The Most Fun We Ever Had (57 page)

“I didn’t mean we ran out of ideas,” her mom said in the kitchen, coming over and kissing her head. “We had plenty of ideas. Dad just liked the sound of your name on its own.”

She didn’t have a middle name, and she didn’t have her own memories, and this was the trouble with being an epilogue. You got shoved at the end of the book before anyone gave you a chance to read it.

—

V
iolet’s relationship with Matt was predicated on a series of never-ending conversations. Before she’d even kissed him for the first time, they’d spent six weeks of evenings together, racing to cover infinite ground: they both had families to inaccurately render and hard-nosed political positions to exaggerate and college roommates to slander; they had between them four decades of books to discuss and low-level secrets to divulge. She never wanted to stop talking to him. She was a 1L and he was a third-year. She approached her postgraduate education with a militancy attainable only by the crazy or friendless, but somehow Matt penetrated her formality; they met at a Studs Terkel lecture and spent several evenings on the patio at a dive on University Avenue, during which they drank a lot together and talked about their most beguiling idiosyncrasies. And then one night he kissed her by the Fountain of Time, and she couldn’t remember feeling this happy—feeling happy at all, in fact—since before she’d gotten pregnant.

His normalcy frightened her, honestly. Because though she had been cultivating a similar image since she was ten years old, to find a man who seemed so entirely without defect seemed statistically unlikely. She met Matt seventeen months after she’d given birth. He laughed at her jokes but he also asked her serious questions:
Explain that; how do you feel about that?;
convince me, Violet.

They were lolling around in his bed one evening, Matt reading an article in
The Economist.
He was a difficult man to distract; his face was twisted in concentration and he was twirling his Uni-ball in a convincing display of absorption.

“Matt,” she said, knitting and unknitting her fingers.

“Hmm.” Not taking his eyes from the magazine, he reached for her hand.

“I don’t want to—like, have a big buildup, but I want to talk to you about something.”

With that he sharpened his gaze on her. “What?” Their relationship was still so new that this could have been an admission of a sex change or a tryst with one of his classmates, and she wondered where her confession was about to fall amid the ranks of betrayal or romantic wrongdoing. She shifted to face him. She loved Matt, already—she knew this—and it seemed pivotal that he know this about her, that he be aware of her most painful thing. She thought of her parents, who seemed to have been sharing everything with each other forever. Disclosure facilitated trust, did it not?

“So I’ve,” she began, and then faltered.

“You sleeping with Professor Milman?” he asked. She would not realize until later what a gift it was to be able to joke about something like this.

“I had a baby,” she said tonelessly, staring at a spot on his blue bedspread, and the statement hung unpleasantly in the air like the fumes of a passing garbage truck. “A year and a half ago. I broke up with my boyfriend and I found out I was pregnant right as I was graduating and I had the baby and I gave it up for adoption.”

Matt was quiet for a moment, still holding her hand. And that had proven to be the most wonderful thing about their relationship, bar none—just the presence of another person, hanging on to you, even if it wasn’t with any particular vigor or purpose.

“I’m not sure what to say,” he said finally, gently, and so she just started talking. She talked about Wesleyan and her straitlaced boyfriend Rob, who was getting a PhD in biochem and who wasn’t always very nice to her, about his cheating on her with a research assistant. She did not tell him about the night before Wendy’s wedding, just a month before graduation when she’d been utterly crushed by the upset of her life plans: the Volvo in the parking lot, the acrobatic blue-eyed boy who’d come inside her and whom she hadn’t seen since.

She talked about moving in with Wendy; she talked about selecting a discreet adoption agency; she talked about how she’d been too afraid to look when the baby emerged from her body and so she’d never actually seen her son; she talked about how empty she felt when she returned from the hospital to her room in Wendy’s house.

“Wow,” Matt said when she’d finished. “I can’t imagine.”

“No, you can’t.”

“But why didn’t you—” he stopped. “Never mind.” Matt had the nightstand of a fifty-year-old suburban father, glasses and Carmex and a well-worn paperback copy of
The Adventures of Augie March,
bottle of multivitamins and glass of water and earplugs to tune out his downstairs neighbors. Matt had had his life figured out since he was ten, Dartmouth and law school and recreational basketball on the weekends. She felt a chilly fear settle around her for the first time since she’d met him. Perhaps he wouldn’t understand. Why had she ever thought he would? Why had she thought she could possibly explain to him—Mr. Perfect, sailing down the path—what had motivated her to make the decisions she’d made?

“Why didn’t I what?” she asked.

“I just mean— It sounds crass to say about— I don’t mean it in a— Why didn’t you just have an abortion?”

She was quiet, considering it. It was, of course, the question she’d never fully answered in her own mind. The best she had was a number of fragments that were all loosely related but didn’t quite add up to a finished whole. When they were in high school, she and Wendy would lie on the eave outside of Wendy’s bedroom window and discuss their potential futures. As kids they’d spent hours playing MASH, sketching out elaborate hypotheticals, marriages to Dennis Quaid or Dennis Rodman, a mansion in Sacramento or an apartment in Queens, careers in food service or international relations. Wendy always made the riskier choices, populating her charts with wild cards, while Violet played it safe, everything in moderation. At the end of the game, Wendy would end up homeless and overburdened with children and married to Pee-wee Herman, but Violet would always have something more palatable, a decent salary and a safe but luxurious car, a stately suburban home inhabited by a manageable number of children who’d been fathered by Bono. It wasn’t always the most logical decision that was the right decision. That would be a foreign concept to Matt, as it had been to her at the time. But she had wanted to be brave, an adjective no one had ever applied to her, especially when Wendy was around.

“Violet, I wasn’t trying to—”

“No, I know.” She picked up the Carmex, screwed and unscrewed its tiny lid. “It just—stopped being an option at a certain point. I can’t really—explain it better than that. It’s—Wendy. That’s the best answer I’ve got.”

“You haven’t talked much about her,” he said.

“It’s complicated.” She pulled her knees to her chest.

“She was the only person who knew about this?”

“Pretty much.”

“I can’t imagine ever doing something like that. I think it— That’d crush me, I think. I can’t believe you’re— It sounds horrible.”

“It was horrible.”

“Violet, I—”

How easy it would be for him to ruin everything right now, to say the wrong thing, to reveal that she was simply too flawed, that the choices she’d made when she was low and confused would follow her forever, ruining her prospects of happiness, of normalcy.

“I wish I could’ve been there for you,” Matt said, and she felt some of the weight lift, because if Matt had been there, things would have been different, better; there wasn’t a doubt in her mind about this.

“I’m telling you this because I think you deserve to know,” she said. She issued a silent apology to the baby, for calling him a
this,
a thing, for slamming the door in his face like she was, for the second time, for so firmly locking the deadbolt after she’d already refused to look at him. “But I don’t want to talk about it anymore, Matt, okay? It happened and it’s over.” If anyone could understand this, it was Matt, who thought he could will away nascent head colds simply by denying their existence, who’d trained himself to wake up at 5:45 each morning without an alarm clock. “If this—changes anything for you, I’ll understand.”

“It doesn’t,” he said.

“But you can’t be
sure
that you won’t feel differently in—”

“Are you trying to talk me out of being with you, Violet?”

“No, I just want to make sure you know what you’re getting yourself into.”

He kissed her. “I’m sure,” he said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Grace was aware, for the first time, of having the upper hand with a member of her family, age-wise. She got to be the cool aunt, the autonomous elder with an apartment and a debit card and a couch on which transient visitors could crash. She’d clocked the power dynamic early—practically from the moment Jonah had entered her house, though he’d caught her braless and depressive and watching a docudrama about the Craigslist Killer.

“We finally meet,” she said. “How’d you get my number? How’d you know where I live?”

“Your dad made me store everyone’s info in my phone,” he replied.

Having the upper hand allowed her to tamp her gut reaction, which was to burst into tears. “How is he?” she asked instead. “Why didn’t anyone tell me you were…” But his appearance caused her to back off, the ghostly glow of his skin that betrayed a lack of sleep, nails bitten to the quick, fear on his face as though she might turn him away.

“Sit down,” she said, feeling big-sisterly for the first time. “Let me get you some water.” To be in the company of one of her family members, albeit one who was still technically a stranger, was an unspeakable relief; she was face-to-face with someone who’d been with her dad before everything had gone south. He looked less like Violet than she’d expected. She felt her eyes fill and turned away, pretending to busy herself with filing her single fork into a drawer. “You hungry?” she asked, then realized, quickly, that the stale pita chips had been the only remaining edible items in her house. She surreptitiously checked her bank balance on her phone. It was technically money allotted for the next two weeks of groceries, but the thought of riding on the bus with him to the market made her soul-crushingly exhausted.

So they ended up at the Comeback. The Irish bartender smiled when he saw her, waved from behind the bar. She felt herself flush.

“Who’s that?” Jonah asked.

She flushed even more deeply, because it was not a promising personality trait to be on a casual-greeting basis with barroom staff. “No one.”

“We can sit at the bar, if you want.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “You’re fifteen years old, are you not?”

It was fun, playing the role of the patronizing older sister. She’d had such good teachers.

“Sixteen, actually,” he said, and she thought she saw him suppressing a smile.

She studied his face. He did seem older than a high school sophomore, but he was still wearing those big Kleenex-box skater shoes and there was a waxy galaxy of acne across his forehead. “Let’s take a booth,” she said. “We have stuff to talk about.”

He didn’t protest, and they sat down together, the high backs of the booth muffling the bar’s ambient noise.

“So you were with my dad. When it happened?”

He squirmed, fiddling with his straw wrapper. “Kind of.”

“Wendy said you called the ambulance. Thanks for doing that.”

“You don’t have to
thank
me. I did what any normal person would do.”

She leaned back, startled. “I just meant—”

“Sorry. Whatever. You’re welcome.”

“Can you tell me— I mean, was he— What
happened,
exactly, was he—”

“He was—like, he started acting really weird. Then he fell. It happened in, like, a nanosecond. Just, like, splat.”

She shuddered. She couldn’t quite bring herself to envision it, her formidable father dropping to the ground like a rag doll. It went against the rules of her cognition. It wasn’t a thing that was supposed to happen.

“Sorry,” Jonah said. “I didn’t mean, like—
splat
.”

“Can you stop saying that word?”

“Have you heard anything more?” He seemed to know almost nothing about her father’s condition. When she’d told him, at her apartment, that her father was, at least, stable, if not conscious, some of the tension had flooded from his face; he’d looked like a kid for a second.

“I’ve tried calling my sisters,” she said. “Nobody’s answering. So I’m assuming— I mean, I don’t really have a
choice
but to assume that no news is good news.”

Their food arrived and Jonah dug into his burger as though he hadn’t eaten since March. She picked listlessly at hers. Had she brought him here because the food was cheap, or because she hoped that Ben might show up? Then her stomach clenched anew, for allowing herself to even think about Ben, for the fact that she was at a bar with her teenage nephew just two days after her father had suffered a major heart attack. She reached for the vodka soda she’d ordered and casually set between them on the table, nodding at Jonah like
See? I’m cool. Have a sip
.

“My dad’s in the hospital,” she said, “and my whole family is with him and I’ve returned to the site of my recent breakup to get drunk with a teenager.” She closed her eyes and pressed her forehead to the hard edge of the table.

“I wasn’t sure where else to go,” he said. “And I…”

“No,” she said, and she reached across the table to touch his wrist, because she’d learned in the last two hours that you were allowed to be motherly with younger people. “It’s actually really nice to have you here. Even if you won’t tell me
why
you’re here and why you have my dad’s car and whether or not anyone knows you’re gone.”

“Who’d you break up with?”

She sighed, allowing him, once again, to dodge the subject, taking full custody of the cocktail. “It’s stupid to even call it that. We weren’t even really together.”