SECOND CHANCES

It was raining when I woke up on Thanksgiving morning. Nick was just coming to life, stretching his arms out and making weird suppressed moans. I went in to Jessie’s room to make sure she was up. The car was coming to take her to her father’s house early, at seven-thirty.

Jessie was up, but barely. She was sitting on the edge of her bed in her scarlet long johns, her pillow in her lap. She is just thirteen, and has, in a bold stroke, cut off the luxuriant mane of her childhood. Her hair is now shorter than Nick’s, and she looks like a trim little boy from the nineteen fifties.

“You’re awake,” I said, nearly whispering. Around us the house slept. She nodded, heavy-eyed. “The car will be here in half an hour.”

“It’s going to be so boring there,” Jessie said.

“Maybe not,” I said, pleased.

“Yes, it will,” Jessie said bitterly. “We’re going to the Wades’, and everyone else there will be grown-ups or tiny children, and I’ll have to stand around by myself for three thousand years.”

“Well, at least you got to see Grandma and Grandpa,” I said. My parents had arrived the night before, especially to see Jess.

“And I got to help you set the table, and polish the silver, and make the centerpiece,” Jessie said, and sighed. “Will you save me some pie?”

The car arrived at twenty past. The driver was a new one, a Chinese man who smiled and held a striped umbrella over Jessie’s head as they went out to the car. I stood in the driveway, in the drizzle, in my bathrobe and floppy red slippers, and Jessie and I waved at each other for as long as we could, as the big car eased its way around the circle, underneath the great standing willows, down the slope and past the stone wall to the road. I was still waving when it nosed between the stone pillars out onto the muddy road, and still waving when it finally disappeared among the wet black trees, taking with it all reason for Thanksgiving.

I went back inside to get dressed. The day, I supposed, had begun. Nick was gone when I got to the bedroom, and I stared at the big rumpled bed. I wanted to get back in it and pull the covers over my head.

Jessie’s father, Chad, gets her for alternate holidays. This year he got her for Thanksgiving and I get her for Christmas. When his secretary called about picking Jess up, I explained about my parents being there on a Wednesday night to see her. Could she leave on Thursday morning, I asked, instead of Wednesday afternoon? She said she’d ask. She sounded nervous. Chad called me right back, and the tone of his voice made things clear from the start. We’ve been divorced for eleven years, and you’d think—or at least I keep thinking—that things will slowly wear smooth between us, that these jagged edges will be worn away. This doesn’t happen. His rage at me is unabated, a fresh flower of fire each time.

“What is all this about Thanksgiving, Kate?” he asked, furious. “It’s my turn to have her, and that’s that. Don’t start trying to screw things up.”

“I don’t want to screw anything up,” I said. “It’s just that my parents will be here on Wednesday night, and she’d like to see them.”

“You always do this,” Chad said. “Lizzie will be wild when she hears what you’re up to.”

Lizzie is his wife. “Maybe I should talk to Lizzie directly,” I said, “I’m sure she understands about grandparents.”

“Lizzie doesn’t want to talk to you,” Chad said. “Lizzie hates your guts. She’d like to rip your stomach out with a machete.”

I hung up.

In the end, I did get to keep Jessie for Wednesday night. Chad claimed he had just used a figure of speech, that it hadn’t meant anything. But since he works on Wall Street, and not a martial arts academy, it seemed like a strange choice of words. In any case, words do mean something. These meant that no matter how much time elapsed between us things would never change, I would stand for only one thing for him. The phrase stayed in my mind, glittering and vicious, like a barracuda in a pool.

When I went downstairs to the kitchen, my father was banging around in there. Someone must have lit a fire in the library, and there was a comforting smell of wood smoke. Nick had gone running. My father turned and smiled at me when I came in, his brilliant blue eyes lighting up his face. He is nearly my height now, gentle, slow, and white-haired. This is always a shock to me: I still expect the towering giant of my childhood, stern and immutable.

“Hello, sweetie,” he said.

“Hi, Daddy,” I said, “sleep well?”

“Marvelously, thanks,” he said. “So did your mother. Her back has been bad lately, so she’s going to stay in bed for a bit. I took her up some tea a while ago, and she’s having a blissful time.”

My mother, who is smaller than my small father, insists on the joy she finds in her days, and ignores the pain she feels in her back. I was glad to think of her resting, her thin, dark hair spread out in a hieroglyph of comfort and luxury against the wide white pillows in the guest room, my mother slowly sipping her tea with our house quiet around her. I offered the picture to Chad in my mind.

I looked into the library, but it was dark, and the deep chairs were empty. The wood smoke smell was stronger than ever.

In the kitchen my father held up a fragile English mochaware mug and a gold-rimmed dessert plate I had set out for dinner. “I guess you don’t care what plates I use for breakfast,” he said.

“Actually—” I said, and dived into the pantry for the everyday stuff. I handed him a thick pottery plate and mug, and put the mochaware back. I went over to the stove. The kettle was on fire.

“The kettle’s on fire,” I said, and snatched it up. Nick bought me that kettle in England, years ago. It has a wonderful shape, a long Art Deco curve of heavy metal, echoed by the long smooth arch of the solid wooden handle. It was the solid wooden handle that was giving off the comforting smell of wood smoke. I held the kettle under the running water at the sink. It made a terrible hissing sound.

“Kettle?” my father said. He was pulling out the canisters from where they stood against the blue-and-white checkerboard tiles: tea, instant coffee, lentils, navy beans.

“It’s ruined,” I said loudly, the gloom advancing. My father ambled over to the sink and peered at the kettle.

“I don’t think it’s ruined,” he said reassuringly. I waited for him to make this true. “See,” he said, “the bottom’s still flat. We burnt one out, once, and the bottom turned inside out. This one’s still flat.”

But I shook my head. I knew ruin when I saw it. He was talking about a different kind of kettle, one of those flimsy whistle ones with the copper bottoms. “It’s the handle,” I said, “look at it.” I wiggled the handle. It was very loose, and the wrong color. The air was full of the smell of charred wood.

My father shook his head, rubbing the back of his neck. “Well,” he said, puzzled, “I wonder how it could have happened.” I didn’t say anything. “I turned it on myself when I made your mother tea, but that was a while ago. I know I turned it off again. Maybe Nick put it on afterward.”

Despair began to enfold me in its dank embrace. I threw the kettle into the trash drawer and slammed it shut. There were tears behind my eyelids. Nick appeared from outside, his hands on his hips, breathing in deep slow breaths. His blond hair was damp from the drizzle, and there were shining drops on his eyebrows. He gave off heat and comfort like a god in sweat pants. He smiled.

“Morning, Sam,” he said. “Hi, lovey. What’s that smell?”

“The kettle’s ruined,” I said. “Someone left it on the stove and the handle’s burned out.” I had my back to him, not wanting to confront him with what he’d done.

“Oh, lovey,” Nick said, unrepentant. “That’s too bad.”

I turned around. “Didn’t you do it?”

“Turn on the kettle and then go out running? Of course not.”

It was my father, then, and he wasn’t even paying any attention. I turned back to the sink and wrenched the water on in a torrent. My beautiful kettle was destroyed, Jessie was gone, and Chad, or his wife, wanted to rip my stomach out with a machete.

My father was heating up water in a saucepan.

“I don’t know how that could have happened,” he said. “Someone must have turned it back on again after I went upstairs.” I didn’t say anything. “Unless I left it on myself,” my father said, “but I can’t imagine that I did.” There was a pause. “But maybe I did.”

I said nothing. Nick could see the blackness hovering around me. He came over and put his arms around me; it was like being grabbed by a strong damp quilt. He hugged me harder and harder until I hugged him back. “She’ll be back on Sunday,” he whispered. “It’s only four days.”

Maybe so, but in the meantime there was gloom all around me, and a houseful of people expecting me to present them with Thanksgiving.

“I don’t know what’s the matter with this coffee,” my father said crossly, “I’ve put about five spoonfuls of it into my hot water, and it doesn’t change color.”

I peered over Nick’s shoulder at the canister my father had gotten out.

“It’s millet,” I said, “you’re pouring millet into your water.”

“Millet,” my father said, faintly outraged. He took his mug over to the sink and poured in the whole mess, where it would, I happened to know, stop things up.

Nick turned me loose and went to the sink as my father returned to the stove for a fresh try at the coffee. Nick started clearing up the soggy millet with his hands. He began to whistle. He was in a good mood because his children were on their way to us.

Chris and Jed are nineteen, good athletes and bad students. They are darker than Nick, and more solid, but they have the same large grin and important eyebrows. They come into our house and transform the space in it, these two large, peaceful bodies, leaning and sprawling and hustling against each other. Things don’t trouble them: not grades, not divorce, not anything much. In some miraculous way they have forgiven both their parents for the divorce and let it all slide away, as though it were a failed algebra exam from last term. Jessie worships them.

Sophie is sixteen and has forgiven no one anything. At least she has forgiven Nick nothing. She has been to our house once in the last two years; the twins come by about once a month. Last spring she wrote Nick to ask if he would take her to Boston on the weekend of her birthday. Nick was thrilled. He wrote off for theater tickets, and got reservations at the Ritz. Then he didn’t hear from her again. He couldn’t reach her, and she didn’t call. Finally, two days before the weekend she called to say she was going to New York for the weekend to stay with her mother. Sophie said she’d forgotten, when she wrote him, that she’d already made plans with her mother. She didn’t even say she was sorry.

Nick had forgotten all this. What he was thinking about, whistling, scraping up the soggy millet, was how great Thanksgiving was going to be. How all of us would sit around the big polished elm wood table bright with expectation while he carved the goose. All he could see was how things would go right between himself and Sophie, how he would say nothing about her plummeting grades, nothing about her nutsy mother, nothing except how fond he was of her. And how she, Sophie, would suddenly have changed: she would be open, talking to all of us, laughing, and letting her father see how fond she was of him, telling stories about school, and showing us we were part of her life.

By the time Nick came back from the station with the children, the goose was in, and the warm, rich smell of it was beginning to drift through the house. I had driven off the black shroud, and was concentrating hard on things going well.

My father had taken over one end of the butcher-block counter. He had covered it with Duco cement tubes, screwdrivers, little jars of things, bits of other things, pieces of the kettle. He was repairing it.

When they came back from the station it was like a thunderstorm moving into the kitchen, jackets and duffel bags, all those big new bodies, careful gestures, the boys’ deep voices, open smiles, and Sophie’s tense, closed face.

We all kissed and shambled about, things were dropped on the floor. Chris leaned into a doorway and put his hands on the corners of the lintels. He swung there, grinning. Jed began to crack his knuckles, slowly. It sounded as though he were dislocating every joint.

“Ouch,” I said, and winced, ritually.

“Sorry, Kate,” he said, grinning at me. “Well,” he said, and looked at Jed. “Guess it’s about that time.”

“What time?” I asked.

At the same time Nick asked, “Who’s playing?”

“Dad,” Jed said, “how can you ask that question? It’s the All-Star Blitz!” One of the great blessings of my life is that Nick does not like to watch football.

The three of them went into the library to watch the kickoff—Nick would sit with them if they were watching hamster races. My father and Sophie and I were left alone in the kitchen.

Sophie is shorter than I, solid and dark like her brothers, but less agile, less graceful. She seems attached to the ground, wary, as though any kind of departure is a risk she cannot take. She had bare legs, and was wearing a wrinkled denim skirt and a rumpled jersey that slid off her shoulder and showed her bra straps. Usually, when she comes to our house she goes straight to her room, closes the door, and puts on her Walkman. She stays there in isolation until someone goes up and bangs on the door and insists that she come down. But this time I had planned something for her, something mild and low-key that might ease her into Thanksgiving with us.

“Want to help me make the pecan pie?” I asked. “I’ll do the pie crust, and you do the filling?”

“Okay,” Sophie said neutrally. I showed her the recipe. Everything was out, waiting for her, the bag of pecans, bowls, the nutcracker. She started cracking nuts, and I started on the pastry.

Making pastry is not what I’m good at. I make all our bread, so you might think I could do pastry but I can’t. They’re very different things. Bread dough loves to be kneaded, you can pound and pound and pound it and it comes out right. But pastry can’t bear to be handled, and too much fussing will ruin it altogether. What I’m not good at is leaving things alone, knowing when to stop.

I mixed the dry ingredients together, flour and salt, and began to measure the lard. “So,” I said cheerfully, “how’s school?”

“Good,” Sophie said. She didn’t look up. I had seen the report card: straight D’s.

“That’s good,” I said. “I hope you’re feeling better than you were when you wrote that letter.” She had written us a sad little note about feeling lonely.

“Oh, yeah,” Sophie said, shrugging her shoulders. “I was just down when I wrote that. I don’t even know why I wrote it.”

“Well, good,” I said, rebuffed.

Nick came back from the library. He stood next to Sophie and put his arm around her.

“You’re pretty good at that, aren’t you,” he said. Sophie was taking out the pecans whole, intact, from the shells.

“Thanks,” she said, without looking up.

“Look at that,” he said, “what hands.” He started to kiss her along her temple, just along the hairline, little tiny kisses. I chopped away with the pastry blender, hoping. What I wanted was the right texture. I wanted everything smooth, the silky flour accepting the soft, frail slips of lard.

“Well, Sophe,” Nick said, “we’ve been talking about taking a trip next summer, the whole family. We’d go all around Spain. What do you think?”

Nick loves planning trips. I looked up. Sophie still had her head down. She was eating one of the broken pecans.

“Fine,” she said. Her voice was noncommittal. It was clear that the trip to Spain—that the phrase the whole family—did not include her, did not have anything to do with her at all. She would not be blended into anything.

“Wouldn’t that be fun, don’t you think?” Nick went on. He was still smiling at her; he still had his arm around her. I started pouring the ice water, little by little, into the flour and water. This was the tricky part. If you put in too much water you end up with a horrible gluey mass that sticks to everything. If you don’t add enough, the whole thing falls apart when you try to roll it out, a pile of disinterested, unconnected crumbs.

“So what do you think, Sophe?” Nick said again, and Sophie shrugged her shoulders.

“I don’t know,” she said, concentrating on her pecans. “I’ve never been to Spain.”

Nick took his arm away from her. “I didn’t ask you if you’d ever been to Spain,” he said. “I asked you if you thought it would be fun, all of us taking a trip together.” Sophie tossed a handful of shells into the bowl. Some of them missed, and went onto the floor. She ignored them. I dabbed gingerly at the pastry with my fingertips. “Would Jessie be coming?” Sophie asked.

“Of course Jessie would be coming,” Nick said. He loves Jessie. “We would all be going. What I’m asking you is whether or not you think that would be fun.”

“I don’t know, Dad,” she said, determined. “Maybe.”

I sloshed a little more ice water into the mixture, and sunk my fingertips in.

“Well, we don’t have to decide this minute,” I said. Sophie glanced at me. I smiled at her but she looked down again. I dabbed some more at the pastry. I was trying not to ruin it. “I’m sure it will be fun,” I said in a general way.

Nick stepped away from Sophie and crossed his arms on his chest. His mouth had gone into a straight line.

My father appeared at my elbow. He held the kettle up to me proudly. “There,” he said, “I’ve fixed it.” The kettle hung uneasily from the wooden handle; the joint was loose and wiggly.

“Thank you, Daddy,” I said.

“I scraped out all the charred part,” my father explained, “and I glued in a wooden match stick, and then you see I screwed that into the joint. That’s how I could make it tight enough for the screw to hold.”

“That’s wonderful,” I said, “thank you very much.” I dabbed at the pastry.

“Sophie,” I said, chatty, “give us the scoop on Allie. How is she?”

Allie is Sophie’s one friend from school who lives near us. As soon as she and Sophie became friends, however, her parents split up and Allie’s mother moved to New York, so Sophie sees her there instead of in the country from our house.

“She’s good,” Sophie said, nodding. “Oh, I meant to tell you,” she said, turning to Nick. “I told Allie I’d spend the night with her tonight. So could you drive me there after dinner?”

Nick said nothing. They faced each other. Nick’s eyebrows were pulled in toward each other, his mouth was at an ominous angle. Sophie’s eyes were hooded and uninvolved, and her eyebrows rose to a central peak of disinterest.

“When are you going back to New York?” Nick asked.

Sophie shrugged. “I guess tomorrow morning,” she said. “I have a lot of things to do.”

Nick stared at her. “So,” he said, “you’ll be here for what, about six hours? Is that it?”

Sophie didn’t answer.

“You come out here for the first time in two years, you’re here for one night, and you have to spend that night with a girl you see every day at school?”

Sophie went on with the pecans. I had to admit she was dexterous: not one of them was broken.

My father was still holding the kettle. “In fact,” he said quietly, mostly to himself, “now that I know how to do it, I think I’ll make it a bit tighter.”

He took the kettle away again. I patted gingerly at the dough. It was all mixed. I took it out of the bowl and set it down on the floured marble slab as though it were made of nitroglycerine.

“Why don’t you set the table for lunch,” I said to Nick. I wanted to get him away from Sophie.

“Right,” he said, still looking at Sophie. “How many are we? Are you going to be here for lunch, Sophie, or is there some friend’s house you’d rather dash off to? Two meals in a row in your father’s house is a lot to ask, I know.”

I began to roll the dough out with the old-fashioned rolling pin, its rich, dark wood taking a firm commanding weight against the difficult dough.

“Well, I hope you are staying for lunch, Sophe,” I said briskly, “we’re counting on you.” My voice sounded strained and terrible in my own ears, but she looked up briefly and smiled at me.

“Yeah,” she said, “I’ll be here.”

It wasn’t going to be great, I could see that. It wasn’t falling apart, but it was a bit sticky, and I slid the spatula underneath it between each roll, to make sure it wasn’t gluing itself to the marble. You can’t just add more flour when it’s sticky. You can ruin it that way, too. I sprinkled a bit of flour on the rolling pin, and kept on pushing it out into bigger and bigger circles. Finally I got the pie plate out to measure it, but the circle wasn’t big enough yet. And it wasn’t evenly round, either. I’d have to patch parts of it, and the rim would be ragged. But I can only make what I can make.

“Put out places for everyone,” I said firmly to Nick, and to Sophie I said, “It should be fun for you to see Allie at her dad’s. You’ve never seen her out here, have you?”

My father appeared at my side again. He was holding up the kettle and smiling, but his eyes looked as though someone had hit him, they were bruised and painful.

“Sorry,” he said gently, “I’ve ruined it.”

I looked at the kettle. He had, he’d ruined it again. The handle was now attached at only one end. He had bored out so much of the charred wood that the hole was too big to fill. No screw would hold it.

“Oh, Daddy,” I said.

“I’d like to buy you a new one,” he said.

“Don’t be silly,” I said, sliding the spatula beneath the dough. It stuck, then yielded. I pressed down on the rolling pin for these last determined surges.

“No, really, I would,” my father said. “It would make me feel better about it. I don’t want you to think of me as someone who comes to your house and breaks things, and walks away.”

Then I turned and looked at my father, whose eyes are now nearly on a level with mine. He stood there waiting for my answer, one eyebrow raised hopefully. He has become so gentle that I can hardly bear it, and he needed something from me. I put my arms around him, my hands meeting unexpectedly soon behind his back. Second chances, that’s all we can hope for, and when we find them, grab.