Sam and Helen arrived late in the afternoon on Christmas Eve. Allison, in the kitchen stirring what seemed to be a dozen different pots, shouted upstairs to Mark when the doorbell rang. He trotted down the stairs—he’d been trying to work, to force himself alert with his third cup of coffee—wiped his suddenly damp palms on his jeans, and opened the door. His father was smiling on the stoop, holding two shopping bags full of gifts. Next to him was Helen: blond, tall—shockingly so. She was nearly the same height as Sam.
“Come in!” Mark said, his voice oddly booming.
“Mark,” his father said, dropping his chin. “Helen Etley.”
Mark wasn’t sure what he’d expected in Helen—someone short and gray-haired, he supposed. Yet even though Sam had told him Helen was younger, he wasn’t prepared for the woman in front of him now: thin, grinning, her eyes so green they seemed nearly feral. “Mark,” she said—her voice booming a little, too—and took his hand in both of hers. “It’s so good to meet you.” She removed her long navy coat; beneath it she wore a long skirt and a blue sweater that—he couldn’t help but notice—showed off a sizable bosom. And she was forty-eight? She could be forty. If he passed her on the street, he’d stare after her.
Helen greeted Allison, whose face lit up in happy amazement—she wasn’t above staring after a statuesque babe, either. Then Allie was showing Helen around the townhouse, and Mark and his father were outside, carrying in suitcases and more bags of gifts from the back of the truck.
His father, Mark realized, was terrified: stiff-backed and grunting, refusing to meet Mark’s eyes.
“Dad, she’s amazing,” Mark told him, shutting the truck’s gate.
His father shook his head. “She’s a pistol.”
“A pistol? Dad, she’s a goddamn shotgun.”
“Don’t embarrass me.” The tips of his father’s ears were red—and not, Mark thought, from the cold. “This is hard enough.”
Mark made small talk with Sam and Helen in the living room until the food was ready, but it wasn’t until all of them had sat down to dinner, and were listening to Helen tell a surprisingly funny story about a plagiarist student, that Mark finally understood why she had shocked him so much—why he’d spent the last half an hour forcing himself to smile: He had never considered that Sam might end up falling for someone so different from Mark’s mother.
When he’d imagined Helen, he had pictured someone short, round, earthy. Someone who never raised her voice, who kept her counsel, always, until it was requested. And now here was Sam with a woman his own height, bold and aggressive, who—Mark heard it now—was speaking in a Voice much like his father’s.
Helen finished her story, to much laughter, some of it her own.
“So how did you two meet?” Allison asked. She sat beside Mark, her knee pressed warmly against his, and was nearly vibrating with love for Helen Etley.
“You want this one, Sam?” Helen asked.
“She gives me the boring ones,” his father said. “It was a committee meeting. A college bylaw-revision task force—”
“You’re a liar. We met the night before.”
Sam shook his head, slowly. “I saw you the night before—”
Helen touched Sam’s hand. “I think Allison’s asking for the romantic version.”
His father was turning crimson again. “I saw her at a concert.”
Allison had clasped her fingers in front of her, was sitting completely at attention.
Sam told them how he’d been at a little club in Broad Ripple, watching a jazz combo comprising some of Butler’s music faculty. He’d noticed Helen in the audience. “Because one notices Helen,” he said. “And I thought to myself, There’s one woman I’ll never speak to. She was surrounded by admirers—”
“Liar. I’d come with a date, but he wasn’t a very good one.”
“Did you notice Sam?” Allison asked.
Helen rubbed Sam’s hand. “I saw him. He was sitting alone and looked completely at ease. He looked cool.”
This was news to Mark. His father: a man women noticed. Cool.
“At any rate,” his father said, “the next day, as I sat down to this terrible committee meeting, I was, perhaps, thinking about the lovely Amazonian jazz aficionado I’d seen the night before. And then I looked up—and there the Amazon was, taking the very seat next to me.”
“I couldn’t help it,” Helen said. “I got so bored I started writing him notes.”
Helen was smiling at Sam, lifting her hair from her shoulder. His father, despite his embarrassment, smiled crookedly back. She said, “I asked him to dinner an hour later. And because Sam is Sam, I am forbidden from saying—”
“The rest is history,” Mark finished for her.
Helen beamed across the table at him. “So what about you two?”
Mark and Allie had rehearsed this. “We met at a conference,” Allie said. “In Newark.”
“Newark!” Helen said.
“Land of romance and intrigue,” Mark said. Helen laughed, as she was supposed to.
He let Allie tell the story. The autumn before last, she and Mark had both been working for downtown design firms, and had both been sent to Newark for a professional conference. By chance they sat next to each other during a presentation. Mark had been wearing an Ohio State cap, and Allie, during a lull in the talk, had leaned closer to him and whispered, O! H!
“And I said what I was supposed to—” Mark began.
“You have to answer I, O,” Allie told Helen, who looked lost. “It’s kind of like a disease.”
Helen nodded carefully.
Allie kept going: Neither of them knew anyone at the conference. When the presentation was over, they talked for a while at the bar. “We kept getting tangled up,” Allie said. “We found out we were booked for the same flight home. We talked in the airport, and then Mark switched seats so we could talk on the flight. Then we shared a cab back from the airport, and by the end of the cab ride we decided we’d better have dinner. And we did.” Allie was smiling her brightest smile. “And that was that.”
They had already told this story to Sam, when he’d first met Allison. Like Helen, now, he’d smiled and accepted it. Of course Sam knew there must be more to tell; Sam, Helen—all the friends they’d told—knew that Allie was newly divorced, and that Mark used to have a family; no one who knew them could assume their courtship had been that easy. But putting a bow on the story—And that was that!—allowed everyone to smile and nod and never ask. It was a courtesy, and all their friends took it, but it bore little resemblance to the truth.
The truth was this: After leaving the presentation, Mark—lonely, possessed by courage that came from nowhere, and which he still could not explain—asked Allie, his fellow Buckeye, to dinner. She agreed, and after dinner the two of them went to his room to talk, and ended up having too-desperate, too-loud sex on the couch in his suite.
Allie, now, met Mark’s eyes. The left corner of her mouth curled up.
He excused himself to the kitchen, where he divided a blueberry crumble into bowls and began to brew coffee. He listened to the voices in the dining room; in particular, Helen’s carried, usually trailing Allison’s laughter.
He reminded himself there was nothing shameful about Allison, about the way they’d met. They were adults; in certain company—well, around Lew—the story could even be a little funny. Even so, they’d developed the lie Allie was still spinning in the dining room.
The two of them hadn’t, in fact, shared the same flight home, let alone a cab. When they woke the morning after, Allie had left his room in a state of obvious shame. Mark realized, as she gathered up her clothes, that he’d never learned her last name.
He might never have seen her again, if Allie hadn’t hired on at his company that winter. Mark’s boss called together the staff on Monday morning to introduce their new web-design specialist, and as he said, I want everyone to welcome Allison Daniel, Mark had lifted his face to find Allison already staring at him. She quickly directed her eyes to the floor, touches of crimson appearing in her cheeks, while Mark’s boss discussed her qualifications, the energy she would bring to their team.
Allie came up to him in the break room at lunch. What were the odds? she asked.
It’s a small town, he said.
She smiled, flushed. She’d grown her hair longer, was wearing granny glasses and a tailored gray suit and very high heels. He thought, I’m talking with a woman who couldn’t run away from sex with me fast enough.
Allie Daniel, she said, and held out her hand. I don’t—I don’t think you know who I really am.
Mark Fife, he said. I was just about to say the same thing.
A week after she’d hired on, Allie brought her lunch to Mark’s cubicle. They ate companionably, and Mark was struck—as he had been in Newark—by Allie’s wide, intense gaze, by the fullness of her lips and the hint of brown in her complexion, as though part of her genetic code had arrived via Bombay. The wicked force of her laughter.
Then her eyes passed over the pictures tacked beside his computer.
Is that—? she started to ask. His heart thumped as she bent closer to the picture. That kid’s got to be related to you, she said.
She looked from Brendan’s face to Mark’s. And that moment, he knew now, was when they’d truly begun. He’d known he could love her when Allison saw the grief in his face, and understood, and did not recoil.
Tell me, she’d said.
Now, in the kitchen, Mark poured coffee into mugs on a tray. Laughter carried into the kitchen—Helen’s, Allie’s.
Was his father ever caught up in moments like this? Maybe it was different, for a man Sam’s age. But when had Sam told Helen, My wife died? When had Helen realized that Sam had gone nearly two decades without remarrying? He wondered if their story was, in its way, as much of a sham as his and Allison’s.
That didn’t mean they were wrong for each other. Already he knew Helen was terrific—smart, funny, beautiful; the kind of woman he absolutely wished for his father to love. But he knew this, too: Apart from what was surely a basic goodness, Helen couldn’t have been a more different woman than his mother. And that hurt him—so suddenly and deeply he could not bring himself to leave the kitchen and face the others.
He wondered, again, what his mother would think of Allison.
I can’t imagine someone better for you than Chloe, she’d told him, only days before she died. I can’t tell you how happy I am that I had a chance to know her.
Mark poured himself a glass of wine, gulped it down, then washed the glass and swallowed some coffee to mask the smell.
His father appeared in the kitchen doorway. “Need a hand?”
“You can watch me scoop ice cream,” Mark said. Did Sam still have his old fatherly powers? Had he, from the other room, sensed his son’s high-school-grade guilt? Mark’s cheeks burned.
Sam was smiling. “Helen couldn’t be having a better time. She adores you both.”
“We adore her,” Mark said. “Allie’s about ready to follow you home.”
Sam chuckled and leaned against the counter. “Tell me the truth, Mark. You really like her?”
“Yeah, Dad. I do.”
“Good,” Sam said. “Well. I need to tell you some news. Helen and I—we have decided to rent an apartment. Jointly.”
Mark was suddenly stricken. He could have said any of a hundred things, but the one that popped inanely from his mouth was, “What about the house?”
Sam moved to the counter. He poured cream into one of the coffees and took a sip. “We’d live there in the summers and on weekends. But the drive’s getting to be a lot for me. And… it’s nice to be with someone, at the end of the day.”
Mark could not falter. Sam hadn’t, when Mark had told him about his engagement. “Dad,” he said, smiling, “I’m happy for you.”
He and his father embraced. “Plus someone can take care of you in your dotage,” Mark said.
Sam faked outrage, but soon enough pulled Mark in for a sideways embrace—one he held for longer than Mark expected.
“Are you all right?” his father asked. “You look a little peaked.”
A crazy woman thinks Brendan is a ghost. A ghost who calls for his daddy. And I told Chloe never to speak to me again. Also, I’m drinking.
“I’ve been working pretty hard,” he said.
“That’s all it is? You can tell me.”
“I know. I’m fine.”
His father looked into his mug and nodded. “Well, I wanted to tell you this, too. I called Chloe yesterday. To wish her a happy Christmas. She sounded… odd.”
Mark stiffened. Nothing got past Sam Fife for long. “Odd how?”
“Hard to say. We didn’t speak for long. She wished me a merry Christmas, more or less.” Sam pursed his lips. “Do you… talk?”
“Not anymore.” Mark weighed his words carefully. “We had—we had a little scene recently. I told her never to speak to me again.”
The lines around his father’s mouth deepened. “Can I ask?”
Mark could only lie. “I told her I was getting married.”
Sam put his hand—heavy, more sandpapery than a scholar’s ought to be—on Mark’s neck. He seemed ready to say something else, but then Allison and Helen walked into the kitchen, laughing. His father gave Mark’s neck one last squeeze; then he went to Helen and slipped an arm around her waist, but not before meeting Mark’s eye. I know, the look seemed to say.
The four of them sat down again at the dining room table. Mark’s father kept his arm around Helen’s shoulders and gazed, smiling and fond, at Mark. Allie and Helen, new best friends, talked and talked across the table.
Mark wondered if his father, then, was thinking just what Mark did: that he sat opposite a wonderful woman, a beautiful, happy person—but that he couldn’t help himself from missing, terribly, the one she had replaced.