The Most Fun We Ever Had (44 page)

Wendy, compromising, leaned back against the built-in flower box on the porch.

“I could never despise you, Mom,”
her mother said, playacting now, embarrassing herself. Pretending they were a normal mother and daughter, that jokes like this could be thrown around casually between them. She seemed to realize that Wendy wasn’t going to smile and she dropped the act. “We need to talk about the college thing, Wendy.”

“What’s to talk about? I’m not going.”

“
Yet.
You’re not going yet.”

“I’m not going ever. It’s stupid. I’m not going to go spend another four years with a bunch of maladjusted brats just so I can get a crazy-expensive piece of paper and become, like, that narcoleptic lady who does the filing in Dad’s office.”

She couldn’t be sure, but she thought her mom might have almost smiled at that last bit.

“You can become whatever you want, sweetheart.” Her mother almost never called her “sweetheart” and they both seemed to realize this at the same time; Marilyn blushed and Wendy scowled. “We’ll do some research. You can apply for next year. Maybe take a community college class. Take some time to get your bearings and figure out what you’d like to do.”

“I don’t want to do anything.”

“I know that’s not true,” her mother replied. “Look, honey—” Again they both bristled at the
honey;
her mother was off her game. “I had no idea what I wanted to do when I started school. And then I discovered how much I loved to read. And once you find that thing—it can be the tiniest thing, Wendy—possibilities start opening up. You start thinking about your life in a different way. For me it was— There was teaching, or editorial work, even
writing,
I thought about. There were options. Things that I never would have seen had I not gone to college.”

“Quoth the woman who dropped out of college to follow a man,” Wendy said, and she watched her mother’s face fall, a familiar expression that suggested she’d just been cracked over the head with a baseball bat. “I’m just
saying,
like, you’re not exactly a paradigm for why college is the answer. Fine—you found some stuff you thought was interesting. But then you left it all behind and married Dad and you—whatever, you have us.” It occurred to her that if anyone ever presented a similar situation to her—
forgo typical young adult dalliances and look: you could be living a boring-as-fuck middle-class life with the world’s biggest asshole as your teenage daughter!
—she would slit her wrists.

“There’s more to it than this,” her mom said, raising her hands to indicate the spread surrounding her, the brick and the geraniums and Grace’s finger paintings taped to the front door. “Of course I don’t regret any of my decisions. But I’m grateful I got those few years as a student. They did me a world of good.”

Wendy saw, before her mother, that Grace was at the front door, trying to bust her way out, fumbling with the knob.

“Mom,” she said, just as her sister tumbled outside, ponytail askew, awash in that three-year-old energy that Wendy found at once adorable and exhausting.

“Mama,” Grace said, throwing her arms around their mother’s neck. She was surprised to see her mother’s face fall again. She’d never really seen her get annoyed with Grace.

“Hey, my pumpkin.” She touched Grace’s arm. “We’re right in the middle of talking.”

More surprising still: her mom apparently considered this conversation more important than whatever Grace was bringing outside.

“Mama, I can’t find Scotty and Liza said he’s in the laundry but he’s not.” Grace buried her face in their mother’s shoulder, and Wendy wondered if she herself had ever been so offhandedly affectionate as a child.

“He’s in the dryer, sweet thing, but Wendy and I are talking right now and I need you to not interrupt.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Gracie,” her mom said, her voice suddenly stern. That was more like it, more like what Wendy had been reared on. “Honey, your sister and I are having a private conversation and you just interrupted. I need you to go back inside. I’ll be in soon and I’ll get Scotty out of the dryer.”

Wendy and Marilyn both watched Grace with apprehension: she was unused to being scolded. Grace looked hurt at first, and her eyes widened in a way that might have been tearful, but then she righted herself, one tiny hand still resting on their mother’s shoulder.

“Okay,” she said, stepping back.

“Give me a hug, gosling,” Marilyn said, and she twisted to pull Grace into her. Wendy watched them, intertwined, and wondered again whether her mother had ever made the same request of her.
Give me a hug, Wendy.
It didn’t seem likely. “Good waiting, sweetheart. We’ll be in soon.” Grace tiptoed inside and Marilyn fixed her gaze on Wendy again. “Here’s my proposal,” she said. “Stay home one more year. Apply anywhere that interests you. Wait and see what happens. And I’ve thought about it and I’d like to pay you to babysit Gracie a few afternoons a week during the school year, if you’re interested.”

She was never asked to babysit Grace. “Are you joking?”

“I’m not,” said her mom. “You’ve had a long year, honey, and I think it could do us all some good to take a breather on this one.”

It was a surprisingly gentle approach, but she couldn’t bring herself to express any kind of gratitude. Another year at home sounded like hell. She would still always be the fuckup who’d not bothered to apply to college the first time around. “Alternately, I could just leave,” she said.

“Alternately with what money?”

She shrugged, raised an eyebrow, tried hard to suggest to her mom that perhaps she had secret and untoward channels of income, that perhaps she had entrepreneurial inklings after all.

“Try it through the summer.”

And because she didn’t have a rebuttal, because she didn’t have any connections or anywhere else to go, because it seemed for the first time in a long time that her mother didn’t actually hate her, Wendy agreed.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Liza was trying not to dwell on the complete egregiousness of the fact that she had been asked to stay at the house on Fair Oaks and keep an eye on Jonah while her parents had one of their clandestine sex weekends. She was trying not to get riled up over the fact that her parents had not asked either of her sisters—because though Violet, the boy’s mother, had maintained a sociopathically troubling lie about his existence for fifteen years, and Wendy, jobless and loaded, could barely be trusted to care for a cactus, both were technically more able to step in than Liza, who was eight months pregnant, six weeks single and deep in the throes of a hellish fall semester. And yet her older sisters had won again. She was curled in her parents’ bed, trying to focus her thoughts on something serene—the sunrise, the snuffling of Loomis’s exhalations from where he lay on the floor beside her—when her morning sickness reared its head again, a familiar, belated and unwelcome guest.

She knelt before the toilet in her parents’ bathroom, waiting for the next eruption. The last time she’d been sick here had to have been in the nineties. Adolescent stomach bugs and her mother’s washcloths on her forehead, blessedly cool. Simpler times.

“I—uh—sorry.” There had never been any doubt that Jonah had Sorenson genes; they appeared constantly in the form of his social inelegance.

She turned to the door. “Oh, Christ, it’s Friday. It’s your Krav Maga day, isn’t it?” She was unused to having to consider the schedules of others. “Listen, I—I’ll take the train to work. You can take my car.” Distracted by the buzz in her esophagus and the bladder acrobatics of the baby, she didn’t notice his second’s hesitation before he nodded. “Keys are on the table by the door.”

She practically fanned him out, and when she heard the door click behind him, her stomach reacted compliantly, heaving, bringing her once again up onto her knees, the baby romping carelessly somewhere southward.

—

L
ake Michigan in late fall: too cold for swimming, of course; an oversight on Marilyn’s part (though she’d tried, valiantly, wading in to midcalf) but fabulously unpopulated, pitch-black by a quarter to six, quiet save for the rhythmic rolling of the waves against the beach. The house they’d rented was old and drafty, and as David made a fire their first night, she stopped what she was doing to watch him, kneeling before the hearth, poking at the pile of wood with a raccoonish curiosity. She was giddy with the freedom of being somewhere different, alone with him; she awakened him at sunrise to make love and then dragged him out to the pier, despite the cold, with a thermos of coffee and an armload of scratchy afghans from the bedroom. She built them a sort of nest on the atrophied boards and coaxed him down beside her, pink light beginning to bleed orange onto the horizon. She shivered, and he pulled her against him.

“Someone’s in high spirits,” he said.

“What, is your coffee not strong enough?”

He laughed. “I just haven’t seen you like this in a while.”

“Oh, God. Are you in a mood?”

“No, I’m not in a
mood,
” he said, “I’m just not feeling as carefree as you are, I guess.”

She moved away to look at him. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Oh, for God’s— Honey, I wasn’t— Forget it, okay?”

“Do you realize this is the first time in my life when nobody
needs
anything from me? Aren’t we supposed to be enjoying these years? Haven’t we earned that? We’ve raised four kids into adulthood. Can’t we feel a little bit smug about that?”

“Well, but they’re not exactly— I mean, have you taken a look at them lately?”

“They’re adults.”

“So we’re celebrating the fact that we didn’t kill them during their upbringing? That’s a pretty low bar, kid.”

She laughed in spite of herself. “I guess I feel like it’s up to them now,” she said. “The onus is— I mean, we can coddle them until we’re blue in the face but the fact is that they’re all on their own. There’s not much we can do anymore but love them and hope for the best.”

“Big talk from the woman who walked Gracie into her classroom until she was ten.”

“
Gracie
was having terrible anxiety. And now she’s getting a law degree, which is precisely my point. We did all we could and now I feel some license to take a backseat.”

“While our single, pregnant daughter takes care of the teenage boy our other daughter secretly gave up for adoption?”

She closed her eyes. “We’ve been through this, haven’t we?”

“I’m worried about Liza,” he said. “And Jonah. And Violet. So my ability to enjoy this
freedom
is hindered by that a little bit, yes.”

She was, of course, tempted to shake his shoulders and say,
Cede me this one; let me enjoy a single goddamn sunrise.
Because if you opened the gates to Liza and Jonah and Violet, Wendy and Gracie would come flooding through as well, all the girls, and their partners and their children and their anxieties and shortcomings, every lie they’d ever told, every mistake they’d ever made, and how those things could somehow be traced back to Marilyn herself—their progenitor, the easy target—and the wave would engulf her entirely, disastrously, forever.

“I’m sorry,” he said, surprising her, pulling her close again. “Liza’s been on my mind.”

She imagined the fluctuating dynamics in their marriage flying around them like molecules, shape-shifting genetic code.
You’re worried. Now I am. Now it’s your turn again.
Colorful protein pearls rearranging at a moment’s notice to accommodate David’s nerves or her own.

“She’s going to be okay, isn’t she?” he asked.

“I assume so,” she said mildly. “Though you know what they say about assuming.” She paused. “Oh, she will, won’t she?” The pearls, glittering between them, reflecting off the surface of the lake, shifting once again. “Lord. They’re all going to be okay?”

“You’re allowed to enjoy yourself,” he said.

“
We
are,” she said after a minute. “Forty-eight hours without us isn’t going to kill them.”

He smiled. “Come here,” he said, maneuvering upright and tugging at her hand. This necessary reminder, so often forgotten, that they existed beyond their children. When she rose, he kissed her, pulling her to him against the November cold. The waves lapped around them. She wove her arms into his coat. Together, they went inside.

—

L
iza never left her phone on during class, trying to set an example for her sea of dead-eyed Millennial drones, so she was delayed in seeing the line of missed calls—
Mom, Dad, Mom, Dad, Dad, Dad
—and the series of all-caps and unnecessarily signed texts from her father.

CALL ME PLEASE, LOVE DAD

URGENT, CALL ME OR MOM…DAD

WHERE ARE YOU? DAD

She felt suddenly faint and sank into her desk chair. Someone was dead. Everyone was dead. She could feel her pulse like it was another body sitting on her chest. She dialed her father, whispering
no no no no no
while she listened to the ringing.

“Liza, thank God.”

“Dad, what’s going on; why are you— Is Mom— I didn’t— Daddy, is everything—”

“Everything’s okay, Liza. Calm down. Everything’s fine.”

“Is Mom—”

“Mom’s right next to me on the couch. Lize, honey, did you let Jonah use your car?”

“What?” The room was spinning in a different way now, more whimsically, routine dizziness instead of the fatal kind. “Yes. I was— I wasn’t feeling well this morning.”

“He’s fifteen, Liza. He doesn’t even have his learner’s permit. They took him to the police station. They thought he’d stolen it, for Christ’s sake.”