Reunion (5 page)

“You know,” her mother said, “we should all get together soon. Then Calvin can see for himself what I mean.” She turned to Calvin. “My girls don’t think alike, and they don’t look a bit alike, either. Melody’s taller, kind of stocky, with wide blue eyes and a little bit of a cleft chin. She’s been blond since she was a toddler.”

“My oldest son’s my ex-wife’s spitting image—well, bigger nose and more facial hair now, ya’ know—while my daughter’s me to a tee. Could be true for yours—one like you, one like their dad.”

“Not that we’d know if that was the case,” Blue said. She hadn’t meant to sound bitter but the words, once out, had an edge. “We don’t know anything about him.”

Her mother looked at her over the top of her wineglass, then finished her sip and said, “For your own good, and what difference would it make if I’d told you every detail? He was gone even when he was in this world, no practical use to me and none to either of you.”

Which Blue was sure was true, but she had been there on those long Sunday afternoons when her mother played Fleetwood Mac’s “Go Your Own Way” over and over again on the console stereo.
(Loving you isn’t the right thing to do / How can I ever change things that I feel?)
Watching her mother towel off after a shower, she’d stared at the black script
on her mother’s right hip and wondered, Lou? Leonard? Larry? Lance? The absent presence of
in their lives had gnawed at them all.

“I did the best I could with you; God knows I wasn’t very sensible in my younger years.”

Calvin said, “Who is? All I got to show for my early adulthood is five years’ experience driving a fuel-oil truck, and a perfect memory of the words to every Crosby, Stills, and Nash song there was at the time.”

Her mother started singing “Teach Your Children” and Calvin joined in. Blue shook her head, but a part of her, a reluctant, soft part that she liked to forget she had, was captivated. That her mother sang
well was no surprise; her singing had always been the cue that Blue and Mel could ask for bubble gum money or, later, new jeans. The surprise was in how her mother and Calvin harmonized so well, and with such obvious mutual pleasure, and in exactly the manner Blue had wished for as a child when she’d watched
The Sound of Music
and imagined that for her mother there could be an add-on father. Their Maria would be a long-haired, soft-souled Peter Fonda sort of guy.

If the likes of Calvin had come along back then, everything would have turned out so differently … There would be no past to hide away, no lost son to track down.

Branford has a lead.

But she could not think about that right now.

“Something to eat?” she asked, heading to the kitchen without waiting for an answer.

Through the kitchen window, Blue saw that the snow was slowing and, out against the dark horizon, whole floors of lights still glowed in the skyscrapers that separated her from the vast black of Lake Michigan. Who was working this late? Who, like her, had little reason
not
to work any and all hours, or was so disconnected from those reasons that getting home at nine o’clock, ten, had become par?

She refilled wineglasses and brought out another bottle, along with cheese, bread, olives. Her mother was in the middle of a tale from Blue’s childhood.

“Now this would’ve been around the time Mom died,” she was saying, “so who knows what those girls were thinking, we were all such a mess, but I came home from work—was it the Laundry, then? No, no, I remember, I was cleaning houses in this snotty part of Milwaukee, for women who filled their days getting their poodles groomed. Anyway, I finally got home and there were the girls, in the kitchen, very serious-looking, water and flour and paper towels spread
everywhere.”

Blue remembered too; she’d been ten, Melody nine. A spring evening shortly after they’d moved to Jackson Park, on the south side of Milwaukee, when Mel, on a let’s-test-the-new-kid dare, had climbed their new school’s flagpole just after school let out. She was already near
the top when Blue came outside—not that Blue’s protests would have stopped her—knees wrapped around the pole, one arm waving to the growing crowd of kids below. Blue’s mouth was just opening to yell, “Be careful!” when Mel lost her grip and fell backward, skimming partway down the pole and then landing hard on her right side. The school nurse—Blue couldn’t recall her name or even quite what she looked like—thought the arm was probably broken. But when she failed to reach anyone at Nancy’s work number, she had reluctantly let Blue persuade her to take Mel home.

Blue remembered how grown-up she’d felt, how capable, standing there somberly in front of the nurse, Mel equally somber, not even crying. If Mel had been hysterical, the nurse would never have let them leave. But faced with two little girls who swore their mother was going to be home soon, was probably on her way that minute and that was why the nurse couldn’t reach her, the nurse let them go. “You tell your mother Melody needs to see a doctor
today,”
the nurse had said, making Blue promise.

“I was
thinking
that Mel’s arm was broken,” Blue said now. “So I was making a cast.”

“Oh, the two of you,” her mother laughed, “with wet flour clumped in your hair and Melody practically mummified.”

“Cute kids,” Calvin said. “Resourceful.”

And Mel’s arm
was
broken, and needed surgery, and their mother had been forced to take a second job to pay off the hospital bills.

“Resourceful—oh, you don’t know the half of it!” her mother said, pouring herself another glass of wine. “There was one year when Miss Harmony Blue here was so determined that I should have a cake for my birthday that she took Mom’s old car while I was gone—oh my God, she couldn’t have been fourteen—so that she could get the cake mix and be back home in time to surprise me with it already made, frosted, everything.”

This was after they’d moved to Homewood, outside Chicago, where a friend had offered her mother a job at a florist’s—a good fit, finally, for her mother’s earthiness, but their apartment had no grocery store in
close walking distance. Blue had driven that car, a worthless Chevelle with rusting, busted-out floorboards, quite a few times before she was licensed to drive. To buy peanut butter and saltines when there was nothing left in the house to eat. To track down her sister, times when Mel failed to come straight home from school.

Once, during her senior year, she’d driven all the way into the city in the middle of the night to rescue her mother from a parking deck where the “good” car, a ’77 Ford LTD, had broken down. To rescue her from a date, downtown, with a man who had turned out to be “too corporate” for her mother’s tastes. That time was in the dead of winter and the Chevelle’s heater didn’t work; she’d driven hunched over the steering wheel, shivering, wiping the windshield every few minutes to keep it clear. Wishing her mother had not missed the last train. Vowing she would not live this way forever. At a stoplight she’d waited, peering out the side window into the vast black sky. There was Orion’s belt and there, there was Sirius, and she had said,
“Please
get me out of here.”

And it had been the very next day—she would take this as a sign—when her high school English teacher, Mr. Forrester, told her that his wife was looking for someone to work for her part time. Receptionist for a commercial realty office, where she’d have time to keep up with her homework. The pay was half again what she’d been making cleaning cages at a pet store. Then there was the added benefit of potentially more chances to see Mr. Forrester’s handsome English professor son, Mitch, who she had first seen when he visited their class in October to encourage them to pursue liberal arts degrees when they all went off to college. He had to know that fewer than a third of them would go to college at all, and those who went would go mostly on scholarship, choosing professions such as accounting and engineering—practical, good-paying occupations that would free them from repeating their parents’ worries about how to pay the gas bill and still buy groceries. Liberal arts degrees were for people who could afford to be idealists. An hour in Mitch’s presence that October and she’d decided that, affordable or not, she wanted to be one. She took the job.

Calvin checked his watch. “We got a nine-fifteen reservation,” he said. “Point me to the restroom, and then, Nancy, we better scoot.”

As soon as he was down the hall, her mother leaned close to say, “He’s The One.” She was nodding as she said it, eyes bright.

Too much wine. “You’ve known him for a week,” Blue said.

“Almost three, actually. Doesn’t matter. When you know, you know.”

“
I
know you’re being brash.” She, Blue, had been brash a time or two, so she knew what it looked like, how it sounded.
She
had imagined, once, that she
knew.

Her mother stood and stared down at her. “Harmony Blue, I did not get to fifty-nine years of age by being completely stupid.”

“That’s not what I’m saying.” Blue got up and began gathering the plates and glasses. “Just, think about it. The money—”

“
Your
money, is that what you mean? He’s not seeing me because my daughter’s rich and has generously padded my own accounts.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“He has his own money—and a little thing called integrity.” She held up her hand to stop Blue’s protest. “Yes, I know, some of the others were lacking. Irrelevant. I was sowing my oats.”

For four decades in all. A lot of oats in Nancy Kucharski’s bag. “Fine,” Blue said, going into the kitchen. “Still, these things take time to play out. You need to see how you feel about him after you’ve been together a year or two—”

“How old am I?” her mother demanded.

Blue set the dishes in the sink and turned. “Mom.”

“How old am I?”

“Fifty-nine,” Blue sighed.

“How many of my friends have died in the past ten years?”

“I don’t know … three?”

Her mother held up six fingers. “Cancer, cancer, stroke, drunk driver, cancer, heart disease. Now tell me I should suspend my judgment for a year or two.”

“You’re as healthy as I am.”

“Today.” She kissed Blue’s cheek and left her standing in the kitchen.

Calvin joined Blue while her mother took a turn in the bathroom. “I’m glad to get to meet you,” he said, and when he smiled there was no evident avarice, only the refreshing sense that, in his eyes, she was equally Blue Reynolds
and
Nancy’s daughter, or perhaps even more the latter. His pale gray-blue eyes made her think of Huskies, those reliable sled dogs of the Inuit. She wanted to like him. So much as she knew him she
did
like him. He could sing. He owned a bookstore. He paid her mother more attention than he paid
her.
If her usual discreet inquiry into this man’s background proved out, well, that would be a start.

What a strange concept, her mother in love after all these years.

“All right then,” her mother called, heading for the foyer. “Have a good trip to the Keys. Watch out for pirates.”

“And sharks,” Calvin said as he and Blue joined her.

“And I love you,” her mother added, kissing her forehead.

Blue watched the elevator doors close after them with tears welling—envy? Longing? She wasn’t sure, and didn’t want to think about it. By the time she was back inside her apartment, she had willed the tears away.

utside Mitch Forrester’s Chapel Hill office window, the trees were a green haze of new leaves, the only real color on this gray, rainy morning. Spring weather had a solid hold on North Carolina, as was evident by the number of students who’d been showing up to class in shorts and flip-flops this last week before spring break. It was scheduled late this year, so they were more than ready. Today would be a mess of dripping plastic ponchos and wet umbrellas, slick floors and poorly attended classes.