Commuters (16 page)

“Those ones didn’t have my
poulet grand-mère
. Or my salt cod mousse.”

“Avery,” Winnie said. She was shaking her head, and for the first time he could hear something tired in her voice that sounded like Rich used to, when he wanted to—what?—bring Avery down to earth.

“I have to go pick up my girlfriend,” he said, and the very words kicked him into action—he poured the vinaigrette into a glass jar and started to soap up the pot and a few others left over in the sink.

“The train won’t get in until twelve forty,” Winnie said. “Holiday schedule.”

Avery nodded, his back to her.

“We’re looking forward to meeting her,” Winnie said, but still, he didn’t turn around. “How do you pronounce it again? Such an
unusual
name.”

There was a gleaming, enormous dishwasher just to his left, but Avery ignored it, trusting his own precision work more than some machine. If anything, he’d use it for some extra drying racks.

“Avery, all I meant was—”

“What?” He said, and it came out shorter and harsher than he had planned. “Yeah, the odds generally suck, when you try to do something new. Thanks, though. That helps a lot. Knowing the specifics.” The water was stinging hot, and he wasn’t wearing rubber gloves, but Avery’s hands had become so numb to heat or pain that he barely registered. “I thought you were—” But he just shook his head, embarrassed at how suddenly disappointed he felt. “It’s not like Grandad doesn’t know the risks, by the way. I didn’t
ask him for that investment money, either. He offered it—it was his idea.”

“I know that!” Winnie exclaimed.

“And it wasn’t as much as you probably think,” Avery said. “I had these old bonds from my other grandparents, from when I was a kid, and I cashed them all in…whatever.” He flicked the hand towel across the faucets, and then snapped it into an exact half fold to be hung over the lip of the sink. He was getting heat from
her
? After all the time he’d put in here, after all the hours he’d listened and nodded and said
sure, an Olympic swimming pool was just what this run-down place needed
. Did she have any idea what everyone really thought about that? Hell, what Avery sometimes thought, about a person who wants to axe the biggest tree on the block so that a couple old people could splash around before their afternoon naps.

What did she want him to say? Something half true or almost true but still completely corny, like the fact that the old man was growing on him? That spending time with Grandad would always remind Avery of not having a father, but then instantly ease that sharp pain? Or that the great gift of his life so far had turned out to be a woman who made him want to be more?

Where did he put the keys? God. Okay, there.

“You’re misunderstanding me,” Winnie said urgently. “I don’t care how much money he’s giving you—you know I don’t care at all about that, not at all. I just wanted to know that you’ll come back.”

“Of course I’m coming back,” Avery said gently, nodding at the oven and stove. “Don’t burn the place down,” he said lightly but without looking at her.

“All right,” Winnie said, just as the phone started ringing again. He went past her quickly, so quickly that he couldn’t be sure
if the older woman had raised her arm to stop him or just put her hand out to him. He thought maybe she had, but he didn’t really know and by the time he was even realizing it, Avery was out in the wispy snow air, a trace of chimney smoke there and gone, hurrying toward the strange car he had borrowed for the day.

He was twenty minutes early for the train, so he sat, fiddling with the dial on the useless radio for a while. And then he shut it off and just sat. A few other cars pulled into the tiny lot and idled nearby, puffing exhaust clouds that drifted up and then faded.

Two nights ago, Nona’s loud, upset voice had awakened him some time before dawn. Avery slept so regularly over at her place now that his clothes and things were pretty evenly divided between his apartment and hers. He’d come up on one elbow, eyes barely open, confused to find himself alone in bed. The flooding light from the main room poured into Nona’s tiny bedroom cave, where the door was ajar. Avery, who was working until 2 or 3 am six nights a week, slept in a thick, unmoving haze—he always had. But sleep was different for Nona, he now knew. She thrashed, she twisted, she shoved him around the mattress. It was common for her to get up several times a night, often to work—he’d gotten used to the sleep-dazed sight of her naked back, bluish in the light of the computer screen, curved away from him as she sat on the edge of the bed, headphones on, obsessively looping and splicing pieces of her own voice.

That radio was still on, upstairs. He could hear the fuzz and blare through the ceiling, as if someone had left the tuner halfway between two stations—one of them Spanish talk radio—and then turned it up, full blast. Nona must be going crazy, he thought. She’d already been up there to bang on the door—no one answered—and she had been pacing and agitated in the hour or
two before Avery could convince her to come to bed. He’d dropped right off to sleep, of course.

“If you could
just go up there
,” she was saying from the other room. “Yes. Fine. I’ll file whatever you want me to!”

Avery pushed open the door a little more. Nona was sitting on a rickety wood chair in the kitchen area, bent over so that her head was almost between her knees. She held the phone to an ear, and had her other hand buried in her hair, gripping the back of her head.

She looked so little and unprotected, her bare limbs out in the chilly air. And something about the way she was slumped over, caught in the harsh overhead light—Nona didn’t just look tired, she looked old. It scared him.

“Listen,” she was saying. “It’s not just me, all right? My husband works nights. You know? He just got back and he needs to sleep and this goddamn radio is keeping us all up.”

Avery, in the car at the Hartfield train station, was seared again by the pleasure of those words—
my husband
—and instantly mortified by how he kept playing them back to himself, the way they’d sounded in Nona’s voice. Of course, she’d only said that to try to win a little extra sympathy from whatever unimpressed police officer had happened to be working the phones at 4 am. He’d known that in the minute he’d heard her say it, and he knew it now. But he couldn’t stop remembering it, either, this stupid throwaway phrase that didn’t mean a thing.

Didn’t mean a thing to
her
, that is. Avery watched the train rumble in, the doors slide open. He understood it then, full force, that he loved Nona more than she loved him.

So it took him a moment, still absorbing such a realization and
turning it over in his head (it didn’t feel
bad
, exactly, this imbalance—didn’t someone have to love someone more?), to realize that Nona wasn’t alone, there on the platform. And also that it wasn’t a coincidence—as dopey Avery first imagined it had to be—that Thomas had taken the same train out to the same suburb, on Thanksgiving afternoon.

Thomas stood and squinted around the platform. Thomas flipped sunglasses down, from his balding forehead. Thomas slowly followed Nona to where Avery was standing by the open car door, thunderstruck and not trying to hide it.

“Hey, you!” She called out in a fake, upbeat, non-Nona way. That was for Thomas’s benefit, Avery understood. Then she was hugging him hard, whispering, “He got in early this morning. He didn’t have anywhere to go, and I tried to call, but did you turn your phone off? I just thought—”

Thomas reached them and stuck out a hand to Avery, which Avery reluctantly shook. “Everyone hates a party crasher,” he said. “Hope you don’t mind, man.”

“Of
course
we don’t mind,” Nona said, and that
we
went a long way toward making it all right, Avery thought, as did her outfit. Far from her usual getups, this was a positively sedate costume for Nona—not only had she wound all her dreadlocks into some kind of single, thick braid that hung down her back, but her plain wool skirt was a size too big, and her dark gray sweater a size too small. Only her shoes, flat and black but scuffed like crazy, with wild pointed toes, could give her away. He knew he was staring, at her clothes and at her gorgeous, un-madeup face, but for a moment Avery just couldn’t even move, because he was so taken in by what the effort implied.

“Well, I wanted fucking flowers,” she was saying, pushing something into his hands. “I went to the place, but all they had were these limp, pitiful excuses for what was once plant life, and then we had to race for the train, so…”

“Juice,” Avery said, turning the lukewarm glass bottle around.

“It’s this passion-fruit kind from Oaxaca,” Nona said. “You can ditch it, or whatever. The bodega guy swore to me that anyone would love it. I mean, it was either juice or some mass-market crap from Grand Central.”

“It’s perfect,” Avery said, tucking the bottle carefully back in its brown paper bag. He put his hand on the soft part of her throat and slipped a few fingers under the collar of her sweater. He went around to open the door for her. Thomas got his bald self into the backseat, and when Avery was putting it in drive, a hand stuck a bottle of red wine in his face.

“Small barrel producer from the Loire Valley,” Thomas said. “1997, which was a decent year, of course. Lot of rain. In my opinion, they could have aged it
one
more year, to soften the tannins and make that flabby pinot pop just a bit more, but what do I know? It’s serviceable, at best.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Avery said.
Dick.
He stuck the bottle on the car floor by his feet, where he could feel it rolling around with a couple of empty, crumpled soda cups. He swung the car out of the parking lot and sped across Main to take the back way, along the road behind the school, to Greenham. The engine surged, and Avery didn’t really try to rein in this outward sign of his anger. They climbed the long hill lined with huge oaks and sycamores, past houses that were set farther and farther back from the road.

When they pulled into his grandfather’s long driveway, Thomas
made a sound, pretending to be shocked. And maybe he was. It had been a while since Avery had really seen what this place looked like—at least on the outside: its sheer size for one thing, its mass of heavy stone walls and handful of pointed roofs, the way it spread out in all directions, with paved little patios all over, each bordered by high, dark hedges. He’d forgotten that the front door looked like something out of a Monty Python medieval spoof, twice as tall as any of them, made of dark wood beams and metal bolts the size of a man’s fist. And the lawn—even covered in branches and uneven, wet piles of leaves, it looked like Notre Dame’s practice field.

“Oh, my
God
,” Thomas said. “Should we go in through the back? Servants’ entrance?”

“Shut it,” Nona said sweetly. She put her hand on Avery’s leg. “I’m starving.”

Thomas got out of the car and just stood there, making a show of gaping at the house. “There won’t be enough crème brûlées,” Avery said, low, to Nona.

“He’ll share mine,” she said, and opened her door.

“Don’t worry about the bird, Chef,” Thomas called to Avery. “I’ll just eat some of the sides.”

“He’s vegetarian,” Nona said. She was twisting her skirt around, trying to right it.

“Everything has duck fat in it,” Avery said, following them, holding tight to the bottle of passion-fruit juice. He’d wanted her to meet Grandad, but now everything about this plan was crumbling. What did Nona think, about this house, about Hartfield? She had to know this wasn’t
him
, right? Because Avery was totally separate, totally different, from everything that was here: it was just Thanksgiving, after all. “He can have toast.”

By the time drinks had been poured and hors d’oeuvres were circulating through the living room, Winnie felt better. The hors d’oeuvres, at least those that she’d seen so far, were reassuringly normal: cheese puffs, a bowl of roasted nuts. At Bob’s urging, Lila had put in a tape of her recent diving meet, and a group had gathered around the silent television to watch a revolving series of young girls, in matching green swimsuits, who stood as still as statues on the board and then launched themselves into the air with gusto. Bob and Melissa and the others—whooping or shaking their heads in unison—seemed to be able to tell the most minute differences between the divers and their dives, so Winnie pretended to also, though she wasn’t always sure which one was Lila, even. The fire was coming along nicely, after several false starts and many interventions, and a flickery warmth had filled the room.

In fact, it had become a little too warm in the living room, but of course Winnie was wearing a turtleneck sweater—of close-knit blue silk, but a turtleneck nonetheless. The patch of darker skin near her jaw had not receded or faded. If anything, the pig
ment had deepened further, and now the affected area seemed to be spreading down the left side of her throat. Rachel insisted you could hardly notice it, and if Dr. Reynolds wasn’t worried—and he wasn’t, though she’d been back twice to check—then Winnie should really try to forget about it…Had she tried some makeup, like foundation or concealer?

Yes, of course she had. With dismal results. Last week, when she had been together with Jerry—in her bed, in the middle of their tender contortions—Winnie had become paralyzed by the fear that he might look down at the spot on her jaw, in the moment, and think it ugly. She was distracted, and then ashamed of her inattention, and then miserable on both accounts. So she had edged a pillow closer to her face, and then closer, and all the while they had continued to make love, until she had the pillow arranged, just so, over most of her cheek and throat.

Jerry had opened his eyes then and flipped the pillow out of the way. “Are you trying to smother yourself?” he’d exclaimed, with the barely restrained exasperation of a man interrupted. She had to laugh. And then they had resumed that slow, sweet work, and Winnie forgot the spot on her skin.

But it was harder to forget it now, and if she wasn’t tugging the turtleneck up almost to her lips—a silly, unhelpful gesture, she knew—she had to fight herself from ducking into the tiny powder room under the staircase, each time she passed by, in order to confirm that the spot was still there. It was always still there.

Avery’s friends were perfectly pleasant, even if they were keeping mostly to themselves, so far. It had been a real surprise to see how, well,
old
his girlfriend was, though she was trying hard to stave that off, what with those regrettable tattoos and that wild
mass of tangled hair. After Avery had proudly introduced her to the others, Rachel had sent Winnie an amused look across the room—eyebrows raised—so Winnie knew she wasn’t the only one who had noticed. Still, the woman had a kind face.

And if she was making Jerry’s grandson happy, then who cared about anything else? The voices filling her home, the gathering of family, the familiar turkey aroma: all were restoring Winnie, but she was still struggling to come to terms with that earlier encounter with Avery. It had all happened so fast, and then he rushed out of the house—Winnie knew she had hurt him, but she wasn’t sure how, exactly. This was a rare, fragile connection growing between Jerry and this young man—she had seen how easily they kidded each other, how invigorated Jerry was after these visits. He would ransack the house for a book he’d promised Avery, trudging slowly up and down all the stairs; once he made Matty take them to a Cuban-Chinese restaurant—in the Bronx!—that Avery had gone on about. Oh, couldn’t she have kept her mouth shut?

All she had wanted, Winnie argued with herself while admiring Lila’s new sweater, was to make sure it was something
real
that was still bringing Avery out to visit—not just the restaurant or its prospects, shifting things like that—but something true and unchanging. Could Avery tell the difference?

But she had botched it.

Avery was a whirling dervish in the kitchen now, firing up every stove burner, and he had firmly turned them all out, even Winnie, who had ventured in a few minutes ago to bring him a glass of cold soda, meaning to apologize (without apologizing, exactly).

“I’ve got it from here,” he’d said, his face red from the heat. He had a red kerchief tied on his head and suddenly he looked like a
real chef, moving easily around the kitchen, shaking something in a pan, dropping handfuls of herbs into another pot. She backed uncertainly away, afraid of the distance now between them.

But then Avery had said something in their old, joking way and then, to her great relief, he had even swatted a tea towel her way. “Get out there and keep an eye on my girl, Winnie. Don’t let her pocket the silver.”

She had mock-scolded him for impertinence, and left with her heart eased. For now. Even the phone had stopped its endless ringing, so there was that, too. And here was Jerry, holding court, in his favorite high-backed armchair by the fire.

With Waugatuck’s pool closed for the season, they had found him an indoor place to swim, but it was all the way out in Edmonton, a good forty-five minutes each way, and Matty had said to Winnie—low-voiced, afraid to be overheard—that the drive itself was so uncomfortable for Jerry that its effects nearly undid any benefit the water might have provided. She had quickly found someone to install a whirlpool fixture in the upstairs bath, and that might help, it seemed, at least a little. Still, the pool project beckoned to Winnie—a kind of promise, a way to hold on to something.

Now Jerry began a favorite story, about the time he’d met Alan Greenspan in the hallway outside the men’s room at a function in Chicago and dressed him down for using the word “recession” in a speech, even though the point had been that there wasn’t going to be one. Winnie knew it well, and she needed to check the table settings, but she stayed for her favorite part:

“He listened to me, thanked me for my thoughts, and then just as he was leaving, leans in real close”—here Jerry started laugh
ing, and Winnie joined him—“and then he tells me that my fly was down. My once-in-a-lifetime five minutes with the Chairman of the Fed. I guess I made a pretty good impression. Completely unzipped.”

Winnie savored the sound of laughter as she went in to survey the dining room. Did the new arrangement of nine settings work, or were the places too crowded together? Should she have Bob or someone bring the table’s second middle piece up from the basement? That would mean taking every piece of china off, and the runner and cloth, and the flowers and candles—not to mention
locating
the middle piece, because who knew where it could be…Oh, who
were
these people who showed up to dinner unannounced and uninvited? To be fair, Thomas had been more than apologetic, in a smooth and charming way. But Avery’s tight smile and silence about the matter told Winnie all she needed to know. Surely, though, Avery couldn’t be jealous? Maybe she’d have to find a way to tell him the obvious: Nona’s friend Thomas was not interested in women, in the slightest.

“Hey, Nana, guess what?” Melissa had followed her, drumming a loud pattern on the doorway, and then the chair back, and then the table. The child never stopped moving, it seemed.

“Do me a favor. Sit down here.” They squeezed next to each other near the end of the table, where Winnie’s place would be, to test the spacing. “Will your elbow be in your sister’s face all evening? Or is this all right?”

Melissa pretended to cut up her turkey with fierce sideways motions. “We can handle it,” she said. “Guess what? Mom said she’s going to take me and Lila to California to visit Uncle Dan in January! And the beach is, like, right outside their
house
. Although
if Lila has practice over the break she might have to go by herself on the plane the next day. Which is kind of scary to her, but not to me. I would
love
to go on a plane by myself, but Mom says no way, José.”

“What about your father?” This was the first Winnie had heard of Rachel’s plan. And she immediately squelched the thought that it must be Jerry’s money paying for this trip: Really, did that matter at all? Then she carefully amended the question. “Or maybe he can’t get away. All this writing. I know he’s working hard.”

Melissa looked at her in surprise, as if something obvious had been ignored. “He wasn’t really invited, I guess,” she said in a carefully low voice that pierced Winnie. “She says it’s just a girls’ trip.”

“Those are the best kind,” Winnie agreed. “Let’s go peek at Avery. Do you think he’ll let us in there to get the water pitcher?”

She followed Melissa into the hallway leading to the kitchen, trying to recover from the girl’s matter-of-fact response. Winnie supposed she shouldn’t be so surprised. They were smart girls, and they had been through a lot. Of course they knew more than either she or Rachel assumed, or wanted to admit, about the rift between their parents. This was something she would have to bring up with Rachel, and this thought stayed with her through the last-minute pre-dinner preparations, the serving spoons and baskets of bread and finding a book of matches for the candles, until the very sight of all of them around the same table, talking and laughing and ignoring her, pushed everything else to the side. Lila and Melissa were just to Winnie’s right, Lila’s perpetually hunched shoulders within an arm’s reach, and Bob and Nona next to them farther
down. To her left was Nona’s friend Thomas, with Rachel in the middle, and Avery down at the other end. And directly across from her was Jerry, of course. Winnie reached out to push one of the glass candle covers out of the way. There. Now he came into full sight, her husband, in his heathered wool sweater and worn sports coat—the gray of that sweater, she saw, matched his eyes exactly; he rapped the table once, hard, said, “What’s everyone waiting for? Let’s eat.”

Last Friday, she had taken Bob to a late lunch at Mary’s Café. It was a date she had arranged carefully, at a time she knew Rachel would be at the dentist with the girls. As they took their seats, though, Winnie said something casual about how it was too bad she couldn’t have joined them—and Bob had only met her eyes with a calm nod. He knew, of course, that she’d wanted to meet with him alone.

“Well, it’s not as bad as I’d guessed,” he said, after several minutes of studying the papers she’d brought. He held half a sandwich in one hand and turned pages with the other. “Everything about the sale of the house looks in order.”

“But—you see what she’s saying about him. That he—wasn’t in his right mind when he, when we—”

“He had a car take him over to the closing, right? That’s too bad.” Bob took another bite and neatly caught a piece of chicken salad that fell. “Weirdly enough, driving yourself tends to convince the court of competence. You see it in probate challenges all the time—some geezer will have left his entire fortune to his pet Pekingese, but if he drives himself over to Dunkin’ Donuts that day…”

Winnie tried to smile. “Do you miss this? The legal business?
You must learn an awful lot about people. About their unhappiness, that is.”

Bob put his sandwich down and wiped his hands with a paper napkin. The early-afternoon light filled the café’s small front room, and caught the lenses of his glasses when he looked down. “Sometimes. It’s not always juicy scandals and intra-family disputes. Sorry. You know what I mean. Most of the time, it’s the usual paper pushing. Especially for those of us who didn’t make partner.”

“That was the firm’s loss,” Winnie said. She knew how much that had crushed Rachel, when it happened a year before Bob’s accident, but she had never spoken directly to her son-in-law about his career. Even now, it was hard to tell what he was thinking.

“I’m going to tell you something, Winnie. And it doesn’t have to go further than this lunch, but it needs to be said.” Bob brought a level gaze up to hers. “Rachel can’t keep taking money from you and Jerry.”

“I didn’t know if you—”

“Aside from my own personal feelings about it, which…She just can’t. Not while you are involved in this lawsuit. Do you know what they use to determine mental weakness?”

Winnie flinched at the term, but if Bob noticed, he didn’t stop—his voice was now hard-edged. “It’s not just old age that can constitute grounds for this—it’s old age in combination with other factors. Including prior history, fraud, or undue influence. What could be construed as undue influence.”

This last phrase hung between them in the quiet restaurant.

“Have you spoken to her about this?” Winnie asked. “The money?”

“Have you?” Bob replied. And for a moment, the two of them just stared at each other. Winnie thought about telling him that she had tried to raise the subject with Jerry, a few days after that unbearable meeting in the lawyers’ office.
I’m not stupid,
she wanted to tell her son-in-law. Of course she worried about what those loans would mean to Annette, what dangers they might expose Jerry to. She had suggested he put on hold, temporarily, all that generosity he’d shown Rachel, and even Avery.

“Just until it all gets sorted out,” she had said, trying to strike a casual tone.

But Jerry had waited so long to respond that Winnie had been afraid she’d crossed a line. And then she thought he was going to ignore what she’d said.

Finally, he spoke. “Don’t worry about any of that,” he said. “I’ll take care of it.” Which was a rebuke, of sorts, even though his voice was level. And Winnie was hurt, though she tried not to be, and so she didn’t feel like describing to Bob that particular moment, or the fact that she had failed in what she’d set out to do. Nor could she put into words the look on Jerry’s face when he’d said,
I’ll
take care of it. He hadn’t seemed surprised by her suggestion (nor did he show any sign of considering it) or unsettled by any part of the escalating family feud led by his daughter. No, Winnie realized. He’d looked like he’d been down this road a thousand times before, with someone giving him unasked-for advice, with someone telling him what he
should
do with his money. He’d looked like he was spoiling for a fight.