French Braid(19)

“Good, huh?” Alice asked him.

“I’ve got to admit,” he said, and Mercy said, “They’re delicious!” David, who was often distrustful of meat, cut himself the smallest bite and chewed it gingerly, with just his front teeth, but a moment later Alice saw him take another bite, so she knew he thought it was okay, at least. And he ate a lot of his salad.

Lily was not at the table. She was in her room with the door shut. They’d called her name twice and she still hadn’t come out, so Mercy rose to go knock. No answer. She opened the door and stuck her head in. “Honey?” she asked. They heard Lily say something. Mercy was silent a moment, and then she said, “Well, suit yourself,” and closed the door and returned to the table. She seemed more amused than distressed. “Young love,” she said lightly to Robin, and she picked up her fork.

“What: you’re going to let her skip supper?” Robin asked.

“She’ll be all right,” Mercy said. She speared a tomato wedge.

“Why are you humoring her, Mercy? It’s the last night of our vacation! We’re eating a special dinner! She needs to come out and join the family like a civilized human being!”

“Oh, Robin. She’s brokenhearted. You remember how it feels.”

“No, I do not remember. She’s fifteen years old. She’s going to fall for some new boy before the week is out; you watch.”

“She says nobody understands her and she wants to die,” Mercy told him. Then she asked, “Can I have the rest of your salad?”

She meant the three chunks of avocado pear sitting alone on his plate. He’d picked his way around them as fastidiously as Cap would pick around any vegetables in his food bowl. “Go ahead,” he told her, and he drew back to give her room to stab a chunk with her fork.

So Lily was forgotten, and it was probably just as well. She’d only have sat there sulky and tear-stained, dampening the atmosphere. Which was very festive, really. Mercy was teasing Robin now with a forkful of avocado pear, and Robin was pretending to shrink away in horror, and David was grinning at both of them.

“Alice took another bite of pork,” her narrator said, “and savored its subtle seasoning.”





3


On the morning of September 6, 1970—a Sunday, clear and cool but nowhere near fall-like yet—Robin and Mercy Garrett drove their son, David, to Islington, Pennsylvania, to start his freshman year at Islington College. They settled him in his room, they introduced themselves to his roommate (a nice enough boy, by the looks of him, though not half as nice as her boy, Mercy felt), and they said their goodbyes and left.

For most of the drive home, they were quiet. Occasionally they would say things like “Those walls could have used a coat of paint, in my opinion” (this from Robin) and “I wonder if David will remember a single word of my laundry instructions” (from Mercy). But generally, they stayed sunk in that sort of silence that radiates unspoken thoughts—complicated, conflicting thoughts cluttering the air inside the car.

Then, on the Baltimore Beltway, fifteen minutes from home, Robin said, “I suppose we should kick up our heels tonight, now that we’re back to just the two of us. Go out for a fancy meal or, I don’t know, have wild sex on the living-room floor or something”—a dry little laugh here—“but you know? I’m feeling kind of let down, to be honest.”

“Well, of course you are, honey,” Mercy told him. “We’ve lost the last remaining chick in our nest! It’s natural we would feel low.”

And she did feel low; no question about it. In many ways David was the child closest to her heart, although she’d expected to feel closer to her girls. After Alice and Lily left home it was just David and his parents, and the chaos died down and sometimes Mercy was able to hold actual brief conversations with him. Besides which, Alice had always been so bossy and confident, and Lily was such a, well, mess, really; but David had a sort of stillness about him and a listening, attentive quality that Mercy had come to appreciate, these past few years.

But. Even so. Mercy had a plan in mind, and of the many emotions that she was feeling as they drove home, the predominate one was anticipation.



* * *



—

On Monday morning, as soon as Robin left for work, Mercy went to her closet and retrieved a flattened Sunkist carton she’d picked up at the supermarket. She opened it out, reinforced the bottom with packing tape, and started filling it with clothes.

Not all her clothes. Oh, no. To look in her bureau drawers, once she’d rifled them, you would never suppose anything was missing. Knit tops remained, but just the ones she didn’t wear very often—the faded ones, the unbecoming ones. Underpants remained, but just the ones with the waistbands going. The carton was not over-large—she had to be able to carry it for several blocks—and she didn’t pack it too tightly. Plenty of clothes still hung in her closet that she hadn’t even looked at yet.

But she had all the time in the world for that.

She folded the flaps of the carton shut, hefted it to one hip, carried it down to the kitchen, and let herself out the back door.

It was Labor Day, and although Robin had gone in to work as usual, a lot of the neighbors were still asleep. She walked down her street without encountering a single other person, and once she’d turned onto Belvedere the few pedestrians she saw were strangers. They didn’t give her so much as a glance.