Every Last One (10 page)

Right after the Fourth of July we drive Alex to camp, although Olivia and her husband have offered to take him along with Ben. The two boys run off together, and we have to chase them for the farewell kiss. The soccer field is already full. Olivia is a bit weepy. “There are three more at home just like that,” her husband, Ted, says, reaching for her hand. She sniffs, then smiles, but the smile won’t hold. “Ridiculous,” she says to herself in her clipped English voice, but even that sounds uncertain.

“They’ll all be gone before you know it,” Glen says, as though that is a helpful observation.

“Yeah, you people with older kids always say that,” Ted says. “Want to borrow ours?”

On the ride home, I’m making a shopping list in my head when I realize that we’re passing the motel where my guys live. A sign that says
ROOMS
teeters atop a metal stanchion. I’ve rarely been there. Once one of the men was ill and wouldn’t see a doctor, and I brought one of Glen’s friends out to examine him. Once the police
called me because there had been a fight, and I told the men, arranged in a small knot in the gravel parking lot, that I couldn’t employ workers who made trouble. Rickie translated as the men looked down at the toes of their work boots, their arms folded over their grubby T-shirts. They have one rusty pickup truck among eight of them, five who work for me and three others who help out at a dairy farm. I have no idea how they manage groceries or laundry.

From inside the motel I hear music, and I listen for some pleasant Mexican song, a plucked guitar, a tambourine. Instead I hear hard rock, and the rumble of faintly raucous voices. It’s after seven, and they have had enough time to start drinking in that way men do when they are really tired, which is not a way I want to interrupt.

“I worry about the guys who work for us,” I say to Glen.

He slows slightly and looks at the building. It could not look more cheerless if it were a prison. In fact, compared with this, the county jail looks country-club. In spring, the yellow rockets of forsythia obscure the razor wire.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Glen says. “You need the hands. They need the cash. It’s mutually advantageous.”

Once José told me that to visit his daughters he drove through the night in January and June to a Texas town near the Mexican border. Each day the girls would arrive in his motel room, and they would play video games at the local diner or go to an amusement park nearby. The girls had special identification papers so they could attend school in the Texas town and go home each afternoon to their mother in Mexico. Two years before, after José had spent only two days with them, the immigration guards at the crossing said, “It’s school vacation this week, isn’t it?” The next day the girls stayed on the other side with their mother and waved at José, and the day after that he drove north again, back to the ski resort
where my guys work in the winter, running snow blowers, cleaning concession stalls.

Whenever I see him at the work site I think of this, particularly with our children away. Without them the days drag and fly, ponderous and yet gone before we even have a chance to notice them. “Is today Wednesday?” I sometimes say at the breakfast table, peering at the top of the paper to check. Glen goes to a three-day conference on laser surgery in Boston and brings me back a necklace I don’t like. “It’s gorgeous!” I say. I go to an extension service seminar at the university on pest control and buy ladybugs and nesting boxes. I wonder if this is what the rest of my life will be like.

Nancy and Bill have a barbecue, and everyone gets a little lit on vodka gimlets. The whole house smells like lime. “A retro drink,” Bill says as he passes them around. In the kitchen a group of women gather around the table, picking at a plate of cold shrimp. The men are in the backyard. “Warming themselves in the flame of the gas grill,” Nancy says, raising her eyebrows. Fred is in the den watching a baseball game. “How’s it going at work?” I ask him as I meander in.

“He’s sore as hell, I can tell you that,” Nancy says, coming up behind me and handing me a fresh drink.

“Thanks, Mom,” Fred says. “Mrs. Latham asks me a question, and you answer. It’s like ventriloquism.”

“How’s it going?” I repeat. I can see part of the answer: his forearms are covered with scratches and bruises.

“I’m okay,” he says.

“The guys are being tolerant?”

“I mean, let’s be real,” Fred says. “I’m the resident gringo. They think you’re paying me double what they make.”

“They told you that?”

“They talked about it the first day. None of them know I speak Spanish.”

Fred spent a semester and a summer in a village two hours from Barcelona. Nancy told me that he’s become so fluent in Spanish that at college he’s tutoring kids in a housing project full of new immigrants.

“Yeah, and now I’m stuck,” Fred says. “I start to talk to them, they’ll remember that they said stuff in front of me the first couple of days that maybe they shouldn’t have said. They’ll figure I narced them out.”

“I think once high school is over that term no longer applies,” Nancy says.

“Whatever. I should have just used my Spanish from the beginning.
Buenos dias
from the get-go, you know?” He rises gingerly to his feet. Fred has always been fit, but there’s running-five-miles-in-expensive-shoes fit, and there’s enlarging-a-six-foot-hole-with-a-shovel fit.

When we hear the shower running above us, Nancy says, “You’re not paying him any more than the others, are you?”

“How can you of all people ask me that?”

“Spare me, Saint Mary Beth. He’s my son, you’re my friend.”

“Everyone’s making fifteen dollars an hour.” I stop, multiply check my math. “God, I’m a terrible person, aren’t I? That’s six hundred a week.”

“You’re right. Your landscapers are being paid only what the teachers at the elementary school make.” Nancy looks sideways, then down. When she wants to say something unpleasant, it is always absolutely clear. “What?” I ask.

“Besides, at least one of them was ripping you off. The one who quit? He took all those plants at that big new place on Winding Way. Apparently, they all know it. Three truckloads’ worth. He sold it all to some nursery.”

“Luis? You’re kidding? He seemed like such a good guy.”

“Apparently not. Are you going to tell the police?”

I envision having my remaining workers questioned, having them vanish and leaving all my jobs undone. I feel ill, as though I had a party at my home and someone stole from my jewelry box or my medicine cabinet, except that I have never even invited my workers to my home for a party, not once. And now I never will. I gave them an end-of-season party last year, with pizza and beer, but it was at a job site, and I never thought about how dirty their hands would be, after a day of work, until I watched them scrub at them ineffectually with paper napkins.

“Food’s ready!” Bill calls from the kitchen. We join the men outside. “I heard someone may rent the Donahue house,” one of the women says. “Apparently, Deborah’s mother is ill and she’s moved up to her mother’s place to take care of her.”

Glen looks across the patio at me. I take a gulp of my drink and promise myself that it will be my last. I know that Deborah’s mother lives in a little town about an hour north of us. I’d been there a couple of times with the kids when Kiernan and Ruby were eight. Deborah had moved in with her mother then, too, not because her mother was ill but because Deborah was. “A complete breakdown,” Kevin whispered. “Catatonic.” Her mother’s house was small, and we sat outside on a porch swing while the kids played on the scrubby front lawn. The light faded and the sun set while I talked about nothing and Deborah stared at the street. Her hands shook in her lap. Kevin told me as we walked to my car that it was because of the medication. “She really needs you,” he’d said, holding my hand. Kiernan stood at his side, and I pulled my hand away. “Daddy, when are we going back to our own house?” Kiernan said.

They’d rented out their own house while they were away, then later sold it, then bought another and moved back to town. Kiernan
was twelve when they moved back. Deborah had thrown her husband out the following year, screaming at him late at night on the lawn as the neighbors stood behind their curtains and listened. For a while, the episode hurt Deborah’s business. When the kids were young, she and Kevin opened a coffee shop on Main Street; he handled the finances and she did all the baking. They sold it when they moved north, and when Deborah came back she set herself up making wedding cakes. The cakes were astonishing things, with quince branches of spun sugar circling the layers or calla lilies made of frosting in a lifelike bunch on the top. But for a few months people thought it was bad luck to buy a wedding cake from a woman who had tried to hit her husband with her son’s Wiffle bat. “Can you ever keep it in your goddamn pants?” she had screamed, so that everyone on the block heard. Kiernan heard, too, and then he heard it again from the boys at school. Ruby was sweet to him then.

“A couple of those guys are going to go to the Keys to go sportfishing,” Glen says as we walk home from the barbecue. “I might go.”

“You don’t like to fish.”

“I don’t?” Glen says, making a crazy face, and we both laugh, and then because we’re drunk and our kids are away and it seems like the obvious thing to do, we go home and have sex. Neither of us seems to want to do it much anymore, but when we do it’s fine. I do things I’ve been doing for years. He does, too. They still work. They just seem a little beside the point, like rereading a book for the sixth time. Another thing that I could never have imagined when I was Ruby’s age, when my boyfriend would edge his fingers up inside the leg of my shorts and my knees would fall open like a physical reflex.

The next morning, Glen smiles at himself as he shaves. “I hope
the kids are okay,” he says at breakfast, as though to show that we are interested in the same things.

We both know that’s not true. Maybe it’s not even important. Sometimes, driving home from a job in the gloomy summer dusk, shivering in the air-conditioning, I find myself crying for reasons that are overwhelming and mysterious. When I was young, my mother used to stay up to watch old movies on television, and when I crept down the stairs, my legs scissoring my nightgown into a trap around my thin calves, I could peek through a narrow sliver of banister and see her hunched forward on the couch, crumpled tissues on the table like white carnations. She cried at
Stella Dallas, Mildred Pierce, Dark Victory, Waterloo Bridge
. I think she used the movies as a plausible excuse to weep in a way that would have seemed indulgent to her otherwise. Her husband had died, leaving her with a houseful of ashtrays, two young children, and enough life insurance to throw a dignified funeral and pay off a five-year-old car. But she still somehow believed she needed to hitch her grief to someone else’s tragedy.

I have no excuse for my own tears. In the way of women my age, I increasingly count my blessings aloud, as though if other people acknowledge them they’ll be enough: three wonderful children, a long and happy marriage, good home, pleasurable work. And if below the surface I sense that one child is poised to flee and another is miserable, that my husband and I trade public pleasantries and private minutiae, that my work depends on the labor of men who think I’m cheating them—none of that is to be dwelled on. Besides, none of that has anything to do with my tears. If I were pressed, I would have to say that they are the symptom of some great loneliness, as free-floating and untethered to everyday life as a tornado is to the usual weather. It whirls through, ripping and tearing, and then I’m in the parking lot of the supermarket,
wiping my eyes, replacing my sunglasses, buying fish and greens for that night’s dinner. If anyone asks how things are, I say what we all say: fine, good, great, terrific, wonderful.

Even among women, we don’t speak of this. Only once did I catch Nancy, sitting on her patio with a glass of wine as the first leaves did a whirligig from the elm shadowing the yard. Fred had just left for college, and Sarah was at swim practice. I said, “Oh, Nance, Thanksgiving will be here before you know it.” But when she turned her face to me her eyes were blank, as though she couldn’t understand what I had just said. The next day when we drove to a brunch together she said, tartly, “At least you didn’t ask if I was having my period. When I was a teenager, I thought women were only allowed to cry every twenty-eight days.”

How foolish we are sometimes. When we were first together, I once said to Glen, my hand on his thigh in that way that doesn’t survive marriage, “Do you ever just cry for no reason?” We were so alike, so compatible. Everyone said so.

“I don’t think so,” he said, his face creased with thought. “I can’t remember ever doing that.” Now I wouldn’t think twice about that response. Now I wouldn’t even ask.

“How was your day?” I ask.

“Fine,” Glen says. “Did you have someone take a look at the roof?”

“They’re coming tomorrow,” I say. “Do you want some wine before dinner?”

“I think I’ll have a beer,” he replies.

What if I were to tell him that that night, driving home late from weeding a garden, heading into a line of darkening pink and mauve where the sun had settled below the ridgeline, I had sobbed as though brokenhearted. “Why?” he would have said, and what would I tell him? Could I sit opposite this open-faced man, with his pink cheeks and his warm brown eyes (not clinically
significant), and say, “Loneliness?” Worse still, what if he said that he had done the same, felt the same? Then where would we all be?

“There’s a six-pack in the fridge,” I say, taking dill from the crisper drawer.