Every Last One (9 page)

When I go into the house, Glen is sitting at the table, eating cereal. I expect him to chide me for the time I’ve spent standing barefoot on the lawn, for my failure to simply put my foot down, which is an expression handed down from his father to him and well worn in our house. Instead, he looks up briefly and makes a rueful little curve of the corner of his mouth. “Poor guy,” he says. There was a Ruby Latham in Glen’s life, too, a girl with whom he went to high school named Betsy. We ran into her once when we were first married, and I could feel the push of the past as she and my husband talked in front of his parents’ house. It goes without saying that she looked a bit like me. Or I like her.

The coffeemaker comes on with its customary click, and I put on water for oatmeal. Glen steps outside and in a moment I hear a
car door slam. I realize that my husband, always practical, had figured out that Kiernan had no way to get home and had taken him in the car. I hope he won’t tell Kiernan that he will get over it. Later, Glen says that they didn’t speak at all, except once when Kiernan asked him to pull over. Even as he threw up at the curb of the Sunoco station, Kiernan was still crying.

Upstairs, Ruby has climbed into our bed the way she did when she was small and there was a storm. “I feel like a terrible person,” she whispers, her voice breaking, and I know she does, and I know, too, that there is some part of her that is going to enjoy this, enjoy being so beloved and so mourned. I go into the bathroom and when I emerge she is sound asleep, a long piece of hair twisted around her finger. Down on the lawn, there is some flattened grass where Kiernan sat, and the pale blue tuxedo jacket left behind.

Ruby’s writing program begins the week after school ends. The night before she leaves, Sarah and Rachel crowd into her bed for a sleepover. “Why do they call it a sleepover when they never sleep?” grumbles Glen, who says this at least five or six times a year. In the morning they gather in the kitchen and weep, but it is the pleasurable weeping of girls to whom nothing really bad is happening. Ruby doesn’t cry. She’s been quiet and sad since the night of the prom. I saw her smile genuinely only once, when at the awards assembly she won the prize for writing, a red Webster’s dictionary with her name embossed on the front cover.

“Kiernan’s mom told my mom that it will turn out that this is the best thing that ever happened to him, that he needs a fresh start,” Rachel says while Ruby is upstairs getting her bags.

“God, Rachel, you have the world’s biggest mouth,” Sarah replies. Outside in the driveway, the three girls hug. “I’ll find you a surfer guy in California after I find one for myself,” says Rachel, who is spending the summer with her father.

“You just be careful,” Ruby replies.

“Always,” Rachel says, putting Ruby’s bags into the back of the car while Sarah and Ruby exchange glances over her bent head.

“Are you worried about Rachel?” I ask as we drive out of town.

“I’m always worried about Rachel,” Ruby says absently.

She is mostly silent for the rest of the drive, looking out the window, playing with her hair, bundling it up, taking it down. She is tolerating the classical-music station. She’s nervous, I know—not that she will feel out of place but, oddly, that she won’t, that she is now the strange and beautiful girl in the vintage housedresses whose story takes up the front third of the literary magazine, and that this summer she will find herself among dozens such, and lose her sense of determined self-invention. It’s been several years since she began to develop this assured persona, and in retrospect it seems that I didn’t handle it well at the beginning without really understanding that I was handling anything at all. There was a period just before I turned forty when I grew my hair and traded my pants and sweaters for dresses that swirled atop my knees. “You’re wearing that?” Ruby had said one night, wrinkling her nose.

“What’s wrong with this?”

“It would be fine if you were my age,” she said.

Was I ever her age? Sometimes I put her music on in the car and step hard on the gas and I can feel it from somewhere deep in my body, a double yellow line atop the asphalt egging you on and a bass beat throbbing in your midsection, that feeling of being young. But I was never that girl when I truly had the chance. My mother liked everything just so, and neither my brother nor I wanted to rattle her. There are two kinds of tempers, hot and cold. The second is worse. My mother had a cold temper, silent and hard. I was never pierced or inked, never wore strange jewelry or provocative clothes. I went to the prom with a boyfriend who was
as much an accessory as a person. Our relationship faltered when I was at college and ran out of stamps for my increasingly infrequent letters. My senior year at a party I met Glen, who was already in med school and was visiting one of his brothers. The two men walked me back to the shabby garden apartment I was sharing with Alice and two other friends, and then they flipped a coin to determine who would call me in the morning. Whenever Glen’s family gathers for holidays, his brother Doug will flip a quarter in the air and slam his hand over it. “Too late, Dougie,” Glen likes to say. Sometimes I remind myself that I almost skipped the party, that I almost went to a different college, that the whim of a minute could have changed everything and everyone.
Our lives, so settled, so specific, are built on happenstance.

Ruby knows that I majored in English, and she once asked why I had not decided to be a writer myself. “I just found it way too hard,” I’d said. She looked away. It seemed that the notion that there was something she could do that I could not was disconcerting. “How do you know what to write about?” Rachel once asked her when the girls had read aloud a story Ruby had written. “I just know,” she replied.

The college at which Ruby will spend the summer looks nothing like the large state university where I went to school. It is designed along familiar lines: iron gates, stone columns, red brick, a quad with some old-growth trees. Ruby says there is air-conditioning in the dorms and frozen yogurt in the dining hall. Her roommate is a girl from New York City named Jacqui LeBoutillier. “I am deeply jealous of her name,” Ruby had told Sarah and Rachel. “I think you would just take seriously anything written by someone with that name.” It turns out that both Ruby and Jacqui like Robert Lowell, Flannery O’Connor, vintage shops, and almond butter.

This morning, before we left, there was a bag at our back door, and inside was a collection of Lowell’s poems called
Life Studies
. Ruby picked it up and paged through it, put it down on the table amid the dishes, the mugs, and the papers. “Are you going to take that?” I’d asked as I grabbed my keys. “I already have it,” Ruby said. “I don’t know how anyone could not know that I already have it.” Poor Kiernan. He can’t seem to do anything right.

When your children are away for the summer, public expectations are twofold. Other mothers assume you will feel incomplete or liberated, depending on their own situations. I feel neither. I feel that my children need to be gone this summer, Ruby to grow, Max to heal, Alex—well, because the other two will be away.

Glen always feels their absence more than I do. “Wow!” he says on the first night that all three are gone. “It’s really quiet in this house.” He suggests that we go out to eat, take in a movie, although he doesn’t really like to go to restaurants, and he’s rarely entertained by anything at the multiplex. But after a day or two he settles into his usual routines, and I into mine. The other fantasy of childless summers is romance for the long-married, epic sex, and household nudity. Once I hinted at this to Nancy, at the missed opportunities because Fred and Bob and Sarah all stayed home for the summer, and she rolled her eyes and said, “The kitchen-floor thing? Please. Spare me.”

Instead of leisure I’ll be out at work, in yards and gardens, long after the time I’m usually home. This is the busiest time of year for me: endless pruning, planting, weeding, listening to whining from homeowners who are enraged at the vagaries of nature, the appetites of Japanese beetles, the ravenous deer, the unreliable weather that brings down trees with a single gusty storm or cripples tender flowers with a searing sun.

After I drop Ruby off at the dorm I drive three hours home,
over roller-coaster roads, stopping to oversee the work at a weekend place outside town. “How we doing here?” I ask Rickie. The man we’re working for cleared a hilltop with a shockingly beautiful view of a string of mountains and valleys so that he could build a gargantuan faux cabin. His builder bulldozed dozens of trees, and now the owner wants to replace them. He is not a patient man—he is apparently one of those people who make money by making money, one of those people whose work I don’t understand and don’t care to—and he likes big trees. He doesn’t want anything to grow; he wants it to appear. I hate the notion; what I love about my work, and I suppose my life, is the slow inevitable progression. I count my years in small bushes grown broad, climbing vines that snake over fences and roofs, saplings that are spreading trees.

“We got the English walnuts,” Rickie says. “They’re really nice. But we’re going to have to work out the watering. I’m hoping we’ll get some good rain the next couple of days. Plus, we’re down one guy. Luis took off.”

“Aw, no,” I say. “We can’t afford to be shorthanded right now. Can you get me a couple of other guys?”

“I got three college prospects home for the summer. One used to be a stoner, one worked for the quarry last summer and only lasted a week because he says he pulled something in his shoulder, and one is apparently your pal Nancy’s oldest kid.”

“Fred? What?” I dial my cell phone and wait. “Nance? Is Fred looking for a job? Why didn’t you say anything? Oh, for God’s sake—well, of course. Of course. Is he over his wisdom teeth? Tell him it’s a done deal. No, I’ll tell him. I’ll call him now. Or have him call me.” I snap the phone shut. “You’ll love Fred,” I tell Rickie. “You know the type—former three-sport athlete, never complains, always on time.”

“That’ll be a nice change,” Rickie says. “Look, go home. We’re
almost done here. We’ll clean up and drop the guys off. I’ll reset the irrigation system in the morning.”

I pull into our driveway and the phone rings. It’s Alice, and I sigh. Heat rash? Allergies? Instead she says, “Hey babe, you okay?” Somewhere she has written down that today was the day I was to drop Ruby off. Having a child has both softened her center and made her sharper at the edges.

“I’m fine,” I say. “It’s an amazing moment, watching her get ready to be whoever she’s going to become.”

“I’m terrified just thinking about it, and my kid’s only three,” Alice says. “Remember us?”

“I remember you. I can’t really remember me. Was I as vague as I think I was?”

“Oh, come on. You were so calm and sane. Like your life, no surprise. I was the one who had delusions of grandeur and ricocheted around for all those years before I got it right. Or semi-right.”

“How is the boy king?”

“He’s with my parents. My mother says she’s sick of hearing me talk about sunscreen, and that she raised five kids without it. Promise me we’ll be deeply, deeply critical when we’re grandparents. Not to the kids, because then they’ll shun us and withhold our grandchildren and ruin our lives. But when we talk to each other.”

“Promise.”

Max is at the kitchen table when I go inside, eating ice cream from the container. “Did you have dinner?” I ask, opening the fridge.

“Yes?” he says.

I can’t help it, I start to laugh. “Oh, Maxie, Maxie, what in the world is going to become of you?” I say, and suddenly his face falls.

“Don’t say that, Mom,” he says.

“Oh, sweetie, it wasn’t existential. I was just fooling around. Where’s Alex?”

“Ben’s?” he says. The question mark goes everywhere with him nowadays.

“Are you packed?”

“Sort of.”

“Is Alex packed?”

“Sort of.”

I take a spoon to the ice cream. It’s the kind with cookie dough in it, and all the cookie dough has been picked out. “It was like that already,” Max says as I dig around. “I swear.”

“Where’s your father?”

“You have a lot of questions.”

“You can say that again.”

“You have a lot of questions.”

I put the ice cream in the freezer. “How early can we leave tomorrow?” Max asks. Maxie, Maxie, finally heading to where he feels at home. I run my hands through his shaggy hair, kiss the back of his bristly boy-man neck, wrap my arms around him. He looks like a dandelion, with his skinny stem and his ruffled head. Once he used to run to hug me; now he suffers me to hug him.

“As early as you want,” I reply.

“Dad’s asleep in the den,” he says.