Never Too Late

by Jo Barney

  “We’ve got to get together with Eleanor! She has no upper arm flab, and her boobs, damn, well, her husband likes big boobs. I don’t, personally, but no accounting for tastes, and she gave me Dr. Johansen’s name when I got worried about my neck. I’m also considering my earlobes. Are yours hanging down to your shoulders like mine?” She pauses to take a breath. “No, of course they aren’t. You don’t wear earrings. You should.”

  “Dr. Johansen?”

  “Peter Johansen. The best.” Her words are muffled. “Okay, honey. I’m through talking.” Lynne comes back, whispers, “He likes a little Wednesday nooner. Sometimes I do too. I’ll call you.”

  It is obvious to me that today Lynne is not into the kind of intimacy I’m seeking, the kind in which one can confess to maybe killing a husband.

  I go back to the bathroom mirror, stretch back a half-inch of skin on each side of my ears, let it snap back. Back-lit, I notice my cracks don’t look that bad.

  I’ll try Kathleen again. At the third ring, my daughter-in-law answers. Instead of explaining her absence, Kathleen says, “I’m glad you called, Edith. I need a little help, only a few nights. I know you are busy, but…”

  I am so pleased with the request I don’t even ask what it is. “Of course. Right now?” I hesitate because I’d like to tell her about a woman in a purple suit, but no matter. “I can come.”

  “This weekend. I want the kids to feel okay and happy, and they will with you. I can’t explain right now, but Brian and I will be going somewhere, we haven’t decided where, and we will be talking. I wish I could tell you more, but I promised him I would not say anything now or maybe ever.”

  Her wavering voice sounds familiar. Like my own, the day I confessed to my mother that I was pregnant. Pleading for something. Love, probably, on my part. Perhaps Kathleen is asking for something similar.

  “Can you take the kids for a couple of days?”

  “Of course. I’ve been meaning to teach them one of the fundamental skills in life and this will be a good time.”

  “Skills?”

  “How to make the world’s best mac and cheese. I’ve got all of the essential ingredients and a little ham if we want to dress it up.” I used to make mac and cheese with Brian. I can do it again with his children. In fact, I need to, since their mother doesn’t do carbs in her own kitchen.

  “I’ll bring them by tomorrow, after school with their sleeping bags.” Kathleen hangs up without saying goodbye.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Kathleen arrives with the children on Friday afternoon. She also brings sliced carrots, apples, unsalted nuts, yogurt, and for dessert, she explains, a whole-wheat muffin, no butter please. Dinner will be the promised mac and cheese with a side dish of steamed spinach which blooms greenly from the bag she carries in her arms. Kathleen looks exhausted despite the smile she’s planted on her lips. Her hair apparently has been overlooked in the rush to gather food. Straggles trail out of the center of the bun and curl on her collar, and she pokes a finger at them. “Sunday morning,” she promises, as she stops at the door. “Scrambled eggs would be good. You have eggs? And by the way, I love your new hair, Mom.”

  The Mom again. My daughter-in-law isn’t just worried about eggs. “Yep, we’ve got everything. Have a good time.” I suspect that a good time isn’t the purpose of this unusual depositing of kids, and that Brian and Kathleen aren’t going away from home.

  Friday evening we lay out the sleeping bags, sample a new cookie dough ice cream, and they read themselves to sleep with the books in their backpacks.

  * * *

  The next morning, “Cartoons,” the kids suggest when I ask what they want to do.

  “Does your mother let you watch TV?”

  Meg looks at Winston. “Sometimes. For an hour or so. When we’ve done our chores.”

  “I’m assuming you’ve both done your chores sometime this week.” I turn on the television, and after a few minutes, I understand that today’s cartoons are not the cartoons of forty years ago. These are sermons, a Sunday School in color, vegetables teaching children how to treat each other, why being good is better than being bad, and in one short segment, not to bully your sister because in the long run, she’ll make you pay. What happened, I wonder, to the Road Runner and Coyote, who were in trouble all of the time, no learning experience to be had? And Bugs Bunny? But once I get used to the fast pace of the dialogue, I am pulled into the stories and am disappointed when SpongeBob slips behind a wall of advertisements.

  “I’m bored.” Winston is flailing in the corner of the sofa as if he’s in pain. “What else is there to do?” For the moment, Meg ignores her brother, eyes focused on a Kellogg tiger.

  “And Grandma, why is your hair yellow?” Meg has also become bored enough to notice my new hair during the next ad. “And your cheeks so red?”

  “I’m practicing to become a new me,” I answer. “I believe change is good thing for people. Maybe next time my hair will be ginger.”

  “Ginger?” Winston is squinting at me, imagining.

  “Orange.”

  “I’d like to change me,” Meg says. “I’d like blue hair and pink lips.”

  “Green, curly hair,” Winston adds. “For me. And tattoos up my arms.”

  Why not? “Come on, guys. Your wishes are about to come true.” Food dye? It’ll wash out, like it does from one’s fingers after dyeing eggs. It should, at least. Tattoos will be easy. What else? My grandchildren giggle and follow me into the kitchen, watch me reach for the bottles, bring out the stool and chair that will allow them to stand at the sink and become new people, hair-wise.

  I hope the blue and green will also wash out from my towels. At least I have thought ahead that far. I don’t even try to imagine getting it out of the stringy hair that drips onto toweled shoulders. And I am disappointed when my old foam curlers won’t stay rolled, and Winston and I have to admit defeat on the curly wish.

  I feel a little crazy, in a good way. As if I am a kid myself, looking for trouble, wondering how far I can go without getting myself in trouble. I hear myself say, “Did I hear tattoos? Stay where you are, and I’ll get the tattoo gun.” Markers, bought and forgotten in a drawer at Christmas. I check the box. Washable. Thank God. “What’ll it be?”

  The boy is first. I suggest a triceratops, and he tells me that at ten he is way too old for dinosaurs. He settles for a space rocket zooming off one arm. And Meg?

  Meg isn’t sure about tattoos. “Maybe a butterfly on my ankle.” That accomplished, she adds, “I want pink lips and red cheeks like yours and Mama’s.”

  “And maybe a mustache for your brother?”

  We head for the makeup drawer in the bathroom, a drawer until just recently rarely opened. A few minutes later the children take a peek at themselves in the mirror. Meg says, “I’m a different person.”

  Winston frowns. “Not really, you still act like yourself.”

  “So who should she act like?”

  “A famous movie star. Maybe Julia Roberts.”

  “And who will you act like?”

  Winston takes another look at himself. “Matthew Broderick with green hair. And a mustache.”

  I don’t know who Matthew Broderick is. Not a mass murderer, I’m pretty sure. Or even a zombie, which I believe is becoming a craze. Kathleen wouldn’t allow people like that into her children’s lives, even in the movies. “Okay. And I don’t think we are really new people unless other people think so, too. Where shall we go?” A walk through the park or visiting one of my neighbors would do it.

  “McDonald’s.” Both children grin at me.

  Oh, why not? I’ve been saying “Why not?” a lot this morning. It seems like a good way to look at things, things being what they are. “Well, new people probably should go to new places. I’ve never been there, and I bet you haven’t either.”

  “Once, when Daddy was in charge of us, and he burned the beans.”

  We walk to McDonald’s, on the way watching people’s reactio
ns when they see green and blue hair, tattoos, pink lips. And a grinning, spiky-haired grandma. Somewhere during the next hour I realize I haven’t had so much fun since I can’t remember when. My red cheeks ache from smiling.

  On the way back, we walk to the park, our new selves slightly smudged but still attention-getting, and then we make the mac and cheese, Meg and Winston standing on a stool or kneeling on a chair to reach the counter as they stir and grate. I did this almost forty years ago. Brian was about eight, wanted to learn to cook, despite his father’s ha, and the two of us did just as I and my grandchildren are doing now. A crazy, crazy thought interrupts my stirring. If history does repeat itself, is it possible that Brian is reenacting his father’s story of infidelity? Brian, the bright, sensitive son who loved mac and cheese? I have to turn my head away from the bubbling pots and the blue and green heads and wipe my eyes on a paper towel. What does any of this mean? Anything, at all?

  “Grandma, the mac is boiling over!” As I turn down the burner and uncover the pot, I have an answer of sorts. One lives for the moments like this one.

  I decide that before they go to bed, the children should take a shower to remove the day-old evidence, but not before I take several pictures that will remind me of this lovely day. For the albums. The blue and the green, with several applications of shampoo, wash out, and the tattoos disappear under the natural sponge.

  I’ve found a couple of the old children’s books I’ve stored for years, and they quiet the kids down. Make Way for Ducklings, Ten Thousand Cats, Lyle the Crocodile. For younger children and for sensitive older ones who want to please their grandmother. “Old stories,” I say. “Almost as old as me.” I nap a bit as the children page through their father’s worn picture books.

  They are back to themselves, and perhaps I am also, whatever that means. For right now, it means lying on the floor between two damp-haired children in sleeping bags, holding a book on my chest, and reading about a girl who shouldn’t have taken a bite of that apple.

  “Boring,” declares Winston, and he turns his back away from the light and falls asleep.

  “Keep going, Grandma,” Megan commands.

  In the morning, at the sound of the doorbell, I hide the cut-up veggies and yogurt at the back of the fridge, stuff the wilting spinach in the garbage and then go to let Kathleen in. My daughter-in-law’s eyes swim in gray pools. The hair hasn’t improved.

  “Thank you so much, Edith,” she says as she shuffles the backpacks and her children toward the car. “I’ll call you. Soon. “

  Chapter Sixteen

  What does one wear to a meeting with a satin-voice in a purple suit and heels? On Monday morning, I answer my question and get ready to meet her. Jeans, the pair without the hole in the knee caused by an ungraceful stumble over a planter box a while back, and a top that settles over the jeans in a somewhat narrow facsimile of a profile. My red jacket, and if it is raining, my red knit cap. If I relax my lips a little, the crevasses at the edges of my lips turn into pleasant, non-threatening valleys. How long can one maintain pleasant valleys, I wonder as I head out to Cuppa to receive what might be really unpleasant information.

  I sit at the table, my untasted latte in front of me, and wait. A woman walks through the door, glances around, finds my red jacket, and points a finger at me. “I’ll get my coffee and be right there,” she calls as she heads toward the barista.

  I had been right about the middle-age, the great suit, the heels, but dead wrong on everything else. This woman has a wide, white-toothed smile, hands that move like dancers when she speaks, and black hair gathered into bun at the back of her head, a white orchid perching on it. Her bracelet is jade, the color of her cheerful shoes. Lynne has a word for a woman who looks like this: fabulous. And I’m glad the distracting orchid and the shoes aren’t visible when she sits down in front of me. But her green eyes, her smooth, light-brown face are.

  “Hello!” She holds out a hand, and I take it, feel the firm skin, the warm welcome it contains.

  I hesitate. “How do you know Art?” I bring my cooled cup to my lips.

  “I’m a social worker, a department head at Children’s Services, have been for years. I’ve met lots of parents and lots of kids, but Art and Latisha were something else, as you may know.”

  The coffee is bitter. I set the cup down. “I know nothing. Tell me.”

  “Art is dead.” Not a question, and she continues, not waiting for my response. “Normally, I’d feel uncomfortable talking about a client, but Art wasn’t a client, more of a friend who needed a little help from someone like me who knows the complicated social services system. But with him gone, well, a lot is now explained. Latisha has felt abandoned these past weeks. Now she’ll know why. Won’t make her feel any better, of course, but she won’t continue to imagine he’s left her on purpose.”

  The woman is speaking in some sort of foreign language. Abandoned? Left her? Who is this person Art has managed to make feel bad? “Start at the beginning. I don’t understand a word you’re saying.”

  Ginnie pauses, pushes aside her cup. She seems to be making a decision. “I met Art last fall when he came into my office looking for a child. She had been given up for adoption eighteen years earlier, and he wanted to make contact, find out how her life had gone, if she wanted to meet her father. He gave me the name of her birth mother, the girl’s date of birth. I actually knew the girl because she had entered a foster home when she was fourteen, after her adoptive father went to prison and her adoptive mother died. I explained to him that because she’s eighteen, she could begin her own search for her birth parents. Perhaps we should let her decide if she wants to do this. She was about to enter college. I said perhaps the timing was wrong.”

  “I still don’t get it. What reason did Art give you for wanting to find this girl, this Latisha?”

  “I spoke inappropriately when I gave you her name. A mistake.” Ginnie Washington looks away, touches an earring. “I regret it.” Then she seems to forgive herself and continues. “At first, he didn’t give a reason. I assumed he was her birth father…”

  “Art and I were married eighteen years ago and long before that. I would have known, wouldn’t I, if he had taken up with another woman, had a child?”

  No, I probably wouldn’t have. Eighteen years ago my only son was about to marry a woman I didn’t like, and I was obsessed, a crazy person, in fact, as I lay awake nights and plotted to break them up. Even at this moment I’m embarrassed to remember that I hired a private detective to try to catch Kathleen in some indiscriminate act.

  After the detective reported that she’d had a date with a male in a small restaurant during which she had broken into tears and left the table, I invited her to coffee in my kitchen and accused her of being a two-timer.

  I could barely hear her quiet, furious response. “I can’t believe you! He’s an old friend from high school, a sick friend who told me that night that he had leukemia. Yes, I cried.” She stood, reached out, took a step toward me, and for a moment, I thought she might hit me. Instead, she grabbed her purse, slammed the door, and walked away. And when he heard about our meeting, my accusations, Brian walked away from me, too. It took me days to find the courage to apologize, and more time for the apology to be accepted by both him and Kathleen. And to get invited to the wedding. They were that angry. I blamed menopause, but I began to understand that my meanness grew from my envy of their happiness.

  Ginnie doesn’t answer my question. “Art gave me a phone number and told me that he’d like to talk to her if she wanted to know more about her roots. I did a background check on him, and a wife appeared in his records, but he never spoke of her. I supposed she wasn’t in the picture anymore. He claimed that an interested party asked him to find out how she was doing. Like I said, I assumed that he was the interested party but wasn’t ready to reveal that fact. When I asked Latisha, she smiled and said she’d like to talk to him, too.”

  She must have seen my eyebrows rise in disbelief. “I
know,” she adds. “But Latisha is eighteen. She’s on her own now. She has the right to make her own decisions about Art. And she did. She had dinner with him a number of times after I introduced them, and I went along a time or two. He was very interested in her plans for her future, her education, what she wanted to do with her life. She told me when I called to see how she was doing that he’d given her money for her books at school when she mentioned needing to get a loan from a friend. ‘Not a loan, this,’ he told her, handing her an envelope. ‘A prize for being a good kid.’”

  “Does Latisha have black hair done up in corkscrews, big hair falling to her shoulders. And is she black?”

  “Yes. Light-skinned like me.”

  I haven’t given much thought to Ginnie’s skin color; the green eyes spoke first, diverting most other impressions except how stunning the woman was. Maybe that’s why the waitress at Jake’s hadn’t noticed either. Jake’s. “Did Art ever get really angry when you were out with him?”

  She shrugged. “Once, maybe, when he tried to buy a celebratory drink for Latisha. He was usually very quiet and intense whenever I saw him. Like he had something on his mind.”

  “Depressed?”

  “No, more like determined. Why?”

  “Because I’m beginning to believe that he may have misused his drugs, intentionally killed himself.”

  “Oh, no.” Ginnie shakes her head. “Doesn’t seem right. He seemed very pleased to have found Latisha finally.”

  And that doesn’t sound right, Art pleased. A gray veil of guilt settles over me, and I close my eyes against it. When had it begun, my coldness? Eighteen years ago? Is it possible that I could have sensed his infidelity? Like Kathleen, smelled another woman on him without knowing what that scent meant? Had I pulled away even more then, never to return? Or, the other possibility, this winter, on one of his night-walks, had he met a charming young woman who listened to him, who made him feel like a man again, who needed him in ways he hadn’t been needed in years, and he had figured out a way to make her part of his life?