All the summers in betwe.., p.10
All the Summers In Between, page 10
Penny began jumping on the unmade bed, and Thea scolded her to stop. The child fell to her knees bouncing on the mattress in a Scooby-Doo T-shirt, then clasped her hands together like Princess Leia, kneeling regal and proud on a pillow. “Help me, Obi-Wan Kachobi.” Penny giggled.
What they needed help with, Thea thought, was getting out the door. Camp started in thirty minutes; Thea had to get moving. “It’s Obi-Wan Kenobi, silly. Did Daddy feed you breakfast?”
“Wheaties.” Penny nodded and jumped off the bed, landing her chubby feet on the wood floors.
She and Penny somehow pulled into the Laurel Oaks Country Day Camp on time, even though they had gotten stuck behind a gas truck that kept stopping and starting. It struck Thea then that when you needed the world to move fast, it always moved slow. But it would be the opposite with Penny, she thought, glancing at her daughter in the back seat in her pigtails. Her days as a little girl who lined up her stuffed animals in rows and taught them school, who insisted on burying a dead mouse they found in the road, who could be hoisted up onto Thea’s hip and carried—those days might move slow, but for Thea, they were moving too fast. Hadn’t her daughter changed so much just this year? In ten years, she’d be sixteen and plotting to get away from her mother.
Thea reached an arm back to squeeze her bare leg, her daughter’s grin enough to satisfy her. “Let’s play dolls when you get home today.”
“Okay, Mommy.”
After walking Penny up to the camp counselor, a college girl with bright blue eyeliner, Thea noticed that Midge was on the opposite side of the parking lot talking to other moms. For a second, she considered pretending she didn’t see her and getting in her car, but Midge waved her down. “You didn’t come to racquetball yesterday—what happened?”
Did they have a match? Thea had completely blanked.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t feel well,” she lied. “A headache. I should have called.” Midge asked if she was going to Peg’s for coffee that afternoon—Peg had called to invite her last night—and when Thea made an excuse for that, too, Midge eyed her. “Are you okay?”
Thea turned to get into her car but stopped for a moment. She faced Midge, her elfin face soft and pillowy and covered in foundation. Midge loved her “Jag,” as she called it, the green sports car parked perfectly centered in the lot, her key chain a small gold jaguar with real rubies for spots (both gifts from a husband who stayed in the city all week). Was Midge asking after Thea because she truly cared—or was she simply looking for gossip? She had very loose lips. And now that Margot was here, Thea couldn’t help but compare her best friend from childhood with her best friend today. It wasn’t that one seemed more or less true, but even after all these years, Thea felt so much closer to Margot than she did Midge. Had Midge been nothing but a placeholder until Margot returned? Sometimes Thea wasn’t even sure she liked Midge and all her judgments about Thea’s way of doing things. All those times Midge had encouraged Thea to be a better cook or to pack up her summer clothes in the attic (rather than letting them mingle with winter’s long sleeves and pants), to let her pots soak with Bar Keepers Friend—wasn’t it all a way of criticizing Thea for not being more like her? But Margot didn’t want Thea to be just like her. In fact, she seemed to enjoy that they were different, and part of what drew them together was rediscovering just how much.
“I’m fine. No, I’m good. Just catching up on some stuff.” To say the least.
“With the person in your barn?” Midge smiled with a knowingness. “I stopped by the other day.”
Thea dropped into the driver’s seat. She needed to act as though it was perfectly normal that someone was at her house. Midge wouldn’t know who it was. Midge didn’t even know Margot. “It was one of Felix’s authors coming for lunch.” What a whopper she’d come up with! “Next time, be sure to knock.”
Midge flicked her eyes. “I didn’t want to be a bother.”
“You never are.” Thea turned over the engine, her nerves shifting with the gears. This was a small town. People talked. How much longer would she be able to keep this secret?
* * *
There was a grumble in Thea’s stomach as she pulled up to the house on the hill and walked up the front steps, immediately going around back to pick hydrangeas to put in a vase on her kitchen table. Margot was outside at the picnic table overlooking the deep blue bay, writing in a leather notebook. Her hand was moving quickly, the words flying across the page. When she spotted Thea snapping off large blooms, Margot waved, dropping her pen and closing the book.
“Any news on Willy?” Thea asked, curious about what she had been writing in the blank notebook. Something about how hunched Margot had looked a minute before had given Thea the impression that there was a development, that maybe she’d received discouraging news. Then again, Margot was wearing a strapless terrycloth romper with string ties at the chest and looking rather fabulous for someone with a missing husband. It both impressed and irritated Thea.
Margot helped Thea arrange the bouquet. “I rung his mother in Chicago—I hope you don’t mind the long-distance call. She barely remembers her own name these days, but I begged her to call me if he gets in touch with her.”
It was already warm and humid, and with Penny in camp until four, they had the entire day ahead of them. It was the kind of summer morning that would have kept them outside all day when they were younger. Everything always seemed interesting back then, even laying on a blanket and staring up at the clouds, trying to catch the world spinning. Mick Jagger’s voice popped into her head: What a drag it is getting old.
“Remember when we used to ride our bikes to work and try to reach up and tear the leaves off the trees overhead?” Margot handed Thea the bright pink bunch and she smiled at the memory.
“I forgot how fun that was.” They went inside, and Thea hunted in her cabinets for a vase, then spun around, remembering, “I’ve got to show you this picture of us that I found.” The photo was of the two of them with their hair blown out big and voluminous and Twiggy-short skirts. The Walrus had snapped the picture with Margot’s camera, right before they left for a concert on the beach for some local band. “Is that the Wheezy Brothers, those three guys trying to sound like the Beach Boys?”
“Yes! That was them. Didn’t one of them like you?” Thea filled the vase with water, arranging the bouquet to fill out the glass.
Margot laughed. “I kissed him. Remember?”
She and Margot hadn’t been able to stop remembering since they started talking yesterday, and looking back made everything seem more charming. In one moment they couldn’t stop laughing about the time that Margot dressed as a chauffeur and drove Thea around the Hamptons in the back seat of her Mercedes, pretending that Thea was Scottish royalty, if there even was such a thing. And then there was the time that Margot convinced Thea to go on her horse with her, and she’d ridden out of the paddock, taking her across the meadow at galloping speed; how Thea had thrown up when she got off, her head not having enough time to catch up to the horse’s pace.
“Remember when I took you to Ditch Plains, and you met that surfer and he took us to his van, where it turned out he had a bed in the back?” Thea snorted.
Margot hiccupped with laughter. “That was disgusting! But I actually thought it was kind of cool at the time.”
“Didn’t you spend the night with him?” Thea rumpled up her face with disgust. “Ew.”
“He WAS gorgeous.”
Thea popped two slices of bread into the toaster. They never did mention the Walrus.
* * *
It had become a familiar pattern, with Felix in the city these last couple of days. Thea prepared breakfast and drove Penny to camp. She’d make small talk with Midge and the other moms, often making plans she didn’t intend to keep. Then she’d return home and find Margot, either in the barn folding the blankets off the couch where she’d slept, or rowing out to her sailboat, or in Thea’s kitchen, ready to launch into a funny story. Thea had things to do—she needed to go to the bank and order new checkbooks, pick up dish soap, and get Penny a stack of elastics because her hair was getting long and unruly this summer. But Thea put all of it off—the vacuuming and dusting, even the laundry—because suddenly, everything other than spending time with Margot felt like a waste.
She’d felt a similar tug when Cara had come home for Christmas this year. Her sister hadn’t been back to Long Island in three years, and there was so much Thea had wanted to show her—what restaurant had replaced the old soda fountain they loved, the colossal houses that were being built along the dunes. Long hours passed when the sisters read in the living room while Penny napped, when they’d bake and decorate cookies in the shape of angels and stars while a winter wind howled off the sea. They shared nightly cups of chamomile tea and flipped through the latest issues of Cosmo and Vogue and remarked on their favorite outfits or quotes or sex tips, all while Felix worked late or remained in the attic with a stack of manuscripts, knowing the sisters wanted to be alone.
On that same trip home, Cara had spent a day with her father, who still lived in the same Cape Cod with the crumbling steps and rusted appliances that Thea had grown up in. Since moving out, Thea had only seen Dale a dozen times: he’d come to her wedding, and he’d visited after Penny was born. Sometimes she’d run into him at the grocery store or Easter mass. That night, after her visit with her father, Cara had tried to go along with Thea’s plans for a fancy dinner at The Palm and a viewing of Rosemary’s Baby, but Cara was quieter than usual on the drive to the restaurant, a sure sign that something was wrong. After some prodding, and as the chorus of “Bohemian Rhapsody” played on the car radio, it came out that Dale, now fifty-nine, had hurt his back on the job and could barely walk, and was hobbling around with a cane.
“He’s in pain, and the house smelled, Thea.” Cara had pulled Thea’s coat tighter around her chest; her sister didn’t have one warm enough to bring home from California. “And in his fridge there was all this rotted fruit, a few bottles of beer, a gray-looking tray of chop meat. I don’t even think he can get to the grocery store.”
“I had no idea, I’m sorry.” Thea had worried about Dale in a distant sense now that he was alone, but never enough to check in on him more than every couple of months. His longtime girlfriend Becky had left him a few years before, just after Cara moved out.
Her sister had paused, the headlights of another car blinding them both as it passed. “I might come back for a while to help out,” Cara had said, pulling a cigarette from her embroidered suede purse, pressing in the car’s silver lighter. “Then you and I don’t have to squeeze everything in, you know? I can go into the city for auditions, maybe try for Broadway. It’s not like I’m doing much more than waitressing out there anyway.” Cara sounded hopeful, and Thea had thought: It’s amazing the drudgery that we can convince ourselves of when we love someone.
Before the cigarette lighter even popped, Thea had told her sister that she’d check on her stepfather every week. She’d bring him prepared meals, drive him to his doctor’s appointments. All in the name of keeping Cara on the West Coast. Thea insisted she keep her apartment, go to auditions in Hollywood or Burbank or wherever. “I don’t want you to push off everything just because Dale is having a tough few months.”
* * *
After dropping Penny at camp on a drizzly morning, Thea drove straight to Dale’s with a platter of food on her passenger seat. With Margot’s arrival, she’d neglected to stop by her stepfather’s since last week, and she was beginning to worry that too much time was passing. Going back to her old house had gotten easier these last few months. At first, she had struggled to feel comfortable around her stepfather, wading only into safe territory, like how his aspirin had run out or his coffee was running low. She rarely spoke of anything going on in her own life, and they didn’t really have conversations. Instead, they spoke in checklists of doctor’s visits and news headlines. By now the effect of Dale’s rants had long dulled, and in those early weeks of January, Dale felt nothing but old to Thea. She felt sorry for him that his body had given out on him, the same body he’d relied on his entire life to make a living.
With the car parked next to his old plumbing van, she knocked on the door.
“Pop, are you awake?” Thea hollered, but when he didn’t answer, she used her key to unlock it.
“In the kitchen,” he yelled, his voice muffled. She found him on his hands and knees under the sink.
“Pop! You’re going to hurt yourself all over again.”
The change in name had happened so easily after Penny started coming over regularly with the steady stream of tuna casseroles and beef stroganoffs that Thea had made. “Grandpop!” Penny called him, and from there, it had been easy for Thea to shorten it, to create a role for this man who had never had a clear purpose in her life. Calling him her stepfather had always felt hollow, since he wasn’t a truly paternal figure to her in his actions or affections, and she’d never felt attached enough to call him “Dad.” But Dale was Penny’s grandfather—and that one small adjustment had given Thea and Dale something to connect on. She tried to bring Penny every time she came over, even if just to break the ice between them, but on the days she didn’t, Dale actually asked about her. Sometimes the way he inquired about Penny’s teachers or her progress in tap dancing had made Thea understand what her own mother had seen in him.
Dale grumbled. “There’s a leak under here, and I’ll be damned if I’m paying someone to do what I’ve done a million and one times.”
Thea set down the plate of chicken wings she’d grilled, a big enough portion of potatoes she’d roasted to last him a few days. When he ran out of her home-cooked meals, she kept a steady stream of Swanson TV dinners in his freezer. He loved the cherry pies.
Dale got up slowly, like he wasn’t sure what might hurt if he moved an inch in the wrong direction. “Where’s my granddaughter?”
“Camp,” Thea said with a shrug, sitting for a moment at the kitchen table. She always felt a little tired here. Emotional nerves, she thought. “Penny loves that camp so much, I couldn’t beg her to stay home.”
He shook his head with a disapproving smile, and he didn’t have to say a word for her to know what he was thinking. In Dale’s mind, camp was for the wealthy summer people who didn’t know what to do with their kids all year long, not the locals who knew the best beaches and fishing spots and ran barefoot through town. But Thea had always dreamed of attending camp as a kid, and she’d vowed that if she and Felix could afford the weekly fee—and boy, did she scrimp on extras all year to cobble it together—she would send her.
Thea immediately changed the subject. “Did you make your appointment with Doc Robbins? He said six weeks.”
“August 12 at eleven. But I don’t think I need those shots anymore.”
Thea rolled her eyes as he rambled about why he wouldn’t go. “Discuss that one with Cara.”
It was a waste of time to banter like this, Thea thought. They both knew that he’d go to his appointment and they both knew he’d get his shot. It was funny, too, because they also both knew he was feeling better. That he could buy his own groceries and fix his own meals, maybe even drive himself to the doctor. But Thea kept stopping by to see him, and Dale kept phoning her with items from the grocery store that he needed. Maybe it was just their shared love of Penny, or maybe it was because they’d both started to look forward to this time together. No matter how flawed he was, Thea decided, it was a comfort to be around him since he was the only person that remembered her mother the way Thea did. Even Cara’s memory was shaky.
Two months ago, Thea had overheard Dale in his woodshop in the garage telling her daughter a story about Thea’s mother, how she would have loved to have met Penny.
“Oh, how that woman loved her girls,” Dale said.
The sentiment hit Thea like a train crashing straight into her heart. She’d been drying dishes by the open window, but suddenly, Thea was steadying herself on the countertop around the kitchen sink, gripping the faux brick linoleum like it was all she could do to keep from falling to the floor.
Chapter Nine
Thea spread mayo on turkey sandwiches in her kitchen while envisioning what kind of trouble she’d get in if the police pulled up to her house right that minute. She could pretend she didn’t know Margot was staying in the barn, or Thea could say that her friend had asked to spend a week’s vacation, clueless there was any kind of trouble. More snapshots passed like a flipbook: Margot being led away in handcuffs, Felix’s disapproving face, police ripping Penny out of her arms.
“You’re certain you told me the truth?” Thea said as she arranged carrot and celery sticks on two plates to accompany the sandwiches.
From the kitchen table, Margot tugged on the hummingbird pendant she’d been wearing around her neck since she’d arrived; seeing it made Thea feel guilty that she’d tossed her matching one in the dark swirl of the ocean years earlier. “Everything with Willy? Yes.”
The insides of Thea’s body quivered with a strange kind of chill. She needed to expel some of this nervous energy.
“After we eat lunch, do you want to go for a bike ride?” She was back home, the drizzle had stopped, the fog had burned off, and it was still early on Friday. Her husband returned that night, but not until dinnertime.
