The Most Fun We Ever Had (52 page)

Wyatt pulled his head away and looked at Jonah. “Where’s Mama?”

He had no fucking idea where Violet was, and he was shocked that she wasn’t here, and it made him nervous, her absence, because forgetting didn’t seem like something she did.

“She got stuck in traffic,” he said without thinking. Wyatt continued to stare at him expectantly. “Yeah, it was— There was a crazy—this crazy accident and your mom got stuck on the other side of it. This big accident with a train and like a million cars, and a fire, and—”

The principal cleared her throat.

“Everyone was fine, though. And Violet—your mom was watching the whole thing from a few blocks away, but she couldn’t move her car, right, because everyone else was stopped, too, and so she—she called me and told me to let you know that she’s fine and she’s trying to make it but if she can’t then…” He glanced up at the secretary, who seemed like a better wingwoman than the principal. “What’s your name?”

“Miss Ruth,” she said, like that was a normal name to go by as an adult.

“If your mom can’t make it, Miss Ruth is going to record the whole thing on my phone, and you and your mom and your dad can all watch it together. Does that sound good?”

Wyatt whispered something, his face once again buried in Jonah’s shirt.

“Come again?”

“I can’t do it by myself,” he repeated.

“You won’t be by yourself,” he said, though he had a bad feeling about where this was headed. “I’ll be there, and your whole class, and—Miss Ruth.”

Miss Ruth beamed.

“No, I can’t
sing
by myself. Mama promised to sing with me if I got too nervous.”

“Yeah, except.” He cleared his throat. “Yeah, except, man, remember how we talked about this? I’m not a singer. You’re the singer.”

“I’m not the singer.
Mama
is the singer but I do it too because no one knows the song if it’s just the music.” Wyatt shook his head, his body beginning to tremble. This poor nervous kid.

“Hey, hey,” he said. He said it into the top of Wyatt’s head like he’d seen Violet do. “All right, man. Fine. I’ll do it with you.”

—

The moms surrounded him in droves after the Star of the Week performance, bringing with them an amalgamated cloud of perfume and a blinding rainbow of athleticwear.

“You two were
adorable
up there,” one woman said. “I had no idea that Wyatt had an older brother; are you adopted?”

He’d gotten through the performance by numbing himself to the crowd and focusing only on Wyatt, his little brother with his teensy guitar. He had a weird moment at the beginning where he remembered hearing the song in the car with his dad—his
dad
-dad, his viaduct dad—but he pushed past it, toward a moment from last week, fixing the gnarly shower stall in the basement with his grandpa and watching David’s face light up as he said, “Marilyn
loves
CCR.” By the end of the first verse he’d kind of gotten into it, drumming the beat onto the edge of the teacher’s desk, singing along with Wyatt without caring what his voice sounded like and without caring, for the most part, that he got a little choked up midway through. And he was proud of Wyatt, the first time he’d ever been proud of another person: this goofy kid who’d just been let down by his parents for the first time in his life and still pulled it together enough to sing a whole song in front of his class.

“You have a
lovely
voice,” one of the moms said, and another, picking up seamlessly, asked, “Is that something you get from Violet’s side? Or your dad’s?”

“Where
is
Violet, by the way?” said another, a startled-looking woman with dark eye makeup and a visor. “She’s been keeping a pretty low
profile
lately, but it seems unbe
li
evable to me that she’d miss Star of the Week.”

He was able to ignore them, mostly, by watching Wyatt commune with his classmates, all of whom seemed to like Wyatt as much as he did. But he was worried about Violet, despite everything, because for her to miss something like this did seem radically out of character, even though he wasn’t entirely sure what her character was. He wasn’t sure she knew what her
own
character was, to be honest, but she at least seemed pretty heavily swayed by the opinions of others, and he figured it had to be something pretty bad that prevented her from being here to fend off the stylish vultures and keep them from learning about him, her darkest secret.

He didn’t like her, but he didn’t wish her
dead.

“She’s not actually my mom,” he said, knowing Wyatt was out of earshot. Being someone’s family had something to do, he’d learned from watching his grandparents, with taking one for the team. “She and her—Matt, they were volunteering at the shelter where I live. And they took me out to lunch one day with Wyatt and Eli and we all just—hit it off.”

“A shelter?” said one of the women, looking suddenly devastated.

“More like a group home,” he said. “Lathrop House.”

Were he some kind of precocious Disney-movie hero, he would have expounded on the importance of giving to those less fortunate, on the fact that nobody who lived at Lathrop House
chose
to live at Lathrop House, and that they could really use some new iPads for the computer lab, some more contemporary books in the library. But at the moment, all he wanted to do was scram before he had a chance to make anything worse, before Tall Hair called the cops or before it was revealed that Violet had been crushed to death by a stop sign in the accident he’d made up to calm Wyatt down. Miss Ruth had assured him that Matt was on his way.

“Buddy,” he whispered, pulling Wyatt aside, kneeling before him. “I’ve got to get back to school. But you kicked
ass
out there, okay?”

Wyatt smiled baldly, trusting him like kids deserved to trust adults, or fifteen-year-olds, whatever, like how he wanted Wyatt to be able to trust the world, though he hadn’t been able to himself; and he held out his fist for Wyatt to bump.

—

V
iolet awakened and didn’t remember falling asleep. Her head felt leaden, her esophagus raw from crying. She rose from the chair and stretched, feeling the stiffness in her body from sleeping in a ball. She wondered what regrettable thing her mother had prevented herself from saying when she hung up the phone. She felt her eyes fill again when she heard a strange buzzing sound: her phone, on vibrate, half-covered by a dish towel on the counter.

“Hey,” she said, seeing Matt’s name.

“Oh my God,” he said. “Oh, for— God, are you okay, Viol? Jesus Christ.”

“I’m fine,” she said. “I fell—”

“I— You have no idea what I’ve been— Holy
shit,
Violet, I can’t believe that you…”

She felt the same creeping dread as she had when she’d talked to her mother.

“I guess you forgot what was happening today,” Matt said.

It thumped through her head like an extra heartbeat:
oh no oh no oh no
. “What?” She leaned against the table, looked over at her kitchen wall calendar. “Oh, God.” Oh, poor Wyatt. Oh, her poor, tiny star, sweeter than anyone on the earth.

“They waited a while for you,” Matt said. “They tried calling you.”

She closed her eyes. “Did you go? Did he do it?”

“I was in a meeting. I left right after they called but traffic was hell.”

“What
happened
?” she asked again.

“Jonah came.”

Surprising and inevitable. It stilled her.

“They sang it together. Miss Ruth made a video for us.”

Were they on solid ground, they both might have laughed at something like this.
Miss Ruth.
They both might have taken a moment to bask in how bizarre it was, their kindergartener’s debut CCR performance, accompanied on vocals by his relinquished half brother, before an audience of women who’d be fueling their lunchtime conversation with the indiscretion for
months,
Bouffanted Gretchen and Ashton’s Mom and Jennifer Goldstein-Visor.

But instead she was crying, and Matt sounded angrier than she’d ever heard him.

“Jesus, Violet. I
told
you something like this would happen. Plus I just left in the middle of a meeting with the DreamWorks guys.”

“I was so tired,” she said.

“Okay, but here’s the— I’m not sure what’s quite so tiring when the only thing you’re required to do is not be a shitty mom.”

“That’s—that’s an awful thing to say.”

“Yeah, well, it’s been pretty fucking awful for the last hour when I assumed you were
dead,
Violet, not
napping.
”

“Did you tell Wyatt how sorry I am?”

“Of
course
I did,” Matt said. “Jesus, have you told
me
how sorry you are? Will you tell Jonah? Christ. This is exactly what I’ve been trying to avoid. But he’s in it now, you see that? He made up this whole story about how you got caught in traffic. He saved us, Violet.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“You could try,” Matt said, his voice eerily measured, “to sound sorrier.”

—

T
he landscapers wouldn’t come to cut down the ginkgo until spring, and he wasn’t going to let it languish like it was, stripped of its dignity, dead branches drooping downward. Plus he had an apprentice now, in Jonah, who was strong and nimble and seemed to take pleasure in physical exertion. A branch fell and he bent to retrieve it, throwing it into the pile with the others. Jonah, fifteen feet up, killed the motor on the chainsaw.

“I forgot to tell you,” he said. “I need this permission slip signed.”

“What for?” He stepped forward as Jonah began his descent on the ladder.

“It’s this tournament,” he said. “This regional Krav Maga thing.”

He did not pretend to understand the boy’s unusual extracurricular activity, but it seemed to be a good thing for him, a source of structure. “Regional sounds like a big deal.”

“Yeah, kind of.” Jonah met his eyes once, quickly, and appeared to be suppressing a smile. “I’m a finalist. Statewide. So I get to compete against—like, really good people.”

“As a really good person yourself, it sounds like?”

Jonah shrugged.

“That’s fantastic,” he said.

“It’s not for a couple months. April. Can I go?”

“Of course,” he said. “I mean—as far as I— We should talk to Marilyn too. And—Violet? Or—well. I’m sure it won’t be a problem. Can families come?” He shook out the stiffness in his shoulder and reached for the chainsaw. Jonah held the ladder for him as he climbed.

“I’m not sure. I guess so.”

He made it to the branch above where Jonah had last been cutting and leaned back against the trunk, winded. “Well, find out. I’d like to see what all the fuss is about.”

“You’d want to come?”

He looked down to see that the incredulity in Jonah’s voice matched the expression on his face. He smiled. “Of course we would. Marilyn’s conflict-avoidant, so she might want to pace around outside during the actual fighting, but we’d love to see what you’re—” A belch rose in his throat and he colored. He revved up the saw and went to work on a branch, but about halfway through he was overcome by nausea. He turned off the saw, his lungs quickly filling with a rising panic. “Christ, it’s hot, all of a sudden.”

“It’s like five degrees out here,” the boy said.

He tried to laugh. “Of course. That’s what I meant.”

The world, at once, seemed finite and fleeting, the breath in his lungs limited. He was sweating through his sweater. His wife, twenty years old, above him beneath this very ginkgo tree. His daughters, again and again and again and again, coming into the world. His father exiting it. All of those things gone in an instant, nobody left to remember them but him and now no longer him, it seemed. Marilyn on all fours, just before Gracie was born.
Motherfucker
. The pain in his chest, sudden and crushing, insistent behind his sternum.

“Jonah, I’m going to drop this down. Don’t try to— I’m just going to—” The saw fell from his hands and he heard it land on the cold ground with a sickening crack. “I just need to—”

“David?”

The lawn swam beneath him. The sharp pain behind his heart. “Sonofa
bitch
.”

“David, are you okay?”

The dog barked, muffled, from inside of the house.

“I need to—I need you to— If you can hold the ladder— I’m just not feeling—”

And then the dog: loud and ever-present, having pushed through the screen door.

“Call Marilyn,” he said woozily. “But don’t scare her.”

“Fuck,” Jonah was saying. “
Fuck,
get
away
from me, you—”

The barking.

“Tell her—” He felt half-formed and disoriented. He smiled. “Tell her she’s the most fun I’ve ever had.” And the sharpness grew sharper, and his vision began to blur, and he couldn’t make his limbs move the way he wanted them to, and Jonah was yelling from the ground, and he wanted to tell the boy not to worry, that there was nothing he could do, but he found he couldn’t really speak, either, because the pain was all-consuming.

“David!” the boy yelled.

The dog barked madly.

His gaze drifted downward. Jonah and Loomis, swirling in circles.

He’d read, of course, about life flashing before you in the final moments.

The last thing he pictured—as he fell from the ladder, as the world began to swim—was the beguiling cat-green of his wife’s eyes.

2000–2001

Violet reentered Wendy’s life in an exquisitely un-Violetesque fashion, her trembling voice over the phone spewing disclosure: “I have nowhere to live and now I’m late and I’m never late.”

And Wendy’s first shameful thought:
Well well well, look who’s just as fucked-up as the rest of us.
She had been sunbathing nude on the roof of the brownstone and she sank back into one of their deck chairs and folded her legs into a pretzel, reveling in her pantilessness and the position of inarguable power her sister was placing in her lap. Violet had been brooding at their wedding nearly three months ago, still reeling from a breakup with her lame boyfriend, too heartbroken, apparently, to dredge up any occasion-appropriate happiness for Wendy, the glowing bride. And now Violet was knocked up. She reached for her sundress and slipped it over her head, suspecting that this was not a conversation she wanted to conduct naked.