Flying Solo(10)

Patrick had spoken up first, in the confident tones of doctor privilege as well as with the authority of the eldest—Number One, Laurie always called him. “I could get maybe a couple of days off,” he said, “but with the kids and the hospital and Marianne starting her business, I can’t take it on. I’m sorry.” Patrick’s kids were ten and twelve, and his wife Marianne had just started doing some kind of IT consulting that Laurie didn’t understand.

“Unfortunately, I can’t either,” Joey said. For him to speak up next made sense, since, despite being Number Four, he was the most competitive with Patrick. The two of them had had closely aligned interests in sports and science when they were growing up, and Joey had once burned a hole in the couch trying to prove that Patrick’s science fair project was flawed. “I’m not organized enough, I hate paperwork, and there’s no way I could get that kind of time off.” Joey did not have a wife and didn’t have kids (yet, as Laurie’s mother would have rapidly added), but he did have a very demanding boss he called Brutus and a job he had been in for only a couple of months. He was a business consultant who worked with medical device companies, which was why every time they got together, Laurie asked him if he was working on any new sex robots.

Scott, who was Number Two, shook his head and held up both hands. “Sorry to play the new baby card, but: new baby.” Scott had been in trouble for about the first twenty-five years of his life, until he started looking after his mental health, but right now, he was the most assertively domestic, the one with a new baby. Her name was Lilac. (Dot’s exact words on this development had been, “How fragrant.”)

Ryan looked over at Laurie, then at his mother. Then he took a deep breath. “If we’re lucky, Lisa’s going to be pregnant then. If we’re lucky. It’s just the worst timing.” Ah, Number Five. The baby who wanted his own baby. “Plus,” he added, “I hope I’ll be working.” Ryan was a New York actor, and he was regularly out of work.

They looked at Laurie, and Laurie looked around the room. Every closed cabinet door was holding back piles of vinyl records, piles of papers, piles of magazines. On one shelf alone, she could see and count twelve egg cups. There was upstairs, too. There was a basement. There was an attic. There were four bedrooms. There was a garden shed outside.

“Laurie, don’t feel like you have to do this,” her mother had said. “We can perfectly well spend a day together picking out some things we’d like to remember her by and then hire someone to do the bulk of the work. We’re not the first people to ever have this problem.”

Laurie nodded slowly. “What would they do with her things?”

Her mother shrugged. “They would donate what they could. They would sell what they could.”

“And they’d throw away the rest of it,” Laurie finished. “It’s her whole life,” she added. “It seems sad.”

“It’s sad that she’s gone,” her mother said. “But she wouldn’t expect you to sit here and fuss with all this. You know she wasn’t like that. It would take you weeks.”

“Honey, you have your own place to look after,” her father said. “You have work to do, you’ll have jobs, and it will be summer. We’ll get someone to do it.”

“I agree,” Barbara said.

But Laurie just kept looking around the room, from shelf to cabinet to drawer. “I don’t think so.” She shook her head. “No. You know, she used to let me come over here whenever I wanted. When the house was too noisy and there was too much yelling, or when everything was crazy, she would let me come over and sleep in the guest room upstairs, in the orange room. You know she gave me a taste of bourbon when I was in high school? She even stayed home with us the first time Scotty went to the hospital.” She broke the spell and smiled. “I can do it. I’ll come back in the spring and do it. I can make the time.”



* * *



—

That night, when Dennis and Barbara were asleep in the green guest room upstairs, Laurie and her brothers poured drinks and pulled blankets over their legs and stretched out all over the living room furniture. “Are you sure you want to do this, Laur?” Ryan asked. “She’s got so much stuff. She has what a hoarder would have if they were organized and only had nice things.”

“I’m fine,” Laurie said. “Go home and get your beautiful wife pregnant.”

Ryan looked at his watch. “She’s sleeping right now, but I can try to get her pregnant tomorrow.”

“Get sleep while you can,” Scott said. “Lilac sleeps for maybe three hours at a time right now.” He turned to Patrick. “When did yours start sleeping through the night?”

Patrick rubbed his eyes at the thought. “I think they were both about eight months? Ten months? It’s not an all-at-once thing; they start sleeping more and then they go back and sleep less, and I guarantee you that at some point you’re going to feel like they’re doing it on purpose, like it’s a psychological experiment.” He took a sip of his drink. “It’s not, though. They don’t start experimenting on you intentionally for another few years.”

“That’s great, that’s great,” Scott said. “Just when I think my brain is fixed.”