Commuters (27 page)

“Um—there was baseball on, spring try-outs, so I’m watching something about the Mets. Anyway. Then this girl sat next to me, and we start talking.” She had been everything Nona was not: tall, thin, young, blonde. Simple. About as interesting as the pre-season Mets.

“So, I’m working it, just a little—I’ve got moves, Winnie, don’t doubt it.” This was forced, but at least she gave a wan smile. “But just as things get going, I realized I’ve forgotten her name, or maybe I never even knew it in the first place—obviously it’s a little late to ask because we’ve been hanging out for over an hour and…”

Avery stopped. He laced his fingers and put his hands on top of his head. This stupid story was making him sweat; he could see
himself there, in all his misery, in that place on West Broadway. Why did it feel so disgusting? To make yourself go through with something when you knew your heart isn’t into it. After a while, the no-name girl had put her palm on the inner part of his thigh, she had whispered something nasty in his ear, and then taken herself off to the bathroom in the back where, Avery understood, he was supposed to join her and lick a stripe of cocaine off her ass before all the usual bodily proceedings commenced. He’d paid for his two sodas and her many Jack-and-Cokes, and left the bar.

Winnie was looking at her hands; she didn’t press him to finish the story, which was a relief. The food lay forgotten on the plates beside them.

“I keep promising myself I won’t ask you something,” she said. “Those times you and he met, in the office. Did he speak very much about…your grandmother?”

“About my—?” A faded mental image of his grandmother, harmless and soft and
old
. What did she have to do with anything?

“Beth Ann. Did he talk much about her? All those years he had with her.”

Avery realized it then, in the sound of that name and the way it was spoken (
Beth Ann
—he’d hardly remembered that had been his grandmother’s name), what was making Winnie so shy and ashamed. He forced his voice to sound hearty and authoritative.

“Nope. Never, really. Just in passing, I guess. Actually, who he mostly went on about was his brother, Frank.”

Winnie flashed a little smile, grateful. She wouldn’t push him, he knew, but it was the truth, anyway.

“You’re being a fool,” she said next.

“What?”

“You, Nona. This is not the same thing,” she said. “These are not the same situation, yours and mine.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“All this bearing up, all your brave let’s-put-a-good-face-on-it. What are you thinking? Isn’t that what they say, nowadays? Why are you so dense?” Winnie’s voice had some real heat in it, and Avery was taken aback. In fact, he was pretty proud of his putting a good face on it. He felt like crap, he was lonely and sadder than he’d ever known it was possible to be, and yet here he was, out in the suburbs to cook lunch for some old lady you could argue he wasn’t even
related
to. Why was he getting all this shit, then?

“You don’t get it. She’s away at this place, for a whole year.”

“A whole
year
?” Winnie echoed, mimicking him in an unpleasant way. “So? Is it a nunnery? Is she kept under lock and key?”

“So, she’s working on her singing, it’s this really big deal…” Avery trailed off. It was exhausting, even saying this out loud, something so obvious it sounded fake and unsure.

“Did she tell you not to go there? Not to try?”

“It’s not allowed—they don’t let—”

“It’s not
allowed
?” Winnie said, and Avery caught the faint glimmer of a laugh in her voice. “Are you now a person who has to be
allowed
to do something he wants to do?”

Man. It’s not like he could explain it to her, the way Nona’s face had looked—careful, uncertain—that one time he’d tried to make a real case for going with her. And you would have thought Winnie, as cool as she was, would be more clued in. It was a disappointment, this whole line from her, the way she was acting like there was some big romantic rescue in the works for him. Swoop into
Rome and just…what? Announce to Nona that what they had was different and better than either of them were admitting? Life wasn’t like that—Winnie of all people should know, right? You had to be—yes, as lame as it sounded—a
grown-up
about things. Love ended. Or it didn’t, but you had to suck it up, stagger through, do your thing even when you were a broken person inside.

He was about to respond—
it’s more complicated than that, you don’t understand, it’s not like I could just
—when the door in the hall outside the kitchen opened and closed. Soon Rachel was there, loud and energetic and tripping over a chair. Bags were spilled; curses were let loose. She didn’t act surprised to see Avery there in Winnie’s kitchen, nor the two of them sitting quietly and close, all mournful and down. She fixed her attention, instead, on the lunch leftovers.

“Good God,” Rachel said, picking up half of Winnie’s sandwich and biting into it. “Is this like a Cuban or something? I’m so hungry I’m about to pass out.”

The living room in Dina Sudler’s house was packed. The main event was present unwrapping, and the spectators were just as involved as the young woman at the center, surrounded by boxes and discarded wads of brightly colored paper—they passed packages to her across the room, over heads and from hand to hand, pitching in with good-natured complaining, as if they had performed this ritual many times over, which they had. From bridal showers to baby showers to graduation parties to engagement parties, the guests at this Hartfield home embraced these two hours with a well-worn familiarity. Women in linen sundresses crowded four to a love seat; some perched on the arms of couches, a sandal dangling from a foot, and some squeezed together on the piano bench; others, like Rachel, stood in the doorway leading to the front hall, moving aside each time the caterer’s girl passed by with another tray of food.

About half and half,
Rachel thought, calculating the percentage of New and Old Hartfield in the room. Dina herself was Old Hartfield—her son Derek, just two years out of Northwestern,
used to mow the Brighams’ lawn for five dollars an hour—and she had orchestrated this June party for her soon-to-be daughter-in-law according to every unspoken rule in town. The invitations were handwritten and had arrived only a week ago. There were bowls of pretzels set out, and fruity drinks in small plastic cups.
From Our Home to Yours
had done the food, and it had been perfectly fine—chilled pasta salad, chicken salad, fruit salad, little lemon sandwich cookies—but for the first time she could remember, Rachel felt slightly dissatisfied with her lunch. She spooned herself portions of the different gelled salads, and oohed a little in anticipation, just like everyone did, but inwardly she found herself wondering what Avery might have cooked. Something brash and overspiced and completely inappropriate for this event. But still.

Many long-time friends of Dina’s and neighbors Rachel knew were there too. Hand Me Down was closed for two weeks, the owner out of town. As a result, she and Bob were spending more time together than they had in a long while. They went to Lila’s meets together, instead of rotating their parental attendance. Both of them cooked dinner one night (they were having Winnie regularly), and at Melissa’s request the entire family had gone to see
Pirates of the Caribbean
at the local movie theater. In the dark, Bob’s laughter rang out louder than anyone else’s.

He was starting back at the firm in late August; by then, the book would most likely have sold (or so his agent told them) and as for after that—well, Rachel didn’t love it, but she was willing to imagine that there was at least a partly different future in store.

“Writers still have day jobs,” she pointed out to Bob, whenever he ventured too far into a vision of himself typing full-time. “They
teach, or something. And what about John Grisham? He was a lawyer and a writer. It can be done.”

“I doubt he does much practicing anymore. But I like the literary comparison—sales-wise, at least.”

“I’m just saying, it’s not like people just sit around and
write
all day long. They have to do something for money. Even when they’ve written books.”

Bob had just grinned at her. Maybe he realized it too. They were talking about
how
he would fit writing into his life as a lawyer, not
whether
. “I can’t believe it,” he said, and for once he spoke so softly she could barely hear him. “I wrote my book.”

Rachel craned her neck to see where her mother was; she couldn’t find her amid the chattering flurry of women crowded in the room. Winnie had been placed in one of the most comfortable seats, an upholstered armchair near to Dina and the bride-to-be, as befitted one of the eldest guests. But she wasn’t there now.
The restroom
, Rachel guessed, and then turned her attention back to the presents. Sure enough, soon the girl was opening an enormous box to discover not one, not two, but
three
heavy enameled pots, the pricey French kind that Rachel coveted, too—Gretchen Marra, who’d moved here less than two years ago, gave a little shrug in response to the group’s squeal of delight.

“I myself can’t get enough of these,” she said. “They’re so fun!”

New Hartfield
, Rachel thought. Ostentatious, anonymous, over-the-top; wrapped by the store, ordered online, most likely.
I mean, really
. A four-hundred-dollar gift for Dina’s son’s wife? It was despicable. Maybe some women thought this kind of present upped the ante, but Rachel knew it was the opposite—bland, rich gifts like this
only made people feel uncomfortable. She could see it in the way that Dina carefully stacked the pots on the floor beside her.

Soon enough, her own present was handed over. Rachel watched carefully, a tiny smile on her face. First, both Dina and the girl—
what was her name?
—exclaimed over the wrapping paper, a thick, lovely violet sheet she had purchased individually at Gramatan Stationer’s for four dollars. Rachel led the room’s laughter when her own wrapping job—messy, hasty—was revealed, tape everywhere, corners botched. Things quieted when the bride lifted out the gift: a thick, antique silver frame that soon garnered soft murmurs of approval from the women. Rachel waited, though.

“Oh,” Dina gasped, and turned her shining eyes toward Rachel, across the room.

For inside the frame Rachel had placed an old photograph she found—after several hours in the crammed closets of her own apartment, and then a dusty sojourn back up to the attic in Vikram’s part of the house. She had pulled the picture from one of her own albums, filled with Christmas shots of the girls in their fuzzy nightgowns and ecstatic summer photos of them at the pool, their skinny limbs golden brown. This one, the one she clearly remembered and had set out to find, was marked, “November snowstorm! 32 inches! 1986,” on the back, in her own hand. It was of their front lawn, thickly crusted with snow up to a man’s waist—or a boy’s, for that was who was in the foreground, Dina’s son Derek, sweaty and holding a shovel aloft triumphantly, gesturing to the wavery path he’d made from their driveway to the front door. He couldn’t have been more than fourteen. Bob had taken the picture; you could see threads from his gray glove in the upper right-hand corner of the shot.

Dina pulled the frame away from her daughter-in-law and clutched it to her own chest.
Thank you,
she mouthed, and Rachel blew her a kiss.

After a few minutes, though, she slipped into the foyer and checked the bathroom under the stairs, but it was empty. In the kitchen, the caterers were loading small glass dishes into plastic crates; no Winnie. Rachel went halfway up the back stairs, calling, “Mom?” Nothing. She couldn’t have gone home; Rachel had driven them both.

Outside, the air was thick with humidity. It was a wet, overcast day with oppressive heat, less like June than late August. Rachel wandered down the driveway and out to the street, where cars were parked up and down the sloping hill along the grassy lawns of Dina’s neighbors. No one. She went back to the house, but just as she was about to go inside again, she caught a flash of Winnie’s light blue jacket through the bushes that lined the backyard. She went up a short series of stone steps and pushed her way through the damp scratchy hedge.

“Mom?” Winnie was standing with her back to the house, in a corner of the lawn. She looked like she might be sneaking a cigarette, Rachel thought, her low heels sinking into the wet grass. “What’s going on? I was about to send out a—” But her light tone died away when her mother turned, her face crumpled and red, streaked with tears.

“You didn’t say anything,” Winnie said in a low, flat voice. “No one has.”

“Said something about what?”

“Do you think it’s easy for me to come to a party like this?”

“I didn’t know you—I thought you were in a good place, about
your decision. About Jerry going back…there.” Rachel had been about to say
home
.

“A good place?” Winnie said. She looked exhausted. “I never know what that means.”

“You were fine last week, when we went out after Lila’s meet. Wasn’t that fun, all of us being together? And Theresa Mead says you stayed at coffee hour after church for nearly an hour, and that you were laughing. A lot.”

“Last week wasn’t my one-year wedding anniversary,” Winnie said. She reached out to touch a tiny boxwood leaf, and then let her hand fall. “And yesterday was, and my husband’s in a coma in another city, and…”

“Shit,” Rachel said. She’d totally forgotten the date.

“Exactly.”

“Mom—I’m sorry. I should have—”

“Oh, I know you’re trying to help. Trying to be ‘there for me.’” Winnie’s sad voice put the quote marks around the expression, as if to emphasize its uselessness.

Rachel was stung. She thought she
was
there for her mother; it’s nearly all she did or thought about since Jerry had left. It had been hard to understand Winnie’s decision at first, although she well knew the constant barrage of pressure from Chicago; still, it was hard to accept backing down from Annette. Little by little, though, Rachel was coming to see it as not just giving, what her mother had done—Bob said it revealed Winnie’s true strength of character—but as a gift to her own self. Until Jerry was gone, Rachel hadn’t noticed the full extent of what caring for him had done to her mother, who became worn and fragile in a new way, despite all the nurses and Rachel’s own constant
help. It had aged her, Jerry’s sudden decline. Of course it had; how could it not? Now the fear of what it might have done to her was lifted.

Wet blades of grass clung to Winnie’s ankles.

Rachel’s heart pounded. The way she had found her mother, here in the garden—that instant sensation of calm, with all the world aligned, as soon as she had spotted her: a barely knowable peace, one so utterly taken for granted. What would it be like, when that was taken away?

A burst of laughter came from the open windows of Dina’s living room, across the lawn. “I guess I thought you wanted to keep busy. With us.”

“You can’t always cover up someone’s pain with a lot of words,” Winnie said, so quietly that Rachel could barely hear. A swarm of gnats rose from the bushes and swept above both their heads. “But we’ve gotten good at that, haven’t we?”

Rachel didn’t know what to say.

“Things are better now, at home. For you. I can tell.”

“Bob’s essentially back to full strength,” Rachel said slowly. “They’ve dropped down his neuro checks to—”

“I’m not talking about the accident,” Winnie said. And she came closer to Rachel, put a damp hand on her wrist, and looked up into her face. “I should have said something, when things were bad for you. When you were so unhappy. I don’t know why I didn’t. Sometimes I thought it would seem like meddling, but…I was also too preoccupied, I had Jerry and I just didn’t want—”

“Oh.” Rachel filled with a sweet kind of embarrassment, like a child whose mistakes are discovered, and quickly forgiven. “There’s always so much going on…” she said.

“No. I kept quiet, when I should have asked you to tell me how you were. And I won’t make that mistake again.”

The party was breaking up. Rachel could hear the scraping of chairs on wood, the women’s voices dispersing through the house. “It’s okay,” she whispered. “I’m okay.”

“I know you are,” Winnie said, and her voice had a thin cord of steel in it. Rachel heard a faint emphasis on the word
you
. A gnat buzzed, close to her ear. Her mother’s light blue skirt was spotted with dampness from the wet leaves pressed against it, and her eyes were still wide and clear, watching Rachel carefully. It would be so easy to deflect this moment, to sketch out the awkward scene when Gretchen Marra’s pots were opened, or see what Winnie made of Lynn Berberson’s new hairdo. They would laugh, instead; they would link arms and walk back to the house together.

Rachel was about to speak, when something about her mother’s face caught her eye. Something missing, that is. The spot along Winnie’s jaw; it wasn’t there. It was gone. It had faded away and she hadn’t even noticed, until now.

Suddenly she thought,
We need to move
. Bob knew it too, she was sure. He must have been waiting for her. They would sell 144 Locust; they could give Vikram plenty of notice before putting it on the market, and—who knew?—maybe he’d even want to buy it. Rachel absorbed this thought, scanned herself for a familiar, accompanying pang of scorn, and found nothing.

Early one morning a few days ago, she had hurried out to the front when she heard Vikram leave the house.

“About the stove,” she’d begun, hesitating. The estimate for repairing two broken burners was high, high enough that the serviceman had flatly told her to replace the whole stove instead.
“We’re going to take care of that, I promise. Things are a little tight, at the moment.” It hurt to say this out loud, but not as much as she would have guessed.

“Okay,” Vikram had said, bouncing a set of keys on his palm. His hair was wet and there was a backpack slung over his suit.

“I can reduce the rent,” she blurted, and instantly regretted this. “At least until we fix it.”

But Vikram waved this off. “Actually,” he said, leaning forward as if disclosing a secret, “I’m not much of a cook. More of a microwave man. So don’t worry about it too much, all right?”

And then he’d jogged down the front steps, hurrying to make the 7:11. She stood there a little longer, in yoga pants and a T-shirt, in the humid early sun of the day. The way he’d made a joke, the trust in her to make things right—

Old Hartfield
, Rachel had thought, watching Vikram go purposefully down Locust Street. Not possible, but somehow true.

They would sell the house, she told herself now, and look for something smaller. Maybe an apartment? There was that courtyard building on Clybourne…

It would not be “starting over.” Rachel didn’t know what to call it, but that didn’t matter. Surely, Bob would have some catchy phrase. Or Melissa.

“Tell me,” Rachel said to her mother, there in the corner of Dina Sudler’s lawn, and let out the deep breath she hadn’t known she was holding. “Tell me how you are.”