Eleanor stood outside the door to the porch, which allowed her the small, simple pleasure of getting to see her children looking happy and relaxed, as at least one of them—Ursula—was unlikely to be when she encountered her mother. It might all change when she stepped in the door, so for a moment, Eleanor just stood there watching this young woman she’d given birth to, soon to give birth for the second time herself. Whatever else was true, one thing did not change. She would always love this child, and her children.
Then there she was—Louise, racing past Eleanor and bursting in the porch door to join them all. Her granddaughter didn’t know her, of course. To Louise, Eleanor was just another wedding guest.
Now she leapt into Toby’s lap and ruffled his hair. “My Toby,” Louise cried out. “I was looking for you everywhere. Let’s go see the goats.”
Toby had always loved babies and young children. (The old Toby, and even more so, this one.) “We can go after, okay, Lu?” he told her.
Through the screen, Toby spotted his mother before the rest of them did. For this one child of hers, no conflicted emotions existed. Just joy. (Here was his mother. This was good news. Simple as that.) His face broke into a smile, as it always did when he saw her. “Mama,” he said. The rest of them looked up.
“What do you know?” Eleanor stepped onto the porch. “All my children in one place. When was the last time that happened?”
She just stood there for a moment, taking in the sight of them.Her family.This had been the thing she wanted more than anything else, all her life, and she had gotten it. Just not as she’d imagined.
In many ways, Al was the least changed of the three. His gender had altered, but not his unyielding refusal to say or do anything that felt inauthentic. Now he reached out to embrace his mother, and for a long moment, the two of them just stayed that way. There was no need to say anything.
Ursula hung back, her silence heavy in a way her older brother’s was not.
It had always been Ursula who had felt a need to put a cheerful face on everything, like one of those yellow stickers kids used to attach to their notebooks. That endlessly loving, hopeful, perpetually smilingperson Ursula had been no longer existed, any more than the wild, exhausting, impossible, and endlessly lovable red-headed son did.
Ursula had been Eleanor’s easiest child, until she became the hardest. And for a while, it had seemed to Eleanor that she’d never get over the last words Ursula had spoken to her, never survive the loss of her daughter, and of Louise.
But Eleanor had suffered that loss so long now, the wound of Ursula’s words to her that day had repaired itself. Not healed—never that—but she had learned to live with the injury, much as Coco had no doubt learned to walk again. With a limp.
“Hello, Ursula,” she said.
It occurred to Eleanor that they were standing in the spot where Eleanor used to set Ursula in her Johnny Jump Up, to keep her entertained while she planted her bed of zinnias outside the porch, that first May after her birth. The spot Eleanor used to pull up, every Friday afternoon (in a different decade), to drop the three of them off with their father.
“Mom.” Ursula hadn’t exactly smiled when she caught sight of Eleanor, but just hearing her say the word was more than Eleanor had received from her daughter in three years, more than she expected anymore. Well, she no longer expected anything.
“How was your drive?” Ursula said—the question people asked, Eleanor recognized, when they didn’t know what else to say.
“This is your granny, Lulu,” she told the little girl.
Ursula set down the boutonniere. A little stiffly, she put her arms around her mother, close enough that Eleanor could feel her daughter’s pregnant belly pushing against her own. Whatever pain and hurt Eleanor had suffered—and there’d been an ocean of that, for Ursula, too, no doubt—didn’t matter at the moment.
“I missed you.”That doesn’t begin to convey it,she might have added. But she’d leave it simple. They were here now.
“This is Louise.”
“Would it be okay if I picked her up? Some children this age aren’t wild about strangers.”
“You’re not a stranger,” Ursula told her. “I’ve shown her your picture.” She handed the little girl to her mother.
“It’s okay, Lulu,” she said to Louise. “She won’t hurt you.”
They’d set up the chairs in the meadow, the same spot where Eleanor and Cam had been married so long ago. Five or six rows of chairs, facing out to the meadow where the peach tree stood, where—thirty-two years before—they’d attempted to bury the placenta of their firstborn child, only the ground was frozen.
Scanning the rows of guests, Eleanor picked out the faces she recognized. There was Bonnie Henderson—the one of the wives who never let any of them forget how many orgasms she had with Jerry, particularly nights he hit a home run. The two of them had split up back in the nineties. “But what do you know?” she told Eleanor—she and the old pitcher from the Yellow Jackets, Rich McGann, had fallen in love after Rich’s wife, Carol, realized she was gay and Jerry reunited with his high school sweetheart at his twenty-fifth high school reunion. “You wouldn’t believe the sex,” she told Eleanor, of her new life with Rich. “Every night of my life, I thank God for Cialis.”
The front row of chairs, on one side, was filled with members of Teresa’s family. The bride’s father wore a dark suit, his stout and beautiful raven-haired wife, a lacy suit with an enormous corsage. If they were having a problem with their daughter’s choice of Al for her husband, their faces betrayed nothing. The bride’s mother, Claudia, dabbed her eyes with a hanky, same as the mother of any bride might, marrying any groom. (The good news was, this one made a great deal of money. More important, he would be—here was one thing Al would have retained from his days as Alison—a deeply loyal person. When Al made a promise, he kept it.)
Eleanor and Louise were standing next to an unfamiliar-looking young woman—one of Al and Teresa’s friends, evidently, who’d flown in from the West Coast. Her name was Heather.
“Can you even believe how beautiful this place is?” she said. “Al told us about his dad’s farm, but I never pictured how totally awesome everything would be. I mean, I come from total suburbia. It must have been so cool, growing up here. The old farmhouse and the studio and everything. The pond.”
“It’s a nice place, all right,” Eleanor said.
“And it’s just so great how Al’s dad created all this. He must be an amazing person.”
