“Great,” Richard responded. “Let’s meet at Oceanaire at about six thirty. We’ll grab some oysters and IPAs before we sashay into the game.”
I was silent. He had heard me perfectly well but was just giving me a hard time. He said, “So you’re going in for a vasectomy today?”
“One of the kids,” I replied. “Abigail.” I hesitated for a minute before completely coming clean, but I knew that Richard wasn’t just a father but one of the better ones I had ever met—a guy, in other words, who would inherently understand.
“I told her I’d read to her tonight, and I don’t want to go back on my word without any notice.”
There was silence between us again. Perhaps we were both considering the monumental change, how it had gone from what I was to what I am. “You know what?” he said, causing me to gird a bit for what was coming next—that I’m an idiot, that I’m a mediocre friend, that I had completely lost my mind and my way.
“You’re doing the right thing. Twenty years from now, you won’t remember the game, but you will remember reading to the kid.”
That certainly sounded nice—until he added an amendment: “You know what, I’m wrong about that. You actually would remember the game twenty years from now, and I’m not sure you’d remember this specific night reading to the kid. But that’s not really the point anymore.”
I wasn’t completely sure what he was saying, but whatever he meant, I knew he was right.
I arrived at about 7:30 that night because of work and traffic, long past the dinner hour, but in enough time to catch them before they surrendered to the kind of exhaustion that can unapologetically overwhelm girls of that age. They were both splayed out on the couch when I walked in, staring blankly at SpongeBob on TV, a show I happen to dislike for its moronity. Buddy lay between them, oddly calm—just another night watching TV with your pet chicken. The bird was staring so intently at the screen that he looked as if he would have pecked off someone’s hand if they reached for the remote control. As it was, his head twitched around just far enough for him to glare in my direction.
“Hello, young children,” I said, needlessly announcing my presence in the fading light of the living room. They gave me a hello, neither warm nor cold. I knew better than to disturb them anymore in midshow, so I made my way into the kitchen to find Pam preparing their lunches and snacks for the next day. The work of motherhood, I was learning, pretty much never ends.
“I’d like to get them upstairs and into bed early tonight,” Pam said. “They’ve got dentist appointments before school tomorrow morning.”
Sometimes, thinking about what filled her days—the running around, the constant commotion, the fleeting sense of control—my knees just about buckled while my heart raced. I didn’t share that. Instead I said, “Whatever I can do to help, just let me know.”
Twenty or so minutes later, as we chatted at the table, Pam called out, “Two-minute warning.” I heard an “Awwwwwwwww” from the other room that made me smile. Then I heard the rooster give a long, loud protest crow.
“And get him back outside!” Pam called out. “He’s got to get to his shelf before dark.”
I went in to play the role I imagined for myself that probably wasn’t really mine, at least not often enough—that of the facilitator, the go-between who added some perspective and humor to the typical and inevitable parent/child tensions.
“Buddy goes outside,” I said, emphatically, waving one arm in the direction of the door in mock anger. “And you two—upstairs. Now!”
They, of course, didn’t budge. Actually, let me correct that. Abigail yawned, and Caroline flicked the channel to a Disney movie that was just starting. “Hey, Mom,” she yelled, as if I weren’t even there. “Homeward Bound is on. Can we watch?”
“No. Bedtime.”
“Awwwwwwwww.”
The two of them slowly lifted themselves to their feet, sleepy-eyed, grabbed their blankets, and trudged upstairs. The dogs hoisted themselves up and followed, like one long parade.
“Abs, I’ll be right up to read to you.”
“That’s all right,” she said absently. She kept walking, her blanket dragging along the wooden stairs.
“No, I said, I’ll be right up. We’re about to get introduced to the Tin Man.”
“I’m too tired,” she replied.
I stood there in the landing with one simple thought banking around my brain: I gave up the Celtics for this? I checked the time. It was a few minutes before the opening tip-off. Richard and I would have been settling into our seats right now, clutching our first beer, getting acclimated, drinking in the show that was the NBA finals, Celtics-Lakers style.
Instead, there I was standing in a dim foyer listening to a nine-year-old trudge along an upstairs hallway and—what’s that now?—the door to her bedroom softly shutting behind her. I actually started hyperventilating. I wanted to shout to the heavens, please, let me have my decision back from this afternoon. Give me one lousy mulligan. Put me in my seat at the Garden, and let me live the life I was meant to have.
Please.
“Are you okay?”
That was Pam, who was walking toward the staircase to see the kids off to bed, a load of laundry in her arms.
“Yes, I’m fine,” I said.
“You don’t look so good,” she said, squeezing around me.
“Abigail said she doesn’t want me to read to her tonight,” I said.
“Yeah,” Pam replied, “she’s pretty tired. We’re all pretty tired. Long day, and morning comes early.”
I wanted to tell Pam what I had given up, where I could have been, the fun I should have been having, and for what? To be discarded in the foyer of their house as if it or I didn’t matter. Calm, Brian, calm. Instead, watching her lug piles of clean clothes up the stairs on her way to get her kids off to bed, I wisely kept my mouth shut.
Still, I followed her up the stairs, gently tapped on Abigail’s door, and walked inside.
The lights were off. Abigail was under the covers, her favorite stuffed animal, Who-Hoo, lying with its head on the pillow beside her. I don’t exactly know what Who-Hoo was. It looked kind of like a dog but seemed like a puppet. Maybe a puppet of a dog. I asked softly, “Are you sure you don’t want me to read?” I knew perfectly well that I was approaching the territory of sounding like an idiot, and in my more honest moments, I was pushing the issue at that specific moment more because of what I had given up than what I wanted to have.
“I’m sure,” she said.
I did what I always did at bedtime. I placed two fingers to my lips, then pressed them briefly against the back of her head. Nobody, for good or bad, is ever going to accuse me of too much demonstration. She didn’t move an eyelash. I said good night, got only an indiscernible response, and left. If women were a mystery to me at my advanced age, take it as fact that girls were a total enigma.
Downstairs, I checked the time again. It should have been about ten minutes into the game. I was tired. I hadn’t eaten. I had a long drive back to the city ahead of me. I figured I’d watch some of the game at Pam’s before getting into my car during halftime.
When I walked into the darkened living room and went to turn on the television, I heard a twisted, twirling scream that cause me to reflexively fling the remote in the air. I looked down, and a shock of white was rising from the couch, moving in my direction.
“Buddy, shush,” I said.
He walked to the edge of the couch where I was and began making guttural noises, sounds as if he were a kung fu champion preparing to tear me apart. I flicked a light on and saw his wings flapping, his head twitching, and his eyes looking warily at me from the sides of his face.
“Buddy, it’s fine,” I said.
It actually wasn’t. Pam was asleep. The kids were asleep. The dogs were asleep. I sure as hell wasn’t going to carry him out to his shelf in the garage, and I knew if I took a broom and tried to push him outside, he’d shout bloody murder and wake up the house and the w
hole neighborhood. I tried to move to the other side of the couch, still determined to somehow watch the game, but he marched down to that end, warning me with those karate sounds to keep the hell away.
In his mind, his couch, his house, his kids, his woman. I was but the interloper in this group, and judging from everyone else’s attitude that night, maybe he was right. Maybe he was telling me what the others didn’t have the heart to say directly.
“Screw you, Buddy,” I said. I turned off the light. I grabbed my keys from the kitchen table. And as I pulled the front door shut, I could hear that little jerk clucking for joy.
17
The morning dawned early on the last day of my old life. I took Baker for a sunrise walk down the banks of the Charles River. We looped through the Boston Public Garden and padded side by side up Newbury Street, his tongue almost hanging to the cement. I thought I’d be morbid, drinking in the scenery as if I’d never see it again, but I had convinced myself of the truth: this was more a beginning than an ending, the move long past due, and not to sound like one of those saccharine kitten-hanging-from-a-branch plaques, but if you don’t change, you wither. It was, to use an overused expression that I’ve never particularly liked, all good.
When the movers arrived around 8 A.M., the crew chief briefly looked around my apartment, stepped back into the hallway, and made a call on his cell phone.
“You told me this was a big move,” I heard him say to whoever it was on the other end, the annoyance evident in his voice. “No. There’s barely anything here. We’ll be done in an hour and we’ll have eighty percent of the truck open, so let me know if you want to throw in another stop.”
Barely anything here. That’s nice. Just my whole life.
He was right about the timing, anyway. They were gone in what felt like a snap, gone with the couch I had bought on a whim at a going-out-of-business sale during a Sunday-afternoon walk with Harry, the leather chair that had been a gift to myself when I got the column at the Globe, the desk where I had written novels, the armoire I had claimed from my broken marriage, plates and utensils that had hardly seen any use. On and on, until I signed some paperwork and the crew told me they’d see me the next day in suburbia.
“That’s going to be quite a change for you, isn’t it?” the burly supervisor asked, as if it had never occurred to me that things might be different.
“No big deal,” I replied. “Just every single thing about my entire life.” I walked back inside from the sun-splashed sidewalk to an apartment that was barren of everything but an overnight bag and a very perplexed dog.
“Well, Bake Sale, this is it,” I said to Baker, who was intently staring at me, straining to understand this seismic event in our lives, all our furniture, our possessions, taken away by those beefy men. He was walking from empty room to empty room, the sound of claws on hardwood echoing from the high ceilings. I sat on the floor, my back to a wall, and he came over and sprawled out beside me with a long, laborious groan, confident that if I was there, things were going to be okay.
My gaze slowly floated around the room, the memories flooding back. I thought of the first time I’d ever stepped foot in the place, a Monday morning probably ten Januarys earlier. It was a wreck, the overcrowded home to a family of four that was finally fleeing for more space, but even amid the clutter, it was love at first sight. I put a bid in by that afternoon. We were done negotiating the next morning. I had no idea I’d live there for more than a decade.
I recalled that feeling after the closing, of walking into a place that’s all yours, the anticipation as walls were being painted and floors sanded and rugs ripped up and replaced—everything ahead of you, the overriding hope being that reality can keep up with your dreams. And it did, for the most part—work, books, life, all of it better than I had hoped.
My eyes wandered to the various places in the apartment where Harry used to take his naps—at the top of the hallway, in the study beside my desk, under the left-hand window in the bay as cool air drifted in from the outside. I thought of the warm evenings when we used to sit on the stoop, of the winter mornings waking up to snow, of the Thanksgiving dinners I used to host with Harry wedged tight under my chair because he so disliked crowds. I thought of that September morning when I’d put Harry down and of the afternoon a couple of weeks later when Pam Bendock had knocked on my door.
I thought of how I had done all of that—or most of it—on my own, built a new life after a rough divorce, moved to Washington, returned to Boston, became a columnist, laughed off failures big and small, every one of them a lesson learned. But most of all, I thought about how a skeptic had transformed into something of an optimist, how my tone had become lighter over the years, my acceptance greater, my insecurities more in check. And I thought about how Harry had had no small role in that, sometimes pushing me, other times making me slow down, always my faithful guide.
My phone rang, and Pam’s name popped up. She had known, as she always knows, to give me space on this last night and morning, to let me work through things in my head. It was one of her many gifts, to either be there at the exact right time or not be there when she knew that was what I needed. “So you’ve canceled the movers and decided to stay,” she said lightly.
“I’m a sitting, breathing cliché, here in my empty apartment playing out a highlight reel of my life.”
“I hope I make at least a cameo appearance in it,” she said. She paused and added, “I’m outside the lawyer’s office.” She was about two streets away, and we were due to pass the papers on our new house. “How long is this film? Should we start without you?”
“I’ll be there in five minutes,” I said.
I rose to my feet, gathered my wits and my overnight bag, and informed my anxious dog, “Don’t worry, you’re coming with me.”
In the doorway, I lingered for an extra moment, my gaze floating one final time across the stage set that had been so central to my life. Without endings, I told myself, there are no beginnings, and with that Baker and I were gone.
The papers were all signed and passed, the movers had delivered two housefuls of furniture to our one new home, the kids roared from one room to the next, happily screaming their lungs out, before rushing outside to set up their horse jumps in the yard, the dogs were poking through every corner wondering what it was all about, when Pam turned to me, a wisp of blond hair matted to her forehead, and said, “I’d better go get Buddy.”
We weren’t quite married yet, but she did have a ring on her finger, I had no other home now but with her, and we had committed to an eternal partnership through that other, most sacred of M words: a mortgage. In other words, I was in no position to tell her, No, I don’t want him anywhere near this place.
“He’s going to love it here,” I said.
“What’s not to love?” she asked, jangling her keys in her hand on her way out the door.
Buddy would supply his own (loud) answer soon enough. But first the kids were still galloping around the yard as if they were a few cards short of a full deck. The dogs were hyperaware of every one of my movements. And I was roaming through the house—my house, my suburban house—just trying to get acclimated.
Be calm, I warned myself. You’re nothing special. Everyone moves at some point in their lives, often at several points. There were probably tens of thousands of moving vans traversing America’s highways carrying countless tons of furniture at that very moment, each and every truck, every single move, leading someone toward not just a new home but a state of uncertainty. And let’s face it, this being 2010, many of those moves weren’t by choice. I was going from a small city apartment to a real live adult house. I was moving in with the woman I loved and planned to marry. I would be living with two children, who would instill in me a greater sense of purpose and responsibility. It was all new and all different and all part of the grand cycles of life. At the tender age of forty-eight, I, Brian McGrory, was growing up.
So why in the back of my mind did I still have t
he expectation that come bedtime, I’d be wishing everyone good night and returning to Boston, with all that wonderful concrete and congestion, where I belonged?
“Buddy’s here! Boo-Boo’s here!”
That was the kids, screaming from the depths of their lungs while they raced across the yard to their mother, who was emerging from her car with a rather annoyed snow-white rooster tucked under one arm. From the kitchen window, I watched the kids stroke Buddy’s face from the other side of the fence. I heard him cluck and coo. I heard Caroline say in her little voice, “You’re going to love this place. Everything’s brand-new!” I heard Pam say, “All right, I’m going to come in and let him down.”
That’s when something odd happened; at least I thought it odd at the time. This new house sat on a piece of land that was just a few postage stamps under an acre, almost all of it cleared, and most of that lawn—which meant it was a good-sized lawn, spreading wide and somewhat far. It was an innocent piece of land, fenced in, green, absent any clusters of trees that might be holding predators who were eager to establish the—pun fully intended here—pecking order. So what did Buddy do when Pam walked through the gate, crouched, and set him free into the joyous green environs of his new world?
Answer: he scampered onto the covered front porch as if he were fleeing Frank Perdue. He looked furiously from side to side, then at the kids, then at Pam, then back to the kids, then nowhere in particular, his head spasming atop his bulbous body. Finally, with unparalleled authority, he let out a screaming, screeching cock-a-doodle-doo that just about brought down the house. And then he offered an encore.
“Oh, you poor little rooster-boy,” Abigail said, climbing onto the porch with him.
For once in his life, Buddy didn’t particularly care about the attention. He screamed again, then again and still again, barely pausing to draw in little rooster breaths. The kids eventually got bored and went off to continue their horse jumping on the other side of the yard. Pam went back to her car to carry in some last-minute junk she had taken from her old house. Buddy went nowhere. He followed nobody. I stood in the kitchen, leaning on the sink, wondering how long one animal could continue making this kind of catastrophic racket. If past was precedent, if our experience in Maine was any indication, the answer would prove to be a miserable one. But right then I seemed to be the only one who cared.
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