Simon didn’t remember our childhood as I did. It was a big deal to him to drive home the point whenever he could that our mother wasn’t a big deal in the business, although it kind of left the question of why no one ever said what, exactly, the Business was. In fact, he loudly doubted that her government work had ever been anything other than low-level translation services, even if the occasional action-hero story could be embellished out of the memory of one of her back-in-the-day trips abroad. According to Simon, she was a good storyteller and that was all; an entertainer when she wasn’t being slightly edgier than all the other work-from-home mothers we knew.
The Long Trip was an anomaly Simon couldn’t diagram away. He didn’t even try. He simply canceled it out, willing his eyes not to roll at me, with the overly patient certainty that whatever it was, they wouldn’t let James Bond live on a tree-bordered cul-de-sac, with all the international secrets tucked in with the banana-bread recipes.
I said he was being naïve. He said I was being dramatic. She was fluent in four languages, proficient in another three. It explained away most everything. What remained was dismissed as either paranoid fantasy or just “her way.” It didn’t, however, go very far in accounting for Uncle Paul.
We always knew that Paul Rowland was no relation to us. He was just our mother’s boss for nearly her entire life, a man who was, and had always been, around often enough that he insisted on tagging himself more familiarly than was warranted. He said that “Mr. Rowland” was what everyone called his father, and that he would never stand on any ceremony that made him feel old. He was, however, more than happy to stand on a ceremony that made us address him as part of the family when we didn’t want to. As we crested into adulthood, Simon was never keen on talking about Paul’s influence on our mother and on the way our lives had spooled out. And it only got worse.
The Big Argument was on a Saturday. If I ever needed to account for why I tagged things with the days of the week, it could have been that it was a reflex, a hand-in-hand natural tendency to go with our family’s quirk of naming certain scenes in our shared history, using shorthand for referencing events that we didn’t want to discuss in detail. The Big Argument would take its place on the shelf with the Long Trip and the Business.
Simon was right out of the army, commended and discharged. We’d already had our welcome-home event with the neighbors and his friends, and this would have been our first dinner together, just the three of us, in my mother’s backyard at the cast-iron table that was nestled into the patio circle of dogwoods and irises, next to a lattice arch of climbing roses in new bloom. She called it the chapel. Dinner in the chapel was sacrosanct. No backing out. No balling up the plans.
Paul’s car was in the driveway. My teeth clenched automatically, but the scoffing sound at the back of my throat was something I’d practiced.
I heard their voices, indistinct but loud, through the open living-room window when I shut off my car’s engine. I slithered out of a tiny wedge of open angle, all that Paul had left me if I didn’t want to ding his door with mine. Paul’s ego, and the Cadillac he toted it around in, took up the whole middle of the driveway as if he owned the place. Their angry words rang clear through to the lower half of the street once I got out of my car.
Simon had already yelled his voice rough. “I’ve done everything you’ve ever asked me to do, you asshole.”
“I did you a favor,” said Paul. “And you’ll come to see that.”
“Paul,” my mother cut in. “You had no right. What were you thinking? Why would you even do such a thing? It wasn’t your place and you know it.”
I’d made it to the front door just as Paul made it to the other side. I pushed it open ahead of his reaching for the handle so that he looked about to shake my hand as the door swung wide. I could have sworn in court only that he was utterly composed, but you could feel a tremor of blood pressure in the air around him, a fury that hummed in his aura that his face didn’t do justice to, even if his color had gone over to rare-steak red in the jowls.
“Annette, whatever our arrangement has been, you’d do well to remember that I still don’t ask your permission or your forgiveness for the things I do. I know you know that in private, and I don’t appreciate you posing like you don’t know it right here standing in front of your son.”
He brushed past me with a tight nod. “Dee.”
“What the hell was that?” I asked.
It turned out to be the fallout from Paul’s cashing in on some sort of official favor to scuttle my brother’s application to the FBI.
In some ways, Simon had admired Paul, almost as a father he didn’t love but looked to for the occasional bit of good guidance. He certainly cared for Paul more than I ever had. The betrayal burned bright and long, Simon railing against Paul at every opportunity until even Simon got tired of hearing it. In this massive falling-out they didn’t speak for ages.
For years afterward, all the way up to her funeral, they avoided run-ins by simply following a rigid schedule of never visiting my mother at the same time. She was a wall, not just between the two of them, but between the specifics of their clash and me. There was no cajoling her into gossip. I never once got her to diagram the collision for me, but since the result gave me more Simon and less Paul, I stopped wondering about it as much as approving of the results.