The Year That Follows (9 page)

The waiter clears their plates, offers coffee, dessert, and Tommy cajoles her into sharing a piece of chocolate cake, saying after the waiter leaves, “I know you like chocolate,” though really it’s something he
knew
, he knows almost nothing now. Not that a taste for chocolate is something you lose, though what changes, what remains, she can’t say. She knew Tommy at seventeen, eighteen, and this puts her at ease. Most men wouldn’t want a woman to know their teenage selves, but he has confidence enough for that. He is still broad-shouldered, athletic in his movements. His eyes, she thinks, are lighter now, still expressive. As a boy he was almost beautiful, but he’s evolved into something more … She searches for the words, what she’ll tell Tonya.
Hearty. Masculine
. Cat can see a tiny bit of chest hair just above the top button of his shirt. He had very little in
1976
. She is curious. Aroused, even.

“What?” he asks.

She shakes her head.

“You’re blushing,” he says.

“I don’t blush.” Even she knows this is a lie.

He laughs. “Uh-huh,” he says.

“You’re flirting with me.”

“Trying,” he says.

Later, after the cake and the coffee and the carefree way he pays the check, she walks with him down the streets of Birmingham. The air is soft and humid, warm.

“I should be going,” she says.

“Get another drink with me.”

“Sure, but not tonight.”

“Even for a middle-aged couple, it’s not that late,” he says.

“Don’t put it like that.”

They walk on in silence.

“At least let me walk you to your car,” he offers.

She wants this, but doesn’t. She drives a beat-up Ford Focus, and she doesn’t want him to see it, but she relents. It’s five blocks to her car.

“You could have just put it in the lot,” he says, not understanding that she wasn’t about to throw away the seven bucks.

With a block to go she can think only if he will kiss her. She wants him to. She can’t say she really remembers what it is like to kiss him, but she wants to know again. She feels maybe it could change everything, that kiss.

“Still driving Fords,” he says when they reach her car. “Like your old man. How is he, by the way?”

“Good, I guess.” Do men ask about your father and then try to kiss you? Apparently not. She unlocks her car and he opens the door for her. She takes a moment to stand very still, but he moves no closer, and so she ducks into the car before she makes a complete fool of herself.

“Thank you, Cat,” he says, holding on to the door. “I had a great time.”

“I did, too,” she admits.

“That address in the phone book, is it correct?”

“Why, are you planning on stalking me?” “I might,” he says. “It’s correct,” she tells him.

“Thanks for being easy,” he says, smiling. Then he shuts the door.
Easy?
She doesn’t know what to think.

S
he sleeps till nine, an eternity for her, then lies in bed reading magazines before stumbling out to her kitchen for coffee. She sits at the computer and looks for Siobhan with no real expectation of finding her, and sure enough there are only strangers in today’s “Portraits of Grief,” five more, part of this endless parade of misfortune. She jogs, especially difficult and laborious on this morning, then showers, dresses in sweats, and calls Tonya.

“Did you sleep with him?” Tonya asks, as if she is expecting a yes answer.

“No.”

“Too bad.”

“Tonya.”

“An old boyfriend? It’s like a freebie, right? Anyway, how was the kiss?”

“He didn’t kiss me.”

“Oh.”

The disappointment in the air is heavy, the first sentiment of the day that they share.

Her buzzer rings, an odd thing at eleven in the morning on a Saturday. She tells Tonya she has to go. At the door is a delivery man with a dozen red roses. “It’s wonderful
to have you back in my life,” reads the note. “I’ll call—T.”

The delivery man smiles, then leaves. She feels wobbly. He sent flowers, she thinks. She hadn’t known till this moment that this is exactly what she wanted him to do, to treat her as a new woman, one he wants to impress. She has to move to her couch, where she sits with the flowers, fragrant in her lap, while she wipes the tears from her eyes.

I
t’s a little after three—she’s just returned home with Connor—when Tommy calls. “I’d like to buy you another meal,” he says.

“I might let you.”

“How ’bout Monday?”

“I have Connor, and it’s a tough night for a sitter. Besides, isn’t there a preseason game on?”

He chuckles. “There is. When do you get him back, tomorrow?”

“I have him now.”

“And tomorrow?” Tommy asks.

Which is how the next day she drives to a ball field in Birmingham so that their boys can play baseball together. “Can he throw and catch?” Tommy asked of Connor, somehow knowing to address Cat’s fear that her son needs more male influence. The truth is that Connor can throw and catch, though not well; when it occurs to Michael to do so, he works with him.

She stands next to Tommy on a dusty infield of red
dirt as he throws first to Jonathan, then to Connor. Next to the field is a Catholic church, its lot crowded with cars. From inside, she can hear singing.

“You want to go over there, it’s okay,” Tommy says. “I’ll pray right here.” He throws one to Connor. Cat realizes that his throws to Connor are easier, softer, than what he tosses to his son, who is older by twenty months, and at least twice the baseball player.

“Why would I want to go over there?” she says.

“To repent?”

“What makes you think I have anything to repent for?”

“I was hoping,” he says.

She feels her blood rise. She sees a rivulet of sweat descend the back of his neck. She is standing close enough that she thinks she can smell him, perhaps something she remembers.

He throws to Jonathan, who catches the ball and does a little step before throwing the ball back. She comments on it.

“That’s called a crow hop,” he says. “Helps you set your feet in the correct position.”

She’s forgotten that he played baseball, too. It never seemed as important as football. He’s instructing Connor now on how to throw, telling him to turn his body sideways, to push off his back foot. She turns herself, trying to mimic the footwork, this subtle male dance. It’s hot on the field, but perhaps she understands the game’s appeal, which seems very much wrapped up in being outside on a summer day. Watching Tommy with
Connor is almost a surreal experience, her son with the man who should have been his father. That’s how she looks at it. It’s a leap, but the truth, she thinks. Tommy walks forward, stands next to Connor now, showing him the motion, and showing Jonathan, too, so Connor doesn’t feel self-conscious.

“All right,” he says, walking back to her. “Connor, let me have it.” Connor throws him the ball. “That’s it! Just like that, every time.”

He looks at her. “Nice outfit,” he says.

Oh God, she thinks. Black tights, untucked T-shirt, running shoes, small earrings, a little eyeliner, sunglasses. She has no idea what to wear to a baseball field.

“Relax,” he whispers. “I’m not kidding.”

Later, he takes them to White Castle for lunch, then Baskin-Robbins. He sits at a table with her while the boys, having finished their ice creams, roam the store with Jonathan in the lead, Connor following step by step behind the older boy.

“Lean forward,” Tommy tells her.

She does as she’s told, thinking he wants to say something that can’t be overheard, but instead he kisses her. It’s no peck, but the real thing, warm, passionate, totally surprising and cut short.

His alarm makes her look immediately for the boys. He says, “C’mon, they just went out the door.”

By the time she gets out there he’s got each of them under his arm, and is telling them that they can’t just leave a store and go out on a sidewalk by themselves. Knowing Connor is safe, she feels herself breathe, then
thinks of that kiss, that she’d very much like to try it again, and take her time.

M
onday afternoon Sam checks messages on his home phone machine and finds the voice of the New York lawyer, Josh Schwager, whom Sam has hired to untangle the mess of Kyle’s estate. Kyle had no will. Why would he? He was forty-one, had never been to war, had no wife, no children, and no plan to die.

Still, he’d been worth a lot of money, with his unfathomable salary and his disinclination to spend. It was last January that Sam flew to New York to meet with Schwager, who was Cat’s age, but seemed more substantial. Sitting in Schwager’s wood-paneled office, Sam tried to put his finger on it. The suit, the hair flecked with gray, the law books, even that he was a man all had something to with it, but Sam suspected something more: dealing with death. Estates were all Schwager handled. Sam asked about it.

“My father did this. Still does, a little. Also, my grandfather. It’s the family business,” Schwager said.

“My father was a jobber,” Sam said. “I didn’t follow. Also, he would have killed me if I had. Do you have a son?”

“Two daughters.” Schwager sat up in his chair at their
mention. A siren reached them, eighteen floors above the city. Schwager said, “I can see Kyle was a fine man.”

“Can you?” Sam understood Schwager was pandering, but he didn’t mind.

“He was organized.”

“He didn’t have a will.”

“In the envelope you sent me I found a detailed plan of how he intended to save. The plan ended in
2005
.I guess he planned to retire then.”

“And do what?” Sam asked.

Now Sam returns Schwager’s call. In past conversations Schwager has said he wants all the money to go to Cat and Connor, which Sam knows is smart from the tax angle—Sam doesn’t need it, he’s told this to Schwager, and anything that comes to Sam will likely soon get taxed again, with Sam’s estate—but Sam would like Cat to be older. She stills seems a bit unformed. Am I imagining this? he wonders. Do I want to see her make it first, as her younger brother did? Sam distrusts inherited money, maybe because he never got any himself.

“Sam,” says the lawyer. “How are you?”

“I feel like a million bucks,” Sam says. He suspects that Schwager has come to like him.

“Not worth what it used to be,” Schwager says.

“For such insight I’m paying three hundred an hour?”

“Three and a quarter,” says Schwager. “But this call is off the clock. Bottom line, this is still a mess. I’m just letting you know. I told you I thought we’d have it wrapped up by the anniversary, and I was wrong.”

“So when?”

“God knows.”

“You called to tell me that?”

“And to say that we really ought to get something down on paper as to how you want it to go. The courts are backed up, as you can imagine, and if they have direction from the family, they’ll likely follow it.”

“Give half of it to Cat. She’s going to get it anyway. The other half, put in a trust for the little boy.”

“Connor,” says Schwager.

“Yes, Connor. I ask myself, when did we start naming our children Connor?”

“And the answer?” asks Schwager.

“When we started marrying shiksas. I was one of the first. That’s how I got a Kyle.”

“Always a pleasure, Sam.”

Sam says his good-bye, then dials Cunningham’s office and tells the doctor’s girl that he’d like to schedule the operation for Monday the sixteenth. Could the doctor arrange it?

“What operation is that?” she asks. She sounds about twelve.

“The bypass. It’s my second. It’s nothing to look forward to.”

“You’ve spoken to Dr. Cunningham about this?”

“No, I just thought I’d schedule it, felt like having a guy root around in my chest.”

“I, uh, don’t understand,” says the girl.

“Of course I’ve spoken to Dr. Cunningham.”

She puts him on hold and he gets an earful of a local
radio station, something the station calls classic rock. Classic rock? What could that possibly mean? He hangs up. Cunningham will call him. In the meantime he decides to have a smoke, but when he finally fishes the pack from his jacket pocket, he finds that it’s empty. A minor inconvenience. He’s almost proud of himself that he smoked a whole pack. It’s not so bad wanting things. Desire. It’s what makes the world go round.

T
hat morning she went to the barricades. She walked the whole way, past people, hordes of them, moving in the opposite direction, everything on the island flowing north, like a river in Maine. The subways were down, the PATH trains; thousands were walking, dazed, an army in retreat. To the south the smoke rose, a huge ash black column that turned white at the top, and tilted east. Otherwise, the sun was bright; it was a day almost without shadows. At the barricades—powder blue with yellow lettering—she found a row of newbie cops, still in their khaki academy uniforms, and a throng of people trying to go south. “I live there, damn it,” one guy kept saying, a big man with a shaved scalp, though Cat could make out a small headband of stubble—he was going bald and had obviously decided to get ahead of it—and hundreds of droplets of sweat.

“You can’t go,” said one of the cadets. “You can’t. Not now.”

There was a young woman trying to get to her boyfriend. “Please please please,” she said over and over, though no one listened. One cadet kept repeating, “None shall pass. None shall pass. None shall …” Both sides had their mantras.

She moved down the line. This was Fourteenth Street, miles away from the attack, and were it not for the barricade it might have been difficult to know something had gone awry. Kyle’s cell phone was going straight to voice mail. Someone finally picked up his office line, but the someone was in London, where the calls had been routed. Kyle’s building was evacuated, the woman said. As far as the woman knew, everyone was safe.

Maybe the air smelled funny. It was Cat’s first day in New York for a long time. Six years? Seven? Maybe the air here always smelled funny.

She moved west. By Seventh Avenue she found a real cop along the barricade. He was older, perhaps a teacher at the academy. She explained that her brother was missing. He didn’t answer his cell phone. She was worried. She could feel it physically, a panic clutching at her stomach.