by Scott Lasser
“Why?”
“Because I went to war with this tag, and I came home. It got me through, and it’ll get you through. When it’s all over, you bring it back to me.”
“How do I find you?”
“I’m in the phone book,” Sam says.
VIII
Sunday afternoon, after a trip to the local park, they return to Cat’s building. It’s square and squat, a bulldog of a structure on the border between Bloomfield Hills and Birmingham, built in the early eighties when money was dear and developers were not inclined to waste exorbitant interest on aesthetic niceties like brick patterns or landscaping. Still, it has central air, and this provides a welcome refuge for Connor and Cat, who sprawl on the living-room carpet. Connor likes to wrestle and he is a boy, and so Cat obliges him, learning as she goes, about boys and herself and maybe something about men, the desire they have to prove themselves, something like the impulse in rams and elk and the other large animals that bang their heads together.
Soon they are rolling toy cars and trucks on the carpet, the vehicles a little gift because she loves him, and even with money so tight she wants to remind him. At the start of the car playing, Cat looks at her watch and then she vows not to look again, but after what she is sure has been an hour she sneaks a peek and finds that only twenty-odd minutes have passed. What’s wrong with me? she wonders. This is my son. She knows she loves Connor, knows it if she knows anything, and so shouldn’t playing cars with him be an enjoyable activity, as enjoyable as would lying on the couch right now, watching some movie from twenty years ago, interesting today for all its anthropological detail—the big collars, the huge feathered hair, the memory of her youth?
She gives it her best shot, mimicking his gurgling engine noises. The cars remind her of the drive home after 9/11. She’d spent a sleepless Tuesday night in Kyle’s apartment, not even bothering with the pretense of going to bed, but dozing now and again while watching CNN. The next day she went to the hospitals, a police station, tried to get to Kyle’s place of work, though she knew it was hopeless. He’d simply disappeared. She called Michael and talked to Connor after he’d gotten home from school—the day before they’d sent the kids home early—and she knew then, hearing her little boy’s voice, that she had to get home. She had to. Yes, she felt she was abandoning her brother, that she’d come all this way, traveled both the miles and time to get back to him, and, perhaps, through him, to herself. But Kyle was gone now, and Connor wasn’t. She needed to get to him.
The airports were closed, but eventually she found a rental car, picked it up Thursday afternoon, and headed west. She made it home in the wee hours of Friday morning. Along the way she passed numerous football fields across western Pennsylvania and Ohio, the lights shining on what must have been Thursday night junior varsity games. She wondered if Connor would play football, as Tommy had, as the boy’s father had, as Kyle hadn’t. She knew most mothers didn’t want their sons to play, that it was a dangerous game, but she hoped Connor would. It seemed a necessary thing that these games were played, that they were played on that one night, nine-thirteen, the Thursday after 9/11, if only so they could be glimpsed from the highway: glowing pools of normalcy.
On that drive home she was finally able to stop crying. She was cried out. She still hoped Kyle would be found, but she also knew better, and so she wished for what seemed possible, which was to get home, hold Connor in her arms, and never let him out of her sight.
Now she decides she’ll give the car game an hour, and she does. Then she reads to Connor Dr. Seuss’s Yertle the Turtle, her favorite. She makes Connor a snack—bits of salami, which he loves, and Triscuits—pours a glass of Merlot, then plops down on the couch, and flips through the channels while Connor eats on his knees at the coffee table. She happens on a preseason football game and thinks again of that drive, and of Tommy. He cared about preseason games. What was at stake, he once explained to her, was not the score but who would make the team. And so now, because of him, she takes a moment to watch. It’s the fourth quarter; the players are from the last rounds of the draft, or undrafted free agents, long shots to make their teams. But still Cat senses the intensity of it, the do-or-die nature of the struggles encased in a meaningless game. She wonders at being the mother of a boy, at how ill prepared she must be to teach Connor what he needs to know to be a man.
One of the interesting things about parenthood is how it can bring your own childhood back to you. Cat makes macaroni and cheese from a box, Kraft, and eats it with Connor. Macaroni and cheese? Till Connor it had been twenty-five years since Cat had eaten mac and cheese. Odd what an effective mnemonic device food is, how she can picture her mother plopping it into Kyle’s bowl and then Cat’s own, that world-weary, tired look on her mother’s face. This was usually on nights when Cat’s father wasn’t home yet; her mother would eat leftovers or nothing at all.
It is Sunday night, the end of the weekend. The phone rings, a rare thing.
“Hey,” says a voice. “It’s Tom—Tommy.”
She feels her breath catch. “You sound unsure.”
“No one calls me Tommy anymore.”
“What is it then, Tom?”
“You can call me Tommy. I like it. It makes me feel younger.”
“Well, then. What are you doing?”
“I’m calling to ask you on a date.”
His idea is tomorrow, but she shoots this down. A Tonya rule, for one thing: don’t be available on his first choice. Also, she’ll never find a sitter in time. They settle on Friday, five days hence. He offers to pick her up, but she says she’ll meet him at the restaurant. She doesn’t want him to see how she lives.
With arrangements made, there is a long silence. She almost thanks him for calling, for not leaving her to wonder if he would call, for the kindness of taking away that horrible uncertainty. But she stops herself.
“Is that a football game I hear?” he asks.
“It is,” she admits.
“You’re a fan now?”
“I have a son. I thought I should learn.”
“I’m really looking forward to seeing you, Cat.”
“It’ll be great,” she says, trying to sound nonchalant.
“Friday, then,” he says.
She hangs up the phone and has a feeling that is part memory and yet very much present: she again has Tommy to look forward to.
It is now after eight, the dishes and the pot are cleaned and put away, and she has to rouse Connor from the couch.
“C’mon, Bucko,” she says. “Time to go get ready for bed.”
Connor says nothing, but Cat can see that he’s tired and not in the mood to move. Together, Cat and Connor collect his prized possessions—a Hot Wheels car, a blue jay feather found outside the apartment, a small rock with a skein of quartz traversing it, the giraffe key chain bought at the zoo, and Brownie, his bear—and head for his room. His favorite thing is to fall asleep in front of the television, now that he’s too big for Cat to pick up and carry to bed. It makes him feel older, he says, to wake up on the couch. Something he no doubt learned from his father.
She has him brush his teeth while she brushes his hair, and then they lie in bed together while she reads a story about a boy with a magic crayon, one of Connor’s old favorites. She reads and wonders what Tommy reads to his son, what lessons his little boy gets. In the middle of her reading she knows Connor is asleep, hears it in his breathing, and so she kisses him on his hot forehead and goes to call the boy’s father.
Michael answers on the second ring, the telltale sounds of a football game in the background. She tells him she wants to take Connor to California over the several days he would normally have the boy.
A whistle blows in the background. She says nothing, something she learned from Sherri. You want to sell something, you’ve got to know when to shut up. Ask for the order, then don’t talk. People will buy just to break the silence.
“Okay,” Michael says. “But he needs some shoes.”
How did she end up with Michael? It is the mystery of her life, the men in it. She always liked boys, and then men, the company of them, the relative simplicity of their interactions that can pass for honesty, and sometimes is. She met Michael in a sports bar (of course) up on Square Lake Road, where she went with two girlfriends on a Monday night precisely because it was a football night. One of the girlfriends, Rhonda, insisted it was the perfect night to meet guys, who would be there to watch the game and not to meet women. “There’s nothing worse than a guy trying too hard,” Rhonda said. “Plus, the odds will be good.” Sure enough, there were only a handful of women in the place, and at halftime there was a subtle shift in attention, Cat could feel it, and then suddenly she was playing pool with Michael.
Pool. Of all the ridiculous things. But she was weak then, susceptible as any woman to broad shoulders and a strong jaw and what started that night carried on for almost a year, when she decided that she could not spend the rest of her life with him, that the whole idea was ludicrous—he was a carpenter, had two years of college and little ambition—but before she could tell him she found she was pregnant. She was at work at the insurance agency, and she threw up in the plastic trash can that was under her desk. It was the third time that week, some stomach flu, she lied to herself. As long as no one saw her she could be willfully and effectively delusional, but on this morning Rhonda witnessed it, and said, “What are you, pregnant?”
There was briefly a moment of limb-loosening, gut-clenching, sweaty panic, but then she caught her breath, looked at Rhonda, and understood something like the truth. It was as if her whole life were aiming to this point, when it would happen just like this, repeating what had come before. It felt preordained, ever since that afternoon almost twenty years before when her mother sat her down and told her what was what.
IX
Something in the female of the species requires more sleep, which Sam noticed once Kyle went off to college and it was suddenly no big deal to have a woman spend, say, the entirety of a Saturday night in his bed. This morning he rises before the sun, and stands barefoot on the cool stone of Phyllis’s garden walkway. He drinks two cups of coffee, reads the Los Angeles Times, and contemplates how he will tell Cat of her origins. Or what Sam knows of them. There are mysteries there.
When the sun is up, Phyllis wakes and makes herself a cup of coffee. He waits for her to take a sip, and then he tells her that Cat is not his biological daughter. “You’re kidding,” she says, her hair still down, her body wrapped in a silk robe of Asian origin. Not Japanese, Sam is fairly sure. “You’ve never told her?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
It’s the obvious question: Cat might well want to know something of her beginning. Sam and Ann had always had an understanding they would tell her when she was old enough; then she was old enough, and yet they didn’t tell her. Silence was easy. Then Ann died, and Kyle, and suddenly Cat doesn’t have a blood relation left on the planet, except for her little boy.
“Maybe it doesn’t matter,” says Sam.
“Only a man could say something like that.”
“We move on,” he says.
“In denial,” Phyllis adds.
“Look, I’m going to tell her.” He feels something in his chest. It could be anything.
“Maybe you should wait.”
“You’re not serious.”
“No,” she says. “I’m not.”
For years Sam studied his children for the differences of biology. With Cat it was always easy to see the influence of another man, physically taller, darker, though perhaps equally somber and quiet. Both of Sam’s children kept their own counsel and thus seemed mature beyond their years. Their size was the biggest difference. Once, when Cat was about fourteen, she and Kyle were in the kitchen. Sam walked in, and on a lark picked up Kyle, grabbing him by his bony ribs and hoisting him, a move that took some effort. Cat, quite unexpectedly, did the same thing to Sam. Now there was an experience, to be suddenly lifted off the ground by your fourteen-year-old daughter who weighed only twenty pounds less than you and was just as tall. Two things occurred to Sam. First, he was reminded that another man was involved; Sam could feel him reaching out, grabbing, reminding him of the secret history. Second, floating there above the tile floor of the kitchen, Sam realized that there had been some change in his authority, in his very essence as a father. Fathers are supposed to pick up their girls, not the other way around. It seemed a long time that he was up in the air. Ann happened by and said, in her sharp voice, “Catherine, put your father down.” And it was done.
Sam came to admire Cat’s size, her height and presence. Kyle, on the other hand, was built like a greyhound. The last year all three were together, Sam took Kyle to Saks to buy a suit for the fall sports banquet. Kyle had outgrown what he’d had; Sam remembered that old suit, a constricting garment Kyle wore to Ann’s funeral, the pants at his ankles, the short sport jacket sleeves, the exposed wrists. Sam thought, He’s really not a boy, anymore. Just as he thought, Cat’s a woman, almost. At Saks Sam discovered that Kyle wore a forty long. This was a size a man wore. There was a moment when Kyle and Cat stood together in front of the three-sided mirror, the reflections of them bouncing endlessly back into the glass. Sam told himself not to forget it, this still shot of his children together, young and strong. Anything could happen, and he had high hopes for them. They were his, equally, and soon they would be gone.
• • •
Phyllis believes in walking, and so after a couple of cups of coffee Sam is out in the Santa Barbara hills. He prefers strolling on the beach for its flatness and salty air, for the sky and the light reflected off the water. Phyllis is more concerned with her personal expenditure of energy. Here, on this dusty trail, Sam sweats. She wanted him to stay home, used his heart as the reason, and so he insisted on coming to prove to her he is fit, and to test the gods. She keeps stopping to wait for him, sometimes even retracing her steps, which is yet another special indignity. I fought a war, he thinks. I once stayed awake for two and a half days, and now I can’t keep up with some old lady.
“You need to go back,” she tells him. “So help me God, if you die out here …”
He’s resting by leaning against a tree, a hand on the textured bark. He’s too winded to speak.
“We’re going back,” she says.
He doesn’t protest. The way back is downhill, and surprisingly easy. He follows her, noting the herringbone pattern her small shoes leave in the dust. Ahead, he sees a bench. He says he needs to sit on it. His idea is to smoke a cigarette.
Sitting next to her, catching her in profile, he can almost see how she must have looked as a young woman. Something, he thinks. She must have been something. He is always thinking this, a constant kind of yearning.
“Aren’t you going to offer me one?” she asks, as he taps out a cigarette.
He reminds her she doesn’t smoke.
“What do I have to lose?” she asks.
“A few years, I suppose.”
It turns out she smoked once in her life. It made her feel a little naughty, she says, which she was otherwise not. After her first husband left her—this was in the sixties—she found she didn’t need the cigarettes to feel unconventional. “A man got me to quit,” she says. “I guess if I could quit for him, I could start for you.”
“I didn’t ask you to start,” he says.
“They say it’s important for couples to find things they can do together.”
“I want you to meet my daughter,” he tells her.
“Then I will.”
Through the trees across the trail he can make out a sliver of shining ocean.
“Stick with me,” she says.
I intend to, he thinks, but he doesn’t say it. He’s having a hard time catching his breath, and, for some reason, he’s embarrassed to speak.
Later, afraid to go home, he spends the night with her. Sixty years ago he learned to expect death at any second, and he believed he could face it with calmness and grace. He also remembers lying in the VA hospital and not worrying, just waiting to see what would happen. Now, though, he is afraid. I should have the operation, he thinks. He decides to call the doctor tomorrow and schedule it for September 16, the Monday after Cat leaves.
X
On Wednesday she e-mails Tonya. Cat hasn’t seen her for six weeks. Tonya lives in Farming-ton now, has three girls, a husband, a marketing job, and not enough time to get together. When they were teenagers they had nothing but time. Cat wouldn’t trade anything for what she has now—that is, Connor—but she misses those days, too, the simplicity of them, the hope. The friendship. Things haven’t turned out the way she and Tonya planned. Farmington isn’t Birmingham, or Bloomfield. Cat’s apartment isn’t like the old house. It’s as if everyone in her generation has taken a step back.
I have a date with Tommy Swenson, says the e-mail. Tonya calls within ten minutes. Then, on Friday, after Cat has dropped Connor at his father’s—it’s not Michael’s night, but he’s agreed to take his son—she returns to find Tonya waiting for her in the parking lot of her building.
“I couldn’t let you face this alone,” Tonya says.
“You’re planning on coming along? A chaperone?”
“God, no, but I’ll help you get ready.”
Tonya sits on the toilet lid in Cat’s small bathroom while Cat takes a bath. It is a great luxury to lie in a hot bath without having to worry about a small child in the house, to hear the light sloshing of water, to have someone you trust close by.
