No Happy Endings

by Nora McInerny

  Ever since that pesky economic crash of 2008, banks have gotten reeeeeeeally upright about handing out mortgages to people who say, “Trust me, I’ll pay it.” They need, like, real proof. On paper, I was not a great candidate for a house, so I had to get beyond a computerized application. I needed to meet face-to-face with someone, to look them in the eye and say out loud, “Trust me, I’ll pay it.”

  It didn’t work.

  I did not have a mortgage pre-approval, or even pre-pre-approval. So, of course, that’s when I found the perfect house: a white two-story with black shutters and bright boughs of flowers spilling over from the window boxes. There was a pergola in the backyard, and an actual picket fence. The house itself was surrounded by a towering hedge of lilacs, which gave the backyard a Secret Garden vibe. It looked exactly like a dollhouse a friend had bought for Ralph at a garage sale, so that’s how I instantly started referring to it. The Dollhouse. It was just a few blocks away from my little brother and his family. The for-sale sign was so fresh that the house wasn’t even listed online yet. I called Dave. “I found the perfect house. Find out how much it costs and offer them a little more than that.”

  Dave insisted that I look inside the house before I made an offer, but I already knew. I already saw our Christmas tree in the front window, and tiny American flags lining the walkway on the fourth of July. I already saw Ralph and me building a snowman in the front yard and shoveling the walkway together. Not just the two of us, but more of us . . . a bigger version of our team, filling out the space. This house was as boring and traditional as houses could be, the kind of house a child would draw if you said “Draw me a house.” This was a house that a family would live in. And instead of seeing Ralph and myself as two pieces of rubble, I saw us for what we were: a family. Even without Aaron, we were still a family. A small family, yes, but a family. Those little condos didn’t feel right because they weren’t right, because our family was meant to grow. I didn’t know how, or when, but I knew that it would happen in this house. That this house, even with its aging furnace and the spider-filled basement, would be where we let ourselves grow.

  “This doesn’t have a big bathtub, a porch, a new roof, an attached garage, a finished basement, a gas fireplace, or any of the things that you said were must-haves yesterday,” Dave said. “And this kitchen is a disaster.” I gave him the kind of hug I used to give my dad, pinning his arms to his sides and squeezing until I felt him give up.

  “It’s perfect. I have to have it,” I replied and started a mental calculation of how many gallons of paint it would take to cover the baby-poop brown that covered the kitchen walls.

  “You have to have a mortgage approval,” he countered. “It’s bad form to make an offer you can’t pay.”

  I did my best to look employed and responsible at the meeting. I wore a skirt and a shirt that had buttons. I put on makeup and pulled my hair back. I sat down across from Richard the Mortgage Guy and started my pitch: “I’m widowed, I’m determined, I’m buying this goddamn house.” That’s the headline, at least. The actual “pitch” was more like me rambling, waving my hands around, and possibly even begging.

  Ten minutes in, just when I was getting to the part where I knew I had found the right house for my son and me to start over in, Richard raised his hand to interject. “Do you have your tax returns?” he asked me, and I reached into my bag to wrestle out the stack of backup information I had compiled: five years of tax returns, bank statements, and check stubs from my shiny new freelance career.

  “This is possible . . .” he said, punching some numbers into his computer. “It won’t be traditional, but it’s possible.”

  Richard needed a few days to pitch my case to the rest of the credit union. He apologized, but the process took time. Would I mind, he wondered, waiting in that kind of limbo?

  Of course, I didn’t mind. I’d heard him loud and clear: it was possible. Yes, this was more in between, but it was a new kind of in between for me. This in between was joyful. This uncertainty was one that had a beautiful new beginning on the other side.

  Chapter Nine

  Ready or Not

  The psychic was hired to tell the fortunes of five ten-year-old Catholic school girls. You’d think she would try to tailor her message to the audience, maybe gloss over some things, cut some corners, keep things on the positive side—tell all of us that we could expect long and happy lives with handsome husbands and healthy children.

  You’d be wrong.

  “Interesting,” she said while she looked into my eyes. “You will have two husbands. Both great loves. With one, you’ll be very poor. With the other, you’ll be rich.” At the time, I looked a lot like Jonathan Taylor Thomas and Macaulay Culkin had a baby together. I wore primarily turtlenecks and coordinating sweat suits. I was often mistaken for a boy, and I had no idea why, because bowl cuts were equally popular among and hideous on boys and girls in equal measure. I was mostly concerned with my fortune for the next week or so, not the next twenty years. I needed to know whether Gene liked me back, and if my basketball team would ever win a game. And here this lady was talking to me about husbands? Sure, I figured I’d be married someday, but I assumed a husband would just be assigned to me, perhaps in college or even high school. A husband. Two husbands just didn’t make any sense, mathematically or otherwise. You could only ever be married to one person; everyone knew that!

  The word divorce would not enter my vocabulary until the next year, when my friend Samantha sat cross-legged on her daybed, tears streaming down her face. Her parents’ living room—her mom’s living room, now—was filled with boxes of her dad’s belongings. Her dad would still be her dad, but he was moving out. I walked across the street to my own house feeling frozen and afraid, and watched my parents warily, looking for any cracks in their relationship that may result in my dad getting a sad apartment and growing a ponytail. Divorce meant that Samantha’s house became a place where we could hang out unsupervised on Friday nights while her mother went on dates with men who seemed too old and too sad to be anyone’s “boyfriend.” But I didn’t know any of this the night of the party. I only knew that my friend Kate’s familiar living room had been transformed by the presence of this all-seeing woman with her intense eye contact and incense. I had chills all over my body as she closed my fingers around my palm and gently motioned for the next girl to enter the room.

  An hour before, I’d been a regular fourth grader, hoping I could get my ears pierced. Now, I was a girl who had seen my own weird future. I don’t remember what the other girls’ fortunes were, but I do remember that when we were all snuggled up in the basement in our dorky nightgowns, eating popcorn and watching Olson Twins movies we were definitely too old for, repeating my fortune for them turned them all into the human equivalent of a grimace emoji.

  My parents were not big fans of sleepovers. “You have your own bed to sleep in,” my dad would rant, “and that’s where you belong.” They didn’t appreciate the sleepover hangover caused by Pizza Hut and daring one another to stay up past midnight. Their enthusiasm was not increased by my bounding into the house the next morning to tell them about my brush with the supernatural. My dad’s normally stern face froze solid while I told him about my psychic reading. “A psychic,” he said with disdain, “told you what?!” I repeated it for him, more slowly this time, so he could comprehend it. A psychic told me I would have two husbands.

  “Well!” he proclaimed. “That’s some bullshit.”

  I was immediately embarrassed for myself, my friend, and my future husbands. My dad was only a strict Catholic when it was one of the major holidays or when he was annoyed with something, and this was just the kind of thing to rile up his religion. “What kind of a person tells a little girl she’ll get married twice?!” His quarrel seemed not only to be with the idea of being married twice, which implied eventual divorce, but with the entire method by which she came to this vision of my future. He declared it all—the psychic, the birthday party, the sleepov
er, and the reading—total bullshit.

  This had been a fun birthday party, but it wasn’t a life-changing event for me. By that age, I was already enamored with the idea of the supernatural. I was a child who lunged for the Variety section of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune every morning, flipping to the funny pages, where the horoscopes lived. I was, and am, such a Capricorn: ambitious, stubborn, loyal. I read my horoscopes half for fun, and half because who doesn’t want a little help understanding their place in this world? I was being raised to believe in a Holy Trinity: God, Jesus, The Holy Spirit. I was being raised to believe in a series of saints, and to pray a rosary. I was not being raised to believe in astrology, but is it really such a leap between the two?

  I grew up to be the kind of adult woman who sees an energy healer and cleanses my children’s auras, which is like saying I grew up to be a soccer mom: the two are interchangeable, and a hugely overlapping Venn diagram. I grew up to be the kind of woman who prays to God, and who lights Palo Santo in the mornings to set my intentions. I grew up to be the kind of woman who believes in spiritual pluralism, a sort of cafeteria approach to faith and religion that puts about as much stock in my star chart and my own self as I do in a benevolent (and probably female) God. It’s all just different ways to make sense of the world around us, and our place in it. We are who we are maybe because of some big, omniscient force, because of when and where the planets were in relation to when and where we were born, because of our own choices and actions . . . because of a lot of things that nobody can really know for sure.

  Let me say right now that it’s a good thing my dad is already dead, or this chapter would for sure kill him. The man’s dying wish was for “generations of Catholic McInernys” and I just started going to a—gasp!!—Lutheran church.

  I mostly forgot about this prophecy, until I was in my mid-twenties, and for some reason decided to bring it up to my then boyfriend. We had reached a point where we should have been talking about marriage and kids but weren’t. I pretended that it was because I was just a very modern woman who didn’t care about conventional family life, but really I was just pretending that this was a viable relationship with a person who did not share my goals or values. I thought he’d find this little piece of my childhood funny, but he was actually deeply offended by this view of my future. He didn’t like the way it sounded: that I’d fall in deep love twice, but that one relationship would be poor, and the other wealthier. In his mind, I’d been programmed at age ten to be a gold-digger, and disclosing this prediction to him was my way of telling him that he was not going to be my one true love. I was stunned because:

  He was actually irritated by a birthday-party psychic from the Midwest and

  I made more money than any man I ever dated, including him, making me the world’s least effective gold-digger.

  Either way, this disclosure haunted the guy. It became the thing he brought up over and over and over again, mostly when he was drunk or high, which was basically always. Why would he marry me if I was just going to move on to someone rich?

  If you can believe it, that boyfriend was not one of my big loves and we did not get married. And I am not divorced, or rich.*

  But I did get married twice. I do have two big loves.

  Here is what I don’t believe in: I don’t believe that God has an itinerary-like plan for everyone, that she’s sitting up there in a cloud, pointing at us like, “You get cancer! You get a fancy house! You get a fancy house and cancer!” I don’t believe that the psychic at Kate’s tenth birthday party was truly telling my future. Or maybe I do.

  Because I remembered that party, sharply, in more detail, after Aaron died. Long before I was ready to think about ever loving another human being again, I remembered being told that I would marry twice, I remembered my father’s reaction.

  I know a lot of people who know a lot of dead people; it’s something I tend to bond over when I meet someone. Once, I was talking with a friend whose husband had also died young. He was a lot like Aaron—preternaturally positive and happy and present—and she wondered: Did a part of him know he was going to die young? Somewhere deep inside, was his soul aware that he was here for a good time, not a long time? I had wondered the same thing about Aaron. And the same thing about myself. Because that little girl who was reading her horoscope was a little girl who lived with a sense of dread about the future, who laid in bed crying about the eventual end of the world, when everything was just particles, and worried that maybe her particles would drift away from her family’s particles and be lonely out there in an ever-expanding universe. There was certainly something in me, from a young age, that knew that life was going to be hard. Yes, I desperately needed therapy, but it was the early nineties and that wasn’t really a thing yet. At least not in Minnesota.

  Maybe everything that psychic said was bullshit. Maybe it’s all bullshit. But some of it is bullshit I can believe in.

  Like many older white men, my father was certain that he had all the answers to life. These were answers that he would swiftly, decisively, and loudly gift to me and my siblings, at his own discretion, looking up from his crossword puzzle to share a withering glance and pelt us with a small kernel of wisdom. Often, these pieces of wisdom began with some variation of “the problem with people your age . . .” before offering the actionable advice you were seeking. If you’re wondering what the problem with people your age is (whatever your age), I can only tell you from my father’s observations that it could be anything at all. I usually zoned out a little during his monologues, but I recall him blaming the shortcomings of any generation but his own on overbearing parents (he, himself, could never be accused of such nonsense), participation ribbons, unrealistic depictions of the female body in media targeted to children, poor diet, and general laziness.

  Of all the times my dad’s voice turned into the horn sound like the grown-ups in a Peanuts cartoon, most of them I’ve forgotten. But I can still hear his most useful piece of advice. “The problem with people,” he said, a vast generalization not targeted to my age group, which may have been why I kept listening, “is that they think there’s a right time for things. They think the world gives a shit about your timing.” Maybe this was why the psychic had bristled him so much: because the idea that the future was predictable was just as ridiculous as the idea that there was a specific chronology you could follow on your way to happiness, that there was a right time for marriage, or children, or buying a minivan. That was pure nonsense to him.

  I was three weeks late entering this world, and I think being so overdue ensured that an acute awareness of time was ingrained in my DNA. Time seemed always to be moving too fast, and I felt perpetually behind. There was a lot to do, and not a lot of time to do it. Aside from my father, the entire world seemed to reinforce this: we had standardized tests twice a year to prove we were learning; we got report cards every quarter. There were always tests to take, and teams to make. And that was in grade school! Middle school would prove more intense: We’d have lockers! We’d need to get good grades so we could get into good high schools and good colleges and have a good life. Life was like an endless to-do list with a very specific order. My dad was wrong. The path to happiness was clear and finite: get good grades, go to college, get a good job, fall in love, get married, have children, work until you die. What was wrong with that?

  If my older brother was an animal, he would be a sloth. Thoughtful, deliberate, and very loyal. I don’t know if sloths are actually loyal, but don’t they seem like they would be? Austin dated his wife, Lori, for ten years before he proposed, and this drove my father absolutely bonkers. What was Austin waiting for, a sign from God? Well, Austin was waiting to be done with grad school, to be financially secure, and also . . . I don’t know, you can’t hurry love or a sloth. My parents were married at twenty-four, mostly because, look, I don’t want to rush to any conclusions, but their wedding was in July and my sister was born the following January, a giant, very full-term baby. That being said, my fathe
r always romanticized their love story. How they were married before they’d finished college. How they moved into a run-down house just off the freeway, where my mother was once robbed at knifepoint by a man whose face was covered by pantyhose, which I bet you thought happened only in movies. This guy threw my mom into the basement and locked the door while my sister slept in her crib, blissfully unaware. How money came and went, and more kids came, and more money went, and they figured everything out together, as it happened. He hadn’t even had a checking account before he and my mother got married, but they were happy, and they had each other.

  Life had worked out for my parents, and their solid marriage and their four not-terrible children were enough evidence for my dad that the secret to happiness is to let it just happen. Or, at the very least, not to expect life to comply with your expectations. Even if you never want to be married or have babies, even if you want to keep all your money in a shoebox under your bed for eternity, there’s something to be said for letting go of the idea that you can engineer life to your specifications.

  That’s what my dad was trying to teach us. He wasn’t telling us that we had to want the same things that he and my mom had (marriage, children, a vacation home to snowbird to), but that we couldn’t let timing be an excuse for not getting the things that we did want. Waiting for the perfect conditions is a waste of what limited time you have on this earth. What Aaron and I had together may not have been our first choice—was not really even a choice at all—but it was good. We made it into the best version of the worst situation, and we made it happen regardless of what the future held. I married Aaron not knowing if he would live for three months or three years. We had a baby together not knowing that Aaron’s tumor would return right before I gave birth. Aaron died at age thirty-five, and while there is no disputing that it was the wrong time for him to die, we could look each other in the eye and say, “We did good.”