Wish You Were Here (60 page)

With a crunching and a hydraulic squall of protest, Arlene's car turned in the drive and floated by the window. She understood that Margaret would tolerate Arlene's intervention, that she felt if not on the same level with her aunt then at least a sympathy that joined them against her. Emily wasn't so much jealous of the bond as resentful, left out. She'd had Henry as a sounding board for so long, as emotional ballast. Now, with no one, she felt outnumbered and alone, wildly unreliable. Her offer to Margaret seemed imprudent, could easily be misconstrued as a crude stab at reconciliation.

Margaret hadn't said that she'd accept it. She might not, out of pride. That would be truly foolish, Emily thought, but not at all surprising.

Well, she'd tried.

She heard Arlene's voice and stood up and went to the dresser, ignoring the gray face that loomed in the shadow-box mirror. The tiled tray Kenneth had made at camp one summer was full of junk they'd accumulated—bent nails and brass picture hangers, dark pennies and a pair of rusty nail clippers, a black electrical adapter, a cat's-eye marble and a squash-colored one from the Chinese checkers, dusty movie stubs (
ONE ADMISSION $3.50
), a battery crusted with some chemical. She picked up a curled golf pass from the club, like a price tag for an appliance, the string still knotted. Why Henry had saved it she couldn't say, but it had his initials penciled in, and the date indelibly punched in the tiny, precise numbers of a time clock, five years ago next week. She couldn't remember the day, and that was a failure. Herb Wiseman probably played with them. She would keep it and throw the rest away.

She suddenly wanted to keep everything—the mirror, the dresser, the house itself. She had enough money, she could figure out a way. That would make everybody happy.

She opened the top drawer. Inside, among her underthings, was a travel alarm clock of his, fake alligator, an old windup job with radium-painted hands. When he first started working, he'd taken it around the world with him, flying BOAC to Europe to help rebuild their plants.

She closed the drawer. She had too much to do to be moping around like this. The bathrooms had to be cleaned, the closets and cupboards emptied, the fridge defrosted, the oven scrubbed. Kenneth had barely started on the garage.

What she really wanted was to take a nap, let the heat of the day lull her to sleep.

She went into the kitchen, saw on the way that Margaret and Arlene were out on the dock, Rufus with them. It was almost five, and she fancied a gin and tonic, but didn't want to start before everyone else. She poured herself a glass of water and emptied the dishwasher while the ice cracked and chimed against the side.

In the middle of the top rack she stopped to admire one of the tumblers Margaret had asked for, the cheap silk-screened design of the car on the side, the glass itself darker by the thin rim and the thick, slanted
bottom. She wondered if she saw them at a flea market if she would give them a second thought. Strange what could take ahold of you. Maybe that was why so many women her age surrounded themselves with knickknacks, their shelves and mantels ranked with pleasant memories. That was what she was doing now, wasn't it, gathering keepsakes. Again, she was surprised that she'd come to that part of her life so soon, where everything was remembered, as if she'd skipped ahead, her sixties missing.

She made shrimp dip, a ritual she'd inherited from Henry's mother, the queen of cream cheese. She covered it with plastic wrap and set it in the fridge to firm. Someone hadn't put the clip back on the potato chips, and they were rubbery. She fed them to the disposal and took down a new bag, propping it on the chopping block. There was enough ice, enough of the children's drink things.

It was too hot to be inside, and she went out on the porch where she'd left her book. Margaret and Arlene were still on the bench, Arlene gesturing to the world at large with one arm, explaining something. Emily thought another mother might see it as a defeat—sitting here by herself while someone else counseled her daughter—but she understood. As much as she might wish it, it was too late to change their places in the family. All she could hope for was a softening of their roles, if not trust then a grudging respect for what they'd put each other through, if that was not too much to ask.

Rather than watch them, she read her book. She'd just fallen into it when the boat pulled in with Kenneth and the children.

Arlene came flapping off the dock and across the yard. “I need my camera!”

“You're worse than he is.”

It was on the table beside Emily, and she handed it to her. At the door, Arlene looked back as if she were coming, holding it open, an invitation to join her. Ever the diplomat, she thought. Arlene knew them both too well.

“Go ahead,” Emily said. “I'll be there in a minute.”

He couldn't read the face Meg gave him as he unloaded Lise and the kids. His mother and Arlene were there, so she would be using code, but her even look—closed and matter-of-fact—didn't seem hopeful, confirmation that things had gone the way he expected. He thought she had no reason to be upset. She didn't really think their mother would change her mind this late.

Meg helped the kids lug everything back to the house while he and Lise put the boat up, and by the time they finished, she and Arlene had gone out to the Lighthouse. He didn't bother with a shower, not with the crowd. He'd just get dirty going through his father's workbench anyway. He'd have time to wash up before he had to grill the shish kebabs. It would be cooler then too.

He smuggled the Nikon outside. He was dull from the sun, his forehead tender, and a cold Iron City revived him. He set the sweating bottle on top of the little refrigerator—his now. The garage was hot and airless, a rich, secretive smell from childhood he associated with loneliness and spying. How many times had he watched Meg and her summer boyfriends making out on the dock? A mellow light slanted through the side window, intersecting lengths of scrap wood jutting from a barrel, a strange bouquet. He bracketed it, hoping one setting would catch what he'd seen. He thought of just freestyling, but nothing jumped out at him, not the campy mermaids or the geometry of the ladder hung on the far wall. He could hear Morgan warning him and shook his head to banish the voice.

He started with what he knew he wanted, his father's tackle boxes. There were two: the rounded green metal-flake one he remembered, and the new square two-tone brown plastic one his father actually used. They were not quite his yet, not until he took them down to the basement at home and set them in a respectful place. Here they were still his father's,
on the workbench where they belonged. He opened the green one, stepped back and bracketed it, pleased with the symmetry of the trays, the different hooks and lures in their uniform spaces.

The brown one he wasn't as happy with. It was cheap and common, not really his father's at all but a functional substitute. The green one's latch had given way. After it had dropped most of its contents on the lawn, his father had picked this one up at Wal-Mart. In his father's eyes, it was simple: this one worked and that one didn't. Ken wondered if he could have the green one fixed. Maybe the differences between the two would create something interesting.

He was going to close the brown one when he noticed a Zippo lighter in the bottom compartment among the bright bobbers and packaged leaders. His father had supposedly quit smoking years before he bought the new box, so it was out of place, an anachronism. He palmed it, then flipped it over, hoping for an inscription (a retirement present, a door prize from some convention), but it was just brushed steel, scratched and nicked with use. The wick was charred and the flint was good, but it didn't light, the fluid long since evaporated, the cotton wadding inside dried up. As a teenager, Ken and his friends had all carried Zippos as part of their style, though they were actually useless for lighting pipes. He'd mastered the switchblade flick that popped the top, ready, any second, to light some untouchable girl's Marlboro.

There were no cigarettes to go with the lighter, and he vaguely remembered his father once using it in lieu of a knife to melt his line when a snag proved impossible to free. Rather than upset his mother, he thought he would give it to Meg as consolation.

He thought she would interrupt him as he framed the beer bottles neatly cased for return, the kindling cut from scraps of some forgotten project, but when she and Arlene returned from the Lighthouse they took the bags inside, leaving her van under the chestnut, its engine ticking.

It was Lise who finally came out and asked him if he was done yet. “Your mom's making noise about dinner.”

“Is everyone out of the shower?”

They were, leaving him zero hot water. He ducked his head under the spray, clenching his muscles, and then when he got out, the humid room made him sweat. He dropped the lighter in the pocket of his shorts, a conspicuous lump.

Meg was on the lawn, helping the kids shuck the corn. She looked up as he passed, and this time he was sure she was asking him something, that she needed to talk. He got the coals going with the starter, and Lise brought out the packages of shish kebabs, Rufus loping alongside her, champing his loose lips and drooling.

“I guess Jeff called,” she said.

“What about?”

“I'm just piecing things together. It sounds like they talked for a while.”

“She was going to talk to Mom about the place.”

“You said,” she said absently, and he thought she was bored with his family's annual melodramas, that in the end she only wanted to go home.

“I'm just worried about her,” he said.

“That's good of you.” She gave him a kiss as a reward and discovered the Zippo. “What's this?”

He showed it to her. “I thought she might like it. I didn't think Mom would want to see it.”

“No, she wouldn't.”

From the porch, Meg called, “Should I put the corn in?”

“Go ahead.”

Lise went in to do the salad, and again he found himself imitating his father, waiting, a long barbecue fork in one hand, a beer in the other. Rufus stayed with him, curled up on the concrete apron of the garage. Finally he got the kebabs on, the smoke floating over the garage and the dock. The kids started a game of croquet. The sun was gone from the sky, and the air over the lake was gray, a touch of mist building. The
Chautauqua Belle
chuffed by, tooting its whistle. The locusts whined.

He knew what his mother's answer had been—that was never in question. He wanted to know how Meg felt about it, and what he could do to help.

He could not pick out a single instance that he'd helped her, a particular time he lent her money or took care of her or the children. They were too far apart for that. He called her, and sometimes she called him back. After talking with her on the phone he felt powerless and ashamed, as if her problems were his fault. They weren't, just as they weren't their mother's, but the feeling would stay with him for days, dispersed only when
Lise teased it out of him. “She's an adult,” she'd say, the exact opposite of his mother, who loved to mock Meg from a position of wisdom: “She thinks she's still a teenager.”

For him she was both, and also his big sister in the fifth grade, the face that had peered through the bars of his crib at nap time. She had paved the way for him, often to places he feared to follow, but she'd always been on his side, his advocate in all matters, even when they sent her off to boarding school. She sent him thick letters covered with vines and flowers, melting psychedelic designs. On the phone she joked that they should run away together.

The kebab on the end was burning, flames licking through the grill. He doused it with a spritz of his beer, stirring up a cloud of ashes, and backed off. He rearranged them and ran inside for a knife, peered into a bloody cut and decided they were done enough. The burnt one would be his.

“You don't want that,” his mother said in the kitchen, raising a hand to take it, and he had to protect his plate.

Meg built a steaming pyramid of corn on a pink flea-market platter and broke out a new stick of butter—“
Not
margarine,” she boasted.

If she was overcompensating, he couldn't tell. Maybe he was the only one thinking of the place, tomorrow being their last day. Maybe it was Jeff.

They barely all fit on the porch. Rufus stood outside the door, peering through the screen, wriggling his nose.

“There's no room for you,” his mother apologized. “You just wait.”

His meat was tough. The boys had trouble cutting theirs, and then he sliced through Justin's paper plate, the juice staining its wicker holder. “Get a new one,” his mother instructed, and Meg went. Ken brought the whole thing inside, trying not to drip on the carpet.

Meg peeled a paper plate from the stack and fitted it in, and he transferred the meat, his hand underneath it, in case.

“Hey,” he said, “you talked to Mom.”

As he asked, he was surprised to find that, after everything, he still held out some hope. She could tell him their mother had changed her mind and he wouldn't be shocked.

“I did,” she said, and even though she was busy cutting Justin's meat, he could read her voice easily. He'd heard it over the phone for
years. It was the flat, disinterested tone that said his mother would never change, that it was foolish to think she might.

“What did she say?”

“What did she say,” she repeated, working, a signal that she didn't want to talk about it. “She said we should have said something earlier. And she's right, I understand that. She says she needs the money, which I didn't know, but that's fine. We had a good talk, actually.”

He checked the doorway to make sure no one was coming, but she was done, ready to head back out.

“Look what I found,” he said, to stop her, and showed her the lighter.