Being alone wasn’t as easy as he was always telling himself it was.
As he slid behind the wheel of his pickup truck the next morning, John couldn’t help but tell himself that the previous evening had only exacerbated some of the cracks in the self-imposed wall he had built around his heart. Most noticeably, it had been during the moments his mother kept excusing herself from the table, leaving him to carry on whatever conversation happened to be in progress with their guest. Topics, he later realized, were unsubtly built around his mother’s observations of all the things she thought the two of them might have in common.
There were of course worse fates than looking across a lasagna plate and a glass of wine at an attractive, intelligent woman in his age range. Any of his friends, to be sure, would have leaped at the chance to trade places with him and, at the end of the evening, would not have been able to recall a single thing she said.
Admittedly, John’s mind had wandered a few times as well, though not for the reasons his peers might assume. Hers was a chair that should have been occupied by Kate, a long-ago fantasy he had conjured about bringing her home to have boisterous holiday dinners with his family. Though Mitch eschewed such Norman Rockwell tableaus as much too sappy for his taste and would likely have fashioned excuses to be absent, John caught himself musing about the dialogues Kate might have had with Jeremy about his homework or whether his mother would have asked for her help clearing the dishes.
“So, have the two of you made any plans?” he liked to imagine Abby taking him aside to ask and he would have told her without any hesitation that he planned to make time stand still so that he and Kate would always be together.
Twice during these musings, Gabrielle had diplomatically tugged him back to the present by asking if she was talking too much about her work. John assured her that she wasn’t. Her sincerity and her knowledge about children who had special needs impressed him, especially when she pointed out that the symptoms of autism were often mistaken for something else by parents who didn’t have access to quality pediatric care.
Kate had alluded only briefly to her sister’s bohemian lifestyle but the comments quickly came back to him during Gabrielle’s recitation of statistics. “A friend of mine has a nephew,” he said. “He’s about five years old or so. A really cute kid. His mom moved around a lot. Maybe now that he’s going to be in a more stable environment, he’ll be able to interact more with his environment.”
Was it just wishful thinking on his part to suggest out loud that maybe Kate was moving back to Avalon Bay for good?
“By all means, she should get him into a clinic for a full set of tests then into a good program of therapy,” he heard Gabrielle suggest. “If she’s interested, I could get her the names of a couple of doctors I know who are really great.”
Even as he thanked her, John felt a twinge of guilt that he’d not only been talking about Kate’s personal situation with a total stranger but that he was also soliciting medical advice she hadn’t even asked for. Would she appreciate his concern, he wondered, or see it, instead, through the eyes of a liberated woman who preferred to handle everything herself?
Abby had walked in on the end of Gabrielle’s offer and wanted to know who they were talking about. When John mentioned it was Kate, his mother shot him a reproving look in the preface to telling Gabrielle that Kate was an “old” girlfriend from high school. “Would you mind running up and checking on your father?” she asked him in her next breath.
“Weren’t you just up there?”
“Yes, and I think he was trying to say your name.”
John had excused himself, knowing full well she was only orchestrating an opportunity to reiterate to their guest there was nothing going on between her son and the girl whose name he’d brought up.
“Listen,” he said afterward when he walked Gabrielle out to her car, “I need to apologize for my mother. Dinner tonight had to be pretty awkward.”
She dismissed it with a light laugh. “I think we have the same mother,” she replied, confessing that she’d no sooner told her mom she was getting a divorce than the latter endeavored to start filling up her dance card. “It almost affected my decision to move back here,” she continued, “but since I’m already seeing someone…”
She dropped it so casually that John nearly missed it.
“We’re taking it slow and keeping it very low key,” she said, relating that it was her partner in the school she was starting up. “The whole idea of being around someone 24/7, well, we’re just going to see how it goes.”
A part of him was relieved that she was already taken. Another part of him was reminded of the void in his own life that, for the time being, looked like it was going to stay that way.
When Kate came down for breakfast that morning, it was to the sight of Lydia sopping up the spills from a carton of milk that Jimmy had knocked over. “I swear nothing’s going to be safe in this house anymore,” Lydia was muttering.
For a moment, Kate wondered whether she had dreamt the scene from the night before when her mother had tenderly rocked her grandson back and forth and even offered to carry him upstairs after he fell asleep. This morning he was back to being “the boy” - the pint-sized bane of her existence.
As she helped herself to some coffee, Kate decided to broach the subject of whether her mother had had any luck finding a recent address for Luke.
“It’s not as if you’ve given me much time to look,” Lydia replied. “I barely had time to get the house ready for the two of you swooping in on me the way you did.”
A vision of broad-winged pterodactyls sporting backpacks and circling the Toscano chimney caused Kate to suppress a smirk.
“Besides,” Lydia continued, “it seems to me that if he’s been out of the picture for this long.”
“My boss said exactly the same thing.”
“Ex-boss, you mean.”
Kate let it slide. “We still have to make the effort to find him, Mom. The court says he has rights as a parent.”
“Well, if you ask me, those rights ended when your sister finally had the wits to divorce him. Do you want some toast?”
“I can fix it.”
“You’re talking about the toast, I assume?” Lydia asked. “Because as far as fixing this situation with the boy—”
“You know, it’d help if you stop doing that.”
“Doing what?”
Kate lowered her voice. “He’s your grandson and he needs to know that you know that.”
Lydia started to open her mouth but Kate anticipated what the older woman was going to come back with and pre-empted it. “He may not be able to tell us what he’s thinking, Mom, but he knows love and he knows if people are paying attention to him. He’s also not responsible for being the way he is.” She let the words sink in. “The way he came over to you last night was so, I don’t know, he just seemed so content and like he knew that he was finally home.”
She turned her head to look at him and gave a small start when she discovered that he was no longer sitting in the chair where he’d earlier been intently watching his grandmother clean up the milk spill.
“He’s under the table,” Lydia quietly informed her. “I think he thinks it’s a tent.”
Kate started to lift up a corner of the tablecloth and coax him out.
“Oh leave him be,” Lydia said. “He’s having fun.”
“And you’d know this how exactly?” a mystified Kate inquired.
“Because some things about being a child never change. Now do you want that toast or not?”
If I live to be a hundred, Kate thought, I swear I’ll never figure her out.
The smudge of morning sun that dappled through the cloud cover was enough to convince Kate it was a good day to introduce her nephew to the timeless tranquility of Avalon Bay. Once dressed in a pair of designer jeans and a tank top, her first order of business on their outing would be to swing by Cliff Harwood’s newspaper and see if she could glean some tips about running a public notice.
“I understand he’s hired someone you went to school with,” Lydia volunteered when she heard where Kate was going. “A Marty somebody-or-other.”
The only Marty that Kate could recall offhand had the IQ of a rock and was far too old to be a delivery boy. Lydia informed her that he was the new editor.
Things are slipping in Avalon Bay, she thought.
“Maybe you could ask him for a job,” Lydia suggested. “Working for the hometown paper would be right up your alley.”
“Not there yet, Mom.”
The sound of the doorbell cut short any further discussion.
Jimmy, who had deemed his hideaway beneath the kitchen table his favorite new place, came out to see what was going on.
Lydia’s face momentarily fell when she noticed the address on the multiple packing boxes the UPS driver was depositing in the foyer.
“You know I can always go to the newspaper later,” Kate offered but her mother was insistent that she could start going through the boxes herself while they were out. She hugged her arms and Kate was reminded of just how frail and vulnerable her mom could look. “Hard to imagine, isn’t it,” Lydia remarked, “that a person’s entire life could be summed up in half a dozen packing boxes?”
As recently as only a few years ago, Kate had envied people like her sister who lived such compact existences that it didn’t take them weeks, or even days, to move from one place to another. She caught herself remembering how much stuff she had put into storage when she accepted Dee’s hospitality of a fully furnished, fully accessorized condo. At least a quarter of it, she reflected, was the wardrobe of winter clothes that didn’t fit the Las Vegas landscape. “The next time you see all of it again,” Dee would tell her, “it’ll feel just like Christmas.”
Christmas, though, was a time of joy, and joy was the very least of emotions she and her mother were feeling right now as they surveyed the pathetic assemblage of boxes that Cassy’s neighbor had packed and shipped off to them.
“I’ll be fine with it,” Lydia reiterated. “Really.”
Kate realized a mother had to have closure as well, as she left Lydia with the few boxes that contained the few items her daughter deemed important enough to keep. These boxes, wonderful memories and her grandson were all she had left of Cassy.
A squeal of brakes and a female voice shrieking her name caught Kate off guard about four blocks from the house. She looked across the street to see Maria Rivera, one of her best friends from high school, alighting from a cherry red El Camino that had seen better days. Maria herself had seen better days as well, most of them as a co-captain of the cheerleading squad when they’d both been much younger. The extra weight she had put on in the interim was evident in the exuberant hug she gave Kate.
“Oh my gosh, I can’t believe how fantastic you look!” she exclaimed before turning her attention to Kate’s perplexed young companion who was staring at her. “And this is, oh my gosh! I had no idea that you even married.”
“Jimmy’s my sister’s little boy.”
Maria’s mouth dropped open in amazement. “Cassy? Really?” She dropped down to Jimmy’s eye level to check out the family resemblance, a sudden move that made him shrink behind Kate.
“He’s a little shy around people he doesn’t know,” Kate explained.
“Well, he’s just the sweetest thing, isn’t he?” Maria gushed. “How old?”
On the heels of Kate telling her that he was five, Maria’s next question was about Cassy and what she was doing with herself these days.
“Oh my gosh, hon, I’m so sorry,” she said when Kate delivered the condensed version. She swiftly enveloped her in a second hug. “Is there anything I can do? Anything you guys need?” She was working at the factory, she went on, but had “gobs” of overtime from all the double shifts she had worked during the holidays. “Crazy, huh?” she quipped. “Remember how we used to say you had to be nuts to work in that place and look where I ended up? But anyway, I’m serious. If you guys need anything, just let me know.”
Kate assured her that they were just taking things one day at a time.
“So, you’re back here with your mom or what?”
“For the time being. I’m not sure how long.”
“Well, I hope it’s long enough for us to catch up. Oh my gosh, I can’t even remember the last time you were here.”
Maria’s segue into mental math only served to remind Kate of what a bad correspondent she had become once she went off to Amherst. The only thing she could think to ask was whether Maria was still with Vinny, her high school boyfriend. She guiltily remembered getting a wedding invitation from them, an invitation she’d had to decline because it fell right in the middle of finals.
“Vinny? Pfft!” Maria replied, proudly pointing to her ringless left hand. “This gal’s a happy camper just playing the field.” She and Vinny had tried, unsuccessfully, to have kids, she explained, but the final straw had come when Vinny refused to entertain the notion of adoption. “‘I’m not gonna raise any kid who’s not mine,’” she mimicked Vinny’s voice. “So how ‘bout you?” she wanted to know.
“Work’s been keeping me pretty busy,” Kate confessed to her single status.
“Funny, I always thought you and John Neal would hook up. You guys were practically joined at the hip in senior year.”
Kate listened to her friend ramble with a vague sense of unreality. How was I able to get away from him for so long, she thought, and yet every corner I turn brings him right back again?
Maria was extolling the virtues of what a cute couple they made. “If you guys had ever had kids,” she added.
“So, who did he end up with?” Kate casually inquired, realizing that a golden opportunity had just fallen into her lap and that feigning ignorance was the only way she was going to find out. If anyone knew what John’s story was, Maria’s penchant for local gossip was probably still as legendary as it was in high school.
“Well, you probably heard about his brother,” Maria replied. “Oh my gosh, it was just the most terrible thing!”
In the back of her mind, Kate remembered her mother’s curious warning not to bring up the subject of Jeremy. “I’m afraid I’m out of touch,” she said. “What happened to him?”