Our best times came later, when both girls were home and Leda came up on the train, leaving Steve in charge of making dinner for their three small children and getting everyone to bed. On those nights I sent Jonathan away, and the two sets of sisters made popcorn and drank beers and watched a movie. Rachel put nutritional yeast on the popcorn, which Sydney regarded as old news and Leda and I embraced as a revelation. That was when the tide began to turn. I believed we had Leda to thank for that. Even when she didn’t appear to be using her therapeutic toolbox to move us forward, I knew she was.
Might I have liked a child of my own? It would be so easy to blame my stepdaughters now, to say yes, I would have been amother if not for them, but it wasn’t true. If anything, the lesson of Candy Fuller confirmed what I already knew: there was no protecting anyone, no matter how much you loved them.
As for love, I loved their father, and as the years passed and the girls found partners of their own, this came to count for more. They took in our quiet and accepting brand of happiness and possibly admired it. Sydney and Rachel were never like my own daughters, but they were my husband’s daughters. That alone would have been reason enough to love them.
That night I called Eddie after dinner to tell him I’d go to the Hotallings’ for brunch on Saturday. He called me heroic. Maybe I was heroic, but I had done these things for my stepdaughters over the years, gone to my share of inconvenient brunches with difficult in-laws. I did it because they were my family, and Eddie was my family. Besides, I had found the photograph of Whistler in my bag. I put it on the dresser.
Jonathan continued to call me from Wisconsin, sometimes first thing in the morning and always at night, lying in the twin bed of his youth after dark. His sister went back to her own house every day after their work was finished, to her own husband and dog five miles away, and every day she renewed her invitation to bring him home with her, but he always declined. “Once this is over, I’ll never be in this house again,” he told me over the phone. “I won’t walk through the door, much less sleep here.”
“That’s the way it works when you sell a house,” I said.
“Believe me, I want to sell this place. I don’t know, maybe I’m trying to absorb the past while it’s still available to me.”
Jonathan’s father, an only child, had inherited the house in Fond du Lac from his bachelor uncle when he was twenty-two.When he married Jonathan’s mother, he brought her home and there they stayed, first the two of them, then with Jonathan and then Bea. Jonathan went to college and didn’t come back, and Bea went to college and came back to marry her high school boyfriend. Thirty years later, their father died—emphysema—and their mother stayed on by herself. The exterior walls of the house were a double thickness of brick—who does that now? There were deep-set windows, a wide porch. “I’m sorry one of Bea’s kids doesn’t want it,” he said, but they didn’t. Bea had talked to all three of them. No, no, and no. Rachel and Sydney just laughed.
It turned out one of the lamps in the living room was valuable. Sydney had found a dealer in Los Angeles who, based on the pictures she’d sent, would pay $8,000. For a lamp. “I’ve been walking past that thing my entire life,” Jonathan said. “I’m pretty sure it came with the house.” Though of course there was no one left who would know.
“The past is soul-crushing,” he said lightly.
“Tell me about it,” I said.
“Maybe we should sell the house,” he said.
“I thought that was the plan,” I said, slightly alarmed.
“Ourhouse,” he corrected. “Maybe we should get rid of everything and move into the city, get a loft in Tribeca, a big open room with triple-height ceilings and a wall of windows.”
What about the rabbits? “You’re having real estate hallucinations,” I said. I liked our house. I liked getting on the train after work. I liked getting off the train and walking up the hill beneath a canopy of trees and sitting in the backyard at dusk, listening to the insects sawing away. I had lived in that house longer than I’d ever lived anywhere else. I liked that.
Jonathan yawned. “Something to think about,” he said. “I’m not making any plans.”
“Good. Don’t make plans. I love you. Go to sleep. You’ve had a long day.”
And Jonathan said that he would, that I was right, that he loved me, too.
Little from the rest of the week was worth reporting. I talked tomy husband, my sister. I cleaned out the freezer. My mother called me more than usual because she kept remembering things she wanted to say regarding Eddie, chief among them that she still had the red leather dictionary his parents bought him as a high school graduation present, “To our son Edward Triplett, with love from Mom and Dad, May 1957” written on the upper right-hand corner of the first blank page. “It’sawfulthat I have it,” my mother said. “I felt so guilty that I put it away, and then I forgot about it completely. I should have given it to you when you were here. Can I send it to you? Would you give it to him?”
“I can give you his address,” I said. “It might be nice if you sent it yourself.”
“I couldn’t do that. He wouldn’t want to hear from me.”
I told her I would ask him, and that seemed to placate her.
“His parents were sweet people,” she said. “I wonder how long ago they died.”
“You knew Eddie’s parents?”
“Of course I knew his parents. I was married to their son. They came to see us a couple of times. They came to our wedding.”
But as much as I tried, I could not find them in my memory.It felt like such a failure on my part. “Where were they from?”
“Altoona,” my mother said. Of course they were from the same place Eddie was from.
We said goodbye, but an hour later she called me back. “You don’t think it wasonlySkip, do you?” she asked.
“What are you talking about?” I was cutting up some watermelon to eat for dinner in the backyard. My hands were sticky.
“You know what I’m talking about,” she said, tired of having to spell everything out for me. “You don’t think Skip Hotalling was his only boyfriend? I mean, he must have seen other people over the years. Otherwise it would be sad.”
