The Book That Matters Most (18 page)

“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not
love breathing.”

—
To Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee

Ava

Ava's father looked especially blank when she walked in to his apartment at Aged Oaks.

A plate of food sat on the table, untouched.

She cut the meat into small pieces and placed a napkin around her father's neck like a bib. But he stared at her, defiant.

“Come on,” Ava urged, spooning some applesauce and holding it to his mouth. “You have to eat.”

Reluctantly, he parted his lips enough to let a little applesauce find its way in.

“She called me last night,” he said after he swallowed.

“Who?” Ava asked him as she put a small piece of meat and some mashed potatoes on the fork.

“Your mother.”

“Dad—”

“I couldn't make sense of what she was telling me. It sounded important.”

Ava held the fork to his lips but he pressed them closed.

“I called last night,” Ava reminded him. “Remember? I asked you about the book?”

Her father looked puzzled. “You called?” he said.

“I wanted to know if you have a copy of that book I loved when I was a kid. For some reason, I think you have a copy too.”

“Your mother called after that,” he said, nodding. “That's right. I was already asleep when she called. She explained why she was calling so late, but I can't remember what she said.”

He pressed his fists into his forehead.

“That's okay,” Ava said gently. “I'm glad she called.”

Her father looked at her, his eyes suddenly bright.

“Someone's in trouble,” he said.

She lifted the fork to his mouth again. This time he opened wide.

“This food is terrible,” he said after he swallowed.

Ava smiled at him. Somehow, he was back again. For now.

E
very day of her childhood, her father left the house early in a suit and tie and shiny polished wingtips, his black briefcase in his hand. He sold life insurance, sitting at a desk in a small office downtown phoning potential clients in the morning and getting in his car after lunch to call on customers. He ate cold cereal with
a banana for breakfast and brought a lunch of two bologna sandwiches with ketchup on white bread to eat at his desk. Her father was solid, predictable, and grateful for the tempestuous, erratic, unpredictable woman who was her mother and his wife.

Sometimes, Ava's mother frightened her with her passion. She screamed about the war in Vietnam and chemicals in food and why the government didn't admit that Lee Harvey Oswald had not acted alone. Even her fierce love of Ava and her sister Lily sometimes frightened Ava. She hugged them tightly, and worried when they were sick, so much that Ava feared that such a love could destroy her somehow. True, there were the tea parties and the fairy costumes and the performances of plays, all led by her mother in the woods behind their house. And there were homemade waffles with fresh strawberries and whipped cream for dinner, perfect hollandaise sauce, golden madeleines dusted with powdered sugar. But there was also the crying, the long hard sobbing that none of them could stop.
How can any of you love me?
she'd ask. They all did, of course. Perhaps Lily most of all.

After Lily died, and then her mother, the magic went out of the household. As predictable as her father's breakfasts and lunches had been, their dinners became predictable too. He made a spreadsheet and hung it on a bulletin board in the kitchen where her mother used to hang three pairs of gossamer fairy wings spraypainted gold.
Monday: American Chopped Suey. Tuesday: Spaghetti. Wednesday: Hot Dogs and Beans. Thursday: Hamburger Helper. Friday: Minute Steaks with Rice A Roni
. Beneath the list was another list, this one of all the ingredients needed for these meals. Ava had to start cooking them by four o'clock so they could eat dinner at six. On weekends they went out to eat at The Chicken Coop or The Hong Kong, silently eating their broasted chicken or chow
mein while around them families chattered. To her, everyone else looked bright and happy; she and her father, on the other hand, seemed to be fading with every passing minute.

Her father was kind, gentle, dull. He asked her about school and her friends, and dutifully attended every parent-teacher night. But as she sat across from him over her plate of American chop suey or hot dogs and beans, she would miss her mother's magic with such an intensity that sometimes she would actually lose her breath. High school became almost a relief from the routines at home. She stayed late attending club meetings—just not to be home. French club and women's lib club and Future Teachers of America. She got boyfriends, as bland and loyal as her father.

Foolishly, she thought now, she'd believed that she and Jim were the perfect mixture of predictable and unpredictable. Hadn't he been an actor? Doing commedia, no less? And hadn't they traveled to offbeat, far-flung places, like Cambodia and Tibet? She had taken comfort in finally being neither of her parents, but her own self. And, like with so many things in life, she'd been wrong.

“
H
ey!” Luke said. “My mom used to make that!”

Ava stared down at the pan of chicken Marbella, her go-to dinner party recipe. Its page in
The Silver Palate Cookbook
had so many splashes of red wine vinegar and olive juice on it that the words were blurred in places. But it didn't matter; Ava knew how to make it by heart. Now, she just wanted to toss the whole thing in the garbage.

“She didn't use prunes, though,” Luke added, frowning.

Prunes were Ava's personal touch. With the dried apricots and green olives, the prunes made the dish look even prettier.

She tried to think of something to say, but Luke's eager face and the chicken Marbella in her pot-holdered hands made her mind go blank. Except one thought:
What am I doing with someone young enough to have a mother who cooks from
The Silver Palate
?

“Cool,” Luke said with even more enthusiasm. “Mom made it with couscous too.”

“You need . . .” Ava began.

Suddenly her brain was too full.
To go home? To grow up? To stop comparing me to your mother?

She looked at him, grinning, wearing nothing but boxer shorts and his dumb hat.

“To get dressed,” she said. “You need to get dressed. They'll be here any minute.”

With the words barely out of her mouth, the doorbell rang. Luke bent down and gave her a big wet kiss. Ava tried not to think about how thirty minutes ago, as she was setting the table with her Fiestaware and the napkins she'd bought at a market in Lyon, he'd walked in, tossed a bouquet of daffodils on the table, lifted her onto the table, and made love to her. She tried not to think about how much she'd liked it.

“Go,” she whispered.

The doorbell rang again.

Ava scooped up the Lysol wipes she'd used to clean up after the sex, and the daffodils, and went to answer the door.

Gray and Cate stood soldier straight, he clutching a bottle of wine and Cate clutching, coincidentally, daffodils. They hugged Ava stiffly, and frowned at the balled up wet naps and the profusion
of daffodils she now held in one hand. Why had she thought having Gray and Cate for a dinner party was a good idea?

“Where's the kid?” Gray asked as soon as they were inside, martinis in hand.

“Be nice,” Cate said.

“Luke,” Ava said. “He's getting dressed.”

Gray lifted one eyebrow.

Ava had given dozens, maybe even hundreds, of dinner parties in this house, and they were always the same. Hors d'oeuvres in the front living room: a soft cheese and a hard cheese on the Bennington Potters platter with grapes and water crackers. A bowl of cashews. Martinis. After an hour they'd move into the dining room for dinner, and then back in here for dessert. Maybe she should have done it differently, Ava thought uncomfortably. Everything was in place, except that Jim was around the corner with Delia Lindstrom instead of refilling Gray's martini glass and worrying loudly about the state of education or the economy or the environment.

“Ah!” Cate said in her change-the-subject voice. “
To Kill a Mockingbird
. How do you like it?” She picked the book up from the chair where Ava had left it.

“I kind of love it,” Ava admitted.

“She wanted to name Nat ‘Atticus',” Gray said. “Did you know that?”

“I did,” Cate said, nodding.

“With this new Harper Lee book, he'd be doomed, right?” Gray said, shaking his head. “Atticus as a racist would send the poor kid to therapy.”

“They're going to end up in therapy anyway,” Ava said, intending to sound ironic.

Instead, she thought of Maggie with a sharp pang. Her daughter's angry eyes as she sat, sullen and belligerent, in the family therapy sessions that had seemed at the time to go nowhere. But Maggie was fine now, Ava reminded herself. So maybe they had helped after all. And she was fine, wasn't she? Ava thought, feeling unsettled.

“I have two friends with daughters named Scout,” Luke said, surprising them all.

He strode into the room and popped a handful of cashews in his mouth. Gray raised that eyebrow again.

“How about a martini, guy?” Gray said.

“If you're buying,” Luke said.

Ava cringed. Had he really just said that?

“Luke, this is Gray, Cate's husband,” she said, getting to her feet. “And obviously you know Cate.”

Luke shook Gray's hand and gave Cate a peck on the cheek.

“Marian the Librarian,” he said.

Ava wondered if everything he said had always sounded so inane. Had she never noticed before?

“So Scout's a popular name with your generation?” Cate asked politely.

“I guess we'll have a granddaughter named Scout then,” Gray complained.

“I think it's nice,” Luke said. “Literary.”

Cate rolled her eyes. “Should we start naming kids Lolita then? Or Macbeth?”

Luke drained his martini. “That's not the same,” he said.

“I for one would welcome a Scout in my class,” Ava said. “I have so many Carolines I can't keep them straight.”

Gray refilled everyone's glasses. “I think the young people
should bring back the name Debbie. Or Kathy. When's the last time you met a little girl named Kathy?”

“That was my mom's name,” Luke said.

“Maybe then you'll name your daughter Kathy,” Gray said. “Start a trend.”

“Maybe,” Luke said.

Ava knew this conversation—no, this dinner party—was not going well. But she couldn't think how to save it. Who cared if people were naming their kids Scout? Or Macbeth, for that matter? How had all those countless dinner parties run so smoothly? Was the missing ingredient—Jim—the answer? She could picture him introducing topics for discussion, navigating all the different personalities in the room, making more martinis.

The conversation had somehow turned to student loans. Not in general, but Luke's in particular. Why did every topic have to do with his age? Luke glanced at her. He didn't look happy. But why should he? Gray was being a boor and Cate was egging him on. Ava reached for the empty pitcher, but stopped. Why prolong the agony?

“Dinner's ready,” she announced.

As they ate their chicken Marbella, Ava decided this was maybe the worst idea she'd had in a long time. Gray was pontificating about the apathy of Luke's generation, Cate was picking the capers out of her meal—since when didn't she like capers?—and Luke had got up and moved his chair beside Ava's, like they were two teenagers sitting on the same side of the booth in an ice cream shop, instead of staying put across from her.

When Gray paused to take another bite, Cate said, “Isn't tomorrow night
Le Fin
?”

Ava cringed. She had purposely not told Luke about
Le Fin
, because he would surely want to go with her. Which was out of the question.

“The End?” Luke asked, baffled.

“Ava's big end-of-the-year party,” Cate said. “Plouff throws it.”

“Like, at work?” Luke asked Ava.

She pretended to fluff the couscous. She pretended he hadn't started his sentence with
like
.

Ava could feel him staring at her. The couscous was definitely fluffed, but she kept lightly tossing it with the serving spoon. Until Luke put his hand over hers to stop her. “Plouff?” he asked.

“Ava's boss,” Cate explained. “The head of the department.”

Plouff went all out for this party, transforming the biggest conference room into a French bistro. His wife made a giant papier mâché Eiffel Tower and vats of boeuf bourgignon. There was plenty of wine and Edith Piaf crooning on Plouff's Bose. Even Jim had liked
Le Fin
. In past years, he'd danced with Mrs. Plouff and the ancient Madame Levesque, the department secretary. He'd once baked profiteroles for dessert, an effort so grand and noble that the whole department had fallen in love with him.

This year, there would be no profiteroles, no Jim. But Ava had no choice but to go.

“It's just a lot of French teachers swaying to Edith Piaf,” Ava said dismissively.

“I love Edith Piaf,” Luke said. “So it's tomorrow?”

“It is, but it's totally boring,” Ava said. “I don't even want to go.”

“What?” Cate said, choking on her wine. “You love
Le Fin
!”

“Love would be too strong a word,” Ava said.

“Is that the thing Jim made all those profiteroles for?” Gray asked. “How many did he make? A hundred?”

Even though Ava was staring hard at the chicken remnants on her plate, she could feel Luke's eyes boring into her.

Abruptly, she stood.

“That reminds me,” she said. “I made that peach cake for dessert.”

“Isn't there salad?” Gray asked, confused.