All Adults Here(13)

His mother started riffling through the quilts on the bed, separating them out in piles based on the colors and patterns she liked and then unfolding them to look for stains. She was engrossed, petting the stiff cotton squares, clearly thinking about how much she’d pay, and how much she’d charge for them in the store once she brought them home. August turned toward the closet, which was open, as if the girl who’d lived in the room was in the process of getting dressed and had just been raptured away.

The closet wasn’t full; there were only a dozen or so things on hangers, waving slightly with the movement of August’s hand. He brushed his fingers across them, just feeling the fabric. It was easy to tell when something was well made, if it was worth money, and that had little to do with the label inside. He stopped on a white eyelet dress and swiveled the skirt out so that he could see the whole thing.

“Pretty,” his mom said, looking over her shoulder. “Last days of summer? We can sell that. Even after Labor Day.” She straightened her back and hugged a small stack of quilts against her chest.

“I thought you meant me,” August said, and fluttered his eyelashes.

“Always,” his mom said, blowing a kiss into the air. August looked more like his mother than his father, a fact that always made him happy. August blew a kiss back, making his face her mirror, and she smiled at him before turning to the dollhouse and making a fuss, just as he knew she would.





Chapter 8





A Funny Story



Porter had a key to the Big House, though she had to riffle through her pockets several times to remember if she had it on her—she was finding pregnancy to be something of a fugue state, where she often couldn’t remember whether she’d already brushed her teeth or washed her hair and would end up doing something two or three times, just to make sure, or realizing at noon that she’d done neither. Porter kicked off her shoes at the door and walked in.

“Mom? Cecelia? Anybody home?” Porter knew that some of her friends from growing up, the ones who’d left town, felt like they traveled back in time to their adolescence when they were around their parents, and within the walls of their childhood bedrooms, as if the pictures of Marilyn Monroe and Joey McIntyre taped to the wallpaper were ready to jump straight back into their ongoing conversation. That was easy, coming home and being a kid again, because presumably they got to be an adult the other 360 days a year. When you were in your childhood house on a regular basis, it was harder to separate the past and the present—nostalgia only worked with distance.

Porter was excited to see Cecelia, the second-best thing her little brother had ever done, after teaching Porter how to properly roll joints when she was in high school, despite the fact that he was younger than she was. He’d always been like that—preternaturally confident in his own abilities. He must have practiced in the dark for hours, but Porter hadn’t seen it. She’d thought about telling her brother that she was pregnant—he would be the most enthusiastic member of her family, she knew—but even though Porter could vividly remember the day that Cecelia was born, her brother’s experience now seemed like a remote continent, too far away from her growing belly to speak the same language. Nicky had been twenty-three, still a kid himself. There was nothing about his experience that was the same as hers. Same with Elliot, who had a wife and a plan and checklists and a hospital bag sitting by the door at twenty-five weeks. It was easier to keep the secret in. That’s where the baby was, after all.

Porter could see her mom’s behind waggling in the air by the counter, her elbows ahead on the kitchen island, the phone snuggled in between her ear and shoulder, a 1950s teenager. Astrid was whispering.

“Mom,” Porter said again, coming close enough to lightly touch Astrid on the back. She didn’t want to scare her—Astrid was almost seventy, and even though her mother had always seemed strong and fit, to an almost immortal degree, Porter had heard about Barbara Baker from Wesley Drewes, and sudden death seemed closer, though of course statistically it had just moved further away. In any case, Porter was nervous.

Astrid swiveled around. “Oh, hi! Hi. Okay,” she spoke into the phone. “Listen, Porter just walked in the door, I’ll talk to you later, okay? Okay. Yes. Me too. Thanks so much, okay. Bye-bye.”

“Where’s Cecelia?” Porter asked, setting down a box of pastries on the kitchen island. Astrid wound around her, following the cord back to the wall, and hung up the phone.

“She’s upstairs, taking a shower, I think. Listen, you’re not going to believe this, but I called Bob—you heard about Barbara, didn’t you?” Porter nodded. “I called Bob to offer my condolences, because I was right there, you know, and you know what he told me?” Astrid’s mouth opened like a jack-o’-lantern, a wide, gaping maw. “She’d just left him and moved in with her mother at Heron Meadows! She was living with her mother! At the old folks’ home! Her mother is so out of it, the poor thing, she probably thought Barbara was her new nurse. It’s the craziest thing I ever heard.” Astrid blew air out of her nose, an involuntary snort.

Porter opened the box and started to eat one, cupping her hand underneath to catch crumbs. “Is this a funny story?”

Astrid waved her hand in front of her face. “Nothing’s funny, everything’s funny! It’s life! Life is finally deciding that your demented—is that what the word is? Dementia’d?—anyway, that your ancient mother is more fun to be around than your husband of thirty-five years, and then getting hit by a school bus! She was probably mailing her divorce papers, do you think? I have to ask Darrell. He delivers mail to Shear Beauty, I bet he’d know. That mailbox has got to be on his route.”