“Then why not?”
Maisie looked down at her plate. “I don’t want to leave Mom.”
Patrick placed his silverware on his plate, the knife carefully between the tines of his fork. He recognized their grief, how untethered they were from the life they had known. He reached out and pulled the kids close to him, until he had one nestled under each arm. It was his job now to give them something, anything, to hold on to. “Let me tell you something. You can’t ever leave your mother, just as she can never really leave you.”
Maisie looked up at him, pleading for more.
Patrick inhaled, hoping the oxygen would give him the stamina to continue. Sara was very much there, in Maisie’s expressions, or Grant’s stoicism. He’d never had any interest in children himself but suddenly recognized some small appeal; Sara had found a way to live beyond death. “She’s half of you and you’re half of her.” He looked at them both, hoping this made sense, hoping that it would sink in. He saw Sara’s eyes staring back at him. “So . . . yeah. Just like brunch. Half breakfast. Half lunch.” He smiled; they seemed to like this. “We’re going to figure this out.” Patrick kissed the top of each child’s head before pushing them off of him and back toward their own place settings with a sudden nagging that they were in danger of becoming too attached. There has to be another way. “Now,” he began, picking up his fork and knife to resume eating. “Who here has heard of a snappetizer?”
Both kids stared at him blankly.
“Are you being serious?” he asked. “Boy. You’re lucky I got here when I did.”
THREE
Patrick could feel his sister approaching before she emerged from behind two enormous parked cars, boatlike sedans they used to give away on The Hollywood Squares that seemed no longer to exist in California. His blood chilled ten degrees. He stood his ground in the parking lot between the church and the cemetery as Clara marched toward him with the sense of purpose she’d exuded since childhood—rigorous posture, heavy steps that fell just shy of stomping, always a little bit pained—and with an almost masculine energy that Patrick, in his adolescence, had been jealous of. Her clothing was a pastiche of Style sections in midlist women’s magazines (publications perhaps better suited to cookie recipes than fashion), and the sunglasses she wore on top of her head had taken root somewhere in her scalp.
“It was a nice service,” she said when she arrived at his side.
Nice. Patrick looked at the sky; the nimbus clouds were gray but not threatening. “Rain held off.” He didn’t know how to behave at these things any more than she did.
“It’s fun to see you back in Connecticut. I thought maybe you were done with us.”
“Planes fly west, you know.” It was an old argument. When Patrick moved to Los Angeles he flew home regularly for years, every six months or so until he stopped. It was the show, it was his schedule. Everyone assumed fame had changed him. And, to some extent, it had. It gave him the confidence to call out hypocrisy where he saw it. He came home, no one came to see him. After a while he began to wonder: What was the point?
“You’re off the hook, by the way. I talked to Darren. We agreed he and I should take the children for the summer.”
Patrick’s whole body loosened, like he’d just walked out of ninety minutes of Reiki. Oh, thank god.
“They should stay in Connecticut to be closer to their friends,” she continued.
“Like Audra Brackett. And whomever Grant pals around with.”
“Who?”
Patrick blew right past her question. “It was farcical,” he offered. “The very idea.”
“I mean, can you imagine?” Clara laughed, and she never laughed. Patrick always thought he would welcome it, the sound of his sister’s laughter; instead, he was immediately put off. “It was good of you to come.” She placed her hand on his forearm and gave it a condescending squeeze.
Patrick had delivered the eulogy. He’d written two on the plane; he gave the version he knew others wanted to hear. About Sara the wife, Sara the mother, Sara the very definition of family. The other was for the Sara he knew. Sara the loyal, Sara the thrill seeker, Sara the irreverent, Sara the brother-fucker. It would have amused him, sharing old stories. The time he took her to the Ramrod, a Boston leather bar, and people mistook her for a drag queen. The time they were arrested for sneaking into the Granary Burying Ground after dark to make rubbings of the gravestones. The time she screamed obscenities in the face of religious protesters the first time they attended Pride. He came close to pulling the second eulogy out of his jacket pocket. But in the end it was for his Sara, not theirs, so he left it in his breast pocket, where it sat directly over his heart.
“Still. Greg asked me to take the kids. Not you.”
Clara pulled her hand away. “Greg was probably high at the time.”
“We don’t have to do this.”
“Do what?”
“It’s not a requirement, is all I’m saying.”
“A requirement of what?”
“Our being related. A lot of people just love their family.”
“I love my family.”
“Okay.”
“I do!”
Patrick fluttered his lips. “You don’t like us very much.”
“You two don’t make it easy.” Clara, the oldest, had always viewed Patrick and Greg as twin nuisances, equal bothers to an otherwise orderly existence.
Patrick shrugged and looked out over the cemetery.
“Anyhow, I have the next few months off. I was going to teach summer school, but my friend Anita is going on maternity leave in the fall, so she was more than happy to take on additional classes before then.”
He was only half listening. “Who?”
“Anita. My friend Anita.”
Patrick surveyed the crowd; it seemed they didn’t know what to do. No one wanted to leave, but everyone looked pained to stay. “Greg has a point, wanting the kids near him.”
Clara didn’t like the look in his eye; he was piecing together a puzzle. “Would you stop? You don’t even want to do this. Let’s not kid ourselves. I’m giving you an out.”
Patrick didn’t know what he found more irksome, the fact that she knew he would want a way out, or that under any other circumstance he would take it. He patted himself down; the second eulogy in his pocket crinkled, like Sara asking him a favor.
“Patrick.”
“Clara.” Patrick locked eyes with his sister. “The kids mentioned they didn’t have many friends. That their house had become too sad. Is that true?”