Bridget shot up in bed. “What’s wrong?” Bridget looked around, the white light slanting in through room-darkening shades, and she realized with a sort of sickening thud that maybe it was actually eleven in the morning. Her mind skittered past thoughts of school and her classes and landed neatly on the word Sunday. She sighed.
“I’m calling to see if you’re up for lunch.” Her words tilted up insecurely, and Bridget could envision her baring her teeth in the rearview mirror looking for lipstick smudges or maybe a wayward speck of spinach from her morning veggie egg-white goat cheese omelet. She could see her coral pantsuit with the buttons matching her bracelets, matching her earrings. “I haven’t seen you and I’m in the neighborhood.”
That was a lie. Petra lived more than an hour away in Bucks County, in a suburb of Philadelphia where Holden grew up, ensconced in the tight, beating womb of private school, music lessons, and theater camp on the Main Line. Bridget could hear the roar of the highway in the distance. There was nothing here, the outskirts of a sleepy bedroom town on the edge of the crumbling paper mill industry, not so depressed that the people themselves seemed gray and daunted, but still. This town had never been anything but a repellent to Petra. No, she was in the neighborhood for no discernible reason other than Bridget.
When Holden had told his mother he’d found a job at Wayne Memorial Hospital as a cardiologist, Petra had balked. He’d thrown a fully paid medical education in her face. She’d wanted Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), Thomas Jefferson, even St. Christopher’s, where one could be philanthropic (but with dignity) because think of the children.
“Petra, I’m not even up yet.” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she squeezed her eyes shut. It was eleven o’clock in the morning; nothing said basket case more than a grown woman sleeping well into the afternoon, which she surely would have done if not for the phone call.
“Oh, no worries,” Petra said gaily. “You have an hour. Let’s meet at that charming little coffee shop where we went for lunch that time?”
There was only one charming little coffee shop, which Bridget did not go to because each cup of coffee smelled like Holden on a Sunday morning, sleepy, slightly sweaty, with the distinct air of newspaper ink, and she could see him there, with his glasses resting on the bridge of his nose and last week’s New York Times Sunday puzzle while he asked her for a five-letter word for smidgen (answer: skosh).
But now Petra would be there, pinked and cheerful, talking about their latest donation to Jefferson in pancreatic cancer research, or maybe the tree they planted (cherry for the blooms but it was just a guess), and maybe the one-year memorial could be at Penn, where Holden had gone to school. Bridget wasn’t ready yet, she wasn’t there. Petra buried her son and cried appropriately, dabbing her eyes with a wet, milky Kleenex and mascara that never ran. Bridget had made a scene, snot on her forearm, clinging to the edge of the casket, an avert-your-eyes kind of scene. A real showstopper. Petra had looked at her with pity, edged in a thin veneer of fear that a person could split so wide open. She’d patted her arm, soft and quick, like maybe Bridget’s grief could spill out, stain her buttercup suit. But Petra had three other sons (three!) who had all done what she’d expected, two lawyers and a doctor (although one of them had gone off the rails into environmental law, so who knows if she even counted poor Thad). Only Holden had gone and married himself a southern hippie schoolteacher.
Bridget would rather do anything than have coffee with Petra. Anything. She thought about telling her that the stores were still closed on account of the birds and all, but it was too late. She was coming, zooming toward Bridget in a midnight-blue Mercedes to talk about God knows what, and all Bridget wanted to do was sleep. Dreamless, empty sleep.
Instead, she wound her little Toyota to the Bean Café, fifteen minutes late, and found Petra waiting patiently at a table in the far corner, tucked away and private. The pantsuit was cornflower blue. But the earrings and the bracelet were just as Bridget imagined, and they’d hardly bit into their biscotti before Petra cleared her throat and took Bridget’s hand in hers.
“How are you doing really, dear?” Petra examined Bridget’s face. Bridget could picture Petra using this exact tone of voice while inspecting a fellow Junior Leaguer’s neck lift. Petra wore her grief like a Girl Scout badge, the sash of Most Grieving Mother draped across her chest, her I’m doing just fine, thank you so much for your kind words voice practiced. Nothing as pornographic as Bridget.
Petra turned Holden into a cause, a champion for the fight against an incurable and relentless disease. She made his death glamorous, erasing the six months of urine and vomit and shit and ugly that Bridget couldn’t forget no matter how hard she tried.
“I’m fine, Petra. Truly.” She set the cookie down delicately on the china plate and blew across her cup of coffee. Her gaze wandered to the walls of the cafe, stacked floor to ceiling with old sepia-toned photos of Mt. Oanoke back in its turn-of-the-last-century heyday. Petra cleared her throat again and the two women avoided eye contact until finally Bridget got sick of wasting her day like this and said, “Why are you here?”
She didn’t mean for it to come out sour, and Petra sank back against the chair. Her face sagged and she looked ten years older than she had a minute ago. Bridget sighed; when it came to Petra, why was she always the bad guy?
“We have to talk about Holden’s memorial. I can do it without you but I don’t want to. A year is coming and you weren’t returning my calls.” Her voice softened. “I know you’re hurting, darling, we all are. But it’s expected that we’ll have a one-year memorial of his death. We can do it in the summer, if that’s more comfortable. It doesn’t have to be an exact year. We want to plant a tree. Not now of course, but we should start thinking about it now. Finding the site, planning the event.”
“What kind?” Bridget asked, only a tiny bit curious.