Reunion: A Novel Page 20

  “But it’s not awful either, is it?” I address this to Sasha. “I mean, is it? I wish I’d been more comfortable with popularity when I was in school. I wish I’d been less embarrassed.”

  “You had friends,” says Nell.

  I think about last night, sitting on the back porch, Sasha insisting my father had no real friends.

  “I didn’t,” I say. “I’m not looking for sympathy. But I really didn’t. I had boyfriends.”

  “Oh,” says Sasha. “She had boyfriends. ‘Look at me, I’m Kate and I have boyfriends.’” She does this playfully and with a singsong quality to her voice.

  Mindy giggles and two more M&Ms bite the dust.

  I laugh to show I’m not offended and because laughter is expected at this moment, the way solemnity was expected earlier at the funeral home. “That’s not how I meant it.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” says Sasha.

  “I just mean, I think I was pretty lonely for a child, especially after Nell and Elliot left.”

  “I would have been nice to you,” says Sasha.

  And, you know, I believe her. Even if she hadn’t liked me, she would have been kind to me. I bet she was the kind of girl who defended the kid at the back of the class who got caught picking his nose. She probably picked her own just to make him feel comfortable and to shame her classmates for being brutes. She probably ate the booger just to drive the point home.

  Mindy polishes off the M&Ms. Noah’s ark is closed for business. The boat is officially at sea, bobbing about in the furious waves, waiting patiently, if not fretfully, for the promised dry land.

  Elliot’s on the phone in the living room. He hasn’t said anything to me since the drive to the funeral home. After the viewing, he looked peaked. And I couldn’t tell whether it had to do with me or with Rita or with Dad. There’s a connection between fathers and sons—even ones who aren’t close—that must be beyond a daughter’s understanding. Seeing our father lying there must have been, to Elliot, a little bit like seeing himself lying there, like seeing into the future to his own death, either timely or untimely. Or maybe I’m making too much of the situation. Maybe I’m imposing significance where there isn’t any.

  “What’s for dinner?” says Mindy, hopping off her stool and going around to Nell and Sasha. She is bored with me now that her M&Ms are gone.

  “Indian,” says Nell, who has once again stripped down to a tank top, boxers, and an apron.

  “We’re going to eat an Indian?” I say.

  The three of them turn and look at me.

  “Inappropriate,” says Nell.

  “But funny,” I say.

  Mindy bites her bottom lip and smiles. What could be better to a child than to see an adult being disciplined?

  “Yum, yum, yum,” I say, ignoring Nell and Sasha and rubbing my stomach for show. “That Indian better stay in my belly.”

  “Totally messed up,” says Nell, shaking her head and turning back to her pots. She’s not really annoyed. She’s just trying to set an example. We play this game all the time with Elliot’s girls. Good aunt, bad aunt; crazy aunt, sweet aunt; et cetera, et cetera.

  Sasha nudges Mindy with her spatula. “It’s the Indian’s fault,” she says. “For being so tasty.” She looks at me and winks, as if to say, You’re cool. It’s all cool. And I think, This family is fine. Perfectly fine, if you ask me.

  43

  movie time

  After dinner, Nell and I sit outside while Elliot and Sasha do the dishes. Mindy’s upstairs taking a bath. She’s been promised she can stay up late tonight, since it’s our last night in town, but only if she’s in pajamas and ready for bed.

  “I don’t have a return flight,” I say.

  Nell and Elliot are both scheduled to leave midmorning.

  “Sasha will let you borrow her computer,” Nell says.

  I push us back in the swing and wait. The crickets are quiet tonight.

  “Could you buy the ticket for me?”

  What I expect is a barrage of questions. What I expect is a complete lack of sympathy.

  Instead Nell says, “You didn’t really lose your credit card, did you?”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t think so.” She takes out her wallet and hands it to me. And it’s this, this complete willingness to be generous without further explanation, that does it, that gets the honesty flowing.

  “I’m in debt,” I say. Just like that. As plain as plain can be.

  I explain the first thousand. The way it doubled, tripled, then grew and grew and grew. More than anything, she seems curious and a little floored by the idea.

  “Forty-eight thousand?” she says.

  “There was interest.”

  “And Peter?”

  “Peter saved my life,” I say. “I mean that.”

  “But it’s not gone completely—the debt?”

  “Ten or eleven more months,” I say. “Twenty-something more installments. Every two weeks. But the thing is—”

  She cuts me off. “You were only able to make the payments because of Peter.”

  I nod.

  She touches my wrist.

  I look down at the watch, the only thing left of our mother.

  “You could sell it,” she says. She twists it so that the gold glows in the final bit of sun.

  I shake my head. “Not an option.”

  To be honest, I’ve thought more than once since last night about selling the Rolex. It isn’t until this moment that I realize I can never part with it.

  “Were you serious about the memoir? Does your agent really want you to write one?”

  I shrug. “The problem is I’d have to include me,” I say. “And I’d want to leave me out.”

  “Maybe there’s a movie in it?”

  But I’m done as a screenwriter, and Nell knows it.

  “What’s the plan, then?”

  “I can still wait tables,” I say, and I can. The truth is, I just didn’t want to. The truth is, I’ve been lazy. I teach three days a week when school is in session. There’s no reason I can’t waitress every weekend. I’ll have the time. My apartment will have to be cheap. And I won’t be able to furnish it the way I want—the way I was raised. But plenty of people have less. Millions. Millions have less than me. What was it Trump famously said to his finance chief after the bankruptcy? Didn’t he point to a bum and say, “That man’s at zero, which puts him millions ahead of me”? Or something like that, anyway.

  “I can help a little.” She says this after some time has passed. After we’ve both taken another turn or two pushing the swing with our toes.

  “If you don’t take money, they can’t tell you what to do, kid.” I lower my voice and say it with a sort of bad New York accent.

  “What is that? You’re always saying that.”

  I explain Bill Cunningham. She seems unimpressed.

  “Yeah, but—” She waves her hand in front of us. I look out at the yard. “I’m never going to tell you what to do.”

  Again we sit in silence. Again I wait for the crickets, the cicadas, but tonight they are minding their own business.

  After a while Nell says, quietly so they can’t hear us in the kitchen, “He’ll forgive you. He just needs time.”

  “I know,” I say. “I just wish I could explain it better to him. I hate it when he’s mad at me.”

  “We all hate it when he’s mad,” she says. “It’s the worst feeling in the world.” It’s true. It is the worst feeling in the world.

  “So did Rita do it?” I say. “Did he tell you?”

  “He told me she’s thinking about it. And in the meantime, she’s talking to Elliot about it.”

  “Weird,” I say.

  “Maybe,” she says, surprising me yet again with her tolerance. “Or maybe more people should be this open.”

  “Should I text her?” I say.

  “You should stay out of it.”

  We sit in silence for a little bit more. It’s getting darker. The streetlamps
will turn on soon.

  What I understand is that Elliot is conflating me with Rita. Not like he thinks I’m his wife, but he’s taking my infidelity more personally than he should because of Rita. He’s thinking, If Kate can do it, then Rita can do it. He’s thinking, The women in my life are shit. I’m not saying his logic is flawless, but I am saying that I get it. He’s human. We’re both human. Too human. If this is my big epiphany it’s a pretty quiet one. There’s a really good chance that the message that’s been waiting inside me to finally take shape is simply “Life is hard.” Which makes me not much better than that three-foot talking Barbie from the eighties who opined, when you pulled a string on her back, that math is hard. Well, you know what? Math is hard. So is life. Maybe a simple message isn’t the worst thing in the world right now.

  “Did you think this was how Dad would go out?” Nell asks. She isn’t looking at me, just staring out at the middle distance, at the buzzing and pulsing and humming of the streetlights now coming to life. “I’m not trying to get all sentimental on you or anything. But, you know, when you got the call, what did you think?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know.” But I do know. I felt hoodwinked. I felt duped. I felt like someone had played a joke on me that wasn’t funny. I felt left out and made a fool of.

  “I don’t know,” I say again.

  Inside, pots and pans are clinking together and the A/C is whirring. Outside it’s just me and Nell, and I feel very nearly at peace with the world.

  “You know what you were saying before?” says Nell.

  “Irmus,” I say.

  She pinches me. I zip my mouth shut.

  “About not having friends when you were little?”

  “Yeah?”

  “That’s my life now,” she says. “In San Francisco.”

  “You have a million friends,” I say. We talk on the phone all the time, and Nell’s always telling me about some bar or some restaurant or some joke that someone told.

  “I have colleagues. I have acquaintances,” she says.

  I want to disagree with her, because I want her to be wrong. I don’t want to think about her in terms of Dad, of being friendless, of the possible implications.

  “Kate,” she says. “I hate my life. Do you know how many spinach quesadillas I eat for dinner alone in my kitchen each week?”

  I open my mouth.

  “I’m like a character from one of your screenplays,” she says. “That’s how two-dimensional I am.”

  She doesn’t mean it as an insult, so I don’t pretend to take it as one. I put my hand on her knee. She rests her head on my shoulder. Together we push back in the swing with our bare feet.

  “I didn’t know you were so unhappy,” I say.

  “I’m not unhappy,” she says. “I just hate my life.” Then, out of nowhere, she laughs.

  “What?” I say. And really, I’m curious. I’d like to know what’s making her laugh like that. Because I’d like to laugh like that. It looks fun. It looks like it feels good.

  “I just realized,” she says. “We’re orphans.”

  “Oh, Nell,” I say. “We’ve been orphans for years.”

  “We have lots of stepmothers,” she says. “There’s that.”

  “Including Sasha.”

  “I wouldn’t really call her a stepmother.”

  I tap her knee so that she lifts her head from my shoulder and looks at me. “I was kind of hoping that you two were gay.”

  “God,” she says, sitting up straight and cracking her back. “I wish. That would solve everything.” Then she knocks my head with her knuckle. “It’s a busy place up there, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I say. Ack ack ack. “Very busy.”

  The screen door opens.

  Here is Mindy, arms akimbo, decked out in ladybug PJs. I can’t remember what it was like when I found out our mother was dead. I was a year younger than Mindy. I must have cried, because it was expected and because I saw other people crying, but there’s no way I could have understood it. The way Mindy struggles with tonight and tomorrow and maybe with time in general just like Pigpie, I’m sure I must have struggled with the idea of dead and gone for good and no longer around. But the specifics of the event are missing, and I think maybe that’s not a bad thing, and I hope, for Mindy, it will be the same. I hope that as she gets older she misses her father, but I hope the pain isn’t there. What’s there is just a missing piece. A little empty space and a pleasant memory of a man who was around until he wasn’t. A puzzle very nearly, but not completely, finished.

  “Mom says we can watch a movie,” says Mindy.

  Sasha appears in the doorway behind her daughter. “Elliot said we should get started without him.”

  “Is he on the phone?” says Nell.

  She nods. “Upstairs.” She covers Mindy’s ears and Mindy tilts her head back in order to read her mother’s lips. “Lots of F-bombs being dropped,” says Sasha. “Lots and lots.”

  Nell pats my leg. “It’s not all your fault,” she says. “Just remember that.” She stands and then offers me her hands. “Up we go,” she says. “Movie time.”

  “Do I really have to go home tomorrow?” I take her hands and rise from the swing.

  “You need to be getting on with your life,” says Nell, pushing me in the direction of the back door and toward Mindy and Sasha.

  “What’s ‘getting on with your life’?” says Mindy. She leads the way inside.

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out, kiddo. When I do, I’ll let you know. Deal?”

  “Deal,” she says, and hops away from us toward the living room. She’s already forgotten all about me. All about our deal.

  I wish my brain were young again. I wish hopping from one room to the next were enough of an activity to clear away whatever trouble had been plaguing me mere seconds earlier. Peter has cautioned me against such thoughts. “Wishes are for children,” he’s told me before. “Don’t wish. Do.” Wishes are for children, it’s true, but that doesn’t stop adults from trying. It’s a human instinct. To wish we were shorter, prettier, more popular. It’s impossible not to entertain the notion, no matter how aggressively we caution ourselves against it. I wish. I wish. I wish. I wish. But Peter does have a point. The word is magic when you’re young. When you’re older, it’s just plain sad.

  44

  a minor revelation

  In the middle of the movie, with Elliot and Mindy passed out on either side of me—Elliot still not having acknowledged me—I get up to see what’s taking Nell and Sasha so long with the popcorn. They’re sitting side by side at the kitchen island, their backs to me. Sasha’s laptop is open in front of them.

  “What are you guys looking at?” I say.

  They don’t seem startled, exactly, but they perform this curious back-and-forth conversation with their eyes that drives me just a little bit crazy.

  “Tell her,” says Sasha.

  Nell swivels halfway around on her stool so that we’re only partially facing each other. She twists her mouth off to the side.

  “Tell her,” Sasha says again, this time shoving her elbow into Nell’s ribs. Maybe they are gay? But they wanted to tell me together? “She can handle it,” says Sasha. “I promise.”

  “I canceled my ticket,” says Nell, shutting the laptop and turning fully toward me.

  “To go home?” I say.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?” What I’m thinking isn’t actually Why? What I’m thinking is How come I have to go home if you don’t have to go home?

  “There’s still Dad’s condo,” she says. “We need to figure that out.”

  The condo. That dreaded place with its dreadful boxes and stacks of things. It was only three nights ago that we stayed there. It was only three nights ago that I wet the bed and that Nell threw away the evidence and that we slept holding hands in a room filled with Mindy’s glowing stars. It seems a world away, that night. Time does pass. Things do change. But Mindy is right to be confused.
r />   “Okay,” I say.

  Sasha makes an arc with her hand as if presenting an invisible platter. She’s inviting Nell to say more.

  “And I might stay on here,” says Nell. “For a while. Even once the condo is sorted.”

  If there is a lightbulb in my head, it is not at this moment flickering to life. I feel 100 percent unable to follow along.

  “I don’t get it,” I say.

  “I told you already,” she says. “I hate San Francisco.”

  “Come to Chicago,” I say. My voice sounds plaintive.

  Nell stands and comes toward me. Why does it feel like I’m being broken up with? Again.

  “I miss Atlanta,” she says.

  “You don’t really know anyone here anymore,” I say.

  “I know Sasha. And Mindy.”

  And that’s when it hits me. “You’re going to move back,” I say.

  She puts her hands on my shoulders like we’re about to slow dance or something. “I want friends,” she says. “I want a life. I want a chance to meet a man.”

  “What about your job?” I say. “What about money?”

  The thought of my sister, nearing forty, giving up her outrageous salary and moving halfway across the country scares the shit out of me. Maybe I’m thinking about her offer to loan me money—my ability to take her up on it even though I’ve already turned her down. If she doesn’t have that job, does the offer still stand? But if it’s what she wants, who am I to try to stop her?

  “I’ll come visit you,” she says. “I promise. This doesn’t mean I can’t come to Chicago for a visit.”

  I let out a sigh and sit down at Nell’s abandoned stool. “So what’s the plan?” I say.

  Sasha says, “She can stay with us as long as she wants. We’ll take care of her.”

  In the movie version of this night, I’d be inexplicably angry. I’d storm out of the kitchen and cry my eyes out about feeling excluded. In the movie version, I’d call Nell a terrible sister. I’d say, “You have a sister already. What do you need her for? I’m your friend too, you know? I’m supposed to be your best friend.” But this isn’t the movies, this is real life, and the thing is, my sister is excited about this change. It’s all over her face. And it makes me happy to think she has someone to hug good night for a while, even if it’s only this weirdo tennis pro who’s just a really good friend.