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  “It’s not what you think. I didn’t get fired. I’m just taking some time off. Preston told me I can come back anytime. I needed to stop for a while because my back was killing me. Last week I pulled something and I couldn’t even straighten up. And I’m taking Advil like candy. That’s not right. I have to find something else.”

  “So go back to school, study for a career.”

  “I’m forty-one, Dad. I don’t have time to be a freshman again. Just let me show you the place. It’s sweet, I’m telling you. You’ll fall in love with it.”

  I can’t give him money, and I’m not signing away my security so he can open the billionth coffeehouse in California and then go out of business. He’ll scream at me that I never support him, that I’ve got no confidence in him, that I’m the reason he’s screwed up, that I never give him the chance to help himself, that I want to keep him “infantilized” (this he got from years of therapy), that he’s going to take back the kids. Can you imagine? He’s going to take back the kids. That’s what he threatens me with. But it’s what scares me, too. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow,” I say, just so I can think.

  In the afternoon the following day, I’ve got an hour before I pick the kids up from school. Jeremy has soccer practice and Abby a sewing class that she’s in with her grandmother. Louise doesn’t drive much anymore, so I have to take her places, to the doctor, shopping, to her hairdresser. Sometimes we call Lift Line and they come for her. The sewing class is something Abby and she are doing together, even though Louise could make a whole dress from scratch if she wanted. But she says it’s an activity to do with Abby that doesn’t require too much exertion, and anyway, it’s a mother-daughter class, so she needs to go.

  The blinds are drawn at Rex’s apartment. The porch light is still on at two in the afternoon. My heart starts beating fast. I’m always afraid of what I might find.

  I knock, I hear shuffling, then the door opens. He’s washed and shaved, dressed and in a clean knit shirt and navy slacks. Nothing’s wrong. He’s not curled up on the floor with his hands tucked between his knees as I’ve found him other times.

  “Dad?”

  “I thought I’d stop over before I pick up the kids.”

  “Um, maybe I should…” He steps outside and closes the door behind him. “I’m a little busy right now.”

  I get what he means. I’m not naïve about such things. “You’ve got company, no problem.” I apologize for not calling first and start to leave when the blind is pushed aside and I see Cheryl.

  “What’s she doing here?”

  “Now just take it easy,” he says. “Everything’s fine.”

  “Everything’s fine? How long has she been here?”

  “Dad, I know what you’re thinking, but we’ve been talking—”

  “Who’s been talking? You and her?”

  “Things have changed. Cheryl has a job in San Jose and she’s been living by herself and staying clean. She wanted to see if she could reach the one-year mark before she even contacted us again. It’s her anniversary today—”

  My head’s exploding with questions. “Anniversary? She got remarried?”

  “Her anniversary of staying clean and sober, so I made arrangements for her to come here last night.”

  I feel my knees go weak, and I sit down on the white plastic chair on the small balcony. “She’s gone four years and she just shows up and everything’s fine?”

  “Listen, Dad, you’re not an uninvolved party here. I know that. And I know I can never repay you for all you’ve done. I can’t change what I did, but I can change. Cheryl wants to be part of that.”

  “My God,” is all I can say. I feel my age suddenly. “Why doesn’t she come out here?”

  “This isn’t the best time. She’s doing great. Maybe a little shaken up about coming here and trying to prepare herself to see the kids. But she’s taken responsibility, Dad, that’s the main thing. And she did it on her own. She’s not asking for anybody’s forgiveness. Believe me, she’ll be the last to ever forgive herself. But we want to try again.”

  I can’t even show him my face, which is hot with fury.

  “That’s why I need to talk with you,” Rex says. “I know we can make a go of the business.”

  “What business?”

  “The coffeehouse. We’ve got a lot of it figured out. Cheryl’s been working as a hostess in a restaurant, she knows about keeping the books, about how to manage a business. It’s still a work in progress, but everything’s falling into line. Just let me explain it all to you, okay? Not now. But tomorrow. I’ve got to go up to San Jose and talk to someone about a new roaster for the place. But after I come back?”

  “Look,” I say, and forget what I’m going to say.

  “You all right?”

  “I have to pick up the kids now.”

  “Actually, we were thinking about doing that this afternoon. A surprise.”

  “No!” I say. I stand up and tell him to his face. “No more surprises today. You don’t just show up and introduce her to a daughter who has no memory of her! Are you nuts?”

  “Calm down, all right? We weren’t going to do it that way.”

  “I don’t care how you’re going to do it. Not today. I’m picking them up like always.”

  “What should we do?” I say to Louise that evening. Jeremy and Abby I’ve told nothing. Jeremy complained of a sore knee after soccer practice. He said, “This could be as serious as Osgood-Schlatter disease, which tends to primarily affect boys my age, or as minor as a sprain. I suspect the swelling will respond to a combination of ice and anti-inflammatory therapy, but the prognosis isn’t good for me to play in Saturday’s game.” This is his way of explaining he’s looking for an excuse not to play.

  I tell Louise that I’ve heard of grandparents going to court over such matters. “We have no official custody but we could make a case, a good case.”

  “I’m not so sure we can,” Louise says.

  “You want to just hand them over to her?”

  “Keep your voice down. The children.” She’s got a gray shawl around her shoulders and her lips are blistered from the cold she’s had. The kids bring home all the stuff that’s going around. “We need to speak with Marvin,” she says. Marvin’s our lawyer, who’s helped us in the past. He’s got a young associate in his office who knows the ins and outs of family law.

  “And what if Marvin tells us that they’re the parents and that’s who gets them? Are you prepared for that? Are you willing to list in affidavits all the bad things she’s done and talk about your son’s problems in front of a judge?”

  I can see by the way she twists her mouth she isn’t. She’s always felt it was her fault what problems Rex has. She was forty-two when she had him, and it wasn’t so common back then to have a child that late. We tried for years with no success. He was our miracle baby. Somewhere he’s still a miracle in her mind.

  She pulls the shawl tighter around her shoulders.

  “You should go to bed,” I say.

  “And you,” she tells me. “You hardly touched your dinner.”

  “I’m fine.” Inside, my stomach turns over as if I’m on the Cyclone at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, a ride Abby makes me go on with her.

  “We find out what they have in mind,” Louise says. I say nothing. “When we know the facts then we can discuss it with Marvin.”

  “Marvin’s got nothing in his pocket to help us. We should have severed her legal ties when we had the chance.”

  “We never had the chance.”

  “When she abandoned her children, we had the chance. We waited, like fools.”

  Louise gets up from the table and pours a little cream over sliced pears for me. “Eat,” she says. “It will do your stomach good.” She sits down next to me and puts her hand on my neck and rubs with her thumb and forefinger. Her fingers feel tiny back there, but they’ve still got strength in them. “We do this together,” she says to me. “You understand that, right?”


  I carve a crescent of sweetness from my pears and eat. I can promise nothing.

  We talk to Marvin. He says the law is on the parents’ side. “There are precedents for grandparents having custody but the case has to be clearly that a child’s welfare is endangered by remaining with the parents. It’s a high bar. It might be easier to have a child yourselves.” Louise snorts at this. “The truth is,” Marvin says, “if she’s clean and sober, and willing to assume her parental responsibilities at this time, it’s going to carry a lot more weight than anything that’s happened in the past, particularly if you haven’t carefully documented it. And if they want to, they can even contest visitation rights by the grandparents. It’s a question of how much to push before they push back. You can gamble, but they could win and be vindictive. I’ve seen it happen too many times.”

  I leave discouraged. Louise and I don’t speak for a while in the car, then she says, “We have to accept the inevitable. He didn’t divorce her. She never gave up custody. We stepped in and now we have to step aside.”

  “So that’s it? Just like that? Since when are you so blasé?”

  “I’m realistic,” she says.

  “I am, too. That’s why it’s not going to happen.”

  “What’s not going to happen?”

  “I’m prepared for a fight,” I say.

  “You’re prepared to take the children away from their father and mother for good?”

  “She comes back from God knows where, supposedly all cleaned up and motherly, and wants them back, and our son says, great, terrific, we’re a family again, come home, children, and you say we’re taking them away? What about them taking away from us!”

  “You heard what Marvin told us.”

  “I don’t care what Marvin told us. And you’re always too ready to do whatever your son asks.”

  Louise puts her hand on my arm. We’re at a stoplight on Mission Street and a boy not much older than Jeremy, a Hispanic kid, crosses in front of us with a surfboard on his head. “It will come to this eventually,” Louise says in a quiet voice.

  I remember a piece of a conversation I heard at the pancake house when Louise and I took the kids out for brunch one weekend. A young man was saying to a woman, maybe his wife, “I’m talking about thirty years down the road.” I imagined he was speaking about their future, what his business might be, or what he pictured for their kids one day. Maybe a second home somewhere they all could meet for vacations. I thought to myself I can’t even say, I’m talking about five years down the road. This is what Louise means in her soft voice when she talks about “eventually.”

  What did I expect? Maybe somebody in a nice pair of slacks, a tasteful blouse, a trim-cut blazer, and a little makeup to freshen the face, like the moms at Jeremy’s soccer games. Cheryl was always a pretty girl. But this Cheryl is thin and all sharp bones, her cheeks more sunken, her eye shadow too blue, and rings on four of her fingers, including a big silver one with a black stone. She wears snug jeans with embroidered pockets and a leather vest over a tight white sweater blouse.

  Cheryl bends down and extends her arms for Abby who shies away. On the way here we told the kids, “Your mother is in town and wants to see you.” Jeremy nodded. Maybe he knew this day was coming. He remembers her, of course, but he never speaks about her. Abby said, “I knew she’d come back. I knew she would.” She became so excited that she made us go back so she could wear her Annie Oakley costume that she got for Halloween in three weeks.

  Abby, a finger twisted tightly around her hair, finally goes over to her mother.

  We all stand there a minute while Cheryl makes a big scene of hugging her. Cheryl’s on her knees in the sand. We decided it was best to meet at Seabright Beach and have a cookout in one of the fire rings. A neutral place.

  Louise gives Jeremy a little push to go over too. I feel like he’s being shoved toward a stranger, but I keep my mouth shut. Now the tears come. Cheryl is crying, hugging Abby and reaching out her other arm for Jeremy, who keeps his body sideways but lets her put an arm around his waist. She turns her face from one to the other like she’s been on a long trip and planned all along to come back. I look away.

  “Let’s eat,” Rex says. He’s got his hand on Cheryl’s shoulder this whole time.

  “Wait a sec,” says Cheryl, and she jumps up and runs over to where they put down their stuff. She comes back with a present for each of them. Abby, who’s in her Annie Oakley outfit—never mind that her brother told her not to wear it because it looked stupid—gets a stuffed orangutan with a baby orangutan wrapped around its neck. Jeremy, who doesn’t rip open his present like his sister but instead neatly peels off the tape, has some kind of board.

  “It’s a skim board,” Cheryl tells him. “You throw it out along the shore and jump on for a ride.”

  “I know what it is,” Jeremy says, staring at it. He’s folding the wrapping paper back up in a perfect square.

  “Oh, honey,” Cheryl says. She’s got a husky smoker’s voice. “Do you already have one? Rex said no. Right? You said he didn’t have one.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Rex says.

  “Do you have one? You’re not disappointed, are you?”

  “It’s fine,” Jeremy says flatly. “I don’t have one.”

  “But you like it right, honey?” Cheryl asks.

  Jeremy looks at me.

  “He’s not so big on water sports,” I explain.

  “Oh,” says Cheryl. Her face is about to collapse.

  “It’s fine,” Jeremy says again.

  “Fine?” Rex says. “It’s a little more than fine, son. This is a top of the line model.”

  Jeremy turns it over in his hands. “I’m most appreciative,” he says, “of your generosity.” This is the way he talks when he doesn’t want to talk anymore. He makes a little house of such language and shuts the door from the inside.

  “Anybody hungry?” Louise asks.

  While Rex starts a fire in the pit, Cheryl takes Abby by the hand and walks along the beach. Couples, groups of teenagers, other families come down to watch the sun set. It’s already too cold to go in the water but surfers go out with their boards and kids slap their bare feet along the water’s edge.

  “So what do you think?” I ask Louise. Jeremy is next to his father, who’s fussing with the fire. Cheryl walks with Abby down the beach, telling her something. Her arms fly out, she jumps up, she squats down and gives Abby another hug. Then Abby shows her how she can do a cartwheel and a handstand.

  “I think,” Louise says, “that Abby’s vote is yes.”

  “You notice she hasn’t said a word to us. She went right to work on the kids.”

  “She’s their mother. What do you expect? She doesn’t have to win our approval.”

  “We’re fools.”

  Later in the evening, Abby will get on the skim board and zip along. Jeremy won’t have anything to do with it. Cheryl will show Abby her blueberry-colored nails and tell her that they can get manicures. Jeremy she’s going to take to the music store. She says she wants to buy him an iPod. Does he download music? What are his favorite bands? Does he play an instrument? She wants her kids to play instruments. What’s his best subject in school? She hardly gives him a chance to answer, and when he does, he says, “The sun is supposed to set at 6:02. It’s a minute and a half late. The tides must be disappointed.” Rex chews a burnt marshmallow and says, “You kids!”

  I watch the waves break on shore. My heart gets pulled out to sea like it’s in a rip current.

  •

  The kids spend the next week at the apartment with their parents. At first, Abby, when we pick her up for the sewing class with Louise, is all smiles and glee. She tells us Cheryl takes her shopping. They go out for fudge sundaes and to the movies. They carve pumpkins and bake the seeds. They cut out pictures from American Girl magazine and put them on Abby’s side of the bedroom she shares with her brother. But then, the following week, she doesn’t say so much. “Tell me what you’
re up to, snookums,” I say. I’m trying not to make judgments. I keep busy on my houses, read a biography of Eisenhower, catch up on my sleep. My arthritis lets up a bit. I’m thinking I can make the adjustment. They’re trying hard to be good parents. In fact, Rex doesn’t even call for my help with the kids.

  “Can you get me a new leotard?” Abby asks. “Mine is ripped.”

  “You can get one at gymnastics,” I say. They have a little store there that sells all the accessories the girls need.

  “Can you buy it?” Abby asks.

  “Yes,” Louise says.

  “Did you ask your parents?” I say.

  “Cheryl says she can’t afford it.”

  “We’ll get it,” Louise says.

  “I thought she had all this money saved,” I say, referring to Cheryl. That’s what she had told us.

  “Never mind,” Louise says.

  “You got anything else you want to tell us?”

  “Shush,” Louise says.

  “Don’t shush me,” I say. “Maybe she wants to talk. Abby?”

  “What?”

  “You got anything else to say?”

  “I’m tired,” she says.

  Two days later, when Jeremy comes over to the house, I find out things aren’t going so well. Rex and Cheryl are fighting again. We’re sitting on the hood of my Chrysler Imperial. I’ve had the car for eleven years and I should trade it in for one with better gas mileage, but I bought it the day Jeremy was born. He has his soccer uniform on now. I’ve had to pick him up from his game because Rex and Cheryl drove out to look at the coffeehouse. I went with them once and was not impressed, a rundown building with too many flies inside. Every day Rex calls and asks if I’ve made up my mind. I tell him no, I haven’t decided, and in the meantime he should think about going back to work for Preston. Why don’t I tell him the truth? That I’m never going to sign. Because he’s got the kids as leverage. He could hold them hostage from us if I don’t cooperate, and in the meantime I can only hope he loses interest or the place gets sold to somebody else.

  Jeremy and I are sharing a package of black licorice. It’s his favorite candy. I eat only one piece because of my dentures, but he chews away. Between bites he tells me about physics, that we exist in ten dimensions but can only experience four of them. He thinks we have many parallel lives that we’re undergoing at the same time. “In one universe I’ve scored five soccer goals. In another I’m just an energy force. Another has no cause and effect and I’m able to jump off a building and land safely on my feet. That one is very dreamlike. But in this one I’m sitting on a white car believing in time.”