The Grown Ups Page 27

  “How’s everything here? Something wrong with your eggs?” The waitress led with her pot of coffee, frowning at their untouched breakfasts. Sam pushed his mug in her direction for a refill because he was unable to speak. Bella looked down at her plate. When neither of them answered, the waitress turned around and left.

  Sam shook his head. “Bella, a lot of shit happened that summer. A lot of unresolved shit. I may have overromanticized those few weeks with Suzie; I may have carried that forward because it was easier to long for something I never had than to be in the moment. I don’t know. Suzie was all tangled up with my parents’ split. These are not excuses but I can’t explain it any better than that. Nothing about that time has ever felt finished.” He took a breath. “Was I shocked as shit that she showed up with Michael? Yes. That they had a relationship? Yes. It threw me for a fucking loop, I cannot deny that. But I’ve grown up. I miss you.” He took a gulp of hot coffee and winced as it scorched its way down his throat and into his esophagus. His voice was scratchy when he asked, “Are you in love with Ted?”

  “I told you. We’ve been together for two and a half years. Almost three, really.”

  “And that means you love him?” Sam paused. “You can do better than Ted.”

  “You don’t know anything.” Bella was still holding the piece of paper with the poem in her hand. She crumpled it up and tossed it across the table before she grabbed her coat and scarf and slid out of the booth.

  “Then tell me,” Sam asked. “Tell me.”

  Bella shoved her arms in the sleeves of her coat but left the buttons undone and the scarf unwound as she bent over and grabbed her bag from beneath the table. Then she strode out of the diner. It took seconds, maybe a minute tops, for her to get away from Sam. The door jangled as she exited, the bells swinging back and forth for a long time after she left.

  Sam let her go. He had already said whatever he thought would have kept her, and it hadn’t been enough. He picked up the crumpled piece of paper, which was nestled in a bed of home fries, and smoothed it out on the table as best he could. The dots of grease combined with the rips made it unreadable.

  Sam extricated a twenty for the waitress and tucked the bill beneath his plate before he carefully folded the paper back up along the creases and put it back inside his wallet.

  Apparently Marguerite and Hunt had gone to get a Christmas tree. When Sam returned home he found his father on his hands and knees under the tree, cursing at the screws in the stand. “Do you need help?” Sam asked.

  Hunt crawled out from under the canopy of branches and sat back on his feet. His face was red and there was a sprinkling of pine needles across the shoulders of his Polartec jacket. He gestured to Sam with a pair of pliers. “I think I finally got the son of a bitch tight enough so it won’t fall over. Give me a lift?”

  Sam held out a hand to his father and hoisted him off the ground. Then they righted the tree in the stand, turning it all the way around while Marguerite found its best side. Sam tried to remember the last time they’d had a Christmas tree, or the last time he had helped to decorate one, but he couldn’t recall. Marguerite had brought many things back into the lives of the Turners, holiday traditions among them.

  Marguerite had the ornaments spread out on the couch and the coffee table and was bent over the boxes searching for hooks. Sam was restless. The last thing he felt like doing was decorating a tree. He wondered where Bella had gone, if she had gone home, if right now she had a zillion little kids clamoring for her attention. He still wasn’t sure how he had gone wrong so fast.

  He needed to forget the fiasco of breakfast, so he went over to the bar and poured a finger out of a dusty bottle of tequila and then went into the kitchen and added ice cubes and a generous slice of lime. The tequila went down easier than Sam expected on a stomach of coffee and nerves. He could feel it turning him sideways. He went back to the bar cart for another and just decided to take the entire bottle of tequila instead.

  Sam could feel his father and Marguerite watching him as he walked down the long hall to his room. The three of them knew that nothing good could come out of a bottle of tequila and his childhood bedroom. “Sam?” Marguerite called after him as he shut the door. “Sam?”

  “Leave him alone,” he heard Hunt say. “He’ll come out when he’s ready.”

  It was dark when there was a knock on his bedroom door. Before Sam could answer, the door opened, letting a sliver of light in across the bed. “Sam?”

  Sam struggled out of the fog of sleep and tequila. When he did he saw his father leaning against the doorframe dressed in a tuxedo. “Hmm?” Sam mumbled, unsure of what he was seeing.

  “Sammy? Hey? We’re leaving.”

  “Where? What?”

  “We’re going to the city.”

  “To get married?”

  “What?”

  “You’re wearing a tux.”

  “We’re going to Marguerite’s hospital fund-raiser. It’s formal.” Hunt stepped closer to the bed. He may or may not have nudged the empty bottle of tequila with his foot. Sam thought he heard glass tumbling against the floor. He closed his eyes.

  His father touched Sam’s knee. His limbs felt heavy, and it was impossible to imagine ever moving them again. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing.”

  “A bottle of tequila isn’t nothing when you start drinking before noon.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re a man.” Hunt’s voice sounded tired. “Do what you want. I just wish—”

  “I was more like Michael?”

  “Cut that crap. It’s way too easy for you to place blame there.” Hunt paused. “I want to help you, if you’d let me.”

  Sam rolled over onto his side and looked at his father. There was a slight pounding in his temple and a roiling in his empty gut. “I should be able to get my shit together without you by now. Hey, are you really retiring?”

  “Yes.” Hunt frowned slightly as he nodded, and brushed something off his lapel.

  “What are you going to do?”

  Hunt laughed. “Get my shit together. Want to help?” He turned toward the sound of Marguerite’s heels tapping against the hardwood floor. “I have to go. I just wanted to make sure you were alive before we left.”

  “Tell Marguerite I’m sorry.”

  His father paused with his hand on the doorknob and said, “I think you can handle that yourself.” And then he walked out of the room and closed the door softly behind him.

  Sam made a dinner of scrambled eggs and toast and sat in the family room next to the bare Christmas tree, watching It’s a Wonderful Life. After a while he felt so bad about the tree he decided to thread the lights on the branches. When he had done that he peered into the ornament box.

  These ornaments were new, purchased by Marguerite in recent years. Sam had no idea what had happened to the wheat paste stars, paper chains, and clay dough handprints he and Michael had brought home every holiday season while they were in elementary school. Before she left, their mother would make a show of unwrapping those ornaments from the layers of storage tissue paper as if they were the most prized possessions she owned. Sam doubted she would have taken those with her on the way out the door. The most likely scenario he could come up with was that they had been thrown away during the renovation.

  Sam considered hanging some of the ornaments until he found the white and red ceramic ball that said Grandbaby’s First Christmas. That must have been purchased before Suzie’s miscarriages. He rewrapped it and plunged it deeper into the box, covering it with a reindeer made out of twigs and a felted Mr. and Mrs. Claus. Sam tucked the box flaps back together and brought his dish into the kitchen just as the doorbell rang.

  Bella stood on the front porch, her hands shoved deeply into her coat pockets. The bottom half of her chin was covered by the same enormous pink scarf she’d worn earlier. It was freezing, and in the streetlights beyond her head he could see a flurry of snowflakes. Sam remembered the storms after
Mrs. Spade’s funeral, the icicles on the windows of the train he and Bella had taken back to Poughkeepsie. He opened the door wide, surprised to see her there. “Do you want to come in? No one’s here.”

  “No,” Bella said, her words muffled against the scarf. She wiggled her chin from side to side to free it from the cloth. “I just wanted to tell you I was sorry for running out on you like that this morning.” She shrugged. “I just have a lot going on right now.”

  Sam crossed his arms over his chest. “You don’t have to—”

  “I do, I do. Can we leave it at that, Sam?” She shuffled down the walk and out to the street. He held his breath and counted to ten but she didn’t look back.

  Without thinking Sam ran down the steps. When he caught up to her he was already feeling the ridiculousness of the gesture. Plus his feet, clad only in socks, were rapidly becoming wet and cold. “I can’t leave it at that, Bella.”

  Bella spun around. “This isn’t real, Sam. You aren’t real. You aren’t even fully formed yet.”

  “What does that even mean?”

  “Nothing in your life is set in stone. You go whenever you want. You disappear.”

  “Is your life set in stone already, Bella? If it is, I don’t think you would be standing here talking about mine.”

  Bella opened her mouth and then closed it. There were snowflakes caught in her eyelashes. Eventually she said, “Go back home.”

  “If you want to be with Ted, tell me, and I’ll leave you alone. But I want you to come with me.” The snow picked up with the wind, blowing the flakes sideways. The shoulders of Bella’s coat were completely covered in white. “Come inside. Please.” Sam began to walk backward toward the house, all the while watching Bella’s unreadable face. He couldn’t feel his feet and he stumbled, nearly falling to the ground before he caught himself and climbed up the stairs to the porch. He was scared to turn around to see if she was following. If he got to the door and she wasn’t behind him he would have to forget her.

  Sam put his hand on the door handle. When he finally got up enough nerve to look behind him, a mass of white filled the space where Bella had just been standing. She was gone.

  SIXTEEN

  Visibility

  Suzie—2011

  As Suzie stepped from the car her coat button popped, revealing the slight pouch of a pregnancy six months along. She touched a hand lightly to her belly, still in awe that this time, this time, she had stayed pregnant. She had felt sluggish all morning and now she watched Marguerite, who had been driving, gather items from the backseat instead of helping her. Suzie squinted over at the front windows of the restaurant. She could see Sam moving back and forth. He was so involved in what he was doing that she doubted he even knew they’d arrived.

  Suzie stepped ahead of Marguerite and held open the door just as Sam came forward. He smiled at them in a distracted way. Against the long brick wall was a lineup of paint cans and drop cloths. To save money wherever he could, Sam was painting the interior himself, and Marguerite’s brother had helped with the kitchen remodel. The actual dining space was small but charming, and as soon as the paneled walls were covered in the soft shade of white Sam had them all approve from a sheaf of paint cards he’d carried around for weeks, the interior would reflect the sage and lavender that huddled against the squat brick-and-shingled building.

  The building that housed Sam’s soon-to-be restaurant was a long, vacant tavern at the end of a small string of businesses in what Marguerite had called the quaint downtown corridor of Rye. Quaint or not really didn’t matter to Sam, Suzie knew. Before he signed the lease Michael and Suzie had met him here at the restaurant. Sam claimed to know instantly when he walked inside that this was where he was meant to be, but he still wanted another opinion.

  Across the street, out the front windows, the commuter train station that had been a fixture of their childhood stood guard. It was strange to hear how differently the brothers remembered those years of their lives. Sam had said that he and his mother had picked up his father most nights from that station. In the winter Sam would wear pajamas and slippers under a coat, and wrap himself in a sleeping bag that his mother kept in the far back of the wagon. Some nights while they waited, Elizabeth would quiz Sam on spelling words or multiplication tables, but mostly they sat in silence. Sam would stare down the tracks, but he knew the train was coming before he could see it; that first vibration of steel against rail, rippling beneath the concrete and coming up through the floorboards of the car, signaled the approach. That was the sign for his mother to toss her cigarette out the open window and check herself in the rearview mirror.

  Michael claimed that he had been along all of those nights, and that he was the one who helped Sam with his math homework. Michael also said it was his idea to wear pajamas to the station so they would have extra time before bed for the glass custard cups of ice cream with chocolate sauce that their mother doled out for special desserts. Once home, before bed they would join their father in the kitchen while he ate his reheated dinner, saved in the same faded red pie plate night after night.

  Suzie had listened to Michael and Sam as they had relayed their stories and seen a hint of defeat in Sam, a concession that Michael had the right memory. Michael seemed not to notice Sam’s confusion. He was all about the facts, and confident in his own recollection. The difference in the way the brothers saw their world had never been so black and white as it had been in that moment, at least for Suzie.

  Now Suzie smiled at Sam in greeting as he tried to take the things out of Marguerite’s arms, even though she wouldn’t let him. Suzie pointed to the kitchen and Sam nodded, so she headed back to look at the stove he had talked about the last time he had seen them, a few weeks ago in the city. The stove had cost more than two months of the restaurant’s rent, but Sam said it had been worth the price.

  When Suzie returned to the dining room Marguerite had set the box down and shrugged out of her coat near the painting supplies. She was bent over with her hands on her knees, squinting at the colors smeared across the lids. With a nod of approval she straightened up, smoothing the fabric down over her hips. “Look what I found,” she said to Sam. She pointed down by her feet.

  Inside the box was a stack of large dinner plates, somewhat irregular in shape, with an organic, handmade feel. Sam lifted one up and turned it over in his hands. The glaze was white with underlying facets of gray and blue, so the effect was like the warmth from a well-worn set of pearls. He smiled at Marguerite’s find.

  Marguerite grinned at his reaction and clapped her hands together. “I’m so happy! I thought they were the ones, but I didn’t want to jinx it. I can have the lot of them, but I just took a few to show you. They’re from a French place near Columbus Circle that went out of business. I went to the liquidation sale in Garden City yesterday, and I talked my way in before they opened it to the public. I put a hold on six cases of thick handmade green glasses with a cobalt lip, and the farm tables too.” She took a tape measure from her pocket and began to walk the space from front to back. She snapped the tape and looked over at Sam. “Perfect! How many times does that happen?”

  Suzie looked over at Sam. He gave Marguerite a wide, toothy smile that made him look goofy and impossibly young. Suzie felt a twinge in her gut at the glimpse of the boy she once knew. She shook her head and glanced out the window. The restaurant had been just as much Marguerite’s project as it had been Sam’s; she had invested an endless amount of energy to make everything happen. Sam had told Michael that he had run out of ways to express his thanks for all her generosity.

  Before the restaurant, Sam had spent months at an organic farm out on Long Island planning for the growing season, but when the financing for the farm had disappeared, Sam had no choice but to retreat to Hunt and Marguerite’s home once again. As Suzie understood it, the restaurant was born out of several late-night conversations between the three of them at that time.

  Marguerite dug around in her bag for her phone. “I’m goin
g to step outside and call them. I don’t want to take any chances. This stuff is good, and cheap because they need to sell quickly.” She disappeared out the door.

  Sam moved over to a stack of notebooks piled on the bar that ran along the back of the room, and Suzie followed him. “We got the liquor license this week,” Sam said as he flipped open the top notebook. He tapped his palms flat on the bar, a long stretch of gleaming chestnut, while looking for a pen, located a nub of a pencil, and scribbled something. “A friend of Dad’s helped a lot,” he added, and Suzie nodded, although he wasn’t looking at her. “So I got Brooklyn Brewery and maybe one other local brewer doing some great organic IPAs.”

  “What’s all that?” Suzie pointed to the notebooks.

  Sam looked down at the stack under his hands. “Apparently I’ve been working on the menu for a restaurant my entire life.”

  “In there? You mean you’ve been making up recipes and—”

  Sam snorted. “I never took notes in class when I was supposed to. But these books have been with me forever. Notes on what I cooked, what I wanted to cook, attempts failed and successful, sources for meat and veggies. You name it.” He shrugged, closed the notebook, and shoved the pencil nub in his pocket. “You guys are coming next week, right? I’m going to cook the menu and invite friends and family for a taste test. It’s helpful to know what works, what doesn’t work. An opening before the opening, you know?”

  “Absolutely,” Suzie said. “I’m looking forward to it. I’m always starving.”

  “You want something now?”

  Suzie pushed aside her pending doctor’s appointment and weigh-in and what she had already eaten so far that day, and nodded. “I won’t turn it away.”

  Sam beckoned for her to follow him into the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator and took out a bowl of hummus, opened the wire vegetable bin and grabbed a few carrots and peppers, sliced them quickly, and slid the cutting board toward Suzie. She scooped a red pepper into the hummus and popped it into her mouth. The hummus was thick and lemony with the right amount of bite from sriracha.