The Night I Got Lucky (20 page)

“Stil in there,” his secretary said, but she sounded disingenuous this time. Or was I imagining it?

I hung up and pushed a few buttons to block my mom’s number from appearing in Chris’s phone. Then I dialed his number. He answered immediately, with a somber, “Chris Rendal .”

“It’s me.”

Silence.

“I just wanted you to know that I’m at my mom’s.”

“Good. Thanks. Tel her hi.”

The phrase “awkward pause” took on a whole new meaning.

“And I also wanted you to know,” I rushed on, “that I love you more than anything, and I’m so sorry about al this, and I’l do anything I can to make it up to you.”

Why, why, why was it so hard to come up with words unique to our situation, to Chris and me, to explain what I meant? Why did I once again sound like Hope talking to Bo in Salem?

“I need some time,” Chris said.

“Right, sure. How much?”

“I don’t know, Bil y.” There was a despondent weight in his voice that said
forever might not be enough time away from you.

“What can I do?”

“Nothing. Just give me some time alone.”

“Please, Chris. Tel me something I can do or tel you or….” There was so little it seemed I could do, real y. I’d been honest with him, and now he was asking for time. So simple, and yet so complicated. “We’ve got to talk about this, Chris. About our marriage.”

“Yes, we do,” he said, with an eerie finality, “but not now. I’l cal you. Bye.”

In memory of Jan Lovell, who was loved,
the plaque said. My mother had placed it on the side of the house, right by the barbecue where Jan died three years ago.

I’d been pacing the lawn, hoping the spring air would simultaneously calm me and then kick me in the ass and usher in a sense of purpose. A sense of anything. I’d thought about Chris, and the night of our engagement, for so long there was a thick layer of fuzz in my head, which insulated me from further rational thought. So I paced, feeling the occasional rays of sun strike my face, the new grass crimp under my bare feet, until I noticed the plaque. I hadn’t paid attention to it recently, since we rarely came out here. This section of the lawn, with its two barbecues (one charcoal, one gas—they gave off different tastes, Jan always said) were Jan’s domain. The gril s stil stood, like sentries, as if waiting for his return. And above them was the plaque. It made me think of an important gift I’d been given in my life. Not the engagement ring from Chris, but a high school graduation present from Jan.

He and my mom had been married for a year, and I was fond of him, but wary. I knew he could go the way of my father and bolt, so I kept my emotional distance. Holding back seemed smart, and I thought Jan wanted it that way, too.

On the night before the graduation ceremony, my mother threw a bash. She was inside, consulting with caterers and triple-checking that the house was in its usual pristine condition, while Jan and I began the barbecue process. This was an important series of actions for Jan, similar to a pilot’s preflight checks. He made sure there was enough gas, he tried al the burners, he cleaned the grates, he readied the charcoal. I wasn’t sure why he’d asked me to be with him, but I felt a mel ow companionship, standing with him on the grass, which was stil wet from an earlier rain shower, nursing a can of soda and watching the sun bruise the gray sky as it tried to fight its way through the clouds.

After oiling the hinges on one of the barbecue lids, Jan took a deep breath. “Al right, Bil y, that’s done,” he said in his deep, rough voice. He usual y wore golf shirts and khaki pants—the uniform of the retired suburban male—but that night my mom had dressed his big, lumbering body in a starched white shirt. His gray crew cut had been trimmed as wel , and he kept running his hand over his hair and then pul ing at the col ar, as if waiting for the time he could get out of it. “I wanted to give you something,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “Do you want me to take the rag inside?” I pointed to the towel he’d used to clean the gril .

“No, no, dol .” Since being married to my mom, he’d adopted a shortened version of my mother’s “baby dol ” term of endearment. Jan tilted his head and studied me. I felt a sudden nervousness. I wasn’t used to being looked at. Four years of high school, and I stil wasn’t comfortable in my teenaged body. But when I gazed back at Jan, I relaxed. He was nodding, clearly on the verge of saying something. And he looked strangely emotional, his lips pushed together. He ran a hand over his gray hair.

I waited. I could hear my mother’s tinkling voice cal ing something to the caterers, something like, “Oh, dear, those are horrid!”

“Here’s the thing,” Jan said, reaching for the shelf next to one of his gril s and lifting a smal , yel owed envelope. “I want to give you a coin. Now, I know that doesn’t sound like much, but this is special.” From inside the envelope, he took out a copper-colored coin. His hands were like large mitts, and the coin seemed petite in comparison. He handed it to me.

“Thank you,” I said, peering at it. On one side was a woman who appeared to be soaring through the air, her arms outstretched.

“She’s cal ed Flying Liberty,” Jan said. “I got that coin and a couple others like it when I was in the service in Italy. I carried them in my pocket and whenever things got bad—and they did

—I looked at the Flying Liberty. I always thought that she could go anywhere and do anything. She was freedom, and she gave me strength, you see?”

“Sure,” I said, nearly tingling with the personal information. Jan was the kindest man—that was always apparent from his actions—but he was a man of few words. “And you want to give this to me?”

“That’s right, Bil y.” He patted me on the shoulder with his big hand. “You’re a flying liberty now. You’re off on your own, and…” His voice died away a little. “Wel , I’m going to miss you when you’re at school.”

“I’l miss you, too.” Suddenly I felt trembly. Leaving high school, leaving my mom and going to col ege was a terrifying thought, one I’d pushed aside by searching for a summer job and pretending August was far, far away. “I can’t believe you’re giving me this,” I said.

And then he uttered the sentence that changed everything for Jan and me. “I gave them to al my kids.”

In that instant, I felt for the first time that I loved this man. That he could think of me as one of his “kids” was a bigger gift than anything he could ever have handed me.

Now, I felt a swel of sadness staring at Jan’s plaque, thinking of what my mom had lost when he died, of how intensely she must have missed him to have made this plaque and hung it on the side of the house, like a mini headstone. I thought of what I’d lost, too, after Jan died.

I spun around then, struck, at last, with a charge of motivation. I went into the study that had been Jan’s. Photos of his extended family lined the wal s. The desk was big and manly, the chair a rol ing leather boat. It pleased me that the room was stil here, stil his. It meant that my mother hadn’t rid herself of everything old in order to embrace her new life.

I had to boot up the computer and wipe off a thin sheen of dust. My mother didn’t believe in e-mails—too impersonal, she said. She preferred to write notes on her pink personalized stationery with her name embossed in silver at the top. The only Internet access she had was through an old dial-up that took about five decades to connect. Once I was connected, I went immediately to Google.

I hesitated. I fiddled with Jan’s silver Mont Blanc pen that stood in a leather holder on the desktop.
Do it,
I told myself.

I put the pen down, and I typed in
Brandon Tremont.
My father’s name.

I’d done this years ago when the Internet contained only minimal information, and I’d found nothing except a family tree showing descendants of a particular Tremont family from Pelahatchie, Mississippi, and the mention of a man named Brandon Gunnison Tremont, born 1859. Decidedly not my father. I’d been strangely relieved at the dead end. My dad was nowhere to be found. I didn’t have to deal with what-ifs. And yet my obsession, my curiosity about him, grew intensely over the years. Until a few weeks ago, that is, when such worries and thoughts had been miraculously erased from my mind. Yet that erasure had left me flat. My obsessing had been the way I’d kept myself connected to him. He was a ghost now. I wanted to say an official goodbye to the ghost and maybe get some answers to satisfy the child in me who’d wondered for so long.

Now, I sat back from the computer feeling as if I’d been slapped. There were 26,415 results for Brandon Tremont. I did the search again, putting his name in quotations so that it would only search for those two names together and in that order. Fourteen results this time. Could he be one of them?

I clicked on the first one. My finger on the mouse felt heavy, awkward. There was a Brandon Tremont Web site, apparently for a guy who was a computer graphics consultant. Did my father have his own Web site? Was he in computers now? Anything was possible. I wouldn’t have been shocked to find out he was a circus performer. I clicked on the “biography” link of the site. And there was a picture of Brandon Tremont—a kid who looked about eighteen years old and had albino-white hair and terrible acne.

I went back to the Google site. The second and third results also concerned the acne-ridden Brandon, who had apparently been on his high school lacrosse team. The fourth and fifth were about some Brandon in Tampa, Florida—a black man, a photo revealed, so again, not my dad. I began to wonder whether this might require a private investigator. My father had hidden from my mother, from his responsibilities, for years. He might have easily changed his name.

I clicked on the sixth result. It seemed to be a misplaced link, a Web site for Cover to Cover, a bookstore in Tel uride, Colorado. But then I noticed a section cal ed “About the Owners,”

which I clicked on. My fingers felt light now, as if they were moving too fast, and for some reason, I wished I could reverse the click. Irrational y, I moved the mouse to the top of the screen, ready to hit the back button.

Too late. There he was.

An older version, of course. Silver hair now, instead of heavy, rich brown, lines stretching from his eyes. He had his arm around a woman with frizzy, honey-colored hair and tortoiseshel glasses. Below the picture, the caption read,
Brandon and Lillian Tremont, owners of Cover to Cover.

Without taking my eyes off the picture, I lifted the phone next to Jan’s desk and dialed United Airlines.

“I’d like to get a flight to Tel uride, Colorado,” I said. “Today.”

“C
an I get you something to drink before takeoff ?” the flight attendant asked. They were so much nicer here in first class. This was the only seat left on the flight to Denver, and luckily I had a plethora of frequent flyer miles from business traveling. “Maybe a water or an orange juice?” she said.

“Chardonnay, please.” It was only 3:45 in the afternoon, technical y not happy hour, but it wouldn’t have mattered to me if it were 7:30 a.m.

“Certainly,” said the flight attendant, who was clearly familiar with daytime drinkers.

The Chardonnay came in a thimble disguised as a wineglass. I downed it in about three seconds while other passengers filed by, heading back to the coach section, where I usual y sat.

“Another?” the attendant said.

“Please.” I fought back the urge to beg for the bottle. This was al happening at lightning speed. And nothing, save my quick-moving relationship with Chris, had ever happened fast in my life. I was a planner, a watcher and, as I’d recently told Odette, a procrastinator. Not even twenty-four hours before, I’d been in Odette’s basement office debating what to do with my life.

Since then, I’d admitted near infidelity to my husband, moved out of the house, tracked down my father and gotten on a plane to find him.

The second glass of wine came, fil ed to the brim this time. I gave the attendant a grateful smile, which hopeful y said,
Keep ’em coming,
because the fact was I’d only tracked down my father on the Internet. I hadn’t cal ed him. I hadn’t even cal ed Cover to Cover to find out if it was stil open, let alone if he was stil the owner or if he was even in town.

I saw my father as a skittish, delicate animal that could frighten easily. You had to sneak up on such an animal. This was a complete departure from the way I used to think of him when I was a child. He was a tal , strong man in a house of women. He was the person who lifted you up and threw you in the air until you screamed with laughter and my mother said,

“Brandon,” in a disapproving but laughing voice. He was the man who spoke two other languages—foreign, awkward-sounding words. He was the head of our family, the sun we al moved around. But he’d taken off, and my feelings about him had gone through wide, fluctuating metamorphoses—from pining for him, to hating him and denying his existence, to obsessing that somehow it was me, the last child, who had scared him out into the world alone.

He wasn’t alone now, though. At least according to the Web site, he was married to Lil ian of the frizzy hair. This made me oddly jealous and irritated. And his owning of a bookstore was perplexing. He’d never seemed the bookish type. But what did I know about him? Absolutely nothing.

I had a few more thimbles of wine once we were airborne, then managed to sleep for an hour or so. In the Denver airport during my layover, I went to the bathroom to wash the plane grime from my face. I had only a smal bag with me, the one I’d brought to my mom’s and then grabbed again after I’d hastily written her a note letting her know I’d cal soon. As I went through the bag now, I realized I’d forgotten to pack my cleanser. I also didn’t have my moisturizer, my blue hairbrush (the only one that could mildly control my waves), a change of socks, the cute Italian driving shoes I’d just bought or any decent shirts. I sank onto the tiled floor, fighting back the panicky feeling of being adrift and unprepared. An older woman walked into the bathroom and glared at the sight of me on the floor. I scrambled to my feet, staring enviously at her huge wheeled bag that probably contained everything she needed to survive for three years.