The Most Fun We Ever Had

by Claire Lombardo

  “Who’s doing that tomorrow?”

  “Me,” he said. “A few of my cousins. A couple of men from the funeral home.”

  “People who didn’t know him?”

  “Your grandpa’s friends are mostly octogenarians. We take what we can get.”

  “Do women ever do it? Hold the casket.”

  “Not that I’ve seen.”

  “Is it allowed?”

  “Whatever we want to be allowed is allowed with this stuff, I think. Why do you ask?”

  “Maybe I’d like to do it,” she said.

  Her father’s voice sounded strangled: “You would?”

  “Yeah,” she said. Then: “Yes. Daddy? Is that okay? Would that be…like…”

  “Of course,” he said finally. “I’d love that.”

  It had been a strangely nice few days, given everything. She and her sisters were all being kinder to each other, and she’d walked into the kitchen earlier to find her parents kissing for the first time in months. And it was weird, she thought, feeling adult and aware, how a thing so terrible as losing someone could yield goodness in the ones who were left.

  PART FOUR

  WINTER

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  A brisk knock, one that was less question than announcement, and then Gillian entered the exam room, not quite smiling but with a face pliable enough that it seemed a possibility.

  “Liza,” she said. “How are we feeling?”

  Who was the we? She and the baby? She and Ryan? She and Gillian? “Fine,” Liza said, though the word didn’t necessarily apply to any of the possibilities.

  Gillian set down her chart and pumped her hands with sanitizer. “I’m a little surprised to see you.”

  She had been avoiding Gillian since their disastrous phone call, had arranged to see other doctors in the practice for her intervening prenatal visits. But her recent change in circumstances had made her edgy and anxious, and she craved, again, what she’d sought Gillian out for in the first place: familiarity. The knowledge that she was lucky. And, perhaps, absolution for her behavior.

  “I wanted to apologize,” she said.

  Gillian raised her eyebrows.

  “My partner left me recently,” she said without planning to. “The baby’s father.”

  Gillian paused. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “It’s not an excuse, but I—I’ve been—going through a lot lately.”

  “Shall I point out that that sounds like an excuse? And a flimsy one, given what you accused me of?”

  Her biggest fear, initially, had been that Gillian would tell her father what she’d asked, but he hadn’t mentioned it, and she’d relaxed. In the room with Gillian now, practically writhing with shame, she realized she’d been too hasty in assuming she was in the clear.

  “I have pristine ratings, you realize that?” Gillian continued. “I have a wait list for new patients through next year. I don’t need to sell myself to you. Your being here is contingent on me, Liza. Let there be no ambiguity about that. So before we move on, two things: firstly, as I believe I mentioned, before you hung up on me: it is entirely unprecedented for me to have someone accuse me of what you accused me of.”

  “I was just—”

  “Second of all, though I’d normally never dignify such an accusation with any type of response, I feel obliged in this case, because your dad’s a wonderful man. I’m telling you this because of that. Not because I feel you deserve an explanation. David was my friend. He was my friend during a very difficult time in my life.”

  She regarded the crests of her knees beneath her belly. “I really am sorry,” she said. “I don’t— I feel terrible for acting how I did. But it’s been a—particularly awful time for me. I’m facing down being a single parent and that would be hard enough on its own, but when you grow up with parents like mine—parents who are in love like mine…God, these stable, perfect, desperately infatuated— It just…” She shook her head. “I’m falling so short of the mark.”

  “Yes,” Gillian said mildly. “It was hard for me too, when I was your age. Trying to figure out my own life while bearing witness, every day, to such an idyllic marriage.”

  Liza looked up to find Gillian staring at her squarely. It occurred to her that this woman may have been one of the few outside of their family who understood the magnificent albatross that was her parents’ love, who had suffered her own pains in its wake.

  “My sole requirement is that we don’t discuss your parents. Beyond the genetic necessity. Understand? This conversation is our last on the subject.”

  The indoor smell of cigarettes. Gillian Gillian Gillian. The woman had been such an enigma to her for so long, a ghostly fragment of her childhood that never fully went away. How odd to realize she hadn’t been so different from Liza herself: navigating a demanding work life, and juggling that, with varying degrees of grace, alongside a quest for personal fulfillment.

  “All right,” she said. “Thank you, Dr. Levin. Really.”

  “And your mother’s aware that I’ll be the one delivering this baby?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Liza said. “My dad told her when I first started seeing you.”

  * * *

  —

  She’d offered Christmas in a moment of weakness because Wyatt wouldn’t stop asking about Star of the Week, if Jonah could come, if she thought Jonah would know the song, if Jonah knew how to play any instruments, could Jonah please come, Mama, even just for four minutes. She’d thrown out a noncommittal “He’ll be in school but maybe you can show him during the holidays” before realizing that it was their year to go to Matt’s family in Seattle for Christmas, but during the three-second delay her son had already darted up the stairs to practice the chord progression again, and so she’d called Matt at work and told him, tonelessly, that she hoped he wouldn’t mind but they were going to have Jonah over for a pre-Christmas dinner. And her husband’s clenched-jaw acquiescence was worse than any fight they could’ve had, as though he no longer possessed the ability or the desire to dialogue with her, the kind of quiet acceptance that one used to placate a padded-cell maniac.

  Matt had driven to Oak Park to pick up Jonah, and after some cajoling from Wyatt had taken the boys with him—“We get to ride in our car with him?” Wyatt had said, awestruck—and when the four of them returned, she couldn’t help but marvel at the sight. If anyone had told her, fifteen years ago, that she’d be standing in her foyer watching the baby she’d given up teaching her sons how to do the “blow it up” fist bump while her husband looked on, she—what would she have done?

  “Merry Christmas,” she said. He seemed to have gotten taller since she’d last seen him. It still made her uncomfortable to have him here against the opulent backdrop of all she’d failed to give him. She willed herself not to think about the housekeepers, the landscapers, the hours of free time that stretched before her like luxurious carpets. The way she filled those hours with book clubs and Bikram and bake sales that were needlessly raising money for elective things that any parent at the preschool could’ve funded out-of-pocket in the blink of an eye. Of course it was silly—worse, obnoxious—to rue the emotional dearth of a materially prosperous life. But Jonah was a salient reminder of the contrast: her excess with his have-nots. She felt sick to her stomach.

  “Thanks for having me,” he said.

  “Of course. Are you hungry?”

  “I— Sure,” Jonah said. “I mean, whenever. Not starving.”

  “Dinner’s ready now,” she said. She had orchestrated it this way, timed it so she was pulling the pork chops out of the oven when she heard the car in the driveway. If they ate early, they could usher him out with the excuse of needing to put the kids to bed. She didn’t care if it was cruelly controlling. His presence in her house made her feel a bit like she was drowning.

  “Mama, can I play
my song first?” Wyatt appeared on the landing with his tiny guitar.

  She swallowed. “Sure, honey. I’m just going to— I’ll be listening from the kitchen, baby. I just have to whip the potatoes.” So what if 80 percent of the things that came out of her mouth were utterly ridiculous? So what if she wasn’t like her own mother, warmly bustling and open-armed? “Matty, I’m just going to— Could you just—” But her husband was already leading the charge into the living room, Eli in his arms. He’d been vehemently opposed to their first dinner, and he’d remained silently opposed to this Christmas celebration she’d sprung on him, and yet now he was behaving with absolute decency, making casual conversation with the boy—the tilt of Jonah’s head reminded her, for a second, of her father. It wasn’t Jonah’s fault. She knew that. He hadn’t asked to exist. And he’d done nothing wrong, nothing at all except for being, and she could acknowledge candidly that it wasn’t so much the boy she resisted as it was all that he represented, and all that he threatened to unravel, but acknowledging that didn’t make a bit of difference.

  In the kitchen, she poured herself far more wine than was socially acceptable and drank it down to an appropriate amount and then leaned against the counter, trying again to remember which nostril you were supposed to breathe out of when you were about to lose your shit. She was just trying to do the right thing, but that wasn’t so easy, because everyone in her life had a different conception of what the right thing was, and she herself was caught somewhere in the middle, trying to give Wyatt what he wanted and heed Matt’s concerns and extend some modicum of something in Jonah’s direction, though she knew she owed him more than she could ever give. She wasn’t a bad person. She was, of course, as had already been well established, not the warmest person, but she was a good mom, wasn’t she? Hadn’t she given everything she had, every single ounce of herself, to her children, and weren’t they growing into fantastically vibrant boys? Didn’t she, for the most part, do what she was supposed to?

  What would happen if she had a full-throttle panic attack in the kitchen? Or passed out, everyone ignorant to the thump of her body because Wyatt really wailed on his guitar strings? What kinds of memories would nights like this imprint upon her children? Remember when Mom’s illegitimate lovechild came for dinner and we found her in the kitchen throwing back a bottle of carménère? Remember that fucked-up Christmas before Mom and Dad got divorced?

  She heard Wyatt playing the chorus and she swallowed, impressively, the rest of her wine. This evening was making her child wildly happy. Wyatt, to whom she was bound in a deeply intricate way, more deeply even than she was to Eli, because of all she and Wyatt had been through together at the outset. Because Wyatt had, simply by coming into being, helped her find herself again, a new self, the one that was his mother, after so many years of being lost.

  He was on the final repetition of the chorus, she recognized, so she poured and pounded another inch of wine before turning the mixer on the potatoes, the sound of which, conveniently, also drowned out Jonah’s applause.

  * * *

  —

  In a tone that sounded, to Jonah, not totally inviting, Violet had invited him over a few days before Christmas to have dinner with her family, and while it didn’t sound fun to him—like, at all—it wasn’t like he could tell her he had other plans, because besides school and martial arts pretty much all he did was hang out with David and Marilyn, both of whom encouraged him to go. So he found himself sitting at their dinner table for the second time in his life, almost enjoying himself, having just plodded through an awkward meal, playing this dumb game with Wyatt and Eli where he tried to guess their ages and kept intentionally guessing wrong.

  “Forty-seven,” he said, and both boys totally lost it, laughing in that infectious kid way where you couldn’t help but laugh, too, even if your dumb birth mother was staring at you from across the table like you were teaching her children how to masturbate. Violet rose from the table with her empty wineglass. The last time he’d been there he’d shoved a few bottles of wine in his backpack. Just for fun. Just to see. They were still in the duffel bag in his bedroom closet. He wondered if Violet had noticed them missing.

  “Can Jonah come to Star of the Week?” Wyatt asked.

  Jonah turned to the kid, making a face. “Like, a real star? In space?”

  Eli and Wyatt both cracked up at this, but their laughter was not enough to distract him from the fact that Matt had blanched at Wyatt’s question, and that Violet had reappeared in the doorway, glass filled and mouth pinched, as it had been when he’d first met her.

  “I’m Star of the Week in January,” Wyatt explained, oblivious to his parents and the horror on their faces, which was plainly obvious to Jonah.

  “Dope,” he said. “Congrats.” He pictured himself showing up at Wyatt’s fancy school, an outsider with three hundred dollars to his name, being run off of the grounds by armed guards.

  “Wy, sweetheart.” She came over and kissed the top of Wyatt’s head. They both stared at him from across the table, two identical sets of dark brown eyes. Violet must have the recessive gene, Bb; this meant, of course, that his dad had blue eyes. “We talked about this, baby.”

  Jonah must’ve looked hurt—he was hurt; he wasn’t the fucking Unabomber; he hadn’t fucking asked for any of this—because Violet softened again.

  “It’s during the school day,” she said. “Just some— Dada and I don’t think it’s a good idea for anyone to miss school because of this, right, Dada?”

  These fucking bizarro cyborg people. Matt nodded stiffly. Violet pressed her lips again into Wyatt’s hair and he could tell, watching them from across the table, that she was a good mom, that she was nuts about her kids, would always be nuts about Wyatt and Eli in a way that she would never be about him.

  “Okay,” she said with what sounded like forced enthusiasm. “What if we get our jammies on and then read The Grinch?”

  “Can Jonah put me to bed?” Wyatt asked.

  Violet stiffened. “Oh, I—”

  Jonah watched with interest as Violet and Matt exchanged some exaggerated pantomime across the room, Violet lifting her eyebrows all the way up on her forehead and Matt cocking his head to one side, scratching an invisible itch on his cheek as he mouthed something.

  “Have you read The Grinch?” Wyatt asked him, clambering into the seat beside him.

  “For sure,” he said. “Every Who down in Who-ville, right?”

  “Mama, he knows it,” Wyatt said, incredulous.

  “Yeah, sweetie, that’s impressive, but isn’t it—”

  “I’ll read to Eli,” Matt said in a tight voice, and then, turning to Jonah: “You can read to Wy.”

  Violet spun from the room, and he followed Wyatt and Matt and Eli uncertainly up the stairs and down the hall.

  “Teeth and PJs first,” Matt said, and Wyatt skittered off to the bathroom, Eli toddling behind him. “You all good with this?” Matt asked him, like Jonah was about to fly a plane or something.

  “Sure,” he said. “Yeah, no problem.”

  “I’ll be right across the hall,” Matt said, and Jonah took a second to stew in the gall of these people, their acting like he was not only an inconvenience but a sketchy Stranger-Danger predator too.

  “Got it,” he said, but only because Wyatt had appeared again, having changed into his pajamas in approximately three seconds. Wyatt took his hand and pulled him into his room. It took a few minutes—Wyatt giving him the tour of his bedroom, showing him his gargantuan arsenal of Matchbox cars; God, their abundance of stuff—but he finally got the kid into bed.

  “Lie down with me,” Wyatt said.

  “Oh—I’m good.” He sat upright at the foot of the bed with Wyatt’s copy of How the Grinch Stole Christmas! on his lap. He looked up at the ceiling, its elaborate skyscape of glow-in-the-dark planets, and thought about how fucking nice it must be to be
these kids, growing up like they were, with racecar beds and guitars and parents who loved them.

  “You live with Loomis, right?” Wyatt squirmed under the blankets. “Do you like dogs?”

  “No,” he said.

  “How come?”

  Violet always referred to Wyatt as shy, but this seemed less and less true every time he saw the boy. He wondered if Violet would be mad if they didn’t read. If she tried to fill a quota every night, a hundred thousand words per kid, stuffing their tiny brains with brilliance. If he’d ultimately be to blame if Wyatt wasn’t accepted to Yale.

  “Will you come to Star of the Week?” This kid was so earnest and hopeful it was ridiculous. “It’s on January fifth at ten o’clock.”

  He thought of Wyatt with a tiny date book like Violet’s and almost smiled. January fifth: his birthday was January seventh. He wondered if Violet remembered. Marilyn had it written on her calendar, had insisted on having some kind of celebration, a dinner out or with some of his new school friends. He’d told her he’d prefer to have it just be with her and David. Was picturing, with a kind of dorky excitement, how nice it would be to celebrate his birthday with people he liked. To celebrate it, period.

  “I’ll try, dude,” he said.

  “Could we sing instead of read? Mama sings to me sometimes.”

  He couldn’t picture Violet singing. “That’s out of my wheelhouse, man.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means I don’t sing. You can sing if you want.”

  Wyatt was quiet for a minute. Then: “Is Santa real?”

  Oh, shit. Of course this was happening to him.

  “Jax told me Santa’s not real,” Wyatt said.

  “Who the hell is Jax?”

  “He’s in my class.”

  “Tell him he’s got a stupid name.”

  “Is he right?”

  He felt like he was on a reality television show where they put unassuming people into uncomfortable conversations with child geniuses and left them to dig their way to safety.