Writers & Lovers(70)

‘It’s nothing,’ I tell them. ‘It’s normal.’

‘What?’ Muriel is laughing. I am whimpering. Harry is hugging us both, dipping us from side to side. ‘You little sod,’ he says. ‘You scared the daylights out of me.’





Oscar and Silas are on my machine when I get back. ‘Now I have to make all kinds of shapes out of their hair when I shampoo it,’ Oscar says. ‘And it adds an extra forty-five minutes to bath time, which was plenty long enough before. When can I see you?’

‘I’m sure it went okay, but let me know, all right?’ Silas says.

I call Silas back and get his machine. ‘It was nothing.’ I pause, hoping he’ll pick up even though I know he’s at work. ‘I’m fine.’ I hang up and call Caleb.

‘Oh. Oh. Thank the Lord. Thank the Lord.’ He’s imitating a televangelist. ‘Oh Puritan Pilgrim Plymouth Rock miracle!’

‘Praise be!’ I say, laughing, but I feel the truth of it. Praise be.

‘I’m coming back there. I decided that either way I should drive Mom’s car to you.’

‘I thought Ashley needed it.’

Ashley is Phil’s daughter. ‘Ashley is an asshole who can go fuck herself. I’m quoting Phil here. I get along with her fine.’

‘You’re going to drive across the country by yourself?’

‘I need some head-clearing me-time.’

This did not sound like Caleb.

‘Adam said I could stay in his guestroom.’

He’d already run this by Adam? ‘You’re really coming?’

‘I am.’

Four days later he’s at my door.

I haven’t seen him since the funeral. He looks different, taut. Hopped up, my mother might say. He reeks of Cheetos and maybe some Funyuns.

He doesn’t think I look so great, either. ‘You look like a rabid gerbil.’

‘I haven’t slept in so long.’

‘Oh sweetie.’ He hugs me hard. ‘It’s okay. It’s gonna be okay.’

It’s so much easier to cry when there are arms around you.

‘Thirty years ago they would have said you were having a nervous breakdown and sent you to McLean’s. Remember Mrs. Wheelock?’

I don’t want to remember Mrs. Wheelock. I don’t want what was happening to me to be called a nervous breakdown, a label from my childhood that scared me even before I knew what it meant.

He asks about my health insurance. I remind him I’ve been fired, and he says I probably have Cobra. I have no idea what he’s talking about. He says I probably have full coverage at least until the end of the month and after that could pay to keep it going for longer. I tell him I’ve had enough doctors’ appointments for the next ten years, but he means for a shrink.

‘You probably have a certain number of visits per year. Maybe you could find someone who would be willing to schedule them all before the end of the month.’

‘A nice rule-breaking shrink.’

I offer him a shower, and he peeks in my bathroom and says he’ll be doing all his personal hygiene at the big house.

‘I brought you something,’ he says.

‘I know you did.’

Out the window is my mother’s car. It isn’t the blue Mustang of my childhood or the white Rabbit of my teens. It’s a black Ford I’ve only been in a few times. I’m relieved by how few memories I have of her in it.

But he reaches into a bag and hands me a round cookie tin.

‘Yum, five-day-old cookies,’ I say. ‘You shouldn’t have.’

‘It’s not cookies.’

I don’t open the tin. I just shake it. Things swish around inside. ‘We did this already. With Gil.’ This friend of his had come with us up Camelback Mountain to the same spot where my mother had spread Javier’s ashes sixteen years earlier, and we tossed into the wind the gray clumps of sand that were supposed to be my mother’s body. I was mad Gil was there. Caleb had let him take a scoop.

‘Not Gil. Giles. That was just half, remember? We agreed the rest should go in the Atlantic.’

I don’t remember. I don’t remember much about those days after she died.

‘I thought we could go up to Horseshoe tomorrow.’ Horseshoe Beach was where she always took us. ‘Adam may take the day off and come.’

I give him a look.

‘It’s not the same,’ he says. ‘He knew her really well. She loved Adam.’

‘Can’t we just do this alone?’

‘I think I need him there.’

‘Be careful, Caleb.’

‘That is not always my strength.’





I tell Caleb about the weekend with the kids and Oscar’s mood when he returned from Provo, but how he’s called me at least once a day since then.

‘Invite him to dinner so I can smell him out,’ he says. ‘I have good instincts.’

‘You have terrible instincts. He’ll just charm your pants off.’

‘Oh, I hope so!’

I smack him and pick up the phone.

We eat at Adam’s. When we arrive, he pours us glasses of wine and we sit on the stools while he stirs a thick risotto on the stove. Adam quickly figures out that Oscar is Oscar Kolton.