Untethered

by Julie Lawson Timmer

“It’s such a beautiful desk,” Allie said.

  Char ran a fingertip along the brass pull on the top drawer. “Mmm-hmm.”

  Allie came closer and touched the wood. “I think I was twelve before he even let me touch it. ‘Not with those hands, young lady.’ Even when I’d just had a bath!”

  “Would you like it?” Char asked. “Your mom might not have room for it now, but I could keep it for you, for as long as you like.”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t think I could . . .” Allie let her sentence trail off, and when she finished it, Char was surprised by the ending. “Move it out of Mount Pleasant,” Allie said.

  “This was his favorite place on earth. ‘As odd as that might seem.’” She made air quotes for the last bit. Bradley wasn’t apologetic about the love he felt for his hometown, but he acknowledged he was a rare person to be so enamored with a city that had never been in the running for a spot on any “Best Places to Live” list.

  “But maybe you’re going to leave,” Allie said. “I mean, this isn’t your hometown. Maybe you’ll want to move to South Carolina to be closer to Will. Or back to D.C.”

  She eyed the desk. “It doesn’t have to stay in Mount Pleasant. You should keep it. Take it with you when you go. I can take other things to remember him by. I’m betting my mom won’t allow it, anyway. You know, unless I have it painted white. Or pink.”

  “I don’t have any plans to leave,” Char said. “Not until you’ve at least finished high school, anyway. That way, if you’re in California and you want to come back and see Sydney, and Morgan, and whoever else, you’ll have a place to stay.”

  Will cleared his throat and Char stared him down. Char’s friend Ruth had broken her leg skiing and was devastated not to be able to make the trip from D.C. for Bradley’s funeral. She had called Char every day, though, and on Friday, she floated out the idea that maybe Char should consider going back to American University for the next school year. One of the full professors in the journalism department had announced plans to retire in the summer, and the dean was already interviewing possible replacements.

  “I know it’s too soon to be discussing such a big move,” Ruth told Char. “Don’t make any big changes for a year—that’s what they tell widows. But I think they’d make an exception in the case where the widow might end up stranded in the middle of nowhere, without family or close friends or the job she really wants, when she could so easily correct all of those things.”

  Will thought Char should follow Ruth’s advice. She didn’t have to accept the job, but she should at least apply for it. Go to D.C. and speak with the dean, he urged her. If Lindy were to let Allie stay in Mount Pleasant, Char could put the brakes on the D.C. plan.

  But if Lindy wanted Allie in California, Char would have an escape route in place, to a city that offered a career she actually loved, colleagues she had known for years, and a solid group of friends, led by Ruth. All Mount Pleasant would offer, once Allie left, was an unfulfilling, cobbled-together schedule of adjunct teaching and freelance editing, and a lot of painful memories.

  But Char wasn’t ready to talk about leaving Michigan yet. As long as Lindy was waffling about where Allie should live, this was where Char needed to focus all of her energies. Allie needed someone constant, grounded. She would never get that from Lindy, so she needed to feel it from Char. How constant, how grounded, could Char be for the girl if she had one foot out the door to D.C.? Talk of revamping her career could come later, once they knew what Allie’s future held. For now, there would be no such talk.

  “Really?” Allie said. “You’re not dying to get back to D.C.? To be a professor again? Uncle Will’s always teasing you about how in love with it you were. The city, and your job—”

  “Maybe someday,” Char said. “For now, I’m perfectly happy with my freelance work, and the CMU job.” She pretended not to notice that her brother was glaring at her. “And I’d be happy to have you buzz in for a weekend every few months, to see your pals. And haul me out for hikes in the state land, remind me how old and out of shape I am.”

  She pointed to the back wall of the office. Like the back wall of the adjoining family room and dining area, it was floor-to-ceiling glass. Not an inexpensive choice in a climate like Michigan, but worth it, Bradley always said, for the view it gave them.

  “Nothing but trees, for miles and miles,” he loved to announce, as he opened his arms wide toward the back windows. Their backyard sloped down to a shallow ravine with a narrow stream at its bottom. A few steps across the wooden planks Bradley had laid down over the stream, and they were standing at the edge of sixty acres of forested state land that had provided them with hours and hours of family hikes.

  Most of their hikes began and ended with Allie calling, “Hurry uuuuuppp, you guys!”

  “It’s like having a puppy,” Bradley had warned Char the first time the three of them went hiking. “We walk straight at a consistent pace, she zooms off in every direction, and every few minutes, she races back to make sure we’re still okay. I’m half tempted to carry cookies in my pocket to reward her each time she returns. Make her sit, and stay.

  “It’s hard to enjoy the serenity of my hike when this blur of color is shooting across the path in front of me, beside me, behind me, every few minutes. On the bright side, though, it gives me lots of opportunities for this.” He pulled Char to him and kissed her, something Allie deemed “gross” and couldn’t stand to witness.

  “That’s a very bright ‘bride side,’” Char said, kissing him back.

  “Ewwwww,” they heard from far off, to their right, followed by the sound of snapping branches as Allie bounded through the woods, her repeated “Ewwwww”s getting fainter and fainter. Laughing, they broke off the kiss and continued hiking.

  “It’s safe again!” Bradley called out, and seconds later, Allie came sprinting up the trail toward them.

  “Should I pat her on the head and say, ‘Good girl’?” Char whispered. Bradley, laughing, did exactly that.

  “Daaaaaaad!” Allie ducked her head down and away from her father’s hand, then spun left and darted off the trail and into the woods.

  Char smiled with the memory, not only of that first hike and those still-precious early kisses, but of the hundreds of hikes the three of them had taken since then, and the many later kisses she and Bradley had shared. Allie was watching her closely, and Char blinked, willing her eyes to remain dry. She didn’t want Allie’s memories of her hikes with her father to be marred by the image of Char bawling about them.

  “You’d stay here until I graduate, just to make it easier for me to come back and see my friends?” Allie asked.

  Will tapped the backs of the teenager’s legs with a box. “Don’t pretend that’s surprising to you.”

  “No,” Allie said. “Of course not. It’s just . . . nice.”

  Char directed her gaze, and the conversation, to the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that made up the wall opposite the window. “Do you want any of those? Wouldn’t take up much room in your mom’s condo.”

  Typical of Bradley, the books were organized into categories: professional texts, general reference books such as dictionaries and parenting guides, nonfiction, fiction. They stood like soldiers, straight-backed and orderly, their spines aligned with precision so that no single title protruded farther than its neighbors. Allie once confessed that she used to pull a book out an inch while her father wasn’t looking, to see how long it would take him to notice and push the offending title back into place. It had never taken him long.

  Allie found her dad’s meticulousness to be “totally dorky.” “As much as it’s against my own interests to say this,” Bradley once told his new wife, “I have to admit I think Allie’s right on this one. Never has anyone ever found this particular quality of mine to be appealing.” But Char wasn’t “anyone,” and more than a few of their rolls in the sheets together had been
initiated by her walking into a room to discover her husband reorganizing items by size or color or height or function. She would laugh at him, tease him for it, and then attack him.

  It drove him into fits when she or Allie stacked the bowls unevenly in the kitchen cupboard. “There are eight bowls,” he would announce. “Eight. It’s a number divisible by two. Two stacks, four bowls each. Who in her right mind would even dream of three and five? It’s preposterous!”

  But the bowls continued to appear in unequal stacks, and Bradley continued to rant about it, and to redistribute them. And his wife continued to pull him to the bedroom every time she caught him doing it. “I used to think Allie was stacking the bowls the wrong way on purpose, to mess with my head,” Bradley told Char after one such session in bed. “Now I’m beginning to suspect it’s someone else in the house who’s sabotaging the china, and for a very different reason.”

  Char felt the corners of her eyes burn, and she turned quickly away from Allie, raising a tissue to her face with the pretense she was about to sneeze. She wiped her wet eyes and took a moment to compose herself. When she turned back, she found Allie looking at Will and shaking her head, a thumb pointing behind her, toward Char. Will’s hands were raised chest high, his shoulders lifted.

  “What?” Char asked, looking at each of them in turn. “I thought I was going to sneeze, that’s all.” Will shook his head and went back to the boxes and Allie said, “Whatever,” and stepped to the bookshelves.

  Walking her fingers over the spines of one row, Allie said, “The books he used to read to me are all in my room. Those are the ones I want to keep. They’re the ones with all the memories. Although . . .” She scanned the shelves. “Where is it? Could he have . . . Oh! There it is!”

  She stepped to her right, in front of the “General Reference” section, bent, and pulled something out. Turning to Char, she held it up victoriously. It was an old road atlas. “I was starting to wonder if he’d gotten rid of it.”

  “Never!” Char said. “It was like a Bible to him. Or a diary. Or—”

  “All of those things,” Allie said. She flipped through the atlas, stopping now and then at a page and tracing her index finger over something. Quietly she said, “We took a lot of trips.”

  Without seeing the pages, Char knew what Allie was tracing: Bradley’s handwriting. He had bought the atlas before Allie was a week old, he told Char. He was so eager to take his daughter road tripping and camping throughout Michigan and the Midwest. Lindy would have no part of roughing it, so it was a daddy-daughter thing from the start.

  Bradley carted the atlas with them on every trip, marking their route with a red pen, noting the places he planned to stop, circling the locations they had loved the most, and writing notes about their stay.

  “Great burgers here!”

  “Call ahead to reserve lakeside campsite—place fills quickly.”

  “Cool campsite, but bring more bug spray next time. Mosquitoes 100 / Allie + Dad 0.”

  “You’re such a dork, Dad,” Allie said every time she saw him making a new annotation in the atlas. But any time he had the book out, she flipped through the pages and reread all the notes he had made over the years.

  Char had been prepared to let them continue their daddy-daughter tradition on their own, but when Allie found out her stepmom liked camping, the girl insisted she be included in their annual treks. Soon they were making a few trips each summer, and each time Bradley produced the atlas and his red pen at the end of the day, Char joined her stepdaughter in teasing him about it.

  “We had some very good times on those trips,” Char said.

  “Yeah,” Allie said. “We did.” She turned a few more pages and studied them before lifting her face to Char. “I know I was a holy terror for a while there. But for some reason, I never let that bleed over into camping trips.”

  “That’s probably why they’re some of my favorite memories,” Char said, winking.

  Allie closed the book. “You know, CC, I’m not sure I’ve ever really apologized to you for that year—”

  Char raised a finger to her lips and turned away to inspect the remaining stacks of papers on Bradley’s desk. She was having a hard enough time holding herself together after what had happened in the past six days. She couldn’t possibly find the capacity to relive hurts that had occurred years ago. And this was hardly the time for Allie to have to add guilt to all of the other emotions she was feeling.

  “No better time than now to let all of that water rush under the bridge, wouldn’t you say?”

  Six

  Will insisted on getting a cab to the airport. “Allie can’t come with us,” he told Char, when she offered to drive him. “She has to wait for Lindy. And if the woman doesn’t show, and you arrive back home to find she’s been sitting here, alone—”

  “Enough said.” Char kissed his cheek.

  He said good-bye to Allie in her room, and Char walked him out. “You’re the world’s best brother,” she told him as the cab pulled up.

  She held the front door open for him, and he pushed through, pulling his bag with one hand and balancing the two file boxes for Bradley’s office on the other arm. Will nodded to the cabbie and handed him his bag and the boxes to put into the trunk, then hugged Char tightly.

  “Call me anytime,” he said. “And remember, open invitation next month, when the kid goes to California for spring break. There’s a lumpy pullout in Clemson, South Carolina, with your name on it.”

  “As inviting as that sounds,” Char said, “I think I’m going to spend the week playing an old role of mine. It’s one you might not remember: your sister as an independent woman. I’m going to start fishing for some new projects, see if I can make myself as busy as I used to be. I’m hoping to spend Allie’s break with a tall pile of manuscripts and a pot of tea—my two old best friends.”

  “Sounds good,” he said, kissing her cheek and lowering himself into the car. “And you never stopped being independent. You just became a different kind of independent. A scaled-down version. You’ll be fine. You just need to, you know, find your . . . um . . . scales.”

  “Was that your version of a pep talk? Because if it was, I’m reconsidering the ‘world’s best brother’ comment.”

  Will laughed. “This is one of the many times when being your only brother is my saving grace.”

  • • •

  Char hadn’t even taken her boots off when the doorbell rang. It was Colleen and her daughter, Sydney, Allie’s best friend. The girls weren’t the only reason Colleen and Char had become close. There were many other mothers on the field hockey and soccer sidelines whom Char hadn’t bonded with. There was something special about Colleen, though. She had moved away for college, stayed away for a job, and returned to Mount Pleasant only after she was married.

  It had become clear to Char that people who moved back to town despite having many good options elsewhere seemed to have a different worldview than those for whom, for whatever reason, staying put was the only choice. Char had met some “townies” who openly seethed about Lindy’s so-called escape, as though her rejection of her husband and her hometown censured them, too. It put Char in the position of having to defend Lindy, which she didn’t always feel like doing.

  Colleen wasn’t personally offended by Lindy in the least. She sometimes made one comment too many about her, but mostly, she found the whole thing amusing—even Lindy’s habit of introducing herself to Colleen each time she came back to town, as though the two women hadn’t grown up two blocks apart and attended school together for fifteen years.

  “Hi, sweetie,” Colleen said. She kissed Char on the cheek and bent to pick up three sympathy cards from the front-hall floor. “Charlotte,” she said, straightening and turning the cards over. None had been opened. “Seriously?”

  Char hadn’t been able to face the cards that had been dropping through the mail slot
for the past few days. At first, she had let them lie there, but Colleen, who had been checking in every day, had clucked and shaken her head and piled them into neat stacks on the foyer table with strict orders that Char needed to stop stepping over them and start picking them up from the floor and reading them.

  “Will must have knocked those off when he went past,” Char said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  Allie appeared then, jumping down to the front hall from the top of the three-step stairway that led to the living room at the front of the house. “Sydney!”

  Sydney squeezed past the adults and ran to Allie, and Char pretended to listen to Colleen chastising her about the mail as she kept an ear tuned to the girls. Eavesdropping had always been a bad habit of hers. It was like reading the kid’s diary, Bradley said once.

  “Not even close,” she told him. “There’s no reasonable expectation of privacy when you’re having a discussion in the same room as someone else.”

  He chortled. “What are you, a lawyer? It’s a bad habit. It’s not respectful. And it’s going to get you in trouble one day.”

  “I’ll quit, I’ll quit,” she promised. But she didn’t really mean it, and from the way he sighed, she knew he knew that. It wasn’t like he didn’t have his own bad habits, she had reasoned at the time, some of which had driven her crazy. Although, standing in the front hall now, she couldn’t remember a single one.

  “Hey, Allie,” Sydney said. “You okay?”

  Char strained to hear Allie’s answer, but couldn’t.

  “So, what’ve you been doing?” Sydney asked. Char could hear the sound of Sydney pulling off her boots and unzipping her coat.

  “Not much. We had brunch.”

  “Oh, right, the brunch thing. Did your mom actually eat anything?”

  “She didn’t come,” Allie said.

  “What? Why not?” Char heard Allie whisper something and Sydney sighed and said, “Whatever. Sorry. But maybe it’s for the best. You hate eating in the morning anyway, and the combination of food and your mom—”