For Love (9 page)

‘Good. I’m starved,’ he says. He shoves the scraper into his back pocket and grips the side rails, starts to descend.

Lottie sets the bag, the seltzer and glasses, on the stoop and steps back up into the kitchen’s sudden dark to get salt and pepper and a sharp knife. When she opens the screen door again,
Ryan is just sitting down, opening the bag. Lottie lowers herself next to him on the stoop. Her knees creak audibly. ‘Want to go halvesies?’ she asks. ‘One is roast beef and
Boursin, and one is turkey and Swiss with mustard.’

‘Oh, upscale stuff. Trying to impress me, huh?’ She nods. ‘Gimme the roast beef first.’

‘The sun falls directly on to them, and they sit side by side and squint out into Lottie’s mother’s backyard. The arbor would be
there
, Lottie thinks. In its place now
is a rampant patch of mint with a wild vine snaking through it. The vine has swallowed the tree back here too, so that it looks droopy and deformed. In the far corner of the yard, a few daylilies
survive, but the rest of the growth and flowers are weedy and lanky. Lottie’s filled with a sudden absurd yearning for the father she never knew. ‘Maybe I should clear out the jungle
back here,’ she says idly to Ryan.

‘No way. If you’ve got that kind of time, you ought to help me.’

‘Yeah, you’re right. It’s low on the priority list.’ She drinks some seltzer. ‘It’s just that it’s such a mess.’

‘Who cares?’ he asks. He looks around. ‘It’s green anyway. I like it like this.’

Lottie shrugs. They chew companionably, and the seltzer fizzes with a steady, pleasing sound in their glasses. Lottie thinks of Cameron, in a phone booth somewhere, calling. She notices that
little flecks of dried paint are sprinkled on Ryan’s forearms, on his T-shirt and pants.

‘Be careful not to eat that stuff,’ Lottie says, pointing. ‘I’m sure it’s laced with lead.’

‘Now you tell me, after I’ve been licking the window frames all morning long.’

‘Well. Be careful, is all I mean.’

‘Careful’s my middle name, Mom. You know me.’

She snorts.

After a moment he says, ‘But I’m not doing this very carefully back here. I figure the front was what counted. Right? For selling the house and stuff.’

Lottie shades her eyes and looks up at the bare, light patches on the wood trim. They haven’t taken the siding off back here, or on the sides of the house. He’s just scraping and
repairing the wood of the windows. ‘No, it’s fine. When they take the siding off, they’ll have to do a lot of repair anyway. Just make it look okay for now.’

After a little silence he says, ‘If it’ll just stay dry for a day or two, I think I can finish up.’ And then: ‘I’m sorry I yelled at you before, Mom.’

‘You were upset,’ she says. ‘How’s your hand?’

‘It hurts a little.’ He holds it up. It’s a clean slash across the pad at the base of his thumb. The skin has whitened and curled a little around the edges of the cut, and the
blood in the middle is blackened and solid-looking.

‘But it’s huge! Maybe you need a stitch.’

‘I don’t want one, though.’

‘A stitch in time saves nine,’ she says.

‘Bad rhyme, Mother Goose.’ He shakes his head. ‘ “Nine” and “time.” ’

‘Nonetheless,’ she answers. They munch in silence. Lottie can feel the pressure of the new filling as she chews. She shifts the food to the other side of her mouth. She is busy
looking out over the backyard, trying to see it as it was, trying to imagine that world, and her parents in it.

She thinks of her mother as she is now, in the nursing home. Lottie has seen her only once this summer, in the second week she was here, and Ryan and Cameron were both with her to buffer it. She
has told herself several times she ought to go again, alone, but she had put it off. She wasn’t sure her mother even knew her on the first visit. But more than that, her mother’s
confusion, her incoherence, had frightened Lottie, repulsed her. Each time she’s thought of driving out there again, she’s pictured the empty, watery eyes, the slack mouth, and found a
reason not to go yet.

‘Is there going to be a funeral?’ Ryan asks abruptly.

She looks at him. He’s frowning. His eyes don’t meet hers. ‘I don’t know, honey. I assume so.’

‘Do you think I should go?’

‘I don’t know, Ryan.’ Then, because he still looks unhappy: ‘No one will object, certainly. If you want to, then you should.’

‘Well, I know I want to. I just mean, do
you
think it’s okay to go?’ He points at her with what’s left of his sandwich. ‘Not, somehow, false.’

Lottie looks at him. ‘Why false?’ He shrugs and takes a big bite. ‘Because you slept with her but didn’t care for her?’

‘God, Lottie!’ He can barely speak with his mouth so full. He finishes chewing and swallows, hard. ‘Be more direct, why don’t you.’ Lottie laughs. He frowns again
then, and says, ‘Actually, maybe that’s it, I guess. I just wasn’t . . . I don’t know. I wasn’t particularly nice to her.’

‘Were you actively not nice? Do you think you were cruel?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t ever call her back, all those times she called me. But I thought it would be more . . . cruel, yeah, I guess, to call or let her think she was, like,
special to me. But also, honestly, it was selfish. I didn’t want her hanging around that much.’ He sets his sandwich down. ‘God, how can I be saying this about someone who’s
dead?’

Lottie reaches over and rubs his shoulders and neck. He lets her. ‘Why would you want to go to her funeral, then?’ she asks softly after a minute.

‘I don’t know.’ He shrugs again. ‘A kind of penance, maybe. That I was that close to someone I didn’t want to bother to really know as a person.’ He looks
sharply at Lottie. ‘I mean, I’m not saying I would have loved her or anything. Or even that I would have liked her. In fact, I don’t honestly think I would. But just that I should
have, like, noticed her more. Her
personhood
. I should know what I fucking felt for her, and I don’t.’

‘So the funeral would be the equivalent of tying a string around your finger to remind yourself not to do that again?’

He chews slowly. ‘Well, no, actually. That’s not what I want. It’s just that the people there will know her.
Will have known
her. And I, maybe, should watch –
should have to watch – what she was to them.’

‘Honey, you shouldn’t
have to
anything. You don’t have any guilt in this thing.’

‘No, I know that. But I want to. I just feel I have to mark this. To, somehow, acknowledge her death.’

They eat in silence for a few minutes. ‘Are you ready for some turkey?’ Lottie asks. He nods and reaches for the half sandwich she passes him.

‘I remember my father’s funeral,’ Lottie tells him. ‘It was the first one I ever went to, and I think I felt a little the way you’re feeling – that somehow I
could get to know him, or something about him anyway, by watching the grownups grieve.’

‘You didn’t remember him?’ Ryan knows that her father died in prison.

‘No, not really. I was only five when he went to jail.’

‘God, I remember a lot of stuff from before I was five.’

‘Well, I just don’t. About him anyway. Maybe when someone is gone like that, and you don’t have their presence to trigger earlier memories, they just fade gradually. It’s
really true that I have a total of about three images of him.’

‘Which are?’

‘One: that he wore a green, see-through visor when he worked – I suppose cellophane or something. His office was in the little bedroom you’re in, the one I had later for my
own. It was crammed with books and papers, it was really a mess, and he sat there and worked on wills or estates or medical claims—’

‘And doctored the numbers.’ Ryan’s grinning. He’s proud, in a perverse way, of this part of his own history. That his grandfather went to jail for embezzlement and fraud.
What he hasn’t taken in, what Lottie has always known, is how small-time, how pathetic, even, the criminality was. A two-bit lawyer, chiseling two-bit, marginal clients. Nothing to be proud
of.

‘Whatever. But that visor just terrified me. I don’t know: something about its
greenness
, something about the way his face looked under it.’ She stares out over the
shadowy yard, remembering.

‘And?’

‘And what?’

‘The other memories?’

‘Oh. When we got the TV. When he brought the TV in, how pleased he was. I loved him then.’ A breeze stirs the trees, gently bends the lanky weeds. ‘I got the crate too, the
crate it came in. I had it back here, for a house, a playhouse, for the longest time.’ Lottie’s voice has slowed. ‘There was something magical about it that I connected to
him.

‘And I remember that he used to dance me.’ She smiles at Ryan. ‘I did it with you too. You know, when you’re little and you put your feet on the grownup’s shoes,
and suddenly you’re taking giant steps and twirling as though you’re part of them. Moving in great . . . arcs!’ She gestures broadly with her sandwich. ‘It felt wonderful.
It was . . . heavenly. I can’t explain it.’

Ryan has been watching her face closely. Now he says, ‘Was he a lush too?’

Lottie sets the hand holding her sandwich down on her thigh. ‘I don’t know, really. And people felt differently about booze then, anyway. It was just a boozier time. I don’t
know. I just can’t remember it. Maybe she wasn’t even as bad when he was still around. And after all, he
did
work. So he must have been sober some of the time.’ Lottie
thinks again of the picture of them together back here, looking at each other, the secret of what was between them. She lifts her shoulders. ‘If he was a lush, he was more part-time than
Mother anyway. She was a pro.’

After a moment, Ryan says, ‘So anyhow, the funeral?’

‘Oh! I don’t know. It didn’t help, that’s all, as it turned out. So few people came. And I didn’t know a soul, and they didn’t seem inordinately sad either.
And then they all came here and had drinks, and Cam and I went out and played in our good clothes and got in trouble. Not even so much because we left the collation as that we’d played
wearing those special clothes that had been bought just for the funeral.’

Ryan shakes his head. ‘I have to say, Mom, that you had a really weird upbringing.’

‘No weirder than yours.’

‘Christ yes, it was. Are you kidding me?’

She looks at him. He believes what he’s saying. ‘Well, actually I’m glad you think so. I used to feel guilty about how bizarre yours was.’

‘Mine? Mine was normal compared to yours.’

Lottie decides just to laugh. Not to bring up or list for him all the things that make her feel uncomfortable about how he grew up – the sometimes strange baby-sitters she had to arrange
for him while she worked, his unbuffered exposure to her short temper and weepiness when a love affair or money were a problem. Even some of the good things have come to seem liabilities. Their
tremendous early closeness seems to have turned him into this edgy, sometimes slightly chilly young man. And compromised her life too: she feels that no adult intimacy will ever approach in either
comfort or clarity the feelings she had for him when he was small.
Everyone feels that
, she has argued to herself. But she knows that she was more deeply solitary than most people then
– no family, no husband, for some years no close friends. She clung to Ryan.

What’s more, she knows that she was healing herself with Ryan’s childhood. For it wasn’t that with their closeness she asked him to be grown up, to be the little man of the
house. No, instead she took the opportunity to be young again herself. She appeared to be a loving parent, she knew. And she was. But she was also a child, reliving in the things she did for Ryan
and gave to him what might have been done for her, given to her, but hadn’t been. And no matter how much she tells herself that she didn’t, after all, take anything from him with all
this, his occasional coolness to her now is like a rebuke to that notion – as though he understands there is something suspect and finally self-serving in the very depth of her attachment to
him.

Though who knows? Maybe he feels none of this.

‘I’ve got to get some more paint,’ Ryan says now. ‘Can I take the car?’

‘Sure. Maybe I’ll work a little up there while you’re gone. Priming, I mean. I don’t want to scrape.’

‘Great. Do as much as you want. I’ll work from the ground up when I get back if you’re still at it.’ They both stare over at the windows, appraising.

Lottie sighs. ‘Well, we’ll see how long I last. I need something to calm me down, though.’

‘Why? ’Cause of Jessica?’

‘Yeah. Not just the accident, though. Though that’s bad enough. But Cam too – I feel so bad for him. And I can’t find him to tell him so.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Just . . . no one can find him.’ Ryan frowns at her, a sharp adult furrow between his brows. Lottie explains: ‘He left his car at Elizabeth’s last night, and it was
still there today, and no one can find him. He did call the store, it’s true, so he’s around somewhere. But I’d like to talk to him, just to be sure he’s okay.’

‘But isn’t that, like, illegal? Like leaving the scene of the crime, or something?’

‘No, no, no. He didn’t leave
then
. He stayed and talked to the police and went and had his blood tested and everything. All those things. But as soon as they gave him
permission to leave, he vanished.’ She lifts her hands, her shoulders. ‘I’ve called his home, I went over there, I went to the store—’

‘Doesn’t Elizabeth know? Where he is?’

‘No; she’s all muddled up in her own mess. Her husband turned up, I guess. And she’s going back to him. With him. That’s part of it, I’m sure, with Cam. He knows
that. I’m sure he’s upset about that too.’ She starts to pick up the plastic wrap, the empty seltzer bottle.

‘But I thought he and Elizabeth were, like, in love. For real, or something.’

Lottie half grins. ‘I would have thought so too. I’m sure Cam did.’

‘Christ. Uncle Cam.’ He shakes his head. ‘First Jessica, then Elizabeth. Bummer.’

‘Good Lord, Ryan:
bummer
?’ Lottie says. Her voice sounds pinched and affronted, even to herself. ‘It’s a little more than a bummer, I’d say.’ Neither
of them speaks for a few moments. He doesn’t look at her. Finally she tries to make a joke of it: ‘And to think I worried that you’d come back from England with a vocabulary too
high falutin for me to keep up with.’