The Year That Follows (8 page)

S
omething in the female of the species requires more sleep, which Sam noticed once Kyle went off to college and it was suddenly no big deal to have a woman spend, say, the entirety of a Saturday night in his bed. This morning he rises before the sun, and stands barefoot on the cool stone of Phyllis’s garden walkway. He drinks two cups of coffee, reads the
Los Angeles Times
, and contemplates how he will tell Cat of her origins. Or what Sam knows of them. There are mysteries there.

When the sun is up, Phyllis wakes and makes herself a cup of coffee. He waits for her to take a sip, and then he tells her that Cat is not his biological daughter. “You’re kidding,” she says, her hair still down, her body wrapped in a silk robe of Asian origin. Not Japanese, Sam is fairly sure. “You’ve never told her?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

It’s the obvious question: Cat might well want to know something of her beginning. Sam and Ann had always had an understanding they would tell her when
she was old enough; then she was old enough, and yet they didn’t tell her. Silence was easy. Then Ann died, and Kyle, and suddenly Cat doesn’t have a blood relation left on the planet, except for her little boy.

“Maybe it doesn’t matter,” says Sam.

“Only a man could say something like that.”

“We move on,” he says.

“In denial,” Phyllis adds.

“Look, I’m going to tell her.” He feels something in his chest. It could be anything.

“Maybe you should wait.”

“You’re not serious.”

“No,” she says. “I’m not.”

F
or years Sam studied his children for the differences of biology. With Cat it was always easy to see the influence of another man, physically taller, darker, though perhaps equally somber and quiet. Both of Sam’s children kept their own counsel and thus seemed mature beyond their years. Their size was the biggest difference. Once, when Cat was about fourteen, she and Kyle were in the kitchen. Sam walked in, and on a lark picked up Kyle, grabbing him by his bony ribs and hoisting him, a move that took some effort. Cat, quite unexpectedly, did the same thing to Sam. Now there was an experience, to be suddenly lifted off the ground by your fourteen-year-old daughter who weighed only twenty pounds less than you and was just as tall. Two things occurred to Sam. First, he
was reminded that another man was involved; Sam could feel him reaching out, grabbing, reminding him of the secret history. Second, floating there above the tile floor of the kitchen, Sam realized that there had been some change in his authority, in his very essence as a father. Fathers are supposed to pick up their girls, not the other way around. It seemed a long time that he was up in the air. Ann happened by and said, in her sharp voice, “Catherine, put your father down.” And it was done.

Sam came to admire Cat’s size, her height and presence. Kyle, on the other hand, was built like a greyhound. The last year all three were together, Sam took Kyle to Saks to buy a suit for the fall sports banquet. Kyle had outgrown what he’d had; Sam remembered that old suit, a constricting garment Kyle wore to Ann’s funeral, the pants at his ankles, the short sport jacket sleeves, the exposed wrists. Sam thought, He’s really not a boy, anymore. Just as he thought, Cat’s a woman, almost. At Saks Sam discovered that Kyle wore a forty long. This was a size a man wore. There was a moment when Kyle and Cat stood together in front of the three-sided mirror, the reflections of them bouncing endlessly back into the glass. Sam told himself not to forget it, this still shot of his children together, young and strong. Anything could happen, and he had high hopes for them. They were his, equally, and soon they would be gone.

•    •    •

P
hyllis believes in walking, and so after a couple of cups of coffee Sam is out in the Santa Barbara hills. He prefers strolling on the beach for its flatness and salty air, for the sky and the light reflected off the water. Phyllis is more concerned with her personal expenditure of energy. Here, on this dusty trail, Sam sweats. She wanted him to stay home, used his heart as the reason, and so he insisted on coming to prove to her he is fit, and to test the gods. She keeps stopping to wait for him, sometimes even retracing her steps, which is yet another special indignity. I fought a war, he thinks. I once stayed awake for two and a half days, and now I can’t keep up with some old lady.

“You need to go back,” she tells him. “So help me God, if you die out here …”

He’s resting by leaning against a tree, a hand on the textured bark. He’s too winded to speak.

“We’re going back,” she says.

He doesn’t protest. The way back is downhill, and surprisingly easy. He follows her, noting the herringbone pattern her small shoes leave in the dust. Ahead, he sees a bench. He says he needs to sit on it. His idea is to smoke a cigarette.

Sitting next to her, catching her in profile, he can almost see how she must have looked as a young woman. Something, he thinks. She must have been something. He is always thinking this, a constant kind of yearning.

“Aren’t you going to offer me one?” she asks, as he taps out a cigarette.

He reminds her she doesn’t smoke.

“What do I have to lose?” she asks.

“A few years, I suppose.”

It turns out she smoked once in her life. It made her feel a little naughty, she says, which she was otherwise not. After her first husband left her—this was in the sixties—she found she didn’t need the cigarettes to feel unconventional. “A man got me to quit,” she says. “I guess if I could quit for him, I could start for you.”

“I didn’t ask you to start,” he says.

“They say it’s important for couples to find things they can do together.”

“I want you to meet my daughter,” he tells her.

“Then I will.”

Through the trees across the trail he can make out a sliver of shining ocean.

“Stick with me,” she says.

I intend to, he thinks, but he doesn’t say it. He’s having a hard time catching his breath, and, for some reason, he’s embarrassed to speak.

L
ater, afraid to go home, he spends the night with her. Sixty years ago he learned to expect death at any second, and he believed he could face it with calmness and grace. He also remembers lying in the VA hospital and not worrying, just waiting to see what would happen. Now, though, he is afraid. I should have the operation, he thinks. He decides to call the doctor tomorrow and schedule it for September
16
, the Monday after Cat leaves.

O
n Wednesday she e-mails Tonya. Cat hasn’t seen her for six weeks. Tonya lives in Farming-ton now, has three girls, a husband, a marketing job, and not enough time to get together. When they were teenagers they had nothing but time. Cat wouldn’t trade anything for what she has now—that is, Connor—but she misses those days, too, the simplicity of them, the hope. The friendship. Things haven’t turned out the way she and Tonya planned. Farmington isn’t Birmingham, or Bloomfield. Cat’s apartment isn’t like the old house. It’s as if everyone in her generation has taken a step back.

I have a date with Tommy Swenson
, says the e-mail. Tonya calls within ten minutes. Then, on Friday, after Cat has dropped Connor at his father’s—it’s not Michael’s night, but he’s agreed to take his son—she returns to find Tonya waiting for her in the parking lot of her building.

“I couldn’t let you face this alone,” Tonya says.

“You’re planning on coming along? A chaperone?”

“God, no, but I’ll help you get ready.”

Tonya sits on the toilet lid in Cat’s small bathroom while Cat takes a bath. It is a great luxury to lie in a hot bath without having to worry about a small child in the
house, to hear the light sloshing of water, to have someone you trust close by.

Tonya is worried about the wrinkles around her eyes. “You don’t have any,” she tells Cat, “but I’m starting to look like I’m eighty years old.” She wants to have her eyes “done.” When they were girls Cat wouldn’t have known what that meant, and now she counsels against it, tells Tonya that she looks fine, that she doesn’t want to end up like Lisa Knight, whom Cat just saw at Krogers: not a wrinkle on her face, but her actual eyes seemed recessed in her head, as if she were staring out through a mask.

“You look great to me,” Cat tells her, the truth, which is to say that she looks the same, same round eyes, same slightly upturned nose, same puckered lips and tiny chin. Tonya’s hair is blonder now—as a teenager it had brownish strands, especially in winter—but hair has always been the most mutable part of her appearance.

“Brian barely looks at me anymore. Familiarity breeds contempt, or something like that.”

“He’s a good guy.”

“Yeah, he’s getting the girls dinner while I’m here. I could hire someone to do that, right?”

Tonya is married to a faithful man who looks after their children, has a good job, does nothing to excess. Cat points this out. “That’s what every woman wants. It’s the dream.”

“Right,” says Tonya.

Out of the bath, Cat stands at the mirror wrapped in a towel, and puts on her face.

“So,” Tonya says, “you gonna tell me what he’s like?”

“Tommy?”

“He’s why I’m here, right?”

They are repeating, Cat realizes, a scene that’s happened dozens of times and a quarter century before: Cat getting ready for Tommy, Tonya coaching, involved and a little envious.

“He’s a man now, calmer, more sure of himself.”

“What’s he look like?” Tonya stands, grabs a lipstick off the sink, tries it on.

“Good,” Cat says. “Thicker, I guess—he’s put on a little weight. Still has most of his hair. He’s a cardiologist.”

“A doctor of the heart.”

“That’s what I said.”

Tonya studies her face. “This color is better for you.” She wipes her lips on a tissue, leaving a reddish smear the color of viscera. “Do you feel like you know him?”

Cat has to think about this. “Not really. Maybe.”

Ten minutes later Tonya is scolding her for her choice of panties and bra. “They don’t match.”

“So what?” Cat asks.

“And the bra’s too plain. What if you sleep with him?”

“I’m not going to sleep with him.”

“What if he wants to?”

“I’m not going to on a first date,” Cat says, a rule she has lived by, mostly.

“First date? You used to sleep with this guy all the time.”

“It’s a first date,” Cat says, but she changes to a bra with black lace. I’ll feel better this way, she tells herself, looking in the mirror. This is for me.

Tonya takes a seat at the end of the bed while Cat goes to her closet, a tiny thing just big enough to walk in. Here, then, are the decisions. She didn’t wake up early enough today, thus she ran a third of her normal time, hardly a run at all, and she’s feeling fat and bloated, and that rules out the jeans she wanted to wear, and the pair she tries makes her feel she’s stuffing herself into them the way a butcher stuffs pork into a sausage. So she tries a third pair—better, but still she can feel herself spilling out the top, and what if he puts his arm around her and feels the fat riding right there, atop her jeans?

“What are you doing in there?” calls Tonya.

Cat tries a skirt but can’t get it to sit right on her hips, then a dress, which is fine except that it makes her look like she’s trying too hard, and besides, it’s sleeveless and her arms aren’t really there, not like she’d like them to be, not like they were before she had Connor.

“Come out here,” Tonya yells.

Cat appears.

“Nice,” Tonya says.

“It looks like I’m trying too hard.”

“He’ll appreciate the effort.”

Cat hasn’t been this stressed about a date since
Michael—there haven’t been many, a couple of losers and then Chris, the young guy is how she thinks of him, and now she’s going all the way back to her youth for a date and yet she is just not young, there’s no denying it, a lot of time has passed and extracted its fee.

“What is it?” Tonya asks.

“I was remembering when …”

“When what?”

“I taught Kyle how to kiss a girl.”

“Your brother?”

“I was trying to teach him to be subtle, but strong. What to do with his tongue. Not to be sloppy. There’s nothing grosser than that. No girl wants to feel she’d been through a car wash.”

“Did you have him kiss you?”

“I did.”

Tonya sits up.

“He was too nervous,” Cat says. “It wasn’t good. But he thanked me. He was fifteen.”

“Funny thing,” says Tonya. “I don’t remember him ever saying a word.”

“He hardly did.”

“What about Tommy? How does he kiss?”

“Like a champ,” Cat says.

“And the rest?”

Cat turns and goes back into the closet, settles on that third pair of jeans and a black T-shirt that has thick fabric (thin would show too much), and a linen blazer that dresses it all up.

“Better fix the mascara,” Tonya says. “I don’t know
why you’re so nervous,” she adds as Cat makes her way to the bathroom. “I mean, you’ve already slept with this guy.”

T
hey’ve been at the table for twenty minutes, her glass of wine already half-drunk, when Cat asks Tommy about his marriage, about who left whom.

“I think she left,” he says, “but I was really already gone, or dead, or whatever. It had been bad for years. I was forty, a doctor with a wife and a big house and a kid and four or five tons of Teutonic steel in a two-car garage, and I seemed like a cliché even to myself. I’m not going to stick up for her, but I don’t blame her, either.”

She’s finally finding she can relax; listening to this story of his failed marriage, looking at him, has that effect on her. He sips his wine and she thinks she can feel what he’s feeling, or felt: the pain of being in the wrong situation, unsure of how you got there and how to get out. It was perhaps a bit forward to ask about his marriage, but there are things she wants to know.

“I almost looked you up,” he says.

“Why didn’t you?”

“I heard you were married.”

The restaurant is dark and upscale, with walls of pastel fabric and piped-in jazz music. Kyle, she thinks, would know who’s playing. She looks at Tommy. He’s wearing a black button-down pressed shirt. It’s the pressing that matters, a sign that he made an effort. The
thing she really likes, that she’s always liked about him, is that he looks right back at her. So many men have a hard time with that, looking in a woman’s eyes.