One Small Thing (17 page)

As Dan pulled out the measuring tape, jotting down the room dimensions, he wondered when he should call Marian and Bill. When was the proper time to announce the existence of their first grandchild? And then, he would have to tell them Daniel was Randi’s boy. Randi was their least favorite person in the world, even if she wasn’t of this world anymore. His father would stop in mid-action, his face clouding and stilling as it did every time Dan had brought home bad news, laying it down in front of their feet like a dead rat. This would be no different, except it would be worse because it would last as long as Daniel did, which would be for the rest of all their lives.

The measuring tape slid back metal and clangy, and Dan stood up. Bed. Dresser. Clothes. Shoes. Toys. School supplies. And what about all those things kids did now? Video games? Scooters with motors on the back? At least Daniel already had a bike. That was taken care of, but he needed everything else. Dan closed his eyes and thought of his boy, short, thin, his pants so big his belt was dangling even on the last hole. His stringy hair under the baseball cap; his curious, deep eyes. His mouth, like Dan’s, wanting to slap out at everyone, especially some nosey stranger who asked questions. Maybe, Dan thought, as he opened and closed the closet door, Avery was right to take a job that would allow her to escape. Maybe his parents had been right to turn away from all the pain he’d put before them.

Just as he was about to leave for Target, the phone rang. He hoped it might be Avery, so he answered it instead of letting the machine pick up.

“Dan? It’s Isabel.”

Dan let a sigh build up in his mouth, but he didn’t exhale the sound. “Hi. How are you doing?”

“Oh, me. Well, fine. But—well, Loren called me. Valerie called her. They’re worried. It’s just—I want to know how you two are doing.”

Dan shook his head. Loren and her damned big mouth, he thought, needing something nasty to talk about. But then he sighed, knowing that both she and Valerie should be worried, Avery suddenly absent, silent, out of the house by seven a.m. “Oh, yeah. It’s been hard.” He leaned against the kitchen counter, thinking of ways to get off the phone. The doorbell? Luis and Valerie needed him right away? He had to go back to work immediately? But Isabel kept talking.

“Of course it’s hard. What a surprise. A sad surprise in many ways. But where is Avery? Why hasn’t she called me? Why didn’t she tell me?”

“She went back to work. She’s in St. Louis,” Dan said, letting more secrets fly free. Why not?

“What? Now? When there is so much to do and think about? When this big thing is happening?”

“Yeah. She won’t be back until Friday.”

“Oh, my.” For the first time, Dan thought he detected disapproval in his mother-in-law’s voice. “Oh, my.”

“Well—“he stopped, not knowing what else to say.

“This is such big news. Really.” Isabel stopped talking, her breath against the receiver.

“I can have her call you then,” he said, finding the door handle of this conversation.

“But, Dan. What’s the next step? Have you met him? He’s yours, right?” Isabel asked, flinging the door wide again.

“Yesterday. Jared came with me. He’s mine.”

“Oh, my. That’s—well, congratulations, I guess you’d say.” Dan saw Valerie on their deck, Tomás strapped to her chest in a Baby Bjorn. She turned to the house, noticed him, and waved. He waved back, as if it were any other day in any other year, this another Wednesday evening in a typical week.

“Yeah. Thanks, but listen—“

“How are you planning? Have you decided when he’s coming? What about his room? Will you use the nursery?”

“Actually, I was just about to go shopping. He’ll be here in a month or so. They want him here before school starts. Anyway, I need supplies I need everything.”

“Can I come with you? Pick me up, Dan. Please, let me help.”

Dan thought of the feared Jell-O salad that everyone scooped up on their plates and ate in big bites on the Fourth of July. Avery had been stunned and then annoyed every time any one said, “Oh, Isabel. This is so good. My mother used to make it, and it was always my favorite. I just love the walnuts. And what is this secret ingredient? Cottage cheese?” No one had noticed Avery’s grimace and closed eyes, all nodding at Isabel appreciatively, asking for the recipe, handing over email addresses and phone numbers, saying, “I need it for a picnic,” or “Now, don’t forget!”

Dan rubbed the back of his neck. “Okay. Great. I’ll be there in twenty minutes. I have a long list.”

“Wonderful. I’ll be waiting.”

Isabel pushed the big red cart down the aisle that cut through the clothing section. Dan checked off pants and shirts, and then looked up. “Okay. Underwear.”

Isabel looked up and then followed the signs, both of them soon standing in front of a rack of boys’ underwear.

“What are all these cartoons?” Isabel asked. “My, underwear has changed. My girls had flowers, a little lace, and maybe colors. But look at these.” She pointed to a pack of underwear with Spiderman’s large webbed face on the front. Next to that was pack with Daredevil; next to that, X-Men. Dan smiled, remembering how he and Jared would read comic books in their room, one after the other, over and over again.

“It’s a whole marketing thing.” Dan picked up a pack and read the back label. Weight. What was his weight? He closed his eyes and imagined picking Daniel up under his arms, lifting him up and down. Seventy, seventy-five pounds? He was so skinny, his knees must look like knobs, his elbows pointy and dangerous. Dan opened his eyes and then found the correct size for the weight and threw five packs in cart.

“Well, he’ll be in underwear for a long time.” Isabel moved the cart toward the socks. “I can’t imagine what socks will look like if underwear have cartoons on them.”

The socks weren’t even half as exciting—rows of white athletic socks, short, white skate socks, and a few brown and blue dress socks, but Dan couldn’t even imagine what size of shoe a ten-year-old would wear. Isabel looked at him, her eyes wide.

“I had girls,” she said, shrugging. “Let me ask the young woman over there.”

She walked over to the counter and leaned up against it, laughing with the clerk, who began to ask questions about her grandson. Isabel didn’t miss a beat, providing the information, and then she was back, taking the right size from the rack and putting pack after pack in the cart.

“I’ve heard,” she said, “that boys are a little rougher on clothing than girls.”

“You aren’t kidding,” Dan said. At ten, if he and Jared weren’t helping Bill trim trees, stack bricks, or mow the lawn or with him in a neighbor’s yard doing the same, they were up trees, in huge holes they’d dug in the backyard, or with the neighbor kids rolling on lawns and running through the streets. For one summer, none of his pants had knees, his mother ironing on patches, saying, “I refuse to buy you any more pants until just before school starts. Really, Danny, what do you do outside?” But she was smiling when she said it. Dan remembered that, even all these years later.

“Well, let’s move on.” Isabel looked at Dan’s list. “I can see we’ve barely started. And then when we’re done here, I’m going to take you to dinner. My treat.”

Dan followed her past the socks and belts and girls’ tights, swallowing down her kindness, surprised how the colored underwear and small, white socks reminded him he needed his mother, a mother, any mother, right now.

“Oh,” Isabel said, pushing away her plate, only one bite of hamburger and two French fries left, Taxi’s burgers so good even she couldn’t stop eating. “I am fully sequansified and have had a genteel sufficiency.”

Dan smiled. If Avery were here, she’d roll her eyes at her mother’s strange family expression, the
sequansified
not even a word at all. But as he looked at Isabel’s happy, truly satisfied face, she could see that she meant it, glad to be out, to be of use.

“Me, too,” he said. “And I don’t have any leftovers.” A tall boy with swirls of acne on either cheek came at took their plates, brushing the fry and hamburger bun crumbs off the table with a damp rag. Dan sucked on his straw, pulling in the last of his Coke.

“Dan, I have to ask. I know it’s not my business at all. But—is . . . has Avery left for good? I want to know. Her asking for her job back seems, well, strange. Especially after all the hard work both of you put in toward having the baby.” Isabel breathed out, the words taking all her air.

“No. She didn’t,” he said. “I mean, she hasn’t moved out. It’s just the job.”

Isabel shook her head. “I really can’t believe she gave up on the baby, even with your news. When she wants something, she sticks with it.”

“That’s why I’m nervous. She didn’t stick here, with me, Isabel,” Dan said, the words pulling on his lips, his eyes filling. Not here. He wouldn’t break down here in front of Isabel and the teenaged staff. Dan rubbed a finger under his nose and sat back. “I think it was hard for her to take. She feels like I’ve abandoned her. Like I abandoned her before she even knew she was abandoned. I know I should have told her about Randi, but I didn’t know how.”

Isabel shook her head and spun her shake glass on the table, nodding. “It’s my fault.”

“What?”

“It’s my fault. It’s because of me.”

The boy with the acne circled their table, looking at the empty space, the drained cups. Dan took one last sip of his Coke and stood up. “Come on. Let’s take a walk to the park and back.”

Isabel nodded, and they pushed out into the night air, the temperature exactly right, 78 or 80, the shadow of the Berkeley hills dark and rolling against the purple sky. They walked in silence for a while, past the new library, and into the park. Other people strolled the path that looped around the wide lawn, voices thrown across the grass like softballs, easy to catch.

Isabel looked at him. “It’s because of her dad,” she said quietly. “I didn’t—times were different then. I guess today I would have been in therapy. You know, a support group.” She paused. “It was during those years when Avery seemed to just push forward on her own. I wasn’t really there to help her. I was like a shadow, there, but not really. She figured her life out, and then she was gone to college. Before I knew it, she’d met you, graduated, was married.”

Dan listened, his eyes on the path, holding Isabel’s arm as a boy on a bike whooshed past them.

“One day after she’d left for Cal, I found a note in her room. It was a list, really. It had all of the steps she was going to take for the future. The title of the list was ‘Perfect Life.’ She’d written it when I was in my—my slump. She hadn’t had me, so she’d gone ahead and found what she needed in herself. But I know that’s not enough. She needed me, and I wasn’t there. Her father wasn’t there.”

“But I’ve always been there for her, though. Through all the pregnancy stuff. I went to every appointment I could. Read it all. Watched the videos.”

Isabel shook her head and blinked, turning to Dan. “You didn’t tell her about Randi. You didn’t let her in. And now when the bad news keeps coming, she feels like you weren’t there, even though you are. Even though you didn’t mean for this to happen. She can’t take that Dan. That’s why she’s gone back to work. She doesn’t know what else to do but to keep moving.”

Dan thought of Avery, thirteen, fourteen, sitting on the floor of her childhood room, writing the list that would make her life perfect. He’d always thought she was perfect. Her list had come true, except for him.

“I should have told her about Randi. About my life before I went to school. But how could I? How could I tell it in a way that would make her . . .?”

“Run away?”

“Yeah.”

“But she ran away because you didn’t tell her.”

Dan watched his feet, one, two, on the asphalt path. “I should have told her.”

“Probably,” she said. “But things happen. Things you can’t predict or explain. I know that now, but I didn’t know it when I was your age. Look at my husband. One day he was fine. I kept thinking to myself just before his diagnosis, My how wonderful it’s all turned out. Mara was going to go to Wellesley and wanted to be a doctor, Loren was popular, a cheerleader, happy, and Avery was going into high school, had a lot of friends, was smart as could be. Walt and I played bridge with friends, went on vacations, still loved each other after all the struggles a long, full marriage can bring. The next thing, he has stomach cancer. Within months, he was gone. How can you predict that? And sometimes, I used to think that because I had the nerve to think that things were perfect was why they turned sour. Like God was telling me to stop taking things for granted because they can be ripped away with one word. Cancer.”

Isabel wiped her eyes and they stopped for a minute, letting another pair of walkers pass them. “I never talk about this because it upsets Avery so much. After I recovered, I started to mention his name, and she’d walk out of the room. From that point on, I never brought him up. I don’t think we’ve talked about him for years.” Isabel exhaled.

“What?”

“How can I tell you that you should have told Avery about Randi? Look what happened when I tried to talk with her about Walt.”