Breakdown Lane, The (32 page)

“I’m a surgeon,” Matt said.

“Huh,” Leo appeared a bit distracted. I watched his eyes flick toward the windows of the house.

“We thought we might take Cat to lunch before I go home.”

“That would be great, Jules, any other day. But she has chores and a whole lot of back homework, and she’s been mouthing off like crazy.”

“Make an exception, Lee,” I urged him. Again, that flick of the eyes, toward the interior. “Gabe, well, he’s doing…okay. He dropped out of school.”

“My dad said. Tough. The longer he waits, the less likely it’s going to be that he ever goes back, so try to steer him toward getting something started….”

“Like I wouldn’t,” I said. “And you can, too.”

“Like he’d listen,” Leo mimicked me, and I had to smile.

“Aren’t you going to introduce us to Joy? Is she your wife? Hannah and Papa don’t…say much about her to me,” I told him.

“Uh, no,” Leo said. “We haven’t quite gotten around to that.” He paused in his door frame. “You look wonderful, Julie. You look like a million bucks. Like a dancer.”
The rain-drenched man.
I felt a sting behind my eyes.

“I’m happy, Lee. It’s been a long time. No offense meant there. Matt, well, Matt and I just got engaged. We’ve actually known each other since we were kids, with a gap of about twenty-five years.”

“You’re getting
married,
Julie?”

“Isn’t that something?”

“Well, yes, yes it is.”

Matt put his arm around me, and I leaned back into his great, solid chest. Leo regarded me. Christ, if he didn’t look…no. Well, I was sure he looked a little bit wistful.

“Let me take Caroline, just for lunch.”

“Can’t. She made her bed this morning, and she’s got to lie in it.”

“Well, I’m glad you’re setting limits for her. But, Leo, you’re a lawyer. You know that I have a right to see my daughter. I have a custodial right to my daughter, if you want to make an issue of it—”

“Yeah, okay.” He looked gray, worn. “Go ahead, Caroline.”

We ate at a little restaurant with good pie.

“Are you really happy here, honey?” I asked Caroline.

“Sure,” said Caroline.

“You seem worn out.”

“I have a lot to do. When you’re part of a community, everyone depends on everyone else. There can’t be one weak link.”

“I wouldn’t call being a kid a weak link,” I said.

“Well, a lot is expected of me. But in return I get a lot of freedom.” She let her hair fall across her face.

“You can come home, Caroline.”

“It’s Cat, and no, I can’t. I told everyone back there that I had the perfect life. And I do. It’s fine. I’m just having a hard time right now.”

“Is Joy hard on you?”

“I’m fine, Mom,” Caroline snapped. “You should be hysterical with joy. All you ever wanted me to do was
chores
.”

“You know,” I said, “when Matt and I get married, I’ll be moving to near Boston. That’s practically right down the road! You don’t have to live with Dad full time.”

“We’ll see. Dad does really need me,” Caro said, eating the crust first, as she always had. I didn’t hear the ring of conviction.

“I need you, too, and I don’t mean because of my sickness.”

“You have to know how much your mom loves you,” Matt put in. “She talks about it like you’re this princess in a tower. Maybe you could cut her a break.”

“I did. I left.”

“Is part of the reason you won’t even think about it that it won’t be just me living in the house? That you’d have to get used to someone new? But Rory’ll be there. She misses you so much,” I said.

Caroline put down her fork. “I miss her, too. I can’t eat anymore.”

“You could go to”—I looked at Matt—“a residential school.”

“A boarding school? No, thanks. At least I’m part of something here.”

“But if you’re not happy…” I suggested.

“Who said I’m not happy? You can’t judge a whole life in a couple of weeks.”

“It’s been six months, Caro.”

“It’s Cat, and I don’t make judgments quickly.” She glanced up, looking pointedly at my ring. “Maybe it’s a learned thing.”

“Do you want to talk alone?”

“Do you mind?” Caroline asked Matt. He smiled and shook his head.

“Not in the least,” he said.

We sat alone on one side of the aluminum booth, and I felt the struggle wrack her. She didn’t say a word. I finally said, “I know it was hard on you, back when I first got sick. I also know that wasn’t entirely my fault or my choice. You know that, too. But we have a whole future to change things between us. And it’s going to be a much more stable future….”

“How do you know, Mom? How do you know he won’t leave you, too?”

I recoiled as if punched. “Caroline, I don’t know. How do you know your father won’t leave Joy?”

“They’re happy, that’s why. It’s not all a show,” she said venomously, but the tears were streaming now, “they’re real. And he would never leave the babies.”

“Rory was a baby.”

“You always twist things, Mom! Always!” Caroline cried, leaping up. “You make it like it’s all everyone else’s fault!”

“Caroline, no. Forget what I said. It isn’t about the past, it’s about the future, and I want a future with you. I love you. You’re my little girl.”

“No, I’m not, Mom,” Caroline said miserably. “I stopped being your little girl a long time ago.”

Matt had to help me back to the car, and Caroline sat in the back, still hiccupping with her sobs. I tried to compose myself as we approached Leo’s house, taking wet wipes to my face and touching it up with powder. “That was a resounding success, huh? Welcome to the family,” I told Matt, trying to plaster over his discomfort with apologetic small talk.

But he wasn’t uncomfortable. “Julie, you two are under a terrible weight. It’s obvious. The love. Yours and hers. But time has to pass for you two to figure out how that’s going to play out. It hasn’t been a daisy path every day for Kelly and me, either. Being a single parent is hard. But being a single parent’s kid is even harder, maybe.” I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Cat give him a watery half smile.

Satisfied as a cat, too pleased even to be as miserable as I should have been, I thought, Hey, that’s my guy.

As we turned up the lane, I saw Leo handing the little baby back through the screen door to a woman with a tumble of curls on her head, though I didn’t catch a real glimpse of her. Caroline kissed me good-bye quickly and went inside. Leo sort of danced down the steps, then walked down to Matt’s car with us. His cocky Leonine quality was back in place.

“Take good care of her, Lee. Our daughter’s going through a hard patch.”

“Adolescence.”

“And a lot more. I think she needs me. Encourage her to come visit me.”

“I’ll try, Jules.” He began to turn away, and then stopped. He swallowed. “Jules. Every blessing. I mean that.”

“I know you do.”

“I…never thought I’d lose you. Isn’t that funny?”

“Funny. Yeah.”

“You’re a lucky guy, Mister MacDonald.”

“MacDougall.”

“Sorry.”

“No matter. I know how lucky I am. I’m glad I got there in the nick of time. Before someone else snapped her up,” Matt said.

“You mind if I kiss the bride?” Leo asked suddenly. Before Matt could react, Leo leaned over and put his cheek against mine for a long moment and then touched my lips with his. It’s a cliché. They say this of drowning people: life flashes past you. That didn’t happen, but I remembered these things: Leo in his black leather outside the rehearsal hall. Our wedding day—two skinny kids in that cavernous apartment, all dressed up as grown-ups under the flowered chuppah. Gabe’s birth. Leo’s triumphant roar as he glimpsed his son. His seeming to grow five inches in height when he handed over the deed for the cottage to his parents. A graduation gown, Leo’s eyes seeking mine in the crowd. And then I stopped. Took my mind in my two hands and stepped back.

“Good luck, Lee,” I said.

Caroline had come back outside, her hair brushed, her eyes clear. She slipped under Leo’s arm. “I’ll write you, honey bun.”

She nodded.

“Be happy. Be careful.”

“Oh, Mom,” she said, herself again. “I’m not stupid. You take care of
yourself
.”

Matt and I got into the car and began driving slowly down the narrow road. We heard the pounding on the gravel behind us before Caroline caught up.

“Mommy,” she said, “will you tell Gabe that I’m sorry?”

I nodded.

She said, “He’ll know what I mean.”

We drove off then, while she stood there, hugging herself. I watched her until we turned the corner, and glimpsed her through the trees as we turned. She was watching us still, her eyes like a furnace. As long as I could strain to see her, she never moved.

So, Matt, he turned out to be a big guy who made big gestures, some of which worked out. I didn’t mind him around. He came every weekend after they got engaged. I thought it was weird, given Mom’s excellent experience with marriage, that she’d want to do it again, so soon. But she clearly wanted another whack at it, and I wasn’t going to be around forever.

I didn’t have to make it clear that I wasn’t in the market for a daddy, but he wasn’t easily discouraged. He figured out quickly I wasn’t that into sports, and when we talked, it was movies and cars, books and music. I didn’t encourage or discourage him. I didn’t even know the guy. They were together only six months when they decided to go ahead with it. But, then, neither of them had that much time left, I guess. They were already, like, well over forty.

Just before they got married, we drove over to Gram and Gramp’s. By then, I’d been accepted at UW-Milwaukee’s program for, like, gifted eccentrics, and had survived the three-week stint in the wilderness that had been thrust on me by my mother.

Matt was curious about that. Apparently the woman he’d been with before Mom had been a hiker and a climber, and he’d done some of that, too.

“Try having to do push-ups for an extra pancake. Sitting out in the goddamned rain if you forgot to zip your tent. And, ah yes, biking. How about, oh, forty miles a day.”

“Doesn’t look like it did you any harm,” he said.

I
had
bulked up. Every other doper and fatso on the first week stint had lost twenty pounds. I’d gained ten and grew three inches over that spring and summer. Mom said I looked like my grandfather Gillis. And it turned out that, once I was back, I was no longer able to make laziness into a sacrament. I got itchy if I didn’t get out and run or stretch or ride my bike a few times a week. I’d also learned a couple of things about anger, which I wasn’t about to share with Matthew.

The way it went was this. We all showed up, and they made us empty out our giant aluminum-mounted duffel bags of contraband, such as CD players or smokes or even a paperback book. You got a knife. You got a water bottle. You got some shirts and pants and shoes and a sleeping bag. Nothing that would inflate or cushion your skinny ass. You got dried vegetarian chili. You got hot Jell-O. On Sunday, you got pancakes for extra physical labor or service to others. Service to others could include helping someone get up a rock face or fixing someone’s bike. Food for kindness. The most basic message of civilization. After the rest of the group of losers went back into their holes, I was out there for two goddamned weeks, making and breaking camps, with this guy, Leif, one of the leaders, who about came up to my waist and could have picked me up and thrown me ten feet no problem. I never saw a stronger guy. He was stingy with his history. So was I. But after a while, fuck, there was nothing to read, nothing to listen to but loons, and I asked him, “What the hell do you do this for?”

“A job,” he said.

“I meant,” I said patiently, “what the hell do you get from hiking around the same terrain with various screwed-up kids?”

“You get one, once in a while, who gets halfway unscrewed.”

“What’s the percentage?” I asked him.

“One in five. The rest, their parents just go back to spoiling them, buying them anything they want.”

“That’s me.”

“Yours is a little different story.”

“What’s yours?”

“Well, I hated my father. He took off when I was seventeen.”

“There’s some common ground. Mine took off on me.”

“That’s about half the kids who come.”

“And he left my mother with multiple sclerosis.”

Leif peeled a stick and chewed on it. He was good with the long silences. Finally, he shook his head and clucked his tongue. “Mine died.”

“He died?” I practically blew up. “You call that taking off on you?”

“Well, you never get a chance to say anything else. And it wasn’t an accident.”

“Oh,” I said, thinking that my situation was infinitely preferable to having found Leo hanging from a rafter. “In my case, he made a cheerful choice.”

“You think that?” Leif asked. “That he seemed like he was happy to leave you? Because even if he acted like he was, he wasn’t.”

“He was. Very.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“You ever think about him, from when you were younger?”

I balled my fists. The first fucking thing that came to mind was the tree fort. “No,” I said.

“That’s bullshit,” Leif said amiably.

“Don’t we have to fall off a cliff or something now?”

“You don’t like the tight spaces, huh, Gabe? Scared of what you might say?”

“I don’t want to blow you off the mountain, to tell the truth. My father, my ex-father, is the lowest form of human life,” I explained.

“I don’t know the guy. But, man, you put a lot of energy into hating him. I looked at your so-called journals when everybody turned in their first entries last week….” Journaling was mandatory. So was proving that you’d done it.

“You know I can’t write well. Well, do handwriting.”

“I don’t mean how it looks. I mean it’s all ‘Leo left.’ ‘Leo screwed us over,’” he said.

“And?”

“Well, you’re like a little kid. Your daddy left you and you can’t get over it.”

“You’re about a mile wide of the target on that one,” I told him, sneering.

“Huh.”

Another long fucking silence.

Then Leif asked, “You ever think of the power he still has over you?”

“That would be…none.”

“No, the thing is, as long as you hate him, he’s got you by the balls, Gabe. Look it up. The power you put into hating your dada for leaving poor Gabie all alone could light up Minneapolis. Whereas, if you forgive him, you’re free. He has no influence over you anymore.”

“That, and pardon me, is fucked up,” I said.

“You’re a kid. I didn’t expect you to get it,” he said. “Time to rappel now.”

He left me alone for my isolation experience three days later. I wasn’t about to jot down the yearnings of my soul in this tattered notebook they made me take. I tried to draw Tian. I gathered about a bushel of rose hips to bring my mother so she could make tea. And finally I pulled down some little branches off a sapling and made a dream weaver, or whatever they call them, for Rory. I used my old shoestrings—you had to bring six pairs—to make a pattern in the center. I slept for about fourteen hours, waking up when thunder struck a tree about two feet from me. I got my mummy bag and started trying to wring out the goddamned thing. It was like trying to wring out a phone book. I wrapped my poncho around my shoulders and sat out in the open so the lightning wouldn’t kill me. I thought Leif would come for me then. But I was wrong about that. I had twenty of my forty-eight hours left, and he was going to make me live through it with a can of beans and a knife. Anyone would have started bawling. So I began to howl, timing my howls with the roars of thunder in case Leif should be within earshot. “Leo!” I screamed, “You fucking bastard! I forgive you, Leo! You’re nothing to me! You’re invisible! You’re a jerk! You’re a loser and a liar! You didn’t give a shit about me!” By then, I was like Rory, so far gone in it, I thought I would throw up. And the howls kept coming. “Why’d you have me, Leo? Why? Did you have to prove you were a man? Or are you just nuts? Leo? Dad? Dad? Do you hear me? Dad? Why did you leave us, Dad? Why did you look at me like I was a bug? Why did you choose to talk Cat into coming with you, Dad? And not me? I fucking loved you. I fucking loved you. I thought you’d come back.” I screamed until the rain stopped, and basically fell over sideways, exhausted. When I woke, Leo…no, Leif, had his arm around me.

“You did good, man,” he said.

I hate that kind of shit.

When my mother flew up and drove to the lodge to get me, she looked all glowy and pink. I figured something was up.

But I never imagined how big it was.

The book thing would have been great on its own, but the guy…She was so, like, bubbly, she practically didn’t even notice the difference in me. A beard (well, stubble) and the rest. She talked all the way home on the plane. She kept shaking me out of my stupor. She didn’t seem to notice that something had transpired with me that wasn’t physical, either. Maybe it hadn’t. Maybe, or so I thought at the time, I was just worn out, or had that thing people get when they’re held hostage. But I felt different, though I was not entirely sure in what sense. Or whether it would last.

I had priorities, though.

When I walked in the door, I kissed Rory, ate two large Tombstone pizzas, and fell into my bed.

He was there when I woke up.

Matt.

I sort of wanted to reenter my own life on my own. But he was an all right guy. I’d only met him before a few times. Now, I had to see him in this sort of bizarre new light. I knew from his having stayed overnight at our house—though they didn’t sleep in the same bed; I could tell that from the laundry—that she was gooey about him. But I’d never figured her for the second-marriage type, given her complete loyalty to Leo, as-a-person-wise, which continues to this day. My grandparents had something for my mom, so he had to go over there. He asked me if I’d come. I shrugged. He kind of insisted. On the drive, after he asked me about the wilderness trip, Matt wondered out loud whether it was okay, his marrying Julie.

I said I didn’t run her life.

But I thought it was borderline classy of him to do that.

We picked up what Gram wanted to give Mom, which was some laces made into a hat thing—they were hand-tatted by my grandmother’s grandmother, and they were for my mom to wear with her cream lace suit. And I wasn’t to tell Mom until the day before the ceremony.

On the way back, we stopped to get a sandwich, and Matt asked if I was going to school and if I would consider the East Coast. I said that right now, I wanted to stay by my grandparents. He didn’t object.

When we walked in the door, my mom all of a sudden started to cry. She said, “You’re as tall as Matthew.”

I looked him in the eye. I was.

Matt stayed on the phone most of the time, making all these secret preparations for the wedding.

Then one day, we were driving to Connie’s to borrow this little religious medal Connie wanted my mother to pin to her underwear. Again, Matt made me come along.

“How do you think your grandparents are taking this?” he asked me.

I told him the truth; how my grandparents felt about my mother marrying this guy was unreadable. They were understandably sad. Regretful, more like. They weren’t losing her. But they were sort of sealing off this part of their lives, the part in which they were really any part of Julieanne’s family, except through us. They would have to have whatever kind of link they could have with Leo. There hadn’t been a divorce in the Steiner family in four hundred years. It made me fall silent, thinking that over.

“So car-wise, it’s a beater,” Matt said, totally out of nowhere. “Yours.”

“Gets me where I have to go,” I said. “You don’t know what we went through to get that car. Well, what she went through.”

“Dream car?”

“Real or like Testarossa?”

“Real.

“MXI. Four-banger with—”

“The Subaru, right?”

“You see it?”

“I mess with cars. I have the standard doctor car, the Explorer, because half the time I can’t get out of my driveway and I have to get to the hospital on time. But if I played cars, that would be up there.”

At Connie’s condo, I hopped out, and she stood on her tiptoes to kiss me. She gave me the religious medal. “Now, all we need is something blue before you give her away,” she said. This was a woman’s joke, I gathered, and mentioned that I didn’t see why they didn’t just give her all the stuff themselves.

“I don’t know myself,” Matt said. “I think if they just shoved it at her before she walked down the aisle, it wouldn’t be like, what do they call it, a trousseau. The woman’s wedding stuff. Special stuff you only wear once.”

“Speaking of aisles, where would that aisle be, Matt?” I asked.

“All in good time, Gabe,” he said. “We have two weeks yet. You don’t know what I have up my sleeve.”

But I did.

I knew the big surprise was he was going to talk Cat into coming. She sent me letters, which I now occasionally answered with two lines. I was more or less happy she would be there because it would make my mother happy.

Three days before the wedding, Matt arrived from Boston with a suitcase the size of my bed. He opened it in the hall and started handing out airline tickets: Gram, Gramp, Cathy, Connie, extras for Stella and her husband. Then, brochures of the suites we had at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. The wedding chapel—he’d blacked out the cost, but I could still read it—that went for two large. “Okay, let’s get organized. We leave tomorrow on the four o’clock plane.”

I knew Cath had to have been in on it. What I didn’t know was that half of fucking Sheboygan, even Klaus and Liesel, plus a dozen of Matt’s friends and their wives, and his daughter, would be in attendance. It was almost humiliating.

Luke drove by in his beat-up paint truck—he was painting for the summer—and said, “What the hell is going on here, mon?” Luke hadn’t gotten the athletic scholarship he wanted, partly because of his size and partly because he kept reinjuring his knee. I was going to college a year ahead of him. For the first time in our life, we were total equals.

There were trucks and junk in the driveway, the rental sign, the guy from the moving company with contracts on a clipboard.

“All this for one second marriage?”

“Massive undertaking, dude. Matt does things in a big way. They’re getting married in Las Vegas.”

“Not here?”

“Memories.”

“He’s from out east? Not there?”

“He’s from Boston. But he’s got this Vegas thing in his mind. I guess memories for him, too. He had a wife who died.”

Luke nodded.

“I’ll go there for part of the summer, then come back and stay with the grandparents until school. Come out. We can go to the Cape.”

“I gotta work daily and weekends, mon. When’s that?”

“What?”

“School.”