Untethered (4 page)

“I'll take dots, you keep paisleys,” Allie said, finally able to smile on the first try. “You want stripes, Uncle Will?”

“I think I'm good on socks,” he said. “You two knock yourselves out.”

“I might want a few things,” Allie told Char. “And I should maybe figure it out fast, so I can let my mom know. She's ordering custom shelving in the guest room—well, in my room, I guess. And
anything that doesn't fit precisely on a shelf? It won't be moving into her place.”

She turned to Will. “You think my dad was anal about things? You should see my mom's condo. Nothing is out of place. Nothing. It's sort of frightening to be there, actually. All the furniture's white. Pink pillows, of course. Pink flowers, pink dishes even. But the stuff you can mess up? Carpets, couches, chairs? All white. I eat standing over the sink, in case a single crumb falls.”

“I'm guessing that's a bit of an exaggeration,” Char said, standing to clear her coffee cup and Will's. “Your mom likes things to be a certain way, but I'm sure if you dropped a crumb or two, you wouldn't be shipped back up here forever.”

The instant the words left her mouth, she froze. But she made herself start moving again, and in the kitchen, she busied herself rinsing the cups and putting them in the dishwasher, so the others couldn't see her face. Or read her thoughts.

N
ot to be gross about it,” Allie said, “but did Dad have life insurance?” They were in Bradley's office, Char behind the desk, Allie on the other side of it, near the door. Behind Allie, Will was kneeling on the floor, putting boxes together. “I mean, are we going to be in trouble? Are you? I think my mom has plenty of—”

“Oh, no,” Char said. “We're fine. Yes, your dad had life insurance, and no, it's not a gross thing to talk about, given the circumstances.” Not surprisingly, Bradley had been meticulous about his accounts, leaving behind a neatly labeled binder of financial statements, usernames, and passwords. Char had heard about people taking months to track down that kind of information. She had merely looked in her husband's desk drawer, found the “Life Insurance” and “Investments” files, and handed them to the lawyer.

She lowered her hand and ran her palm over the surface of Bradley's desk. It was an antique, an enormous piece made of rich cherry, with hand-carved legs and intricate handles. Lifting her hand from the wood, Char touched a finger to each of the paperweights
anchoring tidy stacks of journals—
Automotive News
,
SAE International
,
International Journal of Six Sigma and Competitive Advantage—
and PowerPoint presentations with Bradley's red handwriting in the columns. She held the PowerPoints out to her brother and he set them into one of the boxes.

“It's such a beautiful desk,” Allie said.

Char ran a fingertip along the brass pull on the top drawer. “Mmm-hmm.”

Allie came closer and touched the wood. “I think I was twelve before he even let me touch it. ‘Not with those hands, young lady.' Even when I'd just had a bath!”

“Would you like it?” Char asked. “Your mom might not have room for it now, but I could keep it for you, for as long as you like.”

“I don't think so. I don't think I could . . .” Allie let her sentence trail off, and when she finished it, Char was surprised by the ending. “Move it out of Mount Pleasant,” Allie said.

“This was his favorite place on earth. ‘As odd as that might seem.'” She made air quotes for the last bit. Bradley wasn't apologetic about the love he felt for his hometown, but he acknowledged he was a rare person to be so enamored with a city that had never been in the running for a spot on any “Best Places to Live” list.

“But maybe you're going to leave,” Allie said. “I mean, this isn't your hometown. Maybe you'll want to move to South Carolina to be closer to Will. Or back to D.C.”

She eyed the desk. “It doesn't have to stay in Mount Pleasant. You should keep it. Take it with you when you go. I can take other things to remember him by. I'm betting my mom won't allow it, anyway. You know, unless I have it painted white. Or pink.”

“I don't have any plans to leave,” Char said. “Not until you've at least finished high school, anyway. That way, if you're in California
and you want to come back and see Sydney, and Morgan, and whoever else, you'll have a place to stay.”

Will cleared his throat and Char stared him down. Char's friend Ruth had broken her leg skiing and was devastated not to be able to make the trip from D.C. for Bradley's funeral. She had called Char every day, though, and on Friday, she floated out the idea that maybe Char should consider going back to American University for the next school year. One of the full professors in the journalism department had announced plans to retire in the summer, and the dean was already interviewing possible replacements.

“I know it's too soon to be discussing such a big move,” Ruth told Char. “Don't make any big changes for a year—that's what they tell widows. But I think they'd make an exception in the case where the widow might end up stranded in the middle of nowhere, without family or close friends or the job she really wants, when she could so easily correct all of those things.”

Will thought Char should follow Ruth's advice. She didn't have to accept the job, but she should at least apply for it. Go to D.C. and speak with the dean, he urged her. If Lindy were to let Allie stay in Mount Pleasant, Char could put the brakes on the D.C. plan.

But if Lindy wanted Allie in California, Char would have an escape route in place, to a city that offered a career she actually loved, colleagues she had known for years, and a solid group of friends, led by Ruth. All Mount Pleasant would offer, once Allie left, was an unfulfilling, cobbled-together schedule of adjunct teaching and freelance editing, and a lot of painful memories.

But Char wasn't ready to talk about leaving Michigan yet. As long as Lindy was waffling about where Allie should live, this was where Char needed to focus all of her energies. Allie needed someone constant, grounded. She would never get that from Lindy, so
she needed to feel it from Char. How constant, how grounded, could Char be for the girl if she had one foot out the door to D.C.? Talk of revamping her career could come later, once they knew what Allie's future held. For now, there would be no such talk.

“Really?” Allie said. “You're not dying to get back to D.C.? To be a professor again? Uncle Will's always teasing you about how in love with it you were. The city, and your job—”

“Maybe someday,” Char said. “For now, I'm perfectly happy with my freelance work, and the CMU job.” She pretended not to notice that her brother was glaring at her. “And I'd be happy to have you buzz in for a weekend every few months, to see your pals. And haul me out for hikes in the state land, remind me how old and out of shape I am.”

She pointed to the back wall of the office. Like the back wall of the adjoining family room and dining area, it was floor-to-ceiling glass. Not an inexpensive choice in a climate like Michigan, but worth it, Bradley always said, for the view it gave them.

“Nothing but trees, for miles and miles,” he loved to announce, as he opened his arms wide toward the back windows. Their backyard sloped down to a shallow ravine with a narrow stream at its bottom. A few steps across the wooden planks Bradley had laid down over the stream, and they were standing at the edge of sixty acres of forested state land that had provided them with hours and hours of family hikes.

Most of their hikes began and ended with Allie calling, “Hurry uuuuuppp, you guys!”

“It's like having a puppy,” Bradley had warned Char the first time the three of them went hiking. “We walk straight at a consistent pace, she zooms off in every direction, and every few minutes, she races back to make sure we're still okay. I'm half tempted to
carry cookies in my pocket to reward her each time she returns. Make her sit, and stay.

“It's hard to enjoy the serenity of my hike when this blur of color is shooting across the path in front of me, beside me, behind me, every few minutes. On the bright side, though, it gives me lots of opportunities for this.” He pulled Char to him and kissed her, something Allie deemed “gross” and couldn't stand to witness.

“That's a very bright ‘bride side,'” Char said, kissing him back.

“Ewwwww,” they heard from far off, to their right, followed by the sound of snapping branches as Allie bounded through the woods, her repeated “Ewwwww”s getting fainter and fainter. Laughing, they broke off the kiss and continued hiking.

“It's safe again!” Bradley called out, and seconds later, Allie came sprinting up the trail toward them.

“Should I pat her on the head and say, ‘Good girl'?” Char whispered. Bradley, laughing, did exactly that.

“Daaaaaaad!” Allie ducked her head down and away from her father's hand, then spun left and darted off the trail and into the woods.

Char smiled with the memory, not only of that first hike and those still-precious early kisses, but of the hundreds of hikes the three of them had taken since then, and the many later kisses she and Bradley had shared. Allie was watching her closely, and Char blinked, willing her eyes to remain dry. She didn't want Allie's memories of her hikes with her father to be marred by the image of Char bawling about them.

“You'd stay here until I graduate, just to make it easier for me to come back and see my friends?” Allie asked.

Will tapped the backs of the teenager's legs with a box. “Don't pretend that's surprising to you.”

“No,” Allie said. “Of course not. It's just . . . nice.”

Char directed her gaze, and the conversation, to the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that made up the wall opposite the window. “Do you want any of those? Wouldn't take up much room in your mom's condo.”

Typical of Bradley, the books were organized into categories: professional texts, general reference books such as dictionaries and parenting guides, nonfiction, fiction. They stood like soldiers, straight-backed and orderly, their spines aligned with precision so that no single title protruded farther than its neighbors. Allie once confessed that she used to pull a book out an inch while her father wasn't looking, to see how long it would take him to notice and push the offending title back into place. It had never taken him long.

Allie found her dad's meticulousness to be “totally dorky.” “As much as it's against my own interests to say this,” Bradley once told his new wife, “I have to admit I think Allie's right on this one. Never has anyone ever found this particular quality of mine to be appealing.” But Char wasn't “anyone,” and more than a few of their rolls in the sheets together had been initiated by her walking into a room to discover her husband reorganizing items by size or color or height or function. She would laugh at him, tease him for it, and then attack him.

It drove him into fits when she or Allie stacked the bowls unevenly in the kitchen cupboard. “There are eight bowls,” he would announce. “Eight. It's a number divisible by two. Two stacks, four bowls each. Who in her right mind would even dream of three and five? It's preposterous!”

But the bowls continued to appear in unequal stacks, and Bradley continued to rant about it, and to redistribute them. And his wife continued to pull him to the bedroom every time she caught
him doing it. “I used to think Allie was stacking the bowls the wrong way on purpose, to mess with my head,” Bradley told Char after one such session in bed. “Now I'm beginning to suspect it's someone else in the house who's sabotaging the china, and for a very different reason.”

Char felt the corners of her eyes burn, and she turned quickly away from Allie, raising a tissue to her face with the pretense she was about to sneeze. She wiped her wet eyes and took a moment to compose herself. When she turned back, she found Allie looking at Will and shaking her head, a thumb pointing behind her, toward Char. Will's hands were raised chest high, his shoulders lifted.

“What?” Char asked, looking at each of them in turn. “I thought I was going to sneeze, that's all.” Will shook his head and went back to the boxes and Allie said, “Whatever,” and stepped to the bookshelves.

Walking her fingers over the spines of one row, Allie said, “The books he used to read to me are all in my room. Those are the ones I want to keep. They're the ones with all the memories. Although . . .” She scanned the shelves. “Where is it? Could he have . . . Oh! There it is!”

She stepped to her right, in front of the “General Reference” section, bent, and pulled something out. Turning to Char, she held it up victoriously. It was an old road atlas. “I was starting to wonder if he'd gotten rid of it.”

“Never!” Char said. “It was like a Bible to him. Or a diary. Or—”

“All of those things,” Allie said. She flipped through the atlas, stopping now and then at a page and tracing her index finger over something. Quietly she said, “We took a lot of trips.”

Without seeing the pages, Char knew what Allie was tracing:
Bradley's handwriting. He had bought the atlas before Allie was a week old, he told Char. He was so eager to take his daughter road tripping and camping throughout Michigan and the Midwest. Lindy would have no part of roughing it, so it was a daddy-daughter thing from the start.

Bradley carted the atlas with them on every trip, marking their route with a red pen, noting the places he planned to stop, circling the locations they had loved the most, and writing notes about their stay.

“Great burgers here!”

“Call ahead to reserve lakeside campsite—place fills quickly.”

“Cool campsite, but bring more bug spray next time. Mosquitoes 100 / Allie + Dad 0.”

“You're such a dork, Dad,” Allie said every time she saw him making a new annotation in the atlas. But any time he had the book out, she flipped through the pages and reread all the notes he had made over the years.

Char had been prepared to let them continue their daddy-daughter tradition on their own, but when Allie found out her stepmom liked camping, the girl insisted she be included in their annual treks. Soon they were making a few trips each summer, and each time Bradley produced the atlas and his red pen at the end of the day, Char joined her stepdaughter in teasing him about it.