It was strange for Eleanor, after her years of caring for young children, to find herself living as she did over those first months after moving out—alone in a city condominium, with nobody to cook meals for or ask: Have you done your homework? Have you practiced your clarinet? For the first few weeks after she moved, she called them every night, but there was an uncomfortable awkwardness to their conversations, and sometimes even the sense that the girls were going through the motions, impatient to get off the phone and back to their lives.
One time, when Eleanor called, Ursula told her that Coco was there. Home from school, she’d stopped by for a visit. She’d fixed them a stir-fry dinner in a wok, with a kind of noodles she’d brought from Chinatown.
“Coco’s taking us toDisney on Ice,” Ursula said. She’d seen ads on television since she was little and always wanted to go.
“We even got Dad to come. Even though he’s not the Disney type.”
“Coco’s around an awful lot these days, huh?” Eleanor said.
“She misses us,” Ursula told her. “Phyllis still babysits. Coco’s just our friend now.”
Cam hadn’t told them the rest. Whatever went on between him and Coco—weekends the children were with Eleanor, probably—he kept from them.
Eleanor asked Ursula something about her social studies report then. She had been working on a project about Helen Keller. Maybethe two of them could go to the library when they got together over the weekend.
“Maybe,” Ursula said.
She had to go. It was her turn in Monopoly. She didn’t want to keep everyone waiting.
“Coco made popcorn balls,” Ursula told Eleanor. In the background, the sound of laughter.
Alone in the Brookline condo, Eleanor spent her days on a series of Easy Reader books she’d signed up to write and illustrate, on the presidents. (She’d been assigned the biographies of Woodrow Wilson and William Howard Taft. Could there be a more boring president?) Shutting her computer down at the end of the long days at her desk, she painted the walls in the children’s bedrooms in the colors they’d picked out with her—buttercup yellow for Ursula, green for Toby, and an awful shade of purple that Al insisted on.
“Did you ever consider that surrounding yourself with four walls the color of an eggplant might be kind of depressing?” Eleanor asked Al.
“It’s not the color of my walls that’s depressing,” Al said. She spoke in a low, faintly sarcastic snarl. More and more these days, this was her tone, to Eleanor at least. She wondered if Al did the same with Cam. The one time she’d tried to bring this up to him, his response had been clipped, dismissive.
“You have your relationship with Al, I have mine,” he told Eleanor. “How your children speak to you is their business, not mine.”
She told herself it would be better once the school year ended and they moved into the new place with her. She bought a foosball table and a trampoline. Other than a few things she’d bought that she hoped would be fun for her children, there was little furniture in the place, still. Her shoes on the floor made a hollow, echoing sound as she walked through the rooms.
Friday afternoons now, Eleanor drove up the highway to pick up her children—her first time returning to their old place as a visitor. The three of them were standing outside waiting for her, their bags linedup beside them in the driveway. The message was clear enough: Cam, though not in evidence, didn’t want her coming inside what had once been her home.
When they got to the condo, she showed them their rooms. “I didn’t know mine would be so purple,” Al told her.
“It’ll be fine. Once you put up a bunch of posters, it won’t show so much.”
All spring, she made the trip to Akersville on weekends. Eleanor took the Friday afternoon pickup. Cam took Sundays, bringing them home to the farm.
Because the condo wasn’t set up for cooking yet, and none of their things were there, on their weekends with Eleanor they went out for hamburgers at the diner mostly, or bowling. When Al’s baseball season started, Eleanor made the long drive to her games when she could and the longer drive home. She sat on the bleachers with the other parents—one or two of them old friends from softball summers watching the Yellow Jackets, and mothers of children in Al’s class whom she’d known since their children were babies—women whose children had played at their house over the years, women who’d worked with her selling Avon products to raise money for the class trip to the science museum.
They all knew her name, and some of them greeted her. (They knew the story, too. Or thought they did: That Eleanor was the one who’d moved out of their house. That Cam had stayed. That the children were living with him.)
Beyond an occasional clipped greeting, few of them spoke to her now. Maybe the women thought she’d set her sights on their husbands. Maybe they imagined divorce was contagious. Or she was just a reminder of everything they didn’t want to happen to them.
Cam showed up at Al’s games, too, of course—never with Coco, though one time, on her way to her old house to pick up the children, she’d seen Evan and Betsy walking along the road. Their brief conversation when she’d rolled down the window to greet them—Betsy’s observation that it must be easier getting first-rate help forToby, now that she lived near Boston, Evan’s report on the ins and outs of Coco’s life at the Center for Holistic Studies—made it clear to Eleanor that Coco’s parents still had no clue of the relationship between their daughter and Cam. The way they had spoken with Eleanor that day conveyed a combination of regret and wariness. She noted a small, strange chill in their tone toward her. In the story they had constructed, it appeared, Eleanor was the one who must have decided to end the marriage, with Cam, the lonely abandoned husband, left to hold down the fort.
Another time, in June, right before school got out, Eleanor had run into Coco herself at the house—out in the yard, kicking a ball around with Al. Coco had actually waved when she caught sight of Eleanor, as if she forgot for a minute the most recent chapter in their long history. As for Cam, when he showed up on her doorstep to pick up the children on Sunday afternoons, he might have been the pizza delivery man for all he spoke to her now.
After he left, she walked over to Coolidge Corner to buy herself an ice cream cone. Sitting on a bench outside the ice cream parlor, she could hear someone’s car radio tuned to a country station, and Dolly Parton came on. “I Will Always Love You.”
A couple of teenagers came out of the shop carrying a giant banana split, the girl dressed in short shorts like Daisy Dukes, the boy in a tank top, though he looked like a person who had only recently begun shaving. When the girl got ice cream on her chin, he licked it off her while, on the radio, Dolly sang that part that always got to Eleanor.
Bittersweet memories. That’s all I’m taking with me.
One of those older couples walked by, who had probably been married so long the husband didn’t need to ask his wife what flavor she wanted, or if she wanted a sugar or waffle cone. The wife stayed outside on the other side of the bench, waiting, while the husband made his way up to the window to get their cones.
“We always get maple walnut,” she told Eleanor.
