by Grace Palmer
“What’s your bad news?” she asked.
“The usual, unfortunately. Will be here for a while. I’m sorry, Hollz.”
She let out a sad breath. She’d been hoping it was something else—a flat tire, a mustard stain on his favorite dress shirt. She’d been hoping he was just calling to bemoan the terrible—but really not so terrible—fate the world had inflicted on him, just to make her smile.
But no, it was actual, for-real bad news. He wasn’t calling to make her smile. He was just calling to let her know.
“It’s okay,” she said, trying to mask her sadness. “When do you think you’ll—”
“What? Yes, SMZ Inc. IPO paperwork is here. The Barclays forms are over there. They need it by seven p.m. Sorry, Hollz, someone just walked into my office. I gotta go. Everything okay on your end?”
“It’s … yeah, it’s fine. I’ll see you tonight.”
“Love ya. I’ll text you later.”
“I love you.”
Grady retreated to his room, sans Gameboy and television privileges, as soon as they got home. Holly busied herself packing everybody’s lunches for the next day until Alice got dropped off after gymnastics practice by Mrs. Chandler, who had carpool duty on Fridays. She heard the Chandlers’ minivan pull into the driveway, heard the doors slide open, then slam closed. Little footsteps pitter-pattered up to the front door.
She was hoping for a big hug and kiss from her little girl to take some of the edge off this miserable day. But Alice beelined for her room right away with scarcely a word, leaving a trail of four barrettes, three scrunchies, two bags, and one sad mother behind her.
Holly sighed and checked her phone. No text from Pete.
She went into their bedroom, ironed Pete’s dress shirt and slacks for the next day, and took care of some other odds and ends around the house. Then, dinner time—pork tenderloin and green beans—which was eaten in silence. Pete’s chair was conspicuously empty.
Still no text.
After dinner came bedtime showers and teeth brushing for both her kids and a story for Alice, who tolerated that much at least, thank goodness. They’d just embarked on the first installment of Harry Potter together. Holly wasn’t much of a reader herself, nor was she particularly good at narrating. Pete, on the other hand, used to do different voices for all the characters. Sometimes he’d even get up and act out a scene, which never failed to make Alice giggle.
But Holly just read the words straight. Alice was asleep in five minutes flat. When she was snoring softly, Holly stood up and walked out of her room as quietly as possible, leaving the door cracked open just a sliver behind her so she could peek in on her daughter later.
When she got out to the kitchen and checked her phone where it was plugged into the charger … still no text.
She sighed again and fell into the brown leather loveseat in the living room. She looked around for someone to talk to—literally anybody—and settled on a Frankenstein’d G.I. Joe/Barbie monstrosity that Grady had doctored. She held it up in front of her face.
“My husband loves me, right?” she asked. She knew she was being melodramatic, but she also knew that she wasn’t being too overly ridiculous. There was real doubt there, back for the first time since last summer. Heck, maybe it had never left.
“Of course he does,” she replied back to herself in a silly, husky voice. “He loves you very much. You’re his Hollyday.”
“So why does it feel like he doesn’t?”
“You’re just tired,” said the action figure. “Go take a long bath, light candles, put a face mask on, have a little you time. The kids are asleep. Your husband isn’t home. Treat yourself. You deserve twenty minutes of peace and quiet.”
“That’s a fantastic suggestion, G.I. Barbie.”
She started to sit up, but then spied her phone still sitting on the marble kitchen countertop and decided to try calling Pete first. She didn’t want to bother him too much at work—he didn’t want to be there late either, she knew—but she had a burning desire to hear his voice. If she could just hear a couple little words, that would go a long way towards pushing back the tide of ugly thoughts brewing in her head. She found his number in her favorites, dialed, and waited.
But she didn’t have to wait long at all, because it went straight to voice mail. She hung up and tried again. Same deal. Was his phone off? Dead? Busy? She wasn’t sure.
Then another thought occurred to her. Surely, it was a crazy one. Surely, it was an unnecessary one.
But was there a chance that Pete wasn’t telling her something?
He’d been the first one when they returned home from their Nantucket sojourn to suggest stricter limits on his working hours whenever possible. He’d only broken that agreement a handful of times throughout the fall and winter. But now that spring had sprung, it was happening more and more. Third time this week, eleventh or twelfth time in the last month. They were crumbling right back to where they’d started. And where they’d started was a bad place. Holly didn’t want to go back. She couldn’t handle that heartache again. If there was a risk of it happening, she needed to find out sooner rather than later.
Nip it in the bud.
Whether she truly believed that or whether she just desperately wanted a valid-sounding reason for her next action, she wasn’t sure. Either way, the result was the same: she dialed the number for the firm’s office.
An exhausted-sounding secretary answered on the first ring. “Zucker, Schultz, and—”
“Hi, Annette, this is Holly Goodwin.” She bit her lip. Her voice had come out sounding far clingier and whinier than she’d intended.
“Oh hi, Mrs. Goodwin,” Annette said, sounding surprised. “Is everything okay?”
“Yes. I was just wondering if you could put me through to my husband? His phone must be dead, because—”
“Your husband? I’m sorry, I’m a little confused. Pete left hours ago. Early today, actually. Maybe around four p.m.? I assumed you knew.”
The blood drained from her face. “Oh yes, yes, of course,” Holly stammered. “I just, uh, thought he might’ve gone back to, um, back to the office for his, his—his things. He must’ve—okay, thanks, bye.” She hung up hurriedly even though she knew it was rude. Her heart was pounding in her chest so loud that she couldn’t hear anything else. She felt faint. Like the walls were collapsing inward.
One question ran through her head over and over: Was Pete cheating on her?
5
Mae
“A year,” said Eliza.
“A whole year,” whispered Sara.
“I miss him.”
That last one was Brent. No one looked at him, but Mae and Sara both put a gentle hand on his shoulder. He hadn’t cried yet, and Mae doubted he was going to, but they all knew that Brent had perhaps been hit hardest of all by their father’s loss.
“Well,” Eliza said, clasping her hands together. “Let’s get started.”
The four of them were seated in a semicircle around a thick white candle they’d stuck in the sand. The sun was setting off in the distance, and the ocean was unusually calm, calm enough to reflect the oranges and purples of the evening like watercolors come to life.
Eliza struck a match and lit the candle. There was a slight breeze, but with their bodies blocking the worst of it, the flame only flickered and didn’t go out. “Do you want to say something, Mom?” Eliza asked once the wick was going.
Mae thought about it. To be terribly honest, she didn’t quite trust her voice right now. But she knew that, even if this was for her own grieving, it was also for her children’s sakes. Henry had been her husband, and that was special, of course. But he had been a father to each of them, too. Those relationships were every bit as unique. So, even if she didn’t particularly want to speak out loud to offer up a remembrance for her departed husband, she decided she would. For Brent. For Eliza. For Sara. For Holly, who was present via video chat on Sara’s cell phone.
“I loved your father very m
uch,” she began hesitantly. “I …”
She felt her kids’ eyes on her. She hesitated. What was the right thing to say? No words were going to erase the grief that still snuck over her children’s faces during idle moments. She knew that the sorrow left in Henry’s wake would be with them forever. That much was obvious. But, if tonight was to be a night of remembering, perhaps it would be best to remember everything, all the way back in the very beginning of their family. Yes, that seemed like a good idea indeed.
“Well, maybe I should start with our story.” She cleared her throat. “I was a shy girl in college. Still lots to learn about the world. My own mother and father had done a good job keeping me safe and protected from everything that’s out there, but sooner or later, every man and woman has to face those things. So, when I went from our little farm in Tennessee to college at Boston University, it was my time to face ’em.
“I wasn’t much for partying or for drinking like some of the other kids. But I got dragged out one night anyway. Rebecca Milton was the instigator. She loved to dance, that girl. She was interested in a Harvard fellow at the time, so off we went to a Harvard bar. This would’ve been about 1968, I believe. The very early days of disco. Not that this was a disco club. Anyway, I’m losing the thread … where was I?”
“Harvard bar,” Sara offered. “Rebecca Milton.”
“Ah yes. So, we went to this bar, and Rebecca might’ve gotten me out of the dorms, but she sure as heck couldn’t get me to talk to boys. Not even with a drink or two in me. But there was one boy there—one man, rather—who didn’t mind my shyness. He was an ex-Marine, and Lord, he was handsome. Had that blond hair and that deep tan and he was so muscular! Why, you could’ve eaten caviar off those abs.”
“Mom!” Holly squealed from her end of the video chat, half laughing and half mortified.
Mae blushed, but kept going. “Well, that was your father. He kept sending drink after drink my way, though I hadn’t touched any of them and I refused to look up at him after that first guilty glance. Finally, he came over and asked how many drinks he’d have to buy before I talked to him. I asked him, ‘How much money do you have in your wallet? Because I am awfully shy by nature.’ He seemed to think that was very funny.
“We got to talking. He was visiting his sister in town—your aunt Toni. Though, when I asked why he was at a Harvard bar in particular, he insisted that he’d come to make fun of the nerds. I laughed at that. Hank was how he introduced himself. Henry Benson. He was nice, your father was, and he was a talker. Goodness gracious, was he a talker! I could’ve listened to him for a long, long time. But Rebecca got upset because the boy she’d come to flirt with didn’t seem much interested in her, so she made me leave a little sooner than I might have otherwise. Pity, I remember thinking. Hank was a nice man. I would’ve liked to have spent a while longer talking to him.
“But little did I know, that wasn’t the last I’d see of him. I woke up that night to something hitting my dorm room window. Imagine how I laughed when I looked out and saw your father, standing in the quad two stories down! He had a pile of pebbles at his feet, but that wasn’t what was making the noise. Apparently, he’d tried throwing pebbles at the window, but I hadn’t woken up after the first two or three dozen. So he’d resorted to breaking off a few tree branches, tying them together with his belt and socks, and tapping on my window with this long contraption from thirty feet below! I laughed and laughed and laughed.”
“Only Dad,” Sara said, shaking her head and chuckling.
Mae nodded and continued. “Now, we weren’t allowed to have boys in the dorm back then. So I went downstairs and we snuck out and went to an all-night coffee shop. I told him off for being so cheesy. And do you know what he told me? He said, ‘Well, I made this for you, and I just couldn’t rest until I’d made a proper gift of it.’ And then he showed me what he made—a flower whittled out of a block of wood. It was beautiful. I darn near tried to smell it, that’s how lifelike it looked. You children know your father. He was gifted with his hands.”
“I remember,” murmured Eliza.
“We started going steady—very slowly, of course, because I was still a shy girl from Tennessee, and as nice as he was to me, I was still a little bit wary of this handsome Marine who’d seen the world and had such a smooth way about him. So, that’s how things went for a while. Learning about each other and getting to like each other quite a bit.
“Eventually, he brought me back to Nantucket for a weekend, back to where he’d grown up, and he took me on a sunset sail one night. And do you know what happened on that sail?”
“Here it comes …” Sara groaned.
“Be nice!” Holly interrupted. “This is my favorite part.”
“We got stuck!” Mae yelped. “That darn fool got us stuck on a sandbar, miles away from help! Can you believe that? I thought we were gonna have to spend the night on that godforsaken boat, eating sardines out of the can. Oh, I was steaming mad. Didn’t last long, though, because he said to me, ‘I guess this is as good a time as any,’ and he dropped to one knee and pulled a diamond ring out of his pocket and asked me to be his wife. I couldn’t be too mad after that now, could I?”
These memories were decades old, and yet, as Mae told the story, she could close her eyes and still see Henry kneeling on that sandbar, the sun lighting up his blue eyes, and that warm, mischievous smile, the one that could get a laugh out of her whenever he pleased, no matter how irate he’d made her. She could still see how the ring looked in the sunset. She could still remember the feeling of his embrace and his kiss after she’d said yes, she would spend the rest of her life with him.
Her heart throbbed.
It had been a struggle over the last year to honor Henry and yet keep living her own life at the same time. She couldn’t very well put the world on hold to mourn him, even if that’s all she wanted to do sometimes. She had to keep moving forward. But it was an awfully hard balance to strike. Some days were better than others.
Having her children around her, as they were now, was helpful. After all, there were pieces of him in each of them. It was like seeing broken shards of mirror reflecting a little of Henry’s soul from different angles. In that way, he was still very much alive. In her. In them.
She looked around the circle and met each of her children’s gazes.
Eliza was first. She had fled New York with her heart frozen in place by a bad relationship and a job that drained the soul out of her, even if she didn’t know that’s what it was doing. And look at her now—thawing in the warmth of the love she shared with her beautiful baby, and with Oliver, who seemed like such a good man.
After Eliza, she looked at Sara. She, too, had come running from the big city with pain in her wake. That restauranteur she’d been so smitten with, Gavin something-or-other, had been no good at all for her. Mae knew how easy it was for a young woman to fall in with a man like that. Sometimes, one had to succumb to a bad temptation in order to learn from it. Sara had certainly done that. It was still too soon to say that she had found her place in the world yet, but Mae felt confident that she was on her way. Her headstrong daughter just had to do things in her own time. Like Henry, not a soul on this planet could rush her or change her mind.
Then came Holly. Now, there was love. She and Pete had something special, the kind of fragile-seeming love that was in reality made of tougher stuff. The two of them had made it through good times and bad, and they’d become parents to two beautiful children of their own. Mae loved seeing Holly embrace motherhood. It had brought them closer together than ever before.
She saved Brent for last. When she looked at him, she saw the sadness that still cloaked his eyes. Henry’s death had done a number on his soul. She knew there were still rivers of guilt in him. Enough to consume and blind him. Mae held his gaze longest. As she looked at his face, drawn tight with the effort not to cry, she tried to say with her own eyes what she’d told him so many times over the last year.
I love you
. Your father loves you. And this world is filled with love for you, too. Sooner or later, you’re bound to find it.
She believed that with all her heart. The question was … did he?
6
Brent
Brent stared at the fat white candle, sitting there stuck in the sand in the middle of their semicircle. He could swear he saw his last twelve months play out like a movie in the flickering flame.
He saw the day of The Accident, as he’d come to think of it. Waiting for Dad at the dock. Going out in the boat, catching that dead shark, then feeling bummed out. Parting ways angrily. The storm that came rolling in once he’d gone back to shore. The call from Roger, the marina owner, after Brent had grown sick of waiting for his father and returned home. You need to get back here, right now. Something’s happened.
He saw his dad’s gravestone. He had missed the funeral on purpose—he knew that had broken his mom’s heart, but he just couldn’t bring himself to be there. It was too much then. But he had gone back by himself at night a day or two later to sit in front of his father’s final resting place and apologize.
He saw in the flame the downward spiral that had followed. Eleven months of sobriety, drowned suddenly and irrevocably in so much stinking booze. And the fighting he’d done—so much fighting. Fighting with friends and strangers alike. Getting drunk and angry and beat-up and then passing out in his crummy apartment, only to wake up and do it all again.
He saw his own rock bottom—getting arrested by Sheriff Mike. Then the resurrection, the come-up. All those long days spent slaving over the guesthouse renovation at the inn. The pride on Mom’s face at the big reveal. Finding his dog, Henrietta, rooting around hungrily in that dumpster. She was his only friend who could look at him without judgment in her eyes.