After it was done, she called Timmy Pouliot.
“I know you’ve got a girlfriend,” she told him. “But is there any chance you could take me out on your bike for an hour? Strictly friends. No need to lend me a helmet.” She wanted to feel the wind in her hair.
“Let’s go fast,” she told him.
78.
Like Dating Your Own Children
If Eleanor had expected Al or Ursula to express gratitude for her decision to sign over the farm, she would have had a disappointment in store, but she knew better. The girls didn’t seem to pay much attention to what she’d done, though if she had taken the other course of action presented to her, they would have had plenty to say, and none of it good.
“You’re nuts,” Darla told her, when she heard about Eleanor signing over the farm.
“I couldn’t bear having my daughters hate me,” she said.
She had told Cam her decision on a weekend visit to Akersville to bring Toby to the truck museum.
“That’s a beautiful gesture,” he told her, carrying a bushel of zucchini in from the garden, Elijah running alongside him. He barely broke his stride. Of all of them, the one who seemed to recognize best what it had meant to Eleanor to give away her rights to the property was Coco.
“You don’t know what this place means to us,” she said, taking Eleanor’s hand.
“Oh, I do, actually,” Eleanor told her. “The same thing it meant to me.”
Not long after she signed over the farm, at one of Al’s baseball games, she had spotted her old neighbor Walt, sitting in a folding chair, a blanket over his knees.
“I hear those two ended up with your farm,” he said to her. “Don’t know how that happened. Just figured I’d express my regrets. I know how hard you worked, taking care of that place. All you put into it.”
“Oh, well,” Eleanor said. “A home is only as good as the life you live inside it, right?”
“Still,” he said. “I remember how it was, you moving in all by yourself. What were you, nineteen? Twenty?”
“Too young to know better.”
“Damn shame things worked out like they did,” he told her. “That’s probably why Edith and I stayed together all those years. If I tried to leave she might have got her hands on my truck.”
“There would be a heartbreaker for you.” Eleanor managed a laugh.
“Next time,” he said, “stay married. It might not be what you expected, but you get used to it.”
She studied his face. It occurred to her that all these years, in his quiet Yankee way, her neighbor had probably been in love with her. Not that he would ever have done anything about it, besides delivering a cord of nice dry almond wood now and then, back when she lived alone on the farm, and plowing her driveway when snow fell.
“Or just stay single,” he offered. “Safer that way.”
Her time with her children seemed to be contracting. Weekdays alone in Brookline, she worked, mostly, though now and then she went out to dinner or a movie with a friend. She was volunteering at a soup kitchen, where she’d made friends with a nice group of fellow volunteers.
Weekends she drove to Akersville to see the children, when they could work her into their increasingly demanding schedules. More and more often, they couldn’t. Even Toby was busy now, with 4-H. He was raising goats for the annual fair and helping Cam out on the farm, building a new pen.
Even in the best-case scenario, their times together were short. They’d get a meal at Friendly’s or bowl a few frames at Moonlight Lanes, but they hardly ever got to spend the kind of time together that Eleanor loved best—when there was no particular activity going on. Times they just got to be in the same place, breathing the same air.
The one she talked about this with was Darla, of course. “When they come to Brookline,” she said of her children’s increasingly rarevisits, “they’re always either just taking their stuff out of those paper bags of theirs or gathering it all up again to go away,” she said. “It’s impossible to get a rhythm going. The truth is, they don’t want to be there. They prefer their dad.”
“That’s the one good thing about being married to an obvious asshole, instead of a nice guy who just got tired of being married to you,” Darla said. “With an asshole for a father, my kid is always grateful to have me around. She has no alternative.”
The main thing was, the condo where Eleanor lived now had never been her children’s home. Not really hers, either, though she lived there.
She remembered times, long ago, when it was a snow day and they all got to hang around all day in their pajamas, making popcorn and watching all three Herbie movies in a row or sitting around the table making their valentines or their paper boats, the day Ursula invited all her friends over to make miniskirts on Eleanor’s old treadle sewing machine, the time they had a skating party on the pond with a bonfire.
Now she needed to create a major event to get them together with her. When a big check arrived for a Father’s Day card she’d designed that became a big seller, she took them all to a Club Med in Florida for a week. They had a good time, but she realized something on that trip: that what she did now to make a good time possible seemed to require joining up with a group somewhere—another family, or a whole lot of them, as if the unit of herself, on her own, was not enough. She needed to throw in trapeze school and snorkeling and surfing lessons and karaoke nights. She wanted to make every day wonderful, and the pressure to do this often created the opposite result.
