Every Last One

by Anna Quindlen

  Ruby knows that I majored in English, and she once asked why I had not decided to be a writer myself. "I just found it way too hard," I'd said. She looked away. It seemed that the notion that there was something she could do that I could not was disconcerting. "How do you know what to write about?" Rachel once asked her when the girls had read aloud a story Ruby had written. "I just know," she replied.

  The college at which Ruby will spend the summer looks nothing like the large state university where I went to school. It is designed along familiar lines: iron gates, stone columns, red brick, a quad with some old-growth trees. Ruby says there is air-conditioning in the dorms and frozen yogurt in the dining hall. Her roommate is a girl from New York City named Jacqui LeBoutillier. "I am deeply jealous of her name," Ruby had told Sarah and Rachel. "I think you would just take seriously anything written by someone with that name." It turns out that both Ruby and Jacqui like Robert Lowell, Flannery O'Connor, vintage shops, and almond butter.

  This morning, before we left, there was a bag at our back door, and inside was a collection of Lowell's poems called Life Studies. Ruby picked it up and paged through it, put it down on the table amid the dishes, the mugs, and the papers. "Are you going to take that?" I'd asked as I grabbed my keys. "I already have it," Ruby said. "I don't know how anyone could not know that I already have it." Poor Kiernan. He can't seem to do anything right.

  When your children are away for the summer, public expectations are twofold. Other mothers assume you will feel incomplete or liberated, depending on their own situations. I feel neither. I feel that my children need to be gone this summer, Ruby to grow, Max to heal, Alex--well, because the other two will be away.

  Glen always feels their absence more than I do. "Wow!" he says on the first night that all three are gone. "It's really quiet in this house." He suggests that we go out to eat, take in a movie, although he doesn't really like to go to restaurants, and he's rarely entertained by anything at the multiplex. But after a day or two he settles into his usual routines, and I into mine. The other fantasy of childless summers is romance for the long-married, epic sex, and household nudity. Once I hinted at this to Nancy, at the missed opportunities because Fred and Bob and Sarah all stayed home for the summer, and she rolled her eyes and said, "The kitchen-floor thing? Please. Spare me."

  Instead of leisure I'll be out at work, in yards and gardens, long after the time I'm usually home. This is the busiest time of year for me: endless pruning, planting, weeding, listening to whining from homeowners who are enraged at the vagaries of nature, the appetites of Japanese beetles, the ravenous deer, the unreliable weather that brings down trees with a single gusty storm or cripples tender flowers with a searing sun.

  After I drop Ruby off at the dorm I drive three hours home, over roller-coaster roads, stopping to oversee the work at a weekend place outside town. "How we doing here?" I ask Rickie. The man we're working for cleared a hilltop with a shockingly beautiful view of a string of mountains and valleys so that he could build a gargantuan faux cabin. His builder bulldozed dozens of trees, and now the owner wants to replace them. He is not a patient man--he is apparently one of those people who make money by making money, one of those people whose work I don't understand and don't care to--and he likes big trees. He doesn't want anything to grow; he wants it to appear. I hate the notion; what I love about my work, and I suppose my life, is the slow inevitable progression. I count my years in small bushes grown broad, climbing vines that snake over fences and roofs, saplings that are spreading trees.

  "We got the English walnuts," Rickie says. "They're really nice. But we're going to have to work out the watering. I'm hoping we'll get some good rain the next couple of days. Plus, we're down one guy. Luis took off."

  "Aw, no," I say. "We can't afford to be shorthanded right now. Can you get me a couple of other guys?"

  "I got three college prospects home for the summer. One used to be a stoner, one worked for the quarry last summer and only lasted a week because he says he pulled something in his shoulder, and one is apparently your pal Nancy's oldest kid."

  "Fred? What?" I dial my cell phone and wait. "Nance? Is Fred looking for a job? Why didn't you say anything? Oh, for God's sake--well, of course. Of course. Is he over his wisdom teeth? Tell him it's a done deal. No, I'll tell him. I'll call him now. Or have him call me." I snap the phone shut. "You'll love Fred," I tell Rickie. "You know the type--former three-sport athlete, never complains, always on time."

  "That'll be a nice change," Rickie says. "Look, go home. We're almost done here. We'll clean up and drop the guys off. I'll reset the irrigation system in the morning."

  I pull into our driveway and the phone rings. It's Alice, and I sigh. Heat rash? Allergies? Instead she says, "Hey babe, you okay?" Somewhere she has written down that today was the day I was to drop Ruby off. Having a child has both softened her center and made her sharper at the edges.

  "I'm fine," I say. "It's an amazing moment, watching her get ready to be whoever she's going to become."

  "I'm terrified just thinking about it, and my kid's only three," Alice says. "Remember us?"

  "I remember you. I can't really remember me. Was I as vague as I think I was?"

  "Oh, come on. You were so calm and sane. Like your life, no surprise. I was the one who had delusions of grandeur and ricocheted around for all those years before I got it right. Or semi-right."

  "How is the boy king?"

  "He's with my parents. My mother says she's sick of hearing me talk about sunscreen, and that she raised five kids without it. Promise me we'll be deeply, deeply critical when we're grandparents. Not to the kids, because then they'll shun us and withhold our grandchildren and ruin our lives. But when we talk to each other."

  "Promise."

  Max is at the kitchen table when I go inside, eating ice cream from the container. "Did you have dinner?" I ask, opening the fridge.

  "Yes?" he says.

  I can't help it, I start to laugh. "Oh, Maxie, Maxie, what in the world is going to become of you?" I say, and suddenly his face falls.

  "Don't say that, Mom," he says.

  "Oh, sweetie, it wasn't existential. I was just fooling around. Where's Alex?"

  "Ben's?" he says. The question mark goes everywhere with him nowadays.

  "Are you packed?"

  "Sort of."

  "Is Alex packed?"

  "Sort of."

  I take a spoon to the ice cream. It's the kind with cookie dough in it, and all the cookie dough has been picked out. "It was like that already," Max says as I dig around. "I swear."

  "Where's your father?"

  "You have a lot of questions."

  "You can say that again."

  "You have a lot of questions."

  I put the ice cream in the freezer. "How early can we leave tomorrow?" Max asks. Maxie, Maxie, finally heading to where he feels at home. I run my hands through his shaggy hair, kiss the back of his bristly boy-man neck, wrap my arms around him. He looks like a dandelion, with his skinny stem and his ruffled head. Once he used to run to hug me; now he suffers me to hug him.

  "As early as you want," I reply.

  "Dad's asleep in the den," he says.

  Right after the Fourth of July we drive Alex to camp, although Olivia and her husband have offered to take him along with Ben. The two boys run off together, and we have to chase them for the farewell kiss. The soccer field is already full. Olivia is a bit weepy. "There are three more at home just like that," her husband, Ted, says, reaching for her hand. She sniffs, then smiles, but the smile won't hold. "Ridiculous," she says to herself in her clipped English voice, but even that sounds uncertain.

  "They'll all be gone before you know it," Glen says, as though that is a helpful observation.

  "Yeah, you people with older kids always say that," Ted says. "Want to borrow ours?"

  On the ride home, I'm making a shopping list in my head when I realize that we're passing the motel where my guys live. A sign that says ROOMS tee
ters atop a metal stanchion. I've rarely been there. Once one of the men was ill and wouldn't see a doctor, and I brought one of Glen's friends out to examine him. Once the police called me because there had been a fight, and I told the men, arranged in a small knot in the gravel parking lot, that I couldn't employ workers who made trouble. Rickie translated as the men looked down at the toes of their work boots, their arms folded over their grubby T-shirts. They have one rusty pickup truck among eight of them, five who work for me and three others who help out at a dairy farm. I have no idea how they manage groceries or laundry.

  From inside the motel I hear music, and I listen for some pleasant Mexican song, a plucked guitar, a tambourine. Instead I hear hard rock, and the rumble of faintly raucous voices. It's after seven, and they have had enough time to start drinking in that way men do when they are really tired, which is not a way I want to interrupt.

  "I worry about the guys who work for us," I say to Glen.

  He slows slightly and looks at the building. It could not look more cheerless if it were a prison. In fact, compared with this, the county jail looks country-club. In spring, the yellow rockets of forsythia obscure the razor wire.

  "I don't know what to tell you," Glen says. "You need the hands. They need the cash. It's mutually advantageous."

  Once Jose told me that to visit his daughters he drove through the night in January and June to a Texas town near the Mexican border. Each day the girls would arrive in his motel room, and they would play video games at the local diner or go to an amusement park nearby. The girls had special identification papers so they could attend school in the Texas town and go home each afternoon to their mother in Mexico. Two years before, after Jose had spent only two days with them, the immigration guards at the crossing said, "It's school vacation this week, isn't it?" The next day the girls stayed on the other side with their mother and waved at Jose, and the day after that he drove north again, back to the ski resort where my guys work in the winter, running snow blowers, cleaning concession stalls.

  Whenever I see him at the work site I think of this, particularly with our children away. Without them the days drag and fly, ponderous and yet gone before we even have a chance to notice them. "Is today Wednesday?" I sometimes say at the breakfast table, peering at the top of the paper to check. Glen goes to a three-day conference on laser surgery in Boston and brings me back a necklace I don't like. "It's gorgeous!" I say. I go to an extension service seminar at the university on pest control and buy ladybugs and nesting boxes. I wonder if this is what the rest of my life will be like.

  Nancy and Bill have a barbecue, and everyone gets a little lit on vodka gimlets. The whole house smells like lime. "A retro drink," Bill says as he passes them around. In the kitchen a group of women gather around the table, picking at a plate of cold shrimp. The men are in the backyard. "Warming themselves in the flame of the gas grill," Nancy says, raising her eyebrows. Fred is in the den watching a baseball game. "How's it going at work?" I ask him as I meander in.

  "He's sore as hell, I can tell you that," Nancy says, coming up behind me and handing me a fresh drink.

  "Thanks, Mom," Fred says. "Mrs. Latham asks me a question, and you answer. It's like ventriloquism."

  "How's it going?" I repeat. I can see part of the answer: his forearms are covered with scratches and bruises.

  "I'm okay," he says.

  "The guys are being tolerant?"

  "I mean, let's be real," Fred says. "I'm the resident gringo. They think you're paying me double what they make."

  "They told you that?"

  "They talked about it the first day. None of them know I speak Spanish."

  Fred spent a semester and a summer in a village two hours from Barcelona. Nancy told me that he's become so fluent in Spanish that at college he's tutoring kids in a housing project full of new immigrants.

  "Yeah, and now I'm stuck," Fred says. "I start to talk to them, they'll remember that they said stuff in front of me the first couple of days that maybe they shouldn't have said. They'll figure I narced them out."

  "I think once high school is over that term no longer applies," Nancy says.

  "Whatever. I should have just used my Spanish from the beginning. Buenos dias from the get-go, you know?" He rises gingerly to his feet. Fred has always been fit, but there's running-five-miles-in-expensive-shoes fit, and there's enlarging-a-six-foot-hole-with-a-shovel fit.

  When we hear the shower running above us, Nancy says, "You're not paying him any more than the others, are you?"

  "How can you of all people ask me that?"

  "Spare me, Saint Mary Beth. He's my son, you're my friend."

  "Everyone's making fifteen dollars an hour." I stop, multiply check my math. "God, I'm a terrible person, aren't I? That's six hundred a week."

  "You're right. Your landscapers are being paid only what the teachers at the elementary school make." Nancy looks sideways, then down. When she wants to say something unpleasant, it is always absolutely clear. "What?" I ask.

  "Besides, at least one of them was ripping you off. The one who quit? He took all those plants at that big new place on Winding Way. Apparently, they all know it. Three truckloads' worth. He sold it all to some nursery."

  "Luis? You're kidding? He seemed like such a good guy."

  "Apparently not. Are you going to tell the police?"

  I envision having my remaining workers questioned, having them vanish and leaving all my jobs undone. I feel ill, as though I had a party at my home and someone stole from my jewelry box or my medicine cabinet, except that I have never even invited my workers to my home for a party, not once. And now I never will. I gave them an end-of-season party last year, with pizza and beer, but it was at a job site, and I never thought about how dirty their hands would be, after a day of work, until I watched them scrub at them ineffectually with paper napkins.

  "Food's ready!" Bill calls from the kitchen. We join the men outside. "I heard someone may rent the Donahue house," one of the women says. "Apparently, Deborah's mother is ill and she's moved up to her mother's place to take care of her."

  Glen looks across the patio at me. I take a gulp of my drink and promise myself that it will be my last. I know that Deborah's mother lives in a little town about an hour north of us. I'd been there a couple of times with the kids when Kiernan and Ruby were eight. Deborah had moved in with her mother then, too, not because her mother was ill but because Deborah was. "A complete breakdown," Kevin whispered. "Catatonic." Her mother's house was small, and we sat outside on a porch swing while the kids played on the scrubby front lawn. The light faded and the sun set while I talked about nothing and Deborah stared at the street. Her hands shook in her lap. Kevin told me as we walked to my car that it was because of the medication. "She really needs you," he'd said, holding my hand. Kiernan stood at his side, and I pulled my hand away. "Daddy, when are we going back to our own house?" Kiernan said.

  They'd rented out their own house while they were away, then later sold it, then bought another and moved back to town. Kiernan was twelve when they moved back. Deborah had thrown her husband out the following year, screaming at him late at night on the lawn as the neighbors stood behind their curtains and listened. For a while, the episode hurt Deborah's business. When the kids were young, she and Kevin opened a coffee shop on Main Street; he handled the finances and she did all the baking. They sold it when they moved north, and when Deborah came back she set herself up making wedding cakes. The cakes were astonishing things, with quince branches of spun sugar circling the layers or calla lilies made of frosting in a lifelike bunch on the top. But for a few months people thought it was bad luck to buy a wedding cake from a woman who had tried to hit her husband with her son's Wiffle bat. "Can you ever keep it in your goddamn pants?" she had screamed, so that everyone on the block heard. Kiernan heard, too, and then he heard it again from the boys at school. Ruby was sweet to him then.

  "A couple of those guys are going to go to the Keys to go sportfishing," Glen
says as we walk home from the barbecue. "I might go."

  "You don't like to fish."

  "I don't?" Glen says, making a crazy face, and we both laugh, and then because we're drunk and our kids are away and it seems like the obvious thing to do, we go home and have sex. Neither of us seems to want to do it much anymore, but when we do it's fine. I do things I've been doing for years. He does, too. They still work. They just seem a little beside the point, like rereading a book for the sixth time. Another thing that I could never have imagined when I was Ruby's age, when my boyfriend would edge his fingers up inside the leg of my shorts and my knees would fall open like a physical reflex.

  The next morning, Glen smiles at himself as he shaves. "I hope the kids are okay," he says at breakfast, as though to show that we are interested in the same things.

  We both know that's not true. Maybe it's not even important. Sometimes, driving home from a job in the gloomy summer dusk, shivering in the air-conditioning, I find myself crying for reasons that are overwhelming and mysterious. When I was young, my mother used to stay up to watch old movies on television, and when I crept down the stairs, my legs scissoring my nightgown into a trap around my thin calves, I could peek through a narrow sliver of banister and see her hunched forward on the couch, crumpled tissues on the table like white carnations. She cried at Stella Dallas, Mildred Pierce, Dark Victory, Waterloo Bridge. I think she used the movies as a plausible excuse to weep in a way that would have seemed indulgent to her otherwise. Her husband had died, leaving her with a houseful of ashtrays, two young children, and enough life insurance to throw a dignified funeral and pay off a five-year-old car. But she still somehow believed she needed to hitch her grief to someone else's tragedy.