The Most Fun We Ever Had

by Claire Lombardo

  * * *

  —

  “This is one of the reasons I stopped litigating,” Violet said, aware of her pulse, across from Wendy at the table. “I’m prepared to argue this into the ground.”

  “If you’re cool with being delusional, go for it.”

  Violet was so rarely surrounded exclusively by women—all three of her sisters, her tiny niece asleep against Liza’s shoulder—and she paused a moment to appreciate the energy of it, how different it was from the energy of her own dinner table. The boys in the next room playing Hungry Hungry Hippos—all three, Wyatt with a startling newfound height and Eli the affectionate honey blond moppet and Jonah, the earliest and latest addition to her roster, who was becoming more and more three-dimensional to her each time she encountered him: a dry wit, a diligent student, a discerning scholar of sad indie music; a contrarian, sometimes, and prone to moodiness before noon, but a trustworthy and fervently beloved babysitter to his half brothers. There was a relief in just trying to experience him as a person, no management or censorship. She felt lighter than she had in ages. The world as it was would almost never be the world you wanted it to be, and there was a certain pleasure in finding your space in the schism.

  “Gracie, can you weigh in?”

  “Neither of those people was there when I was. But there was this one guy—”

  “Nobody cares.”

  “Wendy, Christ.” She could admit it now, candidly: that she’d missed being able to laugh freely at Wendy’s observations, always at once razor-sharp and utterly tactless.

  “What? Sorry that I don’t want to hear the annotated history of my high school faculty.”

  “It’s only called faculty when it’s a university.”

  “That’s not true.”

  * * *

  —

  Grace’s sisters—the braying elephants—were facing off across the table, as ever flying down the rails without her, leaving her cruelly in the dust, these two whose explosive closeness she would always envy, Wendy indeterminately intoxicated and Violet seeming a little sloshed as well, but both still relatively good-natured. She could stomach their mockery because she didn’t hate herself quite as much as she once had, though she was twenty-four and living with her parents. Matt had gotten her a job as a paralegal at his firm. Her life did not currently suck, and that was progress.

  Ben had, miraculously, joined them because he had an unexpected layover in Chicago after visiting his aunt in Boston. It wasn’t like they’d planned to meet up, to have him meet her family. Their kiss—her kiss, her as-yet most major assertion of agency—had turned out to be the commencement of something, she wasn’t sure what, lots of text messages and occasional phone calls, the easy amity of a person who listened and made you laugh. And now he was here, in her house, in Oak Park. She should go check on him, sequestered in the living room with the men, but she knew if she rose she would subject herself to more ridicule. Her sisters—with her at the table, fighting about someone she’d never heard of—were delighting in the amount of teasing there was to be done about Grace’s first boyfriend-holiday, ignoring her protests that he wasn’t her boyfriend.

  “He’s just my person,” she’d insisted to Wendy, earlier. “Or, not, like—just a person.”

  “Careful,” Wendy said. “You’ll flatter him to death.”

  But he was in her house, among her family—her other people—and this was emboldening, somehow. Her life had always been abundantly peopled—by her doting parents, by her indulgent sisters—but she now felt accompanied in a way she never had before, by a person who was choosing to feel beholden to her instead of simply scooting up the built-in rope of familial obligation. And it was striking, how much less alone that could make you feel, because of course to be peopled at all was a high-order gift, but to find people beyond your people was nothing short of miraculous, finding a person away from home who felt like home and shifted, subsequently, the very notion of home, widening its borders.

  * * *

  —

  “You’re being ornery.” Liza felt the irritant of her sisters’ voices deep in her molars.

  “Somebody has to.”

  She and Ryan had only thus far spent time together alone, away from her family, in the form of his visits to Chicago to see the baby, in the form of one painfully long car ride with Kit, last month, to the northernmost point of Michigan, where Ryan met them to take them on a ferry to his friend’s farm. This was his first visit to the house on Fair Oaks in over a year, and she knew his presence perplexed her parents and her siblings, but her mother had reached immediately to pull him into a hug; Liza had blushed and shrugged a little bit, holding the baby, who was in fact reaching for David, her daytime playmate, like a little octopus. And her mom had seemed wounded at first, by Kit’s favoritism, but when Liza sheepishly passed the baby to her father, her mother leaned her head against his shoulder, both of them cooing to their granddaughter.

  There was a difference, she’d begun to realize recently, between settling and ceding. She was still utterly baffled by the world around her but she felt at least more comfortable with her bafflement, distracted from it by her job and her romper-clad ten-month-old and the man with whom she’d started everything. Earlier, alone in the kitchen with her mother, she’d whispered, I don’t know, and Marilyn had replied, You don’t have to know. She had something with her daughter that she’d never had with anyone else, a kind of fever pitch, precisely the right note struck, sometimes, and during those times she could not imagine ever needing anything else from the world. At the table now, removed a bit from the conversation by a pleasant veil of exhaustion, her daughter asleep on her shoulder, she used her free hand to massage tiny circles into her jawline, a self-induced relaxation technique she’d found on a website for working single mothers.

  “What the fuck is with you, Lize?” Wendy asked. “Are you high?”

  She tilted her face down, pressed her lips to the top of Kit’s head. “On life,” she deadpanned, and Wendy laughed at her joke, which always made her feel a childish satisfaction.

  * * *

  —

  Jonah felt himself getting fired up over the hippos, had to keep reminding himself that his opponent was only six and that it would be kind of a dick move to annihilate Wyatt at his own board game. Eli was sitting in his lap, bouncing with excitement, cheering him on. Wyatt was making the best face, scrunched up like a gargoyle, concentrating so hard on the game that he didn’t seem to notice that his tongue was stuck almost all the way out of his mouth. His little brother. The world was such a weird fucking place.

  Marilyn had begun to talk to him about college. Wendy had again offered to foot the bill. He’d not yet shared with either of them that he was reluctant to head off to college, that he couldn’t quite picture leaving David and Marilyn, that he was the only member of the family who hadn’t known them since he was born and that he was feeling a little bit greedy about his time with them, these people who woke him up when he turned off his alarm and made him pancakes on Tuesday mornings and stopped whatever they were doing to listen to him, even if he was just telling them he was going to bed.

  “Your technique’s a little off, man,” he said to Wyatt, and he knew he would miss these little dopes, too, if he moved elsewhere. Nobody had written a book on how you were supposed to transition from being an orphan to having about seventeen thousand meddling nutcase family members. “It’s a wrist thing,” he said, demonstrating, as his grandfather did sometimes when they played basketball together. “You’re going to want to hold the handle just a little bit to your right,” he said, “and then you just have to rail on it, buddy, okay, like you’ve never wanted anything more than those marbles.”

  * * *

  —

  David was probably killing the vibe, as Gracie would say, but he couldn’t help but ignore the football game in favor of watching, with interest,
the handful of men who loved his daughters. They’d segregated themselves in that antiquated way, the women arguing at the table, the men crowded around the television. He was most intrigued by Grace’s boyfriend—it pained him to even think the phrase, to think of their baby, partnered, but he grudgingly allowed himself to admit that he liked the boy, possibly even trusted him, ever since he’d seen him, when he thought no one was looking, kiss Grace with a reverent tenderness worthy of their Epilogue. Ben, Matt, and Ryan were together on the couch, visibly aware of how much space they were taking up and of the fact that their bodies weren’t touching. He’d never really had to experience that kind of masculine awareness because he’d snapped into adulthood so early, because he and Marilyn had so securely fastened themselves to each other before either really had a chance to feel the awkward loneliness of being solo in the world. He sat in his chair near the bookshelves, halfway between the two groups, listening to the steady rise and fall of his daughters’ voices and the static blare of the TV, too old to quite fit in with either set. He was aware of missing his wife, a thought that he dismissed as silly because she was, of course, in the next room.

  * * *

  —

  Marilyn tried to tune out her daughters, adults in body if not in mind, while she peered dubiously at the turkey in the oven, which smelled okay but still looked frightening. She waged this battle annually. She closed the oven, unsatisfied, and drifted over to the back door, looking out at the yard and breathing in air that didn’t smell like savory meat.

  “I just went in to break up a brawl.” Arms wrapped around her waist; hands rested on her abdomen. “But they broke it up themselves, before I could even open my mouth.”

  The ease of the remembering: how effortlessly she could conjure the feeling of their first time, her back melting in submission, her scalp prickling to attention, the chill of the ground through her clothes and the warmth of his early inelegance. She put her hands on top of David’s and leaned back against him. “So who died? Mr. Calhoun or Mr. Whiteman?”

  “Huh?”

  She smiled. “Nothing. No one. Come here.” She gripped his hand, unlatched the back door.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “Abandoning our children.” She pulled him outside and down the stairs. She settled on one of the steps and he followed more slowly, his long legs folding achily into acute angles.

  “Dinner smells good,” he said.

  She leaned her head against his shoulder. “Thank you.”

  “Good-looking crew in there too, huh?”

  “Mm.”

  “A little annoying, though, if I may.”

  She snorted. “Yeah. Just a little.”

  “How did we ever live with all of them at the same time?”

  She didn’t reply. She worried about him constantly. She missed him preemptively.

  The girls were all like David; the different similarities were becoming clearer to her by the hour with everyone home, some that she already knew—that she had recognized the moment they were born—and others that she had never noticed. Liza had the most elemental grip on him; she was pragmatic and suspicious and the very kindest kind of scientific. Violet had her father’s loving all-business approach to her children. Grace had inherited his meticulous handwriting and his trepidation about merging with the surrounding world. Wendy—her eldest daughter nearly forty—possessed his art for making the absolute, most sardonic best out of the strange circumstances that had befallen her. And Marilyn in there somewhere, all over all of them, her optimism, her kinetic repression, her pluck, assured further by the pressure of her husband’s hand around her right hip, by the buzz of voices, aggressive but playful, each knotted elaborately around her heart, through the screen door.

  “Sure you’re okay?” he asked.

  “I am.” His shoulder had felt the same against her face for the entire time she’d known him. This man; her heart: maker of beds and terrible coffee, pain analyst and curmudgeon and unfaltering father; owner of strong arms and malleable convictions. Love of her life. She rubbed her cheek against the knit grain of his sweater. “Come here,” she said.

  “I couldn’t be any closer unless I was sitting in your lap, kid.” So much more confident than he’d been when they’d first met, emboldened by the years.

  She lifted her face and kissed him, and the stairs squeaked beneath them, aging green paint that would flake off and embed forest flecks into their clothes; atrophied wood swelled with decades of rainstorms and snowstorms and pounded back into submission by a century of heavy footsteps, stomping teens and loping dogs and gardening semi-adults. They both felt the December chill through the insulatory dearth of their sweaters and David reached an arm around his wife’s shoulders. They both turned slightly to a sound from the kitchen, the thump of the refrigerator door and the clink of glass.

  “Refueling,” David said, and she nodded against him. “Christ, those girls drink a lot of wine. I’ll have to apologize to the recycling guy on Tuesday.”

  “He seems like a forgiving guy.” She kissed him again.

  “Think they’re back at each other’s throats in there?” he asked.

  “Oh, probably. Let’s not worry about it.”

  Those ancient stairs, those six-times-repainted stairs with layers of red and blue and yellow and brown and white and now their green, creaking ominously but never to the point of concern. Those ancient stairs upon which Marilyn had once laid herself strategically, fifteen years old and hoping the odd angles would allow her a more cohesive tan. Upon which the two of them had helped Gracie learn to work her tiny baby legs, adept then at walking on flat surfaces but not inclines. Upon which Wendy had probably done unspeakable things to boys with Napoleon complexes and offshore accounts. Upon which Liza and Violet had once erected a lemonade stand, blind to the fact that they were unlikely to attract customers by setting up shop in the backyard. Upon which now Marilyn was stretching out, arching her back uncomfortably on the stair beneath her husband and impelling him to join her.

  “Old times’ sake,” she said, but he shook his head, moving his knees to accommodate her.

  “My back’s not cut out for this level of holiday whimsy, my dear.”

  She lay back flat, her husband’s knees tented over her thighs in a corduroy bridge, and looked upward. They had five trees remaining in their backyard now, plus the stump of the tree David had put out of its misery: three ginkgoes and two oaks, all of which were older than they, older than her parents, older than anything. The ginkgoes had shed weeks ago but the oaks were different, always Marilyn’s favorite: stragglers, late bloomers, the last to get their leaves and the last to lose them. There were a few remaining on the branches, misshapen handprints, hanging by a thread and waiting to fall.

  Two seasons in Chicago, the old joke went. Winter and construction. But there were so many more, she thought. Dozens of seasons, some only a few hours long, idiosyncratic little pockets between the definitive stretch of autumn, the bright flash of spring. This season now, which may possibly last only a few moments, where you could wear a sweater outside in December and there were still a few leaves on the trees and the warmth radiating from the person next to you was enough to make it all bearable. And the season that would follow when they went back inside, their skin foggy from the cold air and the warm proximity of each other, their bodies overtaken as ever by their children, hands on their shoulders and eyes on their every move and voices in their ears, hands and eyes and voices that would never fully comprehend the complexity of their own origins; hands and eyes and voices that would be forever ignorant to what transpired on those stairs between David and Marilyn Sorenson, on their thirty-ninth Second Thanksgiving, literate in their own elusive language, their merged genes snaking through nearly every person inside the house on Fair Oaks.

  “Hey, love,” she said to him, imploring, but she wasn’t sure what for.

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