by Scott Lasser
SHE NEEDED MATERNITY clothes, so she decided to walk down to a maternity shop where she’d often bought gifts for others. She moved slowly and carried her mocha, intending to buy a couple things, the first subtle outfits that would give nothing away. She didn’t want to tell anyone at work. At least, not yet.
Carolyn walked into the store and there was Mandy, her therapist, buying clothes for her pregnant daughter. “Did you talk to Marty?” she asked in a whisper.
“I did.” Lately, so many of Carolyn’s conversations required whispers.
“And how did it go?”
“He called me despicable.”
“What did you say?” Mandy asked.
“I told him I appreciated his opinion,” Carolyn said. Mandy had taught her to say this. It meant Fuck you.
“I’ll get all the details this week,” Mandy said. They had an appointment Tuesday. The talk with Marty hadn’t been so bad, really. Once Carolyn said she didn’t want alimony, he had given in on everything else.
“You’ll be fine,” Mandy said. Carolyn thought Mandy might actually be right. She left the store without buying.
VI
HIS MOTHER SPENT the night in the hospital. Now David drove his father’s car, the steering wheel practically bumping his chest. Sol wouldn’t let him adjust the seat, said he’d never get it back to just where he liked it. David wasn’t even allowed to put music on the radio, which in Detroit seemed like a crime.
“Dad, what are you going to do if Mom dies?”
“I’m going to stop going to that damn home,” Sol said.
“You know what I mean.”
“Son, she’s already gone. Has been for some time.”
They parked and walked into the hospital, David shuffling beside his father, trying to keep his pace, not rushing him. The sky hung gray and low; the air was damp and raw, and it was easy to think it portended something, but really it was always this way this time of year. Still, David sensed they were near the end with his mother—a call so early could hardly mean otherwise.
They were intercepted at the nurses’ station and led to a small meeting room off a larger waiting area. The nurse offered them coffee. “Let me get the doctor,” she said.
His complexion was dark, this doctor, his eyes baggy and hooded, a veneer of stubble above them that covered his head. “I’m Dr. Czerny,” he said. “I’m very sorry, but Mrs. Halpert has died.”
“Of what?” Sol wanted to know.
“Her injuries. I was paged around two this morning. The nurses noticed she was developing problems with her respiration and blood pressure. It would seem she had a ruptured spleen.”
“You couldn’t figure this out yesterday when they brought her in?” David asked. It was, he knew, the question to ask, but what did it matter now?
The doctor started to speak but stopped, and then David became aware of his father. They were all sitting around a table of fake wood, the kind of thing you’d find in a breakfast nook. The walls were plain, the color of paste. His father’s shoulders were jerking, almost heaving. And then they heaved. “Oh God,” Sol said, and the tears came. David gave a quick glimpse at the doctor and then pushed his chair back, knelt by his father. He put an arm around his father’s back. “It’s all right, Dad,” he said. “It’s over.”
With each gasp his father seemed to let go a small store of reserve, till he was crying as David had never seen him cry, as David had never cried, except perhaps the night of Cory’s death.
• • •
THAT NIGHT HE slept in his old room. He didn’t think his father should be alone. It was a fitful night. He woke often, disoriented, middle-aged but back in the room of his teenage years, in his old bed. He looked through the darkness to the same bookshelf he’d seen every morning as he was growing up. It created a kind of vertigo.
The following afternoon he called the nursing home to tell them his mother wouldn’t be coming back and made arrangements to get her things. He spoke to Arlene, one of the Jamaican women. It had been an awful day, but Arlene’s voice lifted his mood. “Oh, I am so sorry,” she said. “And poor Mr. Jovanovich.”
“He notices she’s gone?”
“Oh, yes. All day he looks for her.”
David thought that his mother might have enjoyed life more if she could have known that when she was gone there would be two men crying for her. He vowed to try to live as if he’d be missed.
• • •
IT WAS ALMOST two in the morning when he called Carolyn. She took the call, said she was driving home from a night out with friends. Immediately he felt jealous, but he kept it to himself.
“My mother died today,” he told her.
“Oh, David. I’m very sorry.”
“Thanks.”
“I ended it with Marty yesterday. It’s all over but the crying.”
“Who’s going to cry?”
“My son,” she said.
He didn’t have an answer. She asked when the funeral was, then told him that she’d be there.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I know,” she said. “Now, what’s this about you buying my brother’s house?”
• • •
SHE FLEW IN the next day, would go to the funeral the following morning and back to L.A. that night so she could pick up her son and bring him right back to Detroit. It was difficult and inconvenient for her, and he was moved by it.
His father’s cousin, Milt Jones, also came to town. Milt drove David’s father to the funeral so David could pick up Carolyn. It had been some weeks since he’d seen her, and for a moment, waiting at the door of her mother’s townhome, he worried that she would seem a stranger. Then she opened the door, beautiful as ever, and he realized how silly he was. She sat in his car and it felt to him as if she’d never left.
“Stop saying that,” she told him. They were pulling away and he’d again thanked her for coming. “I wanted to come.”
Again he had to stop himself from saying thank you.
“It’s been a tough year for us,” she said. “I thought you could use a friend.”
“I can,” he admitted. A long silence followed. There was so much he wanted to say to her, but his mother was dead and what he was feeling was too complicated for words.
“It’s okay,” she told him, as if reading his mind. “Just drive. We’ll talk later.”
They drove straight to the funeral. The radio played music that had been new when he was young but was now called classic: Mitch Ryder, Bob Seger, Glenn Frey, Ted Nugent, Alice Cooper. Detroiters all. It was difficult for David to explain the pride he felt in his city, but certainly this music was behind it. Throw in John Lee Hooker and Aretha Franklin and Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, Smokey Robinson and the rest of Motown, the jazz of Carter, Burrell, and Henderson, the power of the MC5 and the Stooges, the pop of Madonna, and the current efforts of Ritchie, Mathers, and White, and you could argue that what the Motor City really made, the thing that would last long after the Ren Cen crumbled into the river and the world no longer needed cars, was music.
• • •
THE TREES THREW long shadows across the cemetery lawn, which in November was a faded army green. The rabbi had brought several men from the temple to be sure to fill out the minyan. David stood with his father and cousin Milt, all of them close to the grave. With the rabbi and the extra men they totaled seven; ten were needed to say the mourners’ prayer. When it came to the dead, Jews wanted witnesses, but this was Detroit and witnesses were hard to find. Steve Bergen was there, and two of Trudy’s friends, each with a daughter in tow, and Carolyn, but there wasn’t a bar or bat mitzvah among them. David watched as the rabbi said a few words to Sol and made a call on his cell phone. Twenty minutes later a car arrived with three fifteen-year-old boys from the confirmation class, dressed in baggy pants and hooded sweatshirts, like black kids from the Cass corridor.
They began the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. David mumbled the words, unsure if he real
ly still knew them but aware that his recitation was one of the ten that counted.
• • •
AFTER THE FUNERAL, he drove Carolyn back to her mother’s. Tomorrow she was flying back to California to retrieve her son. She had traveled all that way for him.
“Tell me I’ll see you when you come back,” he said. He couldn’t help himself. He missed her already.
“You will,” she promised.
He felt an inkling of calm, just knowing he’d see her again. He leaned across the seat and gave her a kiss, a chaste one, as befit the occasion.
VII
CAROLYN CALLED HER mother from the gate when it was clear the plane would be on time. Kevin sat beside her reading a book he’d been assigned for the break. It had a dragon on the cover. Around them in the industrial light of the airport, people sat reading, staring at laptops, listening to music with earphones, talking into cell phones.
“You know what I heard today?” her mother said. “Your friend David is buying Shelly’s house.”
“He told me.”
“Shelly is very excited to be able to move away.”
“I’m sure she’ll be happy,” Carolyn said. Someone was ringing in. She put her mother on hold.
“I’m trying to reach Carolyn Evans,” said a female voice.
“This is she.”
“I’m calling from Genetic Services regarding the paternity test you ordered.”
“Yes?” She felt her heart beating in her chest.
“Paternity was not confirmed.”
“Not confirmed?”
“Yes,” said the woman. “The man whose genetic material you provided is not the father of the child.”
So it was David.
“Thank you,” Carolyn said. She clicked back to her mother. “Mom, are you still there?”
“Yes. I’ve got your rooms all ready,” her mother responded.
“Great, Mom, but look, I’ve got to go. They’re calling our plane.” She hung up.
“They are?” asked Kevin.
“No, I lied to get off the phone with Grandma,” she told him. He looked straight ahead as he considered this and then went back to his book, lesson learned. Probably he would tell little fibs to her the rest of her life, and she’d deserve it.
• • •
LATE ON HER first night back she met David at the site of their first date. She’d known she’d been carrying his child, and now she had scientific proof. It made her think of him ever more fondly. She had to find a way to tell him.
“You’re out of your mind,” she said. They were talking about Dirk’s house.
“You know, there are luxury cars that cost more than that house.”
“Note to David: you’re white.” The bartender came by, and she ordered a tonic water.
“Don’t you want something stronger?”
“I want to know why you’d move into a black neighborhood.”
“I love that house, and I want to live in the city. All my life I’ve told people I’m from Detroit. I want to really mean it. I’m back. All in.”
All in? She didn’t know what to say to that.
“Why don’t you come over to my place?” he said.
“Whoa, a booty call.”
“What have you got to lose?” he said.
Nothing, she decided, but sex had solved nothing for her.
“I’m not coming over.”
“You look beautiful.”
“I’m still not coming over,” she said.
She waited for him to sip his drink and then look back at her. “You know,” she said, “there was a time when Natalie thought she was pregnant. With your child.”
“She never told me.”
“She didn’t want you to freak out.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“She thought you’d lose it.”
“I was seventeen. I would have lost it,” he admitted.
“And so you had a child with someone else,” she said.
It sounded like an accusation, though she hadn’t meant it that way. The bartender, she noticed, moved away. He was a young guy with sideburns right out of the sixties. He started to load glasses into his little dishwasher, making more noise than could possibly have been necessary.
David got more handsome the longer she looked at him.
“What?” he asked.
“What, what?”
“What do you want from me?”
She intended not to answer, to say nothing at all, but then the truth came out, as it sometimes did. “A little time,” she said.
VIII
HIS FATHER HAD made a reservation at the Holiday Inn because they had room and the price was reasonable and there were just two of them and who cooks Thanksgiving dinner for two people? Still, David couldn’t help but tease him. “The Holiday Inn, Dad? Why not Chinese take-out?”
“Don’t be a putz,” his father told him. “It’s Thanksgiving.”
David drove. It was late—not in the day, but relative to the reservation—and his father wanted him to hurry. “They’re not going to give the table away. We’ll be the only ones there,” David insisted.
He was wrong. The lobby was packed, with many of those there speaking something other than English. Spanish, Polish or Russian, something else he couldn’t place. It made sense, now that David thought about it. If you were born in Hungary, say, what would you know of the Thanksgiving meal? Of course, there were also plenty of American-born patrons, white and black. David made his way to the hostess stand and gave his name.
“Dad, would you look at this?” he said. “Lots of other people who don’t want to cook Thanksgiving dinner either.”
The hostess led them out of the dining room to the enclosed pool area, which was set up with tables and where there were already fifty people or so enjoying the holiday meal. His father asked for something inside.
“We’re all filled up,” said the hostess.
“Go with it, Dad,” said David. “Out here you get the full experience.”
They sat. Above the din—or perhaps under it—David could hear the workings of the pool machinery. “That smell. That chlorine smell. I guess now it means Thanksgiving.”
“I didn’t know about the pool,” his father said.
“It’s okay,” David said.
“It’s the first Thanksgiving without Mom,” his father said.
David nodded.
“Your problem,” his father said, “is that you’re too unencumbered.”
“Too unencumbered?”
“Yes. You lack the basic chattel of life—a wife, children, debt. These things give a man purpose.”
Maybe, David thought, though he had had all that chattel, and look where it had got him.
His father talked on. “Most men, they get up in the morning, they go off to work, and they know why: they’ve got a family to feed. It’s been that way forever. It drives the world. The animal world, too. You, you get up in the morning and then—why do you go off to work?”
“To make you happy,” David said.
“Make me happy?” his father asked.
“Sure, so when someone says to you, ‘How’s David doing?’ you don’t have to answer, ‘He’s home on the couch drinking vodka from the bottle.’ ”
“You’re mocking me,” his father said.
“Maybe, Dad, but just a little.”
“I’m trying to help you. This is what’s so lousy about getting old: I finally know what to do, and I’m too old to do it.”
“You’re arguing for chattel,” David said.
“How ’bout just a woman?” his father asked. “Someone who makes you happy. It’s no good for a man to be alone.”
“You’re alone, Dad.”
“I’m not alone,” he said.
David looked at him, worried suddenly that now his father, too, was losing his mind.
“I’m not alone,” his father explained, “because you’re back.”
IX
TH
E NIGHT OF Thanksgiving she lay beside him and listened to him breathe. She’d promised herself that she wouldn’t do this, that she would put everything on the table first, but then she’d gone ahead and broken that promise. David was asleep already, and she was still damp from making love. She pulled the sheet up, and then the covers, a duvet really too small for two people.
She allowed herself to doze for half an hour, and then she slid out of bed and left him sleeping. She considered him in the shadows, flat on his back, eyes covered, elbow draped over the bridge of his nose. She once read that how a man slept told you a lot about him. There was one type you were supposed to avoid, but she didn’t think it was the back sleepers. No, it was the guys who slept diagonally. She’d known a couple.
David, she thought, carried his sadness with him. You could watch him sleep and know he was a decent man.
On the drive back to her mother’s, she decided she needed to tell David now she was pregnant with his child. It was getting so that dreading it was perhaps worse than actually going through with it. Also, she needed to tell Kevin they were moving. Then she’d take him back to L.A. to finish the semester and say goodbye to his friends. And to his father.
X
FRIDAY MORNING HE watched the football highlights on ESPN. The Lions had lost again. He tried to remember the last time Detroit had won on Thanksgiving Day. He’d probably been living in Denver and hadn’t noticed.
The Thanksgiving meal had been a disaster, but it had been a short disaster, and for that David was thankful. Family obligations were usually horrible, unless you didn’t have them at all.
He hoped Carolyn would come by again tonight. He was happy when she was with him; it was that simple. He took pleasure in the double-take she sometimes gave him, or how she would sit on the couch, legs up, her feet pushing against his thigh while he sat at the other end. It was rare what they had, he thought. He knew things usually got complicated. He told himself not to fear what he wouldn’t have in the future, just to focus on what he had now.
His cell phone rang. He answered without looking. At this time it could only be her.
“Hey,” he said.
“Yo, you David Halpert?”
“Yes. Who’s this?”
“Eric McCall.”
