having your recipe for cucumber salad.”
“Well, listen, can I talk to your mom quickly? She called and left a message earlier.”
“Oh! Sure.” When? What message?
I went to the foot of the stairs and called up to my mother. She had spent some time in the guest room after she arrived, then came down in a better mood to help me make dinner. Now she was up in Hannah’s room, going over her wardrobe with her.
“Aunt Fran’s on the phone,” I yelled. She answered that she’d take it in the guest room.
“Dinner’s just about ready,” I said.
Nothing.
“Mom?”
“Go ahead and get started; I’ll be right down.”
I went back into the kitchen, picked up the phone, heard my mother say breathlessly, “So I need you to—” and then, “Laura?” I hung up, flipped the turkey burgers for the last time, dumped the oven-baked French fries into a basket and salted them, sliced tomatoes, drained the water off the ears of corn, yelled up for Anthony and Hannah, and then went to the basement door to call Pete up out of his workroom. I once read an essay about a woman used to a large family making dinner for only herself, the oddity and awful stillness of it. I can imagine. There are random moments—tossing a salad, coming up the driveway to the house, ironing the seams flat on a quilt square, standing at the kitchen window and looking out at the delphiniums, hearing a burst of laughter from one of my children’s rooms—when I feel a wavelike rush of joy. This is my true religion: arbitrary moments of nearly painful happiness for a life I feel privileged to lead. Think of the way you sometimes see a tiny shaft of sunlight burst through a gap between rocks, the way it then expands to illuminate a much larger space—it’s like that. And it’s like quilting, a thread surfacing and then disappearing into the fabric of ordinary days. It’s not always visible, but it’s what holds everything together.
“SO YOU’LL BE AT THE HOUSE in a little over two hours?” my mother asked.
“Closer to three, probably.” I turned around to look at her in the backseat. She’d come along with Pete to drop me off at the airport. “You know that, right? Why are you asking?”
“No reason. I guess I’m old enough that I’m still in awe of how quickly you can get somewhere.”
“I guess I’m old, then,” Pete said. “I’m amazed too.”
“Wait until your children get old,” my mother said. “Then you’ll know what old is!”
I straightened in my seat. “I’m not old!”
“That’s not what you tell me,” Pete said.
I gave him a look, then pointed at the United sign up ahead.
“I see it,” he said. “Now let’s see if they’ll actually let me stop long enough to let you out.” He pulled up to the curb and I grabbed my suitcase, gave Pete a quick kiss, and then pecked my mother’s cheek as she came out of the backseat to get into the front. “Say hello to Steve for me,” she said.
“I will.” And Caroline?
No message for her, apparently, unless it was in the way my mother slammed the car door. She waved, and then she and Pete drove off. I watched them go, wanting to go back home with them. Instead, I wheeled my bag inside to check the flight information board. ON TIME, it said. This, I have learned, is like a serving suggestion: what you see wasn’t necessarily what you get. ON TIME usually means they haven’t announced the delay yet. I grieve for the airlines, and I hate them.
I stopped at a kiosk before I headed for the gate. This is my deal: If I have to fly, I get a People magazine and a giant-size Snickers. I tell myself it’s so that if there’s one of those interminable stuck-on-the-tarmac delays and everyone is starving, I can say, “I have a candy bar. I’ll share.” But the truth is, the one time I was on a flight where there was a terrible delay, I ate the whole thing myself—one small secret bite at a time. I never tasted anything more delicious. I think my seatmate smelled the peanuts on my breath when I ate it; she snuck envious little glances at me while I looked out the window at the unchanging view on the runway. Half of me said, Would it kill you to give her some? The other half said, Did she not pass the same kiosk as I?
17
STEVE