Untethered (3 page)

Before either her daughter or her husband could object further, Sarah turned her gaze away from both of them. She smoothed nonexistent wrinkles from the front of her coat and picked two minuscule pieces of lint from her sleeves. She tied and retied her
scarf until she seemed satisfied with the knot, and, finally, she pulled a pair of coordinating gloves from her purse, inspecting each before she put them on. Char had seen Sarah every week since early September, and not once had the woman failed to be immaculately put together.

Dave shifted from foot to foot and ran a finger inside the collar of his shirt, pulling the fabric away from his neck. The Crews didn't dress formally for church, Sarah had told Char before, and Dave was a mechanic, used to wearing roomy jumpsuits over broken-in jeans and a T-shirt. Char guessed that the suit he wore today was the only one he owned, and that it came out of the closet only for weddings and funerals.

“So,” Dave said, “Allie sure has grown up since I saw her last.” He had attended the tutoring program's Orientation Night at the start of the school year, as had Bradley, but since then, it was Sarah and Char—and Stevie—who had waited together outside the tutoring room each week. “Almost sixteen, Morgan tells us. Getting her license soon. June, I think Morgan said? That's a big step, huh?”

Char blanched. “I . . .” she stammered, but she was at a loss. She had forgotten. Not Allie's birthday, but the fact that Char might not be part of it.

She, Bradley, and Allie had talked about this birthday more than any of the other five that Char had been involved in. Allie was going to sign up for the first driving test slot of the day, and after she passed, the three of them were going to go out for brunch. They had discussed it only a week ago, in fact. Allie brought her laptop into the living room, where Char and Bradley were cuddled on the couch, watching a movie. Allie held out her computer, letting them see the
No schedule currently available
message on the driving school's website.

“How do they expect to run a business, with this lack of planning?” Allie asked, pointing to the screen.

“It's five months away, Allie,” Bradley said. “Most kids your age don't plan past the next week. They'll probably put it up around April or May.”

“Well, Stanley's let me make a brunch reservation for that day.”

“You've already made a reservation for your birthday brunch?” he asked.

Her expression answered the question, and Bradley laughed. “Hand me that laptop. I'm going to schedule the golf club garden room for your graduation party in two and a half years. Maybe while I'm on their website, I'll book your rehearsal dinner. The year 2030 sounds good to me.” Nudging Char, he asked, “You free then?”

Allie, who had turned over the computer, snatched it back. “Ha. Ha. Ha. Way to make fun of your kid for being ultraorganized, Father of the Year. Next, you'll be saying my GPA's too high. ‘Slack off, kid,'” she said, in a bad imitation of Bradley. “‘Study less, smoke and drink more.'”

“Nothing above eighty proof,” he said, a finger in the air. “And filtered cigarettes only. I'm still your father—I have to set limits.”

“Maybe you won't be invited to my birthday brunch,” Allie said in faux annoyance as she left the room. “CC and I can have a girls' date.”

Char swatted Bradley, who was still laughing. “I really do love the initiative,” he called after his daughter.

Char felt her eyes fill at the memory. This wasn't one they had talked about over the past few days, and the shock of it caught her off guard. She brushed away a tear, and Will put a hand on her shoulder.

Dave looked from the wet-eyed widow to her brother. “Oh, I'm sorry. I seem to have said the wrong thing.”

Will squeezed his sister's shoulder and told Dave, “There's some, uh, question about whether Allie will be here in June, or in California with her mother.”

“Her mother?” Dave turned to his wife, who widened her eyes at him. “Oh, right,” he said. He aimed a thumb over his shoulder toward Lindy. “We met her earlier, didn't we? The, um, vibrant one? Linda?”

Colleen stifled a laugh at the description as Sarah corrected him. “Lindy.”

“But she lives in Hollywood, doesn't she?” Dave said. “Or near it, or she works there, or something? And she's been there all this time, while Allie's been living here, with you? It sounded like that was the permanent arrangement. So, I assumed—”

“It was,” Char said. “But it's not so simple now. I'm her stepmom.” She considered that statement, and amended it. “
Was
. I
was
her stepmom. My only connection to her was through my marriage to her father. Without him, I don't have . . .” She stopped herself from saying “anything.” It seemed melodramatic. But there wasn't a more accurate ending to her sentence, so she let it trail into nothing.

She had asked Bradley about it once, whether he would like her to legally adopt Allie. He told her it wasn't an option unless his ex-wife officially relinquished her parental rights, and she would never do that. Being an absentee mother was one thing—Lindy could justify it by claiming that the combination of her career and the best interests of her daughter meant she should be on the coast and Allie should be in the wholesome Midwest. But officially giving up her rights to her daughter? That would be an admission of something Lindy could never bring herself to confess out loud.

Char hadn't pushed at the time. There hadn't been a reason to. What did it matter if she was Allie's legal parent, rather than a mere
stepparent? It was a technicality, nothing more. Char was part of the girl's life. Wasn't that what counted?

Of course it was.

As long as Bradley remained alive.

Standing in the social hall, Char touched two fingers to the corner of each eye and turned to look at the willowy girl who giggled with Morgan as they played some kind of clapping game. The girl who had never, technically, become her daughter, and who was now, technically, no longer even her stepdaughter. Char's fingers weren't enough to stem the tears, and she had stupidly thrown out the tissue her brother had given her earlier. She reached behind her, to Colleen, and an instant later felt a new tissue being pressed into her hand. She held it against one eye, then the other, and told herself to get it together before Allie noticed.

She had been trying not to think about it, her future with this child. It was all so uncertain, given Lindy's vacillations on the subject over the past few days. Maybe Allie would be here for five more months, until her sophomore year ended. Maybe she would stay another two and a half years, until she graduated high school. Maybe Lindy would want her in California next week.

One minute, Char was a wife, a stepmom, one third of a family. The next, she was nothing. From three important roles to none in the course of a single day. She was a balloon on Monday morning—filled, floating. A broken piece of rubber by Monday night—airless, useless. Her contents hadn't been released gradually, either, but had instead rushed out in a violent, sudden whoosh. From full to empty in the final blink of a taillight.

All morning, people had been telling her they were sorry for her loss. But they only meant Bradley. Her brilliant, funny, perfectionist Bradley. And yes, she had lost him, and God, how it hurt. It seared
right down into her core, hollowed her out so completely that she was certain she would never be able to feel anything, ever again, for any man.

She hadn't simply gone from married to widowed, though. She hadn't only lost her husband. Fate had snatched Bradley's last breath from US-127 and in that same instant the law had taken away Char's family. The girl who Char had lived with for the past five years, had treated like a daughter, had loved like a daughter—wasn't.

Char was the mother figure in Allie's life. She was the one who had been there day to day for the past five years, helping with homework, packing lunches, buying the girl her first bra, her first box of tampons. All of that effort had welded a solid emotional bond between them, but none of it had affected Char's legal rights to the child—she still had none. While Lindy, who had never wanted to be anything more than temporary hostess during Allie's brief visits to California, now had sole rights.

Because Lindy was the woman whose name was on the girl's birth certificate. And Char was merely the woman who was married to Allie's father for a while.

L
indy's Saturday dinner with friends bled into Sunday brunch, after a few of them received word that their flights wouldn't be getting out of Lansing until Sunday afternoon. “But I'll come straight over after that, and we can have a late lunch,” she told Allie over the phone on Sunday morning. “I figured you'd still be in bed until then anyway. Teenagers.”

Allie reported this to Char and Will from her seat on a barstool at the kitchen counter as the adult siblings jostled for position at the stove. Char glanced at the clock—it was ten—and back to Allie. An early riser all her life, the girl had been up, showered, and dressed for two hours.

“No problem,” Char said, walking to the table and removing the fourth place setting. “I don't really have a plan for lunch, but we'll come up with something. Maybe just order in.”

“I'm not sure she'll like anything we have here,” Allie said. “She's more about wheatgrass shakes than hot wings, you know?”

“Oh, right,” Char said, tapping her chin. “Let's just think. . . .”

She ran through the list of takeout possibilities in her mind. It
was a short list, and would be unacceptable to Lindy. “I could go to the grocery store and pick something up,” she said. She pictured the inside of their biggest, newest store: no fresh-squeezed-juice bar, no kale smoothies, not even much of an organic section. “Or . . .”

“I wouldn't worry about it,” Allie said. “She'll probably only drink water anyway. I think she might still be doing her weekend fast thing. Or her weekend cleanse thing, maybe . . .” She closed her eyes as though trying to recall the schedule of her mother's various nutritional schemes.

“Or something. Whatever it is, it likely doesn't allow her to eat a regular lunch. Or any of this stuff.” She waved her hand toward the stove, where Char was scrambling eggs and Will was tending to two frying pans, one filled with bacon, the other with sliced potatoes and onions. “It's just as well she's tied up this morning.”

“We'd better clean up all the evidence before she gets here,” Will said. He winked at Allie. “Don't want to get you in trouble.” Looking at his sister, he added, “Or you.”

“Don't worry about it,” Char said. “Lindy's never been one to push her agenda on us.”

“Yeah,” Allie said. “She tries to get me to drink all her gross health shakes when I'm at her place, but she always says that she knows as soon as I'm home, I'll be back to, well, this. She once told me she hasn't eaten a hamburger, or a single French fry, since she left. Can you believe it? Not one single fry.”

“Hmm,” Will said, popping a piece of potato into his mouth. “She and I really have much more in common than I thought, then. I haven't had a single French fry in”—he took another bite—“twenty-four hours. No, thirty-six.” He patted his round belly. “She may exercise a little more than I do, though.”

“A little more?” Char asked. “So, what, like, twice a year?”

“Watch it”—he aimed his spatula at her—“or there'll be no fried potatoes for you.”

Char looked down at her own soft belly. Like her brother, she had never been disciplined about nutrition or exercise. Bradley wasn't any more health conscious than Char, but he had been blessed with a metabolism that let him get away with it. Mostly, anyway. He wasn't exactly svelte, either.

They had never spoken critically in front of Allie about Lindy's extreme health consciousness, though, even if some of her schemes had sounded over-the-top. They had never spoken critically about her in front of Allie at all, in fact, and she had, for the most part, reciprocated.

Bradley and his ex-wife had uttered some particularly hateful things to each other in the eight years since Lindy announced she was leaving him and their daughter, and their “Godforsaken nothing little town,” for California. But they had made a pact to never let their bitterness bleed over into the things they said to Allie. For all of Lindy's exasperating quirks, she had honored her end of this bargain as well as anyone could have hoped. For that, Char couldn't help but respect the woman. And she had willingly signed on to the deal herself.

“Your mother is certainly in much better shape than we are,” Char said to Allie. “So, if she wants black coffee for lunch, or a glass of water, I say she gets it. Let me just make sure we have a lemon. . . .” She opened the fridge and bent to peer into the crisper.

Seconds later, she stood, a thumb and finger pinching her nose shut. “Maybe don't let her look inside our fridge. It doesn't exactly give off the impression that I'm doing a good job taking care of you. If we have any hope of her letting you stay till the end of the school
year”—she tilted her head toward the fridge—“then that needs to be off-limits.”

Allie's top teeth pressed into her lower lip, and Char regretted having reminded the girl about the elephant that had been pacing through the house since late Monday night.

“Anyway,” Char said, trying to correct her mistake, “let's eat!” She carried the pan of scrambled eggs to the table and slid one third onto each of their plates. Will followed behind with the potatoes and Allie jumped up to get the bacon.

“I'd offer juice,” Char said, “but I'm kind of afraid to check the expiration date.”

“You want me to clear out that fridge and do a grocery run to reload it?” Will asked his sister. “If you don't mind packing up those boxes in the office, I could do a quick trip to the store before I have to leave for Lansing. I'd better not push it, though—last I checked, my flight's scheduled to leave on time.”

He reached his hand across the table toward Char's and she took it. “I've been wishing it would get delayed,” he said. “I'm not ready to leave you two yet. If I could stay another week . . .”

“Don't worry about us, professor,” Char said. “We'll be fine here without you. We've got our moldy orange juice and fuzzy cheese. You need to get back to your students.”

Like his sister, Will was an academic. Unlike her, though, he hadn't scaled down his career to take on a new spouse and stepchild. A professor of engineering at Clemson University, he had already pressed his luck getting graduate students to take over his classes for the prior week.

Char had been a professor, too—of journalism, at American University in Washington, D.C. It was her dream career. On the
side, she did some freelance editing—mostly nonfiction pieces for magazines and professional journals, but she had started taking on fiction as well, in the form of novels and short stories.

It was the perfect setup, and she never had a moment's thought about making a change. Until one night, when she and her friend Ruth stepped into a crowded bar on 14th Street and found themselves sitting beside an automotive engineer from Michigan, in town for some hush-hush meeting with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Ruth thought the man was perfectly nice—a fine companion for the duration of their glasses of merlot. Char thought he was perfect—period.

Later, she would tell Ruth she found it impossible to pinpoint the exact thing about him that drew her in so quickly. Hair, eyes, physique: his were all arranged in the usual way. There was nothing crowd-stopping about him, objectively speaking, and age had added lines and pounds that he hadn't been able, or perhaps inclined, to fight off.

But he was funny, and self-deprecating, and he had a way of leaning toward Char as she spoke as though he didn't want to miss a single word. The men she had dated in the past had been so eager for her to be impressed with them that they always seemed impatient for her to finish her sentence, so they could steer the conversation back to themselves.

Char had been telling Ruth for years that she would rather be single forever than settle for someone like that. In the bar on 14th Street, talking to this man from Michigan who seemed to feel no need to amaze her, she was glad she hadn't settled. This was what she had been holding out for.

“There was something in the air in that bar,” Ruth would say later. “It was like being caught in an electrical storm.” And the
charge had made Char morph (at approximately the speed of light, Ruth teased) from hard-charging professor out for a drink with a colleague to smitten schoolgirl hoping the boy would offer to carry her books and ask for her number.

Char had the same effect on Bradley, and exactly one year later, Ruth and Will stood up for Char in Bradley's backyard. Bradley's priest from St. John's and his nine-year-old daughter, Allie, were the only other guests.

After that, Char didn't take a big step downward, career-wise—she took a giant leap. “Actually, more like a free fall,” she told her brother, though she never said this to Bradley. She flipped her teaching/editing ratio and became a freelance editor with a part-time adjunct instructor position on the side. Every Thursday, she spent the day at Central Michigan University in Mount Pleasant, teaching journalism classes and advising for the school's print and online newspapers.

“What files are you packing up?” Allie asked.

“Ugh,” Char said. “Something for your dad's office. They called last week, very apologetic, saying they needed some things he keeps here. They offered to drive up and collect it all, but Will volunteered to meet up with them in Lansing before his flight. I think it's all in one of the stacks on his desk. I just need to go through everything and figure out what they need. I've been putting it off, but my time is up.”

“I still say I should shove everything into a couple of boxes and let them go through it,” Will said.

“I hate to disturb too much in there,” Char said.

“Disturb away,” Allie said. “Or at least, don't leave it all there for me. If it's up to me, I say you let Uncle Will clear the entire thing off, so you can take it over. Aren't you tired of working from this
table, or the couch? I've been telling Dad for a while that you should be the one using the office. I mean, he's always at work so late. It's not like he doesn't get everything done before he leaves the plant.”

She set down her fork and bowed her head. “
Was
. He
was
always at work so late. He
used to
always get all of his work done before he left the plant. When am I going to stop talking about him in present tense?”

“I do the same thing,” Char said. “I think that's normal.”

“Is it normal to call his cell phone, to hear his voice?” Allie asked, still looking down.

“I hope so,” Char said, “because I've been doing that, too.”

Allie raised her eyes to Char's and smiled, though it took her quivering lips two attempts to position themselves correctly. She sniffed and pressed a fist against one eye, then the other. “What about this?” she said. She shifted sideways in her chair and lifted a leg high into the air. On her foot was a men's polka-dotted dress sock.

“Jesus,” Will said. “You are . . .”

Allie lowered her leg quickly, her face reddening. “Stupid, I know,” she said, her eyes filling.

“No,” he said, shooting a hand out to grab her arm. “That's not what I meant.” He looked at Char for help.

“If I do that move, I'll fall over,” Char said, standing. She walked to Allie's side of the table and planted her feet, wiggling her toes so Allie would look down and see what she was wearing. Men's paisley dress socks.

Allie attempted another smile but failed, and her eyes overflowed. “I miss him,” she cried. “So much.”

Char fell to her knees and wrapped her arms around the girl's waist. “Of course you do. I do, too. You don't have to be in there
when I go through the things on his desk. And I won't have Will clear it all off. It's way too soon.”

“No,” Allie said. “It's fine. It's not the desk that made me . . .” She gestured to her wet eyes. “It's just . . .” Her voice broke and she shrugged, giving up.

“It's just the whole thing,” Char finished. “The voice mail and the socks and the past tense and the fact that we're sitting here right now, talking about any of it. About which parts are normal. Because none of it seems normal. Life, without him, will never feel normal.”

Allie sniffed. “Exactly.”

“Well, like I said, you don't need to be part of it.” Char gestured to Bradley's office, which sat fifteen feet away, on the other side of the family room. The back of the house was open concept, with the kitchen, eating area, and family room one large, connected space. Only the office had a door.

“No, I'm fine,” Allie said, standing. She lifted her plate and Will's and carried them to the sink, then came back for Char's. “And I don't want to miss out on any of Uncle Will's last day here.”

“You're welcome to anything in there, of course,” Char said, pointing again to the office. “Anything”—she moved her arm in an arc, taking in the entire house—“anywhere. All the pairs of socks you want. Only, maybe leave me the paisleys.”