Commuters (17 page)

She and Bob might have said more, but just then the waitress came over to the table, and dropped her pen right into a water glass, and then Renata Harwood spied them from the sidewalk,
and tapped on the window to say hello, and then Winnie’s phone rang—so in the flurry of paying the check and speaking to other people, the discussion was left unfinished.

At Thanksgiving now, she jumped up to get a tea towel—someone had tipped over the gravy boat, and Nona and Lila were trying desperately to corral the spreading pool of brown sauce before it spilled onto the floor. Bob dropped his napkin on top of the mess, still talking, his voice just a shade louder than anyone else’s.

“—didn’t know what to do with it, so they kept it a Chinese place, for over a year,” she could hear him saying, even from the hallway off the kitchen. The subject was the town, and that jinxed little restaurant on West Meade in particular, the one that had changed hands four times in the past two years. Avery hurried past her, loaded down with two platters and a handful of serving implements. Winnie wished he had let her hire someone to help out.

“Dad, it was the Chinese place
after
it was Sunny Sundae,” Melissa corrected.

“You’re right, you’re right. Then it was an ice-cream place. But after Rachel’s friends bought it, there was a fire, and before they could collect all the insurance—”

“Not my friends, actually,” Rachel said. She was prodding a piece of food, very gently, with her fork. “Is this…what is this, Avery?”

“In the mustard greens?” he said. “Caperberries and bacon. But there are some pieces of horseradish in there too, so keep an eye out.”

“No, I mean the…meat. The other meat. Not turkey.”

“Oh, yeah. This guy let me borrow his fifteen-pound sausage
stuffer. This thing is
awesome
. One’s smoked pork belly, and the other’s lamb. With fennel.” Next to Winnie, Thomas gave a delicate, visible shudder.

“You made sausage?” Rachel said. “Wow.” She smiled at him and then shot a warning look over to Lila and Melissa:
Don’t eat that, girls.

“Anyway,” Bob said. “They couldn’t move on new construction for almost a year, so they kept up the Chinese takeout and tried to sell those organic pizzas they wanted to make, at the same time. You could call up and order either. Sometimes, I used to pick up some of each on my way home from the station.”

“I miss Sunny Sundae,” Melissa said. “Remember the one with pieces of bubblegum on top?”

“What is it now?” Nona asked. She used her knife to load both turkey and sausage onto her fork, before taking a bite.

“It’s a boutique shoe store,” Rachel said, rolling her eyes. “We’ve got four now, in town. Because God knows Hartfield women need their three-hundred-dollar driving shoes.”

“Lila got Uggs,” Melissa said, looking around, as if providing interesting information from a general perspective. “Mom wouldn’t let us, and then somehow she did.”

“They were
Bethany’s
,” Lila countered, from the other end of the table. “They didn’t fit her anymore.”

“Lucky for you,” Melissa mumbled.

“Girls,” Rachel said warningly.

“What’s an
ugg
?” Avery asked Lila, who shook her hair down in front of her face, mortified. “Did it hurt?”

Nona laughed at him, a full, throaty sound that opened up the room and startled Winnie. There was a sexiness in her laugh, a
rich uncaring intimacy that made everyone else at the table sudden witness to the rushing current flowing between her and Avery. They locked eyes and he made a little face at her, and Nona just laughed some more, now at the private, wordless conversation of her lover. Winnie, whose first reaction had been mild disapproval—
a little unseemly
—found herself warming to the sound, for all the love and shamelessness she heard in it. She looked across the table at Jerry, to glimpse their own connection amid the raw happiness of the young.

But he hadn’t been listening, or so it seemed. He was absorbed in chewing, and was looking over, with an unseeing expression, to where the four oval portraits of her parents’ parents were hung above the sideboard.

“Shoe stores,” Nona’s friend Thomas said, with a disagreeable snort. “Why is it always the shoe stores? Same thing in the city—first comes Starbucks, then the shoe stores. They push out anything useful or independent-owned and then they convince people they need overpriced
grandé
versions of basic things, like a cup of coffee.”

“Well, Solo Soles is independent-owned,” Bob said. “I just don’t get the name. ‘Solo Soles’? What does that even mean? You come out of there with one shoe?”

“But you’re missing his point,” Rachel said. “That’s exactly what is happening in town. It used to be a local kind of place. Now we have people driving up from Westchester, scouting out real estate, shopping for designer bath towels. When we were growing up”—here she looked over to Winnie for confirmation—“the same stores had been around forever. Now everything is always changing.”

No one spoke for a moment. “Maybe you should put that in the book,” Rachel added, to Bob, as if to make fun of herself. “
Hartfield: Don’t Get Too Attached.
”

“Except it’s about head trauma,” Bob said mildly. “Not nostalgia lane. And it’s my book.”

“Those cultural studies of suburbia always wind up with the same conclusion anyway,” Thomas said to Rachel. Avery turned to say something in a low voice to Jerry, who chuckled. “Money moves in, people move out. Blah, blah, blah. As if everyone hasn’t read
that
before.” No one responded, but to Winnie, it looked like Rachel was oddly satisfied with this remark.

“How did you get the turkey this tender?” Winnie called out firmly, down the table to Avery. She wanted to resettle things back to where they should be. “Not a trade secret, is it?”

“I brined it for about thirty hours,” he shouted back, echoing her loud voice. “Like I told you.”

“What does
brine it
mean?” Melissa asked.

“You just soak the bird in a big bucket of salt water,” Nona answered. “He made me take out all three shelves in my refrigerator.”

“Thirty hours?” Rachel said. “Is that safe? With all the bacteria that can grow, I mean?”

“She said it, I didn’t,” Thomas said, leaning over to reach the bottle of wine.

“So you guys, like, stay over at each other’s place and stuff?” Melissa asked Nona, who made a questioning face at Rachel.

“Well, since we’re all here together,” Jerry said, and his voice startled the room into silence. Deliberately, he set down his knife and fork, plate cleaned.

“May I first toast my Winifred,” he said, raising an empty wineglass. “No sappy stuff, except to say you’ve made an old man happier than anyone has a right to be.”

“Ooh,” Lila whispered.

As the others raised their glasses, Winnie’s heart widened, even though Jerry wouldn’t look at her. He was busy making himself look fierce and impatient, embarrassed in the wake of all the murmurs and loving looks surrounding him.
Finally,
Winnie thought. This
is what they were together for—the harmony of the expected.

“All right, enough,” he said. “Next is for the chef. My grandson, who cooks a damn fine dinner.”

“Hear, hear,” Winnie called. Everyone clapped, and Melissa drummed her spoon a little too hard against her glass of water. Avery held up both hands, and Nona blew him a kiss.

“And now that that’s out of the way,” Jerry said, waiting for them to be quiet. But what was this? Why did he look so serious? Winnie’s chest tightened. Rachel glanced her way, concerned.

“Sometimes in a family…it’s like business. You need to make some changes. Maybe you’ve done things a certain way for a long time, but then—well, even if people expect things to continue in the way they’ve been going, and they rely on that, you’re going to need to assess the situation and change course as needed. Not always easy. Not always popular.”

“Jerry?” Winnie asked. She tried to catch his eye, tried to ease him with a smile. How could she get back to that lovely balance of a minute ago?

“I may be old, but that doesn’t mean I’m out of the game. I know how it’s played. And Jerry Trevis isn’t any kind of pushover, either. Frank here can tell you.” Jerry thumbed angrily toward
Avery, who looked as worried as Winnie felt. Nobody corrected the name mistake.

“Darling,” Winnie said. “Of course not. Why don’t we—”

“I changed my will, and you might as well know about it now,” he said, glaring around the table. “I wrote Annette out, and that’s that.”

There were audible gasps, from Rachel and Melissa. Lila was wide-eyed.

“Is this for real?” Thomas exclaimed, under his breath, to no one in particular.

All Winnie could do was stare down the table at Jerry. “I’m sorry, Winifred, but it had to be done. I didn’t discuss it with you first because I knew you’d just try to argue, change my mind. But my mind is made up.” She nodded dumbly. And what came to mind was the letter she had written to Annette, the one she’d torn up and written again and then mailed, anxious but determined, yesterday.

Your father doesn’t know I’m writing to you,
it began. And then it went on to plead, cajole, and apologize. Winnie had thrown herself on the mercy of this strange woman, she had acknowledged that her new presence in the family—she had even, after much internal debate, characterized her own marriage as “sudden”—was obviously causing problems between father and daughter, and she offered to meet with Annette to discuss whatever grievances there might be and how to resolve them. But, in other paragraphs, she also hadn’t been above thinly veiled references to Jerry’s advanced age, or hints that such a division in his family could make him ill—could, in fact, serve to bring on a recurrence of what Winnie had called “those problems he had in the past,” trusting that her
restrained phrase would signal to Annette that now she, Winnie, knew everything there was to know about Jerry’s mental health. There was no more advantage to be had in withholding that information.

But now, as Jerry was saying something about voiding the prenuptial agreement she had gladly signed, and that he’d met with Ed Weller two days ago, and the new papers had already been drawn up—Winnie could vaguely hear Bob trying patiently to convince Jerry to reconsider—all she could think was that it was all her fault. In writing that letter, by violating Jerry’s trust, by going behind his back to try to win over Annette, she might have made a bad situation worse. Now what would happen? Annette would surely tell Jerry, would throw this attempt right back in his face. And then what would she say? How would he react? What would it do to this nightmare?

With this chaos of thoughts crowding her mind, Winnie barely heard or understood what Jerry said next.

“This house—
our
house—will be Winnie’s sole property, to use or dispose of as she wishes. To pass on to whomever she wishes. And god
damn
anyone who says otherwise.” Jerry nearly shouted this, as if the entire squadron of Annette’s lawyers had suddenly materialized at the dinner table. Winnie was flushed, breathless. How could he make her think about living on here, alone?

“And as for my estate, I’ve made it over to Frank. I mean
Avery
. He’ll be sole inheritor.” Jerry glared at them all, as if expecting vigorous dissent, when what he met was a continued silence. Then he faltered a little, unsure now, and spoke more quietly to the young man next to him—who was, Winnie saw, even through her own hazy shock, frozen. “It’s a bum rap, what your mother and I have
put on you. I’m sorry for my part of that. But it doesn’t change what I’ve done. You’re going to inherit it all.”

Avery looked up, but not at Jerry, and not at Nona, who put her hand on the table and slid it toward him. He turned only to Winnie, and in his face she read the echo of her own stricken expression.

Now
she was hungry. Thanksgiving’s central meal had been over for an hour, and she was starving. Rachel leaned against the island in the middle of Winnie’s barn-sized kitchen and pulled small pieces off the turkey carcass with her fingers. She couldn’t remember when she’d last had a turkey that was this tender and flavorful. Her own, cooked for years in the temperamental oven at 144 Locust—and then just once, disastrously, last November in the “kitchenette” in the apartment on the side of the house—had always served more as vehicles for delivering bites of mashed potatoes, gravy, and (admittedly, canned) cranberry sauce. It was a revelation to enjoy the meat of the bird itself. When Avery dumped the leftover sausages into a plastic container near the platter, Rachel picked up one of those and ate it too.

After a minute, she noticed Avery just standing there, watching her, with his hand on his hip.

“What?” she said, popping the rest of the sausage—must have been lamb—into her mouth. God, this kid was good-looking.
Nona should be thanking her lucky stars. Had Jerry looked like that, back in the day?

“Taste any E. coli?” Avery said. “Salmonella?”

Rachel chewed. “Staphylococcus,” she said, finally. “And a dash of mouse droppings.” He rolled his eyes and went back to the sink.

“Don’t think I haven’t seen that, and worse, in the places I’ve worked.”

“Spare me,” Rachel said. “I never go out to eat anymore, but I don’t want to ruin the possibility for the future.”

“Ah, nothing that bad’s going to get you out here. These places in town probably turn their tables over twice a night, if they’re lucky. You won’t get any vindictive busboys or seriously psycho waiters, out here in the boonies.”

The boonies.
Rachel smiled to herself and used a serving spoon to get at the sweet potatoes. “Yeah, but that’s just the sabotage angle.” Did Avery think that she was so old, so
suburban
, that even a semi-wild night out in Manhattan was completely off her radar screen? It wasn’t so long ago that Rachel had been a regular at dollar draft night at McSorley’s on East Seventh. Well, okay: it had been twenty years ago, and it was a stretch to say she’d attained the status of “regular.” But still, did artfully bedraggled hipster Avery even know where McSorley’s was? “What about all the food safety stuff? Outbreaks come from raw ground beef, not waiters sneezing on things.”

“They come,” Avery said, “from leaving leftovers out too long.” He swooped away the turkey platter and the bowl of potatoes. Rachel snatched a last sausage before he firmly snapped a lid on the container.

The phone rang. Rachel wiped her hand on a dish towel and picked up the receiver.

“Don’t answer that!” Avery called, from inside the refrigerator.

“Why?” she said, pressing the button. “Hello?” There was a faint rustling noise coming from the line, but no voice. “Hello? Trevis residence?”

“Told you,” Avery said, shutting the fridge door.

“Hello?” Was it music? Yes, a recorded song she could only half hear, interspersed with fumbled thumps, as if the other person on the line was holding the receiver up to a speaker. “What is this?”

“Is it Joan Baez again, or that guy with the banjo?” Avery said. He was standing directly in front of her.

“Joan Baez?” Rachel said. Avery motioned for the phone. “Wait a minute.” She listened for a moment to be sure and then pulled the phone away slightly. “It
is
Joan Baez. I love this song.” She listened again. “What’s going on? How did you—?”

Then she caught on. “Are you kidding me? Does this have to do with—? Are these the tree crazies?” Avery nodded, and tried to take the receiver. “No, I’ll—Excuse me. Hello? This is Winifred Trevis’s daughter. I have to ask you to stop this. What do you think you’re doing, anyway? This is a private number, we’re having a family holiday here, and—”

Avery pulled the phone away from her and pressed it to his chest. “That’s not how you do it,” he said. “Watch and learn.” Then he held the phone a good six inches away from his face and roared: “
Listen up, ass-hats!
Call this number again, I’m gonna trace it, then get your loser name and home address, and post it on every frat-boy, web-nerd, Joan-Baez-hating blog in the tristate area. See how
you like these kids, who have nothing better to do than stalk your every pathetic hour, and TP your house, and stink-bomb your car. And that’s just how they warm up.
Are we clear, tree huggers?
”

Rachel was laughing by “ass-hats,” and didn’t stop for several minutes after Avery pressed end and tossed the phone back onto the counter. Her arms were weak from hard, whole-body laughing, but every time she pictured his red-faced bellowing into the innocent phone, she lost it again. The physical release, which almost brought her to tears, matched an inner buoyancy that had been building since dinner ended, in a general shambles, with Avery storming out to heat the pies, his friends perplexed and uncomfortable, and Winnie utterly silent. The girls didn’t know where to look. And so Rachel, in a master hostess stroke, if she did say so, stepped up and made some general, vaguely calming statements—
this is a lot for everyone to absorb, let’s all just enjoy the rest of our dinner
—and led the disgruntled party into a conversation about the new Star Wars movie. Bob, to his credit, had joined in right away and little by little they had carried it off. Jerry, who had retreated to a “Who, me?” expression, heartily ate two slices of pie and then announced he was going for a walk. A minute later Winnie rushed upstairs.

“Mom! What’s going on?” This was Lila, hurrying into the kitchen from the den, where she and Melissa were watching a movie. She looked suspiciously at Avery. “Were you yelling at her?”

“Someone has to,” he said, and winked at Rachel, who tried to get herself under control.

“I heard cursing,” Lila insisted. Her calm eyes followed Avery back over to the sink.

“It’s nothing,” Rachel said. “What are you guys watching? We’ll head home in about an hour, I guess.”

“
When Harry Met Sally
,” Lila said. “But Mel’s just texting with some guy from school, so she’s missed half the good parts.”

“I’ll come in soon,” Rachel promised. “I’m just going to check on Nana.”

“Is she all upset about the—” Lila paused, glancing at Avery’s back. “Everything?”

“She’s just resting, I think. I’ll just run upstairs, and then be right in to watch with you, okay? Is Dad in there too?”

“No,” Lila said. “I thought he was in with you, cleaning up or whatever.” She turned to go, but not without a last glance in Avery’s direction.

As soon as she had left, Avery said, in a low, different voice, “Do you know who Frank was?” He was scrubbing a saucepan with the intensity and focus of a surgeon. Rachel moved to where she could watch him at work, passing the pan again and again under the hot water. The motions were mesmerizing, and tiny stray bubbles floated away on clouds of steam.

“I’d offer to help, but I don’t think my skills are up to your standards.”

Avery shook his head. “Frank. Did you hear him call me that?”

“Yeah. Who is that, his son? Your uncle?”

“His brother. I never met him. I think he died a long time before I was born. But Grandad’s been talking about him a lot, you know. When he tells stories about the old days. Stuff I’m supposed to write down. And I get the sense—”

“Old people get mixed up. He didn’t mean it.”

“That’s what I’m saying!” Avery exclaimed. He brought the gleaming pan up close to his face, and then plunged it back in the suds. “He didn’t mean it, putting me in the will. Something went wrong between them, Grandad and his brother, back when they were just getting the company going. I don’t know exact details, but it had to do with a deal Grandad cut behind Frank’s back. That went bad, somehow. Or maybe he screwed Frank out of some money, either on purpose or by accident. He never says the whole story, but I’m getting the gist of it.”

Rachel squinted, trying to understand. “So you think Jerry believes you’re actually Frank, his brother, from fifty years ago. And he made you—Frank—the inheritor of his estate to make up for a business debt he owed Frank—you—from the past.”

“I’m not saying he really, like,
believes I’m Frank
. What I’m talking about is more symbolic. Repaying someone in the only way he can think of to do that, now.”

“Karma?”

“Yeah, kind of.”

Rachel snorted. “I’d say it’s payback, Avery—but a whole different kind, for your mother.”

There was a silence. Avery rinsed off the pot and pulled a dish towel off his shoulder to dry it.

Shit.
“I’m sorry,” Rachel said. “That just came out.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “Never mind.”

“But, Avery,” she went on, a little desperate for him to see the way things were.
He’s so young,
she reminded herself.
He’s freaked out about what his mom will do.
“Even if that’s the case, it’ll still be okay. He knows who you are. And it’s going to be
your
name on the paperwork. Right?”

He reared back and looked at her like she was crazy. “You think I’m worried about not getting the money? Or the legal shit? You think this is about that?”

She faltered. What, exactly, had she been trying to reassure him of? “Well, I thought you might be worried about…how it would all be perceived.” Rachel finished her sentence lamely, knowing now she’d been on the wrong track. He had already turned away, was stacking things in a cabinet. The dishes, she saw, were almost done.

“Well, I’d better check on my mother.” He nodded without turning.

But just as she passed him, Avery spoke again, in the same low voice as before. “Just don’t tell her, okay?”

“Tell her what?”

“That this isn’t the first time he’s called me Frank.”

From the window at the landing at the top of the stairs, Rachel could see that the light snow had stopped. In fact, all traces had vanished, from the brushy dark branches of the pine trees that crowded close to the back of the house, from the steeply pitched gables of a side roof, from the cars parked on Franklin Street. She paused at the window, listening. There was no sign of any movement down the hall. Boxes lined the hallway, stacked in piles at odd intervals. Rachel bent to one at her feet, and pulled open the flaps.

A jumble of items: woven baskets, a dusty glass vase, picture frames with glass cracked or missing, a rolled-up wad of material that turned out to be the runner Rachel remembered Winnie kept on the large dining-room table, under wobbly candlesticks and the wide, white ceramic bowl full of seashells she and Danny
had collected as children, on summer trips to Long Island. She hadn’t seen most of these things since her father died; when Winnie moved to her small pre-furnished apartment, she hadn’t had the need or the room to display them. Rachel dropped the stained lace runner back into the box.

She pressed her middle fingers to the bridge of her nose and breathed a long, slow exhale. Boxes. Boxes up and down this hall and, undoubtedly, in the closed-up rooms throughout this huge, hardly used house. Yes, she knew that scientists said that humans used only a tiny fraction of their brains. But couldn’t Winnie see how pointless it was, to live as she and Jerry did, huddled close in three or four pockets of this place, the rest a dusty storage center for boxes full of shards of the past?

That’s how
I’ve
had to live,
Rachel thought wildly. Boxes and boxes and boxes of things forgotten.
Can’t it be different now? For all of us?

Last week at Hand Me Down, her friend Cynthia had stopped by, with three plastic storage boxes, the long flat kind made to be tucked under a bed. She and Rachel had pried open the tops and gently lifted out the baby clothes, pressed flat and tight. There were tiny corduroy overalls with rusted hook-and-eye buckles, and blue and red sweaters in squeaky acrylic wool, and lots of cotton rompers edged in curly piqué, the way they used to be made, even for little boys. Rachel got busy with sorting and stacking, mentally dismissing most of it as out-of-date or just slightly too worn. Though some of the overalls had an old-style charm and were lightly used. She set a short pair aside to hang in the boys, 12-month, summer section.

Then a stifled noise made her look up at the other woman, sur
prised. Cynthia, a petite, slightly pudgy Greek woman that Rachel had known for years, was suddenly gushing tears, and making no move to stop them. They slid under the tinted lenses of her sunglasses and down her cheeks. She was holding out a rather unremarkable dark green one-piece sleeper, its rubber-bottomed feet dangling, the fabric thinned to nearly nothing on the knees.
Eighteen to 2T,
Rachel thought automatically.
$4.50.

“Oh, my God,” Cynthia said. She laughed, gesturing at herself, her face shining wet. “It’s just…I’d forgotten this one. And he’s driving now, you know?” She tipped the sleeper back so that it was resting lightly on her open hands. “Right now. He took my car to La Guardia, to pick up his aunt—my sister. La Guardia,” she repeated quietly, amazed. Eyes raking every inch of the faded sleeper.

“Keep that one,” Rachel advised. “Show it to him, tonight.”

Cynthia took a deep breath and wiped tears out from the folds of her neck. “You must be used to this,” she said shyly, recovering. “But it really took me back.”

Now Rachel felt the warmth of her own tears, the ones that had somehow made it past her screwed-shut eyelids, on her fingertips. So she opened her eyes wide and tipped her head back. There. She blinked them back where they came from, and found herself staring straight up at a couch-sized water stain on the ceiling. Numbly, she added it to a catalogue of the house’s flaws that she couldn’t help tallying: the chipped paint everywhere, peeling wallpaper, the torn carpet in the front hall.

Enough. Rachel pressed down hard on her own bitterness. There had to be a way to tackle all of this openly and practically—Jerry’s announcement and what it meant, for all of them.

Striding firmly to Winnie’s room, Rachel knocked twice, waited a perfunctory beat, and then let herself inside.