The Blessings of the Animals_A Novel

CHAPTER Twenty-Five

MY RIBS SLOWLY MENDED AS SUMMER CAME TO A CLOSE. I found myself the mother of a high-school senior. How the hell did that happen? A high-school senior applying to Harvard who wanted to be an attorney before she became president.
The start of the school year coincided with Helen’s birthday. Hank planned a “rib fest” birthday party for Helen at their house, joking that “rib fest” had a double meaning that year.
Vijay had to change his flight twice, but he finally made it and we arrived at the party late but in time for the decadent food. Squeezed in shoulder to shoulder we slurped down tender ribs, corn on the cob, and watermelon doused in vodka.
Hank stuck candles in the peach cobbler (compliments of Big David), we sang, and Helen blew out the candles, everyone urging her, “Make a wish! Make a wish!”
She looked at Hank and smiled a little kid smile. “One of my wishes has already come true.”
Hank kissed her cheek.
After we’d moaned over the warm cobbler and homemade vanilla ice cream, Big David pushed back his plate and put both hands on the table as if about to make an announcement. “Okay,” he said. “We have some good news. We—”
“Oh, my God! You got picked!” Gabriella said.
“Aagh! I wanted to say it!” Big David said. “But yes—we got selected by a mother!”
I couldn’t speak. Something pressed against my ribcage, the pain exquisite. Vijay squeezed my hand. “I’m so happy for you,” I choked out. “This is wonderful! Yay, Helen,” I said. “Thank you, thank you.”
Helen lifted her shoulders, looking shy. “Actually,” she said to the cobbler crumbs on her plate. “This had nothing to do with me.”
“Helen is great for understanding,” Davy said. “We found another attorney, not through the agency. We were only trying to increase our chances. He just made it happen sooner.”
“Tell us everything!” Gabriella said.
It didn’t take much prompting before Davy was reciting, as well as anyone can speak clearly with a gigantic smile on his face, “The mother’s name is Kim. She’s nineteen, not married, already has two kids and doesn’t think she can handle a third. She works at Kroger, but she’s been going to school at Sinclair to be an X-ray technician, so she can provide better for the kids she already has. An infant, obviously, is going to keep her from going to class. She worries it will interfere with all the progress she’s made.”
I winced at the word interfere. How many times had I been asked to euthanize a healthy cat simply because it peed outside the litter box? At least this woman, this Kim, bless her, was not going that route. She was opting to let my baby brother be the dad I knew he was born to be.
Davy still beamed. “And she chose us!”
“When we met with her and her mom,” Big David said, “being gay never even came up. They asked us about income, about our house, about our family traditions—”
“About holidays,” Davy said, “and who would be with her during the day and how we’d—”
“Her?” I asked.
They both nodded, eyes shining.
“I’m going to have a cousin!” Gabby said. “A little girl cousin! What are you going to name her?”
“Brooke,” Davy said at the exact same moment Big David said, “Nicole.”
Everyone laughed.
“We don’t have that much time to decide,” Davy said. “Kim is almost eight months along.”
“So,” Gabriella said, “are her two other kids my cousins, too?”
The Davids looked at each other, as if for an answer. Davy shrugged. “I honestly don’t know. We’ll have to sort all that out.”
“It just seems like it will be so confusing,” Gabriella persisted.
Neither of the Davids looked at all angry, fortunately, but I was mortified.
“A toast,” Vijay said, coming to the rescue. He raised his glass. “To this new family.”
I touched his knee, grateful.
After the toast, Gabriella asked, “Whose last name will she have?”
“Mine,” my brother said. “I’ll be the adoptive father first, since I have better benefits. Then David will have to adopt her, too, but we can’t do it together, as a couple.”
That knowledge put a momentary chink in the happiness but wasn’t enough to drown the fact that they were going to be fathers. They may have to jump through extra hoops, but they were doing it.
A BABY. I DREAMED ABOUT HAVING ANOTHER BABY THAT night. In my dream, it was little, like a kitten, and slippery. It kept sliding out of my grip like a bar of wet soap.
I woke up and padded down the hall to the guest room where Vijay slept. The door was open a hand’s width (we had to leave doors open because Gerald, for whatever reason, hated a closed door and yowled and pounded with his one front paw until it was open). I stood in the doorway, my face in the opening, and listened to the sound of Vijay’s deep sleeping breaths.
The Davids would have the baby they’d dreamed of. A baby. Did I want another? Or was that only part of the Vijay fantasy? I tried to picture my life again with interrupted sleep, interrupted meals, interrupted conversation.
A vivid memory flashed into my head. In my first year of marriage, I’d already had doubts. I wore an orange wool sweater and had been riding on an early spring morning, steam rising from the leftover piles of gray snow. At that moment, with the snow mist and the itchy wool, I’d felt flawed in some way, incapable of loving anyone forever. That belief made me desolate to learn I was pregnant. Each pound I gained felt like an anchor, trapping me in my mistake.
But then . . . how do I describe it? The overwhelming, buoying love I felt for my daughter immediately. She proved that I did have it in me to love someone as long as they lived, or even after. I loved Bobby more than I ever had for making it possible for me to know this about myself.
The Davids were going to experience this love that ripped you wide open and defenseless.
This man, sleeping here in the very room where my husband had told me he was leaving—did we have it in us to love like that?
“Whatcha doing?” Vijay whispered from the darkness.
“Breathing you,” I whispered back. Breathing your intent.
“Come breathe me closer.”
So I did.
THE THIRD WEEK OF THE NEW SCHOOL YEAR, WHILE GABRIELLA and her friend Amy worked on their college application essays in my kitchen, my daughter presented me with an invitation to a baby shower for the Davids.
“What do you think?” she asked. “Our AP History class came up with the idea.”
“No,” Amy said, looking pointedly at Gabriella. “Tyler came up with the idea. It just happened to be in History.”
Gabriella looked momentarily sunburned but shrugged.
I looked down at the pink card in my hand. “You are invited to a baby shower for the impending adoption of one lucky girl by Mr. Anderson and Mr. Neumeister.”
I took a deep breath, something my ribs were allowing more and more. “How can I help?”
“We’ve got it covered,” Gabriella said. I saw this belonged to her.
“Actually, we could use some help with the food,” Amy said.
“I’ll help with food,” I said.
“You don’t cook,” Gabriella said.
I prickled but tried not to show it. “I can cook.” Of all the jobs, it had to be food?
“I’ve never seen you make anything. That’s Dad’s thing.”
Was that a dare? “I’ll do the food. I’d like to. What do you need?”
Gabriella looked skeptical, but Amy jumped in. “Mostly finger foods. You know, appetizers.”
“I can do that. How many people?”
“A hundred were invited,” Gabriella said, still fixing me in her steely gaze.
“But only sixty have RSVP’d yes so far,” Amy said.
Sixty? What had I just committed myself to? “Sixty people at a baby shower?”
“Everybody loves Mr. Anderson,” Amy said.
When Amy bent over her essay again, Gabriella said, “You can just cater it, you know.”
Well, I’d be damned if I catered it. I could do this. I could do appetizers, for God’s sake.
So what appetizers did I know how to make?
There was a recipe I loved from my childhood called “Hanky-Pankies”—a savory cheese-and-sausage mix baked on squares of toast. Mom used to make them at my parents’ postshow and posthunt cocktail parties, along with little wienies and other such things that made Bobby sneer.
I used to eat myself sick on those Hanky-Pankies as a child. Davy and I would lie upstairs and peer down the heating vent, looking at the tops of the guests’ heads. Whenever possible, one of us would sneak down and bring back plates full of goodies.
So that brought my list to: Hanky-Pankies.
I was in trouble. But admit it? Not my style.
I had a brilliant idea, if I may say so myself—Big David’s mother, Ava, was the Appetizer Queen.
AVA’S HUSBAND, MYRON, HAD DIED BEFORE I KNEW BIG David. When I first met Ava, she lived in a tiny two-bedroom apartment on a fixed income but managed to throw legendary dinner parties for miniscule amounts of money. Those parties in Ava’s apartment, before she moved in with the Davids (when she started leaving the burners on or her door wide open), were sweaty, too-crowded affairs filled with laughter. And the food? Divine. Even Bobby had admired her food, although he called it “kitschy.”
When you arrived, Ava would fix you a cocktail (she loved her Bombay Sapphire gin, and the way to her heart was to arrive bearing a new bottle), then usher you into the second bedroom, which was always the Appetizer Room.
She made bourbon wienies bubbling in a warmer, meatballs to rival Mimi’s (although I never said this to Bobby), a spicy dip called Jezebel—cream cheese with a hot, peppery sauce over it—and my favorite, “egg on egg,” a fabulous molded egg salad adorned with black caviar.
I’m sure her main courses were excellent, but I ate myself to oblivion on her appetizers.
THE DAVIDS WERE THRILLED WHEN I ASKED TO COME OVER and look at recipes with Ava. “Could you stay with her an hour or two?” Davy asked. “We need to do some baby shopping.”
Baby shopping. The hair stood on my arms and my heart fluttered.
“The only thing better than being at a party is planning one,” Ava said when I told her why I wanted her recipes. Then she frowned. “Oh, dear. I don’t have things for a baby theme. Hmm.” She put one finger across her lips, then clapped her hands. “We’ll use my Valentine’s Day things. Come on.” Ava led me down the basement steps to three tubs full of pink tablecloths, pink napkins, pink serving dishes, and heart-shaped trays. I could hardly believe the coup.
Ava wanted to look through other boxes, too, so I let her while I went upstairs and thumbed through a faded red gingham binder containing the goldmine of her appetizer recipes.
When I returned to the basement, Ava sat, cross-legged, on the floor, surrounded by papers and photos. “Come look,” she said.
I sat on the floor beside her. Wedding photos. “Oh, Ava. Look at you.”
“So young and skinny,” she said wistfully.
In the photo, she wore a tea-length dress and held the hand of a tall, bearlike man. The two descended the church steps, rice raining all around them. Ava looked at the crowd, laughing, while Myron looked at her, his pride and joy unmistakable.
“Are you glad you got married, Ava?” I asked.
Ava laughed a little trill. “What a question! Of course I am. Gladder about that than anything else in my life.”
I was surprised. “What about having children?”
Ava frowned. “Oh. I’m supposed to say that was better, aren’t I? You won’t tell, will you?” Before I could answer, she asked, “Now, did I have two or three?”
“Children?”
She nodded.
“Two. David and Carol.”
“No . . . seems to me there’s three.”
Was she remembering a child who’d died? “I’ve only met two.”
“Oh, well.” She waved her hand cavalierly as if she were talking about pets or teachers. “That was hard. Having those children. I don’t think I was a very good mother.”
I corrected her, even though I knew she spoke the truth. “You were a very good mother.”
“Really?” Her voice went high and girlish. “How do you know?”
“David and Carol say so.”
“What about the other one?”
“I’ve never met her.”
“Him. It’s a him. I wish I could remember his name.” She picked up another photo.
David and Carol had said nothing of the kind. Ava had been high strung and distant. She’d melted down at David’s coming out, calling the Davids in the middle of the night crying, “What did I do wrong? Why are you doing this to me?”
“He made bread, you know,” Ava said.
“David does,” I agreed.
“No, no. Myron. Myron made bread every evening, for the family. He could whip up a loaf quick as a cat could wink its eye. Every day. That’s how we decided love would be. You have to make it fresh every day. Oh, dear. That sounded naughty! I don’t mean make love every day, although he would’ve been very happy to do that, too. Goodness. No, I mean, you had to decide to love every single day. If you did, you could do quite well, no matter who you married.”
Really. Was it that simple?
“All those weddings we went to. I could tell right away who had a shot at lasting. So many weddings. I’d take the cake.”
Yes, you do, I thought. You take the cake.
“Yes, ma’am,” Ava said. “The worst was when you’d know they would last but shouldn’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“Not every marriage that lasts should be celebrated.” Before I could even react, Ava set down the photos and put her hand on my knee. “And not every marriage that ends is a failure.”
My scalp lifted in goose bumps. Footsteps sounded above us. “We’re down here!” I called.
Both the Davids came tromping down the stairs.
“Cool,” Davy said, sitting on the floor with us. “I’ve never seen these.” He sifted through photos, chuckling. He looked up at me. “We used to play wedding, remember?”
“You did. I tried to avoid it.” I told Big David and Ava, “Davy was usually the bride.”
“You were?” Big David asked. Even Ava giggled.
Davy picked up the wedding photo. “Lucky you, Ava. Myron sure was a good-looking man.”
Ava’s smile faded. She stammered a moment, then asked shyly, “Myron?”
With exquisite tenderness, Davy said, “Your husband.”
“I . . . I don’t know who— I’m not married.” In a matter of seconds, she had changed from her classy, witty self to an old lady with Alzheimer’s. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“It’s okay, Mom,” Big David said. “We know you’re not married anymore.”
“Is . . . is he here? Myron?” She looked around the basement and up the stairs.
“Nobody’s here but us—you, me, Davy, and Cami.”
“I don’t feel well.” Ava stood, photos and letters falling off her lap. “I want to lie down.”
The Davids exchanged a brief glance. I’m not sure what passed between them, but it was my brother who stood and said, “Let me help you, Ava.” He followed her up the stairs.
I reached across the pile of photos and took Big David’s hand. “I don’t want that to happen to me,” he whispered. “I don’t want to be alive for one single minute and not know I’m with Davy.”