“Well, you’ve succeeded,” she said. This was a good thing.
“I wish I could be a different kind of person for you,” he said.
“Then you wouldn’t be you,” she told him.
He buried his face in her hair.
In the end, they hired Coco to come over after school five days a week. The children loved having her around more, naturally. Her presence on the farm made everyone happy.
“Where would I be without Coco?” Eleanor observed to Darla. Coco was the most easygoing, helpful teenager she’d ever laid eyes on. When she’d gotten her license, Eleanor figured she be off all the time with her girlfriends, or boys, but coming over to the farm and organizing games for the children down at the softball field had remained her priority.
“My daughter would probably payyoufor the chance to hang out with your family,” her mother, Betsy, told Eleanor.
“And my children would probably rather spend the afternoon with Coco than with me,” Eleanor said. “She’s a lot more entertaining.”
On her second day of babysitting, Coco brought over her soccer ball. Afternoons now, when Eleanor sat at her drawing table, she could look out the window and see the four of them—her children and Coco—kicking the ball across the field, Coco with her wonderful long legs and her ponytail flying, graceful as a gazelle, the children following behind her like a flock of ducks. Except for Ali, their skills were pretty comical, but it didn’t seem to matter to any of them that sometimes Toby would pick up the ball and run with it or that Ursula tended to forget which goal she was shooting for. One afternoon Cam joined them in their pickup game. Bent over her sketch pad, Eleanor took in the sound of their voices, glad to know her children were having a good time. Having that thing she’d wanted for them more than any other: a happy childhood.
After a few weeks it became a daily event that Cam closed up his woodshop early to play with them. Boys against the girls, they decided. Cam and Toby versus Coco, Alison, and Ursula. The matchup left them close to equally balanced, though one day Eleanor had looked out the window to see all three of her children playing on Coco’s team, with Cam on his own as the opposition. When they defeated him—with a questionable shot, from Toby, in which he’d run the ball between the goalposts—Cam had collapsed on the grass in mock agony. The children tackled him then. Their voices—announcing their victory and laughing—carried all the way up the hill.
One time, when she finished her work earlier than usual, Eleanor decided to join them. She had to dig into her closet to come up with sneakers suitable for running through the grass, and a pair of shorts she hadn’t put on since before her first pregnancy. When she got down the hill to the spot where the game was going on, she called out to them.
“Can you use another player?”
“Come be on my team, Mama.” Toby flung his arms around her. The girls hung back.
“No offense, Mom,” Alison said. “But I just don’t think you’re the soccer type.”
Ali was right, of course. Eleanor sat on a rock instead, watching them, cheering equally for everybody. In a few minutes it occurred to Eleanor that she should probably head back up to her desk. This was the hour of day when, often, her editor at the syndicate checked in with questions about her strip before it went out over the wire.
“I guess I’ll be going,” she said, but nobody appeared to notice. They had moved on from soccer to their other favorite Coco pastime—cartwheels. Even Cam, tall as he was, spun gracefully across a patch of field before collapsing in the grass.
For a moment, seeing them all together that way, Eleanor thought of running back to join them. But she headed to her desk instead.
Eleanor watched from the window after that, looking up from her work now and then when the sound of the voices of her children playing in the field suggested that someone—Coco or Cam—had scored. She could always tell when Coco and the children managed to get the ball past Cam, from the sound of their four high voices crying out, followed by Cam’s mock despair. He’d throw himself on the ground and lie there on the grass as if he’d been shot.
“You got me,” he moaned. Toby and Ursula jumped on top of him then—in a pile of legs, arms, sneakers, laughter, ponytails. Even Alison joined in.
Not Coco. Since turning sixteen, she had become more self-conscious, particularly around Cam.
Watching her family from where she sat, bent over her drawings for that week’s strip, Eleanor felt relief to see them having so much fun together. She was working long days now onFamily Tree.It felt good, making enough money finally that they didn’t have to worry all the time. Not that Cam ever seemed to worry about anything.
There had been a time when she had loved that about him.
32.
Bûche de Noël
That was the Christmas—Christmas, also Toby’s birthday—when Eleanor made thebûche de Noël.
She had gotten the recipe from a cookbook she found at the dump. (“I think I know why someone threw this out,” Darla had said, flipping through the pages, when she’d come over later and found the book on Eleanor’s table. “Who has time for all this stuff? Or money for the ingredients? What the hell is ‘almond paste’?”)
Long ago, at one of their annual holiday parties when she was growing up, her mother had served abûche de Noël.Store bought; Vivian wasn’t much of a cook. Eleanor had been fascinated by its construction—not so much the layers of frosting and whipped cream, but the way whoever constructed this dessert had managed to create a cake that resembled a real log, with moss and mushrooms and tiny woodland creatures, all made out of marzipan. Eleanor had asked her mother (she was probably thirteen at the time) if they could try making a cake like that themselves, next Christmas, but they never did. Baking projects—projects of any sort—had not been Vivian’s thing.
It was a crazy undertaking that called for making a sheet cake first, spreading it with mocha frosting, and rolling it up to form a log-shaped cylinder that you covered with more frosting. Then you got to work on the decorations—forming marzipan mushrooms and leaves, marzipan holly berries, marzipan moss.
Nobody needed a cake like this. The girls—sprawled out in the living room, inspecting their loot, with Alvin and the Chipmunks playing, Toby in his golden birthday crown with a number four on top, and Sally at work on her holiday bone—would have been justas happy (more so, as things turned out) if she’d served vanilla ice cream, or Jell-O. This was Eleanor wanting to give her children what she herself had missed, of course. Eleanor, trying to make everything perfect.
When she finished decorating the cake, she set it on the counter. She still had to truss the turkey and bake the sweet potatoes, along with the dozen other jobs before Cam’s parents arrived from the airport for their annual twenty-four-hour holiday visit.
