The Grown Ups (28 page)

“He's getting old.”

Bella nodded. “We all are.”

“I don't know about that. If I'm in a new place and it's first thing in the morning I feel like I'm eighteen, nineteen, twenty.”

“Ugh. I don't want to ever go back to those years.” Bella lifted her mug to her lips. Sam couldn't read her expression.

“Because of me?” he asked. “Because of what an idiot I was?”

“What?” Bella said softly.

“I'm sorry.” Sam hadn't planned to say it, but as soon as it came out of his mouth he knew there was no going back. “I'm so sorry.”

Bella set her mug down carefully on the table as if she was afraid to spill.

“I'm sorry I left you like that, I'm sorry I never came back.”

The waitress walked over with their plates and slid them in front of them. She pulled bottles of ketchup and hot sauce from her apron pocket and set those down in the empty space between the plates. Bella was staring at the wall when she asked if they wanted anything else and Sam shook his head for the both of them. As Bella turned back to him he saw that her eyes were shiny.

“Fuck you for saying that right now,” she whispered. She looked down at her plate of eggs but did not pick up her fork.

“Bella.”

“No, no, Goddamnit, Sam. You don't get to do this to me after all these years.”

Sam leaned toward her so their foreheads were almost touching. “I had no idea what I was doing, Bella. I was flunking out of school. I thought the best thing to do would be to walk away. If I had stayed with you we would never be here now.”

“There isn't a now, Sam. There isn't a
we
. There isn't even an
us
to remember. I've been with Ted for two years. Two years!” Bella spit out the last part and Sam felt her breath on his cheek. “He wants to be with me, he tells me every chance he gets. Can you imagine that?” Bella collapsed back against the booth.

Sam reached in his pocket for his wallet. He fumbled through junk until he found the piece of paper he was looking for. “Take it.”

Bella took a deep breath, exhaled, and looked back at the paper turkeys.

“Bell, take it, please.”

She held out her hand, and Sam dropped the paper into her palm. The creases where the paper had been folded and refolded, nestled inside his wallet, were nearly ripped all the way through.

“Adrienne Rich.” Bella made a face. “I was so naive.”

“What?”

“This.” Bella's hands shook as she stared at the paper. “Adrienne Rich, she wrote this—it's part of a series of twenty-one love poems.”

Sam sat back. All these years, he had thought Bella had written those words about them.

Bella folded the paper back up and held it in her hand. “Why now?”

Sam couldn't read her face. He swallowed hard. “I don't know. That's not why I asked you to breakfast. I just, there was this opportunity and so I took it.”

“I can't.” She shook her head as if she could get rid of him.

“At the wedding when I tried to talk to you, and we didn't—at all.” Sam stumbled all over his words. “And then that whole thing with Mr. Epstein, you, well, I mean, I felt, I hoped you looked at me a little differently.” Sam swallowed hard. “I never expected you to ever speak to me again. But then there was the night that you caught up to me in the street outside Michael's apartment? And then the Cape?” He tried to pick the right words. “There was so much I wanted to say, but I didn't think you would want to hear.”

Bella cleared her throat. “I know you loved her. Suzie.”

To hear Bella say it out loud sounded so foolish to Sam's ears. “My God, Bella, we were fifteen.” He gulped. “I loved her only if love was all about getting to the next base.”

“I knew all about it.” She shrugged ever so slightly, carefully
holding her body as if she were bruised. “But I liked you even though I knew I would be your second choice.”

“How's everything here? Something wrong with your eggs?” The waitress led with her pot of coffee, frowning at their untouched breakfasts. Sam pushed his mug in her direction for a refill because he was unable to speak. Bella looked down at her plate. When neither of them answered, the waitress turned around and left.

Sam shook his head. “Bella, a lot of shit happened that summer. A lot of unresolved shit. I may have overromanticized those few weeks with Suzie; I may have carried that forward because it was easier to long for something I never had than to be in the moment. I don't know. Suzie was all tangled up with my parents' split. These are not excuses but I can't explain it any better than that. Nothing about that time has ever felt finished.” He took a breath. “Was I shocked as shit that she showed up with Michael? Yes. That they had a relationship? Yes. It threw me for a fucking loop, I cannot deny that. But I've grown up. I miss you.” He took a gulp of hot coffee and winced as it scorched its way down his throat and into his esophagus. His voice was scratchy when he asked, “Are you in love with Ted?”

“I told you. We've been together for two and a half years. Almost three, really.”

“And that means you love him?” Sam paused. “You can do better than Ted.”

“You don't know anything.” Bella was still holding the piece of paper with the poem in her hand. She crumpled it up and tossed it across the table before she grabbed her coat and scarf and slid out of the booth.

“Then tell me,” Sam asked. “Tell me.”

Bella shoved her arms in the sleeves of her coat but left the
buttons undone and the scarf unwound as she bent over and grabbed her bag from beneath the table. Then she strode out of the diner. It took seconds, maybe a minute tops, for her to get away from Sam. The door jangled as she exited, the bells swinging back and forth for a long time after she left.

Sam let her go. He had already said whatever he thought would have kept her, and it hadn't been enough. He picked up the crumpled piece of paper, which was nestled in a bed of home fries, and smoothed it out on the table as best he could. The dots of grease combined with the rips made it unreadable.

Sam extricated a twenty for the waitress and tucked the bill beneath his plate before he carefully folded the paper back up along the creases and put it back inside his wallet.

Apparently Marguerite and
Hunt had gone to get a Christmas tree. When Sam returned home he found his father on his hands and knees under the tree, cursing at the screws in the stand. “Do you need help?” Sam asked.

Hunt crawled out from under the canopy of branches and sat back on his feet. His face was red and there was a sprinkling of pine needles across the shoulders of his Polartec jacket. He gestured to Sam with a pair of pliers. “I think I finally got the son of a bitch tight enough so it won't fall over. Give me a lift?”

Sam held out a hand to his father and hoisted him off the ground. Then they righted the tree in the stand, turning it all the way around while Marguerite found its best side. Sam tried to remember the last time they'd had a Christmas tree, or the last time he had helped to decorate one, but he couldn't recall. Marguerite had brought many things back into the lives of the Turners, holiday traditions among them.

Marguerite had the ornaments spread out on the couch and
the coffee table and was bent over the boxes searching for hooks. Sam was restless. The last thing he felt like doing was decorating a tree. He wondered where Bella had gone, if she had gone home, if right now she had a zillion little kids clamoring for her attention. He still wasn't sure how he had gone wrong so fast.

He needed to forget the fiasco of breakfast, so he went over to the bar and poured a finger out of a dusty bottle of tequila and then went into the kitchen and added ice cubes and a generous slice of lime. The tequila went down easier than Sam expected on a stomach of coffee and nerves. He could feel it turning him sideways. He went back to the bar cart for another and just decided to take the entire bottle of tequila instead.

Sam could feel his father and Marguerite watching him as he walked down the long hall to his room. The three of them knew that nothing good could come out of a bottle of tequila and his childhood bedroom. “Sam?” Marguerite called after him as he shut the door. “Sam?”

“Leave him alone,” he heard Hunt say. “He'll come out when he's ready.”

It was dark
when there was a knock on his bedroom door. Before Sam could answer, the door opened, letting a sliver of light in across the bed. “Sam?”

Sam struggled out of the fog of sleep and tequila. When he did he saw his father leaning against the doorframe dressed in a tuxedo. “Hmm?” Sam mumbled, unsure of what he was seeing.

“Sammy? Hey? We're leaving.”

“Where? What?”

“We're going to the city.”

“To get married?”

“What?”

“You're wearing a tux.”

“We're going to Marguerite's hospital fund-raiser. It's formal.” Hunt stepped closer to the bed. He may or may not have nudged the empty bottle of tequila with his foot. Sam thought he heard glass tumbling against the floor. He closed his eyes.

His father touched Sam's knee. His limbs felt heavy, and it was impossible to imagine ever moving them again. “What's going on?”

“Nothing.”

“A bottle of tequila isn't nothing when you start drinking before noon.”

“I'm fine.”

“You're a man.” Hunt's voice sounded tired. “Do what you want. I just wish—”

“I was more like Michael?”

“Cut that crap. It's way too easy for you to place blame there.” Hunt paused. “I want to help you, if you'd let me.”

Sam rolled over onto his side and looked at his father. There was a slight pounding in his temple and a roiling in his empty gut. “I should be able to get my shit together without you by now. Hey, are you really retiring?”

“Yes.” Hunt frowned slightly as he nodded, and brushed something off his lapel.

“What are you going to do?”

Hunt laughed. “Get my shit together. Want to help?” He turned toward the sound of Marguerite's heels tapping against the hardwood floor. “I have to go. I just wanted to make sure you were alive before we left.”

“Tell Marguerite I'm sorry.”

His father paused with his hand on the doorknob and said, “I think you can handle that yourself.” And then he walked out of the room and closed the door softly behind him.

Sam made a
dinner of scrambled eggs and toast and sat in the family room next to the bare Christmas tree, watching
It's a Wonderful Life
. After a while he felt so bad about the tree he decided to thread the lights on the branches. When he had done that he peered into the ornament box.

These ornaments were new, purchased by Marguerite in recent years. Sam had no idea what had happened to the wheat paste stars, paper chains, and clay dough handprints he and Michael had brought home every holiday season while they were in elementary school. Before she left, their mother would make a show of unwrapping those ornaments from the layers of storage tissue paper as if they were the most prized possessions she owned. Sam doubted she would have taken those with her on the way out the door. The most likely scenario he could come up with was that they had been thrown away during the renovation.

Sam considered hanging some of the ornaments until he found the white and red ceramic ball that said Grandbaby's First Christmas. That must have been purchased before Suzie's miscarriages. He rewrapped it and plunged it deeper into the box, covering it with a reindeer made out of twigs and a felted Mr. and Mrs. Claus. Sam tucked the box flaps back together and brought his dish into the kitchen just as the doorbell rang.

Bella stood on the front porch, her hands shoved deeply into her coat pockets. The bottom half of her chin was covered by the same enormous pink scarf she'd worn earlier. It was freezing, and in the streetlights beyond her head he could see a flurry of snowflakes. Sam remembered the storms after Mrs. Spade's funeral,
the icicles on the windows of the train he and Bella had taken back to Poughkeepsie. He opened the door wide, surprised to see her there. “Do you want to come in? No one's here.”

“No,” Bella said, her words muffled against the scarf. She wiggled her chin from side to side to free it from the cloth. “I just wanted to tell you I was sorry for running out on you like that this morning.” She shrugged. “I just have a lot going on right now.”

Sam crossed his arms over his chest. “You don't have to—”

“I do, I do. Can we leave it at that, Sam?” She shuffled down the walk and out to the street. He held his breath and counted to ten but she didn't look back.

Without thinking Sam ran down the steps. When he caught up to her he was already feeling the ridiculousness of the gesture. Plus his feet, clad only in socks, were rapidly becoming wet and cold. “I can't leave it at that, Bella.”

Bella spun around. “This isn't real, Sam. You aren't real. You aren't even fully formed yet.”

“What does that even mean?”

“Nothing in your life is set in stone. You go whenever you want. You disappear.”

“Is your life set in stone already, Bella? If it is, I don't think you would be standing here talking about mine.”

Bella opened her mouth and then closed it. There were snowflakes caught in her eyelashes. Eventually she said, “Go back home.”

“If you want to be with Ted, tell me, and I'll leave you alone. But I want you to come with me.” The snow picked up with the wind, blowing the flakes sideways. The shoulders of Bella's coat were completely covered in white. “Come inside. Please.” Sam began to walk backward toward the house, all the while watching Bella's unreadable face. He couldn't feel his feet and he stumbled,
nearly falling to the ground before he caught himself and climbed up the stairs to the porch. He was scared to turn around to see if she was following. If he got to the door and she wasn't behind him he would have to forget her.