I’ve just about made it through my first week. Tomorrow is Friday.
After the kids head to school with John and I’ve washed all the breakfast dishes, I settle into one of the four boxy gold velvet chairs in front of the TV to start reading My Ántonia. The wide flat arms of the chairs are dotted with marker. The welting is colored in by hand. Scribbling on furniture, I hear my mother say. What’s next? Painting the carpet?
Though maybe the free-for-all started after the mother got sick. I bet you’d do that. I bet you’d stop saying no all the time so that, later, if your kids were thinking about you, they’d remember you smiling, thumbs up, being the Fun Mom, the Best Mom, the mom with the singsong voice who says, Go ahead, sweetie! That’s great, honey!
I would. If I got sick, I’d say yes to every last thing until the day I died. Hot dogs for breakfast, bubble gum in school, sleepovers on weeknights. No more teeth brushing or bed making. Turn up the music, break out the pottery wheel, pass the markers. Indelible? PERFECT. I’d hang up all their drawings and photos and certificates and ribbons until the walls were covered from floor to ceiling. I’d surround myself with evidence of life, proof that my kids were waxing even as I waned.
I’m only a page in when a guy who looks about twenty-one comes through the sliding glass door in shorts and nothing else.
“Hi, I’m Evan,” he says. “The stepson.”
“Oh, hi, I’m Kelly,” I reply, keeping my eyes from drifting over his bare chest.
I close my notebook and we shake hands, which feels courtly and silly, considering his near-nakedness. We’re right around the same height—five-seven, five-eight. He has long, loose hair that falls just past his shoulders; it’s brown, but you can tell he was blond as a child. He’s taut and muscular, vacuum-packed, like the soccer players I knew in high school. He has perfect teeth, and dimples. Dimples kill me.
“Uh, excuse me.” He disappears down the hall and comes back wearing a T-shirt. My eyes relax.
“I was gonna stir up some eggs,” he says, pulling his hair into a ponytail. “You like eggs?”
“Oh, thanks, no, I’m good.” Why am I nervous?
In a minute, he’s back, sitting behind me at the kitchen table with a pile of eggs that nearly covers the plate. “Mind if I turn on the TV?” he says.
“Not at all.”
He clicks through the stations and stops on a laundry detergent commercial. “Does that say Channel Ten?” he asks, squinting.
“Where? Oh, yeah, Ten.”
“Ever watch Santa Barbara?” Evan asks.
“No. I don’t think so.”
“It’s from America. They live in California,” he explains, in case inference was beyond me.
On the screen comes a blonde named Eden, who, I quickly surmise, has been raped. Her husband, Cruz, a bulky Mexican guy, kneels beside her, running the backs of his fingers along her cheek as she weeps, tending to her perfectly, like people do on TV.
I’ve never known a guy who watches soap operas.
At a commercial, Evan ferries his plate into the kitchen and comes back with the newspaper and a pencil.
“U.S. Great Lake, four letters,” Evan says, sitting down, leaving an empty chair between us. I’ve never known a guy who does the crossword.
“Uh, HOMES: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie.”
“Yep. There she is.”
Evan checks off the clue with a tcht of satisfaction and pulls a bag of sunflower seeds out of his pocket.
I try him on in my mind. Me and Evan, Evan and me. It could work. I could see it. He’s young, but what’s a couple of years at this point? We could bump into each other over dishes, yard work, laundry. We could have a beer one night, wait for John to go to his room, make out in front of the TV, sneak back to wherever Evan sleeps, get horizontal, roll around for a while, spoon, do it all over again the next day.
I know, I do this with everyone (well, not John), but someday one of the people I mentally audition will become my actual boyfriend and then my fiancé and then my husband and it will have started just like this. Hi. Hi. I’m Kelly. I’m ______.
“John went to get paint,” I tell Evan.
“Pfft,” he says in a way that begs interpretation. Unimpressed? Dismissive? Whatever it is, I am not inclined to mention John again.
Evan asks about my travels, so I launch into Things happen when you leave the house and then fast-forward to selling Tracy on the trip, arriving in Sydney, hitting all the bars and restaurants, getting hired and fired by human-rights violator Eugenia Brown, seeing John’s ad, and Tracy’s gig in Beecroft.
“It’s weird to go so many days in a row without seeing her. We were together so much in college, people called us Trelly.”
Just then, Pop shuffles out of his room. He is, as photographed, almost entirely bald, with a nose that draws a second look. His skin is pink, and his eyes, small and set back, are Paul Newman blue.
“Well, hello,” he says, looking down at the two of us in front of what my mom calls the idiot box.
I stand to shake his hand, which is cool and smooth, like a river stone. “Hi, I’m Kelly.”
“Yes, I see. You can call me Pop. Evan,” he addresses his grandson, “how was your trip? You back at work tonight?” It turns out Evan was camping the past few days and has a job stocking shelves at a grocery warehouse from eleven P.M. to five A.M., which explains why he’s so muscular, not that I’m fixated on his body or anything, but, I mean, he is very fit.
“Can I make you some coffee?” I ask Pop.
“No, thank you, I’m out here to get the laundry going,” he says, patting the last of his hair absently.
“I can do that—”
“Pop does the washing,” Evan cuts me off, sounding almost paternal.
Pop makes his way slowly down the hall toward the kids’ room, making an airy whistling sound. When I ask Evan if I should gather all the dirty clothes, he assures me that Pop doesn’t need any help.
So now I’ve met all of Ellen Tanner’s people. The newish husband. The young children, the nearly grown son, the father. If this family were a poker hand, you’d fold. Without that middle card, you’re drawing to an inside straight, and that almost never works out.
It isn’t long before John pulls in the driveway. I hear him at the front door. I’m not eager to be found sitting in front of the TV with Evan while an old man does the washing. I walk to the hall to see if I can help carry anything, but when John gets inside, he nods at me, steps into his room, and shuts the door, just like yesterday.
Back in the TV area, Evan’s seat is empty, the newspaper gone, Pop is back in his space, and I’m alone in a house where one seven-year-old girl and three grown men sequester themselves voluntarily. I itch for Martin, easy Martin, who needs me to listen to his piano piece and buckle his seat belt. If no one will take my help, at least give me some pool tiles to scrub.
I suppose my job here could be to help John see his children as irresistible rascals again before he starts to resent their youth and ignorance and untimely needs. Maybe the great service I can offer John is to take over the crap parts, the stuff my mom did—No no no and Eat your beans and Stop that right this minute—so he can be a beaming dad who tickles and brings home presents from gift shops and says, Come here, Lovey! Give your old man a hug.