The Girls of Tonsil Lake (17 page)

“The plane leaves at ten. There’s an afternoon commuter to Lewis Point, so I booked that, too. Will you need a hotel room?”

“No.” I got out of bed and pulled on a robe, stopping to give her a curious look. “How did you know I’d go?”

Archie smiled at me, and I thought how the expression softened her features into prettiness. Suzanne would have a heyday with that face.
Oh, Suzanne.

“When I went back to Ireland,” Archie said, “I learned that you can’t always go home again. When you went to Maine with your friends, I think you learned that sometimes you can.”

She left the room, carrying my suitcase and the telephone, and I dressed in jeans and a cotton sweater, wondering how Suzanne was doing. I would have liked to talk to her, but Andie said the doctor had given her a sedative and she was sleeping in Kelly O’Toole’s old room at Jean’s house.

I thought of young Tom Taylor, who I hadn’t seen since the summer he and Jean’s Carrie graduated from high school. He had been out of control even then, although charmingly so. And now he was dead at twenty-nine, the victim of a hit-and-run driver on the street outside Suzanne’s condo.

I felt an ache in my chest as I tried to imagine the depth of her grief. Was this what our fifties were going to be? Was it all going to be about loss and pain and suffering?

Archie had coffee and a croissant ready for me when I went downstairs. I sipped the coffee and reached for the phone.

He answered on the third ring.

“Lucas?” I said.

Chapter Eleven

Andie

We gathered at Jean’s after the funeral. The house was full, what with friends, family, and ex-husbands. Had we not been so sad, watching Trent Taylor and Phil Lindsay try to avoid each other would have kept us entertained. As it was, the years-old enmity seemed to deepen our sorrow.

I stood in the dining room with Paul at the sliding glass doors and looked at all of our surviving children together beside the pool. Carrie’s and Miranda’s little ones frolicked in the water. They had probably not all been together since the last wedding in one of our families. Or the last death.

Young Jake stood with an arm around Sarah, and I wondered how far beyond friendship that had gone. My son was not what one would call forthcoming, and Sarah was downright closemouthed.

“I’d like to see that,” said a voice beside me, and I looked up at Jake, Sr. “She’s a terrific young lady, and our boy isn’t so bad, either.”

Paul spoke from my other side. Turning, I realized he was talking to Jake more than to me. “We wondered, didn’t we, back when they played Little League, how they’d all turn out. We talked about it then, and I think we grieved a little bit ahead of time for days like this.”

“I remember,” said Jake, and he wasn’t talking to me, either. “I never thanked you, Paul, for how good you were to young Jake when I couldn’t be there.”

The melancholy in his eyes was overwhelming, and I had to look away, back toward the group of twenty-somethings gathered at the pool. They were laughing uproariously, holding onto each other. It was nice to see, even though it was the kind of laughter that masks pain.

“You were always there, Jake,” said Paul. “Maybe I was your mouthpiece sometimes, but you were always there.”

Jake nodded, accepting the compliment with the same grace with which it had been delivered. “Well, so were you.”

Their eyes met somewhere past me, and I sensed there was more being said than I heard, which is not a new thing for me. I miss out on a lot. Jean says it’s because I’m always making so much noise, but I was quiet now.

“I’d like to think you’ll always be around,” said Jake casually.

“Me, too,” said Paul.

They shook hands, and, slow though I may be to catch on, I had the feeling Jake had just let me go.

“I should go see if Jean needs any help,” I said, and left them there together, the only two men other than young Jake who’d ever had a definitive place in my life.

I found Jean in the kitchen with Vin. They were standing at the sink, their heads together at the window over it. I poured myself a cup of coffee and hipped my way between them, which was easy to do because I have considerably more hip than either of them. “What are you two doing?”

“Look out there,” said Jean, washing glasses without looking at them.

Suzanne stood in the yard with Trent’s arm around her. They’d been together a lot the past few days, grieving for the son they’d lost, and I wasn’t surprised to see them together now. The addition to the picture was Phil Lindsey. Whoa.

“I thought he left after the funeral,” I said.

Vin shook her head, rinsing glasses and setting them upside down on a dishtowel—she wasn’t looking at them, either. I was glad I was drinking from a mug.

I became as involved in watching the tableau as they were. Pretty soon David and Lucas were snickering behind us and Vin hissed, “Shh!” as though the three on the lawn could hear them.

“Oh, shit,” I said. “Here comes Phil. Look busy.”

“We are busy,” said Jean. “Get another plate of sandwiches out of the fridge.”

I buried my head in the side-by-side, coming out again quickly so that I wouldn’t miss anything. Sometimes I am just not a very nice person. When I closed the refrigerator door, I hit my head with it.
Shit.

Phil looked surprised to see all of us crowded into the kitchen. He nodded indiscriminately. “I have to be going. Does anyone know where Sarah is?”

“Out by the pool,” I said, thinking with snotty satisfaction that he was going to have to walk into another crowd of people who made him uncomfortable in order to say goodbye to his daughter.

“Thanks.” He started toward the door that led into the dining room then stopped and turned back toward us. “Do you know if there’s anything I can do for Suzanne?”

“Why, yes, there is,” I said immediately and sharply. I met his eyes across the space of the kitchen and fancied that our mutual dislike made a dark cloud somewhere under the overhead light fixture. “You can tell Sarah the truth. She needs to know that her mother wasn’t the only bad guy in the end of your marriage.”

He hesitated. “I suppose you’re right.”

“She certainly is,” said Vin, her voice crisp and cool. She folded a dishtowel, its corners snapping droplets of water all over the place. We all ducked in unison.

“It might not help Suzanne, though,” said Phil quietly. “What if Sarah thinks I was right?”

Jean gave him her best hostess smile, although I could see definite overtones of superiority in it. “She won’t.”

“Try the truth,” Vin advised. “It often works wonders.”

I remembered something Suzanne had said within the past few days and beamed at him. “Just like cowshit.”

Jean

In the end, Tommy was a hero. The car hit him after he pushed a child to safety. I don’t know how much comfort that is to Suzanne, but I must admit it makes me feel better, if it’s possible to feel better so soon after you bury someone you’ve known all his life. Whose diapers you changed and who you helped teach to do the swim and the frug for the sixties dance when he was in junior high.

This evening, we ended up as we have so often in our lives, the four of us around a kitchen table. David and Paul went to take Lucas to the Indianapolis airport and Jake went to Miranda’s.

Trent had left when they did. He and Suzanne had held each other for a long time before he left. We watched, and our hearts broke a little more.

We didn’t say much at first. We were all very tired and Suzanne’s wounds were too new and too raw to take the chance of throwing salt on them. “It was nice of Lucas to come,” she said. “I appreciated it.”

Vin nodded.

“He’s a nice guy,” I said.

They all nodded.

We were silent.

“I believe,” said Andie in a strangled voice, “this is the scene from
Steel Magnolias
where Sally Field lost it and earned herself another Oscar nomination. Or should have. I don’t remember which.”

I stared at her, aghast. Vin dropped her head into her hands. Suzanne got up from the table and pulled a bottle of wine out of the refrigerator. She set it in front of Andie with a thump. “Here, Weezer, open this.”

Andie fluffed her white hair. “I look more like Olympia Dukakis than I do Shirley McLaine.”

“Yeah, but I can’t remember what Olympia’s name was in the movie,” said Suzanne.

I reached behind me for the corkscrew and tossed it to Andie. I ended up getting up anyway to retrieve four glasses from the dishtowel beside the sink.

After the first glass, I said, “I really hoped we’d never have to share a day like this.”

No one said anything until Andie spoke into the silence that wasn’t silent at all. “Do we all wonder the same thing?”

Yes, we probably did. The look we exchanged acknowledged that, but this was Suzanne’s conversation to lead, not ours. It was, as horrible as it sounds, her day.

“He left a note on my door,” she said. Her eyes were bright, her voice wistful. “He said he was sorry to have missed me. He knew I’d been worried about him but he was going to be okay. He said he was on his way to Sarah’s but if he missed her, too, to give her his love. Do you think he really was okay?”

“Sure, he was,” said Andie.

Vin and I nodded. “Absolutely,” we said together.

Suzanne smiled around at us as huge tears spilled from the corners of her eyes. “You’re all such liars.” She reached for Andie’s and my hands and we automatically grasped Vin’s. “And I love you all so much.”

Suzanne

Two weeks after Tommy’s funeral, I drove to Chicago and turned in my retirement papers. I had lunch with Jake and drove home. When I got back to Lewis Point, I went to the only realty in town and listed my condo. I stopped by the dealership and traded my Camaro in on a nice dark blue midsize that had four doors and built-in GPS that might keep me from getting lost in my own backyard if I could only learn how to use it.

The next morning, I went to Willow Wood Daycare, where Miranda and Carrie both took their children while they taught school, and applied for a position.

I was hired on the spot and went home with finger paints in my hair, paste on my sleeves, and unidentified residue on the front of my skirt. I had read
Green Eggs and Ham
seven times, changed six diapered butts three times, and given three bottles of nasty-smelling formula that left yellowish stains on the shoulder of my blouse.

I called Sarah when I got home and asked her to come over for supper.

“What are you having?” she asked doubtfully.

“Pizza. I’ll call for it when we hang up.” I hesitated. “You can ask young Jake to come if you like.”

“Don’t forget the black olives.” Her voice became muffled, as though she’d covered the mouthpiece, then she came back. “He says he doesn’t like them, but get them anyway. He can just pick them off.”

I took a shower, and when Sarah rang the doorbell, I answered it wearing sweats. My wet hair hung in strings around my face.

Young Jake looked stunned, Sarah uncertain.

“Mother?”

I drew them inside, kissing both their cheeks and herding them into the dining area. “Pizza just got here, so it’s hot. Who wants beer and who wants soda? Jake, why is it you’re not working? Did you get to go to day shift?”

“No, ma’am. Days off.” He came into the kitchen and took me by the shoulders, looking down at me with his father’s face and his mother’s eyes. “It is you, right, Suzy-Q?”

My bravado wavered under his scrutiny, and my voice wobbled a bit when I said, “I don’t know whether it is or not. I just know that who I was wasn’t working out worth a damn.”

He gave me a squeeze. “Good luck. Beer, Sarah?”

Her affirmative drifted in from the living room. I looked up at Jake. “Is she doing all right?” I whispered.

“I think so.”

When the pizza was nothing except a few dried crusts and all the breadsticks were gone, I brought three more bottles of beer from the kitchen and said, “Young Jake, do they ever call you anything else? Are you destined to go through life as young Jake?”

He laughed. “No one calls me that except family. Everyone else calls me just Jake or Lo.”

“That started in junior high,” said Sarah, “when he’d come out on the football field and people would chant ‘Lo-gan, Lo-gan.’”

I took a sip of beer and tried out the name. “Lo. I like that.”

“You listed your condo,” said Sarah. “I saw the sign. What are you going to do if it sells?”

“I don’t really know,” I said. “But this place is too white, just like the car was. Did you see the new one? It’s the same color as yours.” I took a deep breath because I felt like crying and I didn’t want to do that anymore. “I need that, I think…more color.”

“I saw it when I saw the sign.” Sarah turned her beer in a wet circle on the table. “You can stay with me for a while, you know, if you need to.” She smiled self-consciously. “Elmer likes you.”

“Thank you, honey. I’ll remember that.”

They got up to leave an hour or so later. Lo gave me a bear hug and a damp raspberry on my cheek that made me laugh and swat him. Sarah stood, looking uncertain.

“Daddy told me,” she said. “After the funeral, he told me the truth about the day the Rivers’ house was trashed. He told me some other things, too. Like that he didn’t want me to go to vet school so you footed the whole bill.”

“I didn’t want you to have to work too much,” I said. “It’s such a hard course.” I beamed at her. “I’m so proud of you for doing so well.”

I don’t know which one of us reached first; all I know was that in the next moment, my daughter was in my arms and we were both weeping buckets. We cried so hard and so long that Lo put his arms around us both and we stood as a small quaking circle on the sidewalk in front of the condo.

We cried for Tommy, for times lost and times wasted, for the great gaping holes his death had left inside us. I think we cried for our own and each other’s pain because of our estrangement, too, but maybe I place too much weight on a few tears.