Every Last One

by Anna Quindlen

  It's twenty-five after six when Max opens the car door. Despite my best efforts, I've fallen into a doze. "You scared me," I say. Max doesn't answer. He passes me a note with his drum teacher's strange crabbed handwriting.

  "Please call me," the teacher has written.

  "Is everything all right?" I ask.

  "Is that Kiernan's mom?" Max asks.

  The rain has slowed to a gray drizzle, and Deborah has hurried past, a bag in one hand. I catch a glimpse of her big eyes, so like her son's. She wears her dark hair very short now, a ruffly inch or two all over, as though she is daring you to avoid those eyes. Her face looks like a room with no drapes or shades. She angles her umbrella sharply. There's something undeniable about the posture of a person trying not to acknowledge your existence.

  "I can't wait until camp starts," Max says, playing imaginary drums in the air.

  We are standing outside a house on Winding Way, Rickie and I, and John, and Tony, who runs the backhoe.

  "This is so bad," says Rickie. He's chewing hard on his bottom lip. John is shaking his head. Tony is walking back and forth, swearing under his breath. I try not to cry. The boss shouldn't cry.

  It is the Friday of Memorial Day weekend. Two days earlier, we finished a big job: six tiers of shrubs, a small copse of flowering plum and pear, a long hedge of weigela. Almost all of it is gone. The property is pocked with holes. A few of the shrubs have been tossed down a steep slope behind the house and are lying in the creek below, their roots raised to the sky like fingers. Please, please, save us, they seem to plead. Rickie says some may be salvageable. The fruit trees and the bigger bushes are gone, nowhere to be found.

  Rickie has already called the police. A patrol car pulls up as I stand there, arms folded across my chest. I know the officer who gets out. His daughter plays peewee league soccer on the field after Alex and his team are finished, and we have exchanged polite remarks about footing. Somehow this makes it worse. Whatever community impulse those soccer games stand for, this is its opposite.

  "There were really plants in all those holes?" the cop asks. His nameplate says his last name is Jackson. We shake hands. The men nod.

  "Plants, hell," Rickie says. "Thousands of dollars' worth of trees, too. This is more than vandalism. I'd say we're looking at twenty thousand dollars' worth of plantings in all. That's not even counting the labor."

  "I have invoices back at the office," I say. "Where are the guys?"

  The guys are the Mexicans who work for me from spring through fall. They live in an old decommissioned motel out on a back road that was once the best way to drive through this part of the state. When the interstate was finished, the motels along the old road died. My guys live a shabby, makeshift life in a cinder-block rectangle with windows so small they barely let in light and air. They make coffee on a hot plate, eat fast food. Rickie says they live better here than do their families in Mexico, where they send money each month. I've decided to believe it. The wages we pay them shame me. That, and the fact that the only one who really registers as an individual with me is a short thick man named Jose. Or that's what he has told me his name is. Nancy says they all use names they think white people can recall and pronounce. Jose, Manuel, Juan. Jose is a soccer maniac and first spoke to me when Alex, in uniform, was dropped off at a job site. He has shown me pictures of his children, two little girls photographed in white dresses holding pink carnations.

  "All our people are doing that big sod job at the club," Rickie says to me. "Why?"

  "I want to get this fixed right away. These people will be back by the end of next week. I know it sounds crazy but I'm going to feel better if by next week this place looks like nothing happened." I look up at the house. It is a large place, not pretty but impressive. It might as well have a sign at the end of the drive: COSTASMALLFORTUNE. The owners are new to the area, one of those couples who confuse me: prosperous disproportionate to their ages, which I guess to be early thirties. They are away in the south of France and so decided that this was the perfect time to have their place landscaped. Now it looks as though it has been savaged by a storm. What sort of people steal trees? "I don't mean to sound hysterical, but I am really freaked out by this," I say.

  "It doesn't sound hysterical at all," says the police officer. "This is pretty horrible."

  "I think they have lights with motion detectors at the corners of the house," said Rickie. "If we put those on, maybe it will help keep anyone from coming back and doing it again."

  "We might put everything back in and have this happen again?" I ask.

  Rickie shrugs. Officer Jackson says, "I can have a car go by once or twice a night." He makes some notes. "Your insurance will cover the cost of the plants, right?"

  "Is that all anybody thinks about nowadays?" Rickie says, his voice verging on a shout. "Somebody comes in here--or somebodies, because this was a lot of goddamn work--and steals all this stuff that we spent days putting in, and I'm betting just junked it. I'm betting every one of these plants was tossed in a field somewhere and is lying there dying in this heat." It's unseasonably warm for May, in the high eighties, and the policeman has big rings of black beneath the sleeves of his dark-blue uniform shirt.

  "Hey I'm with you," he says. "This is really sick and sad. If one of my kids did something like this, he'd be on lockdown for a year. I just asked because if the insurance will cover it, I'd like to get this lady a police report fast so she can file what she needs to file and recover some of her losses."

  "You think it's kids?" I ask.

  All of us look back at the holes in the ground. The teenagers in town traditionally go a little crazy as the weather warms. When Ruby and the twins were younger and my business hadn't yet taken shape, I was entranced by the notion of long, formless summer days, hiking the hills, going to the county fair, putting up tents so they could spend the nights in the yard peeking out at the stars. But the tales of older kids racing their cars on the outlying roads or smoking pot in the woods scared me off, and by the time the twins were six they had joined Ruby in day camp, making mosaic ashtrays and playing badminton. Max would throw his long arms around my pelvis and bury his face in my side as though he were longing to return to the womb. "Come on," Alex would say in the soothing voice he had once used with his brother. "We can paint." That was before Alex began to understand that Max's behavior reflected on him with the other kids. It was strange that it never went the other way, that Alex's ease and prowess never cast a sliver of sunshine over his twin.

  "I don't have a clue," says the officer. "I mean, we do get some vandalism, but this seems pretty over the top. Not to mention a lot of work. Maybe you could see if you can get something out of your kids?"

  "It's not them," I say, then sigh. "I bet you hear that all the time--'It's not my kids.'" I know he does. The big end-of-the-school-year debacle in town was two years ago, when half the baseball team played too much beer pong and set fire to a ramshackle barn at the edge of what had once been a dairy farm. All the parents spent days denying that their kids had been involved, although two of the boys had bad burns on their hands. There were two fallback explanations: the legendarily destructive and vindictive kids from the next town (who, when we played them in athletic contests, looked and behaved exactly like our own children); and the Mexicans, who were always being suspected of petty theft but, as far as I could tell, never did anything worthy of official notice except fight among themselves.

  Then a construction company building houses across the road produced a security-camera video that showed eight boys siphoning gas out of the SUV that one of them had gotten as a graduation gift and pouring it around the barn doors. The parents divided into three groups: the ones whose boys just stood there and watched, which made them innocent; the ones whose boys did the siphoning and the lighting, which made them "misguided," according to the attorney representing the wildest one; and the two decent sets of parents who made their sons perform hours of community service, picking up trash along the road, even
before the court said they had to do it.

  "My kids aren't angels," I say, "but their friends are all pretty attached to me." I point to the sign we'd posted: ANOTHER LOVELY LANDSCAPE BY LATHAM. "That's a whole lot of alliteration," Ruby had said when I first came up with it.

  "I hear you," the cop says. "But maybe the word'll be going around, you know? Ha ha, guess what me and Jason did--that kind of thing."

  "I'm going to kick somebody's ass," says Rickie. "Kids or adults or whoever. I'm going to kick somebody's ass to hell and back."

  I'm not sure the kids would tell me if they knew. They were good about informing when there were little things involved: which eighth-grade boy carried condoms, which girl had had a summer-camp boyfriend that her boyfriend at home didn't know about. But they kept the big things to themselves. Sarah and Rachel had kept Ruby's secret for six months of freshman year, until I walked into her room one morning and saw her bare back, a xylophone of spine and ribs with not a bit of fat for buffer.

  "It took you a long time to figure things out," Rachel had said to me accusingly when Ruby started eating again.

  Just this morning, I had run into Rachel's mother while picking up coffee. Sandy was wearing a sundress and platform sandals, her toes lacquered a dried-blood red. I knew she thought we were friends, but I had never liked her. When Rachel was twelve, a stocky girl tortured by bad skin and full-on orthodonture, her mother sent her to fat camp. Worse, that's what Sandy had called it--to the girls, the mothers, everyone: fat camp. "As you can tell, she doesn't get it from my side," she'd said.

  "Is Ruby giving you a hard time?" Sandy asked, her hand on my forearm. "Because Rachel is making my life miserable."

  "It's a hard time," I said. "College, the course load. They're all under a lot of pressure. Junior year is probably the hardest year of high school for these kids."

  "Isn't it?" Sandy always spoke as though she were delivering lines from a crucial scene in a soap opera. "It's so hard. I don't know if I'm going to get through it. I keep asking her, What about Sarah? What about Ruby? Why don't they have these issues?"

  "Oh, they have issues."

  "It's my dating. She should be old enough to have come to terms with it." After Sandy divorced Rachel's father, she'd married a real-estate broker, then lived with the man who built pools in the area. Now she's seeing a vice president of the local bank.

  "Well," I say, "I think that's got to be hard on a teenage girl, you know?"

  "I know she wants me to feel guilty. But I just won't. I think guilt is a useless emotion. They need to understand that we have to have a life, too."

  I had sipped at my coffee in lieu of speaking. I was afraid that, like the princess in the fairy tale, frogs of candor would leap from my lips and I would reply: "We don't have a life. We had children instead. Your daughter is sad and insecure and in some kind of trouble. Grow up. Stop thinking about yourself. Forget about men. Buy some appropriate clothes."

  I am a coward. Instead, I had agreed that it was necessary that someday soon we have lunch.

  After the police officer pulls away, I see that I have a message from Alice on my phone. "I really need advice on potty training," her recorded voice says. And it's almost irresistible to call her back and say, Oh my God, it makes no difference--preschool, playdates, sharing, reading readiness. I remember Ruby and Kiernan, both of them five, playing side by side in the grass behind the little house where we lived when the children were small, squabbling, pulling toys out of each other's hands, calling the twins dumbbells and stupid heads. Deborah was worried that Kiernan would resent the baby she was expecting. Someone had said at the time, "Little children, little problems; big children, big problems." What did we know?

  That evening I have dinner with Nancy. The girls have taught us what they call the small-town look-around: Before you begin to speak, you look all around you to make certain there is no one within earshot you wouldn't want to overhear the conversation. Even at a restaurant a half hour out of town, we both do it.

  "I have had the day from hell," I say.

  "Please," says Nancy, rolling her eyes. "You have no idea." Her elder son, Fred, the one in college, had his wisdom teeth out the day before. Her youngest, Bob, fell trying for a ground ball and broke his ankle. "If Sarah pulls a muscle swimming, I'm running away from home," she says.

  Nancy's crises always seem to trump mine, but I still tell her about the stolen plants, and about my encounter with Rachel's mother. "Sandy says Rachel doesn't understand that her mother needs to have a life. She says guilt is a useless emotion."

  "Oh, please," says Nancy. "Guilt is what separates humans from animals."

  "Fries or a salad with that?" the waitress asks as she takes our orders.

  "Fries," Nancy says.

  "Me too," I say. "I'm so sick of salads."

  Nancy had Fred before I had children, and Bob before I had the twins. When we first met, we discovered that Sarah and Ruby were born within two days of each other, and that we both believed natural childbirth was the big lie of our time. (Sandy once told me that she had had an elective Caesarean to keep her tone "down there.") Nancy learns more about Sarah from me than from Sarah, and I learn more about Ruby from her than from Ruby. Although there always seems to be less to learn about Sarah.

  "I have this situation with Kiernan and I'm at a complete loss," I say as our burgers arrive. "He's always at the house, which was always fine, except that now Ruby doesn't seem to want him around."

  Nancy's mouth is stuffed with food, and she is signaling that she wants to speak but can't. She always eats too fast. Once I had to Heimlich her in a Chinese restaurant.

  "I only know this from eavesdropping on Sarah--" she finally says.

  "Of course--"

  "But apparently he's been doing this routine where he bought Ruby this ring and he wants her to make some kind of promise about how they will stay together, and they'll go to colleges near each other--"

  "Which is an idea he might have gotten from Eric and Sarah--"

  "Which you know," Nancy says, "makes me completely crazy. I feel as if I was a bad role model for her, getting married so young, and you know, ultimately, I have no regrets, but still the idea that she might wind up with someone she met when she was fourteen ..." Nancy is eating my fries because she has finished her own. She and Bill met in eighth grade. Fred is twenty and still with his high school girlfriend, and Bob is only fifteen but has had the same girlfriend since high school began. They grew up with a family mythology, and they're sticking to it.

  "So what should I do?" I ask. "I mean, in the natural order of things your daughter breaks up with a boy and afterward you see him a couple of times a year on Main Street or at a game. But Kiernan has practically lived at our house since the Donahues moved back, what, four years ago?"

  "Five. They moved back the week I became department chair." Nancy is a biology professor at the state university campus an hour north of town. She is apparently a recognized expert on some single-celled organisms. Since we are all, in some fashion, single-celled organisms, this makes her an expert on everything and everyone. My friendships have a certain symmetry at the moment: Alice is always asking me what she should do, and Nancy is always telling me what I should do.

  "I don't know what to tell you," she says. "If Kiernan was a different kind of kid, he and Ruby could break up and he could still hang around. But if he were a different kind of kid, she wouldn't have been with him in the first place. She's moving on, and he's not. The thing about Ruby, she's so mature that she understands all this."

  "I don't think you should assume that Sarah is immature because of Eric. It's worked out all right for you and Bill."

  Nancy eats my last fry. "I suppose," she says flatly.

  Bill and Nancy will have a big silver-anniversary party next year. He runs an insurance agency and Glen thinks he's great. I think he's fine. Nancy and I have an unspoken agreement not to talk too much about our husbands. We tell ourselves that it's because of the danger
of disloyalty and because the two men are friends. But we also have a vested interest in making certain that the infrastructure of our lives seems more or less intact.

  "I think if Ruby and Kiernan broke up, Glen would be relieved," I say.

  "I thought Glen liked him. Glen likes everybody."

  "He doesn't like either of Kiernan's parents," I say. "He never has."

  "Well, they're not Glen's kind of people. Kevin Donahue talks big and screws around, and Deborah's completely nuts." I feel my face go flat. "I know you hate to hear that, but it's true. I've never understood how you could have been friends with her."

  I say nothing. I'm not going to submit Deborah to Nancy's harsh judgment, or tell her why the friendship ended.

  "So what should I do about Kiernan?" I say.

  "I have no idea," Nancy says.

  Neither do I.

  I am in the kitchen cooking when Ruby calls me from her bedroom. Usually I find this irritating, since I know the point is that she's too busy or exhausted or important to come down one flight of stairs, while it is simple for someone with as little to do as her mother to come up them. I'm always reminded of Alex's question about a female judge he met on one of our rare visits to my brother Richard's home in the New York suburbs: "But if she doesn't have any kids, what does she do when she's home?" His father and I had cackled wildly in the front seat, shrieking answers: Sleep! Read! Talk to her husband! When we had exhausted our sarcasm, Ruby said in a creamy tone of voice, "You both are so completely full of it the car might flood."

  Today I know that Ruby doesn't want to come downstairs because Kiernan is sitting in the kitchen. He works on the high school paper and has just brought Alex the last edition of the year, which has a story about the soccer squad in which Alex and Ben are mentioned. "With the departure of five varsity seniors," Kiernan reads aloud, "including goalie Chris Argento, the Hawks face an uncertain future next year. But first years Alex Latham and Ben Cooper, co-captains of the undefeated middle-school squad, may help to fill the gap."