Family Reunion (6 page)

Uncle Todd and Angus were in the workshop off the three-car garage, drilling, because Uncle Todd said the leg would be easier to carry around if it had a rope sling.

“Like a submachine gun!” said Angus happily. “Just casually thrown over my shoulder.”

Uncle Todd's approval of everything Angus was and said and had brought on the plane had restored Angus's spirits. It had not done the same for Annette. “I'm going to carry a lifelong grudge against that flight attendant,” Annette said to me.

Aunt Maggie said primly, “Perhaps Angus should not have been permitted to bring the leg to start with. I can well
imagine that Charlie would have been entertained by it, however. My brother always likes to draw attention to himself. That's why I know he will love this weekend. When is his flight getting in?”

Annette looked vague.

Great, I thought. Wife Number Three has no idea when husband's flight arrives. We're talking seriously Not Perfect here. “Why?” I said brightly. “Do you have something planned, Aunt Maggie? Here. Let me help carry the glasses and drinks outside.”

But Carolyn and Aunt Maggie had this under control, of course, and we headed for the backyard, which was nothing like I remembered. Gone was the torn, sagging badminton net, replaced by a long, slim lap pool with blue tiles and yellow stripes underwater. Gone was the patchy grass, replaced by lovely decks and well-planned stretches of brick. Gone were the holes dug by the neighbor's dog. Now everything was edged by impressive gardens, where flowers stood tall and bloomed bright.

Carolyn poured iced tea into frosted glasses, adding slices of lemon and passing a tiny plate of tiny cookies, which probably had a tiny amount of flavor. I happen to detest iced tea. You can add sugar for days and still not have a drink worth pouring down your throat.

We sat beneath a yellow awning, gazing at the towering oaks around us while a single fluffy cloud nicely punctuated
a blue sky. The poolside furniture was sleek and sophisticated. The house itself had central air now, so the hummy sound of window units and ceiling fans was just another memory, soft and vibrating in my past. “No swings?” I said sadly. “No hammock and sandbox?”

Carolyn and Aunt Maggie laughed. “We got rid of those years ago,” said my aunt. “Children of divorce, I notice,” she informed Annette, “always yearn for the safer, more controlled parts of their childhood.”

Annette squeezed a little acid from her lemon into her iced tea.

Grandma said, “I think I'll lie down for a while. I nap every day now. It was such a long drive from the airport. But wake me up the minute Charlie arrives.”

I laughed. “It'll be a long nap, Grandma,” I told her. “He's not coming till Wednesday.”

“What?” shrieked Aunt Maggie. “What do you mean, he's not coming till Wednesday? The party is tomorrow night! Saturday night!” She was so upset that she leaped right out of her chair. The chairs had beautiful cushions, the kind you take inside every night, because they'd be ruined by rain. In our family, we would just use them ruined, but no doubt the Perfects never forgot the task of cushion retrieval.

Annette said nervously, “I know. I'm so sorry. Your twentieth anniversary is such a milestone. It's such an important
date. He's so sorry he's missing it. But he doesn't think you'll notice he's not here. He picked out a gift for you and Todd. I have it in my bag, and when he gets here on Wednesday, he's planning of course to take you out to dinner to celebrate, and of course—”

“He said he would be here for the weekend!” Aunt Maggie screamed.

Annette and I looked at each other.

My aunt flopped back down into her chair. She looked even more limp than Annette. She began to cry. “It isn't our twentieth anniversary,” she said. “I mean, it is, but that's not the party. The party is for Charlie. I put together a huge surprise party for him. People are flying in from all over the country. I have all our old high school friends coming. I have a caterer and a band and a million rented chairs and tablecloths.”

“Oh, dear,” said Grandma. “Well, that's the problem with surprise parties, isn't it? The main character doesn't know that he should schedule it.”

“You get on the phone, Annette,” cried Aunt Maggie, “and explain to him that he is coming. He's to cancel everything and get here in a timely fashion!”

Annette had rarely looked so incompetent. It was unimaginable that Granger Elliott would want this woman back. It seemed more likely that he had thrown a party when she left. She spilled her tea on her dress and stared
hopelessly at the stain it would certainly leave. “Actually, I don't actually have a way to reach him right now,” she said, which was a meaningless remark, because he was never without his cell phone.

“He's on a company retreat,” said Annette. “They're bonding. He has to be there. It's the new chairman of the board and the new chief financial officer, and he's experiencing the wilderness together with them, and it's crucial to his career.”

This sounded so unlike my father that I started giggling. He would probably bond by helping the others escape their wilderness duties, and he'd find a wide-screen television on which to watch a really good baseball game while surrounded by really good food.

“A wilderness retreat,” Aunt Maggie repeated, in the same tone of voice she no doubt had used behind our backs to say, “That boy brought a leg.” Still crying, she said, “It's just like Charlie to do this to me. I invited his favorite teachers! His coaches! Our old neighbors who used to say Charlie was going to meet some terrible doom! And he isn't going to show up?” Aunt Maggie looked surprisingly like Joanna. She pouted in the same way, lips puffed out on the bottom and tucked in at the top. “I should have known Charlie would vanish when I need him. Charlie is never there when you count on him.”

I stopped trying to be polite about her nasty cold tea and
poured it out into the grass. “Daddy's always there when we count on him,” I said.

“Shelley, you don't have to defend him to me. I understand your father all too well.”

Now Carolyn took up the slack, listing the effort that had gone into making this a special occasion. Locating friends not heard from in twenty years. Finding overnight housing for all these friends. Ninety-seven friends, to be exact.

“Ninety-seven friends?” said Annette, dumbfounded. “I thought his whole high school graduating class had only fifty-five in it.”

“I'm including spouses, of course,” said Aunt Maggie. “Plenty of our guests are strangers to me, married to our dear old friends. They'll have been listening to Charlie stories for years. And now he won't be here!”

Ninety-seven people with gifts and expectations, and I would have to make excuses for my father.

I imagined a reunion of Angus's friends twenty or thirty years from now. There would most certainly be ninety-seven of those, and they too would have been telling Angus stories for years. But if there were any Shelley stories worth remembering for two decades, I couldn't think of them.

Grandma kissed Aunt Maggie. “You'll have to make the best of it, dear. You've always been able to make the best of things. I know you can triumph over this.” She went off for her nap, and I thought she might possibly sleep for several
days, skipping Wednesday, so as to avoid being there when Aunt Maggie had a chance to tell Daddy what she thought of him.

“Where's Brett?” I said brightly, because we were in need of a subject change, and no doubt Brett was off doing something impressive that needed bragging about.

“He'll be around later,” said Carolyn. “Let's swim. Who wants to swim?”

There seemed to be very little interest in swimming. If Aunt Maggie acts like Joanna as well as looks like Joanna, I thought, then I know what will happen now. She'll forget what she's mad about and get stranded inside her frown and stare about in a confused sort of way. This was one of Joanna's nicest traits. Angus was always capitalizing upon it. “Swimming,” said Aunt Maggie, looking confused. “Yes, of course. Carolyn, tell Shelley all about your swimming awards.”

“Mom, she's not interested in that,” said Carolyn uncomfortably. “Let's talk about Joanna's summer in Paris instead.”

It might not be the right time to mention that Joanna was bailing on Paris and would be in Barrington on Sunday. The Perfects were looking at another very long drive to the airport the day after their failed party, and then a third drive when Daddy finally landed. Maybe Daddy would have the sense to rent a car. It was only fair to let the Perfects know that Joanna was coming, but on the other hand, Annette
didn't know either, and there was only so much evidence of sloppy stepmothering I wanted on hand.

“Oh, Joanna hasn't done anything except visit cathedrals and castles,” I said. “Whereas Angus sold time-shares in a bomb shelter and almost became a millionaire.”

Aunt Maggie was not amused. “Surely this sort of sick prank could have been prevented. Is it wise, do you think, for Charlie to be away so much?”

Annette said she thought it was wise for him to earn a living.

Aunt Maggie said she was worried about how the children were turning out, scattered around the world before we were even out of our teens.

I knew the next sentence would include the word stability, so once again I changed the subject. “Annette is thinking of going back to work.”

Aunt Maggie was appalled. Not only did we have to have a stepmother, the woman had hardly arrived before she was running off.

Carolyn said, “I'm going to take Shelley to the pool, Mom. See you later. Bye, Annette.” She stood up. I did too, although since we weren't two feet away from the pool, I wasn't sure why we needed to say good-bye.

“We put in this beautiful pool,” said Aunt Maggie, jiggling her glass to make the ice cubes dance, “but you know how contrary the young are. Still hanging out at the town
pool instead of using this one.” She tried to laugh, but her heart wasn't in it.

Proving her desperation, Annette said, “And what's happening these days on the school board, Maggie?”

“We're debating whether to add another wing to the middle school or send the eighth grade over to the high school, where there's space. I'm very, very, very opposed to having the eighth grade in the same building as the high school students.”

“Oh,” said Annette sympathetically. “Are the teenagers here in Barrington all on drugs or something? You have to shelter the little ones from their older brothers and sisters? What a shame.”

I decided Annette was going to be fine.

Carolyn and I went into the house to change into bathing suits. I was to sleep in her room, and Angus in Brett's, while Grandma had the guest room. Annette was sleeping on the sofa bed in the huge family room, where Daddy would join her on Wednesday. “Where is Brett anyway?” I asked Carolyn.

“We'll see him tonight at a Little League game. He's a coach.”

Her room was extremely neat. Everything was folded or rolled or stacked. All colors matched. All photos were in frames. “Do you like your stepmother?” she said.

I don't like that word. She's not my mother. As for step, it
sounds as if we're walking on her. “You mean Annette?” I said.

Carolyn giggled. “You have more stepmothers I don't know about? That sounds like Uncle Charlie.”

My throat got hot and tight, and my contact lenses scraped my eyes. I wiggled into my bathing suit and pulled my jeans up over it. I considered heading back to Annette and pulling the plug on this whole family reunion nightmare. If I said, “Annette, we're out of here,” she'd rent a car and throw Angus in the back, and we'd head for Disney World instead.

Carolyn wanted to know if I knew how to ride a bike, since she realized that I had grown up in New York City, where it was impossible to have a bike. Actually bikes are everywhere in New York, but I skipped this and reminded Carolyn that her own father had taught me how to ride a bike in her own driveway. “Didn't your parents have time?” said Carolyn kindly.

We cycled past lawns green from sprinklers and under trees so tall and leafy they made tunnels over the street. We turned right at the old brick elementary school, which had the shuttered look of schools over summer: hot and dusty, books waiting, chairs stacked. In the distance spread farms. Past the reach of sprinklers, the color of Barrington in August was not green. The color was sunburn, everything toasted. A field far off was like melted butter. Dust rose from highways.

At the pool, Carolyn bought us hot dogs and fries from the concession. She slathered hers with ketchup, and I whitened mine with salt, and we joined her friends. I got that sick, tight feeling that happens when strangers inspect you. It was clear that none of her friends swam. They decorated the pool rim, they tanned and they wore bathing suits, but they didn't swim.

Carolyn surprised me. “This,” she said proudly, as if I were a fashion model on the runway, spotlights casting mysterious shadows over my high cheekbones, “is my cousin Shelley.”

“Oh, yes,” said one of the friends, tapping her teeth with the earpiece of her sunglasses, “you're the one whose father had to leave Barrington, didn't he?”

She smiled. She had small pointy teeth, like a baby's. Her hair was extremely thin and straight. Her eyes were bright and gloating. She knew something I didn't know.