his wife had inadvertently given him a black eye during a particularly hairy patch of labor.
I said, “Hate to break the news, but it wasn’t inadvertent. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. I’m sure your wife appreciates you very much. I’m sure you’re one of those guys who makes ‘involved father’ sound like God’s truth instead of an oxymoron.”
Beckett gave a hardy PR laugh, the kind that displayed his molars to their best advantage, but he didn’t take his eyes off me.
“Oh! The turkey. Let me just get my wallet. Do I pay you—or no, I just probably go get back in line …” I pawed around inside my shoulder bag. No wallet. “Let me just …” I moved the turkey to the crook of my left arm, so I could check my jeans pockets and the pockets of my coat. I have an informal banking system where I leave five-dollar bills in rarely visited pockets, for moments just like this. Two nickels and a penny. This was not good. This was starting to look like shoplifting. “I must have left my wallet at home.”
Beckett took the turkey from me and stuck it under his arm. You could tell he used to play football. A few shoppers in the parking lot dawdled over unlocking their cars, allowing them to stare. Beckett clapped me on the shoulder. “I’ll let it go this time with a recommendation: Get more sleep.”
I had the presence of mind not to blurt out “Easy for you to say!” which is, I suppose, a testimony to my fundamental sanity. I kept quiet, felt my face get hot, then, as I watched him turn around and go back into Donleavy’s, thought I might cry. Tired, that’s all. Tired, and now turkeyless.
At that moment Mary Rose came over. “What was that all about?” She was pulling a waterproof anorak over her head. Around her waist she wore a tan leather holster, where she kept all her clippers and such. I told her what happened. She lit a cigarette, listened, blew smoke sideways out of her mouth. “Shake it off. I’m sure the cop sees stuff like this all the time. It’s no big deal. Where is Stella, anyway?”
“Home with her father. He can’t get enough of her, you know? I practically have to wrestle him to the ground to get her away from him, just so I can feed her. Joined at the hip. Fathers and daughters, you know how they are. From birth they’re that way. Joined at the hip. Wait, did I already say that?”
I heard my voice go wobbly. Is this what motherhood had reduced me to? Weeping in the parking lot of Donleavy’s, wiping my nose with the cuff of my sweater? I tried to remember who I was: a producer of independent films, a baker of berry pies, an occasional runner, the world’s only adult lover of the knock-knock joke. A sometimes skier. A collector of funny ashtrays. The wife of Lyle. The mother of Stella. Brooke Stellamom.
Mary Rose considered me from beneath her bangs. Artemis. That’s the goddess I was thinking of. The virgin goddess of the hunt. The no-time-for-nonsense goddess.
Mary Rose was not one of those women who believed housekeeping extended to tidying up conversations, filling in all the awkward moments with decorative remarks. “You and Lyle should come with me to the Barons’ for Thanksgiving. I don’t think Ward would mind my asking you.”
I said it sounded like fun! I said I’d ask Lyle and give her a call tomorrow. I hopped in the Volvo (pumpkin-colored, formerly owned by someone with a thing for incontinent cats and vanillascented air fresheners), buckled up, gave a goofy wave, and sped off, the Volvo fish-tailing as I hit a patch of soggy maple leaves. I have a peculiar habit. The more bizarre a situation is, the more I’m compelled to pretend it’s as normal as can be.
Mary Rose and the Barons? Audra and Big Hank Baron were among Mary Rose’s biggest clients. I was also related to them in some convoluted fashion which, I’m embarrassed to say, I never remember accurately. I think my grandfather, who had a stroke at the age of fifty-six and didn’t speak for the next twenty years, is Audra Baron’s uncle. Before the stroke, my mother had also been unsure exactly how the Barons were related to us, and after the stroke she was too shy to ask Poppo to scrawl, on his little blackboard, the answer to the question: how are we related to the woman with the hair who threw herself on your chest and wept? I forgot.
The Barons owned one of those West Hills mansions whose grounds boasted 200 year-old trees. They had a foundation (the family, not the house, although obviously the house did too). They had hospital wings named after them. Why would Mary Rose be having Thanksgiving there? I don’t think Ward would mind my asking you … What was that about? Audra and Hank’s son, Ward, was one of those good-looking men—shoulders, jaw, a serious nose that takes your breath away—whose best qualities are visible at one hundred paces. Women see him, meet him, and know this instantly. But they are waylaid by his giddy jokes (“What’s the last thing that goes through a bug’s mind before he hits the windshield? His butt!”), thinking, hoping, that a third-grade sense of humor is an indicator of wit and character.
I decided that Audra and Big Hank were probably out of town, and Ward was having one of his parties. I remember having heard that he was living at home while his houseboat, moored ten miles west of our city in an anchorage full of artists, filmmakers, and nuts with money, was being refurbished.
It turned out to be nothing like that at all.
THE BARONS LIVED high in the West Hills on a ridge of rudely verdant forest. The house itself was a local curiosity; built in the 1920s with money pilfered from the government by the owner of our region’s largest shipyard, it was a three-story Mediterranean villa with raked concrete walls and a terra-cotta tile roof. From the front windows there was a view of three mountains, two rivers, and our lovely downtown.
The only other time I’d had Thanksgiving at the Barons’ was during the filming of my first movie, Romeo’s Dagger, ten years earlier, when Audra was infused with the extravagant feelings of connectedness that always go with making a movie, then dissipate the morning after the wrap party quicker than a throat full of helium sucked from a balloon. Since then, I had seen very little of them, although I occasionally ran into Audra around town.
When Mary Rose and I arrived a little after 4:00 on Thanksgiving Day, Audra gave Mary Rose, Stella, and me a big flapping-hand welcome, kissing the air beside our ears.
“Brooke, it’s been too long. And there’s that adorable baby. Are you sure Lyle doesn’t have any Asian in him anywhere? Little Stella looks as exotic as a little Tatar. Maybe it’s just that black hair. From what I remember of your mother’s side of the family they’re dishwater.” She swooped down on Stella and left an orange lipstick butterfly on her temple. Stella gave her that furrow-browed baby stare, the same one you see every day on displeased senators on CNN. I thought I would pop with pride. No one has more dignity than a six-month-old.
Audra was impressively slim, with thick, highly managed auburn hair. She was one of a vanishing breed, a Lady of the House, who has never held a paying job but has worked herself silly putting food on the table every night for a passel of ingrates. Most people look at this kind of old-fashioned American woman with scorn; they should try getting a meal for five on the table every night for forty years. Audra was in her sixties now, and seemed even more frantic than I remembered. Frantic to do things right. Frantic to amuse. Frantic, of course, to look young. I don’t think she understood that unless you could make yourself look twenty-four, the Herculean regimen and hocus-pocus involved in looking a mere ten years younger wasn’t worth giving up the pleasures of tanning and the occasional Twinkie. Or maybe she did understand. She had a waist, which she liked to emphasize by wearing wide, colorful belts.
“Where is the Sensitive Photocopier Repairman anyway?” Audra made her blue eyes twinkle. I felt my jaw clench.
The Sensitive Photocopier Repairman was Lyle. Or what I used to call Lyle behind his back, when my love for him felt as sturdy as one of the bottom members of a human pyramid. It was cute then, cute and teasingly half accurate. Drunken tiffs, flirtations bordering on infidelity, my backing his new truck into a phone pole, anything was a match for our love. We’d met just after Audra brought me the rights to the story that eventually became Romeo’s Dagger. My life was insane with possibility. My first feature and true love, all in the same month. That my new man was fastidious to the point of pathology mattered not.