Will raised his eyebrows. “Goddesses?”
“Nope.”
“Vortices?”
“Don’t know what they are.”
“Wicca?”
“Never.”
“What’s your position on modern medicine?”
“All for it. Deal?”
“Deal.”
Now, out in his backyard, his mother finished her sun salutation, started walking toward the house, and then leaned forward, squinting, her hands on her knees. Will wondered what she was looking at. It was so much brighter outside than it was in his office; no way could she see him. Then she smiled and blew a kiss in his direction. Will was highly skeptical about things like sixth sense and intuition, but when it came to her kids, his mother could be downright uncanny. This hadn’t always been true, but it was true now. Even though he didn’t believe she could possibly see him do it, he waved.
She didn’t come straight to the office but went instead to the kitchen. Will heard her turn on the water, then clatter around, unscrewing the lids off the small, round metal canisters that held her loose tea leaves and herbs.
Will knew that she would come into his office in a few minutes, would lean against the doorjamb in her paint-streaked shirt, and tell him that she’d finished the last illustration for his new book. She had been close to finished last night, and he was pretty sure she had gotten up before sunrise that morning to paint. It amazed him, how little sleep she needed now, especially since one of the primary ways he remembered her from his childhood was as a long, sloped lump under sheets. He could see himself—he could transport himself into himself—at six, ten, fifteen, standing next to the guest-room bed or next to the couch in what she called her studio, even though she almost never used it for making art, staring at her and churning with worry and anger, his hands dangling, as full daylight sliced in around the drawn curtains.
Soon she would come in with her tea, say she had finished the painting for the book, and tomorrow or the next day, he would drive her to the airport and she would go back to the summerhouse. This visit had been her longest, almost four months. During the last book, she had come for three and had been staying in the guesthouse when Kara finally left him for good.
Having his mother, or anyone else, around to witness firsthand his getting dumped should have been a nightmare of humiliation and awkwardness, but it wasn’t. He remembered how she had waited a few days, staying nearly invisible and quiet as a cat, before weighing in on the breakup. Then all she’d done was tilt her head to one side and say, “I liked her.”
“She liked you, too,” said Will. It was true. Some women might have minded—might have detested—having their boyfriend’s mother living in the backyard, but Kara had repeatedly told him how much she loved it, even going so far as to ask her to eat dinner with them nearly every night, an invitation that, most of the time, his mother graciously refused. In fact, Kara seemed to have a crush on his mother, blushing in her presence, agreeing with her about the smallest things, asking her what kind of perfume she used (“Eau de paint” his mother had said, laughing). Once, Will had come home to find Kara wearing the cardigan his mother had left in their kitchen the night before. Will hadn’t completely understood this enthusiasm, but sincerely hoped—and almost believed—that it had nothing to do with what Kara had once referred to, with a complete and disturbing lack of irony, as his mother’s “pedigree.”
“I liked her,” his mother continued, “but, if I may be blunt, I didn’t think she would stay.”
“Why not?” Will had asked. Forty-eight hours earlier, he might have asked this defensively, but now he felt more exhausted than anything else. Besides, he was curious.
“The way she cleared out a separate shelf in the pantry for her own food, instead of mixing hers up with yours. I thought it was a bad sign.”
“Oh.”
“Also, she always seemed to be a little mad at you.”
Actually, Kara had seemed more than a little mad, a fact that Will had asked her about exactly five times during the nine months they were together. The first time, she had laughed it off. The second time, she had cried and apologized and blamed her anger on her own moodiness. The third time, Kara had yelled, thrown a magazine in his direction (it didn’t hit him), and slept in the guesthouse (his mother wasn’t staying in it at the time), but at four that morning, he’d woken up to her hands pulling up his T-shirt, her mouth on his chest. “Forgive me,” she’d murmured, and he had.
But then, just days later, when her anger came slashing toward him out of nowhere again, and he’d asked her about it, she had pressed her lips into a line, walked out of the room, walked back in, and said matter-of-factly, “You’re just a closed-off person. That’s your right, of course. But I’m passionate; I wear my heart on my sleeve. Sometimes, I get frustrated that you aren’t the same way.”
This had surprised Will because he had never considered himself closed-off. He wasn’t a secret keeper, for the most part; he disclosed. He expressed his feelings when it seemed important to express them. When he tried to explain these things to Kara, she had cut him off, tenderly, saying, “Please. I didn’t mean to put you in the position of having to defend yourself. You are who you are. I love you, and I value you, and I’m sorry,” which pretty much put an end to that conversation.
Then, one night, on their way out to a dinner party, he had kissed her and said, “I love you in that dress,” and she had pushed him backward with both hands, slapped the kitchen table, and snapped, “Well, that’s just great, Will. That’s just peachy,” shoved her handbag over her shoulder, and slammed her way out the front door. Will had stood in the kitchen, listening to the screen door creak on its hinges in the aftershock of her slamming, suddenly feeling his own anger nearby, crouching, like something misshapen and ugly in his peripheral vision.
He had looked down at the kitchen chair in front of him, a fragile thing, and gripped it to steady himself, even as the urge to lift it up over his head and hurl it against the wall rushed up from his hands, into his arms and shoulders.
He’d done the breathing, the visualizing, employed all the strategies he hadn’t had to use in years to calm himself down. Then he’d gone out to the car, where Kara sat in the passenger seat, opened the door, and said quietly, “Why are you so mad at me all the time? The real reason.”
Kara had stared straight ahead for a long time before looking up at him with sad, sad eyes and saying, “I lied.”
“What?”
“That time I said you were closed off, not passionate enough.”
Will knew all at once what she was going to say, the general gist of it, and he braced himself.
“You do wear your heart on your sleeve,” she told him in a hollow voice. “It’s right there. You just don’t love me as much as I love you.”
“Kara,” Will began, then stopped.
“You love me,” she clarified. “But only a little bit. Not enough.”
WILL’S MOTHER STOOD IN THE DOORWAY TO HIS OFFICE.
“How’s the tea?” he asked.
“‘It tastes like licorice,’” his mother said, smiling. “‘That’s the way with everything.’” It was a Hemingway quotation, one Will had been hearing for as long as he could remember. Even though it made no sense for his mother to love Hemingway (Woolf maybe, Austen definitely, Hemingway no), she always had. She knew that particular story, every word, by heart, and could quote whole chapters from The Sun Also Rises. When Will had finally read those stories on his own—he’d been in tenth grade—it had made his stomach hurt to think about his mother feeling so at home with all those unhappy, disappointed, disconnected characters.
“I finished the last painting,” she said. Jokingly, she threw her arms out to the side and said, “It’s brilliant!”
“Same as always. Thanks, Mom.”
She leaned over and kissed the top of his head.
“Have I told you lately how I adore you?”
“Yep.”
“Adore,” she said. “Not just like a lot.”
“Adore. Got it.”
“Good.”
“You still need to do the book cover,” Will reminded her, “for the novel.”
“I’ll come back,” she said.
She turned to face the bulletin board, and Will knew she was reading the e-mail again.
“It still says what it said the first five times, Mom.”
“You know, it’s really too bad Cat ever left in the first place,” she said.
“She wanted to get married,” said Will. “It seemed like a fair enough reason to go.”
His mother turned around and said suddenly, “You know, I thought that after she left, you and Pen might fall in love.”
Will leaned back in his chair, startled.
“Oh, yeah? I never knew you thought that.”
“I guess it wasn’t in the cards, though?”
Will straightened some papers on his desk. He could feel her watching him.
“Nope. We were friends.” He gave a half-baked smile. “Until we weren’t.”
His mother’s cheeks reddened, and she made a gesture with one hand, as though she were brushing away the past.
“Anyway, I think you should go.” She tapped a finger against the e-mail on the bulletin board. “Cat needs you. That’s not a small thing, is it? Even after so long?”
“No,” admitted Will.
“You never could say no to Cat. You and Pen. Could you?” She was smiling.
“I don’t know. No,” said Will, with a shrug, “I guess we never could.”
CHAPTER FIVE
AS PEN PARKED HER CAR AT THE CURB IN FRONT OF AUGUSTA’S father Patrick’s house, or in front of the uniformly rainforest-green ocean of lawn on which Patrick’s house floated like a distant ship, Pen thought what she had thought the very first time she had seen the house and every time since: Patrick was living the wrong life.
Although it’s true that this thought initially came to her during a time in her own life when thinking such a thing was suspiciously convenient, she persisted in thinking it long after she’d stopped wanting Patrick to live a different life in a different house with a radically different wife, a thing Pen had wanted ardently for a while there, or at least had thought she wanted. It was clear to her now: she had been confused and only thought that she wanted to be married to Patrick—although she had to admit that, at the time, thinking and actually wanting felt like one and the same.
But Pen couldn’t imagine anyone who knew Patrick reconciling him—perpetually messy, boyish, slouchy Patrick—with all this newness and gleam: the dazzlingly white driveway lined with still-scrawny trees, the landscaping carefully choreographed for staggered, three-season blooming (crocuses, then forsythia, then tulips, then azaleas, then a bewildering sequence of flowers and flowering bushes, then, finally, dahlias and mums, and somewhere in there, for years, twined delicately around the mailbox, clematis—starry, purple, and hopeful—until Tanya had declared it “folksy” and had it yanked).
The first time Patrick had shown her the house, Pen thought he was joking. She had given his shoulder a playful shove and said, “Yeah, right. Now take me to the real house.”
“What do you mean?” he’d asked, with what Pen had assumed was faux surprise. “That’s it. That’s our house.”
This remark would only sting later, after they’d driven back into the city and she was lying next to him on his simultaneously rock-hard and rickety Ikea futon in his small, unbeautiful, rented South Philly row house, watching him sleep. He had only been living in the house for a few weeks before Pen met him, but already it looked more lived-in than the apartment a few blocks away where she’d lived for years: houseplants on the kitchen windowsill, New Yorker cartoons stuck to the refrigerator door, a grove of candle stumps above the imitation fireplace, the mantel studded with coins of wax.
“That was our house,” he should have said, or “That’s her house,” or even better, “That’s the house I barely remember living in for two years, if you can call what I was doing before I met you living.”
Pen had watched his eyes move under the heartbreakingly thin skin of his eyelids and tried to remember what she knew about REM sleep. He was dreaming, right? Watching things invisible to her. It seemed possible that in such a state, his brain might be especially susceptible to suggestion. “You live here,” she had whispered fervidly. “Got that? Here.”
But because at the time, sitting next to Patrick in the car, Pen thought the whole thing was a joke, she had laughed and said, “Trust me, that is not your house.”
“It is,” he’d insisted. “I lived in it for two years.”
“Please,” she’d said, rolling her eyes. “You did not live there.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because people don’t really live in houses like that. It’s not possible.”
“Houses like what?”
“You know like what. Like oversized and soulless and planted in the middle of what used to be someone’s cornfield.”
They both looked at the house. Because Patrick had slunk down in the passenger seat to hide from the neighbors (although why he bothered was a mystery to Pen, since the neighboring houses were set so far away that, unless the people living in them had high-powered binoculars, they couldn’t have seen a 747 landing in Patrick’s yard, or what Patrick was pretending was his yard, which was almost large enough to accommodate such a landing, should one ever occur), he had to scoot himself up so that his eyes were just above the base of the window.
It had been July, just after twelve noon, and the high white sun pounding down wasn’t doing the house any favors. Pen remembered imagining how, in mellow afternoon light, the stucco might have looked buttery instead of bad-teeth yellow and the tall windows might have seemed welcoming rather than flashing and blind. Despite her old-house snobbery, Pen might have found it sort of pretty or at least impressive. As it was, the house appeared creepily phony, like an enormous photograph thumbtacked to a vast blue wall. Even the flowers looked plastic.
“I think it’s fake,” Pen had said in a stage whisper. “I think if you went up to it and pushed it with one finger, it would fall down flat.”
“I guess I can see how it wouldn’t be everyone’s cup of tea.” Something in his voice caught Pen’s attention because it sounded like sadness. But before she could ask him about it, the yard was suddenly alive, blossoming with tiny, silvery, geranium-flower-shaped fountains and crisscrossed with rainbows.
“Whoa,” breathed Pen.
“Hey!” said Patrick, sitting up in his seat. “That’s not supposed to happen.” He didn’t sound sad anymore; he sounded concerned.
“I guess it’s the sprinkler system. For the grass?” said Pen, figuring it out. She felt a bit deflated. For a few seconds there, the lawn’s abrupt transformation had seemed like a minor miracle.
“Yeah, but it’s set for morning and evening. If you water in the heat of the day, the sun soaks it all up. Tanya must have set it wrong before they left for the beach.”
Pen stared at the back of Patrick’s neck.
Crap, she thought, crappity crap crap shit.
“Um,” she said in a small voice. “So, gosh. You really did live here, in this place I just completely demolished?”
“Until I was thrown out on my ass, yes.” He turned and smiled at her. “Demolished? You doused that sucker with gasoline and set it on fire.”
“I’m sorry. I really and truly didn’t think it was yours.”
Patrick took off his ancient Phillies cap, put it in his lap, and looked at it.
Pen said, “Guess I was pretty harsh.”
Patrick looked back at the house, “You really think it’s soulless?”
Absolutely and entirely soulless, thought Pen, barren and treeless and pretentious and soulless. “I shouldn’t have said ‘soulless.’”
“Because that’s the house Lila’s growing up in, you know?”
At the time, Pen h
adn’t yet met Lila, who was three years old, and whenever Patrick mentioned her, Pen experienced an odd and intense mix of reverence, curiosity, jealousy, and irritation. It was just the way she had felt back in elementary school, when her devoutly Catholic friend Shelby talked about the Blessed Virgin. (“We have the Virgin Mary, too,” Pen could remember protesting. “You don’t pray to her, do you?” Shelby had shot back. “And if you don’t pray to her, you don’t have her. You have God and Jesus, that’s it.”)
Pen looked at Patrick’s longish curly hair, the stubble on his face. His T-shirt was transparent in spots and so decayed that the figure on the front looked more like a Cat in the Hat zombie than the Cat himself, and his Phillies cap was a dull pink, the ratty white buckram poking through all along the brim.
“I don’t know. I guess I just can’t imagine you in that particular house,” ventured Pen finally.
“Why not?”
“Patrick, you shave once a week, tops. And look at you. Every single edge on you is frayed.”
Patrick looked down at himself, fingering the hem of his khaki shorts.
“I’m clean, though. I make a point of being clean.” He smiled at her, but his eyes weren’t happy.
“You are. You do.”
“I let Tanya pick the house. She cared, and I really didn’t. Besides, it was mostly her money.”
Pen wasn’t sure that this was true. Despite his threadbare appearance, Patrick was a partner in a marketing and design firm that even Jamie (who had loathed the Patrick situation from the beginning) had grudgingly acknowledged “did well.” But Patrick liked to think of himself as a “regular Joe,” a trait Pen had found endearingly down to earth, initially, and annoyingly affected later. (“I should have known he wasn’t trustworthy,” Pen told her friend Amelie, after Patrick had broken off their engagement and gone back to Tanya. “The first time I saw him in a mechanic’s shirt with another man’s name on it, I should have known.”)
The house seemed to suit Patrick no better now, almost six years after he’d left her and gone back to it the first time, two since he’d gone back to it for good, than it ever had, but now Pen had her own reasons to regret calling it soulless, since, for one weekend out of every month, Augusta was growing up here, too.