Once Upon a Time, There Was You (28 page)

“Look,” he says. “Maybe we should just … I don’t know, step back. See what unfolds. Let’s meet his mother. Let’s see what we think of him after we spend some time with him.”

“Yeah, well, he could be a prince and I still wouldn’t think she should be
married
to him.”

“I know.”

The timer goes off, and Irene pushes herself out of the banquette
and dons her oven gloves. “So, fine. We’re agreed then.” She slides the pan of eggplant lasagna out, checks her watch. “This has to sit for a good fifteen minutes.”

“Irene?”

“Yeah?”

“What are we agreed to?”

“What?”

“You said, ‘We’re agreed then.’ What are we agreed to?”

She stares at him. “To get her unmarried.”

“Ah,” John says, and then, “We can’t do that. She has to do that.”

“But I don’t think she will!”

“Then she won’t.”

“John, she’s eighteen years old!”

He shrugs. “Exactly.”

His phone rings, and he pulls it out of his pocket to check caller ID. He says to Irene, “Sorry; I’ll be really quick, but I’ve got to take this.”

He tells the caller, “Can you hold on a second? I’ll be right there.” He listens to something while he’s sliding out of the banquette, then laughs. “Are you kidding? Of course!” His voice is warm, affectionate, flirtatious.

A woman, then
, Irene thinks.

He goes down the hall, into Irene’s bedroom, and closes the door. Irene rips lettuce and flings it into a bowl. After that she wipes her hands on her apron and stares out the window to the street below. Not one soul.

She centers a red pepper on the cutting board, and when the doorbell rings, she jumps so hard she nearly slices a finger off. But she doesn’t. She lays down the knife, takes a deep breath, and goes to the door to let them in.

30

J
ohn sits in one of the living room chairs by the window and rubs his neck, arches his back. He’s tired, but he’s invigorated, too; for the first time since he got the call from Irene saying Sadie was missing, he thinks things are going to be just fine.

He’d liked Ron when they first met in spite of himself; he likes him even more now. He’s an old soul, as is Sadie. John trusts him. He trusts Sadie, too. And Ron’s mother is an absolute delight: direct, positive, clear, wise. She’s French, named Huguette, and she still carries a trace of an accent. She uses phrases both charming and amusing: “yesterday night” for “last night,” for example. “Easy as cake.” About a certain restaurant that came up, “About that one I am luck warm.”

Her carriage is that of a dancer: shoulders back, spine straight, and every movement full of grace. She wore a simple white blouse with a stand-up collar, a long black skirt, and a blood red shawl, and she looked like a million bucks. Her hair is long, still dark, and she wore it in a style his mother used to favor: a French twist, or at least that’s what it was called then. She wore a single wide gold bracelet, gold knot earrings.

Irene said almost nothing to her at first, with the exception of thanking her relatively sincerely for a lovely bouquet and a very nice bottle of red wine, but eventually she warmed up. She appeared
to be moved by Huguette’s story of how she and her husband had themselves gotten married so young. John believed Huguette when she said that sometimes age really is just a number, not only for older people but for the young. “They know what they’re doing,” she said, looking over at Sadie and Ron. “They will be happy together, these two.” John felt a lifting inside, a pride; he looked over at his beautiful daughter and for the first time thought,
It’s okay, everything will work out
. It felt good to know that another adult, one whose investment in the situation was identical to his and Irene’s, was so confident and approving. And Sadie saw his relief; she beamed at him from across the table, and he beamed right back.

He sits in the chair full of contentment, of relief.

Irene, however, is lying on the pulled-out sofa bed with one arm across her eyes, mute. After their dinner guests left, Sadie went with them. They were going to take Ron’s mother home, then spend a little time alone. Sadie promised to come home soon afterward; she seems suddenly to have traded in anger and frustration over her self-described imprisonment for a kind of bemused affection. On Sunday, she and Ron will move into their apartment.

“Well, that’s just it, then,” Irene says, finally. She sits up at the side of the bed and looks over at John.

“I think it is,” he says.

She sighs, fiddles with something on the waistband of her skirt, then untucks her blouse. Her still-long hair falls over her face while she does this, and she looks lovely to him: a barefoot, middle-aged woman, bathed in yellow lamplight, her hair free, her blouse loose around her hips. It reminds him of an earlier version of Irene, an earthy woman who displayed a kind of forth-rightness that at first delighted him. Later, he grew weary of it, but that was when he’d grown weary of a lot of things about
Irene, and he supposed he lumped all her characteristics together, both positive and negative.

He feels sorry for her; she’s the one remaining holdout in all of this now, the only one who can’t make the leap of faith everyone else has agreed to do.

“John?” she says.

“Yeah?”

“Do you think there’s a group for parents with children who marry too young?”

“Probably. There’s a group for everything else. And those groups really help people.”

“How do you know? You’ve never gone to any of those groups.”

“Oh, but I have,” he says, laughing, and then immediately regrets it, because here comes the next question, which he is not sure he’s ready to answer.

“What group?” Irene says.

“Huh?”

“What group?”

And so he tells her about the group he went to and then, because he feels he has to, about Amy. How they met there, how they’ve been seeing each other a little bit. A lot, actually. Quite a lot.

“Ah,” she says, nodding, when he’s finished telling the story. “So she’s the one who’s been calling.”

“She’s one of the people. I mean, I’ve been talking to a lot of people about the project I’m doing next. Kind of a cool idea. I want to turn this building on Wabasha into a residential hotel. It’ll have—”

“She’s the woman who called when I was making dinner.”

“Oh. Yeah. This evening? Right, that was Amy, yup. She reminds me of you, actually. Little bit.”

Irene nods. “Well, I guess I’ll go to bed, so …”

So get the hell out
.

“Irene.”

She looks at him, overly wide-eyed. “What?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.”

“What, tell me you’re seeing someone? Why shouldn’t you tell me you’re seeing someone? I’d expect that you were. I see people. I’m seeing someone, too.”

“Are you?”

“Yes.”

“Nice guy?”

She reaches over to straighten a pile of books on the table next to the sofa. “Yes, he’s nice.
Very
nice.” She smiles at this last, a private thing between her and herself, and John is a bit unnerved. “He’s way too young for me, though. In his early forties.”

“Yeah, that’s … That is too young for you.”

“Well, I’m not going to marry him! He’s just fun to … have fun with. You know?”

John tries to imagine who this guy might be: what he looks like, what he does. But he won’t lower himself to ask. It’s none of his business, anyway. But early forties!

“Has Sadie met this guy?”

“No, not yet. Soon, though.”

It occurs to John to say, “So why hasn’t he been calling you?” But he won’t say that. For one thing, it’s possible that she’ll say, “Oh, we
text
.”

“Are you and Amy getting married?” Irene asks.

John’s hand flies to his chest. “Me?”

“Yeah.”

“Am I getting
married
?”

“Oh, my God,” Irene says. “You are. Well, congratulations.”

“I didn’t say I’m getting married!”

“No, but you’re thinking about it. Aren’t you?”

Damn it. He supposes he is. A little. “I think about it sometimes. But I don’t think I’ll do it.”

“Go ahead,” she says. “At least you’re old enough.”

They laugh, then, both of them, and then Irene puts her hands over her face. “Oh, God, I’m such a mess. I don’t understand anything. I really don’t.”

“Irene?”

She doesn’t move, won’t take her hands down. “You should go to bed. I’m fine.” Her voice is muffled, strained; but she infuses it with a desperate perkiness to say, “Good night!”

“Yeah, it’s nine-twelve, Irene.”

Her hands fall to her lap. “I know, but it’s been a hard night. And nobody’s been sleeping very well around here.”

He moves to the sofa bed and crouches beside her, and now she does start to cry. She wipes under her nose, looks dolefully over at him. “Hi.”

“Hi, Irene.”

“I don’t know why I’m crying.”

“It’s lots of things, I’d guess.”

“Do you want to …?” She pats the bed. “You can lie down here. If you want to.”

He moves slowly to the other side of the sofa bed and lies down. A chaste, overly deliberate distance separates them. The space feels alive, like a third person.

“You’re right,” she says. “It is a lot of things.” She rubs at her forehead, and the gesture is so deeply familiar to him. She always did this when she was puzzled or upset about something, wrinkled her brow and then rubbed it. She looks over at him and smiles, and he sees that the green in her eyes is aquamarine in this light. He sees, too, that her eyebrows are laced with gray, and it breaks his heart.

“You know what I found the other day?” she says.

“What?” He starts to take her hand, stops; then takes it anyway, and she lets him. He feels like when a butterfly lands on him; he scarcely breathes.

“I found our wedding album,” she says.

“Really? It wasn’t much of a wedding album, as I recall.”

“No, we were just making fun of everything.”

“Right.” A sadness comes into him, and he is wary of it. He thinks about moving back to the chair.

“There was a picture in there, torn from a magazine,” Irene says.

“The old ladies.” And now it is not sadness that he feels but a great sense of shame. That this is the way they treated their marriage. Especially contrasted to the joy and pride and lack of ambivalence he has witnessed in his daughter.

“No, not the old ladies,” Irene says. “This was a picture that wasn’t glued in; it just fell out. Do you want to see it? It’s in my bedroom closet. I’ll go and get it.”

“Just tell me.” He doesn’t want to see that album ever again, he realizes.

“Well, it was of a house, buried in snowdrifts. Nothing else around it. Just these great big banks of snow, and a black sky, and a small wooden house, a kind of log cabin, I guess. And there was one window with a little light in it. But it made for a big presence, against all that snow.”

“Huh,” John says. He’s not quite sure what she’s getting at.

“Then I found another picture, also not glued in. It was of a black sedan, like a getaway car, driving away from sawhorses put up as do-not-cross lines.”

She falls silent, and John turns to her. “So … what do you make of that?”

“What do you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well,” she says, “for me, it was a kind of metaphor, you know? That’s what we were, in a way, that little house in all that snow. One little light. And the getaway car—”

“That was you,” John says.

She looks over at him. “That was you, too.”

“You think so?”

“I know so. In fact, wasn’t it you who put that picture in there?”

“No!”

“Well, it wasn’t I.”

“I don’t even
remember
it, Irene.”

“Neither do I!”

Awkwardly, he takes his hand from hers. He doesn’t belong on the bed now. But to get up and move at this moment would be an overobvious statement he’s not sure he wants to make.

“I know what,” he says.

“What?”

“Let’s go out. Let’s go out and have a drink at some fancy place.”

“I don’t want to. Thanks anyway.”

“Aw, come on.”

She laughs out loud. “This is ridiculous.”

“Isn’t it?”

“Really, John. I don’t understand a single thing!”

“I know. Life. So, Irene? Let’s go out.”

She smiles. “Okay. Okay, we will.” She stands and tucks her blouse back into her skirt. She reaches down for her shoes. One has slid beneath the sofa bed and she gets on her hands and knees to retrieve it. He always liked her ass, and it’s still a nice ass. He wonders if that schoolboy has touched her ass. He looks away,
and then when he hears her say “Ready?” he jumps to his feet and offers his arm, which she takes.

“Wait!” she says suddenly. “What about Sadie?”

“What about her?”

“What if she comes home and we’re not here?”

“What, your married daughter can’t stay in a house alone?”

“We’ll leave her a note,” Irene says, and it seems to be with some excitement that she says it. It’s as though she’s getting away with something. Maybe she is.

They go into the kitchen, and John stands watching her write the note. This, too, is so deeply familiar to him, the way her script is half print. The way she will sign the note “Mom” and then underline it, as though emphasizing her role.

Irene anchors the note under the sugar bowl on the kitchen table. “Ready?” she asks.

He thinks he is.

31

“H
ello?” Sadie calls out. She stands in the middle of the living room, waiting. The sofa bed is pulled out but empty; the door to her mother’s bedroom is closed. Are they
sleeping
together? The possibility makes for a rush of both excitement and disgust in her. What are they doing
sleeping
together?

She pads down the hall, stands outside her mother’s bedroom. She listens: nothing. She knocks softly, then turns the knob. Empty.

For a moment, she panics, thinking something has happened to them. Ironic, when she thinks of how frightened they must have been when they didn’t hear from her for so many long hours. And now, alone for the first time since she was taken, she feels a sudden, bone-chilling panic. She swallows past a huge lump in her throat and pushes open the door to the bathroom, pulls aside the shower curtain. She looks under the bed and in the closets in her bedroom and her mother’s; she looks under the sofa bed. All that’s left is the kitchen, and she moves slowly toward it. She snaps on the light and sees the note on the table, reads it, and nearly weeps with relief. She sits in the banquette and waits for her heart to stop racing, for her breathing to move fully in and out.