered at my face. “Is that what you think? Oh, Audrey, that’s not why he did it. Garrett is in love with you.”

  Andrew

  When my mom and I went to Target for school supplies, we weren’t in the store five minutes before we saw six other kids from school. My mom had always done the shopping before without me, but I didn’t always like what she bought, so this year I wanted to pick out the stuff on the list. There were certain pencils and pens I liked and she never bought those. She thought she knew what I wanted but she didn’t, not all the time.

  We were in the aisle, putting notebooks in the cart, crossing things off, and Gannon and his dad turned the corner, then they were in the aisle with us too.

  “Hello, Audrey,” Gannon’s dad said.

  “How are you, Frank?” said my mom.

  “Hi, Gannon,” I said.

  “Hey, Andrew,” he said.

  “This list,” Gannon’s dad said.

  “A fresh slice of hell,” my mom said.

  As I found things and put them in the cart, I checked them off, then pushed the cart down the aisle and went around the corner to the next one.

  I heard Gannon behind me. “Dad, can I have my list?” He came into the aisle where I stood scanning the shelves. “Is there only just crap left or what?” he said.

  “Nah,” I said. “It’s not bad.”

  He went back to get the cart and rolled it into the aisle where I was, and started putting stuff in his cart and checking stuff off his own list. We did that together, helping each other find stuff if the other couldn’t, until I’d gotten everything I needed and was finished. By then my mom and Gannon’s dad had come into the aisle where we were.