How selfish she was.
Jonathan lets out a whistle. He is shaking his head vehemently. “Mom. Christ, Mom.” He looks at Cyril, whose expression is opaque. He is utterly still, focused only on Lucinda. “Everybody figures their parents have secrets, but Jesus—sorry, Mom. I don’t know how to wrap my head around this one.”
“Nothing went the way I expected. I was naïve.” No one rescues her from this confession. No Hail Marys are assigned. “Well.” She picks up her fork. “Let’s all please eat. I didn’t mean to starve everyone with so much drama. I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?” Christina exclaims. “This is beyond amazing. I am totally going to be here at Christmas to meet him. I am going to make sure all the girls are here. This is going to be … wild. Momentous. Maddie, are you taking this in?”
“Wild. That is one word for it.” Jonathan shakes his head and looks at his plate. “Well, I am not letting this food go to waste.” He takes a bite. He winces. “Okay, I know this is rude, but I am taking my plate into the kitchen to nuke it. Anybody else want their food warmed up?”
“Jonathan, these plates don’t go in the microwave,” says Christina. “Who cares if it’s not piping hot? We’re not at Chez Panisse. And by the way, Cyril, your stuffing is out of this world. I would eat it ice cold for breakfast.”
“Candied chestnuts,” says Cyril. “Soaked in Armagnac. Imported from France to California and then, wrapped in my socks, from California to here. The largest carbon footprint ever left by a handful of nuts.”
“What’s the green stuff?” asks Madison.
“Watercress purée,” Jonathan tells her. “It’s half cream. You’ll love it. You’re young enough not to care about your arteries.”
In the silence that follows, they hear a dog whining in the den. “God knows what mischief they’re up to,” says Christina. Both dogs, as if they’d been waiting for their cue, begin barking.
“Qui-ET!” Greg bellows. After only a brief pause, they start up again. Greg stands. “I’m sorry. They may need to go out. I’ll make it quick.”
Lucinda thinks how glad he must be to get away from this awkward, perilous conversation, the rich food that’s gone tepid because of it.
“Look. Mom, this is—you know what? It’s like an earthquake.” Jonathan seems to have changed his mind about reheating the food. “I don’t even know what to ask you. Like … all these years. He’s been out there, and you knew it, and you said nothing to any of us. Nothing? I’m always telling Cyril about what it means to grow up Catholic, all the superstition, the stoicism, the guilt, the—”
“I lost touch with her. With Kit’s mother,” Lucinda says sharply. “That’s really what it comes down to, Jonathan.”
“Lost touch? How would that happen?”
Lucinda says, “It was her decision. To … go it alone. Cut ties.”
“But you had rights!”
Lucinda looks to Zeke. He is concentrating on food, no help to her now.
“Times are different. Secrets are made to be exposed. It wasn’t always like that, Jonathan. And please don’t blame it on the church.”
Jonathan frowns at her. “This wasn’t just about you, Mom. This was about all of us, don’t you think?”
“Those are your California values talking,” says Christina. “Frankly, this was more about Mal than anybody else. Poor Mal. He must have thought about that child all the time. I’m still trying to process that.”
Jonathan turns his disapproval on his sister. “I’m proud of what you call my ‘California’ values. Better California than tax-averse Republican right.”
She snorts. “I am not a Republican. Can we leave politics out of it?”
“Fine,” says Jonathan. “Sorry. But doesn’t this upset you at all? Mom, I can’t help looking at you and Dad differently.”
“Can’t you appreciate how complicated this is?” says Christina. “Or is this your old fear about being upstaged by Mal? Could you let that go by now?”
How foolish Lucinda was to imagine a feel-good round of toasts, of memories honoring Mal and excitement about meeting Kit. “I never stopped thinking about this boy—or his mother,” she says. “And I prayed. I know you all scoff at such things, but I do feel as if my prayers were finally answered. Last week I found out that Kit was looking for his father.”
“Who’s long gone,” says Jonathan. “Didn’t he know that?”
“No,” says Lucinda. “No. Mal was not in touch with them, either. He never was. That was his choice from the very beginning.”
No one, now, has anything to say. They eat. They hear Greg coming in the back door with the dogs, the jingling of tags, the good boy good boy good BOY litany, the door to the den closing. When he enters the dining room, he stands still for a moment. What a glum tableau they are, Norman Rockwell in a slump. “Everything okay?” Greg says.
“Sit down,” says Lucinda. “We’re fine here, we really are.”
Jonathan gets up. “Me, I’m having seconds. Anyone else?”
Madison holds up her plate. “Sweet potatoes? Turkey?”
“Please,” prompts her mother.
“Please,” Madison repeats.
Jonathan takes her plate.
“I didn’t mean to bury your news, sweetheart,” says Lucinda. “I’m proud of you, taking a risk like that, to help a lost boy.”
“Thanks.” Jonathan hands Madison her plate, then carries his own to his place. “I’ve been so focused on that, and I was looking forward to telling you. Cyril was right that we should have waited.”
Cyril says nothing. Lucinda is thinking about what Christina said a few minutes ago. She ought to have considered Jonathan’s ego, fragile as ever. Of her three children, Malachy was the one with a “gift,” and the others knew it. Nothing is ever equal among siblings.
Lucinda hears Greg say quietly to Christina, “What did I miss?”
Jonathan raises his hands in a touchdown gesture. “All right, everybody, reboot!” he exclaims. “Me especially.”
Madison can’t help laughing.
Christina’s cell phone rings under the table. Greg frowns at her as she answers it. “Sweetheart! Oh, honey, same to you!” she cries. “Everybody, it’s Courtney, calling us from India! … No, sweetie, your timing is perfect. You’re missing a knockout meal, courtesy of your sophisticated uncles. Here; speak to your grandmother.” Christina hands the phone down to Lucinda.
“Hello, precious,” Lucinda says to her granddaughter. “Tell us what you’re doing there while we eat turkey here. We miss you so much.”
They eat dessert in the living room. Ferris and Jimbo, becalmed by food, are out on parole. They settle near the fire, next to Zeke’s chair. After Cyril removes the plates, Zeke dozes off, though he tries not to, while Lucinda tells her children everything she’s learned about Kit. Greg and Cyril wash dishes in the kitchen. Madison, now shameless in her yearning to be elsewhere, stares reverently into her tiny screen.
After they finish the cleanup, Greg and Cyril offer to set up Zeke’s bed in the living room. “Leave that till tomorrow. Just open the bed in the den,” says Lucinda. “I’ll sleep upstairs.” Let Zeke sleep in his shirt and trousers; he wouldn’t be happy to have his children (never mind their husbands) put him in his pajamas, and she is too tired to try it on her own.
Like the dogs, the humans begin to doze, sedated by their feast. When the clock chimes eight, Christina insists that it really is time to get on the road. Lucinda cannot persuade her to stay for the night. She takes Zeke’s barn coat from the hook where it’s hung, unworn, since last spring, and puts it on to walk her daughter outside.
When Greg claps his hands, the dogs vault into the back of the car. Madison sits inside already, possessed by her gadget, her smooth young face opalescent in the dark. Lucinda thinks of the paintings she saw in Italy: the Madonna glancing down, demure, receiving news of one kind or another.
Christina hugs her mother tightly. “So much to think about. I’ll call you tomorrow.
Do you think it’s good for Dad, all this drama?”
“It’s something to look forward to. Also, to untangle.”
“It’s knotty all right.”
“I thought it would be easier.”
“Easy? What’s that? Nothing’s easy in this family. Probably in any family. Mom, stop fretting. You’re doing that Catholic thing and finding a way to take the blame. Sorry. But it’s true, you know?”
Greg has the car running, headlights on, radio voices tuned in to keep him alert. Lucinda wishes Christina would say more—even her iconoclastic thoughts are welcome now—but it’s clear she wants to get into the warm car. “Good night, sweetheart. Careful on the roads, they’ll be icy.”
“Night, Mom. We love you.”
Lucinda watches them drive down the lane between the rows of young trees. The night sky is busy, stitched everywhere with stars.
Avoiding the frozen puddles, guided by the chore light, she follows the driveway back to the barn, slides open the door, and flicks the switch. She’s almost surprised that the light still works; when was anyone last in this place after dark?
Two feral cats dash across the concrete floor and up the stairs to the loft.
The water troughs and hayracks still run the length of the barn on both sides. The iron stanchions, rusted long ago, still mark a clear space for each cow. Uncracked, swept clean, the concrete floor slopes toward the drains. Overhead, the rafters look sound.
Zeke kept a herd of fifty head until both boys were in high school—trophy cows, the last of the best breeding lines. He insisted that Mal and Jonathan join 4-H in grade school; each boy chose a heifer to raise and exhibit on his own. Unlike his father, however, Zeke never forced his sons to hay the fields or oil machinery. He hired local men whose fathers had done the same tasks for his father. “They should grow up seeing that life, where they come from,” Zeke said to Lucinda when the children were small. “But I’ll be perfectly fine if they grow up to choose something other than farming. Sad to say, I’ll be relieved.”
When Lucinda asked him why, he told her that farming as he’d known it was no longer a viable living. “Not here,” he said. He welcomed the thought of his children heading out to a world much wider than the one he and Lucinda had known—the one they would never leave.
They auctioned off the cows and most of the machinery—keeping the Oliver and the combine, since Zeke had no intention of selling the fields they still hayed—the same summer Mal went to that music camp. What a fateful summer that turned out to be.
Matthew came up from Massachusetts for the auction, alone. It might have been Lucinda’s imagination, but she thought she saw a gloating look on his face more than once, as if the sale of the livestock, the tractors and wagons—nearly everything that defined the farm as a true farm—was a sign of surrender or defeat. Lucinda knew that wasn’t true; Zeke was simply ready to devote himself to the law, and to politics, and he had satisfied himself that his children were headed elsewhere, too. If anything, what he wanted was to help preserve traditions like the one he was personally setting aside. That’s what he told the people who gathered to hear him when he first ran for office.
After the cows were trailered and driven away, after a catered supper for local friends and out-of-town bidders, Lucinda came out to this barn to see it empty for the first evening since it had been built. She stood, just as she stands now, marveling at how big a place it was, how quietly grand, even palatial.
She thought she was alone until she heard a voice, from just behind her.
“End of an empire.”
She turned around and clamped a hand to her chest. “You nearly gave me a heart attack, Matthew.”
He laid an arm across her shoulders. “It’ll be quite the operation, taking this place down. Someone will want to salvage the boards and those beams. Antique hunters will pay a small ransom. Don’t forget about that.”
“Zeke won’t take it down.”
“Sure he will.”
“I don’t think so.”
“We’ll see.”
They stood side by side for a few minutes in the faltering light from the open door, the air stippled with tiny insects. He was the one who broke the volatile silence. “I do sometimes wonder what it might have been like.”
“If you’d been the one to take over the farm?”
“No. Oh no,” he said. “If I’d been the one to marry you.”
She became aware, longingly and fearfully, of his bare forearm against the skin along her shoulders, the prickly chill of sunburn. She had chosen an almost-strapless dress that morning, knowing she’d be out all day in the persistent heat (shaking hands, pouring iced tea, making sure the visitors’ children were entertained and out of the way).
Matthew was taller and heavier than Zeke: no longer as trim as the younger brother but still the one who could turn women’s heads, who flirted by instinct. “Don’t be silly. You fell in love with Dora,” she said. Why didn’t she say, And I fell in love with Zeke?
“I don’t know,” he said. “I came home from France, and there she was, as if she didn’t know she was supposed to stop waiting for Aaron. As if she was an actual widow.”
“I was there, too,” said Lucinda. “Waiting.”
“Sure, but you were a girl. Just a girl. Though not for long. So maybe I’m the one who should have waited. But I was ready for the next thing. Raring to be a grown-up. I wasn’t the only one.”
“You’re not sorry you married Dora,” she said, careful not to make it a question. Matthew’s arm had slipped down, across her shoulder blades. His wide palm supported her rib cage just above her waist.
“Of course I’m not,” he said. “Dumb luck, you could say. But that doesn’t mean …” Abruptly but easily, he used his strong arm to turn Lucinda toward him. He kissed her, without a bit of doubt or hesitation. She let him take her head between his hands, push his fingers deep into her hair. She let him feel that this was still something she dreamed of; she couldn’t help it. Only when he began to guide her toward the stairs to the loft did she pull away and tell him no.
His hands dropped to her shoulders, and he looked into her face, at first without speaking. “Dora wouldn’t know,” he finally said, “but he would, wouldn’t he? You’re not good at pretending. You never were.”
Lucinda raised her hands to his elbows, so that she could hold him and yet, at the same time, hold him away. “You told me I married the right brother—remember the dinner, before the wedding? And I did.”
“You certainly did. It shows, too.” He looked her up and down, admiring her in a way that made her almost wish she could change her mind. He laughed self-consciously and stepped gracefully away from her touch. “Just a passing bout of nostalgia, shall we chalk it up to that?”
“Yes,” she said. She left the barn before he did. She made sure that they were never alone together after that. Not once. Now she suspects she will never see him again, not unless Zeke dies first.
She hears the cats moving overhead in the hayloft. The tiniest rustlings echo loudly in the barn’s cavernous void. Even the loft is empty; these days, the hay is trucked away as soon as it’s baled. She has disturbed the cats’ nocturnal routine, probably scaring whatever mice they could have caught back into the knotholes of the desiccated boards that hold up the roof—the boards for which some salvage hunter would pay a good sum these days.
In that first conversation with Kit—which had lasted nearly an hour, until the battery in Kit’s phone gave out—they exchanged details about their lives as if they were prospective roommates. Lucinda told him that she couldn’t wait to meet his family—her great-grandchildren—but that night she wanted to hear about him. Just him. Between his telling her about his passion for northern art and his confessing to her that he had lost his teaching job, there was an awkward pause. It was during this pause that she realized something shocking, though it was logical: Lucinda knew the voice on the other end of the line. She hadn’t heard it in twenty years, because it
was Mal’s voice. Gentler, less edgy, with none of her son’s urban irony, but Mal’s voice all the same.
Lucinda cried as quietly as she could for the next several minutes, making sure that Kit kept talking. When she regained control of herself, she told him about the farm: what it had been like before Mal was born, then during his childhood, and since Zeke’s decision to enter politics.
“Jasper told me about his stroke,” said Kit.
“He’s doing very well.”
“I just wish …”
“I know what you wish. That you’d looked for us—for Mal—sooner.”
Kit sighed. “Yeah.”
“But here we are,” she said. “Let’s just take it from here.”
“The phone is a terrible meeting place,” he said. That’s when his phone began to beep, as if it were personally offended. “Oh God, I cannot believe this.”
“You know what?” said Lucinda. “Let’s say good-bye, just for now, and let’s send each other pictures.” Quickly, she took down his mailing address. Lucinda had no photographs of Mal on her computer; really, the only photos she had in this form were those her children sent to her, as attachments to their e-mails. She went straight to her sewing room and chose three pictures of Mal that normally she would have been heartbroken to surrender. She folded them into a piece of stationery and sealed it in an envelope. She wrote DO NOT BEND on both sides of the envelope and inscribed it with the name and address of her grandson.
Jonathan and Cyril are still awake upstairs. They are talking, and their conversation, though she can’t hear the words, sounds tense.
She returns Zeke’s coat to its allotted hook and goes through the living room, turning off lamps. She opens the door to the den as quietly as she can.
But Zeke is fully awake, sitting up on the mattress against the back of the sofa. He is still dressed, and he is holding a large envelope in his lap.
“Something tell you,” he says.
“Oh, Zeke, it’s been such a long day. You need sleep, and so do I.”
“Tell you now.”