All Adults Here(10)
Astrid helped Cecelia to her room and then gave the girl some privacy, to settle in. Maybe that was part of the problem, how little space Cecelia had at home, how the three of them were always on top of one another like Charlie Bucket’s grandparents, all in one bed. Astrid padded back down to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. It had been so long since there was a child in the house, she had spent days shopping and baking and cooking. Cecelia’s nutrition was at stake, her energy. Astrid had baked zucchini muffins with walnuts, an enormous casserole of macaroni and cheese, turkey meatballs, chocolate chip cookies, granola bars studded with plump raisins. She’d bought eight bananas. There were enough tomatoes to can and freeze soup and pasta sauce for a whole winter. Peanut butter, almond butter, three kinds of jam. If Cecelia was anything like her father had been, or her aunt and uncle, she would somehow still open the fridge and the pantry doors and moan that there was nothing to eat. But Astrid had done her duty. The blessing of being a grandparent was knowing all the things that had to be done and having the time to do them. Some of her friends thought that extra patience came with age, but that wasn’t it, of course. Their calendars just weren’t as full. Astrid was clear-eyed about her position. Nicky hadn’t said, Oh, Mom, please talk to Cecelia about everything, please help. He’d said, Can she come? And the answer was yes. Astrid was an able body; she was a safe house. He was complimenting her ability to keep children alive, not her parenting skills. Astrid knew that out of all her children, Nicky trusted her decisions the least. She was not his first choice, and the situation had to be fairly dire for him to even have considered the notion.
* * *
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Astrid wanted to call Bob Baker. She’d been there, after all, and had seen it happen. Wouldn’t he want to hear from her? Astrid hadn’t ever called him in her life. She should write a note, she should take a platter of baked chicken to his door. She would do that too. But while she was standing there, somehow no longer alone in her big house, all she could think of was Bob, newly alone in his. Astrid walked over to the telephone on the wall—oh, how Elliot mocked her for her rotary phone, cream-colored and heavy as a brick—and dialed. Bob answered right away, and when he did, she realized that she hadn’t imagined a scenario in which he would actually answer. It was today, after all, somehow still just today that it had happened, and Astrid knew from her own widowhood how many things would be on Bob’s immediate list, things he likely had never thought about: hospitals, morgues, funeral parlors, calling the rest of their family with the news. Astrid knew some people (organized women, all) with terminal cancer who had set up elaborate phone trees, exactly the way they’d done for unplanned school snow days before email, to tell everyone about their deaths when the time came. Bob didn’t have a phone tree. Somehow, he was at home. For a split second, Astrid worried that Bob didn’t know, and that she’d have to be the one to tell him.
“Hi there, Bob, it’s Astrid Strick.” She tried to remember the last time they’d actually exchanged anything more than a cursory nod. Maybe when she’d been behind him in line at Clapham Organic, or standing at neighboring pumps at the gas station? But even that was just polite small talk, no more than you’d have with an actual stranger. It had probably been thirty years since they’d really spoken, back in the time of dinosaurs, when she was still young enough to imagine age was a basis for a friendship.
“Hi there.” Bob waited. He didn’t sound surprised to hear from her. Of course. “I understand you were there when it happened.”
“I was, Bob.” Astrid wound the cord around her finger, watching her flesh pinken and bulge. “It was the damnedest thing, and I am so sorry. Barbara deserved better.”
“She did.” Bob was not a garrulous man.
“I’ve got my granddaughter here now, Bob, but I’d like to bring over some food in the next day or so, would that be all right? I’d drop off a dish, you know, something easy to warm up. Just to cross one thing off the list, is that all right?”
“Sure, Astrid.” Bob paused so long that Astrid thought he might have hung up. Then he inhaled long and hard, almost a snore. “Well, she was living over at her mother’s, these last few months. At Heron Meadows. So I’ve gotten pretty good at feeding myself. I’d still be happy for a dish, though, don’t get me wrong; I just wanted you to know.”
Astrid tilted her head to the left. “You don’t say. Well, a man’s got to eat. I’ll stop by. Thanks, Bob. So sorry, again. I’ve been there. It’s a horrible thing to have to go through, and I’m sorry.” Astrid hung up the phone with a decisive clunk and immediately doubled over with laughter, the source of which she was not quite sure. It bubbled up from her toes and roiled through her belly and came out her mouth like a gassy belch, and for a full few minutes, Astrid found that she couldn’t stop. Her eyes watered and then they, too, sprung leaks, and the world turned blurry, and Astrid made her way into the bathroom and shut the door behind herself, just in case Cecelia came down the stairs and happened upon her. Her own children had never seen her cry. She sat on the closed toilet lid and tried to take deep breaths. When Russell died, she followed his body to the funeral parlor and then picked up his shirts at the dry cleaner on her way home. Astrid’s greatest strength, as a person, had always been her iron tear ducts. When Russell died, she had reigned like a queen, or the dictator of a very small country. Everything was done on time, everything was handled. What happened to Barbara seemed too cruel to imagine: a woman who had finally decided to handle things on her own, as she wanted to. It could have been her, Astrid, who’d been caught by the bus’s bumper, or it could have been Birdie, and then what? They would have each mourned a friend. Astrid’s children would have limped on without her help. That pierced her too—the thought of her children, alone, none of the three of them quite adults, still, even now! When she was their age, she’d been ancient. It wasn’t funny, none of it was funny. Astrid felt like she had food poisoning, like whatever she had ingested was foul and bad and needed to get out of her body one way or the other. Astrid breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth, the way she did when there was turbulence on airplanes. When she was finally calm again, Astrid picked up the phone and called Birdie’s cellphone, not even giving her a chance to say hello.