French Braid(65)

And then she just somehow crumpled up. He had to grab her arm or she might have fallen, and she turned and buried her face in his chest and started crying so hard that she got his shirt wet, and he kept saying, “There, now. I know. You’ve had a terrible shock. I am so, so sorry.”

But it wasn’t the shock she was crying about. She was crying because she’d just walked out on the only person in her world who called her Kendall.





7


By the summer of 2014, the only members of the Garrett family still living in Baltimore were Lily and Eddie. Not under the same roof, of course. Lily was still in the Cedarcroft house, although she’d lost Morris to cancer the previous winter. And Eddie owned a row house in Hampden, which the family found ironic in light of the fact that Robin and Mercy had forsaken Hampden some sixty years before. Nowadays, however, the neighborhood was considered hip. Residents often had to park their cars several blocks from home because their streets were full of outsiders dining at trendy new restaurants and shopping for funky jewelry.

Both Robin and Mercy were dead now—Robin less than a year after Mercy, as if he had seen no point in carrying on without her—and Alice and Kevin had retired to Florida, where Kevin could golf year-round while Alice audited courses at the local college. In theory Lily was also retired, but like her father before her she had a tendency to drop by the store from time to time purely to keep her hand in, as she put it. Eddie always welcomed her and brought her up-to-date on her favorite longtime customers and the newest line of products. (“Bidets!” she said. “What next! Who in all of Baltimore even knows what a bidet is?”) Eddie had been working at Wellington’s since his teens. Of all the Garrett grandchildren only he had inherited Robin’s fondness for tools, and his interest in how things worked and what might make them work better. It seemed only right that he should take over the business. Originally there’d been talk of his signing on with his father’s firm instead, but he had zero enthusiasm for malls and suburban developments. Really the talk had been all on Kevin’s side, not his.

Outside of the store, though, Lily and Eddie didn’t mingle much. She had her friends; he had his. They led very separate lives.

So he was mildly surprised when she phoned him at home one Sunday morning and invited him to lunch. “Lunch?” he said. “You mean today?”

“I know it’s short notice,” she said, “but I’ve been packing up my belongings, and before I call the Salvation Army I want to find out if there’s anything here you might like.”

“Why are you packing up your belongings?”

“I’m moving to Asheville, North Carolina, to help Serena with the baby.”

“What! You’re moving for good?”

“Right.”

“You’re selling your house? You’re buying a new one?”

“Well, not buying a new one. I don’t need to. Serena and Jeff have an in-law apartment on their third floor.”

He was taken aback. He stood holding the kitchen phone and gazing blankly at his wall calendar, a pair of pruning shears dangling from his left hand.

“Serena is going crazy!” Lily said. She sounded pleased, for some reason. “She was crying so hard when she called that I couldn’t make out a word she was saying, but eventually I managed to gather that motherhood is turning out to be a whole lot harder than she was expecting.”

“Well, maybe…how old is her baby, again?”

“Four and a half weeks,” Lily said.

He couldn’t remember the baby’s name. Or even its sex, for that matter. Avoiding all pronouns, he said, “Could the baby just be temporarily colicky or something?”

“What’s that got to do with it? It’s Serena who’s crying, not Peter.”

Peter. Okay.

“All I meant was,” Eddie said, “maybe this is just a difficult stage, and pretty soon she’ll get the hang of it, so you don’t have to move there permanently.”

“Well, of course it’s just a stage! She’ll get the hang of it in no time, if I know Serena. So I have to go right now, quick-quick, before she finds out she doesn’t need me after all.”

Eddie started laughing.

“What’s so funny?” she asked.

“I advise you not to put your house up for sale yet, is all,” he said.

“Too late!” she said. “I’ve already listed it with Dodd, Goldman. Morris’s old firm.”

“Oh,” Eddie said.

“So can you come for lunch, or not?”

“Yeah, sure,” he said. “I’ll be happy to come.”

He figured he’d take a few items off her hands just to be polite and then return them when she came back. Because she would come back, he was sure of it. Serena would prove more than adequate to the challenges of motherhood. And Lily was a Baltimore girl, born and bred. She’d go out of her mind in Asheville.



* * *



—

When they’d settled on what time he was expected for lunch (one p.m., which meant he’d be starving, having awakened at six), he hung up and went back outside to finish pruning. Claude was still seated at the patio table, reading the Sunday paper and drinking coffee. He was not an early riser himself, or a gardener, either. You could sense that just by the look of him—his comfortable, barrel-shaped body and slouched posture, his unkempt frizzy brown beard and smudged spectacles. When he saw Eddie he raised his eyebrows inquiringly, and Eddie said, “That was my aunt Lily.”