Time ticks by: seconds, minutes.
“Do you know her?” Dennis asks.
Caroline is sitting, stiff as a wood plank. She stares at the empty glass she is holding. Absolut vodka, mixed with a little seltzer. No lemon. I would have put lemon in it.
“No,” she says shortly.
“I’m sorry, Mom.” Minna reaches out and tries to place a hand on her mother’s knee. Caroline jerks away.
“We haven’t been married for ten years,” she says. “It’s only to be expected, isn’t it? Even when we were married . . . ” She trails off.
“I don’t remember an Adrienne. Do you?” I say to Alice.
“No,” she whispers back. I don’t know why she’s bothering to keep her voice down.
“There was an Agnes,” I say. “Terrible name.”
“Be quiet, Sandra.”
“And an Anna . . .”
“I said, be quiet.”
Minna stands up abruptly and leaves the room. Caroline is staring out the window. For a second, I feel sorry for her. Caroline gets a bad rap. But she does her best.
“Have you contacted her?” she asks. She still doesn’t look at Dennis.
“He gave an address,” he says. “We’ve written. Evidently, she lives in Toronto . . . ?”
If he’s hoping for a response, he doesn’t get it. Caroline doesn’t move. She continues staring out the window.
“How much?” she asks.
Dennis jerks his head to the left again, like he wasn’t expecting her to ask. “What?”
“How much did he leave her?” Now Caroline does turn her eyes to him, eyes as big and blue as a child’s drawing of a sky.
“A million,” Dennis says quietly.
Caroline closes her eyes, and then opens them again. “More than he left his own children” is all she says. Then she stands up, unsteadily, bumping the chair as she makes her way to the door.
I’ll tell you the nicest thing my dad ever did for me: croaked before he could drain away all his cash and left me a bundle to buy a place of my own. Made sure I’d never have to come crawling back to Georgia.
It’s funny. I have only one really clear memory of my parents. Alpharetta, 1957 or 1958: before my mom and dad split, before my father’s weekends with his good pal Alan. Early summertime, June bugs clinging to the screen doors, the smell of freesia, cow dung, grass clippings, petrol.
They were having a dinner party, and I remember the preparations: cream cheese balls rolled in chopped walnuts; Jell-O salad in the shape of a fish; cubes of yellow cheese beaded with condensation, toothpicks standing proudly like flags from their ranks. I remember helping my mother iron limp white napkins and getting in trouble because my fingers were dirty and left smudges. I remember my dad standing in front of the bathroom mirror, shirtless, moving a razor over his jaw.
I wasn’t allowed inside to play so I spent the evening in the backyard. The air was full of fireflies, and when I’d tired of watching, I ran around trying to catch them.
“You know what they are, don’t you?”
I turned around, surprised by my mother’s voice. Standing on the cement patio, backlit by the kitchen light, her face was unreadable. She held a lit cigarette but she wasn’t smoking it. She looked thin and frail, like a kind of bird.
When I didn’t answer, she came down the steps into the grass. “Fireflies,” she repeated. “You know what they are?”
“Bugs,” I said.
When she took a drag, I could see she was smiling a little. But she wasn’t looking at me. She was staring out into space.
“They’re spirits,” she said, in a low voice. “Souls. When a heart breaks, a firefly is born.” She reached out a hand as though to catch one, then let her hand drop and took another drag of her cigarette. “They fly forever, sending out secret signals to their lost loves. See? Watch.”
We sat very still. I held my breath. In the darkness, the fireflies flared suddenly and then went out, making random patterns in the air. It was the first time my mother had ever told me a story that wasn’t out of the Bible; the first time, too, I ever felt sorry for her, or for any grown-up.
“That’s what a broken heart looks like,” she said, and stood up. “Like a haunting.” She turned to go inside, but at the last second she looked back at me. “It isn’t worth it, Sandra. Remember that.”
Well. I wish I had. Things might have turned out a whole lot different with me and Martin. And who knows. My brains might have stayed where they belonged.
MINNA
It took Minna forty-five minutes to get Caroline into bed after she polished off three-quarters of a bottle of vodka in under an hour. Caroline’s face was swollen and streaked with makeup, and there was a little dried vomit on her lower lip.
Minna rolled her mother over, onto her side, pushing against the warm fat flesh of her thighs and stomach, thinking of a documentary she’d seen once where a half-dozen men had strapped a beached whale with hooks and ropes and pulleys and tried to haul it back to the water. She wished she could sink a hook straight into her mother’s fat ass and heave. At some point, Caroline had taken off her pants, and Minna was disgusted by the sight of her cheap nylon underwear, full seated and worn thin in places, clinging desperately to her thighs like lichen to the side of a rock.
Minna was tired. Something kept twisting in her stomach, an alien pain; she should never have come back. She thought of calling Dr. Upshaw but knew it would just make her feel worse. She couldn’t even make it two days in the old house without cracking. Pathetic.
There had to be someone else she could call, but she couldn’t immediately think of anyone. She was half tempted to call Greg, Amy’s father, just so she’d have something to pin her anger to: nail it down, give it a name, the way she had enjoyed shoving thumbtacks into the corkboard map she’d had as a kid. Find Sweden.
But Greg was still at work, and she’d never get past his secretary. She was only allowed to call him between the hours of 7:00 and 8:00, when he was commuting back to his home in Westchester, back to his wife and his real kids, as he’d once slipped up and referred to them, and half the time he screened her phone calls, anyway. The checks still arrived regularly, though, thank God. She’d burned through four jobs in three years. Fired from two, laid off from two. She had less than two thousand dollars in her savings account.
Amy believed that her dad was a firefighter, a hero, and dead.