“Jane’s not made of porcelain, Tommy. Pregnancy’s hardly an illness.”
The conversation went on in this prickly way, Tommy bewildered to find herself on the defensive, until Morty arrived in the kitchen. Morty was in a good mood, his cheer the antidote they needed. Over dinner, he told Dani about a recent appearance he’d made on a children’s television show. “They made me sing and dance. Specifically, the polka. I made the mistake of watching it afterward. I look like Burl Ives. Christ. I am officially old.”
“That you’d even think of Burl Ives makes you old,” said Tommy.
She and Dani laughed, remembering the Burl Ives records their father had played for them as small children. “And Pete Seeger.” In a flash, Tommy pictured the turntable their father had given them one Christmas, its case of red plastic textured to look like alligator hide.
“And Woody Guthrie.” Dani held his soup spoon to his mouth, as if it were a mike, and sang a twangy verse of “This Land Is Your Land.”
“I used to thank God Dad never played the banjo,” he said after less than a verse earned him jeers.
“You were lucky. Not much music in my childhood.” Morty sounded wistful.
“Careful what you wish for,” said Dani, at which he and Tommy fell into a competitive hilarity, trying to call up the lyrics of their father’s silliest songs.
So by the time they went to bed, Tommy felt as if they’d made it over the rocky start of their fitting together again—not that she could fool herself into thinking they had ever been close.
In the morning, she woke to find that Dani was already up, in the studio with Morty. She let them be. She also decided that she would take Dani out to dinner at the bistro in the village center. Morty could fend for himself.
After lunch, Tommy went outside. It was time to put the garden to bed for the winter. She would do the final pruning, cut back the long-stemmed perennials. Next weekend, Morty would compost the beds and blanket them in salt hay. Dani volunteered to help, but Tommy liked performing this ritual herself.
“Why don’t you go inside and build a fire? Call Jane. Or just have a rest,” suggested Tommy. “Not long and you won’t have much time for that.”
“I’m basically useless, aren’t I?”
“Why would you know how to divide lilies?” said Tommy. “Or prune out deadwood?”
“Pruning out deadwood sounds pretty straightforward.”
Dani was exhausting her.
“Here’s a job. Please go make a pot of tea and take it to Morty. He’ll like that. There’s a box of Lorna Doones in the cupboard over the back fridge. He loves those.”
“Lorna Doones?” Dani laughed.
“I know. Retro in the extreme. That’s Morty. Well, a part of Morty. The Burl Ives part, but don’t tell him I said that.”
For the next three hours, except when he passed her, carrying the assigned pot of tea and plate of cookies, Tommy did not see Dani. She took a bath, answered a few e-mails, and then, as darkness fell, the three of them drank feeble gin-and-tonics by a blazing fire.
On the short drive to dinner, Dani’s spirits seemed to have lifted. He told her a few of Jane’s work stories, the mysteries she solved about the speech afflictions children suffered—and almost always overcame.
But by the end of their meal, he was out of sorts again, critical of everything from the restaurant’s bread to the president’s policies in Afghanistan.
Maybe she’d been insensitive, talked too much about the trip she and Morty took to Hay-on-Wye the summer before, how ecstatic they were to visit a town where books, tumbling from the shelves of shop after shop, seemed to outnumber the stars in the sky. The musty tang of aging paper and ink pervaded even the streets, like a cologne. “Let’s bottle it,” Morty had suggested. “Call it…how do you say bookworm in French? Or Welsh!”
Had it seemed like gloating? Tommy had no idea if Dani and Jane longed to travel (he was right; she hardly knew the mother of her future niece or nephew), but still. Dani had a business to run and probably couldn’t be away for even a week.
She was about to ask him about the shop—knowing that she would be opening a valve to his venting—when he said, “Tommy, are you a lifer in this job of yours?”
She shrugged. “I suppose it’s my golden cage. But you know, it’s rarely boring. And honestly, I don’t miss the city all that much.”
“Yeah, but whose life are you living out here? Yours or his?”
“I love Morty. And his life—which is definitely his, not mine—is one I…enjoy sharing. Not sharing exactly, but…living alongside of.”
Dani shook his head. “You liked living alongside that relationship he had with that gigolo? That looked excruciating to me.”
Tommy was stunned. Her brother had met Soren once, maybe twice. She did remember inviting Dani to come out and stay overnight for one of the many dinner parties Morty and Soren had hosted in their early, happy days. Except that, really, the happiness wore thin even then; it was too dependent on passion—or on dependency itself. The parties gave their partnership a veneer, the reticent house transformed into a bright stage on which they could push back the rockier side of their relationship: the simmering contention and jealousy, the patent inequalities.
“That’s the past,” said Tommy as the waiter poured the last of the wine into her glass. She waved off his suggestion of another bottle. She poured the contents of her glass into Dani’s.
“But you stuck it out. Like for what, ten years?”
“Eight. Morty was on fire then. It was like being in the middle of a book that’s too good to put down. Sometimes it felt like Soren was an inspiration, a muse. Despite everything else.”
“I still don’t get it.”
“Get what, Dani?”
“Why you’ve never wanted to go out and have a family of your own. Or just a circle of friends, Jesus! Mom and Dad were deluded in lots of ways, but you know what? When I think about those Saturday nights with Dad’s musician friends all crammed in the living room? Remember how thrilled he was when they found the Brooklyn house and they could entertain in that tiny back garden? Remember his awful beer-making phase? I felt sorry for him, but guess what? The guy knew how to be happy.” Dani laughed. “When I think about their social life, I’m kind of impressed. Jane and I are too busy for much time with friends. But we have them. We have friends.”
“Well, good for you,” said Tommy, feeling suddenly offended. Was he implying she didn’t know how to be happy? “I’m not living in a cave. We entertain. We travel. We go to the theater. I like my life tremendously.”
“?‘We’? Doesn’t that kind of prove my point?” Dani leaned back in his chair and stared at her.
Tommy saw, for an instant, the hard-nosed little boy who wouldn’t leave the playground, who wrought mayhem at the library, her other home.
“Don’t judge me,” she said, pointedly pulling toward her the folder holding the check, which the waiter had glibly placed before Dani. She stopped herself from saying, I’m not the one who’s always struggling.