He turns and motions to Hammond, who helps the girls off the tire swing so that a couple of the Coburg kids can hop on, and Walt takes over the pushing. We meet in the middle, me and Aiden, slightly apart from the group. I don’t want to make too much of it, but I’m suddenly afraid something about that conversation I just had will blow up in my face if I don’t keep Aiden in the loop. We can’t afford to get our stories crossed. “Nice job,” I say, nodding toward the tire swing and sliding my arm around his waist and looking up at him. When he picks me up for these weekends, his jaw is clean shaven; by Sunday it’s shadowed with dark hair. I like it better this way, not that I’m entitled to have a preference. I offer up a quiet cough, a clearing of my throat, and he takes the hint and drapes an arm across my shoulders. This fake affection—it’s so new. Strangely electric and familiar, all at the same time. My hand on his knee last night had felt like the first time I held a boy’s hand.
From here, I can push up slightly on my tiptoes, get close to his ear. He smells like Irish Spring, the bar of soap he has in our cabin shower next to my bottle of body wash. If he stiffens a little at my nearness, I try not to let it hurt my feelings. “Just so you know,” I say, trying to keep my voice light, level. “I told Lorraine and Val and Rachel that you and I—well. I told them my father died. That you and I have something in common, I meant.” Around my shoulders, his arm tightens a fraction. If I weren’t so aware of him, I might not even notice. “I know it’s not the same, obviously,” I add, quickly. “But everyone was sort of making a thing about how we left last night, and Iwas trying to…”
“Is that true?” Standing this close to him I canfeelthat low voice rumble against me. I feel it all the way to my toes, and that’s saying something, because I’m pretty sure these boots are a halfsize too small.
“You said you didn’t want everyone focusing on your grief,” I say, a deliberate dodge. I know what he’s thinking, but I don’twantto know. I don’t want to confront this again, this distrust he has for me. It’d seemed, over the last day, that things were getting better. That he sawme differently.
But he says it anyway. “I mean about your father.Is that true?”
There’s a nasty part of me that wants to confirm all his worst suspicions.No, it’s not true. I just have no shame, no shame at all.But, of course, Idohave shame, shame and guilt and all the rest of it, and I’d never lie about this.“Yes,” I say.
He looks down at me, a moment that feels as if it stretches forever. I’d like to say there’s some sympathy in the hard planes of his face. But mostly it’s a look I’m well accustomed to from Aiden, though not so up close. It’s half assessment, halfhow-the-fuck-did-I-wind-up-with-her.
I shrug—an answer to that unspoken question, and a rejection of that arm around me. “Anyways,” I say. “Problem solved.”
* * * *
The thing about keeping your guilt jar—or your guilt vase, whatever—right there in the center of your dining room table is that you don’t give yourself all that much time to forget about it. When I get home from the campground on Sunday, it’s the first thing my eyes land on, and I’m tempted to pick the thing up and throw it right in the trash. So what if I’ve made friends with Janet, if I made terrible cookies with her one awkward weeknight? So what if I’ve got a meeting with Dan—the crying paralegal—to help him with his law school application on Tuesday evening? So what if I’m customer of the week at Starbucks; so what if I park way in the back row of the parking lot of the grocery store now?
I shouldn’t have brought up my dad, that’s the thing. So much wentwrongafter my dad died. So many of my mistakes seem to be Hydra heads from that one crushing event, and mentioning it to Aiden—and the tense moment of confrontation and confirmation that followed—seemed to set off a fresh wave of rumination. The whole drive home I was quiet and sullen, a role reversal that might have delighted me if I could have appreciated the way Aiden had become increasingly restless, uncomfortable with my silence. He’d even put on the radio. “It’s that song you like,” he’d said, when the obnoxious electronic beat filled the interior. “Idon’tlike it,” I’d snapped back, guaranteeing that he’d back off for the rest of the drive.
I let my pack thunk onto the floor of the foyer. Probably I should take it straight to the bedroom, start on my laundry right away, check for ticks in every seam. Instead I tug off my boots and head to the table, slumping into one of the chairs. I reach my hand into the vase, pull out my stiff slips of paper until I find the one I’m looking for.
It’s not like my dad is in the guilt jar because I’m responsible for his death. No, that honor goes to the massive heart attack he had at home, while he was brushing his teeth one Tuesday night. Sudden, of course, but it shouldn’t have been entirely unexpected. He was seventy-one years old, after all, had lived a lot of his first fifty years—before he met a pretty, twenty-five-year-old blonde and settled down—fast and unhealthy, drinking gin and smoking fat cigars and working eighty-hour weeks at his firm in L.A.
And he’s not in the guilt jar because I’d disappointed him or been cruel to him when he was alive. At his funeral, dumbstruck and wobbly in a pair of my mother’s heels, I’d tried to think of something,anything, unpleasant that had happened between us. Had we never had a fight? Had he never said something casually unkind, something dismissive or flippant about my childhood interests? Had I never talked back to him, given him normal teenage grief about rules or curfews? If I could only think ofsomething, I’d told myself, the whole thing would hurt less. I’d cling to that unpleasantness, use it as a bandage for the great, sucking hole that seemed to live in my stomach since my mother had called me, my cell phone trilling loud in my quiet dorm room, barely fifteen miles from home, to tell me he was already gone.
But there hadn’t been anything like that, no cruelty or fighting or petty annoyances. From the beginning, he’d been my hero, and I’d been his miracle kid, coming into his life well after he’d resolved to be a lifelong bachelor. When I was six he retired; he picked me up from school every day, took me to tennis lessons at our country club, helped me with my homework. Before I went to bed at night he’d give me an article he’d cut out from that day’s paper—usually an editorial, something about politics or foreign policy—and then in the morning, while we ate breakfast he had made, he’d pepper me with questions about it, about how I’d answer this point or that. He’d laugh at my precocious answers. He’d tell my mom, who was hardly ever paying attention:Look at us, having breakfast with one of the greatest legal minds in this country!
Dad’s in the guilt jar because I did everything wrong after he died. I barely managed to finish out the spring at USC, pulled Cs only because there’d been four weeks left in the semester and I’d done so well prior. I spent the summer in bars all over L.A., drunk and reckless, until I’d met Christopher, and after that I’d been sober, but still reckless. I was cruel to my mother—I hated her for barely shedding a tear, told her she’d always been jealous of me and Dad, that everyone knew she’d married him for his money. It wasn’t that those things were entirely untrue. Shewasjealous. Shehadmarried him, at least in part, for his money, or at least she hadn’t married him for better or for worse. As he got older, his hair getting thinner and his middle getting thicker, I’d sometimes catch her looking at him with a slight sneer of disgust. At the club, her affair with one of the golf pros wasan open secret.
But my dad had loved her, I think, or had at least wanted to take care of her. He would’ve hated the way I treated her, how petty and small I became, how angry and stupid. He would have hated the way I fell apart. He would have been sodisappointed. Sure, I’d cleaned up my act, ended it with Christopher after only a few months, a costly disentanglement that had seemed to sever any chance at reconciliation my mother and Imight have had.
I’d gone back to USC, finished with honors. I’d even gotten that law degree, had moved all the way across the country just so I could go to his alma mater. I’d tried, like I’m trying now, to correct my mistakes.
But I still don’t think I’ve done right by him. Don’t think I’m the person he would’ve wanted me to be. For one thing, he wouldn’t have wanted me to be the kind of person to have enough sins to make an actual receptacle for them. He wouldn’t have wanted me to win the lottery, either—he’d come from nothing, a broken home and college on the GI Bill, a legendary work ethic that kept him doing pro bono cases even after he retired.Work,he used to say to me,is what gives our lives meaning. When I was still at the firm, when I’d come home from the office at ten o’clock at night, barely awake enough to kick off my stilettos and flop backward onto my bed, I’d sometimes just lie there, staring at the ceiling, an ache in my middle that I’d known was the particular, lingering feeling of grief.Is this what my life is supposed to mean, Dad?I’d think.Is it like this, money and contracts and arranging words in preciselythe right way?
I use the tip of my index finger to push the square of paper aimlessly across the table, suddenly so lonely that I feel my eyes well up. It’s a funny thing about the campground: I haven’t felt lonely there, not really. Even in the cabin at night, when Aiden and I choreograph our strange nighttime routine—him out on that stoop until I say, me turning onto my side to face the wall when he changes for bed—I feel some thread of connection to him, a mutual awkwardness I know we’re both thinking about in that musty cabin. I should call Kit and Greer. Kit especially would get a kick out of my recounting Rachel’s math-and-science bit.
I hear the muffled ring of my phone from my pack, and I smile in spite of myself. It’s one of them—I’m sure of it. This is how it works with us, a connection that’s only grown stronger in the months since our lives changed so drastically, since that damned lucky ticket rewrote ourstories for us.
But when I pull my phone from the side pocket, it’s not either of their nameson the display.
It’s Aiden’s.
“Hello?” I answer, my voice tentative. I worry there’s a sound of tears in my voice, but it’s not like he’d notice. It’s notlike he’dcare.
“Hey.” On the phone, his voice sounds even deeper, too close to my ear. I can hear the scratch of his stubble across the phone’s speaker, as if he’s adjusting it against his face. I’ve never seen him use his cell phone—I’m not even sure he carries it with him all the time, a strange quirk these days that makes it seem as if he’s from adifferent time.
“How are you?” I say, because he doesn’t make another volley after hishey, and someone here has to follow adult rules ofcommunication.
“About the same as I was fifteen minutes ago.”
“You called me,” I say, annoyed, but at least I don’t feel like crying anymore. “Don’t keep me. I have to go look at all my clothes and make sure there aren’t bloodsucking bugs making ahome in them.”
I think the sound he makes is a chuckle, but I long to see it in person. He’s sostern, Aiden. Every time I get even a whisper of amusement out of him, I feel weirdlyself-satisfied.
“Wanted to call and say something.” It’s so quick that some of the words run together.
