It wouldn’t show by looking at it, but it’s been over a year since Jack actually lived here. But now all the papers are processed and the jig is up. The marriage is officially over. I give Jack his space as he boxes and bags the things he cares about enough to haul away with him. I watch him decide for and against, holding things up, weighing their significance. I realize that I had come to think of Jack as rather unassuming, but today he’s coming off pretty sexy in his dress shirt, unbuttoned enough to release his tie, and his sleeves rolled up at the cuff. His chestnut-colored and usually clean-cut hair is disheveled, and I know he’s been running his hands through it in that anxious way that he does.
This particular part of a relationship’s demise is like a terribly unfunny joke. You’ve done the yelling, the crying, the bargaining, the giving up. You’ve hired the lawyers and paid the fees, but now you have to hole up in the kitchen and chop vegetables for a dinner you’re not really going to eat so that your disappearing other half can pack the last of his things in a cardboard box. Funny the way we try to put life in a box.
This stage of it all happens in some other twisted celestial plane where things take much longer than they should and you feel like a royal jerk for slicing carrots through the whole mess, but it would be rude to offer to help.
Let’s speed this up now. Toss this in, too; my potatoes are on boil. If you hurry it up, you can be out of here before the biscuits are done.
“I think that’s it,” Jack says, coming into the kitchen and sitting at the barstool like he used to do on those rare occasions when he was home in time to catch me cooking as opposed to our usual routine of Cassie and me eating alone and then nuking the remains for him when he got home.
“Ok, then,” I say.
There is nothing to be said about this process. Nothing that makes it any better, that is. It’s surreal to divvy everything up like children portioning out candy and counting the pieces to make sure each gets their fair share.
You take the couch, and I’ll take the love seat and recliner. You take the bigger of the saucepans, and I’ll take those two little ones that you don’t like anyway. We each get two plates, two coffee mugs, two glasses, and two sets of silverware.
“Are you going with me to the thing?” I ask, feeling silly at my inability to say the word funeral out loud.
“I don’t think so.” Jack swivels around, putting his back to me. “I don’t feel like being the royal horse’s behind all day.”
“Don’t you think not showing up will have the same effect?”
“Two totally different scenarios.” Jack swivels back around on the barstool to face me. “One—I don’t go, and your Aunt Rose asks you in that tone of hers why I’m not there, even though she knows good and well that we’re divorced. You make some excuse for me, or you don’t, and she tsk-tsks at you and goes on her merry way. People talk amongst themselves for a minute, but out of sight, out of mind, and I’m soon forgotten.”
“And scenario two?”
“Two,” he says, holding up two fingers for effect. “I go, and everyone leers at me all day because they know we’ve split and that I don’t belong there anymore and if I look at my phone or yawn or get up to get a drink, it will be an indication of my lack of sincerity and they’ll talk about me behind their hands and roll their eyes like I can’t see them.”
I want to come back at him with some pithy something, but he’s right. Of course, scenario two makes things difficult for him whereas scenario one makes it hard on me. I could fire at him for that, but were the tables turned, I can’t honestly say I would do any different. There’s no sense to torture him. Despite the end of our time together and the events that led to it, I do love him. It’s almost never a lack of love that ends things. There’s always another side to the story.
Jack stands up, and I know he wants to get the heck out of here, so I don’t press the issue. I walk around the counter to meet him, and we stand in front of each other in that awkward good-bye moment that you can only have with someone with whom you’ve shared the highest highs and the lowest lows. Someone you care about despite it all.
“Nina,” Jack says and brushes my hair back from my shoulder. “I’m really sorry about Nate. If you want me to go, I will. If Cassie wants me to go, I’m there. All that other talk was just me blowing smoke—you know that, right?”
“I know,” I say, meeting his gaze and quickly looking away. “You’re right, though. It’ll all go down just like you said, and there’s no need to suffer it when you don’t have to. People get too personal at funerals anyway. It’s just an opportunity for them to nose into your private life.”
“Then I should go,” he says and nods. “You shouldn’t have to bear the brunt of Aunt Rose’s questions alone. And, hey, I can act like a jerk and no one will think anything of it. They’ll expect it of me. It might be fun. Go out with a bang.”
“You’re not going out,” I say. I notice that his sideburns are almost completely gray. Despite how I feel about everything that has passed between us, I have to admit it looks good on him. “Cassie still needs you around. You know that, right?”
Jack twists his mouth in a self-deprecating way. It’s usually followed by a slow fade into his endearing smile, but today the smile doesn’t come.
“Does she?” he asks. “I can’t tell. This isn’t really what I meant to do.”
He’s talking about losing Cassie, not me. I don’t take it personally anymore.
“I didn’t either,” I say. “It is what it is.”
Whatever it is.
This is another one of those weird circumstances of breaking up. Your guard is finally down now that the relationship is broken beyond all repair and you feel a strange comfort in saying all the things that you never said to the one person who would have understood you the best. You’re finally the real you and he’s the real him, but it’s too late.
“So?” Jack asks. “The funeral?”
“I’ll be ok,” I say.
“Are you sure?” he asks. “Because you know Rose is going to ask about me just to get your goat. She’ll pretend like she forgot about the divorce, and once you start explaining and backpedaling, she’ll have you right where she wants you and she’ll be as happy as a lark. She’s an ‘I told you so’ looking for a person to scold.”
What she “told me so” about was having another child. I married Jack when I was twenty-five, and he wasn’t much older. We both wanted a pile of kids, and when we had Cassie right away, it seemed like the plan was going to work. But it didn’t. When my thirtieth birthday loomed and nothing more had happened, I started to worry. I hadn’t thought of it as infertility at the time, but when two, four, six more years went by and all the best laid plans of mice and men hadn’t brought us another child, I became obsessed.
I got so focused on getting pregnant again that sex turned into a science experiment. The bedroom was a laboratory where I was in a white coat instead of a black negligee. Each month that didn’t work out, I got angrier and angrier. I saw a therapist, and she told me I had to stop trying so hard to reach an unattainable goal. She said that was false hope. I said that was the definition of hope—the wish for something good, even in the face of its unlikelihood. But then we did it, we got pregnant just before I turned thirty-eight. It was like a miracle.
I miscarried at nineteen weeks.
So, now here I am at the door to my condo saying good-bye to my marriage. I want to tell Jack that I love him, and I know he wants to say it, too, but it’s the sort of “I love you” that the word bittersweet was invented for and we let it go with a nod and a brief hug.
Later, I stand outside Cassie’s room with my ear pressed to the door. I hear shuffling and her pencil scraping across her drawing pad. She draws these little anime characters that sort of look like her. She draws other figures, too, and I imagine they are characters from a story I don’t know. Sometimes I wo
nder if she’s drawing the brother she didn’t get to have. She knew we were having a boy. We had even started a list of names. She had been so happy. I wonder if she’s lonely. Another epic fail on my part. I wonder if I did anything right at all as a mother. I wonder if other mothers feel the same.
3
Funeral day, and I’m thinking about the sound a dental drill makes and that sickly sweet smell of the dentist’s office. When I was little kid, I used to dread going to the dentist. What a freakish job—everybody hates you, and you have to stick your hands in other people’s mouths. What makes someone want to do that? I remember the sickening feeling I’d get when I’d wake up on the day of my appointment, knowing that no matter what I did, there was no way out of it. The anxiety was brutal.
This is far worse.
I keep looking out the window to see if the rest of the world is still there. Everything feels surreal. I’m in a fog so thick I think I can see it in my closet. My heart is so heavy I can feel it in my arms and legs. My clothes are heavy, weighing on my shoulders like a coat too big for me. Maybe I’ve shrunk, grown younger. Perhaps when I look at myself in the mirror, I will see a ten-year-old girl.
I used to think that going off to college would make me an adult. Then I thought getting a job, getting married, having a child would prove to be the turning point. But no, I see now that it all starts today—the day I say good-bye to my dad.
I already see how it will play out. The parts that will hurt the most, the huge chunks of time where there will be nothing to do but endure. The unbearable hugs and people taking my hand—pressing it hard into their own. The polite, but contrived conversations that I’ll be forced to engage in when I really just want to scream at everyone to get out and leave me alone.
Stop touching me, I will want to say as I yank free from their awful grip, and thanks for the casserole.
I think of Oliver, the nurse’s aide, and the comforting way he put his hands around mine, making me feel for just a moment that I wasn’t alone in my grief. When he pressed my hand between his own, it was different. I don’t think about kissing him. Much.
“Cassie,” I call against the closed bedroom door. “You about ready?”
Nothing. I knock.
“Cass?”
The door opens, and she’s dressed in the same dark blue dress she wore to her piano recital last month.
“Is this going to be one of those open casket things where you have to go gawk at the dead body?” she asks, hiding her fear behind her sarcasm.
“No,” I say.
I reach out to touch her arm, but she nudges past me and out into the living room before I can take hold.
“Where’s Dad’s chair?” she asks, standing in the empty spot that used to hold Jack’s leather club chair. She circles around like it’s there, but she just can’t see it.
“It’s with Dad,” I say, picturing a space with nothing in it but a leather club chair.
I know Jack has found another place to stay, but I haven’t been there. We haven’t gotten that far yet—the switching off weekends and holidays, the arguing about child support paid and time spent. I’m not ready for that.
“There won’t be anything to gawk at,” I say, changing the subject back to the funeral. “It’s just out of respect anyway. People want to say good-bye.”
“It’s creepy,” Cassie says and stomps the floor where Jack’s chair should be. “Grandpa’s dead. It’s a little late for good-bye. And what’s respectful about staring at a dead person—looking to see if they have nose hair?”
She’s right.
“Grandpa was cremated,” I say, realizing she didn’t know that. “There will just be the urn.”
“Oh,” she says, her body going limp. “That’s even worse.”
Cassie’s world has seen too many changes these last several months. She goes into the kitchen and pours the last of the dark roast into her “First Coffee, Then Your Inane Blather” mug. She’s fifteen, sipping java and wearing a wrap dress that dares you not to notice she has hips and that she’s morphing into that scary something between adult and child. She’s right in front of me, and she’s already gone. I don’t even know when it happened. How I lost her.
She was there just a little while ago, clinging to my leg, pulling on my shirttail, showing me her drawings, telling me a joke so funny she could barely speak around her own laughter, and then . . . then some years passed and maybe I was busy working or answering e-mail, talking on the phone, doing housework—I don’t know—but she grew up while I was looking the other way, and now she’s gone. It’s selfish of me, but I’m not ready to be unimportant to her. I’m not ready for her to go, but there’s nothing I can do to stop it.
I’m not ready for this. For any of this.
I want her back. I want my father back. I want it all back—safety and hope and time. But there is no way back. There is only picking up the car keys, opening the door, and passing through into whatever comes after this.
When we get to parking deck, Jack’s spot is still empty. Cassie glances at the space where his car used to be, but doesn’t ask about it. She doesn’t tromp around it looking for a secret passageway back to better times. Instead she jabs her earbuds in and aims her face at her iPhone. I want to say something, have some meaningful conversation about loss and love and everything in between, but I don’t know how.
We emerge from the darkness of the garage into a day too bright and blue. My cell rings as I’m waiting at a stop sign. Lola doing fish face. I’m not afraid of this call. This is her coping mechanism call. She’s not lost in the jungle. She’s just sad. Same difference I guess.
“Hello,” I answer, knowing she’s called to ask me something that seems off subject, trivial. She does that when she’s about to fall apart.
“Hey, Sissy,” she says, and the use of that long-ago nickname makes the road blur.
“Are you with Mom?” I ask, keeping my eyes on the passing cars and the tears out of my voice.
I had busied myself so much with the tasks of losing someone that I hadn’t faced the task of saying good-bye. And especially not to Dad. I’m not sure I can do it.
“I’m in the driveway,” she says. “Do you remember that time I got locked in the bathroom at a gas station on the way to Disney World?”
“Sure.”
I don’t understand the diversion so far, but it means she’s not handling this well. I ease into traffic and turn toward our childhood home.
“I can remember how I got locked in, but how did I get out?” she asks.
“Ray knocked the door in,” I say, one hand gripping the phone, the other tight on the wheel—hurrying to Lola like we all do whenever she needs us.
Breaking that door was one of Ray’s first acts of reckless destruction after Lola’s accident.
“I remember Mom saying all these silly, fake curse words from outside the door,” Lola says. “Why did she do that?”
After Lola’s accident and Mom’s reawakening into a better, albeit unreal, version of herself, Mom tried not to say “undesirable words.” So she said things like “Well, fruity Froot Loops,” and “Tangle my angle.” I’m not sure what that replaced for her, but when she said it, we knew she was upset.
I remember how nervous Ray had gotten when the door wouldn’t open and even the station attendant couldn’t help. Dad was on the pay phone trying to reach a locksmith when Ray decided to take matters into his own hands. He banged on the door and told Lola to move back and then he rammed himself into the door three or four times until it opened. He reached into the bathroom and yanked Lola out like he was pulling her from a burning building.
“We should have stayed at home,” he had said. “She’s not ready.”
“We can’t stay locked up in the house forever, Ray,” Mom had said, fussing over Lola and checking the braces she wore on her ankles to keep herself steady.
Lola kept them covered up most of the time, but they were still there. They made her seem fragile and people wanted to take care of her. When she got the ankle braces off a few years later, eventually no one even remembered they had been there.
I still see the memory of them glinting on her legs, even now, sometimes.
“Why does Mom do anything that she does?” I ask, perhaps with more sarcasm in my voice than necessary.
Across the virtual phone line, Lola chuckles in agreement. “Is Cassie with you?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Tell her I’m fine,” Lola says, always more concerned about everyone else. “You know what I found under Dad’s bed?”
“Why were you under Dad’s bed?”
“That album cover,” she says. “I wanted to play the record, but it’s gone.”
“The one with the monster face?”
“Do you remember the way he used to try to scare us?” she asks, her voice light and airy.
It was Dad’s record—some has-been band that I had never heard of then or since. He used to play this game where he’d sneak into our room and make zombie noises, holding the album cover in front of his face to scare us. We’d scream and hide under the covers, our little hearts pounding, fear squealing out of us even though we knew it was all make-believe.
I look over at Cassie and wonder where make-believe has gone. So much is possible these days that nothing is magic anymore.
“I remember,” I say to Lola, and then try to change the subject. “Where’s Chris?”
Cassie looks over at me, clearly listening.
“He’s inside talking to Mom,” Lola says. “She knows, doesn’t she? That he’s from TV?”
“Mom’s ecstatic,” I say. “She loves those commercials.”
“You told her?” Cassie asks sharply, figuring out what has happened. “Good. I hate keeping secrets.”
The Lemonade Year Page 3