The O. Henry Prize Stories 100th Anniversary Edition (2019)

by The O Henry Prize Stories 2019 (retail) (epub)

  Once we all got settled in the leather booth, however, it quickly became clear that none of these factors had played a role; Robert just really liked eating at Houston’s, and before we had looked at our menus, he’d already ordered the spinach dip and grilled artichokes for the table. When we asked for margaritas, we learned that he was sober. “Three years and eight months,” he said with simple happiness. It was hard to reconcile this large, ruddy person with the radiologist we’d imagined, the bloodless Lothario who had destroyed our friends’ marriage. As much effort as we had put into hating him over the past many months, regularly enraged by the thought of him, our insides roiling at the sound of his name, Robert was, we had to admit, probably beside the point. We protested a little when he reached for the check, but eventually gave in and said thank you. He and Julia had been careful to leave a few inches of space between them throughout dinner, and as we watched them cross the parking lot, we saw her take his hand and kiss it.

  * * *

  —

  The more recent trip to Disneyland was, on the whole, less successful. Julia had persuaded Coco to try a weeklong marine biology camp on Catalina Island, and apparently her reward for surviving it was a weekend at the Happiest Place on Earth; the proximity of all this to San Diego was not lost on us. But it had been such a long time since the kids had seen each other. We didn’t want to take the high road at the expense of Henry, who’d been lobbying to do the Jedi Training Academy for a while now, and despite our discomfort with Julia’s self-interested itinerary, and some deep-seated misgivings about supporting the Disney empire, there was no graceful way to avoid going. And we should say up front that the bulk of the blame for what happened at the end of the day falls squarely on us.

  The real problem was the lack of Sunny, of course. We hadn’t sufficiently prepared Henry for the shock of this—we’d mentioned it plenty of times on the drive to Anaheim, but the reality of Sunny’s not being with us was a different thing altogether. Without Sunny around, the full extent of our children’s incompatibility was free to reveal itself: Coco wanting to do nothing but get her autograph book signed and have her photo taken with princess reenactors, Henry gloomy and lagging behind, unable to recover from the brief high of being a Jedi trainee, which had required us to register as soon as the park opened and then lasted all of twenty minutes. Their only shared inclination was to ask wistfully for “mementos” while stopping to examine the merchandise at gift shops. Neither of them seemed particularly interested in the rides; both of them were unsatisfied with the food options. All of us felt somewhat stunned by the heat and the long waits in line. None of this was helped by the fact that Coco had shot up in the past year and now towered incongruously over Henry.

  While shuffling slowly forward we tried to ask Coco questions about her time on Catalina, but she offered only vague, incomplete answers, made more difficult to understand by a metal appliance that had been installed inside the roof of her mouth. “It’s called a palatal crib,” Julia murmured. “I know it looks like a medieval torture device, but there was no other way to stop her.” Coco was a hardened thumb sucker, grown furtive and resourceful over the years. “The orthodontist said that we couldn’t even think about braces until we achieved ‘total extinction of the habit.’ ” She widened her eyes at the terminology. “And normally I wouldn’t have taken such drastic measures, especially given what’s going on right now, but did you see? She’s already chipped her left front tooth. Her teeth are sticking so far out of her mouth that the dentist says they’re ‘constantly vulnerable.’ We had to do something—Sunny felt the same way.”

  We must have perked up at the reference because Julia stopped talking about the crib and instead continued warmly on the subject of Sunny. “I mean I knew this before, obviously, but he is an incredible coparent. That hasn’t changed a bit. We are completely in sync when it comes to Coco, really clear at communicating about her needs. And completely on the same page in terms of making this transition feel OK for her. We have dinner as a family now three nights a week, all of us sitting at the table, focused, and we never miss it or let anything get in the way. It’s actually more than what we did when we were still living together.” It was odd to hear Julia talk this way, using phrases that sounded borrowed from a parenting book. She wasn’t bothering to speak in a lowered voice anymore, and Coco seemed undisturbed by the topic, staring agreeably into space, as if she were already accustomed to hearing it discussed in her vicinity.

  “That’s great,” we said to Julia, meaning it. “That’s wonderful.” We told her we were glad but not surprised. How like the two of them to approach divorce not as a dissolution, but a kind of renovation, a rebuilding into something new. “Yes!” she said. “Something new. And better. With more room for all of us.” She smiled at us radiantly.

  “And she and Robert”—we nodded at Coco—“they’re hitting it off? That’s going well?” We were smiling too—at Julia, at the kids, at the other people waiting in line—feeling that maybe we’d been wrong, and that maybe, in defiance of our fretful predictions, everything would turn out all right in the end. But then Julia’s lovely face froze into an expression of pure alarm just as Coco, without missing a beat, asked—in a perfectly distinct, piping voice—“Who’s Robert?”

  “He’s a colleague, baby,” she said, “you haven’t met him yet,” and from her backpack she handed out sticks of mint gum to all except Coco, with her mouth crib, who received an energy bar instead. We chewed in silence. No subtle means of changing the subject came immediately to mind. “Watch where you’re stepping,” Julia warned as she steered the children around a pat of bright pink bubblegum glistening on the ground. “That is definitely not sugarless,” Coco noted, and then craned her neck to see if she could guess which person in front of us had spit it out, Robert apparently forgotten.

  But as awful as that moment had been, it wasn’t as bad as what we felt later that night, after we had dropped off Coco and Julia at their Disneyland-adjacent hotel, and after we had made the trek back to South Pasadena and pulled into our driveway. We turned around and there in the backseat was Henry, sound asleep: head cocked and mouth gaping, arms spread in surrender, a light saber in one hand and a small square of silky, pale blue material in the other. Oh God. We knew immediately what it was. We would know that silky scrap anywhere. It was Coco’s. It had started out years earlier as the satin trim on a fancy chenille baby blanket, a blanket she had loved, her favorite thing to do with this blanket being to pile it up on one side of her and then take the very tip of its corner and press it against her nose, where she would stroke it voluptuously with an index finger as she sucked on her then-permissible thumb. Without the blanket she refused to go to sleep; also, she refused to read or be read to, watch a movie, take a time-out, ride in the car—and each summer at the lake house, when Coco emerged from the back of the Subaru, the blanket would appear a little further diminished, until at last it had disintegrated into this one remaining relic-like bit of trim, no more than three inches square. For a few long minutes we sat there in the driveway staring at Henry, feeling sympathetic and sort of furious that he was acting out in this weird way.

  When questioned the next morning, he was not very forthcoming.

  How did he end up with Coco’s wubby?

  She was playing with it when we drove them back to the hotel.

  But how did it come to be in his possession?

  She put it in the cup holder when Julia told her to pull her sweater from her backpack.

  And after she put it in the cup holder?

  They got out of the car.

  Did he tell Coco that she’d forgotten her lanyard, and hand it to her?

  Yes.

  So why didn’t he tell her that she’d left her wubby in the cup holder?

  He’d forgotten to mention it.

  Did he know how much it means to her?

  At this, Henry merely s
hrugged. He was glowing with resentment and by now crying hard. We discussed the logistics of driving to Anaheim and catching Julia before she left the hotel for the airport, but soon enough came to our senses and made Henry draw a card, first in pencil and then more carefully in pen, which we enclosed in a self-sealing business envelope, unable to find anything cuter, along with the little blue remnant. While it wouldn’t quite beat them back to Missouri, Coco would be reunited with her transitional object in just a matter of days. So what an unwelcome surprise it was when the business envelope and its contents appeared in our mailbox several weeks later, looking battered. How stupid—the wrong address! But to us it was the right address, and would always be the right address: the house to which, for years, we had sent holiday popcorn tins and joke gifts and small belated offerings to mark Coco’s birthdays. There were now two new addresses, though still in the same zip code, and we hadn’t had the chance to update our contacts list with either.

  It goes without saying that we did repackage the whole thing, making sure to write down Julia’s new house number and street and also including a set of flavored lip balms designed to look like macaroons, which was meant as a mea culpa to Coco but which also necessitated a larger, padded envelope and a trip to the post office in order for it to be weighed and affixed with the correct postage. Little did we know that due to operating budget shortfalls, the post office now closes early on Saturdays—so the padded envelope went into the backseat of the car, and then it migrated to the trunk when Henry and his friends Noah and Griffin had to be driven to basketball practice, and there it stayed for quite a while until a long-overdue Costco haul, when it was discovered again and placed inside the capacious French shoulder bag that’s intended to collapse into chic origami but, as the repository for seemingly all of the family’s cough drop wrappers, parking tickets, reusable water bottles, school newsletters, store receipts, etc., is never empty enough to do so.

  An absurdly long delay—but we did keep Julia posted on our efforts and having looked hard at ourselves can say that it truly was a case of two parents working full-time, a kitchen remodel going sideways, their kid trying out for the travel team and actually making it, and life just being the breathless, nonstop circus that it tends to be these days. After a month of being toted about in the bag, the envelope became part of the furniture, as they say, and encountering its puffy presence while fishing around for a permission slip or the car keys came to feel sort of reassuring. In fact, the envelope was still inside the French shoulder bag when a last-minute trip to New York proved unavoidable, a parent’s knee finally needing to be replaced, and who of all people should materialize at the Muji store near the food court in JFK’s Terminal 5—full head of hair appearing above the rows of tiny Japanese containers, lean frame moving down the aisle—but Sunny. Our Sunny. Wearing a slate-gray coat and a bright, beautifully striped scarf, looking as marvelous as ever.

  It felt unbelievably good to hug him. He smelled of coffee and fig shampoo. Both the scarf and the coat were cashmere, and though it’s possible that he had an extra layer on underneath the coat, he didn’t feel as thin as we’d been worried he might be. Inexplicably, he seemed an inch or so taller. Never before had my head fit so neatly under his chin. I must have held on for a second too long because he gave me a little pat on the back, letting go.

  He was coming from Glasgow, of all places, where he’d been invited to give a talk. He said it went well, and that he’d been traveling more in general. Gracious as always, he asked after us, after Henry in particular, inquiring about school, the basketball season, whether he was still interested in Houdini. He laughed when he learned about Henry’s ongoing efforts to raise enough money to buy a straitjacket. As we talked, we browsed through the selection of soothing organizational items, unable to stop touching things and weighing them in our hands, and I chattered about the knee replacement and holiday plans and staffing changes at the hospital, trying to resist the urge to hug him again. It was just so good to see him. It had been such a long time, and he looked so exactly himself, which was a relief to me, a great comfort and a relief. Finally, I admitted this aloud and pressed my face against his shoulder, adding how glad I was to hear that they were all doing so well. Sunny turned to look at me. “We are?” His surprise seemed real. He picked up a pocket notebook and began thumbing through its pages. “Julia told you that?” He shook his head. Then he smiled crookedly at the notebook. “I think it’s safe to say that she’s speaking for herself.”

  The notebook ended up going back on the shelf but he did hold on to a clever stapler and hovered over the rainbow array of gel pens, asking if I thought Coco would like them. His question reminded me, for obvious reasons, of the package I had been carrying around with me all this time, the package addressed to Coco; I dug it out of my shoulder bag and held it up for him to see. As soon as I did so, I felt ashamed that we had used Julia’s address and not his. Yet it somehow seemed not only an apt correction but an act of fate that he should be the one to deliver it. I imagined the look of amazement on her face when her father walked through the door, bearing his prize: I could picture the appliance glinting in her slightly opened mouth. What serendipity that I hadn’t had the chance to make a second trip to the post office! For once I felt good about being harried. I gave the padded envelope to Sunny and explained what was inside.

  “Disneyland,” he echoed, and then realized: “Which was in August.”

  I didn’t want to bore him with the convoluted story. He had a flight to catch, and still another one after that before he reached home. I knew from experience that he didn’t like to rush. He seemed to have changed his mind about the stapler and the pens, maybe because a short line had formed at the register or maybe because—this was my pleased, ridiculous thought in the moment—he already had something special to bring back to her. Outside the store we hugged once more, and this time Sunny was the one to give an extra-long squeeze, and the last thing he said was “Be sure to tell Henry I said hey,” before he adjusted the beautiful scarf and headed for his gate.

  In other words, we ended on a very warm note, and I turned dreamily in the direction of my own gate, still glowing from the encounter with Sunny but already starting to feel a familiar melancholy at the thought of their divorce. The truth is that my sense of loss has not abated, as I originally believed it might, with the passing of time. Tincture of time—a phrase I had first heard while sitting beside Sunny in immunology, his foot tapping away. I think it was my sadness that made me glance over my shoulder to steal one more look at his gray coat, growing smaller as he retreated down the bright, polished corridor, and this is how I happened to see what he did then, which was to take the padded envelope from under his arm and drop it into a large putty-colored trash receptacle. He did it without stopping, in one swift motion, a gesture so fluid that I almost missed it. But this was unmistakably what he did.

  Of course I was surprised, actually quite shaken, and I spent the flight home flipping from one free movie to another and trying to analyze the act that I’d not been meant to see. My first hopeful thought was that Sunny didn’t want to reintroduce a crutch after Coco had learned to live without it. Entirely possible. Less probable but also consoling was the idea that he objected to the artificial additives in flavored lip balm—I had mentioned the little gift we’d included—or the marketing of beauty products to preadolescent girls. Maybe he’d never liked the blanket and was just as glad to have it gone. Gradually, though, my theories grew darker, and on the drive home from LAX to South Pasadena, I find myself wondering if his treatment of the envelope is a reflection of how he feels about us.

  * * *

  —

  It’s well after eleven when I pull up to the house. They’ve left the lights on for me, but my first impulse upon stepping inside is to turn them off. Upstairs they are in their rooms, asleep, which makes the house feel very still but also full. In the darkened living room, I pick my way to the club
chair, now twice reupholstered, and as I sit down, it occurs to me that though I will certainly describe running into Sunny, I’ll keep the other part of what I saw to myself. Now that I’m home it’s clear that there is no need, really, to bring this abrasive bit of mystery in through the door with me.

  Our months of conjecture, our lengthy, circular conversations with Julia: they have left us exhausted, not to mention irritable with each other, and with no deeper understanding of why she doesn’t love Sunny in the same way she used to. We ask ourselves, Is there something she isn’t telling us? Is she protecting us, out of kindness, from disturbing truths—about Sunny? or herself? As much as we try, we can’t bring ourselves to believe what she keeps insisting on, which is simply that she wasn’t happy. Simply that her feelings changed. Because this is inconceivable to us, when ours have remained so constant. We love them, Sunny and Julia, as much as we did in the beginning.

  Sometimes it happens that in the early morning, we shuffle out onto the landing at the same time—my snoring has gotten worse, so lately I’ve been sleeping in the guest room—and without speaking we keep shuffling forward until we’re touching, resting on the other’s upright body, and almost magically, Henry opens up the door to his bedroom, and out he shuffles too. The three of us lean into each other, and it’s not exactly a group hug but more like the kind of huddling that animals do in the cold, our flanks rising and falling with our breaths. We stand there sleepily for a minute or two, and once in a while, I’ll think I smell something faint and intoxicating, similar to the fancy shampoo that Sunny must have used at his Glasgow hotel; I’ll sniff Henry’s hair, sink my nose into my husband’s T-shirt, trying without success to find it again. Then, as easily as we came together, we break apart and go about our business, knowing that soon enough we’ll be bumping up against the same bodies, whether on the landing or in the kitchen or somewhere else. Just knowing that, it seems to me, is plenty as it is.