Ms. Taken Identity (32 page)

After the eulogies and prayers from the rabbi, we all throw a shovelful of dirt on the casket. It’s a long line of people,
and I see a lot of familiar faces from the course, a few from the Hanukkah party, and one I haven’t seen in a while, near
the back: Bradley. Instinctively, I scan the crowd for Marie, but she’s not there. People come over and offer sympathy and
hugs, and by the time Bradley has thrown his bit of dirt on my father, I’m standing under a tree, trying to keep cool.

“I’m sorry about your dad,” he says, shaking my hand.

I nod. “Thanks for coming.”

In my mind, there are a thousand different ways this conversation could go. But in reality, there’s only one way it can, in
this place, under these circumstances.

“It was another heart attack.”

He makes a grim face. “How’s everyone doing?”

“Leah’s a mess, inside. But she’s a strong woman. She’s hanging in there as best as she can. And Nathan and Jessica, they
know what it means, obviously, that their dad’s dead, but they can’t really grasp it yet. She’s only nine. Scott’s taking
it hard.”

He studies my face. “And what about you?”

The question catches me off guard, and my thoughts shoot in a dozen directions. “Honestly, I don’t know. I feel sad. I’m sorry
he’s gone. I feel bad for Leah and the kids. But I also feel frustrated. Pissed, actually. Can I say that? I guess I’m just
angry we wasted all this time, that there was something good between us all along and we didn’t do anything about it. Or not
enough. We could’ve been at this point ten years ago. And there were things I hadn’t said, and probably would have, in time.”
I pause. “But it was good at the end, and that’s better than nothing, I guess.”

I regret it as soon as I say it, that last part, because it’s a stupid and empty expression, and not even true. Sometimes
you are better off with
nothing
, because the something you get is so small, and so good, that the taste of it lasts only a second, but the missing of it
and longing for it and living without it will haunt you the rest of your life. I change the subject.

“How have you been?” I ask.

“Good. Working outside a lot.”

“And Skyler?”

“She’s great.”

I rub the side of my jaw. “And Marie?”

He considers this carefully. “Marie’s… okay. She’s been busy.” He’s sufficiently vague and evasive, which I take as a
sign that she told him not to say anything. “She wanted me to give you this.” He hands me a card. “She thought about coming,
but figured it’d probably be better if she didn’t.”

It’s a beige envelope with no name on the front, which isn’t so odd, I guess, since she probably only gave Bradley one envelope
and he knows who gets it. Unless she couldn’t even bring herself to write my name.

The crowd is beginning to disperse and head for their cars. One of Nathan’s friends slips his tie over his head, the grieving
over for him. For Nathan it’s just starting.

“We’re going over to Leah’s house to sit shivah,” I say. “You’re welcome to come.”

He gives his head a soft shake. “I appreciate that, Mitch. But I don’t think so.”

No, not since he knows it’s for family and close friends, and Bradley and I are neither these days.

I take my keys out of my pocket and loop my finger through the ring. “I should get going,” I say.

He looks off to the distance, then kicks at a rocky clump. “I hate the way things are between us, you know.”

“Yeah, me too.”

“Anything we can do about that?”

“Your being here is a start, I think. And when all this is over, I’ll give you a call. Maybe we could go for drinks. Or shoot
baskets.”

He turns to me, and for a moment I see Bradley, and Bradley sees me. “I’d like that.”

We shake hands again and he leaves. As I watch him make his way down the path to the parking lot, the sun beating down on
his back, I allow myself to think that maybe there’s one aspect of my life that’s headed in the right direction.

There’s food galore at Leah’s, and the house is swarming with people, since it’s too hot to be outside. The little kids are
running around, because for them it’s just a party, sort of like Hanukkah without the dreidels or candles. Leah seems to be
holding up well, buoyed by all the hugs she’s getting, and Nathan and Jessica seem too distracted by friends and cousins to
be showing much emotion. I manage to read the card from Marie, and it’s generic Hallmark, sorry about your dad, thinking of
you in your time of loss, etc., but just what it needs to be. But I can’t help thinking that this is the woman who would’ve
been standing with me right now, and I’d be fetching her a drink or a slice of pie or a second helping of kugel, and she’d
be asking me how I’m holding up. Instead I have a three dollar card.

I don’t stay till the end, because it’s clear Leah’s parents and siblings have that honor, so after I swing by my apartment
to take care of Bo, I head over to my mom’s. Scott is there with Melinda and Kyle, and we sit out by the pool for a while,
reminiscing. Then Scott and his family leave, so it’s down to my mom and me and the two of us talking, then she goes inside.
It’s just the pool and the night and me.

My father used to sit here on summertime evenings and listen to the ballgames on AM radio. Sometimes I listened with him,
sometimes I didn’t, but after the game was over, he’d find a station and listen to jazz. I didn’t know it was jazz then, only
that it wasn’t the type of music I liked, which was rock or pop or whatever they were playing on MTV. It was just Dad music,
and when I went to bed and he was still out there, I’d open my bedroom window, even when the AC was on, just so I could hear
the murmur of the piano or saxophone or bass as I drifted off to sleep on those summer nights.

It’s been nearly two decades since any of that happened, and to be honest, I hadn’t given it much thought, till tonight. Sitting
here in the spot where he used to sit, I strain to hear some echo of what once was, hoping that maybe the trees or grass or
stones collected a fragment of those tunes, even a few notes, and will play them back for me. But of course, they didn’t,
they can’t, they won’t. And even if my mom and Scott and I assumed the places and clothes we had in 1984 or ’86 or ’88, and
we all played Yahtzee or Monopoly or Scrabble, the games we used to play, and made popcorn—even if we all agreed to do it
for just one more night, for old time’s sake, it wouldn’t make a difference. I can never go back into that room and open my
window and hear my father’s music and know he’s out here on the patio, and I’m safely tucked into bed. He’s gone. He’s
gone
. And for the first time since Leah called with the news, I cry.

There are no surprises when my father’s will is read, no strange requests that his remains be shot out of a cannon or fed
to the sharks or buried on the eighteenth green (which is good, since any of it would require digging him up and going through
it all over again, and no one wants to do that). Everything is divvied up the way you’d expect it; in other words, it all
goes to Leah and the kids, with something set aside for Kyle. The only part of it that takes me by surprise, but apparently
no one else because they already knew, is that he wants the golf course to be sold.

“But why?” I ask my brother, as we sit on his back deck drinking a beer.

“Dad made it work because he knew how to pinch pennies and scrimp and run a bare-bones operation. In the wrong hands, it would
go bust, and he didn’t want to leave Leah strapped with that.”

“So this makes more sense, financially—to sell it?”

“Yep. His life insurance policy pays off the remaining debt, plus leaves a little extra. Then Leah can sell the course, which
is pure profit. Dad even left us a list of guys who’d already expressed an interest in the land.”

“That’s an odd way to put it, ‘the land.’”

“Unfortunately, the course is more valuable as land for developers than it is as a golf course. Dad knew it, too.”

“So you mean some guy will buy it and put up a row of condos or villas or something?”

He gives his head a sober nod. “That’s exactly what it means.”

This comes to me like a punch in the gut. Knowing how hard he’d worked to keep it going, the pride he took from it. It was
a labor of love. And what about Kip? But my father must have known this was the way it would go. Still…

“So give me a ballpark figure,” I say. “What kind of money are we talking about for ‘the land’?”

He gives me a ballpark figure.

“What if I knew someone who could give Leah just about that and keep the course in the family?”

“I’d say, give me the number.”

“Brother, you already have it, probably on speed dial.”

He looks at me like I’m crazy. “What the hell are you talking about?”

That’s when I introduce him to my sugar lady
Catwalk Mama
.

I
’m out on the course playing eighteen with a guy named Joe Magditch. Joe’s a T-shirt vendor, and I need T-shirts for the charity
tournament I’m planning for August. Joe also loves to golf, so we have a friendly wager in play: if I win, I get free T-shirts
from Joe; if he wins, he gets free golf for the rest of the year. We’re on the sixteenth hole and I have a two-shot lead,
but he has a short putt to cut the lead to one. That’s when my cell phone—which I can’t believe I forgot to turn off—rings.
It’s Katharine.

“Hey, stranger. I thought I’d hear from you by now.”

“Oh? And why’s that?”

“Like you don’t know.” She pauses to let me fill in the blank, which I don’t. So she does. “To coordinate our plans for New
York.”

I step off the green and away from Joe’s evil eye. “I don’t follow, Katharine. Why would I be going to New York?”

“Because you said you would.
Hello
. The bet.”

The only bet that comes to mind is the one I have with Joe. But I don’t think any of the conditions we discussed had me going
to New York with Katharine, and how would she know, anyway?

“
Regis and Kelly
, Mitch. I’m on next Tuesday. And you said you’d go on with me if the book—”

“
If the book made it into the top five
,” I cut her off. Suddenly my heart starts pounding in my throat. With everything going on with my father, I haven’t been
paying attention to any of that. “Are you telling me we made it into the top five?”

“You might say that. We just squeaked in… at number
one
.”

Oh sweet Jesus
. What the fuck have I done?

I’ve never been on TV. The closest I came was my junior year of high school when I was out for a jog in Forest Park and a
local news crew was interviewing people about how they were coping with the sweltering heat and I gave them my secret strategy:
ignore it. But when the story aired, all I saw was a bunch of shirtless guys with six-pack abs talking about drinking lots
of water and sticking to the shade. I felt slighted. This morning, however, sitting in my dressing room, I’d love to see any
one of those bare-chested underwear models again, so I could trot him out there onto the
Regis and Kelly
stage and everyone would forget about me.

I don’t need much time to get ready. A woman comes in to do my makeup and hair. She does what she can with it, even though
I can tell it’s too long, and it winds up looking a bit slick for my tastes. I wear the blazer Katharine got me in Chicago,
with the same shirt, but this time I wear jeans. I head down to Katharine’s dressing room, which is huge and luxurious, and
she’s getting the final touches on her makeup. Her hair is Heather Locklear–blond now, even though the face is still Demi
Moore. It’s a good look.

“Nervous?” she asks. She’s sitting in her chair in a robe.

“A little.”

“Try not to think about what’s happening when you’re out there. Ignore the camera. Pretend Regis and Kelly are two old friends.
We’re all just having a conversation. It’s like we’re sitting in the coffee shop, or back at my place.”

I’m better off thinking we’re at the coffee shop. If I think of her place, I might think of her bedroom, and what the two
of us did in her bedroom, which could be distracting.

A production assistant named Megan pops in and briefs us that Katharine will be out there for two segments: the first is all
Katharine, for her to talk about what’s going on in her life; then, after the commercial, I’ll be out there to talk about
the book.

“What do I say?” I ask Megan. Megan turns to Katharine. Katharine turns to me.

“Whatever you want,” she says with a smile. “Obviously you want to keep Bradley’s identity secret. But otherwise, talk about
her favorite books, any hobbies she has, if she ever dreamed of being a model herself. Anything that would help people get
a sense of her. And talk about the way we met. That’s a good one.”

The stylist rubs in a little powder on Katharine’s cheeks to give them a bronze hue.

“You look great, Katharine.”

“Why thank you, Mitch. You don’t look so bad yourself.”

Megan asks me if I’d like to meet the musical guest, Tony Bennett, and of course I’d like to meet Tony Bennett. Who wouldn’t?
But I pass, since I figure the less this whole thing feels like an event—and meeting one of the most famous American singers
of all time would tend to do that—the better. I’ll stick with Katharine’s notion that I’m just here to chat with a couple
old friends. The problem is, though I’ve had friends named Kelly, I’ve never had a friend named Regis. Tim or Ed, yes. Can
I call him Ed?

I camp out in the green room and the show starts. Regis and Kelly come out and do their bit. Regis talks about how he was
at a party at Al Roker’s house and he was disappointed that Spike Lee wasn’t there, since Spike Lee always stares at him,
and he wanted to ask Spike why he always stares at him, and is it because Spike wants him to be in one of his movies. Kelly
thinks Spike wants to do the Regis story, starring Regis, and he wants to get a good look at him from all angles, and she
says she wants Elisha Cuthbert to play her in the movie, and Regis asks her why she thinks she’d be in the movie at all. Then
Regis tells us that this is the warmest year on record for the Netherlands: an average of eleven degrees Celsius, and let’s
give a hand to the Dutch. Then they spin the wheel and ask a trivia question about Matt Damon, and a woman named Gerry wins
a trip to Barbados, and the lucky member of the studio audience in seat 152 gets three pieces of luggage. Also, just before
the commercial, they single out William and Gladys Davenport, here to celebrate their sixty-fifth wedding anniversary, with
children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She stands up, and he takes a bit longer, because he’s using a cane, and
it’s not even clear when he
is
standing up, since his spine looks to have rolled itself into something of a C after eighty-five-plus years. They get a nice
round of applause.