Then, after I’d been in New York for seven years, Bunny got sick and had to be moved to a memory care facility.
That spring a developer came up with a number that couldn’t be turned away.
My father signed the papers. We all came home for that because Maggie said he needed us around him. To support him. Instead, he raged at us. Told us to go back to our “real lives.” To forget where we came from. He said all kinds of things Maggie assured us he didn’t mean. And since then, although he’s apologized, he’s grown quieter and more morose. His hands shake a little now, and he seems to be hitting the bourbon harder than I remembered.
Your father . . . your father . . .
Misses you.
Loves you.
Wishes he’d been better to you.
Wishes you’d never been born.
CHAPTER FIVE
I call Maggie back as soon as the subway comes above ground.
“Tell me,” I say, all out of breath as soon as she answers. I brace myself in case hospitals are going to be involved. Or worse. “Is everything all right with Dad? What’s going on?”
“Oh. Sorry. It’s not such a big deal,” she says. “I’m just . . . you know. Making mountains out of molehills, as your father would say.” The big sigh that follows tells me everything I need to know. I get it. Nothing serious really, but just a lot of . . . stuff to worry about. There was an early morning frost a week or so ago, and my father slipped on some black ice and twisted his ankle. Nothing to be done for it, she says, just another one of those things involving my father refusing to take care of himself. He wouldn’t go to the doctor, even though he can barely put any weight on that ankle. On and on. “It’s the usual with him,” she says. “I’m telling you so you can join with me worrying about gangrene setting in.”
“Shall we schedule the fitting for the artificial limb yet?” I say, and she laughs.
I get my worrying talent from Maggie. We always joke that even though we’re not genetically related, somehow I inherited her worry gene. She’s the one I can call up when I have a scratchy throat and by the end of the call, we’ll somehow have cheered ourselves up by imagining all the other diseases it probably isn’t. Brain cancer, for instance.
“So, I’m hoping Thanksgiving will make your dad feel better,” says Maggie now. “You know how he gets when the weather gets cold anyway, and he’s taking it extra hard now that the construction has started. Every time they’re out there pouring another damn foundation, he goes into one of his funks. But you kids will cheer him up.”
Maggie knows perfectly well that I can do nothing that would cheer him up; that is, unless I had a personality transplant, time-traveled back to a past that never existed, and was a different sort of daughter, born to a different sort of mother. Didn’t work in New York, hadn’t ever dated the boys I dated, didn’t marry the guy I could only stay married to for eight months. Had been content to sell sunflowers and milk cows and feed chickens and keep the accounts for the farm. Had married some local guy who liked to fix stuff. Had a bunch of blond-haired, trouble-free children who would call him Gramps and to whom he could teach a love of tractors.
A thought flickers in my head. If I married Judd, my father would be proud. Judd has always been somebody who could make him smile. My dad always said he was the best of the bunch of kids Hendrix and I ran around with. Strong, practical, and hardworking. Why couldn’t I fall for a guy like that? That’s what he wanted to know. Why did I always have to like the dangerous ones?
“Hey,” I tell her. “I’m doing a little survey about love and marriage. Do you think marriage can work if the two people aren’t in love but are just really, really good friends?”
“What are you even talking about with this? Are you thinking of getting married?”
“Just answer the question. I’m asking for a friend.”
“I don’t believe you. You’re thinking about getting married again. Wait. This couldn’t be Judd, could it?”
“I said I’m asking for a friend,” I say.
“Did Judd propose? Oh my gosh. He did, didn’t he?”
“Well, in a manner of speaking . . . yes, I guess you could call it that,” I say. I’ve reached my apartment building by now, and I wave to Tobias, the doorman, and get in the elevator. (Judd isn’t here to make me take the stairs.) “We’re sort of sick of dating, and we are such good friends, and he said that he thinks romantic love is nothing more than a recipe for disaster, and that we’d be good parents, and we should move our lives along.”
I unlock the door to my apartment, and Mr. Swanky jumps down from the couch, where he’s been snacking on my bedroom slipper. He comes over, wagging his tail, and he licks my hand, asking forgiveness. My slipper, he says, was asking for it.
“Let me get this straight. Is this just for having kids? Or do you love him?”
“Do I love him?” I say slowly. “That’s the big question. I mean, we hang out together all the time. It’s just not . . . what I would have expected, you know. No . . . fireworks. It’s good. Comfortable. He says that’s the best kind. So I guess my question is: Do you think this is the best kind?”
She takes a deep breath, and my heart clutches. We’ve never ventured into a discussion about the fireworks kind of love versus the comfortable kind, and I suddenly feel weird about asking her this question. I wish I could take it back. After all, poor Maggie is married to a man who broke her heart by cheating on her. Presumably he voted at one point for fireworks, with my mom, and then he had to change his mind.
And also, even more dangerous territory here: Maggie never got to have her own kids—a topic that I know instinctively is off-limits. I’m not sure if they ever tried and couldn’t have a baby—or if Hendrix and I took up so much space in their lives that there was no room for a Robert/Maggie baby. Sometimes I wonder if she ever thinks she would have been better off if my dad had just stayed the hell in Woodstock, and then she could have found a different man and probably had her own kids, and she wouldn’t have had all this heartache. It had to have occurred to her.
I feel awful bringing it all up.
She says, “Well, I’m not so sure you two don’t love each other, to tell you the truth, and you just don’t know it. Maybe you’re expecting it to look different, so you don’t recognize it.”
“Yeah,” I say. I go into the kitchen and open the refrigerator and decide finally on some tired mushrooms and peppers for dinner. “That’s legit. I’m sure I’ve been contaminated by romantic comedies. I can’t picture Judd chasing me through airports, trying to keep me from getting on a plane and flying away from him.”
She laughs. “No, I suppose not. But, honey, we know he’s from a good family, and we know he’s not a serial killer, which was what I’ve been really worried about, you know. That you’d meet some New York guy that none of us had ever heard of, and that you’d fall in love before you realized his tendencies to murder people in their sleep, like what happened to a poor girl on the news—”
“Hey, I’m a better judge of character than that,” I say, getting the paring knife out of the drawer. “I haven’t even dated any serial killers. And I’ve been on forty-four dates in the last year.”