Charlie chuckled. “Probably good for her.”
“You sound great,” I said. “You really—You sound wonderful.”
“I’ve started running. You know, I made fun of John for wearing those faggoty spandex, but man, Lindy, the endorphins are something else. It’s different from other sports.”
“How long have you—”
“Just the last ten days or so, but I’m a new man. Getting up at six, heading over to the track in Cudahy, at the high school. A bit of a drive, but it’s invigorating.”
Charlie was getting up at six to drive to the south side and run on the track at a public high school?
“Listen,” he said. “I don’t want to keep you. Let me sign off, and I’ll call Ella tomorrow from work.”
“Where are you right now?” I asked.
“Just watching the game on TV—the Brewers are playing in Anaheim tonight. Hey, my new office at the stadium is great. You’ll have to come see it.” His tone was as friendly and unfraught as if I were a neighbor of whom he was genuinely fond. “Have a good night, Lindy,” he said. “Love to you and El.”
I had been on the cusp of asking again where exactly he was staying—at home, it seemed, except that I just couldn’t believe it—and also who Reverend Randy was, but the conversation had gone so unexpectedly well that I gave in to its rhythms, its imminent conclusion. “Love to you, too,” I said.
THE FOLLOWING NIGHT, Ella and I read a chapter of Fantastic Mr. Fox together before she went to bed, and after I’d stood to turn out the light, she said, “Mom, who’s Andrew Christopher Imhof?”
I froze. Trying to keep my voice steady, I said, “Did someone mention him to you?” Could Dena have, when and if she’d given Ella the tiara? We’d also run into an old classmate of mine, Mary Hafliger, on Commerce Street, but surely Mary wouldn’t have said anything about Andrew. And even if she had, or if someone else had, I’d have heard it.
From the nightstand, Ella lifted a large navy blue hardcover book. It was my high school yearbook, I quickly realized, seeing the embossed silver cursive on the cover: The Zenith 1964. “He’s in here,” she said, and she opened it, flipping the pages. Then she held out the “In Memoriam” page with Andrew’s full name, his photo in black and white, his fair hair and long eyelashes, his heartbreakingly sweet smile. Beneath the photo were the dates of his birth and death: 1946–1963. They both seemed terribly long ago. The forties, that had been the decade of World War II and Sugar Ray Robinson and Rita Hayworth, but even the sixties, the early sixties especially, seemed very distant: a time when Jackie Kennedy wore a pillbox hat and chimps were sent into space.
Ella pointed to the dates and said, “Does that mean he died?”
I stepped toward the bed. “Andrew was a boy in my class, and he did die, when we were seniors in high school. It was very, very sad.”
“How did he die?”
My heart had enlarged in my chest and was blocking my throat, making it difficult to speak or breathe. Was Ella old enough? She’d been in kindergarten when she asked where babies came from, and I had told her, simply and briefly but clearly; I’d used the words vagina and penis, which, when I repeated the story to her, Jadey couldn’t believe—Drew was then twelve, and at their house, they all still called them hoo-hoos and winkies. But I believed that dodging children’s questions wasn’t necessarily good for them or you.
I took a deep breath. “He was in a car accident,” I said.
“Was he wearing his seat belt?”
“A lot of cars back then didn’t have them,” I said. “They weren’t as safe.”
“Did you cry when he died?”
“Yes,” I said. “I cried a lot.” Then—I was not sure this wasn’t an error in judgment, but I wasn’t sure that staying quiet wouldn’t be an error, too—I said, “I was involved in Andrew’s accident. I was driving one car, and he was driving another car, and my car hit his.”
Ella’s eyes grew huge. “Did you go to the hospital?”
“Yes, I did, but I wasn’t seriously hurt. I was lucky, and Andrew was unlucky. He was a wonderful person, and I liked him very much. I’d known him since both of us were younger than you. When he died, it was the saddest thing I had ever been through.”
“Sadder than when your dad died and when Granny died?”
“It was different. When someone dies young—it doesn’t happen often, and it’s not something that will happen to you, although that’s why you wear your seat belt, or it’s why you look both ways before crossing the street, because you need to be careful—but when a young person dies, it’s different from an older person dying. People are supposed to grow up and get married and have children, and when they don’t, it feels like a mistake.”
“Like Jesus?” Ella was possibly the most serious I had ever seen her—entirely focused, listening to every word I said.
“Well, Jesus was an adult when he died. But you’re right that he didn’t get married or have children, and his death was sad, too.”
Ella was silent, pondering. “Do you think Andrew Christopher Imhof and Granny are together now?”
I smiled. “He was just called Andrew, or Andrew Imhof. You don’t have to say his middle name. You know, he and Granny did know each other a little—as you’ve probably noticed, Riley is so small that everyone knows everyone else. When Andrew and I were a year younger than you are now, Granny and I ran into him and his mother at the grocery store, and Granny thought Andrew was a girl. His hair was a little bit long and curly then.”
“She thought he was a girl?” Ella seemed both appalled and excited.
“I don’t think he was too offended.”
Beneath the sheets, Ella had propped her legs into a tent, the open yearbook resting against her thighs. She scrutinized the photo. “Did you love Andrew?”
“Yes,” I said. “I did.” In a way, it was nice to be able to talk about him—these were questions no one had ever asked me, questions no one besides a child would have dared—but it also was striking to think, standing there in my old bedroom, how far behind I had left him. I still dreamed of Andrew regularly, but in the dreams, a certain blurriness, an elasticity of facts, kept us peers, allowing me to ignore what was in this moment starkly obvious: I was twenty-five years older than he had been when he’d died; I had lived longer, by a significant margin, since the accident than he had lived before it; Ella was much closer to the age he’d died than I was. Was it disgusting, was it unseemly, that as a woman of forty-two, I could remember so clearly the anticipation of kissing him for the first time, how tan and handsome he had looked in his football uniform, how warm his skin would have been to touch? And now I dyed the gray from my hair, I had lines at my eyes and mouth, and my face was weathered—not in a terrible way, I wasn’t someone greatly pained by my own aging, but no one would have thought I was any younger than I was. So much time had passed since Andrew’s death. That was what was hard to believe, that so much time had passed and that the accident was no easier to understand than it ever had been. I could find words to describe it so that it sounded awful and faraway, tragic but long ago, when, really, if I thought about it, it was as difficult to comprehend as it had been in 1963. How could I have driven my car into Andrew’s, and how could that have killed him?
Ella said, “Did you love him more than Daddy?”
I blinked. “Oh, sweetie, it’s not like that. It’s not—Andrew wasn’t my boyfriend. We were friends, and I think we kept track of each other over the years, but we never dated. Because we came from the same place and were in the same grade, you could say we knew each other well, but that doesn’t compare to the way you know someone when you live with them. We know almost everything about Daddy, don’t we? What his snores sound like and which is his favorite shirt and how many ice cubes he likes in his glass of water at dinner.”
Ella laughed—Charlie’s snoring was a source of unfailing amusement to her.
“Just like I know almost everything about you,” I said. “It’s becau
se I’m your mother and I love you and you’re my favorite girl in the whole world.” I leaned forward and kissed the top of her head, and as I did, I thought of what Charlie had said to me in the early morning after our wedding night, when I’d awakened from my dream of Andrew: I want to be the love of your life. He had gotten his way, hadn’t he? Even with the two of us staying in different places, my moods were defined by him, by the latest thoughts I’d had about the hope or futility of our future together. Kissing Joe Thayer, however briefly and clumsily, had given me a glimpse of an idea that came back to me now—that I could not in my lifetime love another man. Not so much due to my loyalty to Charlie as due to a sort of weariness, a lack of interest in starting anew. I loved my husband out of affection and also out of habit, I loved him with my wife’s heart, and with my secret heart, my dream heart, I loved Andrew Imhof. I had no other love to spare, not of the romantic variety. If I went through with divorcing Charlie, I wouldn’t remarry; I simply couldn’t envision it, and I found myself wondering then if living alone, being single again, would be harder than putting up with him. Even putting up with him might be easier than not putting up with him—being the beleaguered wife, propelled forward, given a sense of purpose, by my troublesome husband. Whereas if I were single, I would struggle financially, I would have to delicately navigate interacting with the Blackwells and with Charlie himself, and there would be acrimony of an explicit rather than a suppressed kind.
What I wanted to know (it was useless, and adolescent as well) was if I had left the house a little earlier or a little later that September night in 1963, or if Fred Zurbrugg’s party had been called off, or if I hadn’t argued with Dena and driven alone, or if our argument had left me so despondent I’d decided to skip the party altogether—if the accident had been prevented, would Andrew and I have become a couple, and if we’d become a couple would we have remained one, and would we eventually have married? This had long been the story I’d told myself, and if it was a fiction, it had nevertheless felt true—it had felt like the sort of truth you don’t need to defend because, in spite of all arguments against it, it cannot be diminished. But now I was doubtful. I was sick of Riley after less than a month; I was ready to go home, because home wasn’t here. If I had married Andrew, would I have been content to lead a smaller life, to stay forever in a place like this? Was it venturing into the world that had sharpened my appetite for what the world offered? Or if I’d stayed here, a farmer’s wife, would I have felt stifled no matter what?
“I’m praying right now for Andrew Imhof,” Ella said.
I switched off the light. “That’s sweet of you, ladybug.”
IN RILEY, THE Protestant cemetery and the Catholic cemetery were side by side, about a mile southwest of the river, and in the morning, I drove first to St. Mary’s, the Catholic one. At Buhler’s florist, I’d bought two bouquets of white tulips, and I placed one on Andrew’s gravestone, which was a flat gray granite rectangle set into the grass. It was a beautiful late June morning, about seventy degrees with a light breeze, and no other visitors were in the cemetery, though a man on a riding lawn mower was cutting the grass in the distance. Looking for Andrew’s grave, I had passed some headstones marked by dried flowers, fake flowers, whirligigs, or wind socks, though most, like his, were undecorated. I stood there looking down at his name and the dates. I hadn’t attended his funeral, nor had I ever been to his grave—I probably wouldn’t have come on this trip, if not for my conversation with Ella—and it was jarring to see. I would say that it was like proof of something, except that there was nothing left to prove.
I wished in this moment for greater faith, for a prayer to recite that would feel sincere, but none came to me. I crouched, touching the cool stone as I had never really touched Andrew, and I thought, I hope you’re at peace. I’m so sorry. The only answer that came back was the buzz of the lawn mower, but I hadn’t expected otherwise.
I returned to where I’d parked and drove to Grace Cemetery, the Protestant one; it was probably half a mile from one entrance to another, and I could have gone on foot, but the roads here didn’t have sidewalks, and it would be too darkly ironic to get hit crossing between two graveyards. In Grace, I knew where my father’s and grandmother’s headstones were: Unlike Andrew’s, they were upright, my father’s gray and slightly curved at the top like a headboard, my grandmother’s similar in shape but a polished gray-mottled pink. PHILLIP WARREN LINDGREN, 1923–1976, BELOVED SON, HUSBAND, AND FATHER. And for my grandmother, EMILIE WARREN LINDGREN, 1896–1988. For my grandmother, my mother had selected a back-ground that was like an open book with blank pages—generally meant to evoke a Bible, I assumed, but my mother had said to me, “Since Granny liked to read,” and I knew she hadn’t meant religious texts. The soil at my grandmother’s grave was still dark and moist; she had been buried just over a month before, and I continued to feel that I was due to see her again shortly. I set the flowers between their headstones. Although I didn’t know what I believed about souls or an afterlife, it comforted me that now they had each other for company. My grandmother had outlived her son, her only child, by twelve years, and I imagined outliving Ella; it was an unbearable thought.
I would not have asked my father, had he been alive, what I ought to do about my marriage; he wouldn’t have liked such an intimate question. But I could guess what his advice would have been. As for my grandmother, no guesswork was necessary—she had told me straight out. And here in Grace Cemetery, it seemed shameful that I had ever considered otherwise, that I still was acting as if there was a choice to be made. Perhaps it was living around rich people—perhaps it was becoming a rich person myself—that had caused me to forget that life was hard work. Or perhaps it was the decade, the culture; it didn’t matter. The fact was that I had forgotten. But almost eleven years earlier, I’d taken a vow, made a public promise. I thought of my father’s motto—Whatever you are, be a good one—and though once my identity had been defined by being Phillip and Dorothy Lindgren’s daughter, Emilie Lindgren’s granddaughter, now I was Charlie Blackwell’s wife, Ella Blackwell’s mother. All of these people, each in a different way, would be deeply disappointed if I let my marriage fail. What choice did I have, really, except to go back—to try, as my mother had once made the decision to do with my father, to meet my husband with kindness?
BACK ON AMITY Lane, my mother passed me a note with Lars’s handwriting on it: Call Yvonne Sutton as soon as possible, and then a seven-digit number. When I called, I could hear Antoine crying in the background. “Alice, we’re thrilled about Jessica going to Ella’s school,” Yvonne said. “I don’t know what you did to get them to give her that scholarship, but bless you.”
“Don’t think of Biddle as Ella’s school—it’s Jessica’s now, too, and, Yvonne, she’s the one who got herself in. We’re so excited. If you have any questions about any of it, please feel free to call.”
“That’s real generous of you, and I almost forgot, thanks for the books, too—I don’t think Jessie’s looked up once since you dropped them off.” I started to respond, but Yvonne continued, her tone changing. “Now, unfortunately, there’s another reason I’m calling. Alice, Mama won’t tell you herself, so I’ve got to be the one to say it—she can’t stay another night in Maronee. God knows I don’t mean to stick my nose in you two’s personal business, but it just isn’t right for a sixty-three-year-old lady to be babysitting a grown man.”
“You mean that Miss Ruby—” I hesitated. “I’m embarrassed to say I’m not quite sure what’s going on. Has Charlie asked Miss Ruby to stay with him at our house?”
“Not at your house—at Mr. and Mrs. Blackwell’s. Alice, Mama would do anything for Charlie, he’s had her wrapped around his little finger since way back, but she’s too old for this. She needs to sleep in her own bed.”
Of course—of course Charlie wasn’t staying on Maronee Drive. He was staying at his parents’, and Miss Ruby was staying with him in her room off the kitchen. She was probably also cooking him
breakfast and dinner.
“You’re absolutely right,” I said. “I’m sorry, and I’m glad you called. I’m not sure if your mother has ever mentioned that Charlie—This will sound very silly, but he’s afraid of the dark.”
“Oh, I know.” Yvonne laughed. “Believe me, we know all about the monsters under Charlie B’s bed.”
“I won’t deny that he’s unusual,” I said.
“I try not to judge.” Yvonne’s tone implied that she wasn’t succeeding, at least in this case. “I’m just concerned about Mama. Now, when I talked to Jadey, she said she doesn’t know when you’re coming home, but she’s fine having Charlie there, so if you want to call him, or you want me to call him, either way. He’d probably listen more to you, but if—”
“I promise that I’ll take care of it,” I said. “Everyone will sleep in their own beds tonight.”
BACK IN MARONEE, I dropped Ella at Jadey’s—Jadey shrieked with joy when she saw me, and agreed to take the girls to the pool if I promised to go on a walk with her that evening—and then I went to our house to sort the mail and listen to the phone messages, to throw out the rotting food from the refrigerator and empty the trash and make our bed from what was, I presumed, the one night Charlie had slept, or tried to sleep, in it. Then I drove to Harold and Priscilla’s, where Miss Ruby was watching The People’s Court on the small television in the kitchen. I told her to go home and take the next week off—I would speak with Priscilla—and I collected Charlie’s belongings. He had been sleeping not in an upstairs bedroom but on the couch in his father’s study, which was nearer to Miss Ruby’s room off the kitchen, and she had obviously been tidying his possessions. I took the alarm clock off the coffee table, folded the sleeping bag, which was from our house, and retrieved his toothbrush and toothpaste from the sink in the powder room under the stairs. I surveyed the second floor, but Charlie seemed to have been showering elsewhere—either at the country club or back at our house.