Fiona Range

by Mary McGarry Morris

  “Yah, I’m beat. I got this brutal headache.”

  “You look tired.”

  “Lunch was crazy. We were out straight, and Sandy never showed up. It was insane.”

  “You must be beat.”

  She bit her lip. Hadn’t she just said that?

  “I tried to call you last night, but your phone’s not in service—or at least that’s what the operator said.”

  “Yah, I got sick of all the telemarketing calls, so I had it shut off,” she said with a straight face.

  “You could let your machine screen the calls. That’s what I do.”

  “But then you’re still being harassed.”

  “Yes, but at least you’d have a phone.”

  “A phone perhaps, George Grimshaw, but what about principles?” she said, then shuddered with a deep yawn.

  “You better get home and rest.” He patted her door and stood up.

  “Yah, I better.” She shifted into reverse then looked back quickly. “So why were you trying to call me? What’d you want?”

  “Nothing really. I just thought I’d call, see how things’re going.” He shrugged. “You know, just uh—”

  “Just uh, to talk about Elizabeth maybe?” she interrupted, then felt guilty seeing him wince. Poor George. He had no idea how near he stood right now to a deadly viper.

  “No,” he said quickly, then leaned down to the window again. “I was just going to ask if you wanted to, well, that is, if you might consider going out sometime. With me, that is,” he added, pointing to his chest.

  “Are you serious?” She couldn’t help laughing. For one so volatile, so unpredictable herself, she was never prepared when steadier souls veered off course.

  “Yes,” he said with an emphatic nod. “I’m dead serious. I mean, you’ve known me a long time. You know I don’t say things I don’t mean.”

  “Well no; I mean, yes, I guess you don’t.”

  “So what do you think? Will you consider it?” He grinned.

  “Yah! Sure, I’ll consider it.” She burst out laughing again. “Oh George,” she groaned, as he stepped back from the car. “I’m so sorry. I’m just a mess, I’m so out of it. Of course I’ll go out with you. You name it. Tell me when, time and place, and I’ll be ready!”

  “Tonight! Seven o’clock!” he said, grinning. “We’ll grab a bite somewhere, then maybe catch a movie,” he called, then ran back to move his van, before she could say she hadn’t meant tonight.

  She had slept for a couple of hours before George arrived in a cloud of cologne that made her eyes water and her nose run. He was all dressed up in a sport jacket and tie. He’d been lucky enough to get reservations at the Orchard House, he said with an uneasy glance at her jeans.

  “Well when you said a bite to eat, I just figured . . .”

  “Oh no! I know, I just thought the Orchard House would be nice. I haven’t been there in so long. My fault, I should have called and told you.”

  “But I don’t have a phone, right?”

  “Right. But still, I should have let you know.”

  “You just did.” She laughed. “So I’ll change. I don’t mind.”

  She ran into her bedroom and put on a skirt. When she came out he was still standing by the door, glancing through the coffee-swollen pages of an old Time magazine. There was no place to sit because the chair and sofa were piled with clothes and boxes. “I’m still unpacking,” she said as she locked the door. His quick smile brought back Elizabeth’s patient bewilderment with chaotic Fiona. She was already dreading the evening. Across the way her neighbor’s door opened a crack. “Hey, Mr. Clinch,” she called, tapping on his door as she passed. Little creep, she thought with an uneasy shiver. What if he knew Brad or Krissy? Her head hurt. George’s cologne was making her feel queasy again. She didn’t want to do this, didn’t want to be with him, but he was lonely, and in some fuzzy, unconnected logic—the pulse-beat from her sound, moral upbringing—it seemed a way to make up for last night. Penance: her hair shirt, George.

  “I’ve never moved,” he said, following her down the stairs. “Must be kind of exciting though. Having everything clean and new and freshly painted.”

  About as exciting as going out with you, she was thinking.

  It was cold inside the plumbing van. The loud rumble and rattle of pipes and tools with every bump and turn was painful to hear and made the ride to the Orchard House seem even longer. Tiny white lights outlined the branches of the gnarled apple trees surrounding the old farmhouse that for years had been the best restaurant in Dearborn.

  Fiona couldn’t remember the last time she’d been here. The waiting area was a small front parlor furnished with upholstered chairs and on one wall a long black church pew. She settled into a red wingback chair while George waited in the hallway for the hostess to return. She watched, amused to see him so nervous. He kept leaning over and peering out the window by the front door. He checked his watch for the third time, then glanced around before removing the reservations book from its stand. He turned a page, then quickly put it back just as the hostess arrived. She wondered if he had lied about having a reservation. But now the hostess was saying their table was ready.

  As soon as they were seated George ordered whiskey, straight up. Fiona was surprised to see him reach for it the minute it came. He drank half. Never much of a drinker, he was obviously nervous, his store of small talk already depleted on the ride here. He kept looking at his watch. The dull throb in her head was gaining momentum. Let him start the conversation for a change, she thought, slipping two aspirin from her pocket. She gulped them down with her soda water and immediately felt guilty. Poor George, it wasn’t his fault. He was just too damn nice, never wanting to offend anyone or, God forbid, cause a stir, but his uneasiness was really getting to her. Why did he keep looking around at all the other tables like that? It made him seem furtive, as if he didn’t belong here, as if he were an intruder in so fine a place as this, as if he were a little boy again, the plumber’s son in the middle of the night on the cellar stairs. He smiled at her and nodded, then turned again to look back over his shoulder. An older couple had just entered the dining room. The hostess seated them at the round, candlelit table behind George. He checked his watch. “It’s filling up fast. Just one more left,” he said of the empty table by the door. He took a long breath, then glanced back at the door again and sighed deeply.

  “Do you think it’s too crowded?” she asked. He was a nervous wreck. “We don’t have to stay here. We can go someplace else.”

  “Oh no! This is great! It’s so beautiful here.” He drummed his fingers on the padded tabletop and looked around again. “It’s always been your aunt and uncle’s favorite place. They celebrate all their important occasions here,” he said, his voice thinning with alarm. He cleared his throat and didn’t seem to know what to say next.

  She stared at him. And here’s another bulletin, she wanted to say: your father’s favorite place was Foster’s Pond. He caught a lot of fish there. “Really?” she said, her tongue in mortal combat with her heart as she took up the menu. What in God’s name had she let herself in for?

  He looked around again. Two women, both in black dresses, were being seated at the table by the door. He checked his watch. “Well! Here we go,” he said, opening his menu with an anxious grin. “The grilled mushrooms! That’s your aunt Arlene’s favorite. And your uncle Charles, he always orders the crab cakes,” he said so reverently she felt like screaming.

  “And what about Elizabeth, George, what does she like?” she asked, straining to at least be civil.

  “It used to be the snails.” He glanced up and shrugged. “But who knows now.”

  “Um, that’s true.” She pretended to study the menu. “She has been away a long time.”

  “Yes. And people change. Some people.”

  “But not you, right?” she said too quickly.

  He lowered the menu, his mouth opening then closing again before he spoke. “I didn’t mean tha
t the way it sounds. I’d never say anything bad about . . . about anyone in your family. I hold every single one of them in only the highest, the utmost regard.” He squirmed under her bemused gaze.

  “Feel better now that you’ve gotten that out?” She began to wonder if the message he was struggling to deliver came from Elizabeth.

  “It’s just that I don’t want anything taken the wrong way. By anyone!” he said. “Well, what I mean is, Elizabeth has her life now, and I have mine, but of course there’s always going to be the family, even though they’re separate. I mean apart. Well, in certain situations, that is. What I mean is, from you and me. Like right now.” Pausing, he peered at the menu as if for his place in the text. “The thing is, the Hollis family, well, they’re all such wonderful people.” Seeming only more frustrated, he took a deep breath.

  “Can I tell you a little secret, George? Something you may not know.” She leaned forward and lowered her voice. She had just recognized the couple at the table behind him. They were the Goldbergs, old friends of her aunt and uncle. She hadn’t seen them in years. “The Hollises, they fart and they burp just like everybody else. Just like you and me.”

  “But they all try really hard, you know, like your uncle,” George said. “I mean, he’s probably the finest man, the most principled man I’ve ever known. He’s always trying to help people.”

  “Huh!” she scoffed with a little thud of her fist on the table. “Always trying to help people! I’ll tell you the kind of help. It’s all for show, for credit. To get their picture in the paper or their name on another goddamn plaque somewhere, that’s all they care about! Believe me!”

  They both looked up sheepishly with the waitress’s arrival.

  The minute she left with their order, Fiona told him about this summer’s banishment. The Goldbergs had grown silent. She spoke softly, but felt herself getting upset again. “I mean, there I was with no place to go, and my family, well if I can even call them that now.” She rolled her eyes. “The Hollises, I should say. Yah, the Hollises with all their family unity and loyalty talk. And then when I was never more in need of unity and loyalty not one of them would help me or even believe me.”

  “Not even Elizabeth?”

  “No! She wouldn’t even look at me. I asked if I could move back home for a while, and Uncle Charles said, ‘No, Fiona. We finally have to say no to you.’ At first I didn’t really get it. I figured they thought I wanted to move back home for good or something. No, no, just a week, I tried to tell them, two weeks. A month at the most, just till I find another place. ‘No, Fiona!’ Uncle Charles says like I’m in his courtroom or something. ‘It isn’t even that you stepped over the line once too often, but that you’ve stepped over it too far this time.’

  “‘What? What line?’ I asked him. ‘Selling drugs!’ he says, looking at me, you know, like I’m some trashy defendant he can’t stand the sight of anymore, and then he just walks out of the room!

  “‘But it wasn’t me!’ I start yelling. ‘You know it wasn’t me! You know it was Todd Prescott. Jesus, I mean, selling drugs! How can you even think that of me?’

  “‘I’m sorry,’ Aunt Arlene says. ‘But you’re thirty years old now and you know we’ve always done our best and given you everything that was in our power to give.’ And the whole time she’s talking she can barely even look at me too. ‘So now, Fiona,’ she says, ‘I’m afraid we have to let you suffer the full consequences of your actions.’” Fiona’s voice quavered and she had to take a deep breath. “And so with that she started sobbing so hard she couldn’t talk, which of course only made everyone even more upset with me.”

  She sat back, relieved by the waitress’s arrival with their salads. She had never seen her aunt so distraught. Her hands had trembled out to Fiona in such helpless anguish that Jack had to call his father to help get her upstairs.

  “What about Todd?” George asked the minute the waitress left.

  “That prick!” she blurted, and the Goldbergs turned with cold stares. “I’m sorry,” she said quickly, then buried her face in her hands. “Oh God,” she whispered. “They know my aunt and uncle.”

  “They couldn’t hear,” he said softly, staring at his salad. His face was red. “Not with all this hubbub,” he added, and they both laughed. They began to eat. It was George who finally broke the silence. “What I meant was, wouldn’t he tell them the truth if you asked him? I should think he at least owes you that.”

  “Well, that’s because you think like a decent, responsible man, and all Todd cares about is himself. But you know what kills me, what’s so ironic here? No matter what he does his family gets him out of one mess after another, and me, I don’t even do anything, and my family—excuse me, the Hollises—they just want me out of their lives. I don’t know, maybe they always did.” She gave a bitter laugh. “And I was just too dense to notice.”

  “But what about Elizabeth? I mean, she knows what Prescott’s like, and she knows you better than anyone!”

  “I don’t know. I think she’s been away so long she just listens to them now.” Elizabeth’s rejection was still the deepest wound. She shrugged with a forced smile. “But then again, who knows, maybe she’s waiting for me to call her.” She paused. This was his cue. “Or maybe not,” she said.

  “Yah. She’s changed, so she thinks everyone else has too,” George said slowly, as if interpreting a foreign language.

  “Something like that.” She sighed. So maybe this was just a night out with lonely George.

  The waitress served their dinners. As they began to eat he seemed determined to talk only about food: what they were eating now; his self-description as a die-hard meat and potatoes man, declared with the staunch pride of a political affiliation.

  No wonder Elizabeth had stayed in New York all this time, Fiona thought, blinking the glaze from her eyes as he asked if she did much cooking.

  “I try not to,” she said.

  He not only loved to cook, but was determined to share the details of every single meal he had prepared in the last week. “So then, what I did last night was make this kind of hash thing with the last two slices of meatloaf.”

  “Here, try some of this.” She held a forkful of her veal to his mouth.

  Surprised, he kept looking at her, cheeks reddening as he chewed. “Thank you. Would you like to try some of mine?”

  “Sure,” she said, and his hand shook as he raised a forkful of tenderloin to her mouth. “Delicious!” She nodded. “And really tender too.” She returned to her dinner. When she looked back up he was still watching her. “Aren’t you going to finish?” She gestured at his plate.

  “Yah, I was just . . . thinking,” he said quickly, then winced as if with regret.

  “Um,” she said, taking a big bite of her roll. “Dangerous habit to get into.” She finished the roll, then started on another as if chewing and nodding might facilitate the somber pronouncement he clearly needed to make.

  “You see, Elizabeth and I . . . well, that’s beside the point.” He swallowed hard. “The thing is, I’m really enjoying this. I am! Are you?”

  “Yes. This has been great,” she added weakly, then apologized for all her complaining about the Hollises, but until tonight she had been too hurt to tell anyone.

  “At least you get things out.” He looked at her. “Elizabeth never does. I mean, everything always has to be so cheery and upbeat. But I think that’s part of what happened.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know how to put this,” he began slowly, “but in some ways I used to think Elizabeth was almost perfect, that she was almost too good.”

  “Oh God, I used to tell her that all the time, and then I’d feel so guilty!” She laughed, but could see this wasn’t at all what he had been trying to say.

  “I mean, I know we were just kids when we were going together, but now I think it was more that Elizabeth felt responsible for me than she ever really . . . well . . . well, you know what I mean.” He cleared hi
s throat, looking so miserable that she put her hand over his and assured him her cousin had loved him. In fact, she had told Fiona countless times growing up that she knew she would never love anyone the way she loved George Grimshaw.

  Poor George, she thought, embarrassed by his wan smile. Poor George, Elizabeth used to say when they were children. You know what people call him, the plumber’s son, she would fume, typically finding injustice in what was a fact of life. His father often had to take him along on emergency calls. George had spent many nights on strangers’ cellar steps doing homework under a dim bulb or dozing in the truck while his father plunged and reamed his metal snake through clogged waste pipes. Fiona remembered the time Elizabeth finally prevailed upon her father to call Mr. Grimshaw and tell him to drop George off whenever he needed to. In his terse, polite way Mr. Grimshaw let the Judge know he and his boy were managing just fine, thank you.

  “Good night, Mr. and Mrs. Goldberg,” Fiona said as she pushed in her chair.

  “Oh!” Mindy Goldberg said. “Fiona! I didn’t know that was you.”

  “Yah, right,” she said under her breath as George followed her to the door.

  She said it was too late for the movies so they were rattling and clanging their way home. A bundle of copper piping kept rolling from one side of the van to the other. George had been quiet for the last few miles. Just as they turned onto Route 28 he suggested a nightcap at Pacer’s. He’d installed their plumbing, but he’d never gone in as a customer, he said all in a rush.

  “I’m really tired. Plus I can feel that headache coming back,” she said, touching both temples.

  “Maybe some other time,” he said quickly. “I’m just curious more than anything. It’s weird, you know it’s the same with a lot of the new houses I do; you lay out all the lines, then after, you drive by and you can’t help wondering who the people are and what the family’s like.” He looked over and laughed. “I know! You’re thinking, oh my God, George Grimshaw’s just as weird as he ever was.”