The Most Fun We Ever Had

by Claire Lombardo

  He reached out and shook, a good handshake, a man’s handshake. She liked kids this age; they amused her and they were likely to be intimidated by her in ways that adults generally weren’t. He was handsome and peevish and awkward and he made her heart ache, both because he was so instantly familiar and because she remembered how much it sucked to be fifteen.

  “We should be all squared away,” Violet said, like she was dropping off a flower arrangement. “Unless there’s— Jonah, is there anything you need?”

  He looked up at her like how the fuck should I know and Wendy felt a momentary pleasure that he seemed to treat Violet less kindly than he did her.

  “The guest room’s all ready,” she said, addressing Jonah more than Violet. “There’s an attached bath. You should have everything you need, at least bare-bones.” She’d bought little French goat’s milk soaps shaped like anchors for his bathroom. Bare-bones was perhaps an overstatement, particularly given his history.

  “Thanks,” Jonah said.

  “Well, I should be going,” Violet said. They both stared at her and she twisted her hands together, looking back and forth between them. Wendy enjoyed, as ever, watching her squirm. “As long as there’s nothing else you need, Jonah,” she said. “I’ll—see you, I guess.”

  Jonah was silent, blinking at her.

  “How about if you guys have dinner?” Wendy asked. It spilled from her like vomit. Yes, she had volunteered to take the kid in. Yes, she was happy to have him. But she didn’t feel like Violet should be let off the hook quite so easily, sweeping in and out with the ease of a summer storm. She didn’t feel like she should once again be solely responsible for the fallout of her sister’s whims.

  Violet looked positively murderous, eyes aglow, teeth clenched so tightly that the hinges of her jaw bulged. “I’m not sure that we—”

  “I actually have something coming up,” Wendy said. “I’ll text you when I pin down the exact date. How about if Jonah comes to your house that night?” She turned to him. “Just so you don’t have to spend the evening alone in a strange house right off the bat.”

  “I have no way of knowing if we’ll be free on whatever night it is,” Violet said, unsurprisingly trying to cancel the plans before they’d even been made.

  “It’s important to me. Old friend of Miles’s who’s going to be in town. One night only.” A lie, but Violet always acquiesced when she played the dead-husband card.

  Violet breathed out slowly. “Fine, then, I guess. Sure.”

  “Great.” She nudged Jonah. “Wait’ll you see the tree house.”

  “I should go,” Violet said. She waved with both hands, like some kind of weird children’s show performer. Wendy waited for thanks that Violet declined to provide.

  “Bye,” said Jonah. As if to make a point, he wandered into the living room.

  “Happy trails,” said Wendy. But when she watched Violet walk out her front door, she felt a nauseated catch in her throat, fought the urge to leap into the hall and yank her back inside. Instead she took a breath, latched the deadbolt and turned to face Jonah, who was seated rigidly on her couch.

  “Make yourself at home,” she said ineffectually, and he blinked a few times and rested one of his elbows on the armrest. “Perfect,” she said. “It’s like you’ve lived here all your life.”

  That got a little bit of a smile from him and she buzzed with pleasure.

  “You’re rich, huh?” he said, pulling nervously at the piping on the couch.

  She came to sit across from him. “What makes you say that?” Though of course it was obvious; she’d chosen the blandest and most cookie-cutter modern construction when she moved from her and Miles’s house, a massive glassy expanse, clean white lines and cool gray accents. She found the boring sterility of it soothing.

  “Isn’t that a first-edition Lord of the Rings?” He nodded to the bookshelf by the window.

  “Astute observation. You’re a nerd, then? It’s my husband’s.”

  “So he’s rich,” Jonah said.

  “He was rich, yes.” Her throat felt suddenly dry. “Now he’s dead.”

  Only a second’s pause before he replied: “So you’re rich.”

  “I’m comfortable.”

  “Violet’s rich too.”

  “Yes, turns out marrying Honey Bunches of Snores was quite a lucrative decision.”

  Jonah watched her.

  “Her husband’s rich too,” she clarified.

  “Are your parents rich?” he asked.

  “What is this fixation?”

  “Are they nice?”

  She paused, considering. “They have their moments,” she said, but she felt bad and stood up, drifting over to the wine rack. “I mean, yes. They’re nice. They’re great. They’ll love you.” She pulled out a bottle, studying the label. When she turned back to him, Jonah was watching her again. “What?”

  “How do you know?”

  She rifled through the drawer for a corkscrew. “How do I know what?” Nobody had prepared her for how irritating it would be to converse with an adolescent.

  “How do you know they’ll love me?”

  “They love everyone,” she said.

  “Nobody loves everyone,” Jonah said.

  “That,” she said, yanking out the cork with an accusatory pop, “is the goddamn truth.” Jonah looked nervous so she tried to smile at him as she went to the cabinet for a glass. “I’m kidding. They’ll love you because you’re their grandson and they’re sadistic child collectors who delight in seeing their own genealogical inklings on the faces of malleable offspring.”

  “What?”

  She tried again. “They’re very excited to meet you.”

  “Are you drinking wine now?”

  She glanced at the clock. It was not even four, but she’d had a long day.

  “My parents had us too early, and they had more of us than they should have had. But they’re nice people with nice intentions. Don’t you want to know anything about me? About your new house? About—Christ, I don’t know. Anything?”

  “How did your husband die?”

  She swallowed painfully and the wine went down the wrong pipe and she coughed while Jonah stood by, alarmed. “I’m fine,” she croaked, eyes watering. “Renal cancer. Way to bring down the mood.” She watched him go pale. “I’m joking.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. Life is kind of shitty sometimes. If anyone knows that, it’s you, right?”

  “Me?” he asked.

  “Joking again,” she said, realizing her error. “Listen, should we— Want to order some takeout? Boys like food, don’t they?”

  It took everything she had to not bolt out the front door on her way to the kitchen.

  * * *

  —

  Violet had, previously in her marriage, sensed the acute need for a babysitter, for a night out with her husband where they were both bathed and respectably dressed, where they could speak at conversational volumes without fear of waking sleeping children and where their conversation was unlikely to be interrupted by the bodily effluvia of others. Time alone with her husband was a pedestrian and universal need, understandable by any and all fellow parents if she’d deigned to share her hardship with the Shady Oaks moms.

  But it had never felt quite like this. Both kids were sleeping through the night and Matt had just made partner and Violet had shed her final pounds of baby weight and everything had been going exceptionally, and if they got a babysitter and went out to dinner it should’ve been to bask rather than to save their marriage. Except now there was Jonah, and there wasn’t a restaurant in the Chicagoland area fancy enough to assuage the effects of his arrival. Matt had known about the boy nearly since they’d met, of course, but he was as troubled as she by the announcement of his return, even if he’d sanctioned Jonah’s m
ove to Wendy’s house.

  She’d donned a brave face on the blacktop at school that morning—explaining why a sitter would be picking up Wyatt—and told the other moms not that she needed an emotional-support dinner with her husband after ferrying her relinquished teenage child to the opulent home of her trainwreck sister, but instead that she and Matt were celebrating their meetiversary, May the fifth, fourteen years ago, Logan Center for a lecture on the common man, which actually also happened to be the truth. She’d always insisted, somewhat cloyingly—and, again, with more ease, in better times—that they celebrate the day, even if just with champagne and cuddling once the kids were down. This year, overcompensating, she’d made a reservation at a breathtakingly expensive seafood place in Streeterville and, leaving her car parked in a garage not nearly as far as she would have liked from Wendy’s building, walked south to Matt’s office on Dearborn.

  What were Jonah and Wendy doing now? She hoped not smoking weed or drinking Barolo. The boy had been so silent during their time together that afternoon. He’d given Hanna a hug goodbye and carried all of his stuff himself, dismissing Violet’s offers of help. He had decidedly not embraced her when she left Wendy’s. She hugged her jacket tighter against a nonexistent chill.

  Matt’s office was one of the few places that made her miss her professional life, populated by a bunch of no-nonsense corporate types, people who rarely stopped to make small talk. She sidestepped Carol, his receptionist—winking, putting a finger to her lips, exaggeratedly indicating Matt’s office like she was going to perform some grand surprise—but she paused in his open doorway to watch him, hard at work, writing longhand, shoulders hunched up around his ears. That unbending concentration he had, that ability to power through even the most tedious of tasks. All for the sake of their life together, its steady, comfortable abundance. She’d been drawn to this drive in the first place, this willful blindness he had, all in the service of making their life work.

  “Matty,” she said, and he startled, dropped his pen. “Hey, stranger.” This coquettishness was more for the benefit of Carol.

  “What are you doing here, Viol? I thought you were taking—” He stopped.

  “I made us dinner reservations,” she said pointedly.

  “For tonight? Sweetie, it’s Cinco de Mayo, the pub crawlers are going to be out in droves.”

  She waited for it to dawn on him.

  “Oh,” he said. “I— Happy anniversary.”

  Behind her, she sensed Carol straighten subtly to attention. If a forgotten anniversary could elicit this level of intrigue, she couldn’t begin to imagine what state of transcendental bliss a lovechild adoption scandal would send her into.

  “Not our wedding anniversary,” he said defensively. “Just the day we met.”

  “My husband, the romantic,” she said, but only because Carol was there, and not because her feelings weren’t hurt.

  Matt was right about the pub-crawling, drunken Loyola undergraduates and distressed thirty-somethings with undoubtedly ill-gotten glow necklaces, but the restaurant they arrived at was painfully exclusive and out of the price range of the inebriated masses.

  “How’d it go today?” he asked, somewhat stiffly, and she wilted a little, because she’d hoped—unreasonably—that they might be able to make it through dinner as they would’ve been able to a few months ago, with drowsy conversation about the kids, amusing tales about his colleagues, exchange of bullet points both had accrued about current events. Easy chatter, no-stakes chatter. Matt watched her. He’d seemed relieved, if a bit skeptical, when she shared that Wendy would be taking care of Jonah, that the discovery of her discarded child would not directly upset the landscape of their life.

  She sipped desperately at her cocktail, something fruity and strong, the lip of the glass rimmed with fiery red powder. “Fine,” she said. “Successful hostage transfer.”

  He raised his eyebrows at her, fairly: it was an off-color joke; she wasn’t sure where it had come from.

  “He seemed calm. Wendy was—Wendy. He had the most meager amount of stuff, Matty; it was so—like his entire life fit into a couple of bags. And when we left the Danforths’ house—Hanna was crying, but Jonah was just—resigned. Like he’d done it a thousand times before. Which I guess he has. It just struck me how little I know about him.”

  “No kidding,” Matt said archly. His tone jarred her.

  “I don’t mean that in like a sinister way,” she said. “I just mean that he’s had so many experiences that I can’t even— I don’t mean he’s dangerous or anything.”

  “I’m not necessarily saying he’s dangerous, Viol, but he’s—I mean, he’s a wild card. You know nothing about him.”

  “Hanna had nothing but good things to say.”

  “And yet weeks ago you discredited her as a flaky granola weirdo moving to Ecuador because the spirits moved her.”

  “Well, she is, but…” She cleared her throat, sipped her drink. “He’s coming over for dinner sometime soon when Wendy has plans.”

  Matt froze, then closed his eyes and exhaled. “Violet.”

  “She just sprang it on me—Wendy did, and I couldn’t…”

  “You couldn’t what?”

  “She’s— You don’t understand how she—what it’s like when she—”

  “What? Manipulates the hell out of you?”

  “She’s taking him in, Matty. And I just felt bad, leaving him like that, like I was just dropping something at the dry cleaner’s.”

  “But Wendy is the solution,” he said, as though speaking to a small child. “You didn’t want him to get shoved back into the system. But it’s not fair to Eli and Wyatt to force a stranger into their lives in this way. Have you given any thought to that? It took Wyatt six months to adjust to a new cereal bowl; we can’t just expect him to accept out of nowhere that he’s got a new half brother. And what if things don’t work out for him? What if this isn’t a good fit and he has to find an alternative? What kind of impact will that have on our sons, springing a new family member on them and then having him disappear?”

  “Kids adjust to new siblings all the time. I was about Wyatt’s age when Liza was born.”

  “This isn’t us having a new baby, Violet. How do you plan on explaining this to them?”

  “Well, there may be some literature on—”

  “On introducing your secret teenage child to your toddlers?” he said meanly. “Never mind the fact that it never occurred to you to ask me if I’d be okay with him meeting them.”

  “It’s not as though we have all this time for conversation lately,” she said, a cheap shot. “Matt, this just happened. She just did this. I’m sorry if you feel out of the loop, but I just— This got dumped in my lap and I’m trying to deal with it the best I can and I don’t have a chance to run every single thing by you before I do it.”

  “Wendy didn’t just do it. You agreed to dinner.”

  “She put me on the spot.”

  “And you’re putting me on the spot. It’s not like you to make impulsive decisions like this.” He cupped his hands around his tumbler, staring into it. He shook his head once, quickly. “I barely recognize you lately.”

  Instead of saying me either, she said—another sentence formed and uttered of its own accord: “There was always a chance of him reentering my life.”

  “This isn’t about him reentering, Violet. That’s already happened. This is about you making responsible decisions that won’t completely bulldoze our family. You can’t just play the Wendy’s Wendy card whenever you decide to do something—”

  “Something what?”

  “We’re your family now, Violet. The boys have to come first.”

  “They do come first.”

  “Until your sister opens her mouth, and then suddenly it’s a free-for-all.”

  “It’s one dinner, Matt.”<
br />
  “That’s not how this works.”

  “What’s this?”

  “Anything involving this kid, Violet. Nothing’s a one-off. Nothing can happen that doesn’t affect everything else. We have one dinner and he becomes a part of our kids’ lives, to some degree, and of course it’s not just one dinner, Violet; he’s living with your sister; he’s meeting your parents; he— Are you really not visualizing the ripple effects? What it means that Wendy’s taken him in?” The worst part was that Matt looked worried; his voice was angry but his face was full of a frank apprehension—not about the situation itself, she realized, but about her role in it. About her.

  “There aren’t any rules to follow here,” she said quietly.

  Matt softened, surprised her by taking her hand across the table. “Are you okay, Violet? Should I be worried about you? I’m not— I haven’t seen you so adrift since—”

  Her defenses rose quickly, popped up like springs, and she pulled her hand away. “Since when?” Challenging him to say it. Daring him to acknowledge what she’d known all along, that things hadn’t been quite normal between them in years; that they weren’t off-kilter as a couple solely because of Jonah’s arrival.

  Matt looked suddenly tired. “I’d just like for us to tread lightly with this, Violet. In the interest of our children. And—ourselves. Our family.”

  “I’m trying,” she said.

  They persisted like this, one of those eternal, infernal absurdist conversations, through their entrées, both of them eating quickly, eager to leave. But she’d forgotten that she’d mentioned to the hostess when she made the reservation—as leverage, for a table by the window overlooking the river, which she’d barely glanced at throughout the meal, so engaged was she in this frustrating marital tennis match—that it was an anniversary dinner.

  “Compliments of the chef,” the waitress said, setting a chocolate croissant the size of a fanny pack on the table between them. “Happy anniversary.”