A Field Guide to Deception (35 page)

“It was one of the most eventful dinners we ever had. The pumpkin pie exploded, and one of the dogs discovered the box of chocolates, and this chatterbox asked if she could have a glass of wine.” Susan laughed. “And I was young; hardly forty. My god.” She brought Claire several sweet potatoes and yams to cube. “Speaking of wine,” she said. “We should have a glass. Red or white?”

“Red.”

“Good girl.”

Susan poured a cab, set the glass at Claire's station. Sliced a baguette, Irish cheddar, one of the skinless apples. Claire wondered if Liv's succession of girlfriends had monikers, and what her own might be.
Simon's mother,
in all likelihood, or
the one with Simon
.

Susan, wheezing, sat down beside Claire, and admonished her for working. Forced her to rest and indulge. They finished the cheddar before anything else, and Claire sliced more on the plastic cutting board with the unrelenting German knives.

It was painful to her, sitting like this with an older woman, listening to stories, drinking wine, tending the kitchen subversively, as though this were the field trip, and the others on some tedious errand.

“Were any of them serious,” Claire asked, “Liv's girlfriends?”

Susan pulled another chair round to her side to rest her legs. Her little socked feet hung off the end of the seat. Above her, a crocheted canary swung on fishing line from the ceiling.

“I know she had one on the east coast that got serious, serious enough for her to leave school after they broke up. And Meg. Meg was serious. I wondered at the time—” Here she looked up at Claire, and dropped the story.

“Wondered?” Claire prodded.

“Some things are effortless—skills, athletics, friendships—for some people. Meg and Liv were like that: effortless, intuitive. I remember thinking they must've had each other wiretapped. But, like I said before, simple was never enough for Olivia.”

Claire drank her wine. Wondered where Meg had fallen, high school or later.

“Tell me something,” Susan said.

“Alright.”

“Are you lonely, raising Simon on your own? Besides Olivia, I mean. I remember being so lonely when my children were little, so isolated. I don't mean to be maudlin, or self-indulgent, but cancer has been like that for me too. Illness is, I suppose, isolating. Have you been lonely as a mother?”

“Not while my aunt was alive. She died last January. Afterward, I got so frightened. At the funeral, I started shaking and couldn't stop. Terrified what would become of us, Simon with just me to look after him.”

“You lived with your aunt?”

“Yes.”

“I stayed with my mother for a summer after Olivia was born. She kept a goat farm in Canada. We were like frontier women. I hated every goddamned minute of that arduous summer. Deprivation. That's the way I remember that summer. No men, no conversation, no newspaper. We had the radio, the goats, and each other, and none of that was enough.”

After the museum, Dennis drove them to Peanut Butter and Ellie's for lunch. Simon talked endlessly, to everyone in the café, about ‘the king one' that he'd seen at the exhibit. Liv had bought him a model of the Tyrannosaurus, and Simon waved the model about, roaring at the rest of the patrons.

They ordered two peanut butter and banana sandwiches with local honey, and a peanut butter and marionberry special on French toast. Simon ate his, and half of Dennis' and drank a milkshake as well.

“Growth spurt,” Dennis remarked, as Simon finished off their carrots.

He growled at Liv. “The king one eats your face!”

“If your dinosaur doesn't, you probably will.”

“Simon,” Dennis said, “what say we go home, and I show you my trains?”

He paused, nodded, and walked straight from the restaurant, leaving his coat, his hat, and his party behind. Liv sprinted after him, found him on the sidewalk admiring a yellow bicycle with a banana seat.

“Look, Liv,” he said. “Look. We'll ride it?”

“We're going to ride in the convertible.”

“No. No, thank you. I want to ride this.”

“You'll pedal?”

“OK.”

Proprietarily, he placed his hand on the bicycle, but Dennis came out, spoiling their getaway, and Simon let go of the bicycle, followed obediently behind to climb again into the topless car.

Cinnamon. More than any other scent, cinnamon informed the kitchen. Claire grinned with wine, her sentences brighter, the air around them lightened, comical. She'd been frightened of this woman. Intimidated, as though it were her own homecoming rather than Liv's. She'd been afraid of Susan's anger. Instead, she found herself baking pies, sewing a turkey, opening a second bottle of wine.

“Mama,” Simon shouted from the porch. “Mama, look.”

They'd grabbed him, and Claire could hear the scuffle, the soothing pitch of Liv's voice, the child struggling as his winter layers were removed. “
Mama!
Stop it. Let go.
Mama! Help me
.”

She and Susan came out of the kitchen, their aprons greasy, and officious, as though they were lunch ladies on a cigarette break.

Liv had lifted Simon to remove his shoes, and held him straight out like Superman. He extended his dinosaur to Claire.

“Look, Mama. The king one.”

“Scary,” she said.

He roared, and—released, finally from Liv's stranglehold—lunged at his mother.

“The king one,” he whispered as he curled into her. “I like this one.” The dinosaur kissed her as she carried Simon upstairs. His blanket pulled to his chin, he was asleep before she left the room.

Liv had followed her up, and waited in the hallway.

“You've never seen anything like this kid ate today.” Liv cocked her head, grinned. “Oh, you're drunk.”

“Yes.”

“How's Mom?”

“Drunk as well.”

“Yeah? Interesting afternoon?”

“I've been hearing all about Meg, and the chatterbox, and the suck-face kisser, and the summer of goats and deprivation, and the time you and Kimmie Grant played chicken on the freeway, and the cops brought you home and your mother slapped you.”

“Wow.”

“You were a troubled kid.”

“Do you think, maybe, you should lie down for a nap too?”

Claire considered this. “Yeah. I think so.” She walked into their room, and crawled beneath the comforter, still wearing her apron.

“So, Mom,” Liv said as she walked into the kitchen. “What's with the
drunken indiscretions?”

“Claire wasn't indiscreet. Come sit down.”

“How did you know about the suck-face kisser?”

“Bailey told me.”

“Traitors,” Liv said, sipping her mother's wine. “This is good.”

“Have the rest of Claire's glass.”

“They're both out.”

“Your father too.”

“You'd better have a nap as well.”

“I don't nap.”

“Uh huh,” said Liv. “The turkey smells amazing.”

“I've never sewed a turkey before. It was a little gruesome, holding it together.”

“If you tell all your stories this trip, what will we talk about next visit?”

“Oh, Olivia, I could never exhaust all the stories about you. I forgot to tell her about the time you started the brawl at the basketball tournament, and then won the Best Sportsmanship plaque.”

“Mom, you get that I like this woman, right?”

“Yes, darling, I have sussed that out.”

“Great. So we're done with the mayhem stories. I'm actually not that fucked-up kid from high school anymore. I haven't been rushed to the emergency room, or hurt in a fight in—” Liv stopped, closed her eyes, exhaled. “She doesn't have to learn it all at once.”

“Let's watch a movie,” her mother said. “
Best Years of Our Lives
? I'll make some popcorn.”

When Simon woke, his dinosaur clutched in his fist and pressed into his face, he remembered that he'd been promised a look at some trains, and had somehow been derailed into a nap.

He hopped up and went in search of Dennis. The house smelled of food. In the family room, Liv and her mother were asleep on the sofas, an old black-and-white movie playing unheeded on the television. Simon wandered into the kitchen, and watched Dennis pull
a steaming metal tray from the stove.

“What you got in there?” he asked.

“This,” said Dennis, picking up the child, “is a turkey. We're going to have it for dinner, as soon as everyone else wakes up.”

“No, I don't like this turkey. No, thank you. I want to play trains.”

“Trains, is it? Well, we might be able to find some trains for you.”

Down a flight of carpeted stairs, Dennis pulled the string for an overhead light to illuminate his workshop. Biplanes, racing cars, roadsters, sailboats, engines, cabooses, trains with coaches, vehicles elaborately designed and carved and glued.

“Wow,” Simon breathed. “I like these.”

He squirmed down to walk the line of the worktable, his hand outstretched, though carefully withheld, from the vehicles. They were larger—wider and taller—than any of his Thomas trains. The coaches on the train were attached to one another by hitches. A solitary engine made of cherry wood sat last in the line. Soft, beautiful lines.

“I like this one,” he said, then looked up at Dennis.

“Go ahead and try that one,” Dennis said.

Simon picked the engine up, ran his hands over the wheels and stack, and the hitch at the back. Then he knelt and drove the train along the cement floor before the worktable. Smooth and fast and strong, a good train. With this train tucked under his arm, he returned to his examination of the remainder of the vehicles. In the end, he picked two cars, a train with coaches, a caboose, and the cherry engine. Dennis said yes to the lot, and helped Simon carry them back upstairs.