Where Love Goes (16 page)

“Listen, Mom,” says Sally. “Whatever you want to do with your life, that’s fine with me. You can pick your friends. I would just prefer if you wouldn’t drag me into it. I have my own life now.”

“Yeah, well, I had this crazy idea that I might be part of your life,” says Claire.

T
here was a time—and it lasted for years—when Sally used to beg her parents to provide her with a little sister. Even after they split up, she and Pete would see news reports from Romania and suggest that they adopt a toddler. Sally even had her name picked out: Rose.

“And just where would we put her, this sister of yours?” Claire asked her. It scared her how excited the idea made her. She acted like it was the craziest thing in the world, but the truth was she thought about those Romanian orphans, too.

“She could share my room,” Sally said. Pete said he’d teach her how to ride a tricycle. Sally would give her all her old Barbies.

“And I’d read to her every night,” she said. “
Madeline
and stuff.”

They’d be in a store and see these little sneakers or patent-leather party shoes. Pete and Sally would make this moaning sound and call her to come see. “Don’t you just want to die, Mom?” Sally would say. “Have you ever seen anything so cute in your entire life?”

“Yes, actually,” Claire would say. “You used to have shoes like that. You also had chicken pox and food allergies and tantrums in supermarkets. You liked me to read you
Strawberry Shortcake at the Perfume Factory
twenty million times a day. There’s more to having a little kid around than buying cute shoes, you know.”

“We could handle it, Mom,” they said. “You’d see.”

Maybe it was a way for them to deal with the divorce, she figured. If they adopted a little girl, there would still be four places set at the table. There would be a bigger pile of presents at Christmas. They might feel more like a whole family again.

Whatever the reason for all their talk about adopting a baby, it passed. The kids never mentioned their little sister anymore. Their new phone book didn’t have Rose’s name scribbled all over the cover the way their old one had. And it certainly didn’t have Ursula’s.

T
hey arrive on the dot of six. Tim has brought deviled eggs—something Claire’s children would never touch—and marinated asparagus. He’s wearing a shirt Sally will think is dorky, the kind golfers wear. “I brought this for Pete,” he says. It’s a baseball signed by Whitey Ford. “My dad caught this for me at Yankee Stadium back in 1964. I was probably just the age he is now.”

“I’m so glad we could finally get everybody together,” Claire says to Ursula. Claire bends to give her a hug. “Just look at your dress.”

Ursula is wearing the jumper Claire helped Tim pick out at The Gap the other day, but not with the turtleneck she chose. Why did I let him buy a size ten? she thinks. He should have got a twelve.

She has put a striped rugby shirt on over the jumper, and a lot of those necklaces they throw out onto the streets during Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Although it’s a warm evening, she’s wearing cable-knit tights and sneakers.

“I made these for your kids,” says Ursula. She holds out a couple of friendship bracelets made of thick yarn.

“This is for you,” she says. She is speaking almost in a whisper as she hands the box to Claire. Inside is a blown-glass bunny and a broken robin’s egg and something else Claire can’t identify.

“One time When I was little, a hummingbird flew into our kitchen when the door was open,” she says. “My dad and me tried to catch it but it moved too fast. It just kept bumping into the windows. We tried every day to catch it, but we never could, so we just had to sit there and watch it trying to get out. Finally we got up one morning and it was lying on the floor. Dead.

“So we put it in the box,” she’s saying. “It was so little it didn’t smell. My dad said all the skin part just dried up and turned into dust.”

“It’s beautiful,” says Claire, brushing one finger very softly over the little pile of feathers and dust that used to be the hummingbird. “I never had anything like this before.”

“It’s a treasure box,” she says. “You keep it in your room. If you feel sad you can look in it.”

“You shouldn’t give me this,” says Claire. “It’s too special.”

“No, that’s okay,” says Ursula. “I was finished with it anyways.”

“I understand you like to pitch,” Tim says to Pete as Claire sets out the ketchup. “Football was my sport in college, but I was a pitcher myself, back in high school.”

“Great,” says Pete in a flat voice.

“So what kind of a season did you have last year?” Tim asks. He knows from Claire that Pete struck out ten players in his last four innings on the mound in last summer’s championship game.

“It was okay,” he says.

“Maybe sometime I could show you my slider,” he says. “My dad used to play triple A ball. He pitched to Jimmy Piersall one time.”

“I like your necklaces,” Sally tells Ursula, after a long silence.

Ursula keeps chewing.

“So,” Sally says to her, “what grade are you in anyway Ursula?”

Ursula whispers something to Tim. “She’s in second,” says Tim. “Of course, she’ll graduate in just a few weeks, won’t you, Urs?” Ursula is silent.

“Remember your second-grade teacher, Sal?” says Claire. “Mrs. Foskett? Only you called her Faucet for the longest time.”

“I already know how to throw a slider,” says Pete. “My dad taught me.”

“Why don’t you take Ursula up to your room and show her your trolls while I whip the cream for the strawberry shortcake?” Claire asks Pete when dinner’s over. She’s afraid he might roll his eyes, but he actually puts a hand on her shoulder to show her the way.

She shakes her head and whispers something to her father again.

“Come on, Urs,” he says to her. “You’ll have fun. He’s got this one troll that’s dressed like a wizard and one that’s a karate guy.” Pete looks at Tim suspiciously when he says this. Tim has been in Pete’s room before evidently. When Pete wasn’t there.

“That’s right,” says Claire. “Pete even made them their own little house. It’s really neat.”

“I’ll show you,” Pete says. Claire wants to kiss him.

Ursula says nothing.

“I guess she’s staying down here with us, Pete,” Tim says. “But thanks for asking.”

Pete shrugs and heads out of the kitchen.

A
lone in the kitchen with just the two of them, her father and Claire, Ursula is a different person. Chatty and funny. She is telling a story about a goody-goody in her class who always tells when this boy that sits next to her picks his nose. “The only thing is, she picks her nose too,” says Ursula. “I saw her. She even eats it. She just does it in the cubby room, when she doesn’t know anybody sees her.

“Your daughter is so pretty,” she tells Claire.

“She used to think she was fat for a while there,” says Claire. “You’d be surprised.”

“Did kids ever have a club about her at school?” Ursula asks her. “Where they sit around and tell how they’re never going to invite her to their birthday party? And every time she tried to sit down in the lunchroom the kids at that table would say, ‘Sorry. That seat’s taken’?”

“Do they have a club like that about you?” says Claire. She doesn’t have to look at Tim’s face to know what it must look like.

“Not only that,” says Ursula. “They make fart noises when I go up to the board.”

“What do you do about that?” says Claire.

“I tell the teacher and get them in trouble,” says Ursula.

Claire doesn’t groan but she feels like it.

“It doesn’t matter anyways,” says Ursula. “I hate all those kids. I don’t even want to go to their parties and play Pickle with them. I’m lucky, because I get to have lunch with the teacher.”

They are clearing away the dishes. Claire has told Sally she can go out with Travis now. Pete is up in his room listening to his Counting Crows album. After finishing off her second dish of strawberry shortcake and licking the plate, Ursula is in the living room rearranging Claire’s dollhouse. They can hear her making voices for the dolls.

“I think it went fine, considering,” Tim says to her. He runs his hand down Claire’s back as he says this, very lightly, as if he isn’t completely sure it’s okay.

Claire doesn’t say anything. She reaches to open the dishwasher.

“What is it?” he says. “Tell me.”

She stands at the sink scrubbing the same dish for a long time. She doesn’t say anything.

“What did I do?” he says. “Whatever it is, I’m sorry.”

“There’s just so much that has to be fixed,” Claire tells him. “I didn’t expect it to be this hard, I guess. The kids barely spoke with each other.”

“This was just the first time. The first time was bound to be a little uncomfortable,” he says.

“I just wanted so badly for them to get along with each other,” she says. “I didn’t feel there was one single moment of connection between them.”

“You expect too much,” he says. “They’re just being normal kids.”

“Mine are normal kids!” she wants to scream. “Yours is a mess.”
A person could spend her whole life making Ursula okay.

If Ursula were her little girl, Claire would bake with her and teach her how to make origami paper cranes. She would teach her jump rope rhymes and all the verses to “The Fox Went Out on a Chilly Night” and they would have a birthday party where all the girls brought their Barbies and they sewed outfits for them and then Claire took out the little tool she got when Sally was this age, that attaches rhinestone studs to fabric anyplace you want them, and all the girls would go home with rhinestones on their shirts.

Claire knows how to do all these things. Has done them. She just doesn’t know if she’s up for doing them again, with this particular child.

S
ally doesn’t pay all that much attention to her mother’s boyfriends. Not since Mickey, and that was way back. She can remember how it used to bother her seeing them together, and how much in love they were, how yucky she used to think it was when she kissed him. Now that Sally has a boyfriend of her own, she is just as glad when her mother is going out with somebody. It keeps her occupied and out of Sally’s hair.

Only this one, Tim, is just such a loser. He just seems so
gaga
all the time. He thinks everything her mom does is great. It’s sickening.

He talks in this very serious voice, like everything’s such a big deal. He’s tried to have some of these serious-type conversations with Sally, but she always manages to get out of them. Like when he wanted to hear her opinion of Nirvana, and he didn’t seem to get it that just because she’s a teenager doesn’t necessarily mean she’s some Kurt Cobain maniac.

The worst part is that daughter of his. Sally likes little kids, but this one is just so weird. Sally’s mom can’t say she didn’t try to make conversation with Ursula, but the kid wouldn’t even talk. And the father acts like she’s made out of glass, always hovering over her. Kids at school must eat her alive.

With the other guys her mother has dated over the years, you knew they were going to leave you alone. They might come over, but mostly they wanted to stay away from Sally and Pete as much as Sally and Pete wanted to stay away from them. Whatever her mother did—and Sally is old enough now to understand that included screwing now and then—she didn’t rub their noses in it. At home she was still their mom. They had their way of doing things, and nobody messed it up.

This Tim character is moving in on their world.
Deviled eggs, for God’s sake
. The guy has planted squash in their garden and hung up a windchime. One day Sally came home from her dad’s and found him in the kitchen making stew.

“Here,” he said. “Try this.”

“We don’t eat stew,” she said. She’d heard from her mother about what an incredible cook he was. Like that was going to make a difference to her.

“Just taste,” he said.

“I’m a vegetarian,” she told him. Well, she is now.

T
hey hated her. Ursula knew they would. Kids always do.

The girl, Sally, probably thought she was stuck up when she didn’t answer that question about her teacher.

There were so many things she wanted to say to Sally.
You are even prettier than Vanna White. Did it hurt when you got your ears pierced? Could I touch those fishnet stockings? Can I see your room?

She said none of those things. She just sat there like she was retarded.

She already knows her dad likes Claire better than her now. Soon he will like the daughter better, too. He has already offered to take her driving. He wants to play catch with the boy. What about the treehouse he was going to build with her, Ursula wants to know.

For just a moment there, Ursula imagines that it could be all of them in that sparkly house of theirs, with the Christmas lights and the dollhouse and the trolls and the cookie jar shaped like a kangaroo. For a moment she imagines them all snuggled up under one of their soft fuzzy blankets with a big bowl of buttered popcorn, watching a movie together.
Killer Clowns from Outer Space
, her and her dad’s favorite.

•   •   •

“Wait till you see this part” Ursula tells Pete. “This part is my favorite.” And Claire will pass her the popcorn and squeeze her and she will say, “Come over here and snuggle with me.”

“This movie is awesome,” Pete will say. “I thought little girls only liked to watch dumb movies like Care Bears and Barney.”

“My dad and me hate Barney,” she says proudly
.

“Cool,” says Pete
.

She knows better than this. Her dad will leave Ursula with a babysitter some night when he brings
Killer Clowns
over to Claire’s house and they will have popcorn and snuggle up and they will all watch it together, all right—him and Claire and her kids—and when the girl and her mother get scared, Ursula’s dad will put his arms around them and say, “It’s okay to look again. It’s over.”

He will teach the boy karate, and once he learns it, the first person the boy will beat up will be Ursula.