They May Not Mean To, But They Do(27)

“Daddy, he’s here to help you.”

“I don’t need help. What are you talking about? Help? I don’t need help. You’re the one who needs help.”

“Well, Mom needs help. You don’t want her back in the hospital, do you?”

“Hospital? Nobody tells me anything. Where’s your mother?”

“She’s resting. Do you want her to drop dead from exhaustion? Then who would take care of you?”

He looked pointedly at her.

“Me?” she said. “I wouldn’t last two minutes.”

“Honey?”

“Yes, Daddy?”

He motioned her to lean down again. “There’s a black man in the house,” he whispered.

*

“I knew he was a Republican,” she said later to Freddie on the phone. “But he never struck me as any more racist than anyone else his age. The uncomfortable kind of racism, not the suspicious kind.”

“He’s not himself, though.”

“I hope not.” That didn’t come out right. “Anyway, he’s incredibly difficult one minute, then he just switches over to sweetness. When I left the room, he and Walter were sitting side by side eating vanilla ice cream, watching NY1.”

“That’s the real Aaron, the vanilla ice cream one.”

Freddie was a gracious person. It was one of the things Molly loved about her.

“Thank you for being a gracious person, Freddie,” she said. “Even in the face of ghastly in-laws.”

Freddie laughed. How lovely that laugh was. How close Freddie seemed.

“They could have stopped with the telephone…” Molly said.

“Who?”

“… No television, no cars or planes, no computers. Just telephones, the invention that allows me to hear you from so far away, the magical telephone. It would have been enough.”

“That and penicillin,” Freddie said.

When they hung up, Freddie called her sisters. They were the first and second children, born only eleven months apart. They liked to call themselves Irish twins, though they were not even Irish. Freddie was the youngest, separated from Pamela and Laurel by almost a decade, but they acted like little sisters to Freddie’s mind, giggling and teasing each other, trading clothes, trying each other’s lipsticks, doing each other’s hair. Freddie had never paid much attention to them, two squealy older girls off on their dates, counting their sweaters. It was no surprise when, both divorced, they opened a boutique together, though why they chose Rio de Janeiro she could not fathom. They must stand out in that city like two sore thumbs, two plump pink sore thumbs, she thought. They resembled Freddie’s mother, though they did not remind Freddie of her mother. They were pinker than her mother, who had skin that was soft and blushing, and they were chubby. Freddie’s mother had spoken like an adult woman who hoped someone might listen to her now and then. Her older daughters spoke like girls at a slumber party, breathy and secretive, then shrieking with laughter. And now, presumably, in Portuguese. Freddie could not envision them among what she imagined to be the slender, sophisticated bronzed beauties of Rio. They had done well with their boutique, but when Freddie tried to picture them in their store, she saw only the two of them selling clothes back and forth to each other.

She had been closer to her brothers in age and in temperament. But they had grown up and gone their own ways, like her sisters. If any one of them had moved any farther away from Los Angeles, they’d have ended up being home again, the world being round and all.

“I’m keeping you informed,” Freddie said when Pamela answered. Laurel immediately picked up another extension. How quaint, Freddie thought. Like our grandparents.

“He’s a marvel,” Pamela said.

“What are you two doing for Christmas?” Laurel asked.

“Well, Molly had to go to New York to see her mother, so…”

“No, I meant you and Dad.”

“Oh.”

“He won’t know what day it is anyway,” said Pamela.

“I could take him to the track.”

Neither of them thought that was a good idea, but they were sure Freddie would come up with something.

“I picture you two sitting in front of the fire at Green Garden,” Laurel said.

“Oh, perfect!” said Pamela. “Drinking eggnog. Just the thought of you and Dad in front of the crackling fire makes me nostalgic.”

Freddie did not tell them Green Garden had no fireplace.

She called her brothers next, but she got the time wrong and woke one up, and the other did not answer.

“Molly, I miss you,” she texted.

“Never again” said the text that came back.

*

There were certain things about the Christmas Hanukkah season that Coco did not like. First of all, she felt guilty for having a Christmas tree, not because she was Jewish, but because it was such a waste. A living thing cut down for nothing.

“I understand not eating meat,” Daniel had said the first time it came up, when Ruby was two. “I understand being a vegetarian. But you’re not a vegetarian. And even if you were a vegetarian, you would eat vegetables. Vegetables would die so you could live. Isn’t a Christmas tree like a vegetable? It grows out of the ground. It’s like a big stalk of broccoli.”