The Rules of Inheritance (42 page)

 

And I knew she really had been. Thinking of me. It felt good to know that someone was.

 

She was ninety-three, so I'm not sad that her life is over, only that I won't see her anymore. I sit on my deck that morning, the morning of my birthday, and lean my head back into the warm sunshine that's peeking over the roof.

 

I can't help but feel like I am part of something bigger. Like there really might be a purpose to it all. Like I'm not alone.

 

I get on a plane a few days later, to go to Cape Cod for my grandmother's memorial service. I haven't been away all spring and the feeling of the plane lifting into the air feels good. I peer out the tiny window at Los Angeles glimmering on the very edge of the continent.

 

I feel like I can see my whole life from up here. As the plane climbs higher and higher I see all the progress I've been making in the last year. All the yoga and the baths, the dimly lit back rows of the few AA meetings I went to. I see myself happy too, padding around my apartment in the mornings, making coffee, turning on music. Alone but happy.

 

A feeling of lightness spreads through me.

THE FEELING ONLY GROWS when I arrive in Cape Cod. I'm so happy to see my family. My
family
. My aunts Pam and Penelope. My uncle David. My cousins. These old, weathered houses on the beach that I've been visiting since I was a kid.

 

At my grandmother's funeral I look around and I am so filled with gratitude. All these years I've been focusing on what I don't have and not appreciating what I do.

 

After the service we all go back to Aunt Pam's house, and I take up residence in a hammock in the yard. It's Memorial Day weekend, and beachgoers trickle by on their way to the water. My cousins are down at the beach. I'll join them soon. I just want a moment to be still.

 

I have no idea that just over a year from now I'll be getting married in this very backyard. That it will, in fact, be the happiest day of my life.

 

I can't possibly know that. Yet I do know something.

 

I know that everything about the last few months of my life has been magical.

 

I know that I've changed.

 

I know that I'm happy.

 

I know that I've finally learned how to listen to myself.

 

I smile as I think about all the things I've said yes to in the last six months, all the adventures I've had, all the people I've met.

 

And then I frown for a moment.

 

There's one person I haven't said yes to.

 

The guy I've been e-mailing in Chicago: Greg. He's been asking me to come visit him for weeks.

 

Each time I said no.

 

After we became friends in April it wasn't long before we were e-mailing almost every day. Greg is twenty-eight. He works at some boring job in Chicago that I can never retain the details of. He has curly brown hair, blue eyes. He's a writer.

 

I quickly came to depend on my morning e-mails from him, loved the funny notes he sent me when he got to work. Both of us single, living in big cities, trying to figure out who we are—there was never a lack of things to say.

 

Eventually we started talking on the phone. I liked the sound of his voice, husky but kind too. Before long we knew everything about each other. The farm he grew up on in Northeast Ohio. His five siblings and MFA. That he shares my father's birthday.

 

It wasn't long before he suggested we meet.

 

I'll come to LA for the weekend, he said. Or you could come here.

 

I shook my head into the phone.

 

No way. It would be awkward. We wouldn't live up to the ideas we have about each other. And then we couldn't talk on the phone anymore.

 

Greg laughed. Come on, he pleaded.

 

Nope.

 

So we broke up. Or whatever it's called when two people who only know each other online and the phone stop talking.

 

That was two weeks ago. I miss him though. I miss his e-mails and his voice. I miss his stories and his insights into my silly LA adventures.

 

Why didn't I want to meet him? I, a person who goes on yoga retreats with people I hardly know and gallivants around the Philippines in search of sharks?

 

I know it's because I've been afraid of losing this newfound ability to be on my own. I'm afraid of disappearing into another relationship. But I also know that I can't let that hold me back for the rest of my life.

 

At some point I'm going to have to test my new strength.

 

I look toward the beach. The breeze carries the scent of salt and suntan lotion up to me.

 

I pull out my phone and text Greg.

 

What if I stop in Chicago on my way home from Cape Cod tomorrow?

 

Hardly a minute goes by before my phone beeps with his response.

 

Yes. Please. Do it.

THE NEXT MORNING I find myself, not on a plane back to LA, but instead on one bound for Chicago.

 

I'm nervous and I stare out the window, watching Boston Harbor recede below us. I went out with my cousins last night. When I told them about my Chicago plans, my cousin Chris laughed.

 

Just like your mom, he said.

 

I realize he's right. I think about how my mom got on a plane with my father on the afternoon of their first date. I wonder if she felt like I do right now.

 

I have this feeling like I'm altering the course of something. I'm supposed to be on my way back to Los Angeles right now. I have a party to go to tonight. My friend Lucy is in town from Atlanta. I'm graduating in two weeks from my master's program.

 

What am I doing on this plane to Chicago?

 

At the very least, I think to myself, I'll see a city I've never visited before. And if Greg is a total weirdo, then I only have to put up with him for sixteen hours. My return flight to LA is scheduled for eight tomorrow morning.

 

As the plane rounds its way across the lake, I can see the city gleaming, curving around the lip of the water. We touch down before I can decide if any of this is a good idea. As the plane taxis to the gate I text Greg.

 

Just landed.

 

I'm in baggage claim, he writes back.

 

I'm nervous.

 

You'll be fine.

 

The seat-belt light clicks off and everyone stands up. I grab my only bag, a canvas one with my name embroidered on it—a bridesmaid's gift from Liz—and make my way off the plane.

 

I follow signs to baggage claim, my heart pounding. And then I'm riding the escalator down. In years to come I'll walk by this very escalator a hundred times, and each time I'll look at it in wonder, remembering the final moment before Greg and I really knew each other as it hovered on this moving, silver staircase.

 

And then he's walking toward me and all I can think is, It's you.

 

It's you.

 

The feeling is strange, if only because it is so simple.

 

We embrace, and the heat from his body tempers my air-conditioning cooled skin. After that we ride the same escalator three times, both of us too nervous and too distracted to figure out how to get out of the airport.

 

Once we finally make it to his car Greg drives us back to his apartment in Lakeview, where we stand in the kitchen and eat strawberries from a bowl. Greg cut them himself earlier that morning in preparation for my visit, and I can tell it is something he doesn't normally do. The windows are open to let in the summer air, and during our silent moments we listen to the happy sounds of laughter filtering up from the bar across the street.

 

We kiss for the first time, there in the kitchen, and I'll always remember it for many reasons. One of them is because, for the first time in a long time, nothing about the kiss serves to fill a void.

 

Again, it is much simpler than that.

 

He is a boy and I am a girl, and we are standing in a kitchen on a warm summer day, the taste of strawberries sweet in our mouths.

 

Sixteen hours later I get on an airplane back to Los Angeles. It will be another couple of weeks before I admit to having fallen in love, but as I stare out the window at the Chicago skyline growing distant beneath me, I remember something my mother wrote in a letter a few months before she died.

 

 

 

2003, I'M TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OLD.

I
T'S A WARM California evening and I'm driving west on the 22 toward Garden Grove. My father is in the passenger seat beside me. I am taking him home from the hospital where he has been for six weeks, ever since his legs stopped working and we found out that the cancer had spread to his hips.

 

Must be nice to be outside again, hmm?

 

My dad doesn't answer and I glance over at him. He's staring out the window at the cars streaming by, at the brightly lit billboards on the side of the highway. He's looking at the world like he's never seen anything like it.

 

Something inside of me crumples. Then I feel a snag of fear.

 

My mother had the same look on her face in the weeks before she died.

 

I look back at the road, gripping the steering wheel with both hands. I am determined to get my father home. To nurse him back to health.

 

Inside his condo complex I pull the car up alongside the curb. It's about twenty-five feet to the front door. I shift into park and turn off the engine.

 

I'm going to run in and get the walker, I say. You okay?

 

Yup, my dad says.

 

It's early evening and there is still light in the sky. Inside the condo I flick on a few lights and grab my dad's walker.

 

Back outside I open the passenger side door.

 

Okay, you ready?

 

My dad nods but looks nervous.

 

I help him to swing his legs out the door, making sure they're planted firmly on the asphalt below. I position the walker in front of him, and he grips the handles on either side.

 

Okay, Dad. One. Two. Three . . .

 

I watch the muscles in his arms tense, see the tendons strain in his neck. But nothing happens. My father can't stand up.

 

I think I'm gonna need some help, kiddo.