Families and Other Nonreturnable Gifts (5 page)

Her face darkens, and she shakes her head unhappily. “I wish…”

“What?”

“You know how I feel about this. You should be living on your own at your age or with a roommate. Or even at home with me. But not with Tom. I know I’ve said it before, Keats, but you need to grow up before you settle down.”

“You’re right,” I say and she looks surprised. But then I add coldly, “You’ve said it before. And you’re wrong. I’m happy living with Tom. I feel lucky. You should be happy for me.”

“I’d feel a lot better about Tom if you’d take a break from him for a while and spend some time on your own. Just so you can see what independence feels like. You were so young when you started going out with him, and you’ve never—”

I cut her off. “I know how old I was. But I’m not going to reject someone who’s perfect for me just because I happen to have met him a little on the early side.”

“I thought I was all grown-up when I met your father, but I really wasn’t. I was too young to settle down and so are you.”

I twitch my shoulders irritably. “Tom is nothing like Dad.”

“True.”

I don’t like her tone. “God! You are
such
an intellectual snob!”

She considers this for a moment. “You know, Keats, I find it interesting that you leapt to that conclusion from what I said. That might reveal more about your feelings toward Tom than mine.”

I grab my hair in my hands and tug hard with a moan. “Can you just leave me and my relationship alone? I’m the one here who’s
fine
. I’m the one who’s in a loving, long-term relationship.
You’re
the one getting a divorce and dating every guy over the age of fifty in the greater Boston area and telling everyone in the whole world about it, except for me.”

“Whom have I told about it?” She seems genuinely bewildered.

“You told Jacob before me,” I say. “
Jacob
. He’s not even a member of our family, and you told him first.” I sound like a baby, but I can’t help myself.

Her expression clears. “Oh, right. I forgot. We were just spending so much time together, and it sort of came up. And I knew he wouldn’t care one way or the other. I guess maybe I waited to tell you because I was a little nervous about how you’d take it.”

“But I’m fine with it! I’m fine with the divorce and your selling the house and even with your dating. I’m fine with all of it.” It occurs to me that I’ve used the word
fine
a lot in the last minute with increasing hysteria.

She squints at me. “You don’t
sound
fine.”

“Well, I am!” It doesn’t help my argument that I’m practically shouting. I take a deep breath and say more calmly, “What about the other kids? Have you told them you’re dating?”

“I can’t imagine Milton or Hopkins would care either way. But I did let Hopkins know that we’re going through with the divorce and selling the house. I’m hoping she’ll make it back in the next couple of months to go through her stuff and help us pack up.”

“That would be good,” I say, but I’m dubious. Hopkins is always so busy. She does try to come home each year for Christmas, but it’s usually a twenty-four-hour kind of thing. We don’t overlap much then because I spend most of Christmas Day with Tom’s family. It’s important to him to be with them, and it’s important to me to be with him, and anyway, they’re a lot more religious than we are, so Christmas means a lot more to them.

A few years ago, I did ask Tom if we could spend the day with my family, just for a change, and he agreed, and then I was embarrassed and horrified by how little my family did: I had forgotten what it was like at home, had spent too many years celebrating with the Wellses to remember how pathetic my family was at celebrating anything. The others were all still asleep when Tom and I arrived at nine in the morning. Eventually they woke up and stumbled downstairs, one at a time, at which point there was an unenthusiastic and sleepy gift exchange. Then we ate some French toast that my mother had burned on one side and undercooked on the other, and by eleven in the morning, everyone had retreated back to his or her computer, which is when Tom said to me, “We could still make dinner with my family.” So we left.

Now we just stop by the house briefly on Christmas morning to drop off some gifts and continue on, settling down with his family for the rest of the day.

Can you blame us? Here’s what Tom’s mother does for Christmas: A few weeks before, she decorates their entire Brookline house with wreaths and cinnamon-scented pinecones and candles and red bows. On Christmas Eve, she arranges white-and-silver gift-wrapped presents under a white-and-silver ornamented Christmas tree. The immediate family (which has included me for years) gathers at nine on Christmas morning to exchange gifts while enjoying fresh hot coffee and huge slices of some sweet almond coffee cake she bakes every year. People squeal and emote over their gifts, and everyone hugs everyone else at some point during the morning. The extended family arrives gradually. If the weather’s decent, we all go for a walk together; if it’s not, we play games by the fire until Tom’s mother calls everyone together to sip eggnog and spiced cider while we exchange even more presents. After that we sit down to an enormous dinner of ham and asparagus and freshly baked biscuits, and before we move on to dessert (five different kinds of cakes and pies), we sing Christmas carols around the tree. Did I mention the baskets of fresh tangerines and whole nuts that we crack ourselves? Or the chocolate truffles? Or the—

You get the idea. His family wins, hands down. It doesn’t even matter that at some point after we’ve all had a couple glasses of wine, Tom’s mother gets maudlin and his sister gets sullen and his father gets disgusted and the cousins whisper behind everyone’s back.…It’s still the closest thing I’ve ever known to the kind of Christmas you see in movies. So we end up with them, not with Mom and Dad.

Which means I hardly see Hopkins the one time of the year she comes to town—just long enough to hug and say that we both wished we could spend more time together. But it never happens.

* * *

Jacob says he’s going to bring a load of books over to my dad’s apartment, and I offer to go with him since I haven’t seen my father in a while and I want to check out his new apartment.

Tom is back and on his knees working on the water filter when I tell him I’m heading out with Jacob. His head emerges from under the sink. “You’re leaving?”

“Only for an hour or so. Jacob can bring me right back here. Or drop me off at home if you want to take off.” I haven’t actually checked with Jacob to see if he can take me home (it’s pretty far out of his way), but he’ll do it if I ask him to. “Unless you want to come with us to Dad’s?”

Tom stands up, and reaches for a dish towel to wipe his grimy hands on. “No offense, but I don’t really want to spend my weekend hanging out with your father. He’s not the easiest guy in the world to talk to.”

“Okay. I’ll meet you back home then.”

“We’re going out with Lou and Izzy tonight,” he reminds me.

“I know. I’ll be back in plenty of time.”

He gives me a kiss on the cheek. “Tell your dad I say hi.”

* * *

Once we’re inside his battered Honda Civic, Jacob tells me I can put on any radio station I like. Well, any AM/FM station—he doesn’t have satellite.

I fiddle with the dial and settle on a Top 40 station.

Jacob raises an eyebrow. “You like Lady Gaga?”

“I do.” I want to sound defiant, but it comes out sounding defensive instead.

He shakes his head in bemusement. “Sometimes I wonder where you came from, Keats.”

“Most people in this country love Lady Gaga,” I say.

“I know. I just don’t expect a Sedlak to.”

I shrug: guess I’m still the little red-haired freak.

Jacob’s an awful driver: too slow when he’s going straight, too abrupt when switching lanes. Other drivers honk at him throughout the twenty-minute trip, but he doesn’t seem to notice.

He has his own parking space in the garage underneath my father’s building, which is just a block or so away from Memorial Drive. I’m impressed by the location: Dad’s not only in the heart of Harvard Square, he’s right on the Charles River. “How did he find this place?” I ask as we ride up to the fifth floor, the boxes stacked in a corner of the elevator.

“He didn’t. Your mom did. She knew someone who knew someone who was selling and asked me to check it out.” The elevator doors open, and we start unloading the boxes into the small, well-lit hallway. “At first your father wasn’t exactly enthusiastic—”

“Well, of course he wasn’t. He wanted to stay at home with her.”

“On her advice, I didn’t tell him why we were coming here, just said that he had a meeting.” We finish moving boxes and let the elevator doors close behind us. “It was an ambush: I got him in the door, and then the real estate agent and I double-teamed him. Even so, I doubt he’d have gone for it if your mother hadn’t shown up and made it clear that his days in her house were numbered.” He takes a key out of his pocket.

I watch him as he unlocks the door. “I think I’ve underestimated you, Jacob. I always thought Dad ran your life. Maybe it’s the other way around.”

He looks over his shoulder at me. “You seriously think he runs my life?”

“You’re at his beck and call, aren’t you?”

“It’s not like that,” he says. “I’m not his errand boy or anything. I like the work I do with him and for him. I wouldn’t stick around if I didn’t.”

I feel vaguely chastised and fall silent.

He opens the door and calls out a hello.

There’s an uncertain “uh…Jacob?” from down the hallway.

We maneuver the boxes into the apartment, and I look around while Jacob closes the door behind us. There’s nothing particularly special about the space. We’re standing in a medium-sized living room that has a hallway leading off from one side and a small kitchen off to the other. But the windows on the far wall are large, and you can actually see some of the redbrick Harvard houses and a tiny slice of the river. “Wow,” I say, moving closer. “That view.”

“I know,” says Jacob, joining me by the window. “Nice, isn’t it?”

“Bet Dad doesn’t even notice.”

“We set up an office for him in the second bedroom.” He leads me into the hallway. One door off of it is open and through it I can see a narrow bed, still unmade, the quilt slipping off. There’s something incredibly sad about how messy and small the room is, about how my father’s life has been reduced to an unkempt bed in a claustrophobic room.

Jacob doesn’t seem to notice the pathos of it all—he’s already knocking on the other door and then opening it with a comfortable self-assurance I envy. “Larry?” he says. “Look who I brought with me.”

My father is hunched over a computer at his desk. His neck and shoulders curve forward just like Milton’s. Dad’s heavier than Milton and his hair is mostly gray, but give Milton another fifty years and they’ll be identical. Dad’s wearing reading glasses way down on his nose, and as he turns to look at us, his eyes are bleary under eyebrows that have recently grown straggly.

I haven’t seen him for a couple of months, but he looks a lot older to me.

He swivels toward me in his chair, and I come over and kiss him lightly on the forehead.

“Keats,” he says, and I wonder which of us is more relieved that he got my name right the first time. When we all lived together, he frequently called the three women of our household interchangeably by any of our three names. “What a lovely surprise.” When he says things like that, they always sound sarcastic, but I think it’s just the way he talks: he actually does seem (mildly) pleased to see me. “To what do I owe the unexpected pleasure?”

“I wanted to check out your new place.”

He gestures grandly around the room. “A veritable palace, isn’t it?”

“I like the view.”

He shrugs and I know I’m right: he couldn’t care less about it.

“We brought some boxes over from the house,” Jacob says. “Mostly books and papers.”

“Excellent,” Dad says. “More useless detritus from a misspent life.”

Jacob doesn’t respond to that, just starts gathering up the dirty plates and half-empty mugs of tea that are scattered everywhere. Dad may have been living here only a few weeks, but his Sedlak slovenliness is already on full display.

There’s a small sofa near the desk. It’s heaped with books and stacks of papers—and more plates and cups—so I perch on the arm. “How’re you doing, Dad?”

“As you see.”

“Are you teaching this semester?”

“One graduate seminar.”

“How’s that going?”

“The way it always goes. My students began the class eager and excited to work with the iconic Professor Sedlak, and then disillusionment sets in. I am not what they expected. I am not Aristotle. I have no interest in their moral development. I teach theories of government and expect them to do the reading on time.” He shrugs. “The disappointment is mutual. They’re not what
I
was hoping for, either.”

“Anyone want coffee?” Jacob asks brightly.

“I do,” I say, jumping up a little too quickly. I follow him as he leaves the office, carefully balancing a tower of dirty dishes between his two hands.

* * *

I stand in the doorway of the kitchen and watch Jacob make coffee with the ease of someone who knows where everything is—who probably unpacked and arranged it all himself, come to think of it. “He seems kind of depressed.”

“Yeah, I know.” He glances over at me as he pours water in the machine. “It’s good you came. He misses you guys, but he’s not the type to express that out loud.”

“No kidding.”

“He is who he is, Keats. He’s not a warm and fuzzy guy, and he never will be. But he loves you, and he’s more aware of what’s going on with his kids than you’d think.”

“How do you know that?”

He measures out the coffee into the filter. “He asks me about you all the time. He gets worried about things like any father.”

“What makes him worry about me?”

“Nothing in particular. Just the usual stuff. You know.”

“I really don’t. Tell me.” He’s still silent. “Don’t make me threaten another book, Jacob.”