Goodbye for Now (11 page)

Then one morning, Livvie called while Meredith was out running with the dogs. Sam hesitated but came down on the side of, “What the hell,” and answered.

“Hey Livvie,” he said politely.

She blinked at him for a moment too long while he waited and wondered and worried. What now? If he broke this thing, Meredith would dump him for sure. Then she burst into smiles.

“You must be Sam!”

He was. And he was very impressed with himself.

“It’s so nice to meet you,” he said.

“Likewise! I’ve heard so much about you. It’s great to finally meet you in person.”

“Well, not quite in person.”

“Then grab that girlfriend of yours and come down and meet me,” said Livvie. “I’ve got plenty of room, and I’d love to see you both.”

Sam shrugged. “She says she has to work.”

“That’s what she always says,” laughed Livvie. Then the door opened and Meredith walked in. “Hey, baby.” Livvie was delighted, but Meredith shot Sam a panicked look and collapsed into the chair he quickly vacated.

“I’m just meeting your grandma,” he told her brightly, standing behind her and looking over her shoulder so that Livvie could see them both.

“Why are you running in the winter without a hat on, young lady? You’ll catch your death. Look at you—you’re soaked. Either put on a hat or come run down here.”

“I can’t,” Meredith managed, and then she and Livvie said together, “I have to work.” She stuck her tongue out at her grandmother.

“Well, it’s good to finally meet your fellow at least— Hey, you’re at my house!”

Sam and Meredith exchanged a quick glance. “Uh, yeah,” said Meredith. “My apartment’s being painted? We thought we’d hunker down here for a bit?”

“Little snug for two at your place, huh?” Livvie winked. “You’re most welcome, of course. Make yourselves at home. I’ve gotta run, my darlings. Talk to you soon. Very nice to meet you, Sam.”

“You too, Livvie.”

“Love you, honey,” she said to Meredith.

“Love you too,” Meredith whispered. “Bye.”

She turned to Sam and let out all her breath. “You called my grandma?” Somewhere between question and statement, accusation and incredulity.

“No. She called me. Well, you. All I did was answer.”

“She called me?”

“Yup.”

“Did you know she could do that?”

“Nope.”

“Who the hell did she think you were? You must have scared the shit out of her.”

“Nope, she knew me right off.”

“How?”

“She guessed. Who else would be home with you answering your video chat?”

“But she never met you.”

“She’s—it’s—learned. You’ve told it you met someone. It adds that to what it knows about you. It—she—reacts as she would have. Your grandmother would have been delighted to meet your new boyfriend, to see and talk to him—me. She’d have been sweet and excited and genuinely glad to lay eyes on this guy finally. So that’s what she was.”

Meredith shook her head, astonished. Slightly traumatized too. “This could have gone so badly. I might have lost her again forever.”

“Why?”

“She doesn’t know you. I didn’t even realize she could talk to anyone but me.”

“I was careful.”

“Why’d she suddenly realize we were at her place, not mine? We’ve been here all along.”

“Who knows?” Sam shrugged. “She just noticed. She’s had that information all along, but she has loads more data than she can use at any given moment. She metes it out. Like my dad.”

“What will I tell her next month and next year and in a decade? That my place is still being painted?”

“I’m not sure how time’s going to pass. For her,” he added, and this was true though what he was really unsure of, and far more worried about, was how time was going to pass for Meredith. If time didn’t pass for the computer projection of Livvie, it didn’t really matter. If time didn’t pass for real-life Meredith, that was a far, far bigger issue and much harder to solve.

Just before Thanksgiving, Meredith got an e-mail from her grandmother idly complaining about her mom. Not mean, not really angry, not even bitchy—true to character, the only option available to her, Livvie went the passive-aggressive guilt-trip route. “How’s Mommy?” Livvie asked. “I feel like I haven’t heard from her in ages. She must be really busy, but when you speak to her, ask her if she has a moment to check in with me. Her old mom misses her.”

“You can’t tell your mom,” said Sam.

“I know.”

“You can’t.”

“I know.”

“Seriously, Merde. No one can know.”

“I know.”

It wasn’t out of the realm that Livvie wouldn’t have heard from her daughter in a while—it was entirely in character which was the only reason she had been able to comment on it. Kyle and Julia had cell phones and TV and an internet connection just like everybody else. But unlike everybody else, they ignored all of it for weeks and weeks at a time. Meredith hadn’t seen them in a few months, not since the funeral, but they were coming for Thanksgiving, for the whole weekend in fact, and though Meredith was looking forward to seeing them, she was a little anxious about the four days it meant she had to be out of touch with her grandmother.

Julia had lost some weight, but otherwise she seemed well. Kyle looked as he always did in “The Big City”—game, glad to see his kid, and oddly out of place somehow. They arrived late Thursday morning bearing island cheeses and yams and pies. Meredith was making soup, turkey, salad, beets, and a valiant attempt at steering the conversation away from what Sam was up to these days. It wasn’t easy.

“So, Sam, what are you up to these days?” Kyle asked genially.

“Don’t ask him that.” Julia swatted Kyle’s butt with a dish towel and then added sotto voce, but not quite sotto enough that Sam missed it, “He’s unemployed.”

Sam was not offended though he could hardly answer the question. “I’ve been running a lot in the mornings. Down along the waterfront. Sometimes in the Arboretum. It’s beautiful out there. I’ve been learning to cook, making a lot of meals. Getting settled in here. Getting caught up. I’ve also been doing some … projects. For a friend.” He added this last so as to suggest freelance work and the ability to financially support Kyle’s daughter—who shot him a warning glance—but he worried her parents might have follow-up questions he couldn’t answer.

“Looking for real work too?” Kyle wondered.

“Stop it!” Julia swatted him again. “Remember the Thanksgiving my dad asked when you were going to quit screwing around with Play-Doh and get a real job?”

Kyle laughed then made his voice extra deep. “ ‘Calluses aren’t manly if you got them playing with clay.’ ”

Julia dropped her voice to match. “ ‘Being an artist is fine for a girl—we never expected you to need a job, honey—but Kyle has to learn it’s time to be a man.’ ”

They seemed to have forgotten Sam was there. Meredith rolled her eyes at him as she skittered around the kitchen. She’d seen this act before. But Sam, new to it all, found it charming, these carefully loving parents with choreographed conversations, curiosity about Sam tangled with concern for their daughter intertwined in their own memories and provenance. He lacked for parents, having had only a dad—somehow a dad on his own didn’t seem like a parent—and the overlap of adulthood and parenthood was new territory for him.

Meredith ran out of butter after the twice-baked potatoes had been baked only once and sent him to the open-till-three grocery store for more. The rain had cleared briefly, and walking through soggy orange leaves and horizon-level low sunshine, Sam finally felt fall and family for real. It was good to be out in the fresh air, good to be out of a kitchen too crowded with cooks, good to be out of an apartment too small for four adults and two dogs and food enough to feed the whole building, but he was also overwhelmed with nostalgia and missing them almost immediately. It felt great. He texted Meredith, “Your parents are sweet. They must get this from you.”

“I am rolling my eyes,” she replied.

“They love you so much. And they love each other so much. It’s nice to watch.”

“It’s gross,” she replied.

“It’s not!”

“It’s foreplay,” she replied.

“It’s gross!” Sam agreed.

The next morning, Meredith and her father made brunch with the leftovers—cheesy, yammy, beety turkey-egg-potato scramble. Apparently this was tradition, but Sam fed most of his to the dogs under the table (even they seemed skeptical). After brunch, they went for a walk in the Arboretum. Downtown was crowded with shoppers. The apartment building was abuzz with relatives. But along the lake it was quiet, empty. It was raining steadily and cold, but Kyle and Julia had raised Meredith on an island, and they were all used to damp. Sam was chilled to the bone. Kyle and Julia walked with their hands in each other’s back pockets. Sam walked with his hands in his armpits. Meredith was trying to corral the dogs when Julia stopped suddenly, turned to Meredith, and demanded, “How are we screwing you up?”

“What?”

“How are we screwing you up? As a person? Tell us. We can take it.”

“This conversation isn’t helping much.”

“I mean it,” said Julia, looking like she did even though she wasn’t making much sense. “I can tell you exactly how my parents screwed me up. Grandpa never did think what I did for a living was respectable, and he certainly never thought it was art. He never forgave Kyle and me for living the way we do, for raising you ‘in the wild,’ as he put it, like we’d handed you over to wolves or something. And Grandma, well, you know we were close, but look at it out here.” She waved at the dripping trees, the mud, the gray lake flowing into gray sky, autumn leaves mashed into paste.

“What am I looking at?” said Meredith.

“It’s gorgeous. All this nature. Smell the air.” Sam did. Something was rotting. But he took her point. For rainy and gray and cold, it
was
gorgeous. The memory of the mountains under all that fog, even if they wouldn’t see them again for months, sustained him on long runs. A heron raised one leg, tai chi slow, and brought it down with infinite care a foot in front of the log it was straddling, then froze statue-still to make absolutely certain all was well before unbending the other telescoped limb and doing the same. Julia was right. It was beautiful.

“This is Grandma’s fault how?” asked Meredith.

“Three miles from home and she never took me here once in all the time I was growing up,” said Julia. “If my high school art teacher hadn’t
brought us here to draw leaves and grass and dirt, to sit and breathe and just
be
, I’d never even have known about it. If my parents had their way, I’d never have become an artist. I’d never have left the city. I’d have moved down the hall and married an accountant. So I’m asking you, how are we screwing you up?”

“Well, I’d have liked to live down the hall from Grandma,” Meredith tried. “With my rich accountant father. No offense, Dad.”

“None taken, sweetheart.” Kyle had the same complicated look on his face Sam could feel on his own—bemused but intrigued and suppressing all of it so as not to get in trouble.

“Plus, you’re about to freeze my boyfriend to death,” Meredith added. “Let’s go back to the car.”

“All parents screw up their kids somehow. I just want to know how,” Julia said quietly.

“What brought this up?” Meredith asked.

Julia shrugged. “First Thanksgiving after Grandma died, I guess. I miss her so much. Maybe I’ve been trying to list reasons why I shouldn’t. You know, like if I could be mad at her, I wouldn’t be so sad she was gone.”

“How’s that working out?” said Meredith.

“Not that well. But better than anything else I’ve tried.”

“What else have you tried?”

“Wallowing.”

“It’s really cold, Mom. We’re soaked. Let’s go home and play Scrabble or something. We can think of ways you screwed me up on the way.”

“Thanks, baby,” said Julia, putting her arm around Meredith and walking back the way they came. “You’re a good daughter.”