I jump up and go to the back door and throw it open, and there he is in the hall, the sweetest boy, ten years old with his yellow hair sticking up, and his pale, fair skin practically see-through in the light from my kitchen windows, peering at the world through those adorable giant round glasses he loves. And he’s grinning at me.
“SamMEE!” I say, and we do a fist bump, which is hard because of the scooter he’s carrying and the outsized New York Mets backpack he’s wearing. Jessica’s next to him with her harried morning face, and as usual she’s juggling her cup of coffee, her bag, the car keys, and her one thousand worries, and at any moment she could drop any of it except the worries.
But today she also looks like she’s about to burst into tears. Not only is it Sammy’s last day of school—but for the very first time, his dad, whom Jessica hates in the way you can only hate somebody you once loved beyond reason, is going to take Sammy upstate to stay with him and his mysterious new girlfriend—whom Jessica had never even seen—for a whole month. The court said this had to happen, and Jessica fought it for as long as humanly possible, but now today is the day. When she got the news, she asked me if there was any way Houndy and I could hand Sammy over to the ex, since she didn’t think she could do it without falling apart. So we’re going to.
Sammy says, “Blix! Blix! Guess what! Did you know that when I come back from my dad’s I’m gonna know how to play the drums?”
“What? You’re going to be even more amazing than you already are?” I say, high-fiving him three more times. “You’re going to play the drums?”
He rocks back on his heels and grins at me and nods. “I’m going to drummer camp.”
Jessica rolls her eyes. “Yeah, well, we’ll see. Andrew makes a lot of promises he can’t keep.”
“Moooommmm,” says Sammy. “He’s gonna do it!”
“Let’s hope so,” says Jessica grimly. Poor thing, she is a woman who has been given more than she thought she could handle, including a cheating husband and a boy who is sort of quirky. She’s always twisting her rings around and around on her hands and looking worried. I’m always beaming love toward her, and watching as she gets bombarded with all the little love particles, but so far none of them seem to have landed in a permanent way. I think she’s kind of enjoying being furious with her ex for now, if you want to know the truth. It’s hard to make room for love when anger still feels so good.
“So, Sammy my boy,” I say, “Houndy and I will meet you at the bus stop outside and then we’ll all hang out here to wait for your dad.”
“Wait. Mama’s not going to stay with me?”
“No, babycakes. Today you get me and Houndy and some chocolate chip cookies.”
He turns to Jessica with his tiny, serious eyes. “Is it because you’re too sad to say good-bye to me?”
She has one of those faces that shows every single one of her thoughts marching across, and now she has about fifty-seven thoughts at once, most of them tragic. “I-I have to work late today, so I thought Blix could meet up with your daddy instead.” She fiddles with her keys, wipes at her eyes, gets busy shuffling her bag over to her other shoulder.
“It’s okay,” says Sammy. He tucks his hand into hers. “I know. You’re too sad to see my daddy take me. But it’s going to be okay, Mama.”
You see? This is when I want to rush in, slather them with love.
“I just—I want you to go off and be happy,” she says. “But—”
No, I think. I send her a STOP message. Don’t say the next part, that you don’t want him to love his daddy and the new girlfriend more than he loves you.
She clears her throat, and our eyes meet. She’s about to cry. So I go over and hug her and him both, mostly so I can block her from saying that she’s terrified that Sammy’s not going to want to come back to her. That the drum lessons and the novelty of attention from his father and his dad’s girlfriend are going to make him want to stay away forever. That she’s afraid her world with him, the world of homework and sadness and the grind of school, can never measure up to a month in the Berkshires. With a lake and a drum camp.
Ah, love. Why does it have to get all convoluted? I’ve been eighty-five years on this planet, and I still think the universe could have worked out a better system than this stumbling mess we find ourselves in.
I kiss Sammy on the top of his delicious little head and tell him I’ll see him later; I squeeze Jessica’s arm—and then they’re off, but first she turns and gives me a look, a tearful look that says all is lost.
All is not lost, I beam to her.
I’m always beaming love messages and light over to Jessica, but Lola, next door, who is keeping score, says that Jessica’s negative vibes are so far winning against my efforts. Lola jokingly claims to have an Excel spreadsheet on what she calls my Human Being Projects and that she can tell me just how all of them are going on any given date. The numbers would show, she says, that my Jessica Project might be a little bit lacking in success, which doesn’t mean a thing, of course, because, as I’ve explained to Lola, everything can reverse in an instant when the vibes change.
And if you want to know the truth, my Lola Project might need some tending, too. She’s been a widow forever, which she claims is fine, but I happen to know that, with just a tiny bit of courage, she could be having the time of her life and could love again. I keep calling for the universe to send her love, doing little love spells here and there when I think of them. But Lola—she can’t see it.
So I have Jessica and Lola . . . and now I also have Marnie.
And oh yes, then there’s Patrick.
Houndy comes into the kitchen, scratching his huge, round belly and smiling. “Is that our boy off to school already?”
“Yep, and today’s the day he’s going away for a month to see his dad.”
“Oh, no! I’ve got to tell him good-bye!”
“You’ll see him later. We’re—”
But Houndy’s already bounding off, going out the back door and down the stairs, and I hear him reach Sammy and Jessica, and hear them all talking at once. And then after a bit, he comes clomping back up the stairs, winded as hell, with Lola following him, wearing her lavender housedress and carrying a cardboard tray of cups filled with iced coffee that she goes and buys every morning even though it makes no sense at all. We can make our own coffee. But that’s Lola; she’s been my best friend forever, in this life and probably about five lives before this one, if you believe in that sort of thing and I do, so I don’t question her. I start throwing fruit into the blender to make us our daily kale-strawberry smoothies, and Lola gets out the frying pan to fix the eggs for the mushroom omelet that we’ll take up onto the roof. We all have our jobs to do to get breakfast going.
“By the way,” says Houndy while he’s collecting the plates and silverware. “I told Jessica she might as well come up after work. Have a glass of wine so she just doesn’t go home and cry herself to sleep. That girl—she always looks like she’s going to fall apart.”
The phone rings just then, and it’s Patrick. The phone seems to ring in an altogether different tone when it’s him.
He lives in the basement apartment—the one that’s almost completely underground, which he claims suits him perfectly—and he’s calling to find out if a package was delivered for him yesterday. I tell him no but invite him up for eggs and mushrooms anyway. He’s an introvert of the highest order, and so he hesitates and says he might come, only first he’s got to write all the symptoms of all the diseases that have ever been recorded and invent a computer program that will cure Alzheimer’s, so he’ll probably be busy for a while getting that done.
I laugh. “Get on up here, you big galoot. You can save the world from illness after breakfast,” I tell him, and he sighs.
Which means he’s not coming.
“Come on,” I say. “We’ll sit up on the roof, just the four of us.”
“Um, I’d have to take a shower first.”
“No, you don’t. We’ll be on the roof. The fresh air will blow the stink off you.”