“Mona!” Denny’s voice came over the line.
“Hello, Uncle Denny.”
He laughed. Then: “It must be after two in the morning where you are! Is everything all right?”
“Everything’s fine here. I just wanted to check in with the boys, make sure everyone was fine there too. Imagine my surprise to learn that there’s a new chef and William broke his arm.”
“You object to the chef? If so, I can send him back.”
“No, I don’t object to the chef!”
“That’s good, because he makes the best eggs Benedict in the world.”
“Where is he sleeping?”
“The basement. It’s a bit of an issue if I want to work late, but not much. He plays a mean ukulele when he’s in the mood.”
“Can we move on from the chef to William’s arm?”
“I’m sorry. I thought you expressed surprise at the chef and William. Actually, it’s Willie now, if you hadn’t heard.”
“I did, and I also heard you heartily approve.”
“Hardly.” He snorted. “It’s ghastly, isn’t it? But if it impresses the bird he likes…”
“You lied to him, didn’t you?” I said softly.
“Excuse me?”
“When you told William those stories about all the things you’re scared of. You told him big hairy spiders were one of them, that you wouldn’t even tour in places that might have them, but that isn’t true. You’ve been to the Amazon”—the mags had said—“and, I don’t know, I’m sure you’ve been to lots of other places that do.”
“Well, not everyone knows that, do they? And I wanted to come up with something anyone could relate to, and the kinds of things that do scare me probably wouldn’t mean very much to a ten-year-old boy, so.”
I digested that. It wasn’t just that he’d told stories to keep William’s mind off his own fears, it was that he’d been so thoughtful in the way he’d done it.
“So,” I said, “what are you really scared of?”
There was a long pause before he answered: “Being less.”
And now it was my turn to pause as I digested that too.
“I should come home,” I said abruptly.
“Please don’t,” he said, just as abruptly. “I mean, of course you can if you want to—it’s your house, at least for the summer; your kids—but honestly, everyone’s fine. William, especially, is fine.”
“But isn’t it a bit much for you? Watching them, particularly now that William has a broken arm? Wouldn’t you rather get back to…your life?”
“Mona, if you’re worried I’m going to scarper off and leave the boys in the lurch, that’s not going to happen. I’ll stay at least until you come home.”
At least until…
“That wasn’t what I—”
“Look, I have to go soon. They’re getting restless. They’re supposed to be teaching me how to play Monopoly. I’m the Hat. I made them promise I could be.”
“So I heard.”
“Harry tried to make me be the Thimble. Can you imagine—me? The Thimble? Well, you do have to have standards. Otherwise, they’ll walk all over you.”
I had to laugh at that. It was the kind of thing Jack might say or even me.
A thought occurred to me then.
“Did you ever get to spend much time with your own kids? Like this?”
There was silence. Then: “No. That was something I somehow missed.”
I saw it then: the reason why Denny had come. He didn’t come for Jack. Or maybe he did, but he also came for this, the time spent with my boys, the second chance at being a father.
“You’re doing a great job,” I said then. “I can tell the boys are loving having you there.”
He didn’t say thank you. Instead, he said a cautious, “Right, then,” as though expecting there to be a “but.” But there wasn’t.
“See you at the end of the week then,” I said. “Enjoy being the Hat.”
So that, William breaking his arm, was the second thing that happened.
Denny
The third thing that happened, happened on the plane ride back from our trip—and what a trip it had been!
For a long time, years even, I’d had a niggling worry in my mind that once the boys were grown and Jack and I were alone again, we’d discover that there was simply no there there for us anymore, that with the connective tissue gone, we were just two people bouncing up against one another from time to time. But the trip had shown me, shown us both, that we were more than just the parents of two boys. We were still us.
Funny, I hadn’t known we positively needed this time away, but Denny had.
At any rate, it was on the plane ride back from that wonderful trip that the third significant thing happened.
No sooner had the plane cleared the runway than Jack let out a huge yawn. Then he folded his arms across his chest, tilted his head to one side, and shut his eyes.
“You’re going to sleep already?” I asked.
He opened one eye. “You’re not? Aren’t you tired?”
“I am actually,” I said. And I was. One of the great joys of our time in Morocco was rediscovering “we can have sex whenever we want to without fear of interruption unless we ourselves choose to call room service.” On our last night, we’d turned it into a marathon session. We hadn’t fallen asleep until we’d watched, arms around each other, as the sun came up, and then we’d only slept an hour—we had this plane to catch. So yes, I was tired, and luxuriously sore in ways I hadn’t felt in a long time. “But I don’t think I could sleep right now if I tried,” I told Jack now. “I suppose I’m too keyed up about seeing the boys again.”
“I’m excited about seeing them too, but I’ll be even more excited if I’m not completely exhausted. And it’ll be easier to get back to work if I rest now, since I certainly won’t be able to later.”
The whole point in coming to Connecticut for the summer had been for Jack to work on his music, to come up with enough songs to finally put out a fourth album. Jack’s career may not have been big by Denny’s standards—whose is?—but he did have a small independent label that believed in him and was eager to have something new to put out. As keen as Jack had been to accept Denny’s offer of the trip to Morocco, when we first arrived there, he’d felt guilty about leaving his musical ambitions behind for two whole weeks. But then, during the trip, we’d seen and heard so many great things, causing Jack to make notes on any stray paper he could find, and I knew he was just as eager to return to the beach house so he could get back to work.
“Do you want me to wake you when food service comes around?” I asked.
“Only if they’re serving lobster.” He closed the eye. Then: “It was really great, wasn’t it?”
“Which part?”
“All of it, every second, but especially just being us again. Know what I mean?”
“I love you, Jack.”
“Love you too.”
And then he was asleep, a huge smile on his face. It wasn’t until he started to snore lightly that it occurred to me how rare it was—not the snoring; that was common enough. Rather, the part where I said, “I love you,” first. It had almost always been Jack who would say it, with me then responding in kind. We were like a call-and-response in church, with me only able to participate if someone else led the way.
I kissed him gently on the forehead, knowing I wouldn’t wake him now, and said it again even though he couldn’t hear me: “I love you, Jack.”
Then I rooted around in my carry-on bag for reading material, and so that was when I finally got the chance to read the magazine that I’d bought at the airport nearly two months ago, when we’d first flown from London to the U.S.
• • •
In the past, the mags had always been my guilty pleasures. I’d read them only when Jack wasn’t around or when he was sleeping, like now.
I looked in the Table of Contents to see what
page the article on Denny was on and was about to flip through to it, but then I thought: Wait. I don’t have to do this!
Yes, when I was a young teen, I read about Denny and the band obsessively. Well, of course I did. I was a fan and he was a Rock God, and for a time, even more than that. Then on my wedding day, I’d discovered he was to be my brother-in-law. But in the ensuing years, we hadn’t gotten to know each other the way in-laws do, not the way I had with Burt and Edith or Jack had with my own parents. No, in the dozen years after my wedding, I’d seen him scarcely as many times and always with other people around, so we’d hardly spoken really, and he remained a stranger and a Rock God, albeit one who happened to be my husband’s brother. But now? After this summer? Why, we’d spent weeks together, living under the same roof. We’d shared meals, we’d talked—we’d even laughed. Who could forget the cake we’d baked together? And look how wonderful Denny had been with William! It would not be outside the realm of reason to say that Denny and I were now friends, that I knew him. I was no longer an outsider trying to look in. I was on the inside now. So what did I need to be doing reading about him in the mags like some lowly fan?
Laughing at myself, laughing at how silly that would be, I began at the beginning of the mag and read every single thing from cover to cover—from the Letters to the Editor at the front to the book reviews at the back; I even looked at all the adverts in between—studiously going around the article on Denny, not even letting myself look at the pictures. It was only after I’d read the very last page, with its ad for menstrual pain reliever, and looked over at Jack, saw he was still sleeping, that I thought: Well, the mag is right here…And anyway, wasn’t it even more silly to deliberately not read the article than it would be to just read it and get it over with?
• • •
THE NEW MRS. DENNY SPRINGER? HARDLY!
Talk about your attention-grabbing headlines! And how ridiculous. Of course there wasn’t a new Mrs. Denny Springer on the horizon. Denny would never have come to stay with us all these weeks if there were. Even the headline itself couldn’t keep up the pretense; the denial was right there. Still, I did glance at the accompanying picture before reading the rest of the text. I supposed the person depicted was pretty enough, but in a rather skanky sort of way. And she did look frightfully young. But then I’d found as I moved into my thirties that a lot of people looked young to me now, and anyway, it was impossible to assess her true age, what with all the raccoon eye makeup. Denny’s previous wives had all looked like models, while this person looked more like the sort you might see waiting for the Tube in a sketchy part of town. So what was this really all about? I read on.
A fair amount of print is devoted to speculation on that evergreen subject: who WILL the next Mrs. Denny Springer be??? (OK, we confess: we create a lot of that print. But we’re curious! Aren’t you?) And yet of all the candidates, there has never been one quite so unlikely…or so young.
Fifteen-year-old Tiffany Glynn first met the forty-two-year-old rocker, frontman for The Greatest Rock-and-Roll Band In The World, following the band’s concert two weeks ago in Leeds. (In case you’re worrying that your eyes are deceiving you or that there’s been some kind of misprint, we need to point out that that is not a mistake, and we did in fact say FIFTEEN.)
“I just hung out at the backstage door afterward,” young Tiffany said. “I guess you could say I got lucky.”
We’re sure some would agree, although perhaps not all. After meeting her idol, Tiffany somehow found herself back at his hotel room, where events occurred that are too salacious to detail in the pages of this magazine.
“He was really good,” Tiffany did share with us without prompting, “for a geezer.”
Normally we wouldn’t print the name of an underaged girl (Did you hear that, Denny? UNDERAGED!), but it was in fact young Tiffany and her mother, Amber Glynn, age thirty-one, who brought the story to our attention.
“I’m proud of her, aren’t I,” said the elder Glynn. “When I was her age, I had a thing for Denny—still do! My parents were positively horrified. Denny was the kind of guy they warned me away from…which only made him more attractive! But I never got my chance. So you could say Tiffany is living my dream!”
Look, we’re all for a little salacious scandal. (You know we are. And the bigger the little salacious scandal, the better!) But even we have to draw the line somewhere.
And apparently, we’re not the only ones. Word has it that even some of Denny’s most trusted insiders are appalled by this latest turn of events. Even Trudi Lundquist, longtime president of Denny’s biggest fan club, was so disturbed by the news, she’s resigned her presidency. In fact, we think she puts it best when she says:
“It was funny in the beginning, when he was younger. But those were different times, weren’t they? Back then, you’d hear stories about rock stars picking up thirteen-year-old girls in L.A., having sex with them, and then leaving them on the opposite coast in New York, with no way to get home. We all thought it was all fun and games—cool even. But the old days aren’t these days, are they? And the idea of a forty-two-year-old man with a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl? That’s not funny or cool. And it doesn’t matter if Tiffany and her mum think it is. It’s just wrong.”
We couldn’t agree more.
As for the aging rocker himself?
He’s not saying. When we tried to reach him for comment, all that came back were the sounds of crickets chirping.
Was this, in the end, why Denny had come?
By the time we deplaned, I’d convinced myself that the article had to be wrong. It had to be.
The Denny I knew wouldn’t sleep with a fifteen-year-old. Perhaps he might have once, when he was younger, when he was closer to still being a teenager himself. But surely not now. This girl was only five years older than William, only a few years older than Roberta from the beach. It couldn’t be true.
And hadn’t I learned, after taking them as my bibles for so many years, that the mags could be wrong about things having to do with Denny? They’d certainly been wrong about his partying habits. To hear them tell it, his life was one big orgy of drinking and drugs. But he’d told me it wasn’t like that, and, having spent several continuous weeks in his company, I fully believed it. The man didn’t even smoke weed. Why, he was practically a teetotaler. OK, an expensive-wine-drinking teetotaler, but still. He was in every way much more…mellow than the mags made him out to be. So they were wrong about that and they were wrong about this.
“Are you OK?” Jack asked as we walked through the arrivals door.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Why?”
“I don’t know. You just look like your mood changed somewhere while we were in the air.”
“I’m fine,” I said again, thinking of the magazine, which I’d shoved back down far into the bottom of my bag.
There was Jeeves, waiting for us.
“Boss sent me,” he said.
“How thoughtful of him,” I said.
And it was: thoughtful. I could see where after my initial push-and-pull with him, Denny had been exceptionally thoughtful all summer long. So surely, he was not the sort of man who…
I shook it off.
When we got home, I figured, I’d get this all sorted out.
• • •
“William!” I cried as soon as I saw him step outside as we pulled up in the stretch limo. Behind him were Harry and Denny.
I know it was a bit mother-hennish of me, but I couldn’t help myself as I enveloped him in a big hug. I still couldn’t believe I hadn’t been there when he broke his arm, and now here he was with that arm in a cast and a sling.
“I’m so sorry I wasn’t here!” I said into his hair. “Are you OK?”
“S’alright, Mum,” he said, wriggling out of my embrace. “Uncle Denny took care of everything. And it’s Willie now, don’t forget, not William.”
“I’ll try,” I said, ruffling his hair as I drew away, and
then Jack moved in for his own hug from our eldest.
“What did you get us?”
That, of course, was Harry.
“How about a hug first?” I said.
“All right.” Then, when I’d barely had a chance to enfold him: “So. What’d you bring us?”
I laughed. “Come on. Let’s go inside first.”
But before we could do that, I had to get past Denny, who was moving toward me now, arms slightly extended. When he was inches away, too close for comfort, I thrust out my hand for a shake. We’d never been the hug-each-other-kiss-on-the-cheek sort of in-laws before, and I certainly wasn’t about to start now.
“Nice to see you again,” Denny said stiffly, taking my hand. “Welcome home.”
• • •
Inside, I opened my carryall and pulled out the identical souvenirs I’d bought for the boys.
“What’s this?” Harry said, fingering the maroon felt and the black tassel.
“It’s called a fez,” I said. “The men in Morocco wear them.”
“Cool,” Harry said, trying his on right away. “Do I look Moroccan?”
“What about me?” William tried to put his on with one hand but immediately ran into trouble. I moved to help him, but Harry beat me to it. “You should see me try to take a shower with this thing,” William said, shaking the cast. “Well, no, you shouldn’t, Mum. But really, it’s very funny.”
“Who’re all the other fezes for?” Harry asked, indicating the items I was still holding.
“I also got them for Matt and Walter,” I said, “plus Jeeves, and of course Super Mario if he’s still around. It was so nice of him to come cook for you while I was gone.” I paused. “And I also got a fez for you,” I said, extending one toward Denny.
It had seemed silly even while I was purchasing it, the idea of getting something like this for The Man Who Has Everything. But then, it would have felt mean spirited not to get something for him when I’d gotten something for everyone else. After all, he’d done so much to take care of the boys, not to mention the fact that he’d paid for the whole trip himself.
The Other Brother Page 19
