A Little Hope(20)
He felt so selfish delighting in this young person when Kay had nothing else. Over the years, she joined the garden club, a book club at the library, the country club holiday committee, but she still seemed to be languishing. He would find her lying on the sofa with her pots of violets behind her in the window. In her nightstand drawer he found a journal in which she regularly wrote letters to Benny. He couldn’t bring himself to read them.
He thought about Iris (his daughter, his daughter) at night when he couldn’t sleep. He whispered prayers to watch over her as Kay slept beside him, once in a while reaching over to hold his hand. “You’re missing out,” he wanted to say. “You’d love her,” he wanted to say. Kay had always wanted a daughter. God, how she would have loved to pick out prom dresses or go to the cosmetics counter at a department store with Iris or listen to her talk about boys. Kay was still so girlish at heart, Iris would rejuvenate her.
A few times he tried to mention her, but he stopped when Kay scrunched her eyebrows in that angry way. “Never mind,” he’d say.
Now twenty-three and in graduate school for occupational therapy, Iris told him about the baby yesterday. “You’re going to be a grandpa,” she said. She hardly ever called him Dad—maybe she sensed how complicated that word was for him.
Of course it’s too soon, he thinks. Of course she should have waited longer. Of course she barely knows this guy in her program—who she says stays over at her apartment most nights. Maybe, he thinks, she should have considered other options here, but Iris has a good head on her shoulders. A baby. Grandpa. He can’t help but feel ecstatic.
Now in the church, he watches Kay put her rosary away. He wants her to be a part of this. He thinks of Benny and what they missed out on. He wants to hold her hand, tell her he’s sorry for the thing with Melinda, for the shame he brought with Iris, his child that no one knows about. But on the other hand, they could gain something. They could be grandparents. Wouldn’t Kay love that? Wouldn’t she be as good as she is with the Tyler girl? Couldn’t she forget where this baby came from? He wants to say: She renewed me. She almost, almost fixed me. Let Iris help you, too.
He rests his hand on her back again and they walk slowly up the aisle. “I have news,” he tells her and she looks at him in that way.
“I don’t like news,” she says, and shakes her head. She can tell from his look. She always can. “It’s about the girl?”
He nods. “We need to talk about her.”
“You know better,” she whispers.
“Hear me out.”
“No.” She pulls away from him, and he holds back. She trembles as she slowly marches toward the door, barely limping now, her ankle and foot cooperating. “No,” she says again.
Alone, he touches each row of wooden pew after wooden pew. He looks at the soft carpet below his feet, and the holy statues in the back. He knows all the fake candles they’ve lit behind them are flickering, and it makes him happy they will burn through the night. He feels relieved already, but he doesn’t know why. He hums some recessional hymn in his head as he leaves. He has to tell her. Outside in the car, he will tell her about Iris and pray she will listen.
8. Until You Do
The Cul-De-Sac is a new restaurant outside of Wharton on Route 23, about a mile past Crowley Cleaners. Out front are pots of boxwood around the benches, and the dumpsters are off in the corner surrounded by a lattice screen. They designed the interior of the place, for some reason, to look like a dive bar. Bowls of peanuts on the tables (with a peanut allergy warning on the double glass doors), cluttered pictures on the walls, red leather booths, and a cement floor that looks aged but is so clean it almost shines. Freddie holds her daughter’s hand as they wait for a table with Mr. and Mrs. Lionel by the hostess station. Servers in black T-shirts and jeans hustle by, and the podium with the menus and pagers is draped in a pine swag. Freddie wouldn’t have picked this restaurant, but what can she do?
Her husband pleaded to get out of the house. A round of chemo later, almost two months since the follow-up diagnosis, Greg has gotten so tired of the walls of their home, of her hovering. He sits on the long bench to their left, next to an old woman who keeps leaning over to talk to him. Greg sitting while they all are standing, who would rather die than sit because he never sits. How many times, she thinks, did this man give up his seat for an elderly woman on a bus, on a train, and now there he sits right beside one.
Freddie is surprised she convinced Greg to sit. “I’m fine,” he said. She glared at him, hoping the Lionels wouldn’t notice. She gave him that please just do it expression, and she sees how resigned he looks now as he slumps and converses with the strangers near him. Greg in a blue ski cap because his hair is gone. The woman keeps blotting at her nose with a crumpled tissue, and Freddie wants to rush over there and pump hand sanitizer into Greg’s palm. Now she wishes she had let him stand. A cold could be his end.
He looks over at Freddie with his wide eyes, so much more clear since some of his eyelashes have fallen out that she can see hints of blue to their hazel. “Look,” he said one day. “Confetti.” He held some of the small dark hairs in his hand and blew them into the air. “I hope you made a wish,” he said quietly, his voice only half joking.
She tries to make small talk with Alex and Kay, but she can’t take her eyes off Greg. Addie twists against her. “I’m going over to see Daddy,” she says. Freddie watches her safe passage to her father, and when he says, “Puppy dog!” and scoops her up, something wilts inside her. “Please Come Home for Christmas” plays on the speakers amid the background noise of pagers going off and a group of smiling servers singing “Happy Birthday” to a woman in the distance whose face is illuminated by a brownie with a candle in it.