“Should we be into the same things?” You can’t help yourself from asking.
Suddenly, absurdly, Gary has become a project. You love projects. You cannot resist a project, and though you don’t want Gary, you don’t want him to not want you, so you try to flirt a little. His phone rings a third time, and as he picks it out of his pocket, you understand you don’t need to do this, so you make a little bye-bye sign with your right hand, then spin around and take a good, long drink of your beer. Gary reaches beside you, puts his half-empty drink on the bar, smiles wanly—oh, you love a wan smile—and then pats your back in farewell as he walks away, his phone still attached to his head.
You think of the Esche, the mighty Esche, growing in the Jardin du Luxembourg.
You think of the riding academy and the moment in front of the Vermeer painting, and you can’t help it, won’t help it, you think of afternoons in Berlin when your bodies collided and stopped against each other like sticks searching for sparks inside themselves, and He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named slowly takes over all your thoughts, your vision, your memory, and you drink the rest of the beer with your eyes on the mirror behind the bar. Single girl, Manhattan, Friday night.
40
On the train to New Jersey, to home, you text Eleanor at work: Nice guy. Glad we met. No magic. But thanks.
Downy face emoticon.
You text to Constance and Amy:
Nice guy. Glad we met. No magic.
Dad met me at the station.
“Hey there, sweetie pie,” he said when I climbed in beside him. “You’re riding the rails late.”
He smelled like butter and popcorn. I threw my overnight bag in the backseat, then leaned over and kissed his cheek. He wore a white shirt from work, but it was one of his older ones, relegated to his casual wear. Over the white shirt, he wore a Carhartt vest, his favorite weekend Dad-fix-it-manly-man wear. He looked tired, but calm, as if perhaps he had been dozing before picking me up at the train station. His hands, heavy and useful, hung from the two and ten positions on the steering wheel. He was a good-looking man, I decided, but not flashy. His hair, grayer now, had thinned a little on top, and I knew, from my mom’s reports, that it was a source of injured vanity for him. He possessed strong cheekbones, well defined, that lent strength to all his other features. He was fifty-two years old, a man in his prime, a calm, steady force in all our lives. I found him very dear in that instant, my dad, and it felt good—no, more than good—to be sitting with him in our car, the lazy weekend ahead of us, the refrigerator, I knew, stocked with my favorite treats, the TV couch in the den comfortable, my mom doubtless being the Mom-a-saurus.
Then, out of left field, I put my head on his shoulder and started to sob.
“Hey, hey, hey, what’s this all about?” he asked, his voice consoling, his voice the one that picked me up off my fallen bicycle when I was seven, after a failed tryout for the lead in South Pacific in high school. “Hey, hey, sweetheart, take it easy. Are you okay? Did something happen?”
I shook my head.
He kissed the top of my head and slowly pushed back my hair from my face.
“What’s going on, cupcake?” he asked and reached forward with his other hand to turn down a college football game on the radio.
I felt absurd, but I couldn’t stop crying. The car idled. It was cool outside, and he had the window down, and the air smelled of leaves and October and fire. He reached over quickly to his glove box and pulled down the door, rummaged inside for a second, then produced a handful of Dunkin’ Donuts napkins. He handed me a few. I put one against my eyes and blew my nose in another one.
“You okay? What is it, sweetheart? What’s going on?”
I lifted my head from his shoulder. I shook my head. What was worth saying that hadn’t already been said? I missed Jack. I missed what we had and what we might have been. That was established family legend. For all intents and purposes, I had been left at the altar.
“Just the blues, Daddy,” I said, covering. “Just a long day.”
“Work okay?”
I nodded.
“But on the social front?”
I shrugged. I couldn’t risk speaking.
“But you’re liking your apartment.”
Which was a safe conversation point. He knew I liked it. I nodded.
“It’s small, but I like it. It’s miniscule, really. You’ve seen it.”
“Well, New York living. That’s what it is. I heard the other day about some condos over in Jersey City just coming online. Newark is coming back, too.”
“Hmmmm,” I said.
I dabbed at my eyes.
“Mom’s got all your favorites in the fridge.”
“Oh, good.”
“And I am going to make my Magic Chicken Dinner on the grill. The one and only.”
“Then all is right in the world.”
I expected him to move the car. Cry over. But he didn’t push it into drive. I squared my shoulders and blew my nose again.
“Listen, Heather, I’m afraid I have some bad news. I hate to add it to your unhappiness right now, but Mr. Periwinkle died yesterday.”
I felt, incredibly, the same stillness I had felt in the Paris airport. In Charles de Gaulle. Something so horrible, so irrevocably painful, had happened, and it took the air from my lungs and the blood from my heart.
“What?” I asked, tears returning. “How?”
My voice went up on the last word, and I could barely contain a sob. My father took a breath and patted my knee.
“He didn’t come inside. Your mom hadn’t seen him. He was out in the garage in that place he liked to go. In the morning sun. He was just dead, honey. Old age.”
“Not Mr. Periwinkle.”
Dad put his arm around me. Mr. Periwinkle, cat of cats, my childhood friend, my tear pillow, my comfort, my kitty, was gone. And nothing I could do, or say, or hope, would change that one iota.
*
Appropriately, it rained as we buried Mr. Periwinkle the next morning.
I dug the tiny hole for him. Down in the basement, I had scrounged up an old hatbox—at least it looked as though it had once been a hatbox, with a six-sided top and a pale blue cover—and had found a discarded pile of raffia my mother had used for some sort of crafty project years before. I made a raffia-lined coffin for my kitten, for my old friend, and I put him carefully into the box and taped it shut, content that I had done what I could. I left the box in the garage while I dug the hole.
It was early, just past eight, and the leaves stuck to the earth in wet patches of muted colors. When I had the hole three feet deep, the turned soil on a piece of cardboard box stationed next to the hole, I stopped and regarded the work. It felt good to have my hands on something solid, a shovel handle, not more numbers on a computer.
“Deep enough?” Dad asked, coming out with two coffees. He handed me one.
“I think so, don’t you?”
He nodded and said, “He was a good cat.”
Dad wore an Irish tweed hat he had bought on a trip to Limerick years ago. I liked seeing him that way.
“Tell me something you remember about Mr. Periwinkle,” he said. “What was your best memory of him?”