Objects of My Affection (37 page)

“Oh, cut the crap—I don't care about the money. I care about what's
mine.
”

“Why?”

“Wha—” She blusters for a moment, tripped up by my searing inquiry. Finally she says, “Everyone cares about what's theirs.”

“Not everyone. I don't. I was able to let go of everything I had and barely flinched.” I raise a hand to ward off her objection before she can say it. “I am not implying that makes me morally superior.”

“It makes you a fool. Or a liar.”

“Because I'm not a pack rat?”

“Because you haven't any idea what's of value to you, so you claim nothing is.” She sets the toilet-paper holder down. “Is this your clever strategy—to tie up my attention with a silly debate while half of Chicago walks away with my belongings?”

A barrel-shaped woman immediately snatches up the toilet-paper holder. “You know what they're asking for this?”

“Ten dollars,” Marva says.

The woman sets it down. “Too much.”

After she leaves, Marva sighs. “I believe I paid several hundred for that at an antique store.”

I seize the opportunity. “Marva, it's clear that everything here at one time was worth something to you, but that doesn't mean it has to be forever. They're holding you back from the
life
you could have.” For good measure, I'd emphasized the word
life.
“Let it go.”

“You sound like an infomercial.”

“So are you buying what I'm selling?”

She surprises me by laughing. Then she does the same slow spin Daniel did, drinking in her surroundings. “So this was all in my house. Tremendous. Clearly I have a gift for managing spatial relationships if I was able to fit all this in there. But … I suppose there is no point in dragging it back. That wasn't the purpose of my visit today.”

“Why
are
you here?”

“I thought I'd enjoy having one last chance to bid it all adieu, say a final farewell. I hadn't anticipated how annoying it would be to see people pawing through my valuables.” She slides a cutting look to a group of women trying on her clothes over the top of what they're wearing. “Nonetheless, I'd like to peruse what's here. So pardon me, will you? I'll do my best not to bring anything back home, although I can't make promises.”

“I'll go with you.”

“I'm certain you have other duties more pressing,” she says, which is her nicer version of
I don't need a babysitter.

I watch her walk away, at least leaving the cart behind. I have a brief moment to reflect sadly on how she's giving a more personal good-bye to her stuff than she is to her son before I spot Daniel making his way down a nearby aisle. Oh, swell. Here's my chance to face all my demons before lunch.

“How's it going?” I say, walking up to him, and then I notice his empty cart. “So you haven't found anything that shouldn't be here?”

“Not really. And they seem to be on target with their pricing. I'd have done a few things differently, but nothing major. So I'm about to get going. You don't need me.”

“Good. Well. Thank you. For checking. That was. Sweet of you.” We're walking side by side past a pile of several dozen beanbag chairs, on which a couple kids are wrestling. I consider telling them to stop but one of their parents beats me to it.

“So what's going on with Ash?” Daniel asks, keeping his eyes on the merchandise and off me.

“Um. Look, I should get back to the sale. It's a long story, and I don't have time—”

Daniel's voice is hard as he says, “Alive? Dead? Can you at least spare me a couple seconds for the upshot?”

His reaction shames me into answering. “He's in Tampa, but the guy he claimed to be staying with doesn't seem to exist. I put him up in a cheap motel for now, and I'm trying to convince him to go back to rehab.”

Daniel nods, picking up a glass bowl and then setting it down. “That's all I was asking.”

We continue walking in silence, and it strikes me that—for the first time in a long time—Daniel's asking about Ash doesn't feel like prying but, rather, something quite different. Something more along the lines of what I'd found missing with Niko, and it makes me realize how unfair I've been. “I'm sorry. It's very considerate of you to ask about Ash.”

“It's
considerate
of me? I'm not asking to be polite. I'm worried about him—I've
been
worried about him. I happen to love the kid.”

The word
love
irks me. Sure, maybe Daniel does care—I'm willing to admit I haven't given him enough credit for that—but if he really loved Ash, wouldn't he have stuck by him? By
us
? I'm not in the mood to let this one slide. “You sure had a funny way of showing it.”

He stops cold. “What's that supposed to mean?”

I distract myself pretending to look at a poncho on a clothes rack. “I mean the fact that as soon as things got tough, you took off. Tried to make me choose between Ash and you. Well, I chose my son. Of course I chose my son!”

Daniel grabs my arm, spinning me to face him. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Pulling myself from his grasp, I say, “When you broke up with me, I—”

“When I broke up with you …”

“Yes, as I was trying to say, when you broke up with me—”

“What the
hell
are you talking about ‘when I broke up with you'?” His voice is low and even, but he seemed to be shaking with a quiet rage.

“May I finish please?” I snap. “All I'm saying is that when you broke up with me—because I wouldn't choose you over my son—I believe you demonstrated how deep your caring for him went.”

There! I finally said it, and, whew, it feels positively liberating to call Daniel on his bullshit.

He starts several times to respond, stops himself, then finally says,
“I've always believed in you as a writer, only now it's become clear to me that your talents were wasted writing that book on organization. You should write a novel. Because, Luce, what you said there was truly the most remarkable piece of fiction I've ever heard.”

“Excuse me?”

“I didn't break up with you.
You
dumped
me.
”

“What—that's insane. Why would I do that?”

“You tell me. You told me to get out of your house. You
threw
me out.”

“Sure, after you already said I had to choose between you and Ash.”

“I
never
said you had to choose. Ever! All I said is that I couldn't stand by and watch you not doing anything—because I loved the both of you. I'd simply given you the hard truth, that Ash isn't someone who does drugs. He's an addict. The next thing I know, you're screaming at me to go and pitching my albums into the yard like they're fucking Frisbees.”

An elderly man reaches nonchalantly between us for a pewter candlestick, making me suddenly aware that while we're having our lovers' quarrel, we are doing so in the midst of a group of shoppers.

“There are people here,” I say. “And what you're saying … it's not what I remember.”

“Well, it's what happened.”

The image of the
Pretty in Pink
sound track sailing through a blue sky tugs at my memory, but all I say to Daniel is “It doesn't make sense that I'd react that way to you simply giving your opinion that Ash is an addict.”

“Sure it does. You shot the messenger.” He taps his heart, an indication as to where the bullet went. “It doesn't matter, though. It's ancient history. I'm over it, and I'm not mad—but do
not
tell me that I didn't care.” He takes a step away from me. “You've got work to do, so I'll leave you to it.”

N
ot until two o'clock do I have a chance to think as I sit down outside and eat a slice of the now room-temperature pizza Organize Me! brought in for the workers (
dang
, those people are good—they think of everything!), washing it down with a Diet Coke.

Marva has caught a ride home with Niko because, sadly, the truck was needed, as she had a change of heart about parting with the armoire she'd noticed earlier. Will is still inside working. My tiff with Daniel is playing in my head, and it's forcing me to revisit the day we broke up, which isn't easy. I've buried the memory so deeply that to dredge it up is on par with attempting the raising of the
Titanic.

Did
I
really break up with
him
?

I thought I remembered clearly what happened—I'd tortured myself during enough sleepless nights. It was a Saturday afternoon, and I'd just told Daniel I couldn't go with him to his brother's birthday party. Ash had crawled home a few hours before in pretty bad shape. Although it wasn't worth taking him to a hospital, I was on duty poking him every few minutes in case he was worse off than I thought. That's when Daniel said it:
I can't take living here with Ash anymore. His drug problem is more than I can deal with. You have to choose—it's either him or me.

But now that I'm forcing myself to look at it, is it possible that all this time I've conveniently edited what he said?

It's either him or me.

An image of Daniel floats up, red-eyed, miserable, and he's pleading with me, and now that I let myself really look at it, I realize he's not saying,
It's either him or me.
There was more to it.

It's either keep pretending there's not a problem with him or have the courage to listen to me. …

He's an addict.

Luce, baby, I know this is hard to hear, but your son is an addict.

In desperation, doing anything I could to fight off the possibility that Daniel could be right, I grabbed on to what he said about Ash's problem being more than he could deal with and used it to beat him senseless. “It's too much for you?” I said, looking wildly about the
room at anything other than Daniel's eyes trying to catch mine, looking at me with a compassion I wasn't willing to accept. “That's too bad, because I already have enough to worry about with Ash. I don't need to mollycoddle you, too.”

That's when I did it. I tore into the living room, flipping madly through his collection of albums, grabbing the ones I knew would cause the most pain because I wanted him to hurt as much as I was, to feel as helpless as I felt. “You don't want to look?” I shouted. “Then get out.” And I chucked the records into the yard, while Daniel stood mutely by, not stopping me, but simply watching them sail into the air, one by one at first, then handfuls at a time.

He'd only tried to tell me the truth, but I wasn't ready to hear it. I'd pushed him out, then I changed the story—for myself more than for anyone else—so the truth couldn't find me. It had taken a couple more months, and an irritated cabdriver, to shake me into reality. But by then, I'd already lost or thrown away everything that mattered.

Y
ou didn't buy anything?” I joke to Will as we walk together to our cars. The sale is closed, and the storage room looks as picked over as a Thanksgiving turkey.

“Not a chance. I'd only planned to pop in, but turns out I was dressed for work,” he says sheepishly. “It felt great getting rid of so much of my mother's junk. I've been wanting to roll up my sleeves and do that for years.”

“Whatever didn't sell is going to charity, so you'll never have to see it again. Nothing is coming back into that house unless it's over my dead body.”

“I suggest you don't give my mother that option unless your will is up-to-date.” We're at my car, which is in dire need of a trip to the car wash, when he says, “Say, what's with the paints and the canvas? I saw it in Marva's office when I picked her up this morning, and she said you bought them. Why'd you do that? Isn't the point to take things out?”

I tell him about my plan to inspire Marva, fully expecting he'll make fun of me, but he says, “Interesting.”

“It hasn't worked. She hasn't so much as looked at the paints.”

He gives me a friendly pat on the back, which is such an un-Will-like gesture I'm tempted to feel his forehead for fever. “It's not a terrible idea, getting my mother to paint. It certainly
is
the love of her life, her art. All she ever cared about.”

“That's not true. She cares about you.”

He gives a wry laugh. “Anyway, nice job on the sale.”

A compliment? Now I
am
sure he's ill.

“Will, have you talked to her yet? About … you know …”

“Wouldn't do any good. Besides, I'm starting to wonder if we've misunderstood those notes you saw in the book. That they weren't about suicide. Maybe it's something else entirely—we're misreading it.”

As much as he finds comfort in pretending nothing is wrong with Marva—if anyone understands how tempting that is, it's me—he needs to face it. He won't get a second chance if he doesn't. “I found her suicide note.” His expression grows bleak as I continue, “She was working on it in her office, and I came across it.”

“What did it say?”

“Mostly that she was done living. She mentioned you in it. She kept crossing things out because she was trying to find the right words, but she said she was proud of you, of the man you are. So see? You do matter to her more than you know. You can get through to her.”

“You said it's only a draft. Let's see if I make it into the final,” he says with a sigh of resignation.

“Do you want to wait to find out? It can't be easy having a mother like Marva, but she's the mother you've got. You may find this hard to believe, but she's tried to do what she feels is best by you. Maybe it's not what you wanted, or needed, but it's what she knew how to do. Parents make mistakes.” I pull open my car door, embarrassed in front of Will by the creaking noise it always makes. “It'll ring true when you're a dad. You do the best you can.”