The Journey Home (14 page)

Just to the left of the playground, a father was offering encouragement to a toddler sitting on the grass. “Come on, Liam, you can do it. Come walk to Daddy.”

The boy pounded the ground excitedly with both hands, waved them wildly in the air, and started crawling toward his kneeling father. The man stood, offered a finger to his son's outstretched hand, and helped the boy get to his feet. Then he let go gently, backing up several paces. The boy teetered for a second, but stayed on his feet. The man reached out his hands and offered more encouragement, but for maybe ten seconds, the toddler didn't budge.

Then he took a tentative step forward, his face taut in concentration. With his second step, his knees started to buckle and it appeared that he was going down. However, the boy managed to straighten up, taking three more steps into his father's arms. He giggled as the man swept him up and twirled him.

Joseph found the vision transfixing, only noticing that he'd been holding the last of his second hot dog a few inches from his mouth after the father took
his son to a baby swing to push him. The scene he'd just watched seemed so familiar to him. Had he done something like this with his own son? Did he even have a son?

“We should probably get going,” Will said, putting a hand on his shoulder.

“Yeah.”

Joseph ate the last of his food while still watching the man and the toddler. He could hear the tinkle of the boy's laughter every time his father pushed him a little higher.

Will patted his shoulder again. “You wanna go?” Joseph reluctantly stopped watching the man and baby and stood. He turned to gesture toward Will to let him know that he was ready.

But the Will he saw now was not the Will who had been his impromptu traveling companion for the past four days.

The Will he saw now was both strangely recognizable and achingly foreign.

. . . Antoinette had asked Don to come with her to this meeting with the doctor. She was horribly worried that the news would be bad, and she didn't know how she'd be able to handle it alone. For nearly forty years, her body had worked in such predictable ways, but in the past couple of months that had changed. Two years ago, Ralph's wife Theresa had died of cancer, and Theresa's symptoms had started in a similar way. Antoinette had no idea what she'd do if she had to face the same disease. Theresa had been in so much pain at the end. And what would Don do? He was strong in so many ways, but could he stay strong if he knew she was that sick? What would it do to him to watch her life fade away? She couldn't allow herself to think this way; she had to keep a positive outlook. What the doctor had to say to her now didn't have to be awful.

Dr. Turner was a tall, stately-looking man with huge hands. His graying, receding hairline gave him the appearance of an academic, but his soft, warm eyes always made him seem very approachable to
Antoinette. She knew that if he had something dreadful to tell her that he would do so as gently as he possibly could.

“Your palms are sweating,” Don said as he squeezed her hand while they waited in the doctor's office.

Antoinette leaned toward him, touching her head to the side of his. “Sorry.”

Don kissed her hair. “It's going to be okay, Hannah. Whatever he says to us today, it's going to be okay. We're going to be all right.”

The door opened behind them and Antoinette and Don got up from their seats. Dr. Turner shook their hands and then sat behind his desk. His eyes and his relaxed expression helped soothe Antoinette's anxiety the tiniest bit, though she knew he was a professional and would always look this way to his patients.

“You're not sick, Antoinette.”

Antoinette melted in her chair at those words. It felt like someone had just covered her with a warm blanket.

“You're pregnant.”

What Dr. Turner said so stunned Antoinette that she was sure she heard him wrong. If that were the case, though, Don wouldn't be squeezing her so tight right now that she couldn't breathe.

“Oh, my god, Hannah,” he was saying. “Oh, my god. I'd completely stopped hoping. I'd just come to accept . . .”

The rest of what he was trying to say remained unspoken. He hugged her even tighter and then kissed
her full and long on the lips. Antoinette could still barely believe what was happening. After all the heart-break, she'd never even considered this possibility.

“I'm pregnant?” she said to the doctor.

Dr. Turner smiled broadly now, his eyes shining brightly and sending off even more warmth. “You're definitely pregnant, Antoinette. I hope that makes you happy. It certainly seems to have made your husband happy.”

Antoinette looked at Don, seeing an expression on his face that she'd never witnessed before. He'd always looked at her lovingly. There was softness in his eyes even when they argued. But what she saw now nearly caused her heart to burst with emotion. Don was looking at her as though she were some kind of miracle. As though heaven itself had just smiled down upon them.

“Don, we're going to have a baby.”

Then she was in his arms again and the full force of the doctor's news hit her. There would be a baby in their home again. Seventeen years after tuberculosis had stolen their little boy when he was only fourteen months old, they would once more have a child. For so long, they couldn't even think about trying again, and then when they did, Antoinette could-n't conceive.

But now . . .

She started sobbing and Don held her to his chest.

“After all these years,” she said.

“I know, darling. We'd stopped hoping. This is such a blessing.”

She looked up at Don, reaching to hold his face in her hands. She hadn't realized until that point that Don was crying as well. “I've missed him so much. I'll never stop missing him.”

“That will never go away. How could it possibly go away? How could we ever want that? But this – this – is a remarkable thing.”

A laugh burst forth from deep inside of her, shaking her with its power. She'd certainly run the gamut of emotions in the past few minutes, hadn't she? “It
is
a remarkable thing, Don. Remarkable.”

Dr. Turner cleared his throat and rose from his chair. “We have some things to discuss. Pregnancy at your age is a little more complicated than it was when you were younger. But we can get to that another time. For now, I'll just leave you alone to savor this moment. Congratulations.”

With that, he left, patting her on the shoulder as he did.

“I think we just kicked the doctor out of his own office,” Don said.

Antoinette laughed again. There was so much to think about. They had family and friends to tell, a room to clean out for the nursery, and a million little things to do before the baby arrived.

For now, though, the only thing she wanted to do – or even
could
do – was let Don hold her. As excited as she was about everything, she needed to be here right now. She needed to feel this because she had been so convinced that she would never feel it.

Warren had given long thought to whether he should try making Warren's Apologize to the Neighbors Chicken before he did it. The cooking aromas were very strong. Very, very strong. The first time Mom made it, Warren told her that he could smell it while he was playing outside at a friend's house, which was how the dish got its name. Mom was being facetious then – the neighbors didn't seek apologies, though they regularly sought invitations to dinner – but he wondered if he might not be apologizing to the people at Treetops for days after making this in his mother's apartment.

In the end, he decided to forge ahead. He'd made many meals for Jan at this point, but he'd never made her any of the dishes Mom had created in his name. And he was decidedly cooking for Jan now. Warren no longer had any illusions about serving this food to his mother. She hadn't had a bite of anything he'd made since the tiny bit of Ellie's Chicken Pie he'd gotten into her when she woke suddenly a few weeks back. If that were truly the last home-cooked food his mother ever ate, he wished it could have
been something more sumptuous and something with more personal resonance. If he had only known, he would have made one of her favorites. Maybe he even would have taken the ultimate risk and tried to create a dish in her name. That would have been the proper tribute, the kind of dedication appropriate to someone who'd dedicated so much to others. It was not to be, though, so his only alternative was to continue cooking in her name.

He browned chicken pieces in the fat rendered from a half-pound of bacon. He did this in the electric skillet, knowing he could never get the sear he wanted on the apartment's stove. Warren had only recently started to cook the occasional dinner at home – he was usually too full from lunch to need anything other than a salad or some soup – and he was delighted to learn that his own stove was considerably more potent. Only a couple of months ago, having a powerful stove at home wouldn't have mattered to him at all. When the chicken was brown, he removed it from the skillet and added the peeled cloves from two full heads of garlic, allowing them to get a bit of color and to, as his mother used to say, “stink up the place.” Then he returned the chicken and bacon to the pan, added a bit of chicken broth, and allowed the entire thing to simmer for an hour. The intense smells of the garlic and bacon filled the room; it was aromatherapy for gourmands.

Normally, he would have tried to speed things along with the pressure cooker, but he had something else to do with the time today. The job prospect that had seemed so promising had ended with an insulting
offer – slightly more than half of what he'd been making before – so he'd brought his laptop with him to send out more feelers while the flavors in the chicken developed. He'd do more of this when he got back to his place later, but he wanted to get a jump on it here.

When the hour passed, Warren added some chopped tomatoes and let them cook into the sauce for forty-five minutes. By the time this happened, he'd sent his résumé to a dozen new HR departments and had joined his fourth social networking site for corporate professionals. When Jan arrived, he threw pasta into a pot of boiling water and stirred a few tablespoons of heavy cream into the chicken.

“I've been smelling this all morning,” Jan said, “and now I'm ravenous.”

“The question is whether the people on the highway or maybe in the next town have also been smelling it all morning.”

“A definite possibility. Mrs. London asked me today why the food coming from the kitchen always smelled so good and then tasted so plain. I didn't have the heart to explain it to her. Have you thought about putting a catering truck outside? I'll bet we could negotiate it into the residents' meal plans.”

“Thanks for the idea. I'll work on that.”

Jan walked into Mom's room, emerging about fifteen seconds later. “I just wanted to check on her. She seems comfortable, though her breathing is still a little shallow.”

Warren had never seen Jan with any of the other residents, so he had no idea if she was like this with
everyone, but the caring look on her face after she tended to his mother always touched him. She took her job incredibly seriously and she was sure the people in her charge felt it, even if many of them had minds as clouded as Mom's had become.

“If I stay in there with her for a while, I notice that it cycles. Sometimes her breathing quickens and sometimes she's very still.”

Jan looked back into the room, seeming contemplative. That could mean so many things, some of which were welcome and most of which were not. She turned and offered him a narrow smile that required no interpretation. After a moment, though, she brightened.

“So, what's on the menu.”

Warren told her the name of the dish.

“She made this one for you?”

“She did.”

It suddenly seemed to Warren as thought they were crossing some kind of threshold with his presentation of this meal. Since he always told Jan what he knew about why a dish had its name, she understood what Mom tried to capture when she created something original. Therefore, presenting Jan with Warren's Apologize to the Neighbors Chicken was a form of inviting Jan to see him as his mother saw him. He hadn't considered that when he'd decided to make it today, and now he found himself reviewing every step he'd taken. He certainly hoped he'd cooked the dish properly. There was no time to worry about that now, though. Jan was here and lunch was ready.

Warren put Jan's plate in front of her and her eyes widened. “Wow, it's even more powerful when you serve it than it was in the pan.” She grinned at him. “Were you particularly . . . fragrant when you were a child?”

“I'll never admit to that.”

She cut a piece of chicken and tasted, reacting with the level of appreciation he'd come to anticipate from her but never fully expect. “Oh, I get it, you were an especially
delicious
child growing up.”

Warren's face warmed and he hid it by getting up to retrieve a jar of crushed red pepper. “Give it some of this,” he said, handing her the jar. “It completes the assault on your senses.”

Jan shook on a few flakes and tasted again, nodding to acknowledge that his recommendation had been a good one. “How close is this to what you remember?”

Warren took another forkful of chicken and then tasted it again with the pasta, allowing himself to go back to his first memory of the dish when he was in elementary school. It had been an entirely ordinary spring day, warm enough to play outside after school. When his mother served it for dinner that night, the flavors hit him immediately. It took longer than that, though, for the import of his mother's naming the dish for him to sink in. That day, she'd said that she wanted to make something very dramatic in his name because that would show him how dramatic his place in her heart was. At the time, he'd passed this off as the kind of soppy thing mothers said to their kids. He wasn't thinking that now.