The Far End of Happy (16 page)

Beverly plopped a paper bag down on the table beside her daughter. “Here, Sunshine. You should eat.”

Ronnie waited until Janet walked down the aisle between tables toward the restroom. “Who paid for it?”

“Why on earth does that matter?” Beverly said. “We both love you.”

Ronnie looked Beverly in the eye. “Who paid for it?”

“We split it.”

“Your idea?”

“It was Jan’s, but I don’t see what difference—”

Ronnie unwrapped the hoagie, ripped the bun in half, and handed back the rewrapped portion.

“What’s gotten into you?”

“See if I have this right. While you watched, Janet counted out her pennies to pay for this.”

Apparently Beverly hadn’t done too well at disguising her expression. Ronnie was right on the money.

“Well, guess what, I still can’t be bought. I will not let a Farnham throw money at me again and let it stand in for love. She can keep her half of the damn sandwich.”

Ronnie bent over some sort of drawing.

“All those circles in the rectangle. What are they supposed to be?” Beverly said.

“They’re chickens in the barn, thank you.”

Beverly chuckled. “You don’t have to snap.”

“I’m sorry, Mother. My armed and dangerous husband is standing off against a shitload of police with sniper rifles and my horses are frantic because they haven’t eaten and my kids have been shipped off to a house deemed safer than their own home. Oh, never mind, that was the exact same situation an hour ago, when you went out for a spot of lunch.”

Beverly opened her mouth to speak, then caught her lip between her teeth.

“What?”

“I can’t go through this alone,” Beverly said.

“
You
can’t? Wow. This is truly a proud daughter moment.”

“Look, Ronnie. There are some things I need to tell you.” Beverly looked at Corporal McNichol. “Can I have a minute with my daughter?”

Corporal McNichol took the revised drawing from Ronnie. “I’ll go check in with my men.”

Beverly waited until the corporal had left the room. “You have his eyes, you know.”

Ronnie tensed.

“And that same determined set of jaw that frankly scares the crap out of me. But I like to believe you have a touch of my spunk too.”

Ronnie spread her hands on the table and looked at them for several painfully quiet moments. “Do you know how many times in my life I would have loved to hear more about my father?” she finally said. “And I’m not even talking about all the times I asked. I’m talking about when we left Teddy and Daryl. Or when Jeff and I married. Or when my sons were born, and I wondered if either of them looked like him. But instead you’d tell me now, when I will always associate his memory with this heartless room and Jeff’s suicide standoff?” She looked up at Beverly with that determined jaw in full display. “Why?”

“Well…” Beverly was not overly eager to dive right into that part. She had carried some things alone, for so long, she didn’t know if it was wise to share the burden. Yet her daughter was hurting in a way all too familiar, and Beverly knew Ronnie needed a scrap of something new to hang on to. “You have time on your hands, don’t you?”

Ronnie kicked out the chair across from her. Beverly took it.

Beverly had long imagined this moment, despite her inability to bring it to fruition. She’d hoped the sharing might be more companionable, but that was the way with secrets, she supposed; the longer words stayed buried, the harder they clung to their grave. Was now the right time to exhume such a story?

Ronnie again looked at the table. “If he raped you, just tell me and I don’t need to hear any more.”

Beverly took in a sharp breath. “Is that what you think happened?”

“It’s crossed my mind. You’ve kept everything about him from me, as if he were some sort of a monster. As if you feared the part of me that might exhibit the same qualities.”

“For one thing,” Beverly said, twirling her small diamond, “you don’t wear a promise ring your whole life long from a man who raped you.”

Ronnie pulled her mother’s hand toward her and looked at the ring anew. “You told me it was just a trinket.”

“It is a trinket,” Janet said, joining them. “Look at the size.”

“Now, Janet, hush. It may be little, but it’s real.”

“So you’re expecting he still might come back?” Ronnie said. “You told me he was dead.”

Beverly sighed and shook her head. When she and Ronnie had left Tony in the Massachusetts woods, and Beverly was missing Dom something fierce and needed to talk about him, she’d told Ronnie that he had died of a stroke when she was two years old. When Ronnie was a teen and questioning how such a young man had died of a stroke, Beverly had changed it to an aneurysm. Janet had called Dom’s death the “ever-changing story.” And Beverly had learned to keep her mouth shut. “The end’s no good, so let me start at the beginning.”

Janet propped her chin in her hand. “Curious to hear this story.”

Beverly sank into her chair as if its metal surface had softened. This was going all wrong. She shouldn’t have said anything. Sharing Dom with anyone was fraught with complication, but if their own daughter rejected the idea of him—or rejected her because of him—the tender love she’d nourished all these years would wither and be gone.

Ronnie put up an open hand in surrender, then sat back to listen.

“You remember Grandpa Saylor, Ronnie, and how strict he was. He wouldn’t let me go down the shore with my friends on vacation because they were all seniors and I was only a junior. Well…I went anyway.” Beverly then filled in all the missing details in the story of how she met Ronnie’s father.

• • •

One night, when the girls were eating dinner at Veronica’s Grotto, a handsome stranger sat eating nachos and nursing a beer at the next table. Beverly kept sneaking looks at him. He had this aura of sadness that kept begging her attention. When her friends noticed, they dared her to ask him to join them. It didn’t take much for Beverly to consider it the ultimate flirting challenge.

He wouldn’t join their group but instead asked Beverly to join him. And once Dom pushed his plate of nachos toward Beverly, there was no turning back. She couldn’t even say how long after that her friends left. She and Dom talked for hours. It was as if he’d stored all his words in a secret vault and opened it just for her. He offered to buy her a drink, but since she had just turned seventeen and was what some might call a runaway, she didn’t want to push her luck. When the place got crowded and hearing each other grew difficult, Beverly suggested a walk on the beach.

At the ocean’s edge, perhaps aided by the anonymity darkness conferred, Dom told her about surviving the car crash that had killed his parents. Their deaths clung to him so tightly he couldn’t stop questioning why he had been spared, and before they ever touched, Beverly already knew she would be the one to kiss all his pain away. They walked for miles along the shore that night, and Beverly taught him all of the words to “On Top of Spaghetti.” His voice was so warm and robust he made the ditty sound like an aria; she expected a pod of dolphins to follow along or a whale to breach. He even joined her in a little dance to the beach gods that brought him so far from that dark place and into the moonlight that he was laughing.

His laughter made Beverly feel so powerful and alive. And when they reached his house and he invited her in, and she saw the little dinette and comfy leather couch, she felt like she was home. She knew who she was meant to be. She could never make her father happy, but she could make Dom happy, and that became her new goal. She stopped by the condo to pick up her things and say good-bye to her girlfriends, and when they returned to Pennsylvania, she did not.

Her father was livid. During a loud phone call during which he invoked both God and Lucifer, he said she’d made her bed and would have to lie in it. She was more than happy to take that advice.

Then the missed period. She and Dom were so happy playing house that she didn’t fear telling him she was pregnant. It was the natural extension of their intimacy. Beverly curled up on the leather couch, making lists of everything they’d need for the baby—the bare minimum, of course. It would be like camping, she told him. They could line a drawer with a blanket for a crib. Cut bibs and washcloths from old towels.

But she could not get him to join her on that couch. He came up behind it, put his arms around her, and said, “Don’t worry. We’ll be fine. Don’t worry.”

Well, she hadn’t been worried at all. That’s when she knew he was. Beverly assured him she’d get a job, that the clinic said she was healthy. Their two incomes would keep them afloat.

In the beginning of August, Dom lost his delivery job. With the tourist season drawing to a close, he couldn’t find work. His mood grew a whole lot darker.

Then one day in late August, he returned home from the unemployment office all chipper, said he’d figured everything out. It was so good to have him back again; Beverly wanted to spend every free moment with him, but that wasn’t his plan. He wanted her to go back to Pennsylvania and finish high school. But first he got down on one knee and gave her the little diamond.

• • •

“With tears in his eyes,” she told Ronnie, “he told me that no other woman would ever have his heart.”

“He was romantic,” Ronnie said. “And dutiful. And caring. Like Jeff used to be. And the ring is sweet, Mom. I don’t know why you never told me.”

Oh, Ronnie. The things I haven’t told you.

“Leaving him was like leaving half of myself behind,” Beverly said. “But I went back home, like Dom suggested, to finish school. I was only under my father’s roof for one night before he called me a tramp. Even though you were still a little notion in my belly, I figured you had ears that didn’t need to put up with that kind of language, so I walked out, with no real plan of where I was heading. If a certain typing teacher hadn’t found me a cheap room to rent, you might have been born on the street.” She tilted her head toward Janet.

“It’s a good thing my other students weren’t such a handful.” Janet parted her lips, almost forming a smile.

“You were harder on me than anyone else in the class, remember?”

“Of course not. I had one hundred budding secretaries each year depending on me for their livelihoods.”

“You gave me a D.”

“I was kind. By the end of the first quarter, you hadn’t yet qualified for an F in either speed or accuracy.”

“You said you didn’t remember being hard on me.”

“Didn’t remember, trying to forget—it’s all the same. What did you need typing for anyway? You can write Dear John letters longhand.”

“I know enough about my mother’s failed marriages,” Ronnie said. “Let’s get back to the romantic part. You said my father had a plan. What was it?”

A plan was exactly what Beverly had failed to have when she launched this story. She looked at her daughter, her eyes now brighter than they’d been all day. This had been a mistake. Beverly back-pedaled.

“He planned to come spend Thanksgiving with me,” she said weakly.

“That’s it? Mom, seriously, you have to work on your storytelling skills.”

Beverly could feel the story sinking back into her. It had grown used to her innermost recesses and was not quite ready to leave the dark.

“I know that look,” Ronnie said. “Don’t leave me hanging. Please. Whatever it is, just tell me.”

Suddenly it was all Beverly could do not to cry.

“Mom, no. You can’t jerk me around like this. What did you want to tell me?”

Janet reached over and touched Ronnie’s wrist. “This is the most she’s said about Dom in more than thirty years. It’s hard on her. Give her a bit more time.”

“Just what I needed,” Ronnie muttered as she stood. “More waiting.”

Beverly watched her daughter lap the room. She understood Ronnie’s impatience. But experience told Beverly that it was the tension between the beginning and the end that held all of life’s possibilities and the full array of her imaginings. Once the questions ended and the knowing began, there was no turning back.

And the knowing could leave you hurting like hell.

For a moment, with her curls back and those bright eyes trained on her mother, Janet remembered what Ronnie looked like when she was little. Janet had been jealous of Beverly back then. She had always wanted a girl.

Like all the Hoyer family, Janet’s mother, Amelia, believed in the power of women. Along with the Bible and marriage, they put their faith in a woman’s tight-fisted management of her husband’s paycheck—to great success.

When a few missteps had Janet threatening this matriarchal manifesto, Amelia took measures to set them right. When Janet fell in love with Jerry, who couldn’t afford college, they paid his way so he could have a reliable career. And when Janet got pregnant while still in school, Amelia paid for their wedding, gave them a place to live, and nursed her after the birth so that Jerry’s paycheck could be invested and put to immediate work. Although Janet tested her mother’s limits by skimping on prayer, in every other way, she had taken her place in her mother’s lineage and felt empowered by the way the family nest egg had grown on her watch.

After Jeff married Fay Sickler, Janet expected heirs and was surprised when year after year went by without the arrival of one single grandchild. Not that Janet cared for Fay; she hadn’t liked her one bit. Jeff had met her in a barn, where she was mucking out stalls in exchange for free board, which said a lot. After all of the work it took to get Jeff through high school and into college, Fay’s unrealistic demands had forced him into leaving his respectable job as a corn broker to tend bar. Janet was proud he’d advanced to manager, but those late nights and rowdy people—what kind of life was that?

Truth be told, she thought Jeff might be too skittish to have children. After he and Fay had bred one of her mares, Jeff had called Janet from the barn when the horse started pushing. When Janet got home from work, she went straight to the stable. “Oh my, twins,” she said, before realizing they were still as still could be. Both females. Jeff sat in the corner of the stall, crying. He never again tried to breed.

But he seemed to set his disappointments behind him when he married Ronnie. They got right to work spiffing up the house and trying to get pregnant. They had two quick losses. Janet watched Jeff carefully, fearing he might give up. But Ronnie wanted kids, and wanted Jeff to be their father, and, well, if sheer determination can turn a sperm and an egg into a child, then she pulled it off. Then and now, Andrew felt like a miracle. A boy miracle.

Ronnie only wanted two children, so when the next one came along, Janet had one last shot at a female heir. The child took its sweet time entering the world. They’d gone to the hospital at six a.m., and when she didn’t get a call all day, Janet was gripped with the memory of those stillborn fillies.

Who doesn’t fear the worst when she reaches for a ringing phone after midnight? She almost swallowed the word: “Hello?”

“Mom, it’s Jeff. It’s another boy!”

What was with all these boys? “Is he okay?”

“Perfect. Ronnie did such a good job. She’s pretty tired, but she wants to tell you something.”

“Janet?”

“Congratulations, Ronnie. Have you thought up a name yet?”

“That’s why I’m calling. We’re naming him William Hoyer Farnham.”

Janet burst into tears. She had no idea she even held so much emotion inside her.

“Janet?” The phone jostled, then Jeff’s voice. “Mom, are you there? Did you hear her?”

“I heard,” Janet managed to squeak out. “Thank you for using Hoyer. It means so much to me.”

The next morning, before she even visited the baby, she stopped in to see Mr. Dempsey at the bank. Someone needed to ensure her grandsons’ futures.

Within a month, she, Jerry, Jeff, and Ronnie all met at the bank while Beverly watched the boys. Once Mr. Dempsey had assembled enough comfy chairs so they could all sit, he said, “How much do you want to invest, Mrs. Farnham?”

All eyes turned to Janet. This pleased her. Everyone knew she was the one with the power in this meeting. “Forty thousand.”

Jerry sank down in his chair and ran his hand over his mouth. For much of his career, that had equaled his annual salary.

Jeff gave Janet an approving smile; Ronnie caught her breath. “That’s too generous.” Jeff put his hand on Ronnie’s arm.

“Forty thousand total, or forty thousand each?” Mr. Dempsey said.

“Each.”

Ronnie put her hand to her chest. Janet enjoyed the entire show. She knew Beverly did not have access to such sums. Beverly didn’t speak of money at all, fearing that hard analysis would extinguish whatever magic it was that had kept her family afloat all these years. When she had finished high school typing, Beverly would have been smart to take bookkeeping from Janet as well.

Janet told the banker that investing in stocks or mutual funds—yes, even eighteen years’ worth, she said when he questioned her—was too risky, given the current economic climate. And since savings account earnings were laughable these days, she preferred a product you could count on. She chose to invest the money in whole life insurance on Jeff’s life, with each of his sons as a beneficiary. The principal would grow slowly, Mr. Dempsey explained, but steadily. The boys could cash out the policy when they went to college. If Jeff should die before then, the boys would inherit plenty to see them through school.

“Who will you name as a second beneficiary?” he said.

“Why do you need a second?” Janet said.

“If, God forbid, something happens to Jeff while the children are still minors, the money has a clear legal path to the second person.”

The question threw Janet into a tizzy. She glanced over at her husband. Jerry was not a good choice; that money had done well for generations in female hands. It was hard enough to entrust the money to Jeff, but what could she do? She had not been blessed with a daughter.

Janet felt everyone watching her. She looked at Ronnie, as close to a daughter as she would ever have. But she and Jeff had spent so much money on the renovation already, burning through their entire inheritance from Janet’s brother in California on the kitchen and a new car. Fifty thousand gone, Jeff saying he’d spent it for Ronnie. Janet feared the girl didn’t know how to protect her finances.

When Janet didn’t respond, Mr. Dempsey prompted, “That would typically be the children’s mother.”

After another awkward pause, Janet decided you couldn’t go around throwing large sums of money at people who aren’t blood.

Jerry hung his head so he wouldn’t have to watch.

Janet said, “Put my name down.”

If Jeff died today, the money Janet had invested for the boys would come right back into her pocket.

And her choice had proven wise, given that Ronnie was leaving the marriage. Yet now the victory felt hollow. What good had decades of scrimping come to if it couldn’t save her son’s life?