which Weezy knew he wasn’t. Will didn’t really care or keep up on any of the neighborhood news.
It was the mothers that remembered everything anyway. That’s what Weezy had learned after three decades in this house. The mothers knew what was happening in the neighborhood. They knew the history, the scandals, the stories, the transgressions. They were the ones that kept the details straight, that passed information to the new people on the block. They gave the prompts to the fathers—“You know who I’m talking about, the one that got pregnant, no, not the Brennan girl, the other one, the Sullivans’ daughter.”
They knew who had gotten divorced, who was getting divorced, and who would probably get divorced soon. They knew who had cheated and who got the best settlements. And the fathers would always just nod as they listened to all of this, the stories sounding vaguely familiar, or at least more familiar than unfamiliar, like it had been overheard at a picnic somewhere, discussed at a barbecue, or whispered in the kitchen while dinner was being prepared and the kids were in the next room doing their homework.
As the kids had grown up, the neighborhood gossip had slowed down. Everything had slowed down, really. For some years in the midst of it, when the children were growing up, Weezy had spent a fair amount of time talking with the other mothers on the block about everyone’s business. It wasn’t mean-spirited, or at least Weezy liked to think it wasn’t. It was just something to get them through the day, at a time when their days were always so busy—school projects, money worries, shuttling Max to hockey, and grounding Claire. It was all so fast that sometimes it felt like you needed a reminder to breathe.
Weezy and Will used to talk about what they would do after the kids moved out, when they had their own lives and no children to take care of. “We’ll be those crazy old people that buy an RV and drive cross-country,” Will said once. Weezy had laughed. She would be happy with an apartment in the city and a cottage by the shore. They had looked forward to that time, when they could relax and just enjoy themselves. It was still coming, Weezy believed. It was just put on hold for a while.
Ten years ago, if Weezy could have predicted where her children would be at this point, she would have guessed that Claire would be married and maybe even have a baby or two. Martha was harder to guess, but Weezy thought she’d be living on her own, nursing, and enjoying every minute of it. Max was still in school, so for the moment, he was still on track. But who knew? These things could get derailed at any moment. She knew that much.
Sometimes Will got a surprised look on his face when Martha or Claire walked into the room, like he’d forgotten that they lived there now. It wasn’t that he disliked having them there. Sometimes Claire would say something that would make him laugh loudly, a huge, surprising guffaw. And he and Martha enjoyed spending quiet time together, reading the paper in the mornings and drinking coffee. Sometimes he seemed confused by their presence, and sometimes he treated them just as he always had, as if they were still children.
Just the other day, Martha had walked into the kitchen to get some aspirin, and Will said, “You still have a headache? Poor baby.” And something unsettled itself in Weezy, hearing him say that. Martha wasn’t a baby. It didn’t seem right to call her that, to say poor baby and pat her on the head.
It didn’t help matters that when the kids were home they seemed to start acting like teenagers again. They left shoes and bags and jackets scattered all around. Glasses were missing from the kitchen, only to be found in bedrooms or the basement. Dishes rarely made it to the dishwasher. The best you could hope for was that they’d get rinsed off and left in the sink. Usually they were just abandoned in the kitchen, on the counter, presumably waiting for a fairy to come and clean them up.
This was not how Weezy had raised her kids. Not at all. She taught them to clean up after themselves, called them back to the kitchen to clean up the apple and peanut butter snack that was now smeared on a plate. But that was when she was younger