“Thanks. But let’s not talk about her today, OK?”
“You got it.”
After they hang up, Van pulls his feet out of the water and sits cross-legged on the rough wood. He remembers he forgot to ask her about Irina, crying in the kitchen. If that’s something a woman really is prone to do out of just being “tired.”
The boards bounce beneath Van as someone approaches from behind. He turns to see his father, striding along with his hands clasped behind him, peering out over the harbor.
“Good morning, son. How’s the speech coming?”
Van bites back a groan. The speech. In his Barbara-wallowing, he’d neglected it. “Katya should have done this. She’s the married one.”
“You really want Katya in charge of every single thing? Anyway, you’re the lyricist. Maybe you could write us a song and just read the words.” His dad could be joking, but he’s not laughing. Nor smiling, even. Van squints up at him, taking in anew his dad’s gingery hair, going gray in odd threads here and there, his freckly scalp exposed more each time Van comes home. His eyes framed by deep wrinkles; too much squinting, maybe. Too much reading. Van catches himself pulling on his ear, so he takes his hand down and stands up from the dock. There’s something else going on. He seems slumped or sad.
Van doesn’t know what to ask, exactly, so he says, “You OK?”
“Sure.” He smiles, and it seems like his usual one, crinkling his round face into a grin.
Van wonders if he’s become hypervigilant of his family’s emotions, like his sister monitoring the slightest change in the barometric pressure. He turns his thoughts to the speech he must deliver this evening. All the time that Van’s been ruminating, Max has been staring at the water. Van knows the feeling well; one could lose whole chunks of an hour just watching the sunlight dance on the lake.
“Can I ask you something, Dad?”
“Mmmm.”
“How did you find Mom?”
Max looks away from the horizon. “Huh? She’s at the salon with your sister.”
“No, I mean, the first time. When you first met.”
“I never told you that story? I found her at the library.”
Ivan chuckles. “What, did you look for her under ‘D’ for Delouvois? No, that’s not what I mean. I’ve heard that story before. How did you find her, though? Someone you could stay married to for thirty-five years?”
That something returns again, something like sadness, a slumping. Maybe that’s what old age looks like. Maybe you lose the ability to stand as tall as you once did. “Dumb luck.” Max reaches up and ruffles Ivan’s hair, just like Mira had done the night before. “I know what you’re talking about. And my advice to you is: Stop looking so hard.”
“You weren’t looking when you met Mom?”
“I was only looking for a book.”
CHAPTER 22
Katya
“I’M SORRY I DROPPED THE PHONE.” KATYA MUMBLES THIS, AS IF ANY of the tourists going by on the sidewalk can hear her, or care that she’s on the phone with an old boyfriend.
“What? I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that. We must have a bad connection.”
You don’t know the half of it, Katya thinks. “I was just apologizing for dropping the phone.”
“So, that really was you who called last night? My caller ID said K. PETERSON, so I took a chance that it was you and dialed back.”
Katya is distracted by her mother and Patty saying something about pedicures and walking back, and she waves them off, settling onto a wrought-iron bench at the next storefront. Took a chance it was you… He wanted to hear from her.
She clears her throat, aware the silence on her end has stretched too long. “I, uh, didn’t realize it was so late. I was just, I got to talking with my parents, and…Anyway, sorry about that. I realized it was so late just at the same time as you picked up, and I ended up hanging up on you. I didn’t mean it, but it hardly seemed right to call back and bother you again to explain.”
Tom chuckles, and that sound fills Katya with a ticklish warmth. “That’s my Katya, always with an explanation. I wish I had a better one, myself, for why I called you to begin with.”
Katya grips the arm of the bench to remind herself where she is. She looks down at the platinum band on her left hand, with a three-diamond anniversary ring above it. “Oh?” is the only reply she gives.
“I mean, it must sound pretty strange, for me to be calling you based on a mirage of you driving by my house.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Her voice feels tight, like her windpipe is closing. She coughs and takes a breath. “Maybe you’ve just got old times on the brain, you know?”
“Sure, must be. So, how are you? Married? Kids?”
Katya feels a heavy connection again with the real world, the iron bench pressing into her thighs, leaving red imprints of filigree. The hot sun scorches her feet, which are outside the shade of the awning. The tourists flocking by seem louder, more bustling, their shouted conversations reminding her of squawking birds at the zoo.
“Yes, I’m married to a man I met in college. Charles. He’s a businessman. I have my own business, too. Kat’s Cradle Design; I do graphic design.”
“Ah!” Katya can hear the smile in his voice, and she pictures his dimpled chin. “I remember those little cartoons you used to do. You used to draw the cutest little sketches of all our friends.”
“And I have three children, now. Chip—that’s Charles Jr.,—Taylor and my youngest is Katherine, but we call her Kit.”
“Sounds like a full life.”
“Yes, it’s busy all right.” Katya wonders if that’s what he meant by “full.” “And you?”
“I’ve got a daughter, she’ll be thirteen next month.”
“Oh, how nice. I’ll bet she’s excited.” Katya digs her fingernails into her thigh, trying to stop herself, but she asks anyway. “And your wife?”
“Not married anymore. Emily lives with my ex in Chicago.”
“Oh, so far away.” Katya cringes for him. Much as her kids drive her insane, she’d sooner rip off her arm than live in another state.
A silence falls. Something beeps somewhere in Tom’s house, like a microwave or oven timer. Katya can’t stand conversational silence, it makes her ears ring. “I’m up here celebrating my parents’ anniversary. Here in Charlevoix, that is.”
“Say hello to the lake for me, and don’t forget to trip a fudgie.”
Katya laughs. “Trip a fudgie” was their inside joke about the tourists who flock north and buy fudge, along with T-shirts that proclaim Charlevoix as the home of “Boats, Bars, and a Few Weirdos.”
“I could do that right now, there’s a whole parade stomping by. Though really, I guess I’m a fudgie myself. I live down in Grosse Point.”
Tom gasps. “So do I! Say, maybe I really did see you that day. You ever have cause to drive down Oak Tree Lane?”
She shifts uncomfortably on the bench, then stands up so quickly she nearly whacks her head on a hanging planter filled with petunias. “Oh, I don’t know, I run the kids so many places. It’s possible, I guess.”
“You’d think it was fate, or something.”
“What brought you downstate, anyway?”
He goes into a small-talk spiel about a new job and more money luring him away from God’s country up north, and Katya sees something ahead of her on the sidewalk that makes her body go into fight-or-flight, complete with sweat and hammering heart. Her hands buzz with adrenaline.
Charles is bearing down on her, forging a path through the fudgies, who part with a mixture of irritation and awe. His mouth is so hard it looks forged from iron. The kids trail behind, hands jammed in their pockets or arms folded. It has clearly not been a good morning.
Though a part of her cries out against it, she snaps the phone shut at his approach. She pushes the button on the side to shut off the ringer.
“Oh. There you are.” Charles pulls up in front of her and the kids all jam into a cluster ar
ound him. Katya feels the presence of the building behind her, awning above, and this ring of family closing in, and she would like to bellow like a wounded bear and shove Charles with what little strength she has, right in his chest.
“Good morning,” she says instead, because that’s what one says.
“Your sister told me where to find you. If I’m going to this thing tonight, I have a lot more work to do, so you need to take charge of the kids.”
“The kids can take charge of themselves, back at the house, with Aunt Irina and Uncle Van, and Grandpa Max, and plenty of other people who are perfectly capable of taking charge, because I’m a little bit busy right now organizing an event.”
“So you don’t want to deal with them?”
Katya steals a glance behind Charles. Chip is ogling some girls in skimpy shorts passing by on the sidewalk, Taylor is crossing his eyes at his reflection in the store window behind her, but Kit appears to be taking in every word. Her hands jam deep into her pockets, elbows locked straight. Shadows darken her eyes, as she tilts her head down.
“Children are not problems to deal with, Charles. They’re not a conference call, or a meeting with investors. They are supposed to be important.”
“So why don’t you want to take them?”
“I didn’t say…Why do you have to turn things around on me?”
“I had a simple request, for you to take over for me on minding the kids because there’s freakin’ crisis at work, and I’m trying not to burden you with it, and I’m trying to get it taken care of before the party so I don’t have to spend the whole thing on my cell phone having you glare daggers at me all night.”
“What crisis?”
“Nothing to worry about, unless you want to keep paying the mortgage.”
“Charles…”
“It might be nothing, but it might be important, so please, Kat, instead of having a fight right here on the sidewalk in front of every tourist in northern Michigan, just keep track of the kids while I go try to get my ass out of the fire.”
Charles doesn’t wait for an answer but turns on his heel and strides away, so fast that Katya feels his presence sucked away from her. The kids stand on the sidewalk in that same semicircle, as if he’s still there.
Chip and Tay are paying attention now, too. The mention of money snapped them out of their daydreams. “Mom?” Tay’s voice cracks a bit, whether from anxiety or puberty Kat can’t tell.
Katya comes forward to give them all a quick group hug. It takes them a moment to move close to her, after all, people are watching, and they’re too cool for that kind of thing. But they relent for a quick squeeze. “Your dad is stressed out, and you know how he gets. Listen, what should we do now? How about we go get some lunch back at the house?”
They all make a face, and Katya’s surge of irritation rises up at their automatic rejection of everything associated with Mirabelle. Then she closes her eyes and wills it back down again. After all, she herself gets sick of wheat-flour pasta and pita bread. “Let’s eat out, then. Where would you all like to go?”
“Pizza!” shouts Kit, coming to life, dark circles now gone, her face bright again.
She lets them lead the way down the street. They thread between the fudgies clogging the sidewalk. How like Charles, in a way, that they just forge ahead without an “excuse me” or without even slowing their steps. She almost loses sight of them, but catches Chip’s short crew cut shining in the sun and Kit’s pink poufy ponytail holder, and she latches onto those cues to pull her toward her children. Yet they are not like Charles at all. His path through the crowd was arrow-straight, and people flowed around him like the river around an upstream steamboat. Katya finds it oddly heartening that the children at least seem aware of other people.
In the dim restaurant, they bump into Mira and Patty, who are just leaving. A lock of Mira’s hair has already drooped from her hairdo. Katya resolves not to say anything about it, and instead knows she will pin it back up herself, later. Patty gives her an extralong hug, just like Max had done the night before. Katya pulls away quickly, wanting to sit with the kids, feeling suddenly very attached to them. Mira and Patty announce they’re not interested in a pedicure, and instead they’re going back home to spend time with Irina and her new husband because Patty is dying to meet the Denzel look-alike, she says, and finally Katya is released from their small talk. Though she does notice an oddly distracted air about her mother, and she smelled beer on her breath, and for heaven’s sake, it’s not even noon. Honestly.
The kids bicker good-naturedly about pizza toppings, and Katya finally rewinds herself to the moment when Charles mentioned the mortgage. He’s always left her out of the business because she wasn’t especially interested, and he’s never been a forthcoming man on such things. His tales from the office are typically in miniature: which assistant is screwing up, a boorish salesman. He studiously avoids mentioning his own assistant, Tara, which is one more dead leaf on the compost pile of her suspicion about the two of them.
Katya couldn’t even say for sure what Peterson Enterprises did, though it had to do with investing and various esoteric technological advances, on the order of robots who would wash your dishes or brush the cat. Or, rather, the tiny components inside such robots.
Charles continues to bring home more than enough money to pay the mortgage (two mortgages, counting the Key Largo place), or so Katya assumes. Though, truthfully, he’s the one who pays the bills through online banking; in fact, Katya doesn’t even know the password to the account. She only knows her ATM pin number.
“Mom? Can we get ham and pineapple?”
“Sure, whatever.”
“Your hair looks like a football.” This is Kit, who already enjoys a nasty feminine pleasure in deriding Katya’s looks.
“Glad you think so,” she says, choosing to pretend she’d been paid a compliment.
Katya pretends to root in her bag for a compact or a tissue or some such thing, and surreptitiously glances at her cell-phone screen, which shows two voice mails recorded in the last fifteen minutes.
CHAPTER 23
Irina
IN THE MIRROR ON THE BACK OF THE BEDROOM DOOR, IRINA TRIES to imagine her belly swollen with child. Instead of this sunny yellow dress fluttering smoothly from her bosom to her knees, there would be a huge…mass. A growth.
She flops down on the end of the bed. Her bare feet just skim the wood floor. She swings her legs, brushing her toes across the varnished surface, picking up grains of sand that may have been brought in by her own siblings years before, after a trip to Ferry Avenue Beach.
What kind of mother refers to her unborn child as a growth? That’s one step shy of tumor. Irina nods; she’s right to give this baby over to Darius completely. She’s still a child herself and doesn’t even own a cat because it’s too much responsibility.
Irina hears a knock, and she can tell it’s Ivan. The knock is soft, hesitating, as if the knock itself is asking, Can I come in, if it’s not too much trouble? I’m sorry to bother you… Sometimes Irina thinks that Katya got the balls in the family.
“Come in.”
Indeed it is Van, wearing khaki slacks with a ballpoint pen smudge on the thigh, and an unbuttoned shirt that looks yellowed from too many bleachings. His tie is loose around his neck. His black hair sticks up spiky, not in the current fashionable way; just because it does that. Irina would like to smooth it down, but she’s too comfortable on the bed, and anyway, Van is too tall for her to reach his head.
“Hey, Reenie.”
“Hey.”
“You look pretty.”
Irina smiles down at herself. Big brothers are good for the ego even if they are blinded to flaws like chicken legs and limp, flat hair. “Thanks. What’s up? Need me to tie your tie?”
“Nah. I’ll figure that out eventually for myself. It’s just too damn muggy to get fully dressed yet. Have you seen those clouds? Kat’s having a seizure over the weather report.”
“What does she
care? The party’s inside.”
“There’s a balcony, though, and she wanted the sunset to backdrop the toast.”
“Well, she can pass around a petition against God for making it rain. Jesus.”
Any two Zielinski children’s favorite pastime is gossiping about the third. Irina has no doubt this includes her when the older two are together.
“What’s up? I should finish getting dressed.”
“Are you OK?” Van chews his lip and pulls on his earlobe, a habit that’s persisted ever since Irina can remember, and from years before her birth, according to family lore. Mira likes to joke that his right earlobe is longer than his left from all the nervous tugging.
“I’m fine. I’m just worn-out from my whirlwind wedding.”
Van sits gingerly down next to Irina, as if he’s afraid of jostling her too roughly. “Are you really?” He squints at her on the “really,” and Irina almost laughs. But she knows he’s in earnest. Van always is.
“Yes, really. What’s your problem?”
“I’m just worried about Darius. He seems so…bossy.”
Irina frowns, trying to remember when Darius has even been around Van except for their first meeting. Then she recalls the incident with the coffee and Darius concerned about the caffeine.
“Oh, that. He’s just concerned about me. I don’t take care of myself very well, you know.”
“Seems to me you’re doing OK.” Now Van folds his arms, and Irina knows what he’s thinking about. So unfair; Alex was an aberration.
“Look, I would think you’d be pleased that I have a decent guy who wants to look out for me.”
“I just don’t like his controlling behavior.” His voice drops to a theatrically low register. “Has he ever…pushed you? Or anything?”
Irina jumps up. “For fuck’s sake! Leave it to Ivan to take one tiny thing and turn into battered-woman syndrome. If this is the way you act around girls, no wonder they freak out and bail on you.”
Real Life & Liars Page 9
