Falling Together (27 page)

“Hold on,” Will had said. “I thought you forgave him.”

“I did. I do. I let go of my anger and blame, but I know him.” She had given Will a look of such fierce tenderness that he knew he would never forget it. “And you are my child, and, unless that man undergoes a radical change, which could happen because miracles do happen, but which I’m sorry to say seems unlikely, he shouldn’t be anywhere near you.”

Now, four years later, Will was no closer to forgiveness, unless not caring much anymore counted as forgiveness, and Will’s father, if not dead, was as gone as ever, not as gone as Pen’s father, as Cat’s, but only technically. Will could still see Pen lying on the ground outside the old gray church, could still hear her voice saying, “My dad died two years ago,” and he knew that his father was gone in a way that Pen’s and Cat’s would never be.

But when his mother said that, about how they had all lost fathers, Will hadn’t launched into a conversation about degrees of fatherlessness or grief. Tired from his drive, his head full of Pen and Cat, he had looked out his window and said, “I think my lawn has grown a foot since I left. Is that possible?”

Will’s mother said, “Ben Calloway was an uncommonly good man.”

“Yeah,” said Will. “I wish he hadn’t died.”

“You wish it for Pen’s sake and for her family’s sake the most,” his mother went on, not noticing, or more likely ignoring, his terseness. “But also for your own. He was more a father to you than your father ever was. I know how you loved him.”

Sometimes,
he thought,
you are too much
. Time to pull back. Time to set limits. “I haven’t seen him in a long time,” he said.

“Honestly, William,
time
?” his mother had snapped. “
Distance
? Those things have nothing whatsoever to do with love. Who knows that better than you?”

It happened the way it always happened: Will set limits and his mother rolled over them like a tank mowing down a picket fence.

Will hadn’t bothered bringing up his overgrown lawn again. He smiled a resigned smile, shook his head, and said, “Nobody.”

I
N THE MIDDLE OF THE DRIVE TO
J
ELLICO
, P
EN CALLED
.

“Where are you?”

“Driving.”

“Where?”

Will looked around him. Highway. Hills.

“In my car.”

“Your
speedy
car,” said Pen, who had seen Will’s car at the reunion and given him the kind of look you’d give a traitor. “How could you?” she’d said. “This car is shiny and speedy and blue! The only thing it has in common with your old red Saab is that it’s German.” When Will told her that Saabs weren’t actually German, she had refused to believe it, saying, “Why would I have thought all this time that Saabs were German if they’re not?” to which Will could find no answer.

“I hope you’re not speeding,” said Pen.

“If by ‘speeding,’ you mean exceeding the speed limit, Grandma, then I am.”

“I don’t blame you,” said Pen giddily. “I can’t wait until you pick the brain of Samantha Denham-Drew. I bet the anticipation is killing you.”

“I wouldn’t say ‘killing,’” said Will.

A couple of days before, Pen had e-mailed Will a list of fifteen questions for Sam with the instruction that he should add them to his own, checking, of course, for redundancy and preferably arranging them in a subtly rising arc of intimacy and importance. Will had reminded Pen that nobody showed up to a conversation with a list of questions; went on to say that, as far as he could tell, Sam was the kind of person who would talk for hours, in detail, about any subject, especially Cat,
unless
a man were to hand her a list of questions and instruct her to answer them; and had added, “Besides, all we really need to know is where Cat went, right?” To which Pen had hollered, “Are you insane? It’s been six years! You have to find out everything! How can that happen if you’re
not
prepared
?”

Now, as he had known she would, Pen asked, “Did you bring the list of questions?”

“I e-mailed them to her in advance,” said Will. “She’s putting together a PowerPoint presentation on the last six years of Cat’s life that she’ll project onto the wall of the barbecue joint.”

“Shut up,” said Pen, laughing her laugh. “So you’ll never guess what happened.”

“What?”

“Guess.”

“You said I never would.”

“Guess.”

“Uh, Augusta lost a tooth.”

“That’s mean, Will,” reproached Pen. “If you saw her perfect, little, square white baby teeth, you would know how mean it was.”

“Sorry,” said Will. “So what really happened?”

“My mother came home.”

Something in Pen’s tone was familiar to Will, and it occurred to him that maybe the tone was a universal, the way you sounded when your mother came back: like a little kid and so glad that you shine, even over the phone. Maybe he had heard Tully sound that way. Or Philip. Maybe he’d heard himself.

“Wow,” said Will, “that’s great news! You must be really happy.”

“I’m beside myself with happiness,” said Pen. “And gratitude. And relief. I just came home from work and saw her sitting there with Augusta, and it took my breath away. It was like someone fixed my television.”

For a second, Will considered saying what he figured most people would say to this, something like, “Man, you must really like television,” but the fact was that he knew immediately and exactly what Pen meant. “Colors got brighter,” said Will. “Edges got sharper.”

“Everything gleamed,” Pen said. “Like sometimes happens after it rains.”

“How is she?”

It took Pen a little while to answer, and when she did, something uncertain had edged into her buoyancy. “You know,” she said. “She’s fine.”

“Good. But if she’s fine,” said Will, “then why do you sound like that?”

“Like what?”

“You tell me.”

Pen sighed. “Worried? A little?”

“About what?”

“Listen, are you driving with one hand while we’re talking? Because that’s dangerous.”

“I have a Bluetooth phone.”

“You have to know that I have no idea what that is.”

“I just talk. No hands required. So why don’t you tell me what you’re worried about.”

“Okay. I know this sounds crazy,” said Pen, “but she’s almost too fine. If you had seen her when she left—. I mean, my father had been gone for over a year and a half, but she seemed sadder than she was right after he died. More than just sadder. She was heartsick, despondent.” Pen quickly added, “And, Will, you know I would’ve given anything to make things better for her.”

Will remembered the last visit he’d made with Pen to her parents’ house, how he and Pen’s father had just come back from a bike ride and could hear, from the driveway, even before they’d gotten off their bikes, Pen and her mother singing in the kitchen: Michael Jackson’s “Ben” at full volume, their voices stretching for the high notes near the end, then collapsing into laughter.

“Sure, you would have,” he said. “You don’t even have to say it.”

“But there’s something about her now that’s more than what I expected,” said Pen. “I expected peace, acceptance. But she seems so
actively
happy. She has this—this luster to her.”

“She was in India and Tibet, right? Maybe she had some kind of spiritual awakening. Or maybe she’s just glad to be home.” Will could see how a spiritual awakening and coming home to Pen could amount to the same thing.

“Jamie, Augusta, and I are driving her home tomorrow morning. She mentioned that she has something she wants to tell us.”

“Could be the meaning of life,” said Will.

Pen laughed. “I’ll keep you posted.”

L
EAVE IT TO
C
AT, THE MOST DRAMATIC PERSON
W
ILL HAD EVER
known, to have a friend who walked into a tiny barbecue joint in a tiny Tennessee town at twelve thirty on a June afternoon looking like a head-on collision between Marilyn Monroe and Johnny Rotten: white halter dress, white sandals, red lipstick, orange sea urchin hair. As every person in the restaurant—mothers and toddlers, men nursing beers at the bar, people on their lunch break—turned to look at her, Sam whipped off her enormous black sunglasses and flicked her green gaze over the room. Will started to raise his hand (he was that sure of who she was), but her eyes didn’t rest on him for more than a split second before she strode across the room to the bar, grabbed a giant of a man with a ZZ Top beard and a John Deere cap by his copious shoulders, cried, “Will Wadsworth, you are exactly what Cat described!” and kissed him, Euro-style, on both cheeks.

For a second, the man stared at Sam. Then, as the other men at the bar erupted into hoots and laughter, he removed, with great delicacy, Sam’s hands from his shoulders, stood up, took off his hat, and said, “Ma’am, I believe you have me confused with somebody else.”

Sam’s eyes widened, and she gave the man a smile that had the grace to be abashed and that confirmed Will’s suspicion, from their phone conversation, that Sam Denham-Drew was a little out there but was overall a good egg. Gesturing toward Will with one red-nailed hand, she said, in a further demonstration of good-eggedness, “Sir, I was playing a little joke on my friend here, pretending I didn’t recognize him, and I am mortally sorry if it embarrassed you. I can be thoughtless.”

The man, and every other person in the restaurant, looked over at Will, and, feeling suddenly scrawny and overgroomed, Will stood and gave the man a forlorn thumbs-up.

“Me as him, huh?” said the man, chuckling. “That
is
funny.”

“See?” said Sam to Will, as though the whole display were part of some conversation they’d been having. “Funny!”

“Hilarious,” said Will.

When Will put out his right hand to shake Sam’s, she batted it away and grabbed his left.

“Ha! No ring!”

She narrowed her eyes at him. Up close, Sam’s face was pretty in a surprisingly ordinary way, bare, apart from the lipstick, snub-nosed, pale and freckled, like eggnog sprinkled with nutmeg.

“Unless,” she said, “you’re one of the ones who refuses to wear one?”

“I’m one of the ones who refuses to wear one because he’s not married.”

“God, I hate those guys,” seethed Sam. “Expect your wife to sport an ‘I’m taken’ diamond that can be seen from space but won’t wear jackitty shit yourself.”

Before he could catch himself, Will laughed.

“What?” said Sam.

“You’re just so—mad.”

“I know,” said Sam, sighing. “Hi, nice to meet you. I’m full of rage.”

“Will you hit me if I ask you if you want to sit down?”

Sam appeared to consider this, then wrinkled her nose and said, “Nah, I’ll sit.”

Will walked around the table and pulled out a chair for her. She stabbed a finger in his direction. “Don’t even start with the gentlemanly crap,” she said. “I’m in a vulnerable place.”

“Sit the hell down,” said Will.

“That’s better.”

A teenaged female server in a T-shirt with a pink pig face on it and the words
HOPE YOU’RE BIG ON PIG
walked over. Her hair was dyed a sooty, shineless black. Will would’ve bet money that she hated having to wear that T-shirt. Will waited for Sam to order a drink and was relieved when she asked for a Diet Coke with lemon.

“The lemon’s not an affectation,” she told Will. “I really like it better that way.”

“I believe you,” said Will, and ordered a ginger ale. As the server walked away, Will saw that the other end of the pig was on the back of her shirt. “I think I was expecting you to get bourbon,” he told Sam. “Possibly a double.”

“Because of the rage thing,” said Sam, nodding. She mimicked throwing a drink in his face. “A ‘Take that, asshole!’ kind of drink.”

“And because of the smoking,” admitted Will, with a grin.

“Oh, I only smoke on the phone,” said Sam. “It’s one of my rules.”

“I see.”

“And when I drink, which I do from time to time, I hate to say it, but I lean toward the pink and frilly,” she said and quickly added, “But I know you don’t drink at all.”

“I do, actually,” said Will. “Not a lot, but sometimes.” He smiled. “Not in the middle of the day when I have to turn around and drive two hundred miles, but if you’d ordered that double bourbon, I would’ve had no choice.”

“Can’t stand to be outdone by a girl?” asked Sam. “Or can’t let a lady drink alone?”

“Both,” said Will.

“Whoo!” said Sam, snapping her fingers. “Cat would
hate
it that I know you drink and she doesn’t. Know, I mean. Not drink. Which she does. Not like a fish or anything, but if you were married to Jason, you’d throw back a glass of wine now and then, too.”

“I’m sure I would.”

“You said you’d tell me about Pen’s kid. So tell.”

“Her name is Augusta. She’s about to turn five.”

“Is she yours?” asked Sam, clasping her hands pleadingly under her chin.

“Nope,” said Will. “I’ve never even met her.”

“Oh, yeah.” Sam snorted and rolled her eyes. “Like that means anything. Like fathers who have never met their kids aren’t a dime a stinkin’ dozen. Stinkin’ deadbeats.”