THEY WERE MARRIED on New Year’s Eve.
Marty and Patrick were Frank’s witnesses; and Claudia’s were Hope, Eden, and Claudia’s sister Miranda, who, as Frank’s wedding surprise, met them on the steps of the courthouse, with their dad. The ceremony lasted exactly six minutes. Even Frank found it cursory. But his bride’s beauty and demeanor compensated. In a cream-colored 1940s suit she’d found in some antiques store, carrying calla lilies and white roses, Claudia looked like Grace Kelly. When Claudia made the ancient promises, she surprised Frank when her eyes filled. She had glanced around proudly at the small group and put out her hand to Ian and Colin, pulling their hands between hers and Frank’s as Frank placed the ring on her finger.
“Pronounce us, please,” Claudia asked prettily. “Husband and wife, and parents and children.”
Not many women would have taken him on, Frank thought, and almost none would have taken all three of them. When people spoke of emotional baggage, they rarely meant a virtual mud wagon of wet rocks and manure. But so she had. With the help of a social worker Claudia knew well, the paperwork for a stepparent adoption was already under way, and the home study and interviews with Colin would begin as soon as January.
As Claudia arched her back to toss her flowers, Frank spoke to Natalie, his own eyes stinging. Wish me well, my sweetheart, my generous girl.
Protect us.
After the wedding and a lunch at Old Anthony’s, an Italian place they both loved, they all went back to Tenacity Farms. It was a mild day for the last day of the year, and Claudia changed out of her wedding dress, surely the only bride who celebrated her wedding day by putting her horse through a small exhibition. Her father, the other Dr. Campo, said to Frank, “She’s something, isn’t she? I didn’t know how she’d recover from Pro.”
“Claudia’s gifted, and she trusts me, and Glory Bee trusts her. I would have never imagined either one of those things happening.”
“Can she go all the way?”
Frank couldn’t imagine tamping down the old man’s pride by revealing Claudia’s decision. Since there was a hope, slim but real, of another time, Frank played along. “Nothing’s certain, but she’s already come further than most. I feel good about it.”
“You’ve made her happy,” Miranda said.
“I don’t quite know how all this happened,” Frank said, laughing. “But I’ll take it. I’m the one who’s lucky. Claudia’s too good to be true.”
“Wait until you get a taste of her temper,” said her dad.
“I have and I’m sticking to it. She’s too good to be true.”
The following week, Frank began the process of dissolving Tenacity. Tearfully, Eden decided to give Saratoga to her best friend from childhood. Frank obtained passage for Glory Bee, Sultana, and Bobbie Champion. Finally, on a bitter January day, he chose to walk past the lower corrals, around the indoor ring, and up Penny Hill to hand over the lease on Tenacity to the Batchelders. They could exercise the option to buy after two years unless Frank and his family returned.
When he came back, he was freezing, and quickly slipped through the outer and inner doors to take refuge by the fire in one of the leather chairs that wasn’t new—an old high-backed oxblood-colored thing that had belonged to his father. How many times had he sat in this very chair, removing his gloves and liners, holding his fingers out to the fire, trying to pick out the bouquets of spices—turmeric or cumin or oregano—that described the dinner to come. He sat back and looked up at the rubbed hardwoods of the wide stairs, the marks on the wall beside the downstairs bath that signaled the incremental growth of Eden Constable Mercy, the great half-moon window at the end of the living room that showed the rise to Penny Hill and, each night, showcased the sunset. How many other Mercys before him had done the same thing?
As they began to pack, and to separate out what they would sell before the move, Hope grew pensive and, on occasion, weepy. She looked at things she certainly would not need—an ancient set of embroidered towels, a nest of cast-iron cake-baking mugs, outdated art unearthed from closets, a thousand hardcover books—and treasured them unreasonably. For the first time Frank could remember, she seemed querulous. One day, as she and Eden prepared tags for the auction to come, she said, “It’s not these things. It’s what I see as I sort them. I fed my babies in this kitchen. It may be fixed up, but it’s still my kitchen. I still see the same trees and fields and hills from my windows. I roasted a hundred turkeys, and sat up late at this table doing the bills after Francis died, waiting for Eden to come home from a date, doing the dishes while a thunderstorm rolled up over those hills. I’m leaving the thousands of mornings I started my day in this room, taking my coffee and my newspaper to that big red leather chair. I leave the sound of Frank calling my name when he came home from overseas with the medal, and the doorway he carried me through when I was a twenty-year-old bride. The phone call telling me that you and Natalie were going to be married, and that my husband was dead. All the sun and shadows of a life.”
Together, for a moment, they listened to Ian, who was murmuring to the fish, something he did often, calling them by name, and lately, encouraging them not to forget him. All of the grownups had explained to Ian that their new house might one day have a place for an aquarium, maybe even an aquarium as big as this one, but they couldn’t take these very fish or this very aquarium. Frank warned Ian that if they started feeling pretty sure they wanted to do it even when they knew they couldn’t, they would know it was Ian working on their brains and Ian would get a consequence for that: it was hard enough for all of them to move and Ian didn’t need to make it harder.
Knowing he sounded like a child, Frank said, “You’ll make new memories, Mom.”
“No, I won’t. But I’ll try to keep these dear. I always imagined that I would be the grandmother in this house and this would be where my grandchildren would come for summer weeks.”
Frank said, “I’m sorry.” He added, “You could get married again. Plenty of people in their seventies get married.”
“Plenty of people in their seventies die, Frank, and a few people in their seventies get married. I’ve had about five dates since your father died, period.”
Frank had no idea there had been so many.
“But if you went now, and Eden and Marty went, given everything that’s happened, it wouldn’t be the same. It’s as if I’m not leaving home, Frank, it’s leaving me.”