“If she gets into a decent middle school,” Karen said ruefully. “Anyway, in case you were curious, Mather is the school where all of Ruby’s friends from Elm Tree went.”
“Oh—right,” he said as he made his way over to the fridge and pulled out a locally brewed ale. Once, Matt had drunk Corona Extra. But Karen had seen an article on the Internet about how it contained corn syrup, a foodstuff that she’d come to understand was a thousand times worse than sugar. Though she wasn’t entirely sure why, as corn itself had never struck her as a particularly venal product. In any case, Karen had urged him to stop buying it, and eventually, begrudgingly, he’d complied.
Bread had been subjected to a similar pressurized winnowing in the Kipple-McClelland household. Once, Arnold’s multigrain had been good enough for lunch. Now Karen shopped at the bakery with the French name up the street, frequently splurging on the blended rye and wheat miche that, according to its museum label, had been subjected to sixty-eight hours of fermentation. In a different life, Karen would have heard the word fermentation and run in the other direction. But that was then. Even Ruby thought the miche was delicious. But was it five-dollars-a-loaf better than Arnold’s? “Is that all you have to say?” she asked him.
“Look, Karen,” Matt replied in a weary tone. “Rubes is happy. That’s all that matters.”
“How do you know she’s happy?” Karen shot back. The moment she said it, she knew she shouldn’t have. But it was too late.
Now it was Matt’s turn to get defensive. Slack-jawed, he stared at Karen. Then he said, “Excuse me?”
“I mean, have you asked her lately if she’s happy at school?”
Clearly angered by the implication that he wasn’t around enough to know what was going on in his daughter’s life, Matt didn’t even deign to answer Karen’s last question. Instead, he narrowed his eyes, shook his head, took a swig of his beer, and walked out of the room while Karen stood there motionless, not entirely sure how they’d arrived at the place they’d arrived or whether she should apologize or dig in but feeling suddenly alone and adrift.
Her thoughts turned to her dead parents. The truth was that, while Karen was fine in a day-to-day sense, she still hadn’t found relief from the rudderless feeling that her mother’s death in particular had engendered. In some ways, it had only gotten harder. In the first few days and even weeks after she died, Karen’s memories of her were so vivid that she almost felt as if Ruth Kipple were still out there somewhere. And they’d buoyed her through the shock.
It wasn’t until recently, when Karen found herself struggling to remember how her mother looked and sounded, to recall her thinning auburn hair, light brown eyes, and throaty voice, that time seemed to stretch out indefinitely ahead of her, with every new calendar day bringing Karen further away from the last time she’d seen her alive. Only then did the magnitude of what had happened finally set in. So did the mundaneness.
One day, Herb Kipple, who’d never drunk or smoked, had gotten a stomachache. A week later, he’d been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. He was gone in under three months. And then, just like that, Karen’s mother, not wanting to be left out or left behind, or maybe because she was brokenhearted—or maybe it was all just random chance—had received a cancer diagnosis of her own. For a brief window of time, when she was still cogent but clearly dying, she’d seemed almost relieved and even liberated—possibly because the illness had lent a certain concreteness to her discontent. But then, just as quickly as in Karen’s father, the disease took charge. Her mother’s naps grew longer, then even longer. Finally, she too shriveled up and slipped into the abyss. And that was that. The world went on as before.
Except it hadn’t for Karen.
For one thing, her parents’ deaths had removed a psychic barrier between Karen and her own mortality. Once a comfortably abstract notion, her own demise now seemed to be, if not imminent, then waving in the near distance. Karen was especially terrified of dropping dead before Ruby was fully grown and out of the house. She worried how Matt would manage and also that Ruby would end up subsisting entirely on junk food because Matt would fail to notice or care. For another thing, Karen felt bitter both that her parents were missing out on Ruby’s childhood and that Ruby was missing out on knowing them. Or was the real loss on Karen’s side—the loss of a mirror to reflect back her own choices and confirm once and for all that she was a good daughter and, by extension, a good person?
In truth, when Ruth Kipple was still alive, Karen had considered her to be an endless burden. Karen had felt guilty for not visiting enough, not doing enough, as if there were anything anyone could have done about her mother’s depression and, later, her dying. To an extent, her death had come as a relief to Karen. It also felt like a terrible waste. All that suffering; what had been the purpose? It had produced no great poetry or scientific breakthroughs, only more suffering—for her family members, for herself.
In any case, Karen had no one to talk about it with anymore. Her friends had long since ceased inquiring how she was doing. And even at the time, there had been an assumption that Karen must have been happy that the whole ordeal was over. Matt had been supportive in the immediate aftermath, but Karen sensed his patience had run out too. And Karen’s brother, Rob, who sold surf equipment in Orange County and whom Karen spoke to twice a year, if that, had seemed relatively unmoved by the events, having separated himself from the family psychodrama decades earlier. Or maybe it was just that he wasn’t willing to share his grief with Karen. After all this time, he still seemed resentful that she’d been their mother’s favorite and had played the dutiful-child role that he’d never wanted for himself. On the phone, he answered Karen’s questions monosyllabically, then made up excuses about why he needed to hang up.
Suddenly desperate to reconnect with Matt, Karen followed him into their bedroom. She found him typing on his phone. “I’m sorry I implied you were a bad father,” she said. “I don’t think that, and I shouldn’t have said it. And I know you’re working really hard on this project, and it means a lot to you.”
It was another five seconds before he stopped typing. “It doesn’t matter what it means to me,” he finally answered, his tone flat and his eyes still cast south. “It’s about connecting people in need with affordable housing.”
“Matt, I’m sorry.”