The Most Fun We Ever Had (16 page)

He was on his way down the hall when he happened to look out one of the front windows where the sun was just starting to set, a radioactive orange. There was a green Subaru station wagon parked at the curb, windows rolled down, and the man and woman in the front seat were kissing. He paused to watch, intrigued. The woman had an orange scarf wrapped around her neck like a flag. Some gross neighbors, he assumed. He proceeded to the bathroom.

When he returned, he barely had time to sit down before another guest showed up.

“Hello?” someone called. “Hey, hi, sorry, I—” The woman from the car—untying the silky orange scarf—appeared in the doorway. Liza, apparently—she was pretty, with bright green eyes and a shiny goldish ponytail; he thought Wendy’s assessment of her Band-Aid hair was ungenerous. “Ooh, sorry. Hey, everyone. My meeting ended early and I figured I’d try to make it in time for dinner. Ryan’s—busy tonight.”

“Jonah, this is my sister Liza,” Violet said.

He rose uncertainly, and after he did it he noticed that everyone else was still seated but by then it was too late.

“Great to meet you.” Liza leaned in to hug him, which seemed both weird and generous, her way of making him feel less awkward for standing up. “Sorry to interrupt.”

“That’s okay.” He wondered why the guy from the car—Ryan?—hadn’t joined her.

“Can I get you a drink, sweetie?” Marilyn asked.

“Water’s great; thanks,” Liza said.

“Liza’s pregnant,” Violet explained, as though someone needed an excuse for drinking water.

“Jesus, Viol, he’s not retarded,” Wendy said.

“Wendy,”
said Violet.

“It’s not like it’s a
secret,
” Wendy said.

“Yes, that’s the part of the sentence I was objecting to,” Violet snapped.

They were all giving him a headache. He felt like he was watching a dodgeball game.

“I feel like I’ve killed the mood,” Liza said, sitting down, frowning. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. I hoped you guys might still be getting ready for dinner.”

“We’re on a weirdly speedy schedule tonight,” Wendy said. “Mom’s in schizoid mode.”

“Wendy.”
This time it was David who spoke up.

“Sorry, sorry,” Wendy said, waving a hand. Marilyn returned, and when she’d sat down again, Liza raised her water glass.

“To Jonah. Welcome to the family.” Liza seemed kind of insane too—was anyone in this family
not
insane?—but she was friendly.

“Cheers,” David said.

He lifted his Coke uncertainly, and a chorus of clinking followed.

Dinner consisted of a series of interrupted conversations. They asked him questions and he tried to sound more interesting than he actually was. Wendy talked about her core barre class and Liza talked about her students and Marilyn never stopped moving, refilling wineglasses and stopping trails of wax from dripping onto the tablecloth. Afterward David rose to clear the plates. When Jonah tried to help, as Hanna had always insisted, Wendy touched his hand.

“No, stay,” she said. “Dad’s got it.” So he was left with the women, Violet and Liza and Wendy and Marilyn all staring at him like a horror-movie coven of unassuming kindergarten teachers who were about to disembowel him.

“I’m sure this is a strange thing to say,” Marilyn said, sounding almost kind of dreamy, “but you have my father’s nose, Jonah.”

He squirmed in his chair. “Is that—sorry, is that a—good thing or a bad thing?”

He heard his grandmother laugh for the first time and he decided, sitting in the dining room of their big weird house, that he liked her.

CHAPTER EIGHT

“If it isn’t our lawyer-to-be,” was how her dad answered the phone when Grace called home on a Thursday morning in June. Of course she should’ve nipped things in the bud after she’d lied to Liza. Made up something plausibly stupid,
I was high when I told you that; sorry
or
They sent me an acceptance by mistake
. But she hadn’t been able to bring herself to do it, and so when her parents called her the day after Liza had, she’d lied feebly, shyly, as though being humble, while still not quite
fully
lying:
Yeah, so,
she’d said.
Looks like I’ll be staying out here.
But since then she’d realized how fucking stupid she was to think she could maintain a fiction of this immensity. She lived in a linoleum box. She made $380 per week before taxes. She had, at present, no viable prospects for future endeavors beyond hermitage and transiency. She had somehow botched her life to an almost laughable degree, and then accidentally lied about it, and this phone call was her chance to set the record straight. Her parents loved her unconditionally, and Liza was pregnant now, so they were likely to be distracted, and so less likely to be too angry when Grace revealed that she’d massaged the truth a bit at the outset. There was a crack above the door to her bedroom that was starting to look moldy, black specks in the bend where the wall met the ceiling. What did asbestos look like? Could you
see
asbestos?

“How’s tricks, Goose?” her dad asked.

Tricks are not going particularly well at the moment, actually.
She swallowed. “Okay. How are you?”

Her dad paused. “Honestly, sweet?” he said. It startled her. She wasn’t aware of her father ever being
dis
honest, but the prospect made her uncomfortable. “There’s kind of a lot going on around here.” He sounded tired and old. “With your sisters. Plus all these little things around the house. We’re having a hell of a time with one of the ginkgo trees in the backyard. A busy time, oddly.”

“Oh.” Her
how are you
s were rarely met, by her father, with anything but
oh fine, tell me about yourself
s. He didn’t usually
talk
about himself. It occurred to her that it must be hard to be the only man in a family of women. Hard to get a word in edgewise. Hard to prioritize your own emotions over those of everyone else. Hard, perhaps, to acknowledge those emotions instead of putting them perpetually on the back burner. She was moved to prod him along: “Is everything…okay? With Liza? And—Violet’s—”

“Jonah,” he said. “Yes. Relatively, I guess. Lize is—healthy. A little—worn out. You heard about her promot—”

“Yes,” she said.

“And Jonah—he’s a nice kid. Funny. Sharp. You’re really going to like him, Goose.”

She felt strangely hurt by this assessment, by her father referring to someone else—someone younger than she was—as
sharp
and
funny.

“We all had dinner last week,” he said, not realizing he was rubbing salt in the wound. “Minus you, of course.”

She was still—alongside her envy—concerned about the note in her father’s voice. She recalled a specific moment in her childhood, riding in the car on the expressway with her dad, her sudden awareness that he was a person, too, capable of doubt and weakness. “And are—
you
okay, Dad?”

But then there it was, the response she’d been expecting earlier: her father laughed. “Oh, sure, Goose. I’m just fine. Enough about me. What’s new in your world? Gearing up for school? Mom’d like a coffee mug from the bookstore, whenever you have a spare minute. She recently learned that your mascot is a duck; is that true?”

They’d googled her fake school. They actually believed that she was someone who was capable of normal, upward-moving behavior. Picturing her mom doing image searches on their ancient desktop PC for the beanie-clad and uncreatively named Oregon Duck just about did her in, and she sank Indian-style onto the kitchen floor.

She’d been crying a lot lately. It typically happened at convenient times, when she was away from the concerned eyes of others, but now she felt the telltale throbbing in her throat. Recently she’d felt more achingly alone than she thought was humanly possible, walking the streets alone, waking up alone, making solo trips to the weird off-brand grocery store, where she bought wine and honey and alfalfa sprouts like a biblical widow.

“Grace?” he said, concerned. “Gracie, are you okay? What is it?”

She decided, then, that she couldn’t do it, that she couldn’t bear to worry her father more, her father, who was always on top of things but who now, for the first time, sounded truly overwhelmed. How could she justify, upon reflection, adding even
more
stress to his life? He’d just retired and was supposed to be doing retired-person things; her dad who was older than everyone else’s dad, golfing or day-trading or solving crossword puzzles. Yet he was still clearly devoting all of his energy to her sisters, and would dredge up more energy to devote to her, if she asked, and it didn’t seem fair to put him in that position.

How in the hell had she gotten so far off-course? Other people her age were in graduate school. Other people her age were getting engaged, were convincingly sporting business-casual outfits, were romping around exotic lands with boyfriends who were rugged enough to wear the straps of their backpacks clipped across their chests without inciting mockery. Other people her age had
careers;
other people her age had domestic partners with whom they shared pets. And then there was Grace, who had an apartment that looked like the room where Nosferatu kept his victims. Grace, who’d eaten leftover brown rice
with her hands
for dinner last night because she owned only a single fork and was too depressed to wash it. Grace, whose only romantic prospects existed in the form of accidentally answered sales calls and pleasantries about the weather with the hot, red-bandanna-wearing bike messenger who sometimes delivered packages to her boss. Grace, who’d half-assed her law school applications and then—surprise, surprise—been rejected from every single program.

Then again: she wasn’t as bad off as
Wendy
. And she wasn’t doing anything as serious as Liza was doing, so the stakes were lower. And this
certainly
didn’t match the high-level duplicity of Violet’s early twenties.

She swallowed down her crying. “No, I’m great,” she said. “Just tired.”

Other people went to bed at reasonable hours. Grace drank wine in her bed and drifted off watching
Gossip Girl.

Other people—the crux—probably didn’t miss their parents this much. She could picture her dad leaning against the kitchen counter, drinking lukewarm coffee, scratching Loomis’s neck with his free hand. And this was what worried her the most: nothing had ever felt as comfortable, as easy, as
good
as being with her parents, her
family.
No one, it seemed, would ever regard her with the same enthusiastic awe as her mother; the same quiet, feverish pride as her father. It aroused concern within that she was slated for a lifetime of disappointment from the outside.

She wished she was with her dad instead of just on the phone and that she could curl up into the fetal position against him as she had the day she was born, when it was just the two of them, her mother elsewhere, bleeding, somewhere between life and death. It had always terrified her to picture that day but now she thought of her father’s side of the story, how he must have felt to be sent into an empty room, without his partner, burdened suddenly with the sole responsibility of Grace herself. He’d moved her into her freshman dorm nearly five years ago.

“It’s what I’m here for,” he’d said when she thanked him, as she watched him struggle to assemble her assortment of IKEA furniture. “It’s in my dad contract.”

She wished she had such a concrete favor to ask of him now. She missed being someone’s responsibility. But didn’t her parents deserve one child they could be proud of? When you were the youngest kid, the bar was set differently, influenced by everyone who had come before. You got points simply for not dropping the ball
quite
as far as your older sisters had. And Grace had always performed accordingly. She couldn’t imagine what it would do to them if they learned she’d committed an offense of this level. She needed some more time to think it through, to figure out a smoother way to extract herself. Then, she told herself, she’d come clean.

“I have to get to work, Daddy.”

“Godspeed, Goose,” he said.

Two days later, a FedEx envelope was delivered to her door. Inside were five brand-new ATM twenties, accompanied by a handwritten note on a Mallory’s Hardware Post-it:
Goose, Take yourself out to dinner. Keep up the good work. We love you. Dad and Mom.

It was written in her father’s hand and it made her cry for forty-five minutes.

—

T
here was a surprising amount of information to be found on the Internet about arboreal illness. It had become one of David’s go-to morning activities, after his wife left for work: cup of coffee with the dog on the sunporch, laptop on the old picnic table, page after page of root-knot nematodes, phytophthora rot treatments, and slugs. Marilyn had been encouraging him to explore his interests, and this made him feel the same kind of energy he felt as a diagnostician, checking things off the list
: vascular, infectious, toxic, autoimmune…
He was concerned about Gracie, who’d sounded unusually lost when she called that morning, but he knew what Marilyn would say—that they needed to let her grow up, find her own way—and so he pushed the thought from his mind in pursuit of more concrete knowledge. The leaves on the ginkgo hadn’t come in as they normally did; he’d begun collecting leaf samples, lining them up on the kitchen windowsill. He was hesitant to call an arborist—it seemed too bourgeois, a frivolous waste of money—and was trying to solve the mystery himself.

If the tree were dying of natural causes—sinister midwestern slugs, a bad reaction to last year’s unusually cold winter—then he would cede one to nature. The ginkgo had been enormous back when he and Marilyn met; perhaps it had simply lived out its time. The quietude of his days afforded him thoughts like these, psychological measurement of organic matter. He didn’t
want
the tree to be dead, certainly, but if it was, he would accept it with serenity—he also, sometimes, for something to do, thumbed through his wife’s new-agey mindfulness books.