The Blessings (2 page)

But now, tonight, everyone is still here. The talk around the table is getting slower. The women sigh, cut slivers of cake, wipe children's noses. They ease their shoes off and flex their stockinged feet beneath the table, squeezing the carpet between their toes. Aunt Lauren is sitting next to Abby, the new baby squirming in her lap. She gave birth four months ago and still looks extra soft, extra tired.
Isn't he cute?
everybody croons, though Max is red and scrawny.
Too new to be cute
, Abby thinks, then immediately regrets it, hoping she hasn't doomed herself to having an uncute baby of her own.

“So when are you leaving, Abby?” Aunt Lauren asks, half turning, tucking the baby against her shoulder. She's wearing a loose pink blouse, a small diamond necklace resting in the tan hollow of her throat. She has the kind of skin that's tan even in winter, the kind Abby has always envied.

“Tonight,” Abby says. “After this.”

“Oh—tonight?”

“But I'm only going to New Jersey.”

“Oh. Well. That's not so bad,” she says. Lauren is distracted, nudging a pacifier into the baby's mouth. In Abby's family, babies are passed around constantly, casually, like serving bowls around a table, but Aunt Lauren likes to keep hers to herself. Aunt Lauren is an only child, Abby remembers, and it occurs to her then—the sort of awareness she may not have had before going away to college—that maybe Lauren isn't used to being around big families. She used to be Protestant, too, but converted to Catholicism when she married Uncle John.

From downstairs, there is a sudden gust of cheering, a few hard claps. Then Uncle Patrick comes jogging into the room. The women pause and look up, expectant.

“Fourteen-nothing us,” he reports, and they nod—they don't watch the games but they want to know the score, to gauge the mood of the room, of the city in the morning.

“Good,” Gran affirms, picking up her cup.

“More tea, Mother?” Aunt Margie says. The oldest siblings, Abby's mother and Margie, call Gran Mother; the younger ones, the boys, call her Mom. “Anyone? Tea?”

Uncle Patrick reaches over Abby to grab a brownie, rapping his knuckles on the top of her head. The Blessings all look Irish, fair-skinned and blue-eyed, but her youngest uncle is like a flag of Ireland, with red hair and freckles so thick that in places they're solid brown. “I hear you got some new wheels, Abs,” he says.

It is the one thing Abby has accomplished over break—a used Volkswagen, three thousand dollars. Her parents paid half. Her father paced around the guy's driveway, picking at his fingernails, jingling change in his pocket. It wasn't like her parents to make big purchases, but it would be easier, they reasoned, for her to get home and back.

“You like it?”

Abby smiles. “I love it.”

“Used?”

“Yeah. But not too used.”

“Be careful driving,” Uncle Patrick says. “Especially in that cold.”

When she first arrived home, this was her family's primary question and greatest source of fascination:
How cold is it up there?
Then:
And you don't mind?

“Just let the engine warm up first,” Uncle Patrick is saying. Abby nods. She can feel her mother across the table, listening. She's concerned about Abby driving on highways, driving in snow, driving after dark, driving period. She doesn't want her leaving tonight, staying in Boston until intersession starts next week: This wasn't the plan. Of course, her mother has said none of this, but Abby can tell she's thinking it. Her mouth is drawn, her eyes sad. Even the way she's chewing that snowball cookie—how can chewing look so pained? It will be years before Abby's parents get divorced—not until Meghan is in college, after all her problems are out in the open—and only then will their lifelong quiet strike Abby as strange instead of soothing, and she and Alex will grow closer, out of necessity.

“Abs, is he bothering you?” Aunt Kate says, appearing at Uncle Patrick's side.

“Me?” Patrick says. “Never.”

“Right.” Kate laughs, swatting playfully at his arm.

Abby smiles. She knows this is not really about her—she's a means to an end, a reason to flirt—but doesn't mind because she likes Kate, now Aunt Kate. Kate and Lauren are the same age, only eight years older than Abby, though Kate seems younger. She and Uncle Patrick got married last summer and live in an apartment in Center City. Abby likes how affectionate they are. Once, she saw Kate sitting on Uncle Patrick's lap, his finger in her belt loop, an intimation of some private, physical ease. Her own parents never touched.

“So,” says Aunt Kate, dropping into a chair beside Abby after Uncle Patrick has headed back to the game. She's wearing faded Levi's and long beaded earrings that swing forward as she inspects the desserts. “Got any New Year's Eve plans?”

Only Kate would ask. A year ago, the answer would have embarrassed Abby (she'd spent New Year's Eve watching movies she'd rented with her mother), but this year she can answer confidently. “Yeah. A party with some college friends. In Boston.”

“Oh, I
love
Boston,” Kate says, and sighs. She selects a cookie and leans back in her chair. “And you're loving school?”

“Yes.” Abby nods. “Totally loving it.”

“Savor every minute,” Kate says, shaking her head wistfully as she chews. Kate went to Bryn Mawr, unlike Abby's mother and Aunt Margie, who didn't go to college—
It was a different time
, her mother always says—or even Aunt Lauren, who went to Drexel for two years, then dropped out when she met Uncle John. “When do you declare a major?”

“Next semester,” Abby says. “I'll do English, I think. Or maybe art history.”

“Or both?” Kate says, and Abby nods, appreciating this sense of possibility. Kate pops the rest of the cookie in her mouth and sweeps her hands together. “Have you met any nice guys yet?”

No one else in the family would venture to ask this either. Abby is grateful for the
yet
, as if her meeting them is one day inevitable.

“Kind of,” Abby says. She glances at her mother, who is pretending not to listen as she presses her fingertip to a plate, collecting crumbs. “One.”

She can't help herself. She knows it's a distortion of the truth, painting Eric Winn as anything more than a drunken hookup at a party, but who here will know the difference? All she needs to do is release a hint of him into the family and the rest will take care of itself, gather a life of its own as it gets passed around the table, accumulate legitimate weight and shape.

“Oh yeah?” Kate says. “What's his story?”

“He's from Canada,” Abby says, adding, “Toronto. He's an ice hockey player.” She feels weirdly proud as she offers up this profile, a person so different from the kinds they know at home. Since going to college, Abby has frequently found herself in thrall of such details—people with lives she's never considered, never known existed. Like Mara, who had spent Christmas skiing with her mother and stepfather. Or the girl in her dorm who has bulimia, who abruptly confided to Abby at a party that her esophagus was full of holes. Abby was alarmed and kind of excited at the same time.

Then Uncle John calls out from the living room—“Laur, can you grab her?”—just as Elena comes streaking into the room. She is wearing pink, footed pajamas and her mouth is smeared with confectioners' sugar. She pulls up short, as if startled to find herself there. Lauren is still holding the baby—“Can someone…?” she says, a touch anxious—but Elena, lunging for a fruitcake, has already been scooped onto Aunt Kate's lap.

“Not so fast!” Kate says, tickling her. Elena shrieks with joy. The rest of the table beams, imagining Kate with a baby of her own.

Kate calls back: “I've got her, John!”

It is still nearly a year before Uncle John will get sick. Next Christmas, things will feel different, quiet and careful, fraught with unspoken and unspeakable things. But for now, the cancer in Uncle John's kidney is not yet there, or not yet known.
My uncle is really sick
, Abby will tell Nicole and Mara next November.
Aww
, they'll say, a quick frown, a poke of the bottom lip. It is not enough. She will repeat it to other people, inappropriate people—a professor during a conference about her Chaucer essay, a random girl in the bathroom at a bar. Every time, their reactions will disappoint her. She can tell it doesn't sound as important as it is.
Uncle
—in other families, it means less.

Dessert is winding down. The football game is over. The baby is tired, whimpering, a fuzzy little bundle packed into pajamas. The conversation gets slower, the pauses longer. Abby is thinking of tomorrow—of driving to Boston in her new Volkswagen with Nicole, of the jeans she bought with her Christmas money from Gran and Pop, jeans she's planning to wear to the party, of the possibility that Eric Winn will be there.

“Do you remember Matt McCabe?” Aunt Margie says. Abby hears the somber note in her voice. The table pauses, looks in her direction. “Joe's old friend? He played football for Saint B's?”

They nod, oriented—Joe, football, St. B's—and wait for the rest.

“His son just died.”

“Died?”

“Died? How?”

“They don't know.” Aunt Margie shakes her head slowly, almost reverently. “No reason. The doctors have no idea. They just found him dead in their backyard.”

A note of disbelief, then murmurs of sadness around the table again, like the lapping of waves. Heads shake, spoons clink gently on teacup walls. Strange, how sadness can sound soothing. Abby remembers an experiment she learned about in Intro to Psych, about the relative improvement in the health of patients who were prayed for. She thinks about mentioning it but doesn't.

“How old?” they ask.

“Six.”

“Six years old.”

“Can you imagine?”

Slow shakes of the head. They can't. But would any age be less horrible than any other? Abby wonders. Is it worse to have known a child for six years, or is that extra time a gift? Instantly she regrets these thoughts. It makes her nervous to have even allowed them in, like tempting fate. Abby knows that being part of a family like hers carries with it a responsibility to be aware of those less fortunate. To be humble, to be grateful. To realize happiness is always edged with peril. As she stares at a stain on the tablecloth, Abby forces herself to think about the boy, six years old, the same way she forces herself to talk to God in church. She wonders what her family would think if they knew she'd gone to Mass only twice at college, back in September, and then only because she was lonely.

Abby feels loneliness now, pooling up inside her even as she sits among the people who have known her all her life. It is the beginning of what will become an unsolvable ache. When she's away, she'll miss her family; when she's with her family, she'll miss herself.

The coat pile is on the bed in her cousin Stephen's room—a rack of weights in the corner, posters of Kiss and Ozzy Osbourne on the walls. Abby thinks she smells pot, which seems unlikely. How old is Stephen? Fourteen? An aquarium bubbles in the dark. The fish look menacing and sharp. In ten years, Stephen's troubles will have grown so stark that Aunt Margie and Uncle Joe can no longer contain them. But now Abby locates her parka among the long wool coats on Stephen's bed, thinking of the furry pullovers that pile up in the corners of parties on campus, pawed through at night's end.

“You're not driving too far tonight, are you?” Aunt Margie says. She is standing at the bottom of the stairs, holding a glass of pink wine in one hand and rubbing her arm with the other, back and forth, as if she's cold.

“Nope,” Abby reassures her. “Just to New Jersey.” Then she waits for the rest—where in New Jersey, what route she'll take. But Aunt Margie has gone quiet, surveying the room. Her cheeks are flushed, eyes bright, maybe from the wine.

“It's a good moment,” she says, “when everyone is okay.”

At first Abby isn't sure Aunt Margie wasn't talking to herself. Abby has her coat only half buttoned. Elena is scrambling past her knees, wrapped plates of leftovers are being passed from hand to hand. But her aunt looks at her with an extra modicum of gravity, and Abby sees that this was meant for her. That there will come a time when she looks at life this way, too: when, if everybody is okay, it is enough.

For now, though, Abby finishes buttoning her coat. She recognizes this point ahead, knows that someday she'll accept it as her measure of the world, but today, she's eighteen. Eighteen and in college, living away from home for the first time. Tomorrow is New Year's Eve.

“I better get on the road,” she says, kissing her aunt's cheek. “Thank you for the party.”

Then she starts her good-byes. Her parents stand by the front door, like the end of a receiving line, ensuring they are the last to say it. Abby makes her way across the living room, thanking Uncle Joe, touching Max's head, protesting as Gran hands her a plate of cookies—
for the drive
—nodding at parting advice from Uncle John about snow tires and antifreeze.
I'll see you soon
, she says to Pop.
March. Spring break.
He fumbles a twenty into her coat pocket, cups her face in his dry hands. She waves toward Alex, who is frowning at the postgame analysis, leaning forward with his hands on his knees, pretending to care. Meghan hugs her tightly, wrapping both arms around her waist and pressing a warm cheek to her side.

“Bye, bye, bye, bye,” her family tells her—they never say
I love you
, but she knows it's true. A flurry of kisses, palms to cheeks, eyes pinched against the cold as the door is pulled open, jostling the jingle bells that hang from the knitted red cap on the knob. Her dad is hovering by the door, her mother clutching her sweatered elbows in her hands. Flakes are falling, but there's barely a dusting on the ground.