He held his breath and knocked. He won’t be home, he thought. He isn’t here. Then the door swung open, and there was his dad.
He wore a plaid shirt and khaki pants and bright white athletic socks. It was the socks that undid him, that untied the knot that had bound his heart forever. He could imagine his father, who, clearly, didn’t have much, walking to one of the stores on Chestnut Street or maybe even more than one of them, looking carefully through the merchandise, carrying his selection to the cash register, counting out exact change with dollar bills and pennies.
You can stop running now, he imagined he heard Mr. Sills saying.
“Andy,” said his father, and held out his hand.
Rachel and Andy
2015
The telephone rang, jolting me out of a dream about college, where I’d signed up for a class that I hated but had forgotten to go to the registrar’s to drop, and now it was the day of the final and I hadn’t even bought the books. Next to me was Delaney, who’d fallen asleep in what she called “the big bed” wearing nothing but a rhinestone tiara and a pair of Hello Kitty underpants, with Moochie, the little terrier we’d adopted for her birthday, asleep in the crook of her arm.
“Hello?”
“Rachel?” I sat up, with the last shreds of the dream evaporating.
“Brenda? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” she said indignantly. “Jesus. If I hadn’t known you for so long I’d be insulted.”
“Well, it is . . .” I glanced at the clock, preparing to scold her for how early she’d called, except it was almost nine, which was a long way from ridiculous. “Saturday!” I finally remembered.
“I know it’s Saturday. But I just got off the phone with Dante, and he wants me to come up for parents’ weekend, except I already told Laurel that I’d babysit for her, and also . . .” Her voice took on a familiar, good-natured wheedling tone. “That’s a long-ass bus ride up there.”
“That it is.” With the phone against my ear I slipped out of bed. Moochie opened one eye, considered her options, then recurled herself and went back to sleep. I walked downstairs in my white cotton nightgown, which covered me right down to my toes and had pockets. Now that I was officially man-less, I could wear whatever I wanted to bed, and cover up anything that I didn’t feel like shaving or waxing. “But it’s a pretty drive, especially when the leaves are changing.”
“Don’t give me ‘pretty drive,’ ” Brenda said. “Isn’t there some kind of fund for poor single mothers whose kids got into Ivy League colleges, and they want to go visit them, only they don’t want to take the bus?”
“I believe we call that fund ‘my credit card.’ ” I used my shoulder to keep the phone in place while I started a pot of coffee, put four slices of bread into the toaster, and wondered, again, whether it was time to repaint the first floor. I’d done the bedroom over the summer, going from the light blue that Jay had chosen to a creamy ivory, with new curtains and a new bedspread to match. New pillows, on which he’d never slept, and new sheets. Bit by bit, I was reclaiming the house for myself and the girls, turning it into an increasingly girlie little nest.
While Brenda complained about Laurel’s lax attitude toward her children—“She lets them drink that energy stuff, where it says right on the can it’s not for kids!”—I emptied the dishwasher and looked at the calendar. Delaney had a birthday party that afternoon. Adele had a makeup oboe lesson, and then, as was all too commonly the case, nothing. Maybe I’d take Adele out for dim sum and then to the library, and then we’d pick up Delaney and grab something to cook for dinner.
“So listen.” Brenda paused in her litany of complaints. “What if,” she said, then stopped.
After over a decade on the job, I knew the steps to this dance. “What if what?”
“What if, just for example, if you knew that a mom with little kids was doing something bad, but you didn’t want to, you know, tell anyone about it because they’d start a file on her and she’d lose her babies.”
“What would I do?” I asked. “What do you mean by something bad? Are the kids in danger?” She was talking about Laurel, I thought, and there was already a file on Laurel, one that had been started after she’d told her pediatrician that she gave her three-year-old daughter, Olivia, a Tylenol PM so she’d stop getting up in the middle of the night.
Brenda sighed. “It’s my daughter,” she said. “My baby, you know? I don’t want to get her in any trouble. I love her, and I know that the way she turned out is ’cause I wasn’t around enough and I wasn’t the best mom myself.”