Daughters for a Time (10 page)

I watched Larry’s eyes well up, and then he shook his head.

I nodded. The emotion was rising in me like milk warming on the stove. I figured I had about five seconds to get the hell out of there before I bubbled over, making a mess that would be hard to clean up.

“I’ve got to go,” I said, putting down the beer bottle on the coaster. “Thanks.”

“Helen,” he said, following me to the door. “I’m glad you came.”

I nodded, looked at him for a split second, wondered whether it was my wet eyes that made his look wet, too, and then ran to my car.

Once upon a time, I thought as I drove away, we were just an average family—a mom and dad, two daughters. Then my father left and my mother died and my sister and I were heavy with grief. Maybe those things were average, too. Maybe heartache was more normal than the absence of it.

The phone was ringing when I walked through the door. It was Davis and Delia, Tim’s parents, who were always both on the line when they called. And who were both always in the most cheerful moods.

“How are you, darling?” Delia asked.

“Good. I just walked through the door. I’ve been at Harvest for most of the day.”

“And Tim?” she asked.

“Busy! As usual. He’s still at the restaurant. I won’t see him for a few more hours.”

“We just wanted to check in on you, dear.”

“We’re good,” I said. “Really good.”

“And the adoption? Is everything going okay?”

“Yeah, as far as I know, it looks good.”

“When you and Tim get back from China, we’ll come up and help you out.”

“That would be great,” I said, thinking that all this talk of China meant that it was getting closer by the day.

“Let us know when you have a date,” she said. “We’ll book a room.”

“No you will not. You’ll stay with us. No arguing!” This was our obligatory back-and-forth every time they visited.

“We don’t want to burden you, dear,” Delia said. “We want to help.”

“Burden us? We love it when you’re here. End of discussion.”

Many people loathed their in-laws. I adored mine. Davis Francis was the retired CEO of a string of manufacturing companies. With broad shoulders and a thick wave of black hair, à la Michael Douglas as Gordon Gecko in
Wall Street
, Davis was a towering man with an equally towering presence.

Tim’s mother, Delia, was as petite as Davis was tall, and her presence as mild as Davis’s was imposing. A size four with tight brown curls, Delia had a way of looking at me that made my throat tighten and tears pool in my eyes. “You are so special,” Delia had said to me at the end of our first dinner together. She placed her petite hand on my cheek and added, “Cancer took my mother, too.” I fought for the breath that was stuck in my throat, but it was a lost cause; Delia’s words undid me. I cried that night—hysterically, cathartically, painfully—on the quilted down of Delia’s four-poster bed. She held me and I remembered thinking how long it had been since I’d found comfort in a mother’s arms, how uniquely curative they were, like a warm spoonful of chicken noodle soup on a rainy day.

Davis and Delia regarded each other like fine wine—with reverence and adoration. I watched them in wonder as if I were observing exotic animals at the zoo. What is this creature called “loving husband and father,” I’d think. How did Davis grow into this caring human being who valued family more than anything, when my father had been overcome by husband-hood and fatherhood?

Of course, there were no answers, and I didn’t really care; I was just so thrilled to be part of a family who loved so deeply and with such loyalty. “God’s smiling on us today,” Davis said to Tim and me on our wedding day. Davis then walked me down the aisle, and at the altar, he lifted my veil and kissed me on the cheek, his eyes filled with tears. He squeezed my hands and
whispered the word
daughter
sweetly in my ear just as I looked up to the back of the church to see Larry, standing in the corner, decked out in a three-piece suit. Against Claire’s advice, I had sent him an invitation to our wedding. At the reception, Larry sat awkwardly at a table with some of Tim’s relatives. At one point, I saw Claire talking to him in a corner, though when I asked her about it later, she waved it away as nothing. As the night went on, Larry stayed inconspicuously out of sight, blending into the background during the toasts, cake cutting, and first dances. When he said good-bye, he took an awkward step forward as if he wanted to hug me but stopped short and settled for a quick hand on my shoulder. He shook Tim’s hand, gave us a wedding card along with his congratulations, and left. That was seven years ago, the last time I had seen my father before this evening.

Davis and Delia’s generous manner and easy lifestyle had yielded a wonderful son, albeit one who was a tad naive. Tim believed that there was goodness in every person. I wasn’t convinced—a belief bred not of pessimism or cynicism, but pragmatism. Most people had been hurt at some point. Most people had had their faith—in humankind as well as anything divine—tested. But Tim’s private-school, loving-and-doting-parents, always-in-a-safe-environment upbringing had left his belief intact.

I recalled one evening in late August when Tim and I were dating, having recently returned from our travels abroad. We sat poolside at Tim’s parents’ estate, our feet dangling in the cool water, a bottle of Riesling sitting empty between us.

“What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?” I asked. Though Tim and I had been together for four years, there was a feeling of newness to our relationship now that we were stateside.

Tim thought, looking up at the marbled sky, as though he wanted to come up with something good. “I once invested in this IPO that went sour the next day…”

“No!” I protested, punching him in the arm. “I’m not talking about business. What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to
you
?” I considered helping him out, filling in the blanks, offering suggestions. Hurt by someone you loved? Father left? Death in the family? Heart broken? Hadn’t he ever been devastated by something, someone? Hadn’t he ever felt the earth shift beneath him? Hadn’t he ever felt utterly alone?

“I’ve had a nice life,” Tim said with a shrug, rubbing my thigh in a way that told me that he knew I hadn’t navigated my first twenty-seven years with a similar ease.

I was dumfounded and yet pleased by my new boyfriend’s purity. Yes, next to pristine Tim, I felt so marred, so
seasoned
, yet I was right where I wanted to be—planted firmly in the middle of a family devoid of chaos, absent of hurt. I only hoped that by association I, too, would be purified.

Tim slipped through the front door at midnight. Tonight I was wide awake and eager to see him. He kissed me, said hello, and then headed to the bathroom to take his shower.

I stood on my vanity chair and peered over the top of the shower. The damp steam billowed onto my face. “How was the dinner crowd?”

“Busy—we served two hundred,” Tim said, scrubbing his body with a loofah.

Tim’s back was lobster red from the heat. He rubbed the bar of soap under his arms, down his back. I used to do this all the time—talk to Tim as he took his after-work shower. I smiled at the familiarity of it.

“But we ran out of the veal,” Tim said. “I underestimated how many would want it.”

“Did you substitute pork or take it from the menu?”

“I subbed pork,” he said. “It worked okay.”

“What else went on? Any juicy gossip from Sondra or Philippe?”

Sondra was our knockout hostess, a stunning twenty-five-year-old brunette with high, sculpted cheekbones and pillowy, ruby lips. We’d hired her when we were getting ready to open the doors to Harvest and she was newly graduated with a degree in hotel management. In the space of a few short years, she had grown into a beautiful woman who radiated confidence like she held a thunderbolt.

“You tell me,” Tim said. “You talk to Sondra more than I do.”

“She told me that she broke up with another boyfriend. I told her that she needs to date a guy her age.”

“She likes the guys with thick wallets.”

“What about Philippe?”

“Nothing much,” Tim said. “He’s really learning a lot, though. In a few years I can definitely see letting him run the show.”

“You said that a couple of years ago,” I reminded him.

“What about you? What’s new?”

“Well,” I said, a smile stretching across my face, “I went shopping tonight. Got all sorts of stuff for our trip. Whether we, or the baby, happen to have constipation, diarrhea, bug bites, rashes, a cold, or a fever, I’ve got us covered.”

“Great.”

“And I got us money belts, and passport holders, and airplane pillows.”

“Somehow you and I made it all around the world without all that stuff,” Tim said, smiling.

“Yeah, but we were just twentysomethings. Now we’re going to be parents. We need to be prepared. No ‘winging it’ allowed.”

“Listen to you.”

“I’m getting really excited about this,” I said. “And I talked to your parents tonight, too. They’re going to come up to help us out when we get back from China.”

It was always easier talking to Tim when he was in the shower. The glass wall of the stall cut the tension between us, as if it were a confessional. I hadn’t knelt in a real confessional since the month before Mom died, hoping that offering up my sins would somehow open me up to some good fortune. But Mom died, anyway—her faith intact, mine spent.

“That’s great, Helen,” Tim said.

“There’s more!” I said, an uneasy chuckle tumbling from my mouth. I peered at Tim through the steam. “I saw my father tonight. Larry. I walked up to his door and actually talked to him.”

Tim was silent for a moment, wiped the water from his eyes. “Why’d you do that?”

“Because he’s my father” was the only answer that came to mind.

“And…”

“And when we were applying for the adoption, the social worker—Elle Reese—asked all about him and I didn’t have a clue what to tell her. Did you see what she ultimately wrote in the home study? She wrote, ‘Father estranged.’”

Tim turned off the shower, reached for his towel, and nodded his head in consideration.

“I don’t want him to be estranged anymore,” I said. “Especially if we’re getting a baby.”

“Especially
since
we’re getting a baby,” Tim corrected.

“I just feel that he deserves another chance. Doesn’t everyone deserve a second chance?”

“Helen, I think it’s great. I’m all for you reconciling with your father. What will Claire say?”

“She’ll say that I’m nuts. Our memories of Larry are very different. I was so much younger. I didn’t see the half of it. She dealt with all the grown-up stuff. Mom confided in her, so I’m sure that tainted Claire’s feelings, knowing what Mom was going through. So whatever she says, I won’t be able to blame her. I just remember good times. Right or wrong, I always liked being around Dad.”

Claire and I are separated by six years and our mother treated us very differently because of it. Claire was her confidant, and Mom leaned on her as she would a best friend. Claire once told me that Mom—only days before she died—had apologized to her, saying that she knew all along that it wasn’t right to ask her daughter to shoulder her worries, but that Claire was just so capable.

For as much as Mom relied on Claire to act older than her age, she relied on me to act younger than mine. I was her baby, the daughter she could cuddle, a talisman of the early years before her husband and body had betrayed her. Except that, when Mom got sick, I got mad, and because there was no one else to blame, I blamed her. So instead of being pliable and cuddly and childlike, as she needed me to be, I became snotty and hurtful and blasphemous, sprinkling my thirteen-year-old language with Goddamn this and Jesus Christ that, those deities who seemed solidly in cahoots with cancer to take my mom away from me, those deities to whom Mom seemed to be giving a pass.

After Tim got out of the shower, we locked up the house and then crawled into bed together. I pulled out the stack of letters that Claire had given me, and snuggled up against Tim.

“Do you remember where this was?” I asked Tim, showing him the front of a card, a simple sketch of cobblestoned streets, a town square, and mighty church in the middle.

“That could basically be any city in Europe,” he said.

“But it was Lyon, remember?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said dreamily, and opened the card.

Dear Claire,
I’m writing you from Lyon, the gastronomical capital of the world! I’m sitting in a
bouchon
(a small restaurant), eating an amazing dish called
poularde demi-deuil
(pullet hen with black truffles), along with soft cheese with herbs piled on the most amazing baguette, and washing it down with the most amazing Cotes du Rhone wine. Hilarious! I see that I just wrote “amazing” three times. But truly, this food is AMAZING!
So wish you were here. Do you believe that I miss you? I really do, but I know you’re taking the world by storm. I tell everyone about you: MBA, youngest senior investment manager at Goldman Sachs. Someone asked me if you did “arbitrage.” I told them I wasn’t sure. What the heck is arbitrage? Sounds kind of scary. Don’t do it if it’s dangerous.
Anyway, I can just see you all put together in your banker-gray, pin-striped, double-breasted suit, pointy heels, and smart chignon, strolling into the office, snapping your fingers for one of your minions to bring you a latte and the
Wall Street Journal
. Just kidding, I know you wouldn’t be bossy. Ha, ha. Seriously, I’m sure you’re the best to work for and with.
Love ya, Helen