Tuesday, February 17, 2015
Itasca, Minnesota
“Mom, you can’t keep me from seeing my own father,” Caden snapped, as he buckled in to Molly’s Mazda SUV for the ride to school. The argument had started over breakfast; Molly had hoped he would just let it go.
“Well, pardon me for being surprised,” she said, turning to back out of the drive of the rented blue bungalow, craning to see over the snowbanks on either side. There never seemed to be an extra five minutes in the morning to warm up the car, the way her father, Dean, had always told her she should, and she could see the fog of her breath in the cold interior. “When you announce your father’s coming to town this weekend for your game. You haven’t seen him in six months, and I haven’t seen him in two years. I haven’t even talked to him in weeks.”
“Yeah, well, he calls me every day. And it wasn’t his fault the weather was bad at Christmastime and I couldn’t reschedule my trip to Newport on account of hockey.”
Molly bit back what she wanted to mutter—the enlightened, positive communication practices she recommended to her clients did not come easy—and, at a four-way stop, took her turn, tires crunching on leftover snow. Honestly, the changes to Caden in the six months since Evan had seen him had been seismic (six inches, a deep voice, a whole new taste in music, plus he was reading Hemingway!)—would Evan even recognize him?
“Mom, I just really need you to be cool about this,” Caden said, and in his voice suddenly was the little boy he’d been—the one whose heart she’d broken.
Instant tears stung her eyes, and she found herself remembering her mom’s voice on the phone that terrible morning three years ago—Your dad’s gone, Liz had said, and Molly had thought, Gone where? Already, she and Evan had been struggling, and the idea that someday soon she’d get a similar call about her grandma, or her mom, had sent her careening like a car down a mountainside after busting through a guardrail. There was just no turning it around. None of the dozen healing modalities she’d been trained in could seem to touch the wreckage of her heart; none of her highly-trained-therapist’s techniques had managed to bleed over into making her marriage work. Less than a year after her dad’s funeral, the marriage was over, and she and Evan were in court to decide whether almost-twelve-year-old Caden would stay in Rhode Island with his father or move with her to her old Minnesota hometown.
Yet—imagine asking a child in court which parent he preferred! (“I love them both equally,” Caden had said, with an equanimity that had clearly been rehearsed; it slayed her to imagine him, probably in the privacy of his bedroom the night before, in that voice that had been so tiny then: I love them both equally.) And when the decision came down that he’d move to Itasca with her, she’d known instantly that meant she’d be the one making him go to the dentist, do his homework, brush his teeth, take out the garbage, while Evan would be the fun one, the one picking him up at the airport and taking him to the beach, the surf shop, up to Boston for Red Sox and Bruins games. The one Caden would long for, in other words.
Her grandma Cecily had tried to console her: Some things you never get over. Sometimes life makes you strike poor bargains, and sometimes you just plain don’t know what to do. And you just have to go on and do the best you can!
Honestly, how would Molly have made it without Cecily, these last two years in Itasca? Their weekly lunches—Molly brought takeout; dessert was always a slice of one of Cecily’s famous fifteen-layer cakes, left over from this or that recent community meeting—were all that had really sustained her. With her mom, Liz, never that easy to talk to in even the best of times, it was only Cecily who’d made Molly believe that, even after all that had happened and all she had lost, she could still succeed in building a new life in her old hometown—and in raising her son on her own.
“Okay, bud,” Molly told Caden carefully now, as she pulled into the line of traffic in the high school’s circle drive. She did try to be enlightened. “Just give me a little time to process, okay?”
A big sigh. “K, Mom.” And he was gone, slamming the door.
“Have a nice day!” she shouted through the window to his back. His shoulders were slumped a bit, till a friend came up and they bumped gloves and disappeared through the sliding glass doors.
Always like a pinprick to the small balloon of her heart, that. And why did kids these days talk like every utterance was a text message?
Then she had to laugh at herself: kids these days. She was just glad Caden had made good friends when he’d moved to town at the start of seventh grade—small-town cliques could be so unforgiving—as well as that he’d inherited his athletic abilities from his father and not from her, because scoring goals for Itasca Central as a freshman made you a once and future king, and that was that. She’d been such a nerd in her day, class of ’93.
She sighed at the thought of seeing Evan, put the car into gear, and inched ahead, close behind the bumper of the car in front of her. Once she got out of here, it was just a two-minute drive to the century-old brick building downtown that housed her private practice. Her cell phone rang in through the stereo; she clicked the button on the steering wheel to answer. “Hey, Mom!”
“Moll?” From the tinny sound of the Bluetooth and road noise, it was obvious Liz was calling from the car. She never called at this time of day, and, as Molly recognized the sound of bad news, her stomach clenched.
“Moll,” Liz shouted through the speaker. “It’s your grandma. Meet me at the hospital!”