On the other end of the line, Cam said something about the farm. How hard he was working now to take care of it, on top of physical therapy classes and working with Toby.
“You’re quite the hero, all right,” Eleanor said. “Maybe you forget who it was that bought that farm in the first place. Who paid the mortgage all those years while you were off at craft fairs charming the pants off some girl or other.”
He must have put down the phone at that point. Ursula stood there.
“I wish you wouldn’t be so hard on Dad all the time,” she said. Al had already headed up to her room. Toby, on the floor, kept his eyes on the controls of his video game—something about lining up jewels so all the matching colors filled a row, not that he ever got them to do that.
64.
GoodbyeGoodnight Moon
It was August, and the girls were off from school. (Not Toby. For Toby, school was a year-round event, not that it seemed to be doing much for him.) Ursula was trying to show Toby how to tie his shoes. Al was stationed at her usual spot—the Commodore 64, having recently discovered a sound chip that could re-create songs in three-part harmony. She had just successfully programmed it to play a tinny version of “Fast Car.” Now Tracy Chapman’s words appeared on the screen—“Starting from zero, got nothing to lose”—as a bouncing snowflake followed along.
Eleanor loaded the dishwasher as the three of them ate breakfast, and Ursula’s conversation turned to a yard sale they were planning to hold at their dad’s farm the weekend after next. Normally, even this amount of information would have been more than they’d share with their mother. But Ursula had been explaining how she intended to send the proceeds to Ethiopia for the babies who were starving there. They’d seen pictures in a magazine.
“That’s great,” Eleanor said. “So what are you planning to sell?”
She had made waffles that morning, feeling guilty at having spent the whole day before at her desk, sending out pitches for work.
“Tons of stuff,” Ursula said. “Dad said we might as well get rid of all the old books we outgrew. There’s got to be a hundred.”
She could see their covers, and the shelf in the borning room where they were kept.Blueberries for SalandBabarandCaps for Sale, The Story of FerdinandandMiss RumphiusandThe Little House. Goodnight Moon,and, in the later years,The Borrowers, Matilda, James and the Giant Peach.And a few hundred others. It seemed to her that the story of her years of raising children in that house was contained in the pages of those books.
“You can’t sell our books,” Eleanor said. She was trying her calm voice.
“We don’t read them anymore,” Al said. “Even Toby isn’t interested.”
Eleanor set the plastic jug of maple syrup on the table. Maybe she slammed it down.
“My teacher says we should try not to buy so much plastic,” Ursula offered. Changing the subject, or trying to.
“Dad’s syrup comes from trees,” Toby said. He was speaking sentences, finally. She could have been happy about this, but that wasn’t what she was taking in at this particular moment.
“Your dad does everything right,” she said, in the bitter tone of voice she nearly always adopted when the topic came around to Cam.
“Who are you anymore, anyway?” Al said. She got up from the table.
“I’m serious.Who are you?”
It was a question Cam had asked, too. It was a question Eleanor asked herself.
The children were heading out on a camping trip with their father that weekend. This was the unit now: Al, Ursula, and Toby, a little tribe who trudged back and forth along the same stretch of road from the home of their birth, with their happy, carefree dad and his new wife, to the condo inhabited by their angry and resentful mother. No experience in their lives to date had bonded them more powerfully than their parents’ divorce.
Saturday morning, Eleanor woke with a plan. If she were planning a bank robbery she might not have felt any greater level of adrenaline coursing through her body.
She set out early for the farm. The temperature had been over ninety all week, and she thought if she went early she might escape the worst of the heat, but by eight thirty, when she arrived, the temperature was right back up there.
Pulling into the driveway, she saw Coco’s VW Bug. As her car pulled up in front of the house, Coco appeared at the entrance to theporch. Evidently Cam had chosen to go camping alone with the kids. Maybe Coco had some massage appointments scheduled. Maybe a twenty-year-old needed a break from parenting.
Except for one time—just long enough for a quick wave—Eleanor had not seen Coco since her split from Cam. The last time they’d spoken was in her kitchen, baking together—back when she paid Coco a dollar an hour to look after her children.
Now Coco was wearing a very short dress, more like a nightgown. Maybe it was one. Through the fabric she could see Coco’s tiny breasts, her dark nipples. Those long legs. Bare feet. Beautiful toes, with nail polish on them. Eleanor imagined her lying on the grass with Ursula (Toby, too, maybe, but definitely not Al) applying polish to each other’s toes.
“I came to pick up some things,” Eleanor said, approaching the door. “It won’t take long.” Coco followed after her, as if all one hundred and ten pounds of her could have any effect on barring Eleanor’s entrance into the house she’d bought when she was the age Coco was now.
Eleanor had brought a box of green plastic trash bags with her—the extra-large, heavy-duty kind.
“I’m not sure Cam wants you to come in his personal space anymore,” Coco said. But nobody could have taken her seriously, saying this. Her voice was soft and tentative, and the way she spoke the words—her inflection going up at the end of the sentence—was more like a question.
