Today you and Linus both left for somewhere, and I don’t know where you went or what you did, but when you came home you sat together on the couch and shared a Sprite.
Today was Thanksgiving. I stared stupidly at the turkey, not knowing what to do with it, even after spending the month in a sea of cookbooks on turkey preparation, on loan from the library. You would not believe the vastness of literature and debate over wet versus dry brine, stuffed versus unstuffed, breast-side up or down.
I cried uncle, my only uncle. I called John.
“The bigness is irrelevant,” he said, sounding fed up. “Think of it as a large chicken.”
But still John sacrificed his whole afternoon to help stud the ham with peppercorns, while—in the living room—you and Mom napped straight into the evening, her feet inside the bottoms of your pants.
Partway through dinner there was a knock on the door. I opened the door, and there was Grooms, looking coiffed and perfect as usual. She had Kevin in her arms and a crate of pears at her feet.
“Hi,” she said.
I screamed, and hugged Grooms as hard as I thought I could without killing Kevin, who was between us.
She’d driven down, on the vague invitation to spend Thanksgiving with her ex-husband’s family in Laguna Beach. Brady had said something cryptic to her about wanting to meet Kevin. The house was in a gated community; she gave Brady’s sister’s name to the security guard. She circled the house a few times, changed her mind, and headed here.
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” she said, sheepish.
“You’re fine,” I said, and ushered them in.
You and Mom took turns with Kevin in your laps, spooning him potato.
“He’s so fat!” you exclaimed, happily. You bounced him on your knee.
Today you put a whole cabbage into our Ronco Showtime rotisserie.
Today, into the enormous salad I was making, you slam-dunked a whole tomato.
Today you took my hand and filed a nail, the way people do to babies.
Today, I caught you in the garage, eating the peaches from the earthquake kit. I joined you. We drank the syrup and then we drank the packets of water.
Here I am, in lieu of you, collecting the moments.
Collecting—I guess that’s the operative word. Unless it’s moments.
December
Linus—who still loves Christmas the most of any of us—did the decorating. He walked around and around all the trees in the front yard, winding each of them with Christmas lights. He spray-painted the oranges gold. He came home from the supermarket with red and green candy corn—“reindeer corn,” the packaging called it. He built a gingerbread house and tasked me with the job of applying the icing mortar. He bestowed, upon each of us, a brick-sized gift in snowman wrapping paper—wrapped so expertly and taped so excessively, it would be impossible to unwrap and rewrap the gift without detection.
You said, You’ll be free to go soon.
You said, I’m still your father and I still make the rules around here.
And when I said, Sure, Dad, what are my rules? you said that after Christmas, you wanted me to leave. You didn’t want me feeling obligated to stay. You said you didn’t want me feeling guilty. You said you didn’t want me seeing you act loony tunes. Loony tunes: that’s what you said.
I told you that I would think about that rule. You said there was no thinking about it: you were my father, a rule is a rule. I told you I was a grown-ass woman, unfortunately, and didn’t have to listen to you.
Theo and I went to a restaurant. A date, I guess, you could call it—and in fact you did, when you opened the front door. You whistled at us when I climbed into his car.
At the bistro, our server struggled to remember the pie list. Theo put glasses on to read the menu. We watched a waitress—who didn’t think anyone was looking—down half-full beer glasses left by patrons. Later, we walked along a street that was remarkable in that it was completely unremarkable. There were no stores of any interest. There were two tanning salons. Theo took my hand and I didn’t try to wrest it free.
“The cat’s name was Fluffy,” he said, and when I imagined Theo as a little boy getting his hand scratched up by a mean cat with an inappropriate name, my heart went insane.
Later that week there was Theo calling and Theo saying, “Look at the moon.” Us sharing a bottle of bourbon he’d tucked into a mitten. Me saying, “How farsighted are you?” pulling him really, really, really close, so close that you could string a tightrope tautly from his pupils to my pupils and an insect could tiptoe across it.
“What can you see?” I asked.
When he didn’t answer right away, I flinched, a little.
“Enough,” was what he said, finally. It might’ve been an insult. It felt like the correct answer.
There was a night, a few nights later, at his place, when he thought I was asleep, and said, “You’re too perfect.”
I knew I should protest; I had a list of reasons with which I could. I also knew I couldn’t, because we’d both be embarrassed if I did.
This morning, we opened Linus’s impeccably wrapped presents. He’d gotten each of us a walkie-talkie, which he’d labeled with our names.
You and Linus watched a Christmas movie marathon on TV, and Mom and I cooked dinner. We invited everyone: John and his girlfriend, Lisa, and the Nazaryans. Mom cooked the turkey and I helped with the hundred other things: a pecan pie with chocolate in it, two stuffings, macaroni and cheese, vegetables both cruciferous and not.
I made unsuccessful gingerbread men—the recipe was a stinker. Mom had always recommended eating the legs first, so your gingerbread men wouldn’t run away. It’s something I still do, I noticed yesterday, taking the legs off these bad cookies without a second thought.
Cleaning out my purse earlier in the week, I had found Cookery by Carl, the endive guy, and I made his recipe for boats: endive leaves and cheese and nuts and honey.
My earliest memory, I think, I’ve narrowed down to this. I’m two or three, maybe, I’m with you, in Riverside, in the one-bedroom apartment where you and Mom slept on the bottom bunk and me on the top.
In that same apartment, the next year, I caught pneumonia, remember? And you gave me a sponge bath? And my temperature rose and now I know the worry you probably had, the worry that I’d have brain damage.
Anyway, the memory: You are holding my hand. You’re cutting my fingernails, and I’m crying, first because I’m expecting that the procedure will be painful, later because it doesn’t meet my expectations: it feels like nothing, and the feeling of nothing is disorienting.
I remember your large hand, holding my small hand. Your being so careful to clip the nails off my tiny, tiny fingers. I remember that sponge bath, too, and how I was so scared the water would be too cold, but it wasn’t—to my fevered body, it was just cool enough.
Theo arrived first, wearing a khaki shirt. He lingered at the threshold. I told him I liked his shirt. He said he had advice on it. He asked a waitress what he should wear on a date. She’d told him a khaki shirt.