The Opposite of Maybe: A Novel (32 page)

Rosie will resume her life with Jonathan, both of them changed now, and he’ll get used to the idea of what it means to be a father, and his heart will expand exponentially.

Dena and Annie will marry; Dena will have a child, and she and Annie and Milo will be cemented together in a way that will wound Tony, who simply has got to find his own story.

Greta and Joe have lived in the thick of family life and busyness, but now their kids are spinning slowly into their own orbits. Already Sandrine, with her alienated eyes, her marijuana, and her defiant chin, is mostly an adult, and the boys—who have left their sports jackets out in the dirt in the darkness—are not far behind.

And all of it—all of it—will someday blow away, like dandelion fluff, with only the remnants of the stories of love and trouble remaining, if anybody sees fit to pass them down.

She can’t figure out why this makes her so happy—or why she feels her eyes filling up with tears. Maybe it’s that she now feels she has a part in this huge circle of stories. She’s part of a chain, in a way she never thought she’d be—she and Soapie and Serena and the new baby, who kicks gleefully inside her.

The next week, after Rosie and Soapie have had tea and toast and have watched
The View
, and then watched the rain running down the windowpanes, Rosie takes a deep breath and, unable to help herself any longer, says, “Do you remember anything about my mother? Is there anything you can tell me?” Just saying that takes so much effort that she has to stretch out on the sofa. She is so hungry for a fact about her mother that she can’t even get herself to look at Soapie.

Soapie says, after a moment, “Oh, Lord. I really don’t remember much about her anymore.”

“But you must remember some things. Was she—when she was pregnant with me—was she happy to be having a baby?”

“Oh, I don’t have any idea. Honestly. Why do you ask that? I suppose she was. Any woman might think it was going to be a great adventure.”

“What about my father?”

“What about him?”

“What was he like, Soapie?”

She lets out a loud sigh. “He was one of those men who knew how to get what he wanted. He talked your mother into things.”

“Like having me?”

“Oh, I don’t know about
that
.”

Rosie looks over at her. Soapie has closed her eyes, gone away somewhere. “Listen,” Rosie says softly. “You think it
doesn’t matter, because I lost them so young. But they always exist for me. They’re—they’re like these people-sized holes in my heart.
You
knew your mother and father. But can you imagine what it would be like if you knew hardly anything about them, and yet there was a person right there with you who actually knew them but who wouldn’t talk about them?”

“I don’t remember much about them.”

Oh, God. She’s going to cry. “But you must remember some things. Tell me what they liked to do.”

“Oh, Rosie! What do you want from me? I’m old and I’m tired, and I can’t give you what you want. She wanted you. Everybody loves their own kids, right? They weren’t together long. He had long hair and he laughed a lot. She was one of those girls who didn’t talk much. She was moody.”

“She was shy, you think?”

“Probably. I don’t know.”

Rosie sits up. “Listen, I kept a box—I still have it—I kept a box of things that might have belonged to my mother. Objects that you—that you once said might have been hers. Did you know that?”

Soapie opens her eyes and stares at her. Her face is all contorted with something—pain, maybe, or fear. But she’s watching.

“Here, I’m going to get it for you.”

“What do you mean, you kept a box?”

“I did. I kept a box.” She goes into her bedroom and finds the box, which has been stored at the back of her closet. She brings it back into the living room and sets it down.

“Here,” she says. “Let’s look at this together.”

“No. I don’t want to drag all that stuff up from the past.”

“It’s not going to be bad. Here, it’s just some things. Look.” She starts taking out the photographs, the scarf, the hair clasp, the cassette tape, and laying them out on the
table, looking at Soapie’s face. “I just picked these things up. Some of them, you mentioned … I thought they were things that she’d—that she’d touched.”

Soapie is looking at her, alarmed. “Where did you get this stuff? I didn’t want any of those things around us! Just poisons things, keeps people from starting over.”

“But we did start over. That’s done. And I know that’s how you saw it, but I just always thought maybe I’d find a little bit of her …” She stops talking because her throat has closed up. Then she begins again. “I kind of remember her, a little. I think she sang me a lullaby, one time.”

“She did. She sang.” She pushes the box away, as if it might be full of snakes. “I don’t think looking at this stuff is going to do either of us any good. It just makes us sad after all these ye—Christ sake. What do you have here, anyway? These weren’t hers, you know.” She peers in.

“No? Are you sure? I guess I just needed something back then. I told myself they were hers.”

“No. That was
my
hair clasp. And that scarf—well, maybe she wore that. I can’t remember.”

“There’s a tape of her singing. Would you like to hear it?”

“No. God no. Put this stuff away, will you?”

“Did she—did she love me?” Rosie can barely say the words.

Soapie looks up from the box and something shifts in her eyes. “Oh, don’t be silly. Of course she loved you. What the hell does love mean anyway?” She stops and swallows and lowers her voice. “All right, I’ll tell you what I remember. But it won’t do you any good, just stirring all this up. She loved you just fine. But it ruined her—you know, with
him
. Your father not sticking around. Because of the—because of the … the times …”

“The draft?”

“Yes. He could have done other things, I don’t know, gotten a lawyer, got out of it. But he takes the coward’s way out and goes to Canada. And he tells her he can’t come back. Not ever. So she wants to go there, too, but he says no. He’s got some other plan for them, he says. Keeps putting her off and asking her to wait. And so she’s living with me and saving money and planning to go. Anybody could see what’s happening, but not Serena. No sir. She could be so stubborn about things.” Soapie closes her eyes. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

“But did he ever know what happened? To her? Did you tell him? Did he ever try to be my father?”

Soapie is silent. Her lips clamp together tightly. “I can’t, I won’t,” she says at last. “It doesn’t do anybody any good. All that hurt dragged out again.”

One day, after Rosie is tired of looking up local assisted-living facilities for Soapie that will allow a person to have both overnight visitors and alcohol, which Soapie is still insisting upon—she types into Google “diamonds from peanut butter.”

And holy bling! It turns out that there are lots of sites that say you
can
turn peanut butter into diamonds—but that to do it right, you’d need the pressure of fifty elephants for one square inch of peanut butter, and a temperature source that could get to two thousand degrees.

Or a microwave you don’t care anything about, and the courage of Superman. She watches a YouTube video that makes her put her head in her hands.

“Totally not worth it,” she reports to Tony, who has also
looked it up and, being Superman, of course wants to do it. “You’ve got to do it outside, and it involves fire and electrical cords and, if it goes wrong, you probably won’t have any eyebrows for the rest of your life.”

He says, “Hmmm.”

“The two mommies will have a fit when they hear about it,” she says.

He says “Hmmm” again, like somebody who can pretty much do anything he wants. He’s been out painting a house all week, and it looks as though his house-painting business is taking off. A real estate agent called him and said she’s going to recommend him to all her clients who need to get their houses in shape before they go on the market, and he’s thrilled.

She argues just the same, knowing she can’t win. It’s dangerous … lighter fluid? … blow up a microwave? How is this sane? Also, any custody matter that later comes up will be sure to mention the day that Tony lost his mind. Judges, she points out, are always looking for that sort of evidence.

He laughs. He tells her he visited the kindergarten class, and every one of the nineteen children in the class
and
Amelia Minton were talking of nothing else but Milo’s peanut butter diamonds.

Like that matters, she says.

And then when Milo comes over to visit the following Saturday, Tony says, “Get in the car—we’re heading out for a secondhand microwave, a jar of peanut butter, some charcoal, and a bottle of lighter fluid! The Cavaletti men are going for broke!”

When he and Milo get back, they set up everything on the patio, snaking a long cord out there so they can plug in the microwave.

Milo is so excited he’s like somebody on a pogo stick. Soapie and George are in the house, peeking out the window, and Rosie goes outside and helps Tony smear the briquettes with peanut butter. Milo does a somersault across the yard, and then another and another.

“Can we sleep outside again, Dad?” he calls.

“It’s winter, you crazy,” says Tony. “Come and look to see if you think this is enough peanut butter.” He holds up a huge, messy chunk.

Milo runs over to inspect it and declares it needs a little more on the side. So Tony coats more on, and then puts the two briquettes into a glass microwave-proof dish and slides it into the microwave and closes the door. It has to cook for one hour, according to the Internet.

“Here goes!” he calls, and Rosie and Milo both come over and stare through the microwave window at the dish turning around and around. Tony shivers and lifts Milo up in the air and runs around the yard with him, with them both yelling and singing at the top of their lungs. When they make a lap close to where Rosie is, she can tell they’re singing, “You’re a Rock Star.”

Every ten minutes, Tony runs over and turns off the microwave for a bit. Just to keep the thing from blowing up, he says. Every time he opens the door of the thing, smoke comes pouring out, and Tony claps his hands. “This thing is really
smokin
’ now!” he yells. He and Milo do jumping jacks, play a game of checkers, do some Angry Birds during their ten-minute intervals, and while the smoke clears each time, they run victory laps around the yard.

“This, ladies and gentlemen, is science at its best!” Tony crows at one point, with black smoke billowing in the background.

Soapie totters over to the door and says, “What kind of
fool nonsense is this?” George joins her, and Tony explains to the two of them that diamonds are being created here. George is interested and comes out and peers (from a safe distance, arms behind his back) into the microwave and declares this to be a scientific marvel, if it works.

Rosie is cooking supper for all of them when the sixty microwave minutes are up, and a whoop of celebration comes from the outside. Tony takes the dish in his oven-mitted hands and walks it over to the barbecue grill, where, amazingly, he pours lighter fluid on it and sets the whole thing on fire. Milo goes wild.

“We did it! We did it!” he squeals, coming to the kitchen and pogoing himself through the doorway. “Now we just need some spatulas and a calendar.”

“A calendar?”

“You know, to poke the ashes through the holes,” he says. “We’re gonna get all our diamonds now!”

She laughs and gets him the colander.

“Are you, by any chance, related to Mr. Tony Cavaletti?” she says, and chucks him under the chin. “Are you happy?”

He doesn’t answer, just grabs the colander and the spatulas and zooms back outside.

In the end, it’s not so much a beautiful diamond that surfaces through the black ashes as a lump of some stone that looks—well, kind of yellowish and unclear.

“It looks—it looks kind of like an old toenail,” says Tony. “Wow.”

“It does not!” yells Milo. “It’s the best diamond in the world.” Then he screws up his little face and says, “What is a diamond anyway?”

She can’t stop laughing and eight hours later, when Tony takes her into his arms in the darkened hallway and kisses her soundly on her mouth, she buckles under the weight
of what is clearly an overflow of joy. Sometimes, a kiss is just laughter being expressed in a different form, and even though she dimly knows she’s supposed to be pushing him away, she’s so happy, too, and she can’t.

That’s it. She just can’t.