by Matt Dean
Chapter 13
There was a dose of Plan B in her purse. She’d paid cash for it in West Ashley, miles from home, at a Rite Aid where she’d skulked through the aisles like a mortified teenager. When the cashier offered to sign her up for a Wellness Rewards card, she very nearly abandoned the whole project and flew from the store on guilty feet.
In the end, though, she’d come away with one white tablet in a blister pack. A single pill. It weighed almost nothing. You’d never break a sweat lifting it. Still, she had a sense that that one tiny pill was throwing off the car’s balance, slowing it down, dragging it to the right.
She drove aimlessly, playing The King Is Dead on shuffle but barely listening. She stopped at the Barnes and Noble Cafe in West Ashley and bought a tall coffee, but she was so distracted that she forgot to add sugar. She kept trying to decide what she thought, what she felt, what she did and did not know. She kept trying to make lists of pros and cons. She kept hearing Andrei’s voice in her head: What you’re saying is, you don’t want to have kids with me.
He’d gone to Atlanta, of course. She understood. Romance was all well and good, but he had a contract. What else was he supposed to do? Before leaving, he’d once again invited her to come along, but she couldn’t, or wouldn’t. It was a long drive, and she was sure they’d spend at least nine-tenths of it slogging through one argument after another. Five hours would seem like twenty.
Now that he’d gone and she’d stayed, she could admit to herself that he was right. She didn’t want to have children with him. But was that true for now, or for always? Did she have cold feet, or a cold heart, or a dying marriage?
What she needed, she thought, was a new way of thinking about the problem. Her father liked Andrei a great deal, which had always seemed like a happy accident. Her mother barely tolerated him, which had always seemed like par for the course. If she could see Andrei reflected, for just a moment, in the rosy mirror of Daddy’s good opinion, and also at the same time in the wavy funhouse glass of Mama’s antipathy, maybe she, Corinne, could see him more clearly for herself. Maybe it was a stupid idea. But it was worth a try.
She drove to Montagu Street and parked opposite her parents’ house. Holding the steering wheel at ten and two, staring blindly into the shadowed street, she let the CD play, let the music wash away her thoughts. Nobody, nobody knows. She popped the white tablet out of its blister and washed it down with cold coffee.
Cutting the engine, she got out of her car and crossed to her parents’ driveway. As she drew even with the piazza steps, the door swung open and a man stepped across the threshold. He was backlit, but she could tell that he had a bushy beard. He wasn’t anyone she knew.
From the doorway, she had to be plainly visible in the glow of the nearest streetlamp, but if the bearded man spotted her, he gave no sign. Instead, he halted abruptly and spun around. Corinne saw, then, that her father was standing in the entryway, too, and presumably had been all along. He moved swiftly forward, toward the bearded man, and grabbed him hard in a sturdy embrace.
Corinne had no words for how strange that seemed.
It wasn’t that her father had never hugged anyone. Far from it—he was an inveterate hugger. No, it was the fact that the hug itself seemed so—
Well, it seemed like an unusually close hug. That was one word she might use—close.
Her father’s eyes were shut. His lips were parted. He had the look of a man who’d abandoned himself completely, a man for whom everything had disappeared except for the intimacy of two bodies in immediate contact.
Another word she might use: Intimacy. It was a particularly intimate hug. There was something vaguely illicit about it. It was a hug, but it might as well have been a kiss.
Each man stepped back from the other. Her father’s face turned bright red. Though he was gaping at the other man, he only had to glance away to see that everything had not disappeared after all, and that there’d been a witness to this close hug, this act of intimacy.
Corinne turned and fast-walked to her car. She’d locked it—of course she’d locked it, though she wished just this once she’d forgotten. She had zero time to fish around in her purse for her keys. She dashed around the back of the car and ducked behind the rear fender on the passenger’s side.
She felt so foolish hiding practically within view of her old bedroom window that she popped back up again. The bearded man appeared in her parents’ driveway. Where it met the sidewalk, he looked left and right, as if preparing to cross the street. Again, he made no sign of having seen Corinne, but she dipped out of sight anyway—she had to, she couldn’t help it. The smell of gasoline was sharp in her nose. She took her phone from her purse, so that if necessary—if the man walked by and saw her, as he seemed sure to do—she could pretend to make a call. Hello, yes, Triple-A?
The man didn’t cross. Instead, he hurried away. Corinne waited while the quick snap of his flip-flops faded into the whoosh and buzz of the city.
What was she supposed to do now? Sneak away? Breeze into the house as if nothing had happened? She could make a scene, she supposed. She could stomp through the door, arms flailing, demanding an explanation.
But an explanation of what, exactly? A sentimental and demonstrative man had hugged someone. Not the first time, not the last.
After a time—a stretch of two or three minutes, maybe, though it felt like an age—she got to her feet. She’d been hunkered down so long that her legs had gone to sleep. While she shook them out to restore the circulation, she decided to hunker down in her empty apartment and medicate herself with rum raisin ice cream, to induce a carbohydrate coma and pretend the twenty-sixth of October had never happened. Even so, once she stepped off the curb, her tingling feet led her inexorably toward her parents’ piazza steps. She climbed them and went to the door and peered through the sidelight. The entryway was vacant now.
She should go in, shouldn’t she? Rattle her key in the sticky lock, shake the door on its tarnished hinges, call out in her cheeriest voice—Hey, y’all, it’s me!
But she didn’t do that. Instead, she walked softly to the kitchen door and stood back from it, shielding herself behind an azalea.
Mama was sitting at the island, legs crossed at the ankle, hands folded in her lap, mouth turned down at the corners. Daddy stood with his back to the corner shelf where he kept his iPod and speakers, as if his wife’s irritation or unhappiness—or perhaps her very personality—had consumed all the available space, leaving him just this tiny triangular patch of floor to occupy. She was dressed as if for work in an iron-gray skirt and crisp white blouse. He, in jeans and a T-shirt, was as rumpled and untucked as she was tidy.
He was speaking. Corinne could hear his tone, at least when the wind was right, but not his words. Without quite knowing it, she’d expected him to be pleading with Mama, begging forgiveness or understanding. If anything, he sounded cross.
Corinne’s phone jangled at full volume. The noise so startled her that her purse slipped from her fingers and fell to the patio with a whap. Her keys tumbled out, jangling on the bricks. A bottle of concealer, a pair of lipsticks, and her compact spilled out and tumbled away with a series of clacks and clatters. While she bent down to gather her things, the French doors opened.
“Coco?” It was her father. “What brings you out on a school night?”
Hugging her purse to her belly, clutching her phone in her fist, she rose and turned. “Just in the neighborhood.” She didn’t sound quite as breezy and carefree as she’d hoped to. A tampon half out of its wrapper lay against the doorsill, barely an inch from her father’s big toe. “Thought I’d, you know, drop by.”
He hugged her and kissed her cheek. “Come in, come in,” he said. “Hungry?”
Mama had a musical score spread out in front of her—wide, accordion-folded pages crammed with hand-drawn notation. She folded it up and tucked it into a manila envelope. Corinne greeted her with a kiss and hug. As they were parting, Corinne caught sight of
her phone, which was still in her hand. She’d gotten a text message from John Carter: Mamas an asshole. She thrust the device into the deepest abyss of her purse.
“Hungry?” Daddy said again. “I made croutons.”
“Just croutons?” Corinne said, sliding onto a barstool.
“Everyone’s doing that Paleo diet now,” he said. “I like to zig when everybody else is zagging.”
He bustled through the kitchen—taking a casserole dish from the oven, fetching plates from the cupboard, scooping forks from the drawer, setting two open wine bottles and three glasses on the island—but the plink of flatware and glass did little to break the deepening quiet. He scooped Caesar salad onto three plates, and they dug in. Corinne chewed slowly, trying to muffle her crunching.
“It didn’t start out contentious,” Mama said at last. She’d meticulously segregated all her croutons on one side of her plate, and now she set about stacking shards of parmesan cheese in the middle. “I was only trying to give him a little advice. A mother can still advise her son, can’t she?”
Dad wiped his mouth with his napkin. “Mary Worth meddles less than you do.”
Corinne said, “Y’all know I have no idea what we’re actually talking about, right? Who’s Mary Worth?”
Mama clucked her tongue. “When I got done with my last lesson, I found him in a practice room, working on his Brahms intermezzo.”
“She’s talking about your brother,” Daddy said.
“I still don’t understand,” Corinne said. “Isn’t he supposed to be practicing?”
“He got fired again,” Daddy said. “He was supposed to be working till close.”
“Ah,” Corinne said. “What happened? Did he just forget to show up or something?”
“Jo Barber is persnickety,” Daddy said, dismissing the whole thing with a flick of his wrist.
“He was flirting with some girl,” Mama said.
With a laugh, Corinne said, “Go, John Carter!”
Daddy closed his eyes and shook his head. Mama scowled.
“Sorry,” Corinne said. “I guess that was inappropriate.”
“He needs to get his shit together,” Mama said. “Someone needs to tell him to get his shit together.” She turned to Corinne. “Maybe you should talk to him.”
“Me?” Corinne said. “Don’t look at me. I don’t even know who Mary Worth is.”
“Leland, would you back me up for once? I’m trying to get one of these kids through college and into a decent career.”
“What are you talking about?” Corinne said. “I went to college. I graduated third in my class. I met Paul Krugman once, and he’d actually heard of me.”
“And where are you now? Getting knocked up—or trying to—is not the same as having a career.”
“Anna Grace,” Daddy said, slapping the top of the island.
“What goes on between me and my husband is—” Corinne clenched and unclenched her jaw. “What goes on between my husband and me is our business, not yours.”
After a moment, her mother said, “When someone loves you, they want for you what you want for yourself—or better yet, what you don’t yet dare to want for yourself. If someone says they love you, but they expect you to give up your dreams for theirs, then they don’t really love you.”
“So then,” Corinne said, blinking. “Just to be clear—are we talking about Andrei and me, or you and John Carter?”
“Coco,” her father said. It was only barely a word, and rather more like a weary sigh.
“I give up,” said Mama. Seizing the manila envelope containing her musical score, she held it with both hands, so tightly that she wrinkled the paper. “If the two of you are planning on ganging up on me, I give up.”
“Anna Grace,” Daddy said again, more weakly than before.
Taking her wineglass and her envelope, Mama glided away on silent bare feet. Corinne watched her retreating back until she disappeared into the front room.
“You’re not going to leave it like that,” her dad said gently. “You’ll apologize.”
It was neither a command nor a suggestion. It was nothing more than an incontrovertible fact. Soon, perhaps even tonight, Corinne would go to her mother and make amends. For now, though, her molars were still grinding together. Blood still pounded like surf in her ears. She nodded toward the stove, where her father had set the casserole dish.
“What’s the main course?” she asked him, her voice cracking. Hoping to steady herself, she laid her hands on the granite.
“Something going on?” he said. “Anything I can help with?”
“Well, there is one thing.” Her voice had evened out. The cool solidity of the granite calmed her. “I’m ravenous, even after that salad.”
Getting down from his barstool, rounding the island, he gave her a quick sideways squeeze. It was a comradely, slightly gruff gesture, the kind of hug a Little League coach might give the runt of the team. Ridiculous, inept, and exactly right.
“It’s eggplant parmesan,” he said, kissing the top of her head. “Sound good?”
She leaned into him. “Sounds perfect.”
He got fresh plates and a spatula and dished up a big helping for each of them. Garlicky steam wafted from her plate, and she took a moment to breathe it in, to savor the perfume of it. The sauce would be his Famous Marinara, the stuff he made and froze by the gallon in late May, when you could buy bushels of ripe tomatoes at the farmer’s market. They ate, silent except for Corinne’s murmurs of approval.
“I’ve been meaning to ask.” He blotted his lips with a napkin. “Do you have names yet? For the baby?”
“I don’t—” Corinne smoothed her napkin across her thigh. Nobody, nobody knows, she thought. “It’s pretty early for names. We don’t even have a blastocyst yet.”
“Your mother and I named you on our third date, before we’d even—you know.”
Cringing, Corinne said, “Yes. I do know.”
“She said she liked Corinne for a girl and Bennett for a boy. I picked the middle names. I liked the alliteration,” he said, leaning in the l’s. “Corinne Conor. Bennett Baines. Names from my family.”
“Your grandmothers’ maiden names. My middle name was your father’s middle name. I know, Daddy. I’ve heard this story before.”
“Sorry,” he said, blushing a little. “Wait twenty years, and then see how you do, generating all-original content all day long.” After a moment, he said, “Paul Krugman actually heard of you?”
Corinne cleared her throat and took a sip of water. “Just between you and me?”
He drew his fingers across his lips, as if zipping them.
“He had me confused with Elizabeth Littlefield.”
“Who?”
“A presidential appointee. She runs OPIC, which is— Well, it’s not important.” She sipped a little more water. “I usually tell that story as a joke, but this time I thought it’d work better without the punch line.”
“Uh-huh,” he said. “You fibbed. If I’d known that, I’d’ve sent you to bed without supper.”
“That reminds me,” she said. “I don’t know why it reminds me, but it does. How was your MRI? It was today, right? Did you get claustrophobic?”
Now he blushed a little deeper. “I didn’t…uh…”
“What? Daddy, no! You skipped it?”
“I canceled it. I didn’t just…blow it off.” He screwed up his napkin and left it on the counter to untwist itself. “Do you kids still use ‘blow it off’ in that sense, as in ‘to skip’?”
She gave him a long, level look.
“We had a guest coming for dinner. I had to cook.” He sighed. “They haven’t found anything. They’re not going to find anything. I’m fine. Maybe I hadn’t eaten yet that day or something. I just…fainted, that’s all.”
She took his hand. “If it turns out you have some silent disease that’s eating you up inside, I will kill you before it does. Get me?”
Clasping her hand in both of his, he
said, “Got you.”
While he cleared away the plates and filled the sink with water, she went to the corner shelf. She picked up his iPod and ran her thumb around the wheel. Pip-pip-pip, pippip. He’d been listening to something called Rhythm and Dance. Karen Holmes—one of his customary choices for entertaining.
“Will you hyphenate?” he said over the splash of water and clatter of dishes. “You know, since you kept your name? Littlefield-Long is kind of a lot for a newborn to take on.” He paused for a moment. “I guess it’s better than Long-Littlefield. Sounds vaguely Elizabethan. Aye, plowman! Harrow ye long little field ere the eventide turneth the sky’s rosy cheeks.” He gave a short bark of laughter. “Not bad, huh? Maybe I’m doing okay after all—you know, on the whole original content thing?”
On the other hand, Corinne thought, when she’d arrived, the eggplant parmesan had been warming in the oven, as yet unserved. The salad had been pristine in its wooden bowl, as beautifully arranged as something from a magazine. She set down the iPod and turned toward the sink.
“Who were you having for dinner?” she said. “Was it that bearded guy? Why didn’t he stay?”
The plinking of silverware and china abruptly stopped. He didn’t say anything. He blushed again, more deeply than before. His neck, the quarter-sized bald spot at the crown of his head, the very tips of his ears—all turned brilliantly red.
“Daddy?”
Moving rather slowly, he reached for a dish towel. Wiping and wiping and wiping his hands, he crossed toward her. It was a day of days, she thought: Men kept giving her plates of food and washing her dirty dishes and coming at her with dishwater hands. Soon, he stood quite close to her, and his face was going white and red now in waves, and it briefly occurred to her that she ought to be at least mildly frightened. Not that he would strike her, or even raise his voice. No, he’d always been a calm sort of parent, slow to rage, reluctant to bluster. But she sensed that something had altered just now, and that the alteration was not a minor one.
“I should tell you—” he said. He twirled the towel around into a kind of braid. “It’s not a very easy thing—”
“Jesus.” She grasped his wrist. “Oh, Jesus. Is this about the MRI—about why you skipped it? Or why you fainted?”
“Oh, God, no,” he said. He cleared his throat and took a step back. “No, not at all. It’s like I said. I just fainted. That’s all.”
“You promise?”
“Cross my heart.” With his forefinger, he drew a little X on the left side of his chest, and then with a halfhearted smile, a vague aspiration of a smile, he added, “And hope to not die.” Looking down at his hands, he went on. “What I was going to say is— I should tell you—” Now, all at once, he straightened his back and held her eyes with his own. “I should tell you that I’m very proud of you.”
She waited for more.
“Things get tricky sometimes with you and your mama. I know that. But she’s proud of you, too.”
Corinne bit her lip. He’d had to do this kind of patch-up job more times than she could count on all her fingers and all her toes. It couldn’t possibly have caused him any worry or required any great mustering of courage. There was something else, some shift beneath the surface of things. And what else could it be, other than his health—some horrible decline yet to come? Maybe the bearded man had been a counselor of some sort. He’d had that hippyish look about him, the look of someone who’d burn incense and show you a mandala and help you accept your mortality.
“Thank you, Daddy,” she said at last, because she could think of nothing better to say, and she hugged him and held him tight.
