Family Reunion

by Caroline B. Cooney

  We went block after block. We came to a stone church flanked by blooming shrubs and a glass-fronted announcement board for Sunday services. “Our church,” said Carolyn. “We get to skip during the summer, but during the school year we go. Not Brett, of course. It would make my parents happy if he went, so it's the last thing he's going to do.”

  We didn't go to church except on Christmas and Easter, and I had never attended Sunday school. I was uneasy about admitting this. Carolyn might report to her mother, who probably ranked Sunday school even higher than backyards for creating stable families.

  We walked on.

  “There's Johnny Cameron's,” said Carolyn.

  The Cameron house was being relandscaped. Brand-new shrubs, the size of footballs, stood at attention in straight lines. Tiny trees, tethered by wires thicker than their branches, were placed at regular intervals. Sprinklers in a newly installed underground system tried unsuccessfully to keep the grass seeds damp under the hot sun.

  I wondered what kind of people Mr. and Mrs. Cameron were, and whether Brett was happy living with them, and whether they would in fact buy him new sneakers. I said, “Where does Toby live?”

  “Chicago, of course,” said Carolyn. “He's staying with his grandparents, though. Celeste's parents. They never approved of Charlie.”

  “Will they be at the party?” I asked.

  “No. But Toby will. He's always wanted to meet Charlie, of course. And now he won't. But who cares about any of them? I care about me. You know the parable of the prodigal son?”

  I didn't know the words parable or prodigal, so I just said, “Not really.”

  “It's a story Jesus tells. There are these two sons, see. The bad one leaves home. He parties, he takes drugs, he hangs out with scum. The parents never hear from him. The good one stays home and does all the chores for his father and runs the farm. One day the bad kid comes back and says he's sorry. The father is so happy, he throws a big party. But all the time the good kid was being good, the father never once even thought of throwing a party for him.”

  Carolyn walked like a person eager to kick a dog. “I bet anything,” she said, “that I'll stay home being good year in and year out, and the most they'll ever give me is new spiral-bound notebooks every September. But the minute Brett comes back in the door, it'll be a new car, a new computer and a winter vacation on a Florida beach.”

  We detoured into the street to avoid being soaked by lawn sprinklers, and then the water looked pretty good, so we walked through it and cooled off.

  “I am completely sick of being a nice person,” said my cousin. “I feel like puncturing a few tires.”

  “You know, you're not bad, Carolyn. Can I stay here all summer?”

  “No. It's my turn to go somewhere. I get to go back to Vermont with you.”

  “That would be great. I'll tell Annette. She's pretty relaxed about stuff, really. She has low expectations after a year and a half of Angus.”

  We walked on in companionable sweatiness.

  A car straight off one of the posters that Joanna and I paper our apartment bedroom with pulled up next to us: a 1963 maroon Cadillac convertible. It was packed with girls our age, twice as many girls as space or seat belts, and driven by a hugely overweight man. “Carolyn!” they yelled. “You forgot Pammy's birthday party!”

  “Hi, Pammy!” shrieked Carolyn. “I didn't forget! I RSVP'ed that I couldn't come because I was setting everything aside for my cousins.”

  We hadn't set aside anything when Brett and Carolyn visited us in New York. We never even thought of setting anything aside.

  “We tracked you down, though,” said the fat man. “What's a party without a Preffyn? Come on, you two, get in! And you must be Charlie's girl Shelley. Glad to meet you, Shelley.”

  Carolyn clambered right over the side of the Caddy and fell messily into the laps of the other girls. “Come on, Shell,” she said over her shoulder.

  The girls wedged into the beautiful convertible seemed younger and gigglier than I was. Carolyn blended in. She ceased to be my cousin. I couldn't tell her apart from the others. I was afraid of them all, suddenly, as if they were not a bunch of laughing girls on their way to a birthday party, but a pack of wild dogs.

  “No, you go on,” I said quickly. “I'll walk on home and make sure Annette's okay. Help Aunt Maggie get set up and stuff.”

  “I'll get you guys back home in time,” the driver assured me. “You won't be late to Charlie's party. I'm coming myself. Went to school with your dad, you know. Yup. Graduated the year after him.”

  “Oh, Mr. Hallahan,” said Carolyn, beating on his shoulder as if he were her property. She must have known him, and his daughter Pammy, if I was adding this up right, for a long time. “My mother didn't remember to tell the guest of honor to come on the right date. Charlie won't be here.”

  Mr. Hallahan laughed hugely. “That's our boy Charlie,” he said.

  I thought it was actually our girl Maggie, but I was polite and begged Carolyn to attend the birthday party without me, and off they went. I stood alone in Barrington. I felt misplaced. I walked slowly back the way we'd come, pausing at each corner as if I thought something might go wrong.

  And something did.

  * * *

  How dumb daydreams can be.

  I found myself facing the Camerons' house. I had not even managed to say hello to my cousin Brett the night before, he had kept such a distance. I went up and knocked on the front door. After all, these must be pleasant people, the sort of loving, generous folk who took in kids in trouble. They would answer the bell exclaiming, “Charlie's daughter!” Brett would say, “Gosh, I'm glad you came. I really need a cousin to escort me home so I can apologize and get along with my mother again.”

  That was my daydream.

  And I, the essential follower—the one who tags after Bev or Kelsey or Marley in the city, and after Angus in Vermont, and after Carolyn that day—I led the way. I went alone up to a stranger's house to interfere with somebody's life.

  “Oh, hi,” said Brett without interest. “It's you.”

  Brett seemed so much older than I had expected. His tan was not golden like his sister's or Toby's, but dark and hard. He wore reflective sunglasses that hid a third of his face, even though he was indoors. I didn't feel related to him at all. Where was the cousin I had played with in distant summers? The cousin who had lowered his bike seat for me so I could ride more easily? The cousin who had found Band-Aids when I scraped my knee? The cousin who had given me his ice cream cone when I played too hard and the ice cream fell out of my cone and onto the sidewalk?

  The front door opened directly into the living room. Behind Brett, a tall, thin boy stared at me. Brett did not introduce me. Motionless on the couch was Miranda. The three of them were watching television. There were no adults around. The house had a thick smell, as if garbage needed to be emptied and sheets needed changing. The acrid scent of cigarettes was strong. The shades had been pulled down, and the rooms were dim and sullen. Who would run away from Aunt Maggie's sparkling home to this?

  Somebody either desperate or stupid.

  “Whaddaya want?” said Brett.

  “Just to say hello.” I was flustered. “We haven't had a chance to see each other yet.”

  “Oh, wow, Brett, what an honor,” said Miranda. “The cousin from New York City going out of her way for a little down-home chat.”

  The thin boy laughed. Miranda laughed. Brett remained behind his silver lenses.

  “Are you coming to the party tonight?” I said, knowing how pathetic I sounded.

  “Why would I want to hang out with that bunch of assholes?” said Brett.

  The word shocked me. Not because I hadn't heard it before, but because it meant us: Uncle Todd, Aunt Maggie, Grandma, Annette, me, Carolyn, Angus. The word was so ugly, so mean.

  “Your own father couldn't be bothered to come,” said Brett. “What makes you think I'd make any more effort than he does?”

  No reas
on came to mind.

  “Aren't you supposed to be helping with the big event?” he said. “The big failure, I should say. Since as usual our sainted mother figured she could engineer everybody else's lives without asking first.”

  Poor Aunt Maggie. They were so mad at her. But we had been mad at her too, since the divorce. Aunt Maggie went on relentlessly, cheerfully, faultlessly, no matter what was going on around her. Aunt Maggie was Perfect.

  Miranda flicked the remote control at high speed. Scraps of dialogue, bits of advertisements, two notes of a theme song and a burst of applause were tossed into the room like broken lives. I was afraid of these three. This was what giving up looked like. Shuttered and dusty and mean-mouthed. I would rather be like Aunt Maggie any day.

  I backed toward the door.

  “Have a nice day,” said Miranda.

  I stumbled out, shutting the door behind me, and ran down the street, thankful for every house and tree and fence that protected me from them.

  Nobody ever solved a problem by shutting out the air and the family. Except me. I had shut out my mother. Shut out her entire world. Hid from her. Just like Brett.

  I stopped running. The Barrington sun was frying me like an egg. My hair turned sticky. Even my thoughts stuck together.

  How could I be the one who was wrong? Other people were the wrongdoers; I got dragged along. I made none of those awful decisions, filed none of those awful divorce papers.

  I found myself not on Carolyn's road, but a block over from the little stone church, on the quiet, half-occupied old main street. Parallel parking was neatly marked in front of its old-fashioned stores, and most slots were empty. When I was little, my mother had taken us to a drugstore on this street, and we had gotten something called a root beer float. But nobody anymore would have a soda fountain in a drugstore.

  I walked past each store, little places that probably couldn't afford rent at a mall. Sewing machine repair, silk flowers, Thai takeout, secondhand paperbacks, children's dance school, real estate agent.

  And a drugstore. And inside it, an ice cream parlor.

  It wasn't exactly what I remembered, but then, neither was Brett. At least this was sunny and bright with little glass tables and little round-bottomed chairs and zinnia bouquets on each table. The zinnias sold me. I fished in my jeans pocket to see how much money I had.

  The ice cream choices were written on a blackboard in colored chalk. I could have pumpkin-pie ice cream or pink peppermint or mocha cream peanut butter. Somebody else came into the ice cream parlor and stood right behind me, then shifted next to me. I half looked. Old jeans into whose pockets were jammed big masculine hands. Old T-shirt. Big elbows.

  I'll have chocolate, I thought, the way I always do. I looked a little more closely at the person in the old T-shirt and the old jeans.

  It was Toby.

  Here's why I don't like to ask questions.

  It's not because I'm afraid of the answers.

  I just don't think there should be any questions to start with. Your father should be your father; he should be married to your mother; you should all live happily ever after. And that's that.

  “Hi, Shelley,” said Toby eagerly.

  He was as handsome as he had been the afternoon before. “Let's share a table,” he said. “Come on.” He nudged me forward. The waitress followed us, envious of me. I ordered a chocolate sundae, and he ordered butterscotch on vanilla. We were obviously not the kind to experiment with important things like ice cream. Toby got straight to the point. Looking anxious, because it mattered, he said, “Does your father ever talk about me?” He dipped his spoon into his sundae and had an enormous butterscotch-dripping mouthful of vanilla.

  I could not really breathe.

  Breathing is essential to speech. I clung to my small paper napkin and ran out of air.

  “I've always wanted to meet Charlie,” said Toby, looking up from his ice cream and into my eyes. What was he looking there for? Blood ties? You wouldn't think, under the circumstances, that his attention could be so evenly divided between the topic of discussion and the ice cream.

  “I owe him a lot,” Toby added.

  I wanted to run. Like Angus. The whole way home, to Vermont or New York City. I understood Angus, slamming a door, hiding out.

  Families and divorce and secrets are like history-class discussions of World War III or nuclear bombs. Everybody gets extremely intense for forty-five minutes and says profound things and considers the doom of mankind. But then the bell rings, and you have important things to consider, like whether to lend your best friend those silver-and-turquoise earrings, whether to go to the game with your buddies or to the library and start the research paper due tomorrow, which you should have started a month ago.

  A month ago Angus had handed me a bomb, and when I thought about it, I was afraid and sweaty and angry. But mostly I didn't think about it. You can't think about a bomb any more than you can think about your own parents' divorce until it's there and it's in your lap, which is filling with tears.

  I could use a bomb shelter right now, I thought. Because I think old Toby here is about to drop a bomb. “You owe him a lot?” I repeated, trying to be calm and ordinary. I paid close attention to how I held my spoon. I kept control over the corners of my mouth, which were trying to tremble.

  Like, what was owed? Life? Breath? Genes?

  Joanna and I had giggled and teased on the phone when we considered a hidden half brother. She was rather thrilled by it. But it was not thrilling. It was sick and terrible.

  Can I still love Daddy if he's really bad? I thought. If he couldn't be a father to Toby at all, then is he a good father? Even to me?

  “If your father hadn't paid the bills,” said Toby, “I don't know where we'd be now. I mean… ”

  Toby said “I mean” as if it were a whole sentence, as if nobody, including Toby, could possibly know what he meant.

  “You read about terrible divorces and horrible betrayals,” said Toby, “or if you like talk shows, the kind where they do relationships, you listen to people who hate the person they once loved, and they trick them and spit on them.”

  No. I didn't read about them. I didn't listen to them. I didn't watch them. Who needed reading material when she could just live through it?

  “And your father,” said Toby.

  Toby's technique of using short little phrases as if they were long, detailed explanations was giving me a headache. “Well, he's your father,” said Toby. “But he paid for me.” “Paid for you?” I echoed stupidly.

  Toby looked at me oddly. And then he seemed as upset as I was. “You don't know anything?”

  “He's never even mentioned you,” I said. “I don't know a single thing.”

  Toby stared down into his ice cream. He gave a funny little laugh. “I don't know whether to feel rotten about that or not.”

  “I feel rotten,” I said. My tears dropped with surprising weight, not blending into my ice cream, but lying in tiny tear puddles on top.

  “Don't cry,” whispered Toby, appalled. “It's not your fault.”

  “But it's terrible! He should have told us about you.”

  “It's not that terrible,” protested Toby.

  “Not to tell us that he has another son?”

  Toby's jaw grew slack. Then he rolled his eyes. “Carolyn and Brett been getting back at you for all the times you conned them in New York? Shelley, your father isn't my father.I'm not your brother. The only son he has is Angus. Which, from what I've heard about Angus, is a good thing.”

  “You're not my brother?”

  “How could I be your brother?”

  “Angus said Daddy had a son named Toby.”

  “Oh. Angus probably overheard something and got it wrong, like half this dumb, gossipy town. My mother and your father hardly even got married before they separated. They were only sixteen, remember. Back then you had to quit high school if you were married, and so they couldn't go to school, and they weren't earning any money
, and the dishes got dirty, and the car ran out of gas, and my mother went to live with her aunt in Chicago, and your father hitchhiked to New York. And they each went back to school and finished college, and the funny thing was, they stayed in love, even though they couldn't stand living together, or dealing with Barrington gossip and relatives. I mean, Shelley, you just can't imagine gossip in a small town. Me from Chicago and you from New York—we don't know gossip, not the way our parents do.” He drank some Coke. “Celeste and Charlie were the focus of the town's attention, because she was the girl everybody had expected to go out and be a stunning female success, and your father was the boy who should have founded a major corporation or become president.”

  For a moment I could see them: my father, golden and blurred—only two years older than I am now—overcome by Celeste's lovesick eyes; two kids running away to find perfection and landing in pain. “Don't stop,” I ordered Toby. “

  Tell me the rest.”

  “You never heard any of this?” He was amazed and definitely hurt.

  “Daddy never talks about Celeste. We only know about her from family gossip.”

  Toby nodded, but it was the kind of nod of somebody who doesn't understand. He wanted Daddy to have talked about it, I thought. Toby was sure he was special enough for my father to share him with us.

  I stirred my tears into the ice cream and wondered if it would taste different.

  Perhaps there is no time when a secret is a good thing. Perhaps for every person you protect, you damage another one. But who could know that? Who could weigh whether protection or exposure matters more?

  “They used to telephone each other whenever one of them had enough money for the long-distance phone bill,” said Toby, half laughing, abbreviating a beloved story he had heard a hundred times. “Your father and my mother. They just didn't know what to do. My mother says they were afraid to meet each other again. On the phone, they could be kind and affectionate, because she was in Chicago and he was in New York. They were afraid that if they both went to Barrington, or visited each other, or met in the middle, they'd fight again.”