The Far End of Happy (12 page)

At the other end of the room, the poor meatball rolled out of the door—and the boys’ voices stopped. Ronnie waited for it…and the creative verses began: “I ride on a Yeti,” “My frog is named Betty,” “I ate the spumoni.” Will’s voice: “Hey, that doesn’t rhyme.” Andrew’s: “But ice cream is always good!” They sang with gusto, occasionally dissolving into giggles. Andrew raised his arms as if on Broadway; Will threw in a hip wiggle. From where Ronnie sat, the boys seemed up for the challenge of getting their grandmothers to smile. She couldn’t imagine how Janet was managing. How would Ronnie, if it were Andrew or Will holed up in that store? She hoped that their childlike joy, which had found expression even on a day like today, would never be extinguished.

Good singers, both. Where had that talent come from? Ronnie’s voice was thin, and Jeff couldn’t even sing “Happy Birthday” in any recognizable fashion.

“A lot of people have been coming to see you,” Corporal McNichol said after checking in with her men. “A store employee, Karl Prout, and a few others who may or may not have been neighbors. My team has turned them away. But a Lisa Schulz is here and says she can help with the boys.”

Corporal McNichol’s gaze flicked to the far end of the room where Andrew had just run Will through with an imaginary sword. Will clutched at his heart and fell to the floor, his tongue hanging out.

Ronnie wished Jeff were sitting beside her to listen and laugh, so they could feel their love for the boys amplified through each other. Wished he had ever felt the glory of a song in his heart. Wished his sons had inspired him to become the man he wanted his sons to be. Tears fought their way to her worn-out eyes. She had lost Jeff so long ago and was well aware she had stayed in the marriage long past its useful life. She’d done so for her boys, until she couldn’t abide Jeff’s role-modeling a moment longer.

The fact that this day had inserted itself into her life story was one more thing she’d have to deal with on the long, slow road to becoming Ronnie.

But it should never, ever have happened to a child.

“Ronnie?”

“Mmm?”

“This is hard enough on you as it is,” Corporal McNichol said gently. “There are people willing to help. Shall we let her in?”

“Who?”

“Lisa Schulz.”

“Oh. Sure.”

A minute later, Lisa, who lived in the house across the street and was the mother of Will’s friend Brandon, walked into the room wearing white scrubs and a pink sweater. The thought of Lisa being unable to return home after working a twelve-hour night shift at the hospital brought Ronnie a deep sense of shame.

Lisa’s concern, however, was for Ronnie. She offered to take the boys to her mother Beth’s house, a few blocks away. The boys were familiar with the place, a stone house set way back into the woods, and since Beth cared for a constant string of foster children, there would be plenty for them to do. Besides, Lisa said, her mother wanted to help.

“What do you say?”

Ronnie supposed Corporal McNichol was beyond done with the boys. The police had their statements, and at this point, the boys could contribute nothing but distraction.

Lisa and Beth could offer what Ronnie had wanted when she’d first called her mother that morning—for the boys to be removed from unfolding events. This wasn’t their battle. They shouldn’t have to witness it. And she wanted them safe.

Yet with everything in her world upside down, Ronnie wanted to hold her sons close. She wanted the distraction they provided her. While Ronnie hesitated, her mother went to round them up.

Ronnie pulled Lisa aside. “They can play video games but not on the computer. And don’t let them watch TV, okay? They’ve seen enough.” Ronnie was suddenly glad she hadn’t been able to afford to buy the boys cell phones, like Lisa had for Brandon. “And if Brandon comes over—”

“No smartphone.” Lisa gave her another hug. “I’ll take good care of them.”

“Are you coming too, Mom?” Will said.

“They need me here, sweetie. To help Dad. I’m jealous, though. You’re going to have fun.”

“Mr. Eshbach, if you want a change of scene, we can take you with us,” Lisa said. The man wasted no time donning the jacket he’d placed on the back of his chair.

“I don’t know if I should go,” Will said, looking to Ronnie.

“I’ll see you a little later,” she said, trying to be brave. “This is good, that you’re going.”

“But I forgot to tell Dad we’re hatching chicks at school.”

“That’s okay, you can tell him tomorrow.”

“He loves chicks. They make him happy. Make sure you tell him, okay?”

Ronnie couldn’t speak. She pulled him close and rubbed her hand across his thick buzzed hair in the same way that soothed him to sleep at night. The hairs tickled her palm.

From the folds of her sweater came Will’s tiny voice. “Do you think Brandon’s grandmother will let us use the trampoline?”

“Only if you follow the rules. Can you do that?”

He nodded. She kissed his sweaty head. Salt lingered on her lips.

As the group headed for the door, Ronnie pulled Andrew back. “Don’t you leave here without giving me a hug,” she said. She wrapped her arms around him. “Thank you for calling 911 this morning. I’m really proud of you.”

He looked down at the ground, and his cheeks turned red. “You and Will were the ones that kept Dad from driving. I couldn’t move.”

“Whoa. Look at me.”

Andrew lifted his eyes to hers. Those beautiful blueberry eyes, so much like Jeff’s. “We couldn’t handle this alone. We needed help, and you brought it to us. You were like a superhero.” A tear spilled from his eye. Ronnie gave him another quick hug and kissed his damp cheek.

The exodus of the others rumbled through the floor as they headed down the metal staircase. Andrew looked toward the door. “Better go.”

Ronnie nodded and turned back to the big room, not knowing what to do with the emptiness that now touched every part of her body.

Once the boys left the fire hall, it began feeling too much like a tomb for Beverly’s taste. She was getting hungry anyway, so she convinced Janet to cross the street and get some lunch at Perlmutter’s General Store. Standing at the back counter, Beverly watched its wheezy owner, Sophie, dish up some of Janet’s favorite creamy cucumber salad to go with her sandwich, then turn her back and lick the spoon. Even Sophie couldn’t resist her salad’s sweet, vinegary cream. After only a quick rinse under the tap, Sophie hung the spoon back on the wall for reuse.

“I saw that, Sophie.” The woman screwed up her face at Beverly. Beverly had no clue how Janet could continue to eat the stuff, but today Janet needed all the love she could get, and if she wanted Perlmutter’s cucumber salad, that’s what Beverly would give her.

“How’s she doing?” Sophie said.

“I don’t know how she’s still putting one foot in front of the other,” Beverly said.

“I heard on the scanner—”

“Of course you did.” When Beverly had lived in the apartment upstairs more than thirty years ago, the constant stream of alarming situations spewed by Sophie’s police scanner had been the soundtrack of her pregnancy. Who would have thought her baby would grow up and star in one of those dramas?

Sophie reached back to turn it down, but not before Beverly heard it squawk: “That’s negative. The media reports are wrong. Farnham’s still alive.”

Beverly looked for Janet, checking prices down an aisle near the front of the store, before breathing a sigh of relief. Jeff was alive, and Janet hadn’t heard the false report that he might not be. For once, Beverly was thankful for Janet’s growing inattention to detail.

Maybe a newspaper would distract Ronnie. Beverly pulled one from a pile beneath the counter. The headline:
PTSD
Blamed
for
Harrisburg
Murder-Suicide
.

Beverly shoved the newspaper back where she found it. She wasn’t going to pay for that crap. What the hell was the matter with the men in this country? Teaching their younger counterparts how to kill, sending them off to fight wars that scrambled their brains with fear, bringing them home so damaged they thought they had to protect their loved ones against life itself. How were women to raise healthy kids at home with that kind of story for inspiration?

When the creaky wooden floor signaled Janet behind her, Beverly picked up a box of Tootsie Rolls and plopped it on top of the newspaper pile to hide the offending headline. Beverly couldn’t help but wonder, though, what tomorrow’s paper would say.

Janet set a bag of gingersnap cookies on the counter.

“Will that be all?” Sophie looked from one woman to the other. She was a tough little lady—Beverly guessed she had to be to keep her store open 365 days a year—but Beverly perceived some uncharacteristic softness in her face for her old friends. When Beverly nodded, Sophie said, “That’s $24.85, girls. The pickles were free.”

“Hmm,” Beverly said. “For some reason, I thought the cucumber salad was free too.”

Sophie and Beverly stared each other down across the counter. “Fine. $21.20 then.”

Janet reached for her wallet and Beverly said, “No, honey, let me get it.”

“You don’t have to coddle me.” Janet pulled out some bills.

“I’m not.”

“You are too. You called me ‘honey.’” Unable to find the change she needed in her wallet, Janet put a five and four ones on the counter.

“Okay,” Beverly said. Janet had become quite the stickler about money. “I’ll get the rest then.”

But Janet rooted around deep in the bottom of that ridiculously accommodating handbag until she was able to add enough loose change to pay exactly half of the total. “We each have our own things to deal with.”

Outside, the women paused on the stoop and looked back at the firehouse. Its featureless brick facade seemed indifferent to the tension it contained.

“You okay with going over to the park to eat?” Janet said. “I’m not sure I can digest this otherwise.”

The earlier wind had died to a breeze, and Beverly watched it whip strands of Janet’s gray bob across her face. One got stuck in her eyelashes and she made no effort to move it.

Beverly swept it aside for her and hooked her arm through Janet’s. “Come on.”

A half block away and across the street was a tennis court with basketball hoops erected at each end. A lone bench faced the high chain-link fence surrounding it, and the women sat there to eat. Janet pawed around in her handbag and Beverly looked away, knowing Janet would enhance her iced tea from a flask. Every ounce of that stuff was another hundred calories. What that woman could consume.

“Remember when we’d wheel baby Ronnie over here so Jeff could shoot hoops?” Janet said. “He was determined he’d be ready for Jerry’s varsity basketball team when he got to high school.”

Beverly smiled at the memory. “That ball went everywhere but in the basket.”

“I think it went over the fence and bounced into Ronnie’s stroller once.”

“That’s one way to make an impression on a girl.” Beverly unwrapped her sandwich and took a bite, recalling how hard Jeff had worked to win the admiration of his father. If Jerry had only been a little worse at his job, he would have continued to coach a bunch of small-town kids with a passion for the game, and his son may well have made the team. But once he’d turned them into state champions, expectations were raised—as were the height requirements. Jeff couldn’t make the cut. Those who had made the team dwarfed Jeff at Jerry’s funeral, just as they had in high school.

“So much of Ronnie’s early life is a blur,” Beverly said. “I felt so lost and so afraid of my future. I don’t know what I would have done if Sophie hadn’t let me rent a room so cheap.”

Janet skipped the sandwich and went right for the cookies. “Don’t say a thing, Bev. The sandwich was your idea. If the cancer’s going to get me anyway, I might as well enjoy myself on the way out.”

It struck her then: Janet looked old. Beverly wanted to believe age had pounced on her with the shock of today’s events, but she knew that wasn’t how it worked. When was the last time Beverly had really looked at her? Or really thought about how lonely she must be, losing her husband after such a good, long marriage?

Until now, Beverly had not thought of losing her ever-constant friend—whether to age, the cancer bogeyman, or the aftermath of how this day might play out. “This whole thing with Jeff is such a mess. You don’t deserve this.”

Janet drank down some of her doctored iced tea and said quietly, “Ronnie doesn’t either.”

“How can you be so calm? I want to go punch somebody.”

Beverly set her sandwich aside and went for the pickle. Its sour, garlicky flavor sent pricks of pain through her taste buds. A food better suited for a suicide watch.

“I didn’t see this coming,” Janet said. “The second I saw that barricade today, I thought it was Ronnie.”

“Ronnie? She bounces right back from everything.”

“That wasn’t true when she came home from college.”

Janet was right, Beverly thought. But Jeff had changed all that.

“Remember the picnics at the farm? Jeff always went down to Delaware to bring back fresh steamed crabs. We’d make salads, and Jerry would ice the beer in tubs and set up tables in the side yard.”

“Then cover them with Kraft paper,” Janet said.

They could have spread out more at Janet’s, with its larger house and property. But its stable was long empty, and its expanse impersonal. They all knew Jeff and Ronnie’s six acres had the intimacy that said
family
and
home
.

“Remember that one time Jeff boosted you onto Ronnie’s horse and led you around the paddock?” Janet said.

“If only I could forget.”

“You were screaming and giggling and saying, ‘I need a seat belt’!”

“If I’m going to leave the surface of the earth, to this day I’d prefer to do so while slung under a nylon balloon powered by blasts of fire rather than on one of those bucking broncos.”

“The horse was trotting. Slowly.”

“That beast was trying to get me off its back and it almost succeeded.” She looked at Janet out the corner of her eye and enjoyed her smile. “I’d never heard you laugh that hard before. Or since, for that matter.”

“Well.” Janet rubbed her hand across her abdomen. “Life doesn’t always hand you a whole lot of funny.”

Beverly watched the breeze swish through the glorious red leaves in the trees at the far end of the park. “What ever happened to those picnics?”

Janet thought for a while. “I don’t think they’ve had one since Jerry’s been gone.”

Once more, they had circled around to death. Beverly kicked the topic aside and spoke again.

“I’m so worried about the boys. Thank god Ronnie’s a better mother than I was. I knew nothing about life at seventeen.”
Or
death
.

“I was only twenty-one when I got pregnant.”

“But you and Jerry gave Jeff a stable home. You hung in there for the long haul.”

“Togetherness is a sweet-and-sour concept.”

“Speaking of which…” Beverly picked up the salad. “You going to eat this?”

“Maybe not.”

“I’m craving vinegar.” Beverly peeled the top from the cucumber salad and decided that her hunger for life was greater than her fear of death by food-handling infraction. Since neither one of them had thought to ask for a plastic fork, she slurped cucumbers, onions, and sauce from the side of the container until they were gone. “Do you want to get back? In case there’s word?”

“We both have cell phones. If there’s word, they’ll find us.” A sudden wind blew through the deserted park, pushing the baby swing and slapping a page of newspaper against the jail-like bars of the bike rack. “I can’t stand being walled up. I feel more connected to Jeff out here in the air. As though if I keep breathing”—her voice faltered—“he will too.”

Beverly nodded and stood. “Come on, hon—”

“Do not coddle.”

“Then come on, Miss Bitchy Pants. Let’s walk.”

Beverly and Janet made a slow circle of the park before heading back. Janet took Beverly’s arm; the iced tea had her wobbling a bit. Along one side was a Rails-to-Trails conversion with a lofty arch of trees overhead, and as they processed along it, Beverly had the odd sense that they were marrying.

Of course when patterns keep repeating, it’s hard not to recognize them.

She’d divorced Tony when Ronnie was six. Janet had warned her not to marry him in the first place, but the pain of Dom’s loss had endured, and the notion of escaping to the Massachusetts woods with a sweet, pot-smoking poet sounded romantic. Janet could have claimed her right to a big old “I told you so.” But when Beverly and Ronnie emerged from the woods, Janet welcomed them back to Bartlesville without judgment and listened to their stories as if Beverly and Ronnie were swashbucklers who had engaged with every Massachusetts slug, salamander, and chipmunk.

Beverly could see the happiness they brought her in the way she was energized to suggest trips to the zoo and the library and the outlets. She and Janet were no longer student and teacher. They were friends, and when Beverly found a cute little cottage to rent within walking distance, it made them all happy.

That fall Jeff came home from college one weekend to tell his parents about his first few months at Penn State. Ronnie wanted to tell him her woodland stories, and used to Janet’s undivided attention, expected the same kind of audience from Jeff, who at that age had no use for children. So she climbed right onto his lap, reached up with her two little hands, and turned his face toward hers, as if no one else in the room existed.

Beverly smiled. In light of Ronnie and Jeff’s later marriage, this story had become one of Beverly and Janet’s favorite co-creations, embellishing Ronnie’s ringlet curls over the years with a frilly dress, petticoats, and taps on her shiny Mary Janes. Ronnie always laughed at that part, saying she couldn’t imagine doing this because for one thing she’d never wear a dress—but over years of repeated telling, even Jeff remembered it the same way.

Daryl was a tougher good-bye. After Beverly had Teddy, Daryl had moved them to Baltimore to open a practice with a friend from dental school, and despite Beverly’s determination to make a go of it, she was lonely for the kind of companionship only Janet had ever given her. She and Janet entered the cell phone era just to keep the long distance charges under control.

Beverly wasn’t the only one who had trouble adjusting to life in Baltimore. One day, when Teddy had been crying to get up from his nap, Beverly walked into the nursery to find that Ronnie had already pulled the boy from his bed. She was rocking him, telling him not to cry, and promising that they’d find new friends in Maryland someday.

The negotiations were simple, if heartrending: Daryl would give her a nice settlement if Beverly let him raise Teddy. The bargain still sounded crass. Beverly came home without her son, and Ronnie, at thirteen, was as bereaved as if she’d lost her own child. But again, Janet didn’t judge, and begged a new slew of stories from the great wide world. The money allowed Beverly to buy the cottage they’d once rented and her daughter to stay put throughout high school.

Beverly often wondered if she’d done the right thing. But Teddy turned into a fine young man, and Ronnie and Jeff…well. Beverly and Janet were even closer now that they shared two fine grandchildren.

That would have been it for marriages, if Ronnie hadn’t left home for college. For Beverly it was like losing Dom all over again. For months all she could do was put one foot in front of the other out on the roads of Bartlesville. Until she found Jim on the road, equally forlorn after losing his wife a year earlier. He found Beverly fascinating, his interest made her inner fascinator spring back to life, and soon enough their neighborhood wandering turned into a proposal of marriage. Because he was willing to stay in the area, she said yes.

Identifying new distractions became Beverly’s full-time work. As youngest (and let’s face it, the most vivacious) in the group, she would concoct fun double dates, challenging Janet, Jerry, and Jim (he was even a
J
!) to Hawk Mountain hikes, hot air balloon rides, and bowling with fake names (the one Beverly used the most: “Jeverly”). Much to her surprise, she ended up enjoying “the college years” very much. But Beverly could only add a momentary oomph to Jim’s outlook. Hikes soon required first-aid kits too bulky to carry. Hot air balloons? No way. They can snag on live wires; he’d seen it on the news. Bowling required weeks of chiropractic recovery. Beverly saw the writing on the wall and, in the end, had to admit that bonding over sadness might not lay the best marital foundation.