The year Eleanor turned fifty-three, on what had become their regular Sunday afternoon call, Ursula told Eleanor she had some news.
“You’re going to be a grandmother,” Ursula said.
The next day, Eleanor ordered her a copy ofSpiritual Midwifery—still in print after all those years. “I know this will seem like the ultimate hippie book,” she wrote, in the note accompanying her gift. “But back when I was pregnant with you, I found a lot of wisdom in these pages. Mostly, I’m just so excited for the two of you. There was nothing that ever brought me more joy”—this was true, though she could have added the words “or more sorrow”—“than raising the three of you.”
Ursula’s impending parenthood seemed to have brought her closer to her mother. In addition to their regular Sunday afternoon conversation, Ursula called Eleanor every few days with a question, generally related to pregnancy. After all those years in which her daughter had kept her at arm’s length, hearing her voice on the other end of the line now asking about water birth, or the pros and cons of letting the new baby in your bed, felt like a wonderful and unexpected gift.
The summer after his sophomore year in high school back in Akersville, Elijah rode the bus to Boston—and the T, to Brookline—to see Eleanor. “I’ve got this crazy idea to run by you,” he told her. “It’s okay if you say no.”
He wanted to ask if she’d consider letting him move in with her. School never really worked for him, he told her. When you got down to it, all he cared about was making music. But if he lived in the city,he could get a job to pay for lessons and audition for gigs. He’d pay her rent, he told her.
“Forget about rent,” Eleanor said. “But what about school?”
He told her he’d study on his own time and get his GED.
Elijah moved into Al’s old room the next week. He was taking guitar lessons twice a week from a Berklee graduate and landed a part-time job at a music store. Within a couple of months he’d picked up work performing in clubs around the city every weekend. More often than not, in the evenings, she’d hear the sound of Elijah upstairs, practicing.
She was working at her drawing table one night when he came in with a mug of tea for her. He asked if they could talk.
“My parents are having problems,” he said. “My mom’s moving out.”
All these years, Eleanor had felt bitterness toward Cam and Coco for how happy their lives had looked to her—having the three older children around, and another of their own, their garden and Coco’s massage practice, and the big, loving gatherings she heard about—bonfires and dance parties, holiday meals. In her mind, at least, she had constructed a picture of the life they led together as a close approximation of the one she’d imagined once for herself and Cam. They seemed to have everything she had wanted, back when Ed Abercrombie first brought her out to the farm.
Now, hearing Elijah’s news, she registered nothing but sorrow. Nobody who’d lived through the end of a marriage could wish that on anyone else, not even the person partly responsible for the breakup of hers. Most of all, she felt sad for Elijah. And for her own children, of course, who loved Coco, and no doubt counted on their father’s marriage as the one model they could look to of an enduring relationship between a man and a woman.
“I’m sorry,” Eleanor said. It was not for her to ask what happened, but Elijah volunteered.
“My mom fell in love with someone else,” he said. “She told my dad and me last weekend.”
It might have looked to Eleanor like a form of perfect justice, Coco leaving Cam in the same way Cam had left her. Very likely whoeverwas replacing him was younger, as Coco had been when she moved into Cam’s life.
Observing him stacking wood out by the barn the other day when she’d been out to the farm to see Toby, she had been struck by how old he looked. He was still a handsome man, but he had looked tired. Hearing this news now, she was surprised to discover she felt sad for Cam, too.
“I can’t believe my mother took off with some idiot she met at a bar,” Elijah said. “What was she doing in a bar, anyway?”
93.
She Doesn’t Count to Ten
That weekend, the call came from Vermont: Jake, telling Eleanor that Ursula had gone into labor. All that night he called with updates, as Ursula had evidently instructed him to do. When he called to say they had a baby girl, Ursula wanted to get on the phone with her mother.
“Come meet Louise,” she said.
Fifteen minutes later Eleanor was packed and on the highway, headed to Vermont to meet her granddaughter, her heart exploding in a way she had not known was still possible.
She’d planned to stay at a hotel nearby, but Ursula surprised Eleanor by suggesting that she stay at their house. She could help with meals and laundry, and hold the baby when Ursula took a shower.
“I don’t want to get in the way,” Eleanor said.
“You won’t,” Ursula told her. “Jake and I want you here. Me in particular. It’s the kind of moment when a woman wants her mom.”
As someone who’d given birth three times, without her mother, Eleanor understood.
Later, Eleanor replayed those days—three of them, all told—for signs of the trouble that followed, but in her memory of that early, precious time taking care of Ursula and getting to know Louise, she couldn’t remember a single moment that had felt wrong, or difficult. Ursula was breastfeeding Louise, so Eleanor wasn’t needed to feed the baby, but in all the other ways, Ursula had seemed grateful for her mother’s presence. Now that she had a baby of her own, she had a new and limitless interest in the stories of her own birth and those of her siblings. The two of them—Eleanor and Ursula—sat by the woodstove, discussing every moment of Ursula’s labor—the minutiaethat were lost on Jake—in a way that nobody but her mother could have cared about as much as Ursula did.
Up until this point, they’d been getting takeout and snacking on food Ursula and Jake’s friends brought by, but on the third night, Eleanor offered to cook them dinner. She had expected Ursula to ask for a vegan dish, but her daughter said, actually, what she’d love was Eleanor’s spaghetti carbonara.
They were sitting around the table—Louise in Eleanor’s arms, to give Ursula a chance to eat her meal more comfortably. Jake had opened the bottle of wine Eleanor had brought them. Ursula wasn’t drinking, but Eleanor and Jake had nearly polished it off.
