Sixteen.
It was nearly four, and Frances was herding Theo and Kate down toward Anne’s house just as Richard pulled up in front of it. He got out and started toward Anne’s door, not seeing the kids until he was nearly on top of them. His arrival at the end of Anne’s path coincided to an almost comical degree with theirs, and both parties came to a polite halt. The front door opened and Anne called to the kids, not seeing Richard until the words were out of her mouth. To add to the general Marx Brothers–ness of the moment, Charlie’s car pulled up in front of the house and parked behind Richard’s, and his kids started bouncing up and down and calling, “Daddy!” in amazed tones, as if he’d just returned from several years in exile, rather than eight hours at the office. Anne went pale and turned to see if Frances was there. She was, and she was moving. She was pretty sure the guy on Anne’s path was her boyfriend, and she was one hundred percent confident Charlie was about to run into him. But don’t worry, sister, said her swift, sneakered footfall, the cavalry was on the way.
Charlie got out of the car and walked around, grinning at the kids, his eyes only on them. They threw themselves at him, presumably overcome by the surprise of seeing him in the street, rather than in the house. What the hell? their little faces said, we didn’t see that coming! Kids were like dogs in this way: happy to unexpectedly see you. Although, unlike dogs, they were also just as likely to hate you and blame you for everything, including the weather and the physics of bodies in motion. Lally and Lucas, who had been left to clamber out of the car alone, started bleating after Frances, sensing that something interesting was going on. Ava, of course, had already gone into the house, earbuds on, head down.
Had Charlie’s car pulled up ten seconds later, or had Anne opened the door ten seconds earlier, or had Richard known anything at all about the public-school timetable, this situation would never have happened. But, you know, life is hilarious that way.
Richard was halfway up Anne’s path when Charlie noticed him. Richard was looking at Anne, and suddenly put it all together. Until that split second he’d thought she’d opened the door for him, and that the adorable kids were just local color and not two tiny horsemen of the apocalypse. The realization that they were her kids, and that therefore the man they were hanging on was almost certainly her husband, made him freeze in place like a rabbit. This inability to multitask and improvise is why women are just better.
“Hey, wrong house, doofus!” called Frances, smiling widely. “Hey, Charlie, how’s things?”
“Good,” replied Charlie, frowning and trying to parse the scene. Frances moved past him and hailed Richard again.
“We’re one forty-two, not one thirty-two, goober.” She had reached Richard and gave him a hug. “It’s just as well I caught you before you embarrassed yourself by going to the wrong house, right?”
“Right,” said Richard, struggling to catch up. He looked over at Anne, who looked, if anything, slightly annoyed. “Sorry.”
Kate and Theo blew past them and hurtled into the house, telling their mother about how bizarre it was their own father showed up outside their own house. Charlie was behind them, and paused politely for an introduction.
“Charlie, this is Phil. Phil, this is Charlie, my neighbor.” Richard stuck out his hand, automatically, and he and his lover’s husband shook hands politely. Fortunately, Anne missed this cosmic ridiculousness, having already turned blindly to follow her kids and shake some crackers into a bowl. She’d turned her life and fate over to the gods, in the earthly form of Frances. Besides, nothing could go wrong now, she’d already fixed this problem, hadn’t she? She’d done the right thing.
“Nice to meet you, Phil,” said Charlie with his usual easy charm, and then he paused again. “How do you two know each other?”
“School,” said Frances.
“Work,” said Richard.
There was a pause. “Both,” amended Frances. “School for me and work for him. He works at the art college, and Ava was thinking of applying. We know each other through a mutual friend, and he came over to chat with us about the application process.” This sounded utterly lame to her, but it was what she had at that moment. Fortunately, Charlie wasn’t considering the possibility of her lying to him, as she’d never done it before, and took it at face value.
“Wow,” he said, “you’re way ahead, aren’t you?” He laughed. “What’s next, visits from Harvard and Yale?”
“That’s next week,” said Frances. “Come on, Phil, let’s let Charlie get on with his evening.”
“Of course,” said Richard, pale but pulling it together. “I could use a cup of coffee, it’s been a long day.”
“I bet,” said Frances.
“Well, see you around,” said Charlie, heading in to his wife, a small jewelry box hidden in his suit pocket. He’d spent more than usual, still reeling from the sexy Anne who’d appeared that afternoon. The door closed.
There was a pause, and then Frances turned and started walking away, followed by Richard, Lally, and Lucas, like a gaggle of goslings.
They’d reached Frances’s house before she gathered herself enough to turn and face Richard. “We don’t really need advice on art school applications. You can go home.”
Richard stared at her.
“Don’t start crying, please,” she said, keeping her voice low. “Lally, you and Lucas can go inside, OK?”
“Is Lucas going to play?”
“Yes, honey, for a little bit until his dad gets home.”
“Can we watch TV?”
“Yes, sweetie.” Once the door closed behind the kids she turned back to Richard. “Look, I realize you don’t know me at all, but . . .”
“You’re the one who walked in on us the other morning.” His voice was deep and sexy, but to Frances it just sounded sad. “It all started to fall apart after that.”
Frances was firm. “Yes, that was me, but I’ll be blunt, it was never together in the first place. You just nearly destroyed Anne’s life, and whether you agree she deserves it for having an affair in the first place, I would hope you agree that her kids don’t deserve to see their lives unravel in real time, before they’ve even had an after-school snack.”
“I didn’t realize they would be around,” said Richard.
“School gets out at three.”
“Art school doesn’t. I’m sorry.”
Frances shrugged. “Go home. She doesn’t want to see you anymore.”
Richard turned and walked away, the set of his shoulders as depressed as anything Frances had ever seen. She kept watching until his car turned the far corner, and then she sighed. What a fucking shit show. And now she was part of it.
Inside the house everything was as usual. There might be a storm brewing down the street, but here the leaves weren’t even rustling. Frances sighed and walked into the kitchen, realizing when she saw Ava that she’d been smug too soon.
“Who were you talking to outside?”
“What?”
“Just now. I wanted to ask you a question, so I stuck my head out of the door and you were talking to some guy.”
“Some guy who needed directions.” She paused. “What was the question?”
“Are you cheating on dad?”
“Was that the question?” Frances looked at her daughter. Her tone was cool, but her mother could see a telltale stiffness in her shoulders. Ava was freaked out.
“No, the question was about tea, but then I saw that guy and your face looked weird, not like someone giving directions.”
Frances turned away from Ava, and walked over to the cupboard above the kettle where she kept the tea. “Which tea were you looking for?”
“Why aren’t you answering me?”
Frances opened the cupboard and scanned the many boxes and tins of tea. Maybe one of them would have the answer printed on it. “Because it’s a ridiculous question. Of course, I’m not cheating on your dad. If you must know, that guy was a friend of Anne’s, and he and I were just chatting for a moment.” Silence. Frances put the kettle on and went to the refrigerator to see if someone had crept into the house earlier and made dinner. Sadly not. Over her shoulder she said, “You’re making too much of it.” She leaned on the fridge door and suddenly spotted two pounds of ground beef hiding behind a wilting head of lettuce. Nice try, she thought, it might have been a good spot before your little green friend gave up the ghost and got smaller. She reached in. “Spaghetti and meatballs for dinner, OK?”
“Is Anne sleeping with that guy?”
Oh, for fuck’s sake. Frances sighed. “Ava, it’s an adult thing that’s complicated and private, so, if I can quote something you say to me all the time: Stick to your own lane.”
“Adult things are complicated? What do you think my life is, paint by numbers?”
OK, good, thought Frances, her daughter’s teenage narcissism had dragged the topic back around to herself, so maybe we can move away from talking about Anne. She waited for what felt like inevitable follow-up questions, but when she looked up Ava had already left the room.
Lucas ended up staying for dinner because Bill got stuck in a meeting. As Frances watched him eat his spaghetti, chattering away to Lally about God only knew what, she marveled at the mystery of other people’s children. It didn’t matter how many children you had of your own, other people’s children seemed alien. Well, to Frances anyway. Lucas was bigger than Lally, and moved differently. He was a boy, but she’d raised a boy. It wasn’t that. He was just unfamiliar, and that made him appealing. He seemed nicer than her kids, better tempered, easier to deal with. Even though she knew this was completely untrue, she enjoyed the illusion.
The way children behaved with adults who weren’t their parents was interesting. They were more polite, more accommodating, less inclined to bridle at the smallest thing. She knew this was true because other parents would tell her how well behaved her own children were. At home they would balk and kick up a fuss if a green vegetable even approached the table, whereas other moms would open the door to Frances after playdates and say things like, “Wow, Lally is such a good eater! She packed away the broccoli like a champ! I wish I could get TiddleyWink to eat vegetables like that!” or “It’s always such a pleasure when Ava babysits, Frances, she’s just so interesting to talk to. So chatty!” It was one of the paradoxes of parenting that the children you wished you had were actually the versions of your own children that other parents saw. The secretly much nicer versions. Thank God parents talked to each other, Frances thought, or we’d all be circling the drain wishing our kids were like everyone else’s.
However, Lucas was, even his own parents would admit, a nice kid. Four was a difficult age, or had been for all of Frances’s kids, but it seemed to suit him. He was ready to argue the toss over everything, like every four-year-old, but somehow it just came across like good-humored independence. As she knelt down and wiped the spaghetti sauce off his face, Frances could see Julie in his eyes, and wished she had gotten to know her better before she went wherever it was she had gone. And maybe she’d misjudged Julie, seeing as she was apparently able to leave this perfect child and her lovely husband to go off and follow her star, wherever that was. Maybe she was a selfish cow, and Frances had dodged a bullet by never becoming close with her. She doubted it, but everything she’d thought was true was turning out not to be, so why not that?
When Bill came to pick him up, full of unnecessary apologies, Lucas and Lally were both sleepily sitting on the sofa, being read to by Milo. As an older brother, Milo was frequently guilty of neglect, albeit benign, but he enjoyed being the bigger boy and after dinner they’d all played Legos until the littler ones got tired. Lally had asked Milo to read and Frances, tidying up in the kitchen, had reached for a dishtowel to dry her hands and take up the task, but Milo had surprised her by saying yes. For a moment she’d stood and listened to the soft questions he asked, determining whether they wanted a picture book or a chapter book, and the sounds of all three of them getting settled on the sofa together—Do you want your blankie, Lally? Are you warm enough, Lucas?—and her eyes suddenly filled with tears, remembering the feeling of her own brother’s head against her shoulder, the soft ear of his stuffed bunny in his hands, folding and refolding as she read him Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle.
You grew up in a family, you left that family and then, life permitting, you built your own family using much of the same material. She would hear herself saying things to her children her mother had said to her, re-creating moments she hadn’t even realized she’d treasured at the time. She did Christmas stockings the same way her parents had. The birthday child got to pick whatever meal they wanted. The tooth fairy left a silver half-dollar, inflation be damned. You give them the best eighteen years of your life, if you can, and you think about their health and happiness and choices and future and then they become adults and all that effort becomes a single line in their life story: My mother made lunch for me every morning. Or, My dad was away a lot. Or, Yeah, my parents divorced, but it was cool.
Frances had friends whose child, as a baby, had spent weeks in intensive care recovering from heart surgery, whose brief life had hung very much in the balance. Her friend would have slit her own throat to give that child life; she would have done anything at all to make it better. She’d cried and prayed and clutched her husband’s hand in terror, and that whole experience would be related by her daughter as: Yeah, funny story, I had heart surgery before I was even a year old! Crazy, right? Frances remembered sitting with Ava as a baby, nursing at 2:00 a.m., looking down at her milk-drunk child and suddenly understanding that her mother had loved her like this, and that she loved her daughter more than her daughter would ever love her, and that was how it was supposed to be. You’re supposed to walk away with only the very occasional backward glance, and only appreciate years later, as you hold your own child, how painful that was for your parents. As Vonnegut so elegantly said: “So it goes.”
Bill came into the kitchen while Milo finished the book he was reading. Frances looked sad, which was unusual for her. But then she saw him and her face changed, smiling away whatever inner concerns she’d been contemplating.
“He’s a nice boy, Milo.” Bill smiled back at her, shaking his head at the offer of coffee. “I wish Lucas had a brother.”
“He’s welcome to borrow mine,” said Ava, who was sitting at the kitchen table doing her homework. The dogs thumped their tails on the ground, hearing her voice.
Bill looked at Frances and smiled. “Thanks for being so helpful, Frances. I needed to stay at that meeting.”
“Of course.” Frances smiled. “What are friends for? He’s very easy company, and he and Lally get on so well. It’s our pleasure.” She wanted suddenly to ask him where Julie was, but then Milo finished the book and the moment was gone.
Bill carried his son across the street, the little head nestled into the curve of his neck, and wished his wife wasn’t so far away. They tried to Skype to say good night. “Maybe she was out, Lucas, or maybe she was already asleep. Tomorrow morning, for sure.”
Bill put Lucas to bed, ate a ham sandwich standing over the sink in the kitchen, and went to bed himself. Maybe tomorrow morning would be better.