She loved that moment when he’d hold out the towel for her, as she stepped out of the tub. Later, on his saggy waterbed, he’d lay his head on her belly and kiss her stretch marks.
“I know you,” he had said to her once.
She knew him, too—not just his body, though that, too.
Often, when she got to his apartment, he’d be playing Guns N’ Roses, but he also loved Hank Williams and Vince Gill. He had a sweet voice, and he was teaching himself the guitar. He’d written Eleanor a song that he called “Dream Girl.”
Now he stood on the bed—his body swaying a little on account of it being filled with water. He wore nothing but a bandanna, and he had a belly on him, but not much of one. A sweet smile. That tattoo of his dead father’s name, “Brian.” The tattoo artist should have written “Bryan,” but making the change would have cost too much, so he just left it. Sometimes, lying next to him, Eleanor traced her finger over the letters.
A person who didn’t care about Timmy Pouliot might have said this was a pretty bad song, but for some reason it made her cry. He only knew a couple of chords. The lyric featured “love” and “skies above.” The refrain had to do with Eleanor being his dream girl.
“I never wrote a song before,” he told her. “I guess you inspired me.”
After, as she hit Route 93 South back to Brookline, Eleanor thought about what it would be like if she invited Timmy Pouliot over for dinner some night, to have dinner with her and her children. They knew him slightly from Yellow Jackets games. But they would never in a million years picture him as someone who could be their mother’s boyfriend.
Toby wouldn’t mind, of course. Toby liked everyone, but a guy on a motorcycle, more so. Timmy would take him for a ride. Slow enough not to worry her, and with a helmet. Most people to whom Toby showed his rock collection would take about sixty seconds to look at it and then say something like “Wow, impressive,” but Timmy would study each rock and ask where it came from, ask Toby which one was his favorite, at which point Toby would bring out his best find, a piece of granite with a very small garnet embedded in it.
Ursula, meeting Timmy in this unexpected role of boyfriend, would be baffled, then disappointed. She’d recently started making suggestions to Eleanor about men she thought her mother should date—the widowed father of a boy in her class, whose gaze seemed fixed on the floor every time she met him at some school event. Their neighbor down the street, Barry, who wore beautiful suits and had a poodle. Barry was clearly gay, but Ursula loved his dog.
To Ursula, Timmy would appear poorly dressed and scruffy. “What’s his job, anyway?” she would ask. Ursula would like her mother to marry someone with a house at the Cape, or a mansion, or a boat. Either that, or British royalty. Observing Timmy’s choice of transportation (the motorcycle or his ten-year-old Subaru), she would conclude, not incorrectly, that Timmy was poor.
Al would be mortified by the way Timmy looked at her mother, and the way he touched her. Which he would do, for sure. He couldn’t help it.
“I promise I won’t do anything totally nuts,” he would say to Eleanor, if she invited him to their home. “But you can’t expect me to keep my hands off you all night. I have to at least kiss you.”
She would push him away when he did that. But not very hard.
63.
Mr. Fun
Many times over the months and then years after she and Cam parted, Eleanor reminded herself what they had told each other, told themselves: that they would never speak ill of their children’s other parent. Cam probably managed to keep to his side of the bargain. He seemed to go on with his life as if Eleanor had never existed. She, on the other hand, brooded over their story until she questioned even the good parts of their marriage, or the parts that had seemed good once.
Maybe they had only appeared to be happy, back in the old days. Maybe Cam never loved her, he just liked living on the farm and everything that went with it. Maybe all those years she’d said it wasn’t a big deal that Cam spent so much time off making bowls and playing softball, it had been eating away at her, and she was just now waking up to her anger.
Eleanor didn’t know what was real anymore. The story she’d lived—the one she had told in herFamily Treestrip—felt like fiction now.
In the old days, when they were married—the early years, anyway—she had said it was okay that she made most of the money. They each did the things they were good at. They were a team. But with the syndicate money gone, and the pressure to come up with enough to pay for the braces Al needed, and for Ursula’s braces, and for Toby’s rehabilitation sessions—nobody there to shovel the snow or fix the dishwasher when it gave up the ghost—the absence of a contribution from her children’s father began to wear more heavily. She had no doubt that even with his new income as a physical therapist, money was even tighter on his end, particularly since he now had to come up with the mortgage payment. And still, Cam seemedto move through the world (as little as she saw of him in it) with the same easy, relaxed air he always had.
She called him up one night—rare event—to say that Ursula wanted to take guitar lessons. Al had bitten into a Brazil nut and broken a tooth. A doctor had recommended special shoes for Toby, to help with his balance issues.
“I can’t do everything on my own,” she told Cam. “You need to chip in.”
On the other end of the phone, she heard him sigh. “I don’t know what to tell you, Eleanor,” he said to her. His voice sounded far away, as if he were in some yoga pose—the one they did at the end of the class, where you just lie there chilling out—and she had crashed into the room playing some kind of awful music, with the volume cranked up high.
“I’m sorry you’re so hung up on money,” he said. “For your own sake, I hope you learn to let go of your anger.”
She could feel it happening: the bitterness taking hold of her. She no longer minded if her children heard her on the phone to him, the speeches she made about how hard she worked, how much it took to support a family. Maybe she wanted them to hear this, as if, hearing her, they would recognize how unfair he’d been, as if she could make them stop loving their father. Why would any loving parent want to accomplish such a thing?
“Of course you’re the cool one,” she said—loud enough to be heard in the next room, where they were doing homework. “Mr. Easygoing, Mr. Fun. See how much fun it is to pay for braces.”
Only he would never know that.
This conversation took place on the phone. But she could see him on the other end of the line—knew, even, the place where he’d be sitting, at the old trestle table he’d built from a tree that had come down in a storm one time, his hair tied back in a ponytail, maybe, feet on the old velvet footstool that had belonged to his grandmother. There would be a fire in the woodstove, and Coco fixing some extremely healthy dinner for the two of them. Out the window, icicles, and snow drifting down over the bare branches of their old tree.She could picture Sally at his feet, having one of her squirrel-chasing dreams. There had never been any question, when the two of them split up, which of the two of them would get their dog.
“Maybe I could be mellow and easygoing, too,” Eleanor told Cam now, over the phone. (Crazyland alert. She was heading in that direction.) “If I didn’t have to support three children.”
Whatever their father said in response, the children couldn’t hear it. Only the shrillness in their mother’s voice, a sound nobody hated more than Eleanor herself.
