The Most Fun We Ever Had

by Claire Lombardo

  The first time she got a straight story it came from her father. She had the sense that something was awry but she couldn’t quite place what it was.

  “We’re going to the hospital to visit your sister,” her father said, merging onto the expressway.

  She turned to him, first confused and then embarrassed. Her dad, perhaps sensing this, took one hand from the steering wheel and ruffled her hair.

  “You know how Wendy was going to have a baby, Goose?”

  “Yeah.” This was, in fact, what had prompted the burning-bread Sex Talk from her mom, Grace’s inability to wrap her mind around the notion of sisters becoming mothers.

  “Well, sometimes—sometimes a pregnancy doesn’t take, honey.” Her father could be very awkward. She didn’t know what he meant. She looked at him in the driver’s seat, clutching the steering wheel more intently than usual. “The baby died, Gracie,” he said. “It’s a really terrible thing that happens. Sometimes people die before they’re born.”

  She wanted to say I don’t get it or How is that possible? or What happens to all the cupcakes Mom and I just ordered for the baby shower? but she also didn’t want her dad to go into any detail; she didn’t want a repeat of the Sex Talk, made significantly more awkward because it would be coming from her father.

  “It’s a sad thing, Goose.” His voice sounded thin and wobbly. “Wendy and Miles are really sad. So are Mom and I. Wendy’s going to be okay, but it’s a really sad thing.”

  She didn’t know babies could die. She knew, certainly, that people could, but babies weren’t people, or not really. Does this mean I’m not an aunt anymore? she wanted to ask, and Do you still get to have a name if you die before you’re born? She felt herself starting to cry, not because she was sad—though she was; it was a sad thing—but because she recognized, at twelve years old, that a part of her had died, too, the part that was normally spared these sorts of details. Because it was the first time her dad had ever told her he was sad and that seemed like a pretty seminal thing, the realization that your parents could feel sad or scared.

  Her father squeezed her knee, not picking up on the selfish layers of her thoughts. They were on the Eisenhower bound for the hospital, nowhere near the Turano factory, but she smelled it anyway, burning bread, and she rested her head against the window and breathed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The phone buzzed in Wendy’s sports bra, and she answered, even though she was in the middle of core barre.

  “Wendy?” And at the voice, her heart stalled. Took them long enough. Jesus Christ.

  She slipped out into the hall. “Where the fuck are you? Where have you been?” She was finally allowed to exhale, finally allowed to reveal how fucking terrified she’d been since she’d heard he’d left Grace’s house, despite the fact that she kept assuring everyone that he’d call when he was ready.

  “I’m sort of in a jail.”

  “In jail?”

  “In—like, a jail, not an actual cell, just, like, the location, technically, is a jail.”

  “I’d kill you if I wasn’t so happy you’re alive.”

  “I need— They said I need someone to come pick me up. I have your dad’s car but I can’t— They won’t let me drive it.”

  “How did you get to a jail?”

  “I got pulled over. One of the taillights was out. Sorry, Wendy. I wasn’t—expecting this to happen.”

  “When you stole your grandfather’s car and drove to fucking Oregon? Without a license? You weren’t expecting to get pulled over and end up in a jail?”

  “You can stop saying a jail; I get that you think it’s funny.”

  “I love that you managed to evade capture when you were driving across the entire country but you ended up getting busted for something as stupid as a taillight.”

  “Wendy—”

  “Where are you?” she asked. “Where, technically, is this jail?”

  “Sort of in Montana.”

  “What, like, half-in, half-out?”

  “In Montana.”

  “How’d you end up in Montana?”

  The voice got smaller. “I got kind of lost, and then was thinking of—like, maybe Canada, but I realized I didn’t have any ID with me.”

  “Jesus. Don’t quit your day job.” She sighed. “Are you safe? Can you stay in the—jail? I’ll get the next flight.”

  She heard the murmur of a voice from the background. Then: “He wants to talk to you.”

  She closed her eyes, leaned against the wall, wondered if the heat coursing through her veins felt at all like what it felt like to be someone’s mother. If her mix of terror and relief and hysteria and exhaustion had anything in common with loving someone, parentally, whether you were their parent or not. “Put him on the phone,” she said. “And for fuck’s sake, stay where you are. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  * * *

  —

  Marilyn insisted on setting them up temporarily in the downstairs guest room.

  “I didn’t break my legs,” he’d said irritably, as he had when she’d insisted on wheeling him out of the hospital in a wheelchair.

  She had, both times, ignored him.

  So David was sitting by the window in the easy chair his wife had dragged from the living room, looking out into the yard, Loomis curled obligingly at his feet. His broken arm had shifted from hurting to itching in its cast, and he felt renewed and retroactive sympathy for eight-year-old Violet—Dada, it’s a mean itch—who had broken her wrist falling off of the monkey bars. The discomfort in his chest had abated as well, but he still didn’t feel like himself. His appetite was gone, which meant his energy was low, which meant he was less interested in doing things like showering, which meant that his hair felt waxy and his face like steel wool. Dressing was an ordeal, so he was wearing his bathrobe. He was embarrassed by himself. And feeling no insignificant degree of self-pity. And the fact that Jonah—who’d been missing now for nearly a week—had had to witness it all. For all David’s years in practice, he’d never actually seen anyone having a heart attack. To have to experience that, to see it happening to your grandfather. He shuddered, and was reminded again of his infirmity by a niggling spark of pain in his shoulder—no longer the ache he’d been ignoring for months but a new kind of pain, a sprain, from the fall.

  “Sweetie.” Marilyn bustled in, bringing with her the static smell of cold. She kissed his head. She’d brought tea and toast, which she arranged on the end table beside him. “The Roths just got this unbelievable snowblower. Space-age. Like a Zamboni.” She perched on the windowsill in front of him. “Dan did the driveway and the sidewalks for us.” Certainly she wasn’t rubbing it in on purpose, but she had to remember that he actually enjoyed shoveling snow, that it was yet another simple pleasure now denied to him. She retrieved his pill case from the nightstand—a day-by-day, like his elderly patients had, filled with a flamboyant amalgam of pills—and knocked the day’s allotment into her hand. “You want water instead of tea?”

  “It’s fine,” he said, taking them. Then, remembering: “Thanks, kid.”

  She smiled at him and smoothed his hair away from his forehead. “How about we get you showered today, huh? It might feel nice; it’s so cold outside.”

  Infantilization aside, the thing he was having the most trouble thinking about was the simple fact of her being here, being home. It had actually taken him until recently to notice that she was home all the time, home to administer his meds and make him bland meals and lie in bed beside him and cheerfully read him notable news items.

  “Did you draw up some kind of family leave policy?” he’d asked. “For powerhouse women to care for their one-armed husbands?”

  She’d turned to a new page, not meeting his eyes. “I put Drew in charge.”

  “You what?”

  “It just seemed easier that way
.” Then she’d looked up at him, smiling tiredly.

  “You’re taking a leave from work?” He’d felt a creeping sense of déjà vu. “Hang on, Marilyn, I didn’t— I’m not going to let you—”

  “It’s done,” she’d said, and she’d leaned over to kiss him on the shoulder. “I’ll go back when we’re ready. Once we’ve got you climbing trees again, huh?”

  Now he’d adjusted to her being home, and, less so, to her tending to him.

  “A shower,” she said, sounding preoccupied, lost in her own mental calendar. “And then maybe something out of the house? The grocery. Or a movie, if you’re feeling adventurous.”

  “Naah,” he said. “I’m not in the mood.”

  “Well.” She rose, her voice unnaturally chipper, and went about making their bed. “Sometimes it takes a little jump start to get in the mood. Let’s get you in the shower, and it’ll warm you up, and then you’ll be all nice and clean and we can—”

  “For Christ’s sake, Marilyn, could you stop talking to me like I’m a toddler?”

  She froze, leaning over to tuck in a corner of the sheet.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, though he didn’t feel terribly sorry.

  “No,” she said, “that’s—a reasonable request.” She cleared her throat and went back to work on the bed. “It’s just difficult for me to talk to you like an adult when you’re behaving like a little boy. I have sort of a hard time equating that person with the husband I’m accustomed to.”

  “It’s not fair for you to resent me for—”

  “I don’t resent you in the least.” She said it so plainly that it startled him. She came over and stood in front of him again. “This is why we exist, isn’t it? To be here for each other? The store isn’t my top priority right now. Because I love you, and you being well is more important to me than anything else. You’d do the same for me, wouldn’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  “The only thing I resent is your complete unwillingness to look on the bright side.”

  “I could’ve died,” he said, the first time he’d verbalized the thought.

  She took his hands. “But you didn’t. That is the bright side. You’re here, and you’re going to be okay. I’m just trying to help that along.”

  He took a slow breath, felt the warmth of his wife’s hands in his. She was the only person he knew who could find an upside like this: medical recovery as a means of enjoying life, exploring new hobbies, basking. “Thank you,” he said.

  She smiled, smoothed his hair again. “You don’t have to thank me. Hey, we’re both unencumbered and not working, at the same time, for the first time ever. It’s criminal for us to take that for granted.”

  “I guess we could go to the grocery.”

  “Oh, my adventurer.” She bent to kiss him.

  “If you agree to shower with me.”

  The phone rang and she rose to answer it, calling over her shoulder: “I’ll give that some serious thought.”

  * * *

  —

  Liza’s first word was, bafflingly, David. Not Papa, which was Wendy’s, or Ma, which was Violet’s, but David, two crisp syllables from her tiny handlebar-mustache mouth, David, at the dinner table, and her parents had looked at each other, fighting constantly at that time about money and mortgages and space and time management, and laughed, the tension of their difficult months momentarily extinguished.

  What would her kid’s first word be? Despair, she thought dully. Injustice. Existential apathy. Gloom. She was in her sunroom, marooned on the glider, marveling over her enormity and her isolation. The only reminder that she was not completely alone was the occasional thump she felt from within, the baby now too big to move around with much intent.

  “I’m David and Marilyn’s daughter,” she’d say sometimes, introducing herself to family friends. Her kid wouldn’t get to say that. Undetermined Sorenson-Marks, the kid would say. As-yet-androgynous offspring of Liza Sorenson and Ryan Marks, two people who tried to settle but couldn’t ever make it work.

  She shifted uncomfortably on the glider and a gripping in her torso took her breath away for a good thirty seconds. There was a warm, sharp-smelling fluid between her legs, seeping out of her onto the floor; when had her life become so gross, so undignified? This couldn’t be it; of course it couldn’t; she was supposed to have several more days; the sensation was so violent, hurt so much, had emerged out of nowhere, out of her indulgent self-pity.

  Motherfucker; this was it. She thought she might throw up. She thought of Dirk the tattoo artist, the musk from his armpits, the needle on her neck a 4 out of 10 on the pain scale. How naïve she’d been. She wanted her dad; she wanted a do-over. She picked up her phone and dialed.

  “Mom?” she said. David and Marilyn’s daughter. The relief of being able to call herself that. “Mama, I need you.”

  2006

  Another wedding in his backyard. Another daughter married, on her way to building an autonomous life. Violet had friends and coworkers and a husband, now, and with him a large, vaguely agnostic extended family. But as pleased as David was for his little overachiever, at some point he became painfully aware of Wendy, who, as the night wore on, got progressively drunker. Between requisite dances with his wife and his other three daughters he kept an eye on her, saw her nearly topple a waiter trying to grab a flute of champagne, saw Miles chastise her and saw her rebuff him with a jab of her elbow. Saw the guests watching her similarly, warily.

  “Someone needs to cut her off,” Marilyn said. They were standing together by the ginkgo, taking a breather, thinking of their own inception, thirty years ago in this very same spot. “She’s drawing attention to herself.”

  Wendy had pulled even further away from them—from everyone—since she’d lost the baby. She’s hurting, he wanted to say to his wife, but he knew she already knew that. It was a mystery to him why the largest-hearted woman in the world had such a difficult time mustering active sympathy for their firstborn, especially when he knew how much time she spent worrying about her.

  “Should I go get Miles and have him take her home?” she asked. He smoothed the material of her dress between his fingers. She looked beautiful, had looked radiant all night; all his girls were glowing except for the one self-destructing in a folding chair over by the swing set.

  “No,” he said. How nice it would be to just stay over here with her, agree to dance with her to “Tennessee Waltz,” sip at his scotch and feel good about life. “I’ll go talk to her.” His poor kid had been through so much. He kissed Marilyn’s hair and handed her his drink. “Go remind our new son-in-law of your fictitious ties to the Irish mob.”

  She smiled a little at him but her gaze shifted to Wendy again and she wilted. “Bring her some seltzer,” she said. “It might settle her stomach.”

  He nodded and set off across the lawn.

  “Wendy,” he said. He wished he didn’t always sound like such a stickler. She looked up, her eyes watery and wandering, and she smiled.

  “Daddy,” she said. He squatted down before her. “Nice socks, dude.”

  “How about you come with me?” he said. Wendy attempted to glower at him. He took her elbow. “Humor me; come on.” She shrugged and made an effort to stand. He helped her up and guided her slowly inside, through the kitchen and past the caterers, into his office, grabbing a liter bottle of Perrier from the counter on the way. “Have a seat,” he said, leading her to the sofa.

  She stumbled a little on her way down, and she laughed, a cackle that both scared him and reminded him of times when she was three, spinning around in his arms in their old backyard, unapologetically gleeful. He grabbed the ottoman from the foot of his armchair and dragged it over, sitting down before her. He uncapped the bottle of water and handed it to her.

  “Daddy, I’m fine.”

  “Wendy, drink some water.” He lif
ted the bottle to her lips and she moved to drink some, spilling a considerable amount down the front of her dress.

  “You’d die if you knew how much this cost.”

  He reached for a tissue and blotted at her face.

  “One thousand six hundred dollars,” she said in an affected whisper.

  “All right,” he said. “Just try to relax.” But relaxation was not what his daughter needed, he knew. She needed coffee and psychotherapy and a father who knew what to do besides dry her off with a Kleenex and tell her to relax.

  “I know Matt’s Mr. Savings-and-Bonds,” Wendy said. “But I don’t think it would have killed Violet to buy a dress that didn’t look like it was from Kohl’s.”

  “Okay, now.” It was what he always said when they did things that made him uncomfortable, when they tried to confide in him past a point that he understood. Okay, now. “It’s her wedding day, Wendy. Try to be happy for her.”

  “I’m thrilled,” Wendy said. “Mazel tov, Violet. We’re all so fucking shocked that your life is turning out perfect.” It had been six years since Wendy’s wedding, since the day he’d observed Wendy looking, for the first time in her life, truly happy.

  “I know you’ve had a hard year.”

  Wendy turned her face to him and he saw her make that frightening shift achievable only by the extremely intoxicated, a fluid leap from joviality to malevolence. “Do you, Dad? Do you know what a hard year I’ve had?” The final syllables bled together, an assonant slur that betrayed how far gone she was.

  “Lower your voice.” He felt his face getting hot. “Of course I do, Wendy. We all know.”

  “She could have waited,” Wendy said.

  He’d had the same thought. He’d mentioned it to Marilyn, wondered aloud if maybe Violet shouldn’t put off the wedding for a while, if maybe it wasn’t kind of unseemly to have a big party on the heels of your sister’s stillbirth, but Marilyn had looked at him as if he had three heads and said, “It’s been almost a year. And she’s always wanted to get married in June.”