Truth in Advertising (27 page)

I say, “See, now to me, that sounds like a new drama on ABC. ‘Soldiers. Heroes. Lovers. It's all part of Veterans Affairs. Thursdays following
Everybody Loves Raymond
.'”

Kevin snorts and sips his giant latte. Maura shakes her head and nibbles on a premade sandwich. Eddie looks at me like I have snot on my face. It's like we're strangers stuck on an elevator, waiting for help.

What happened was this. We stopped caring. I don't know when, exactly. We were all hurt, suffering. Eddie, our legal guardian. Maura, our emotional guardian. Neighbors checked in, but we drifted inward, to our own worlds, needing no one. We crossed paths in the house occasionally, left a note when we went out, then left nothing. Then simply left. Eddie enlisted in the Marine Corps (feeling the need to prove himself a man, angry, instantly regretting his three-year stint), Kevin went to college in California, Maura to God. But not happy, all-encompassing God. Boston-Catholic God. Feel-bad-about-yourself God. I read, watched a lot of television, and learned to make up stories. We sold the house when I left for college. The occasional phone call turned into the rare phone call. Maura's wedding was an excuse to get drunk. So was Eddie's. Our friends became our new family, untainted by the Dolan history. Each of us tried to distance ourselves from our common past. From his leaving, from her sadness. Until what you end up with is four strangers with the same last name who look a bit alike sitting in a coffee shop counting the minutes until they leave each other.

A woman, mid-forties, long dark hair, sits alone, looking at the door. A man walks in. She stands and they hold each other as if no one else is in the room. They sit across from each other, leaning across the small table, faces close. She touches his face.

Kevin says, “I think that's a good idea.”

Maura says, “Sounds good to me. Unless someone wants to get on a plane. Finny?”

Before I can answer, Maura says, “Why wouldn't he want to be buried with his wife?”

Eddie shakes his head. “No. I wouldn't have allowed that.”

Maura says, “It wouldn't be your call, Eddie. Like it or not, they were married.”

A little too much edge. Eddie raises his eyebrows.

Sip the crappy coffee, look at the couple. What are they saying?

Maura says, “I'm just saying, okay?” She shakes her head slowly and looks away, annoyed.

It wasn't always like this. And that's what I don't understand about time. Where did we go as a family? Because for a short period of time, after she died, we came together.

This one time. Not long after we buried our mother, Eddie got tickets to a Bruce Springsteen concert at the old Boston Garden. I remember I had a test the next day. “What are you going to remember in fifty years, my little man?” Eddie had said with a smile. The old Eddie. I'd never been in the Garden—never been to a concert for that matter—but I loved hockey, loved the Bruins. When we walked in, when the place opened up in front of me, what a thing that was. Those Stanley Cup banners hanging from the rafters, the Celtics World Champion banners, the energy of the crowd, the heat and the lights. It was gorgeous. We made our way up to the front. I couldn't stop looking around.

“You stay by me, right?” Eddie said. Maura was holding my hand. Kevin was on one end and he'd somehow managed to get a couple of cans of beer in his coat. He and Maura snuck sips. He hated Bruce Springsteen. He was into Echo & the Bunnymen, The Clash, Joy Division. It was winter. Eddie was leaning over to say something to me when then the lights went down. The crowd went wild. Eddie had bought the album and listened to it pretty much nonstop. He loved “Thunder Road,” loved the song “Born to Run.” I loved “Meeting Across the River,” this sad song about a guy named Eddie. The lights came up on the stage as the music kicked in. Loud, fast, intense. “Born to Run.” Those drums, that horn. And Springsteen screaming into the mic. Everyone dancing in place, mouthing the lyrics. We all knew them. It felt incredible. I felt so alive. I turned to look at Eddie, to look at Maura and Kevin, to see if they were feeling this, too. Maura's beautiful wide-eyed smile, those big green eyes,
Eddie's squint-eyed grin, just like our mother's, slow nodding. Even Kevin's face lit up. We didn't need to say a thing. It had been a long, horrible few months. But here we were, together. Kevin draped his arm around Maura's shoulder and Eddie put his arm around me and Maura wrapped her arm around my waist. We'd never done anything like that before and wouldn't again. We weren't huggers. We weren't touchers. But in that one moment we were a family, together, the Dolans. And I remember thinking,
If we could just stay like this.

I lean back in my chair now, the memory so sharp. I feel my eyes begin to well so I look to the ceiling, realize I'm touching my scar and quickly stop. I'd gotten it that day, the day my mother died. Did I mention that? I should have mentioned that. When I came home, Maura stared at me. She was smoking, which she never did in the house. Mother would kill her, I thought. She didn't seem to notice the blood on my chin, my shirt.

“Finny,” she said. “There was an accident. Mum's dead.”

She sat down on the kitchen floor. Dropped to the floor, really, sobbing. I sat down next to her. I didn't want to get blood on her. I didn't cry.

Now, at Starbucks, I put my hands inside the pockets of my coat and feel the plastic bag. I take it out and put it on the table.

I say, “They gave me this at the hospital. It's what he had on him.”

I take the wallet out of the bag and empty the contents on the table. I take the picture out last. No one says anything. Not even Eddie has anything to say this time.

Kevin goes first, looks for a time, says, “Jesus.”

Maura takes it and stares and I can see her trying hard not to cry. She hands it to Eddie. He takes it and puts it down without looking at it, then can't help himself and stares at it for several seconds.

Everyone wants to leave, to go back to their families, the families they chose.

I slide the box across the table to Eddie. “He's all yours.”

•   •   •

Outside the plane window, Manhattan from three thousand feet. Silent and clear and a partial moon. The weather says it's twenty-three degrees. We bank left at the Brooklyn Bridge, make our approach to LaGuardia. I made the last Delta shuttle.

The cab driver asks where to, and at first I'm not sure. Work comes to mind. Home. But neither is very appealing. I am suddenly hungry and in need of three glasses of wine. I give him the address of a place in SoHo, a small French place called Jean-Claude.

I have texts from Ian and Phoebe and a voice mail message from Keita.

“Fin. I hope your father's better. I am here if you need me. Maybe we could have a drink or dinner. Tell me please and I will help. This is Keita, by the way.”

I call Phoebe.

“How are you?” she says.

“I'm sorry I haven't called.”

“I'm so sorry about your dad. Are you okay?”

“Not really.”

She waits, the good listener.

I say, “Have you had dinner?”

“Fin, it's ten-thirty.”

•   •   •

There are two other couples in the place, a bitterly cold Tuesday night in January. The tables, maybe twenty of them, are small, with squares of brown grocer-bag paper held down by silver clips at their edges. A candle on each table. A small zinc bar, the two waiters speaking French. One pours two glasses of wine.

Cornish game hen and risotto and for Phoebe a bowl of potato leek soup and very good bread and we're on our second glasses of Bordeaux. She's windburned from skiing and her hair is down and a mess and lovely and she has her glasses on because she'd taken her contacts out for the night. They were her father's frames, dorky, forty years old. Bad imitations are available now at Barneys for $350.

I'm watching the waiters and she's watching the beautiful couple in the corner and we're close enough, the place small enough, to hear goodly parts of their conversation.

The music is low, Chet Baker, I think. I hear the gentle scrape of fork and knife against plate, of a chair moving against the wood floor as someone adjusts their position. I smell Phoebe's perfume, faint at the end of the day. She's leaning forward, arms splayed out on the table, head tilted a bit to one side, face open and inviting, flushed from the cold, the wine. I am intensely aware of this moment. Here I am, in New York City, in a restaurant, on a winter's night, eating this food and drinking this wine, and I am alive and for a moment, just a moment, before it flits away, I am happy, feel, in fact, an overwhelming joy. And then, just that fast, as I try to hold on to it, to stay in it, the noise of thought pushes it away, like coffee spilled on a table, spreading out, covering everything. What have I been doing, why have I never been to Morocco, why don't I speak Spanish, why can't I kickbox, why didn't I take a night course in philosophy/art history/Euclidean geometry, how is it that Eddie and Kevin and Maura are strangers to me? I watch my mind come back to the moment, unable to pick up the thread from before, the feeling from before. But right before it ends I want to touch her face, put my hand to her cheek, feel her lean into my hand. I need to tell her about the ashes. I need to tell her that my mother met another man, had an affair. I need to explain my confusion and anger. She'll help me put it into perspective. I have heard that people can talk like this.

I say, “It was all a hoax. My father was there. We all laughed and hugged and then went to Olive Garden, whose new tagline is ‘When you're here, you've made a horrible mistake.'”

Phoebe waits. I swirl wine in my glass, watching myself, a suave man in a restaurant swirling wine in a glass at dinner with a beautiful woman. Except I do it too fast and a small amount of wine jumps the rim and spills onto the table.

Phoebe says, “I'm sorry. That must have been awful. Especially the Olive Garden part.”

I smile. She listens to what I mean, not what I say.

The waiter comes by, wipes at my small spill, tops off our glasses without saying a word.

The beautiful couple nearby have been eating while also doing things with their iPhones. Now, the beautiful man says to the beautiful woman, “If you could be any animal, what would you be?”

The beautiful woman looks up from her phone and says, “I don't know. Like, a deer, I guess?”

He nods. “That's cool.”

He clearly wants her to ask him but she's back to looking down at her iPhone.

He says, “You know what I'd be?”

“What?” she says, still looking at her phone.

“A plum.”

She looks up and stares at him, then nods and says, “Totally.”

They both go back to their phones.

Phoebe stares out the window and I yawn.

I say, “Do you ever think about dying?”

Phoebe says, “This is fun. I'm glad you called.”

I say, “Isn't it funny that we all know that we're going to die?”

Phoebe says, “Hilarious.”

The waiter brings a dessert, a crème brûlée. It's a thing they do for people who eat there a lot. I go to take a bite but Phoebe knocks my spoon away and goes first.

I say, “Amy called me today.”

Phoebe says, “Your fiancée?”

“Former fiancée.”

“Why?”

“To tell me she's getting married. To thank me for not marrying her.”

“Seriously?”

I nod and Phoebe tries, unsuccessfully, not to laugh.

She says, “I'm sorry. It's just . . . you had a bad day, pumpkin.”

I say, “There was a moment . . .” But I stop.

Phoebe says, “What?”

“Nothing.”

“Tell me.”

“It's stupid. It's pathetic.”

“Tell me.”

“There was a moment when . . . I thought . . . this is stupid . . . when I thought she was calling to get back together. And there was this part of me that was actually a little excited about it. Not that I want to be with Amy. That's not it. More just the idea that maybe I could . . . that I could get a second chance.”

“It's not stupid. It's a tiny bit sad and pathetic, but it's not stupid.”

I think of her wedding photos. I take a spoonful of dessert.

Phoebe says, “Okay. If tomorrow were your last day to live, what would you want to do?”

“That's easy. Work on a diaper account. You?”

Phoebe says, “C'mon. Last day on earth. You die at midnight. What would you do?”

I look to the beautiful people. No help there. The waiters. Nothing. The window. Nada. To Phoebe. “I don't know.”

She reaches over, gently removes my hand from my face. I was touching my scar. I hadn't realized.

She says, “You do that when you're nervous.”

I'm embarrassed. I say, “What about you?”

Phoebe says, “I'm doing it. Hang out with my friends, my family. Wine would be involved. Possibly pot. And an eighteen-year-old Spanish bullfighter.”

She sips her wine and says, “‘I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die. Just think of all the projects, travels, love affairs, studies, it—our life—hides from us, made invisible by our laziness, which, certain of a future, delays them incessantly.'”

“Who said that?”

Phoebe says, “Frank.” She smiles. “Marcel Proust.”

I say, “How do you remember that?”

She says, “I printed it out, had it on my desk at work in Paris. I used to look at it all the time.”

“We'll blow it up big, put it in the lobby. Except people would walk in, read it, and run screaming from the building.” I pause. “You still thinking about leaving?”

She nods.

I say, “That's probably a good idea. I would if I wasn't so insanely happy in my work. Any ideas about what you're going to do?”