The Lemonade Year

by Amy Willoughby-Burle

  Lola laughs. This is how we have always gotten through the tough times—by playing out our movie life.

  “What then?” she says, and her face becomes like stone. “Will Ray come?”

  Dad and Ray had never been able to sort out the details of a regular father-and-son arrangement. Ever since the night of Lola’s accident, Ray and Dad were at odds. Warring in a battle neither one of them seemed to know the rules to.

  “Of course Ray’s there,” I say, although I can’t picture it. “And afterwards, we all come back home and eat too much green bean and fried onion chips casserole. We’ll avoid Aunt Rose like the plague. We’ll listen to people tell us the story of our lives as they know it. We’ll cry a few times and laugh a lot—you can’t talk about Dad and not laugh—and then we’ll fall asleep in the twin beds upstairs in our room because we won’t want to go home and start the rest of our lives just yet.”

  A room that mom hasn’t changed since we left for college.

  “Where will Ray sleep?” Lola asks.

  Ray’s room had been turned into a mini-storage facility—medical equipment and furniture from our parents’ bedroom that took up too much space once they bought the hospital bed for Dad to have at the house.

  Mom had kept Dad at home for as long as she could after the first stroke, but after a couple of scares and trips in the ambulance, her nerves were shot. For a while, she had someone come over to the house, but insurance wouldn’t pay for round-the-clock, in-home care, and Mom worried the most at night. She couldn’t let herself fall asleep for fear that something would happen and she would wake to find Dad sprawled on the floor with his head cracked open.

  Dad seemed to dip into dementia not long after the stroke, and we never really got him back. Once, he woke in the night and went out into the yard. Mom found him the next morning sleeping by the mailbox. After a few close calls, it seemed there was nothing to do but place him in a facility that could care for him and watch him all the time.

  There’s a sadness that takes over in a place like that, and you start to forget the person you once knew and see them instead as this less-able replacement of themselves. A weird copy of the person you love—except they can’t walk or speak clearly, and you wonder why someone would make a copy of your father and mess him up like that.

  Ray never went to the nursing home. He kept saying he would. But now Dad is gone and it’s too late.

  “Ray will have to sleep in the bathtub,” I say and Lola smiles.

  We stand there for a moment. The world around us beams beautiful and oblivious.

  “You’re right.” Lola sighs. “That is the way the movie goes.” She turns her head away.

  For a second, just a small one, we’re out in the front yard, just like this, but I’m kneeling down in front of her, arranging a pair of rainbow-striped leg warmers over her ankles, covering the braces the best I can because it’s the first day of school and Paul Brooks is new in town and all summer he hasn’t seen the braces, all summer he’s been entranced with Lola and her leg warmers in the heat and her coal-black hair. He’s never seen her do anything “strange” and the most important thing to me is to help everything seem normal.

  Mom and Chris come outside with the photo boards. They load the happy memories into the trunk, and Chris makes a goofy face at Lola. Her eyes widen, and I know she’s seeing the commercial character in his expression. She smiles at him and winks at me.

  “Let’s go, girls,” Mom says. “Sit up here with me, Lola.”

  Lola gets in the front, and I ride in back with Chris and Cassie. Mom moves her hand to turn on the radio, but seems to think better of it and doesn’t. We ride in silence for a bit, turning down familiar lanes as though we could be going to the mall, the first day of school, over to Grandma’s.

  “Oh, look,” Mom says, pointing out her window and slowing down. “The Mackelvoy place is for sale. Open house. I’ve always wanted to see the redo on their kitchen. Should we go in?”

  “Mom?” Lola looks over at her and then turns around to look at me. She looks terrified.

  “We’re sort of busy today, Mom,” I say.

  “Of course,” Mom says and chuckles. “Maybe some other time.”

  I look at Chris and wonder what he must be thinking, but he’s looking at Lola. I look at Cassie, but she’s staring out the window.

  Mom speeds back up, and we continue the short distance to the funeral home. Although I’ve been down this path before, I take notice, now, of the houses slung back from the road, their fenced yards and clean cars a wishful dream of peace and tranquility. I see the new blooms around the mailboxes like a deeply planted shield, a useless attempt at warding off the deadly and devastating. There is no protection from the wiles of the world.

  4

  I hang back in the parking lot of the funeral home and let everyone else go in without me. I’m looking for Ray. I expect to see his face poking out from behind a bush, like in some stupid movie, but instead, I see him in his old Chevy Nova. I’m the only one who knows he’s in town.

  He found me at work the day after I called and told him Dad had died. He asked me not to tell anyone he was here. I asked if that was because he might not stay. He said yes.

  “I should know better than to leave the doors unlocked,” Ray says when I open the passenger side and get in.

  “Look,” I say, and I’m suddenly angry with him. “No one actually thinks that you’re going to show up for this part. But you better be at that church. Don’t you dare let this day go by and Mom doesn’t see you and Lola doesn’t see you and you finally manage to accomplish what you set out to do years ago.”

  “What’s that?” He turns his garden-snake green eyes toward me.

  “To break everyone’s heart,” I say.

  He looks away.

  “That’s not what I meant to do,” Ray says.

  Most of the family still think he’s in jail. They think maybe he’ll get some sort of temporary release and come to the funeral in an orange jumpsuit with his hands in cuffs and his feet bound up in chains.

  I look at Ray’s hands. He is gripping the gearshift like he’s ready to speed off. I shouldn’t have spoken to him that way.

  I reach over and put my hand on his. He doesn’t move his hand to reciprocate, but he doesn’t move it away either.

  “I’m just going to screw up no matter what I do,” Ray says. “I shouldn’t have come. I’ll just make things worse.”

  “Showing up is the right thing to do,” I say. “We want you here. You’re part of this family.”

  An unexpected memory surfaces of summer vacation at the beach, long before things changed. Ray, baby Lola, and Mom were somewhere in the pier house getting ice cream and souvenirs. Mom wasn’t drunk yet, and we were all trying to make the most of the day while we still could. Dad and I walked out onto the pier. I must have been only four or five, but I remember. I was hand in hand with Dad, and he was so much taller than I was that all I could see were his legs, his long stride down the creaking wood, and his hands—one holding mine and the other pointing out across the ocean at a shrimp boat in the distance.

  Seagulls hovered and squawked over the boat like a loud, gray cloud.

  “This is how they go fishing,” Dad said of the birds.

  I remember seeing a bird with a fish in its mouth jut up and away. Then I was lifted up onto Dad’s shoulders. The sunlight sparked just in time for his face to white out of sight and then the light softened and from the top of his shoulders I could see everything that moments ago had been unknown to me.

  Sometimes Ray seems like a person from a memory or a movie actor I can’t quite place. Looking him hard in the face, I think—yes, I remember—he’s that guy from back when we were kids, and we used to hang out all the time. He looks a little older now, but that’s definitely him. We had this secret club that met in the linen closet. Then somet
hing terrible happened and everything changed.

  “I can’t go in there,” Ray says. “It’s too close in there.”

  I nod.

  “I’ll come to the service,” he says. “I promise.”

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  Back at Mom’s house, after the church service, I watch the men pass around photos and talk about their families. One story leads into another, like a thin rope made of strong sinew, a wisp of something deeper than bone. I forget how hard a man can love. How desperate and irrational the heart can be. I look around for Jack, feeling guilty for things that I can’t do anything about now. Too many screaming matches between there and here.

  My father, though, had been that quiet type of man whose offer of sincere emotion was a surprise. He was a jokester, a kid at heart, showing us his affection through play. Words often failed him. I had known that he loved us, of course, but hearing the stories told by other fathers around the mourning room brought the truth home to me. How much had my father wanted to reach beyond the restraints of his own malfunctioning body that was stuck in the nursing home to tell me himself? I tried to recall the small handful of times he had found words while he was there.

  I see Ray with his close-cut, dark hair and three-day stubble, sitting in a folding chair in the corner by the back door. His ill-fitting, dark gray suit and starched white shirt hang on him like a costume. This is the suit he wore to court to look respectable and repentant, and to cover the tattoo sleeves on his arms. The suit—then and now—makes him look like a book stuck on the wrong shelf.

  What if all the restraint he’d had has been exhausted? What if, this time, jail and the pain of a tattoo needle and his general helping of self-loathing and beer can’t keep him from splitting down the middle?

  He sees me and presses his lips together. I tilt my head at him, thankful that he’s here. During the funeral, he sat on the back row with some of the people I recognized from the nursing home. He lifted a hand to me, but when I waved him up, he shook his head.

  I see Aunt Rose sauntering over to him, and I try to push my way through the crowd. She’s talking loud enough to be heard halfway across the room and I know that she knows this.

  “Well, Ray,” Aunt Rose says, her hands on her hips. “I almost didn’t recognize you. What did you think of the service, or were you there?”

  I step over some kids coloring, all their little hues spread out around them.

  “I sat in the back,” I hear Ray say.

  Someone stops me to talk about something, but I’m listening to Ray. I’m so close, but stalled just feet away from him.

  “I suppose you’re happy your mother had him cremated,” Rose says.

  “Why would that make me happy?” Ray asks, and I can almost see what he wants to say forming in a cartoon thought-bubble over his head. Kiss off. I loved my father.

  You don’t have to get along with someone to love them. Love or the lack of it was never the issue between Ray and Dad. Love is easy. Like is more difficult.

  “I guess you would have preferred to see him off in a pine box,” Rose says. “I wanted your mother to get one of the nice caskets. The kind with the stylish interior. But she decided to have him burned up like a pile of old leaves that you want off your yard before they kill the grass.”

  This is why no one likes Aunt Rose.

  “Coffins are tacky,” Ray says and looks beyond Rose to where I’m standing. “They look like my sixth-grade saxophone case.”

  I think about the bright blue, plush lining where the instrument fits in—a perfect cutout to keep it snug in place for safe travel.

  “How awfully rude,” Aunt Rose says to Ray. “Typical.”

  “Kiss off, Rose,” Ray finally says, not even offering her the formality of her family title.

  She gasps and huffs away.

  I sense an opening in the one-sided conversation I’m trapped in and make my escape. I sit down beside Ray in an empty folding chair. This would have been Jack’s spot, if he were here. It’s like the time-out chair and Ray happens to have been the bad little boy today.

  “I’m not in the mood for another lecture, Nina,” Ray says.

  “I came to congratulate you for annoying Aunt Rose,” I say in an attempt to lighten the mood.

  “What is it you want?” Ray asks, not ready to be lightened up.

  “Just checking on you,” I say. “I was a little harsh in the car and I’m sorry.”

  He looks at me with a mock expression of shock, and I think, There it is, right there, my Ray. There you are. I want to reach out to him like I’m grabbing onto someone who has fallen off a boat. Don’t go under, Ray, please don’t go under.

  “Is that a white flag?” he asks.

  “Truce,” I say. “For starters.”

  He nods and loosens his tie. “This thing is a noose. This sucks.”

  I know he doesn’t mean the shirt and tie.

  “Yeah,” I say. “It does.”

  We watch the tide of black dresses and dark sports jackets ebb and flow through the room. Faces become solemn and then less so in a strange rhythm of solidarity and stoicism.

  After a while, Ray jams his hand in the breast pocket of his suit and pulls out a palm-sized photo. He hands it to me and shakes his head.

  “Who’s this?” I ask, looking at a head-and-shoulder shot of a brown-haired boy in a sweater that I’m sure he doesn’t usually wear.

  “My son,” Ray says.

  I scan the room instinctively for my Cassie. She tried so hard not to cry at the funeral. Why do we do that—put on a brave face? Hold it back, keep it in—until it rips its way through you like that beast in Alien. I see Cassie sitting on the floor with the little kids—cousins twice removed and random toddlers of indiscernible family relation. A little red-haired boy has crawled up in Cassie’s lap. That was all I wanted. That was what I sacrificed everything for and didn’t get.

  “How old is he?” I finally say and turn the picture face down in my lap.

  “Five,” Ray says and takes the picture from me. “No one knows, and you can’t tell Lola. I don’t know what to do yet, and she’ll make a big deal out of it.”

  Ray looks at the photo and tucks it back in his pocket.

  “Like it’s a reason for you to stay this time?” I ask with a discernible scoff in my voice.

  I wince. I don’t want to talk to him like this. I want us to be what we might have been if it had all happened like it should have. I know he wants that too. He’s gruff and rebellious, but I know he loves us. I know he’s ripping himself to pieces over all the things he should have done and didn’t, or did and shouldn’t have. That’s what Ray does. He tears himself to shreds.

  He picks up a coffee mug filled with clear liquid. I raise an eyebrow at him as he sips. He shoots me a dirty look when he swallows.

  “I’m going to make you some coffee,” I say and stand up from the metal folding chair.

  “I’m fine with this.” Ray lifts his cup to me.

  I take the cup from his hand. “I’ll be back.”

  “Always full of threats,” Ray says, but he doesn’t try to take the cup back.

  Lola is in the kitchen, and she grabs my hand hard when I round the corner, almost making me spill Ray’s contraband. I set the cup down on the counter.

  “I can actually picture Ray sleeping in the bathtub,” Lola says. “It makes me smile.”

  I’ve caught Ray looking at Lola from time to time, and I know he wants to talk to her but isn’t sure what to say. He’s been gone a long time.

  “Don’t rush him,” I warn. “He’s pretty Ray right now.”

  We both look at him from around the kitchen corner. I feel flighty and nervous, watching him. It’s like sneaking up on a bird I know I’ll never be able to catch. No matter how slow I go or how close I get, it will wing away from me. I think about t
hat owl in the road. If Ray were a bird, he’d be that owl.

  “You ok in here, sweetie?” Chris asks, startling the both of us.

  Lola jumps and looks him in the eyes. “I didn’t know who you were,” she says, shaking her head, the truth suddenly spilling over. “I didn’t know.”

  Chris looks at me, and I grimace.

  “I didn’t tell her,” I say, holding out my hands in front of me like a surrender of truth.

  “Now what?” Chris asks. His face tightens into a squint and his shoulders tense.

  “Now what, what?” Lola asks, looking around as if some other revelation is just around the corner.

  “I should have told you,” he says, looking like he’s just leveled her with a deep dark secret. “It was stupid not to. It’s just a job. But I was sort of embarrassed.”

  “Why?” she asks.

  “Have you seen them?” Chris says, wincing. “I was classically trained. I thought I was meant for something else, you know. But nothing else came. That character has taken over my life, and it was just nice to get it back for a while. It’s stupid.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Lola says and takes his hand. “Besides, I’m likely to forget by next week.”

  Chris laughs and then catches himself, biting his lip. Lola punches him in the shoulder.

  “I should have told you,” he says. “You’ve been up-front with me about everything, and knowing the issues you struggle with, it was sort of mean for me to keep something hidden from you. Especially something that everyone else knew about.”

  He has no idea how close to home his words hit. There is too much that we hide from Lola.

  “I’d love to keep my ‘issues’ to myself,” she says, “but I have no choice. Otherwise you’d think I was crazy. Especially once I invited you to my house.”