The Grown Ups (7 page)

“Seriously, dude? That's your bike. You came home with a tire last night and this bike, your bike, is missing a tire.”

“Okay, detective, it's my bike.” Michael's voice was flat. “Come on.” He shoved his hands into his front pockets and leaned forward as he walked, as if he were trudging through snow. In that moment Sam saw what else Michael and his mother shared. Each of them had a life that was entirely separate from the one they lived day to day with Hunt and Sam. Sam knew only the side of
Michael that Michael wanted him to see, while their dad and Sam put everything out there.

“So who is she?” Michael stopped walking and looked over his shoulder at Sam. “That girl back there?” As soon as Sam said the words he flinched.

Michael shrugged. “Vera is my lab partner. We studied really late last night, and I left my bike at her house because there is something wrong with the gearshift and I didn't feel like dealing with it.” He raised an eyebrow at Sam but offered nothing else.

“It looks like she's into you.”

Michael shrugged and started walking again. “Possibly, but . . .” He shrugged again, as if Vera's liking him wasn't important. “She's just like that. Flirty. Vera likes everybody and nobody. I told her I would stop by tonight for some food, that's all.” Michael smirked, as if explaining things to Sam about the opposite sex was funny. “So, you talk to anyone?”

“Huh?”

“Girls? Back there? You talk to anyone? What's your type?”

Frantically Sam searched his brain for his type, something to offer up to Michael. But the only type Sam could come up with was Suzie. And he didn't want to bring her name into this; he didn't want Michael to connect the dots between his old desire for Suzie Epstein and whatever their mother had been doing with Mr. Epstein.

“Don't sweat the answer, Sam. The best thing about college, or being anywhere away from where you grew up, is that you can be who you want to be and no one can tell you that you can't.” A corner of his mouth turned up in a shadow of a grin.

Sam was silenced by this brotherly advice. But he did walk faster to catch up to him. Maybe he needed to give Michael more credit.

They went back
down the hill to a section of town he had never been to before. Michael had said earlier that they had places, plural, to be seen, so he guessed this was another stop. This party was noisier, spilling out onto the sidewalk.

Michael circumvented the crowd and wove around to the back of the house. On the packed back porch Sam saw Carrie, perched on the railing with a joint poised before her lips. Their eyes met and she waved the joint. “Hey, it's the Turner brothers.”

Michael shot Sam a look that he couldn't read. Carrie popped off the railing and came over to them. “Did you read your folder of material?” Her words were slightly slurred, but Sam didn't think she was messy drunk. She offered Sam and Michael the joint, then, when neither of them made a move to take it, handed it off to some guy walking past.

“I lost it,” Sam said, swallowing hard, wishing for a beer.

“Bad boy,” Carrie teased, but she was looking at Michael. “What's up with you not telling me your brother was coming to see the school?”

“I signed him up for your group, didn't I?”

Carrie rolled her eyes but she was smiling. “Busy, busy Michael. Such a busy boy.” She said it like she was joking but her face looked anything but. “Kate's in the kitchen, I think. Trying to make nachos the last I saw.”

Sam glanced over at Michael at the mention of Kate, but Michael's face didn't change. Was this Kate really his girlfriend? Why was Michael acting so weird and secretive?

They picked up beers out of a cooler on the porch and Sam followed Michael into the kitchen, where a girl with a high blond ponytail was shredding cheese into a bowl. She was wearing a sleeveless top despite the weather and her biceps flexed slightly each time she ran the cheese over the grater. Her jeans were low
on her hips and revealed a smooth lower back and the hint of something lacy peeking out. She looked like one of those girls whose attractiveness came without trying. Sam shuffled his feet and coughed and she turned around, saw Michael, and gave him a wide, easy smile. “Hey, you. Study break?”

Michael leaned over and pressed his lips in the vicinity of her lips. His hand rested proprietarily on her hip. The girl craned her head around his shoulder and smiled at Sam. “Is this your baby brother?”

Sam felt his cheeks redden. “Hey, I'm Sam.”

“Sam I am,” she joked. “I'm Kate. Nice to finally meet you, mystery brother.”

“Huh?”

Michael twisted around and gave Sam a look that seemed to say, please, don't embarrass me.

Sam shrugged. “I'm not that mysterious, but thanks, I guess.” He smiled at Kate and she grinned back at Sam as if he had just said the most brilliant thing. At least she seemed nice.

Michael's shoulders relaxed as he looked at Kate. “What are you making?” He nodded toward the clump of cheese.

“Carrie was starving and I was bored, so I decided to make her something to eat.” She picked up a bag of chips and dumped them onto a tray and then sprinkled the cheese over the top. “There,” she said. “Let me just put this in the microwave.”

“You forgot the salsa,” Sam said, pointing to the bottle on the counter.

“Oh!” She turned quickly and plopped the tray back on the counter so hard the chips and cheese bounced.

“Let me,” Sam offered, taking the jar of salsa from her hands and pouring it over the chips.

“I have an idea, Julia Child, why don't you nuke this and take
it out to Carrie?” Michael was already leading Kate out of the kitchen as he said this over his shoulder.

Kate yelled, “Thanks, Sam I am,” and then they were gone. Sam looked down at the smear of cheese and bloody, chunky salsa. His brother had certainly perfected the disappearing act.

Sam stood in front of the microwave watching the nachos twirl around as if he were a guard at Buckingham Palace. When the cheese melted he held the plate aloft and went in search of Carrie. She hadn't moved from the back porch and she squealed when she saw what he had in his hands. They sat on the steps and rested the plate on their knees and ate all of it, pretty much in silence. When they were finished Michael and Kate reappeared.

“Let's roll, Sam.” Michael tapped him on the shoulder as he squeezed past.

Sam looked at Carrie, who shrugged, and back at Kate, who was smiling at Michael.

“Brunch tomorrow, the usual?” Kate called. Michael nodded. She turned to Sam. “Don't let him stay up all night studying.”

“I'll try,” Sam said as he stood and followed Michael.

“Goodbye, Turner brothers,” Carrie called after them.

Sam caught up with Michael on the sidewalk. “That was fast.”

Michael shrugged.

“You really have to study?”

“Yes, Sam, I really have to study.” He paused. “I'm going to the library. You can have my bed again, okay?” He added the last bit softly and Sam wondered if Michael was asking his permission.

“Kate seems nice.”

“She is.”

“How long have you known her?”

“A while.”

“Is she your type?”

Michael stopped walking and turned around and glared at him. Sam shrugged and held his hands up in front of his face. “Hey, I'm just trying to figure this out. You asked me what my type was, I'm asking you.”

Michael didn't answer, but he didn't move either.

“Do you think Mom was Dad's type? Do you think Dad was hers and then she changed her mind?”

The muscles in Michael's jaw twitched. “You'll figure that out for yourself.”

“Did you?”

“Sure, yeah, I figured it out.”

Sam shook his head. “That's not what I was asking. I meant, did you ever change your mind after you thought you'd figured it out?”

Michael turned and started walking again. At the entrance to his building he handed Sam the keys. “I'm going to get my bike.” He paused. “I'll just take the couch when I get home. Don't worry about it.”

“I thought you said you were studying.” Sam called after Michael as he walked away. Sam watched him for two blocks, and just as he was about to turn the corner and start the climb back up College Hill, Sam realized Michael didn't have his books.

“Michael! Hey—” Sam took a step forward. “Michael!” His voice echoed in his ears, and the strain made something behind his eyes throb.

Michael slowed down at the crest of the hill and kicked at the crumbling curb. Randomly, Sam recalled a day with their mother. She had taken them to the quarry to look for flagstones for the front walkway. While she debated the merits of veining and thickness and color, Sam stood close to the edge to watch the prehistoric jaws of the earthmovers lift gigantic chunks,
sediment spilling over the sides, confetti-like, to reveal a bedrock of uneven slate below the surface. Beneath his Converse the combination of dust and gravel was even as glass, and as he leaned out to get a better look he slipped. Before he could panic—before he even realized what was happening—Michael tugged on the neck of his T-shirt, yanking him back from the edge.

All the way home their mother drove slowly, as if the stones weighed her down. Sam waited for Michael to brag that he had saved his life, but he never did. They unloaded the stones from the car, the shapes reminding Sam of the puzzle pieces in his map of the United States. Their mother paid them in Popsicles, and they sat on top of the rocks and licked them quickly and quietly before they melted. The pile of stone remained at the end of the driveway for so long that it began to look like an impromptu wall, and no one complained when Sam eventually used the stones to support a piece of plywood for a bike ramp at the end of the drive.

“Michael,” Sam yelled again. “I leave tomorrow. Dad gave me money for food, for us. So I can pay for brunch, if you want.”

Michael held up three fingers palm out and touched his temple in the Boy Scout salute, and it was then that Sam finally accepted that what he wanted Michael to do and what he was going to do were two entirely different things.

B
ella's mother had a thick leather diary in which she had
kept track of social engagements, dinners, menus, meetings, and appointments for herself, her new husband, and eventually her children. It was swollen from the years, creased with age, its pages yellowed on the way to fragile. Every year she had carefully added more pages to the book, and it was so thick that she'd had to replace the leather tie that kept it all together. As Bella well knew, her mother had purchased the book her junior year of college on her first trip abroad, a semester in Barcelona, where her rudimentary Spanish grew adequate. She told Bella that when she held it in her hands she imagined the diary as something she would have her entire life, the leather growing soft with age.

Whenever Bella's mother spoke of Barcelona her entire demeanor changed. She admitted to Bella she had been terrified to go. She still left Vassar on the weekends to see her parents. Her father put gas in her car, kicked the tires for air, and changed the oil. Her mother took her shopping for new clothes,
monogrammed her cashmere, noticed when she needed a haircut or a teeth cleaning, and made her appointments.

It had been her art history professor, an enigmatic man not much older than his students, bearded, corduroy wearing, who convinced her to go. His lectures were full of romantic tirades about Gaudí, the people of Barcelona, the beauty of the nights, and the heady indulgences of food and wine, unlike anything their pedestrian American palates had ever experienced. The class was mostly young women like Bella's mother, and that year nearly twenty of them signed up for the semester abroad. The plane ticket was purchased, and the passport ink dry, by the time Bella's mother realized what she was about to do.

When she returned after six months it was not an understatement to say that she was an entirely changed person. Instead of spending the summer before her senior year at home in Bedford with her parents, she took a share in an apartment on Bank Street in Greenwich Village with two girls she had traveled with. She got a job in the library at NYU, where she met Bella's father, then in his second year of law school.

By the time she returned to Vassar that September she knew she was going to marry him, which she did, five days after her graduation, in the backyard of her parents' home, in the center of the heirloom rosebushes her mother so carefully tended and in view of her childhood bedroom window. One hundred guests drank and ate and danced beneath the tents well into the night.

Bella knew the story of her parents' wedding so well she felt as if she had been there. She supposed her friends would think it was weird to be envious of the romantic life of her parents. But it was all Bella had. Bella's mother's pregnancy with Bella was what had inflamed her illness, and afterward her body never recovered. Bella's father and her two older brothers had known
a different wife and mother. Bella had only her mother's stories, the diary, and the photographs.

There were boxes and boxes of photos of her parents, the extras that didn't fit into the many albums Bella's mother had carefully curated. There they were in Central Park on a plaid blanket, her father reading a thick law text and her mother reclining next to him smoking a cigarette, her ankles crossed, one hand resting on his knee. In another her father was asleep, the tent of the book open on his chest. And later, that same day, her mother lay curled on the blanket, her head resting in the crook of her arm and her eyes closed. There were pictures of her mother feeding a carrot to a horse in front of the Plaza, of her perched atop a low stone wall, looking away from the camera. Her mother was long and lean, and wore classic clothing that didn't age. She favored V-neck sweaters and slim skirts, cropped pants and flats, scarves tied around her head or her neck. In some of the pictures she was wearing what looked to be Bella's father's dress shirts, knotted at the waist, sleeves rolled to the elbow.

There were honeymoon pictures from a week in Maine, where her father's parents once had a house. Bella's parents standing at the water's edge with fishing poles, her mother squinting at the camera. On clay courts surrounded by ocean, dressed in tennis whites. In one, her father was bending over a pile of empty crab shells in the center of a table.

There were too many years of memories: her mother blowing a kiss to the camera, her mother with a fat barn cat on her lap and a faraway look in her eye, her parents at their wedding laughing and linking arms like the joke was on everyone else, her mother in an impossibly slim sleeveless shift dress and a small hat, her father in a dark suit, a small clutch of flowers between them. Then Bella's mother was hugely pregnant with Bella's oldest
brother. She wore a black turtleneck and pants, and her face was soft and round, her hands resting lightly on her distended belly. She looked surprised that she had been caught by the lens, but happy.

In recent years her mother had stopped writing in the diary. She no longer kept track of her own doctors' appointments, let alone Bella's, and especially not her brothers' now that they had families of their own. The social engagements, the invitations, the dinner parties, the to-do lists, the shopping lists, and the birthday notations had disappeared. The diary was a record of before, while Bella had been living in the after for almost as long as she had been alive. There were only a handful of years in the beginning of Bella's life when her mother had tried to keep up the pretense of running the home and their lives, but eventually the entries stopped.

Bella kept it all tucked between her mattress and box spring. She wasn't sure if her mother would even care that she had it, but still she said nothing. Sometimes when she came home from school and the house was too still, Bella would make herself a snack and curl up on her bed and pull out the book. She studied the rhythm of her mother's days, memorized the cooking instructions for a roast beef dinner. Bella assumed her mother had cooked this dinner for her father, since there was a sloppily drawn open-ended heart next to the ingredients list, but she had never asked. Asking felt like an acknowledgment that one day her mother wouldn't be able to answer.

In a few weeks Bella would turn eighteen and graduate from high school, and in the fall she would be going to Vassar just like her mother. She knew that had made her happy, that Bella would be attending her own alma mater. It had actually been an easier decision than Bella had led her parents to believe. She liked that
she would be a train ride away from home, far enough but not too far. She also liked the proximity to the city, and the English department was regularly visited by an impressive roster of writers, allowing Bella to visualize a sort of utopian college life in which she would spend her days reading great literature and having intellectual conversations.

But graduation and college really weren't on her mind. She had become one of those girls who worried what would become of her high school relationship.

Bella knew that Sam had been a virgin when they first slept together. She had finally grown tired of waiting for him to make the first move, so she surprised herself by reaching for his hand as they walked to the dance. The weight of his hand, the warmth, the way he stroked her palm with his thumb, made her sorry she had waited so long. At the dance they had stood side by side, bumping into each other as they swayed to the music, laughing and talking to their friends. But when he brushed up against her she felt her skin tingle all over.

In her mind that night, as Sam buried his face in her neck, sighing against her ear, the weight of him pressed against her, there had never been anyone else. All those awkward kisses, the fumbling beneath clothing, the push and pull of what she would or wouldn't do, no matter the desire, no matter how sweet the boy, had led her here. Sam was someone she had been waiting for her entire life, even if neither of them had known it before that moment.

Bella made tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner. Her father was in the city for a late meeting with a client and her
mother's evening nurse's aide would be late due to car trouble or a missed bus, her excuse something Bella couldn't quite make out when she answered the phone. Bella had a graduation party to go to that night, but she wasn't in a rush. While the end of high school was bittersweet, there was a sameness to these parties that was mind-numbing. She knew Sam and the other boys would drink too much and act stupid and she and Mindy and Ruthie would leave early, go to the diner, pile into their usual booth in the back, and order way too much food. The boys would stumble in later, smelling like booze, only to fall on the half-eaten plates of greasy leftovers as if they were attending their last meal.

Bella carried the tray of food into the room, set it down on the table at the end of the bed, and parted the curtains so she could open the windows. Her mother's room always smelled like cold cream and menthol, the menthol likely from the balm for the bedsores that the aides were constantly wrapping and rewrapping, afraid of infection or worse. The television was on low, turned to the local evening news, a recitation of burglaries, attempted assaults, and accidents. Bella thought she might like to write a poem like that, a roll call of crime headlines taken from the news. She turned back to the bed and glanced at her mother.

“I have to go to the bathroom.” Her mother winced, her eyes large and liquid, magnified behind her thick glasses.

Bella nodded. She knew, they both knew, that if her mother used the bedpan it would be easier. But she also knew that her mother must have waited until the last possible minute, hoping she wouldn't have to ask Bella to help her get out of bed. Bella didn't blame her for holding on to what dignity she had left. She brought the wheelchair close to the bed and pulled back her mother's blankets, then helped her swing her legs over the side of the bed. Her mother's legs were atrophied from the disease, red
and scaly where the skin was dried. Her calves had shrunk to the size of Bella's forearm, her toes were permanently flexed upward, and her legs spasmed every so often in an uncontrollable bicycling movement. Bella tried to think of anything but what she was about to do as she brought her mother to the bathroom. They avoided eye contact as Bella helped her mother onto the toilet. She left the room, taking the wheelchair with her and pulling the door shut behind her.

“Are you okay?” she called through the door.

“Yes,” came her mother's faint reply as Bella turned and walked a few steps away, attempting to give her more privacy. When she heard the toilet flush she waited a few minutes before she knocked and her mother gave her the go-ahead to open the door.

Bella wet a washcloth, squirted soap into the folds, and handed it to her mother, who washed her hands. Bella took the cloth and wrung it out under running water before handing it back again so her mother could rinse.

“Thanks, honey,” her mother said into Bella's shoulder as she leaned against her and they did the dance again, into the chair, out of the bathroom, and back into bed. Bella tried to fix the blankets and pillows but her mother held up a shaky hand. “It's fine.”

By the time Bella remembered their tray of dinner the soup was congealed and the toasted cheese was dry and hard.

“I'm not very hungry anyway, Bella. Don't worry.”

Bella picked up the tray. “It will take just a few minutes, Mom; I'm going to heat up the soup again and make new sandwiches.” She walked past the bed and out of the room before her mother could stop her. If her mother weighed one hundred pounds it was a miracle. They were always trying to get her to drink milkshakes
or the little cans of high-protein drinks, but it was hard to tell if any of that was working or if it even mattered. She wasn't going to get better. Sometimes Bella thought it was crueler to keep her mother like this, this insistence on maintaining the semblance of a life.

When Bella brought the food back she was surprised to see her mother sitting up against the pillows, her hands folded in her lap, alert and waiting. The television was still on, the news replaced by
Jeopardy!
“Changed your mind? My cooking skills swayed you, didn't they, Mommy?”

Bella was rewarded with a smile as she set the food down on her mother's tray table. She handed her mother a cloth napkin and then helped her tuck it in at the neck of her robe. Then she slid the bowl closer to her mother and handed her a spoon. “Do you want me to cut your sandwich?”

“Yes, please.” Her mother picked up her spoon and dipped it into the soup. “Looks good.”

Bella smiled. “I'm in with those Campbell's Soup guys, you know.” She crossed her middle finger over her index finger and held it up for her mother to see.

Her mother brought the spoon to her lips slowly, careful of the slight tremor in her hands. After she swallowed she said, “Cooking is overrated. That brain of yours is what matters.”