Handwritten on dime-store paper, shoved into the nearest envelope at hand (sometimes used, x-ed out addresses like abandoned flags, gray spots thinned by erasure): in those years, her notes piled up on his glass coffee table, and by the telephone, and in his briefcase. Tangible objects trumpeting financial woes. Maybe, James thought, this was the nineteenth-century side of Nora, maybe her retro form of aggression. Admittedly she’d always used whatever was at hand: when they’d courted, she’d written him notes on scraps, half sheets taken from brown paper bags. She’d drawn comic animals and caricatured his professors. But since the divorce, she’d avoided leaving the short erasable phone messages so common during their marriage. Sometimes she’d send a letter with the girls: here was today’s, delivered by Katy, on the broad-lined tablet paper the girls used to practice their alphabets. So it was Nora-as-Nora, sending him the notes, her hurried script: Remember school clothes? I need the checks. The last is three weeks overdue, the next due by Friday. The lawyer will call. P.S. The girls weary of spaghetti.
If only it were merely Nora-as-words, the past and therefore inessential Nora rattling around. But school clothes were school clothes, and today at lunch, Delia surprised him with news of a bad roof. Katy shushed her as Delia described wet feet on a rainy night, a plastic bucket she circumnavigated en route to the toilet.
“Has your mother called a roofer?” he said.
Sara, silent, traced and retraced her plate rim with her index finger. Delia shrugged, meaning I don’t know, possibly meaning What’s a roofer?
“She’s working on it,” Katy said, a note of warning in her voice.
“Well, she should be,” James said.
“If you tell her that?” Katy said. “You’d better send her a check.” Katy had become sharp-tongued—when had that begun? (Was it the boyfriend?) And too, she’d developed a mature woman’s body, solid-hipped, full-breasted, vexing. Sixteen. Hadn’t she been shy? Nothing about her seemed shy.
“How long has the roof leaked?” he said.
Katy shrugged. “A while.”
And the image rose of a four-gallon bucket filling with water, a steady clear line from ceiling to bucket, dully pinging in the dark of the bathroom he’d retiled years ago.
“Wait,” he said. “Isn’t there a light fixture in that ceiling?”
“Oh,” Katy said. “We don’t use it.”
“Fine, fine,” he said, his face now hot. After he cleared the lunch plates and served the girls cookies, he wrote a three-thousand-dollar check to Nora.
“Perfect,” Katy said.
He’d just paid Theo’s tuition, the girls’ medical insurance; each month he contributed to their college funds. The latest check to Nora? He had not meant to defer, but then—what? Months ago he’d been impulsive with investments—a stock gambit had failed. He’d been stunned by his misjudgment; at least it was private, not professional. And now? He needed to transfer funds; he had not stopped at the bank. Next week he’d be paid. He loved his daughters—of course he loved them. Still, one gap, then another, would open between intentions and results.
When he pictured the house (and often in those years he did not: his daughters simply appeared in restaurants or at the doors of train stations or cars, or in his own condominium), he pictured it as it had been before he moved out. If prompted, he could recall the flooded storage room, the seasonal wind damage, the annual need to regrade the drive and add gravel. But in his mind, the drive was well graded, and the house had neither a leaking bathroom ceiling nor a splintering deck. No, for James thick towels still filled the closets, along with new sheets, new boots, new coats; in the leak-free bathroom, amber glycerin soaps and pastel-handled toothbrushes lined the tile counter (these from the era the Murphys moved in year-round, after Rome, before Delia or even Sara—when Nora spent hours at the department store with Katy and Theo to distract them). What could he say of this? It was not the only slippage.
He’d given up his marriage. You leave: you keep walking. You do not look back. Yet now back was not what it should be. Back fragments and leaps forward and adheres to your skin. And the mind slips; attempting to corral the whole and lock it in place both exhausts and makes you stupid. But if you can’t claim a present separate from the past? Then what? A kind of crushing. James could not have said how such a crushing might take place, only that a deathly sense washed over him. It was difficult to parse one story from another: how does anyone? No clean order, instead the tangled strands of boyhood and marriage and Rome further tangled with strands from his father, his mother, a line of dead immigrants and desperate farmers. But no. He had left. Leaving ought to mean leaving. Arriving ought to mean arriving. So again a boy escaped from a childhood apartment; once more a man reinvented his life. He had left, he had arrived: yet no matter. Nora’s notes appeared, redolent of a treacherous bygone era; the exigencies of the present still showed up slathered in history. What did he owe?
The girls. His girls, his daughters. The younger ones seemed tall, though only compared to their younger selves: they were average height, or perhaps small for six and seven. Here they were, drawing birds and forests; here they were, playing Fish. A still point of clarity. Love: he loved them. But days later he would again feel suspended between lives, the bills for both too often converging, and again he’d defer, cross into a tightly fenced present, miss another due date. Nora would again send paper scraps, her messages hypercivil and snarky, Would you agree dental care for the girls is a sound idea?
And again he would send a check, and again recommit himself to his present, evidenced by the condo he was renting, the house he was considering, the woman he was falling for. His daughters appeared in the present, lived in a house that belonged to their present. He needed to be mindful. But you could leave, you could start again, couldn’t you? Start, this time, with a patent attorney named Josie Brundige, thirty-eight and lovely, intelligent, single, free of trauma. He had taken her to lunches and dinner and the symphony, and three times made love with her at her Back Bay apartment. He’d been looking at houses along the North Shore commuter line. Maybe he’d marry again. Redouble his efforts. He would, he told himself, introduce the girls to Josie.
“How about the supermarket?” Katy said. He had tucked away his checkbook; he’d suggested mini-golf.
“That’s what you want to do today?” he said. “Grocery shop?”
“Well,” Katy said, “mini-golf later? But we could get ice cream—Sara, Delia,” she said, “don’t you want ice cream? And pick up a few other things.”
“Mint chip,” Delia said.
“Okay,” Sara said.
In the supermarket, Katy filled the cart with premium brands. Provolone cheese and sliced ham from the deli, albacore tuna, tins of cocoa, chocolate-covered grahams.
“That’s a lot of cocoa,” he told her. “A lot of ham.”
“My coach recommends ham,” she told him. “I’ll just take the extra back with me.”
She was, it seemed, as scrappy and canny as Nora—perhaps as scrappy and canny as James himself.