Page 36

While the rest of my family is at church, I make lunch. It’s what Dad used to do. Missy, Mom, and I would go to Sunday mass. Dad would stay home and prepare a huge meal. We’d eat and then Mom and Dad would take a nap and Missy and I would finish homework, and that night, we’d have sandwiches or pizza while watching a family movie.

I’m not going all out like Dad would’ve. No leg of lamb or anything like that. But I bake a cake from a box for Melissa’s birthday tomorrow. She’s turning seventeen. I’m not letting the day pass without some celebration. As a light rain falls outside, I dig out some chicken breasts from the freezer and apricot marmalade from the pantry. I defrost the chicken, caramelize some onions, mix them with the jam, spread the mixture over the chicken, and add a few shakes of paprika. I have not made this recipe in years, apparently, but it comes back to me. I can’t smell it, not really, but I can imagine the aroma greeting my family, the comfort of a waiting hot meal.

It’s funny the things you take for granted. Sunday lunch with your family. This is something I’ve always had so I didn’t notice it. But now I do. Now I notice everything. Like Melissa, I’m learning to pay attention. Because clearly I wasn’t before. Calvin and Casey. How could I have missed that?

The anger has passed now. I loved Calvin once. We said it was forever but as I wrote him in my letter, I’m not even sure what forever means, what time means, or even what death means. To Melissa I’m alive. I’ve always been alive. Then again, my sister is special. She always was. I just wasn’t paying the right attention to understand that.

I’m frosting the cake when Mom’s car pulls into the driveway. I fluff the rice and check the chicken. I pull plates from the cabinet and start to set the table.

“Wow, it smells amazing in here,”

Melissa calls as she comes inside.

“, are you cooking?”

Mom asks, shaking off her umbrella. The rain has started to come down heavier now.

“Yeah,”

I say, feeling oddly shy around my family. “I made Sunday lunch.” I give the frosting a final swirl. “And birthday cake.”

“A real celebration,”

Dad says, his eyes shining.

Mom takes over the table-setting for me. Not with the regular plates but the wedding china that she only uses for special occasions. She extracts the beeswax taper candles she buys from an apiarist on the edge of town and lights them.

“This is really nice,”

Melissa says as we sit down at the table, the four of us, like we used to do.

“Thank you. Happy birthday.”

“Not until tomorrow,” she says.

“Is it weird that we’ll both be seventeen?”

I pause. “Am I seventeen? Or am I twenty-four?”

“These are all details we can work out later,”

Mom says. She takes a piece of chicken from the tray and is about to pass it to me, but then she looks at me for a long moment and passes it to Melissa.

It’s a little thing, but from Mom it means a lot. She knows there’s something not right with me. But she’s accepting me for what I am.

Dad’s phone chimes. He picks it up and frowns before turning it off.

“Who was it?” Mom asks.

“It’s that reporter again. He’s in town. He asked if we could meet.”

He looks at Mom, as if bracing for her anger. But she picks up the rice, passes it to Melissa, and says, “Don’t you hate it when people call during mealtimes?”

“It’s the worst!”

Melissa agrees, and they all laugh.

“It seems like church went well,” I say.

“It did,” Mom says.

“It was good,”

Dad adds. “Nice. It felt right to be there. Together.”

“Maybe we can find a church that has room for lesbians and atheists who believe in miracles and God,”

Mom jokes.

“I think that’s the Unitarians,”

Melissa quips.

“I don’t need church to confirm what I believe in,”

Dad says. “I just need this family. I believe in us.”

“Me too,”

Mom says, and they brush hands, like they used to.

“Did you make an announcement?”

I ask. “Were people suspicious?”

“Not really,”

Mom says. “We met with Father Mercer ahead of time and told him we got back together.”

“And that this was the miracle,” Dad says.

“And he agreed it was,” Mom says.

“Then we told him we would be traveling for the next few weeks for family matters,” Dad says.

“He didn’t blink,”

Mom says. “I don’t think he told Scott Locke.”

“So maybe we don’t have to leave?”

I look at Melissa.

Diplomatic as always, my sister changes the subject. “Mom and Dad weren’t the only ones getting a blessing. You’ll never guess who else is getting married.”

“Who?”

“Remember Mr. King from school?”

“The English teacher?” I ask.

Melissa nods.

“How is he still alive?”

I ask. “He was like eighty when I died.”

“He was in his sixties,”

Dad says. “And he’s alive and well and recently retired from teaching.”

“He’s marrying a very nice woman who used to volunteer at the pet shelter. I can’t recall her name,” Mom adds.

“Kinda late to get married,” I say.

Mom and Dad touch hands. “There’s no such thing as too late,” Dad says.

Arnold

Fifteen Minutes Earlier

No one knew exactly how old Barley was. The vet estimated between eight and ten when Nancy adopted him. That was five years ago, which put him somewhere between thirteen and fifteen—nearly one hundred in dog years. He was old. His kidneys were failing. He was blind and could no longer jump onto the couch. His hair was so matted that Lady had taken to grooming him.

He was dying.

His impending death had opened a hole of grief in Nancy, who found herself mourning, all these years later, the loss of her son, Jeremy.

Family was precious. It was a lesson Arnold had learned late in life, but he understood it deeply. The dog was family. And Jeremy was family. One had left Nancy; the other would soon leave.

He had sold his house a few years back when he’d moved in with Nancy and had a nice nest egg from that. He used a large chunk of it on an engagement ring. The practical side of him knew that spending this much on a ring for a marriage that would, according to actuarial tables, last ten years if they were lucky, was silly. But he didn’t care. Love was love. Family was family. This mattered.

Three months earlier, he’d gotten down on bended knee—no small feat for an arthritic seventy-one-year-old—and asked Nancy to marry him.

They decided to do it in early May. Before it got too hot was how they put it. But the subtext was there. Before Barley passed. In preparation, they came up with a guest list. Hired out a restaurant. They bought Barley a tuxedo collar and Lady a taffeta one, which she ripped to shreds the minute they put it on her. And Arnold hired a detective.

Over the years, he’d raised the idea of looking for Jeremy, but Nancy always refused. “If he wants to come home, he knows where to find me.”

In the end, he decided to go against his fiancée’s wishes for two reasons. The first was that it turned out that Arnold had taught Jeremy. He hadn’t remembered him but when he’d moved in with Nancy, they’d cleaned out her attic and he’d come across Jeremy’s old notebooks—and there among the papers was his obituary assignment. The last lines struck him: Jeremy Halyard lived a long life. In the end, he surprised everyone. Especially himself.

He thought about that obituary often these days. He wanted to give the boy a chance to surprise himself. He now knew, of course, that Jeremy had a drug problem. Had had one as far back as high school when he’d written that assignment.

The second reason he decided to look for Jeremy was that he knew that losing Barley was going to carve a chasm in Nancy that he wasn’t sure he alone could fill.

So he hired a local detective named Earl Simcox, who gave him an address where the young man was living. He printed out a wedding invitation and put it in the mail. Every day he went to the mailbox to look for a response. Every day he checked the email account they’d set up for RSVPs. He heard from his old friend Nick Flores, who emailed that he would be coming. He heard from his cousin, who said that he would not. He heard from Nancy’s friends she’d made over the years at the pet shelter, where she’d gone from volunteer to manager to retiree. But he hadn’t heard from Jeremy.

The wedding was this week. Just that morning at church, Father Mercer had called up Arnold and Nancy for a benediction. And he’d also called up another couple for theirs, a husband and wife who’d separated and reunited. He hadn’t recognized them. His eyesight wasn’t what it once was, after all those years of marking papers. He was always losing his glasses. He had left them in the car that day.

It was Nancy who recognized them. “I think that’s her.”

“Who?”

Arnold whispered.

“The woman who was supposed to adopt Barley. But she was too upset about losing her cat.”

Nancy paused. “Mr. Fluff. That had been the cat’s name. I can’t believe it came to me after all these years.”

Though he had told Nancy so much about his past, he had never told her about and therefore that he’d also recognized Gloria Crane that day they met. It felt like an intrusion into the family’s privacy and honestly, it was something he grappled with. He often thought of that quote he’d suggested to the principal for ’s memorial wall, that someone had to die for everyone to live more. He’d had no way then of knowing how ’s death would, inadvertently, lead him to Lady, to Barley, and to Nancy. How it would bring him to his family. It would give him his life.

He sometimes wondered how the family would react to knowing this. Would they resent that they had paid the price for his happiness? Or be glad that their daughter’s death had changed his life for the better? But he never thought about asking them, just chalked this up to another of life’s mysteries that would go unanswered.

On the way home from church, Arnold and Nancy stopped to run a few errands: finalizing the flowers, picking up the lanterns they were going to string on the bushes outside the restaurant. It was coming on two by the time they arrived home, and both were worn out.

It had rained that afternoon. A branch had fallen off the maple tree, blocking the driveway.

“I’ll get it,”

he told Nancy. “You take Barley out.” The poor guy couldn’t hold his bladder as long as he could when he was younger.

“Thank you,”

Nancy said, kissing him lightly on the cheek.

He parked on the street, behind an unfamiliar car. He was just starting to clear the branch when Nancy screamed.

She was standing at the open front door. Arnold’s first thought was that it was the dog. Barley had died, days before their wedding.

But then Barley ambled outside, peeing on the first bush he saw before he trotted over to Arnold, pressing his button nose into Arnold’s knees. Arnold turned to Nancy to see what the matter was just as a man emerged from the dark house.