Souvenir

TWELVE

Savannah and Rachel soaked in the poolside spa while Meg stood at her black granite kitchen counter making a turkey sandwich. The counter was so glossy that she could see her reflection, a tired woman with a deep crease between her brows; she reached up and pressed the crease, stretched her cheeks to erase the scowl. That was better, but she thought she might have the granite changed for something matte; the glossy stuff was obviously meant for Suzy Homemaker types who whistled pleasantly while they mixed and kneaded and dolloped and minced and sautéed, nothing more taxing than making a tasty meal on their minds. A kitchen counter should not remind a woman of her stresses and faults; it was bad enough just to have such a beautiful kitchen in the first place, its underuse a vague but ever-present guilt.

Through the open patio doors she could hear the girls laughing, hear their cell phones ringing every few minutes, while she concentrated on smoothing mayonnaise onto cracked-wheat bread with her right hand. She dipped her knife into the jar, scooped little globs of mayo, spread it easily with the knife’s tip, over and over again without even a hint of weakness. ‘Son of a bitch,’ she said.

When her own cell phone began vibrating in the pocket of her white linen pants, it startled her and she dropped the knife onto the floor. She took the phone from her pocket, saw it was her sister Kara, and answered, her eyes on the knife.

‘Hello, sis,’ she answered, making her voice normal, as she’d done for the girls when she picked them up. How accomplished she was at pretending.

‘Did you see it?’ Kara asked.

‘Did I see what?’

‘The official announcement – Carson’s engagement, what else?’

Kara would be all a-tizz about that. She’d followed Carson’s career and life like a groupie, just as she’d once trailed Meg and Carson over the hills and fields of their farms. ‘I saw something about it on the CNN website,’ Meg said, bending down to get the knife. ‘Is that what you mean?’

‘No, no, not that. The Ocala paper’s got the real official thing.’

‘How do you know?’ Meg asked, picking up the knife. Kara lived in Northern California now, near Travis Air Force Base where her husband Todd, a master sergeant three years away from retirement, was finishing out his enlistment.

‘I read it online – how do you think I keep up with what’s going on back home?’ For Kara, who’d had four homes since leaving Florida in 1992, only Ocala would ever be the real thing. She’d told Meg she was trying to talk Todd into going back there when he got out of the service; she wanted to start a plant nursery. She had it all planned out and was certain it would be a hit. Of all the Powell girls, Kara was the most like their father.

‘I assumed you were psychic, obviously,’ Meg said.

‘Oh, I wish! Then I wouldn’t have to ferret out every detail of the kids’ lives. God knows they don’t tell me anything! Well, at least I can read the news – and you really need to see this. You get the paper, right?’

‘We do – but I haven’t read it yet.’

‘You haven’t read it? Jesus, it’s four-thirty out there – what’ve you been doing all day?’

Kara’s innocent question was an ice pick in Meg’s gut, but she made herself stay calm. ‘I had a mom in labor all last night and this morning, then Savannah had a softball game this afternoon. I’m just getting a chance to make a sandwich and sit down for five minutes.’

‘Well, don’t sit yet – get the paper so you can see this.’

While Meg tracked the paper to the den, where Brian had left it after his cursory glances at the front section and sports, Kara asked how their father was doing.

‘Haven’t you talked to him?’ Meg said.

‘Not in about two weeks. He’s being pissy about us not being able to visit this summer. Screening his calls, I assume. But I know he’s fine or you’d have told me.’

Of course she would think that; gatekeeper of information was Meg’s role, had always been her role. Her parents had left her to mind her sisters, and now her sisters had left her to mind their parents – parent, now – and always, she was to keep everyone informed. ‘He’s doing okay. Settling in. His left kidney’s acting up.’

‘Is he eating right? I swear, he’s so stubborn! What’s the deal with the kidney?’

Meg pulled out the newspaper’s lifestyles section, where the engagement and wedding announcements appeared each weekend. ‘I’m not sure; I told him to call his nephrologist.’

‘There you go with the big words,’ Kara teased. She was bright, but not college-educated, having married Todd at nineteen, three years after meeting him at Meg’s wedding, where he’d parked cars for a few extra bucks before starting basic training. Four kids – all boys – had followed. Meg hoped Kara would prevail with her desire to come back to Florida; she missed her sister, who had been her closest friend besides Carson. She and Beth were close now too, and she could visit any of her sisters by plane if she could just find the time. Time, however, hid from her as well as Savannah had done in department stores when she was little. Any more time stubbornly refused to be found.

Returning to the kitchen, Meg said, ‘Okay, so I have the paper – lifestyle section, I presume.’

‘Open it to page two.’

Meg did, and there was the announcement. ‘Grammy winner Carson McKay to wed Miss Valerie Haas of Malibu, CA,’ read the caption beneath a photographer’s picture of the betrothed couple. Meg closed the paper.

‘Well?’ Kara said. ‘Isn’t she just as cute as you can imagine?’

‘Cuter,’ Meg said. She finished constructing her sandwich, grasping the knife again and cutting the sandwich smoothly.

‘I never would’ve pictured him with a professional surfer. Have you ever heard of her? My god, it says she’s twenty-two! And he’s, what? Forty?’

A professional surfer? Meg hardly knew there was such a career, particularly for women. ‘Not yet – he’s thirty-nine until November.’ Her own thirty-ninth was coming up in late June.

‘Wonder what they’ll do for his fortieth. Probably rent an island for a party and invite their hundred closest friends.’

As Kara was saying this, an image of Carson on the old tire swing came to Meg; he was sitting with his legs through it, holding on to the thick rope they’d used to suspend it from a high branch of the oak near the swimming lake. He leaned back and, with bare feet, pushed himself in a lazy circle, while she watched from the shady base of the tree. ‘For your fortieth birthday,’ he said, ‘I’m taking you to Africa on safari.’

‘Are you, now?’ she asked, more interested in watching his naked back than in considering anything that might happen more than twenty years in the future.

He said, ‘Yep. Count on it.’

‘What about for your fortieth?’ she said.

‘Thailand,’ he answered, ‘for lemongrass shrimp.’ He let the tire sway then, peering into the oak leaves like their future was painted there, episodes of their life-to-be displayed for preview on each toothy leaf.

Kara laughed. ‘God. Seventeen years.’

For a second Meg thought Kara was talking about how long it had been since that day. Not seventeen years, she thought. Twenty – no, twenty-one. And then she realized Kara was calculating the age difference between Carson and his fiancée. No wonder they were calling him a cradle robber; his bride-to-be was probably just learning to walk when he’d made his safari promise.

‘Whatever makes him happy,’ Meg said, wanting to be done with the topic. ‘Now tell me, how go your plans for the plant nursery?’

‘Do I detect a change-of-subject attempt here? I mean, c’mon Meggie, you had your shot and you let him go.’

‘True,’ Meg said. Neither she nor her parents had ever told Kara or Beth or the youngest, Julianne, the whole truth about why she and Carson broke up.

Kara sighed. ‘Jesus, if I’d known he was going to get famous, I would have snagged him, for God’s sake. Nothing against Todd.’

‘Of course.’

‘Well, I guess we both fucked up where old Car’s concerned – gotta live with it. But life is good, right? I mean, I have Todd and the boys, you have Brian and Savannah – you wouldn’t trade her for the world, even to have a kid of Carson’s.’

‘Nope,’ Meg agreed, though of course it was fully possible that the two children Kara was referencing – Savannah and a theoretical child of Carson’s – were in fact one in the same. But Kara had no clue that Savannah might not be Brian’s. No clue that Meg had seen Carson the day of her wedding and that she had not been nearly as successful at closing the door behind her as she thought she’d be.

‘Are you doing okay? You sound cranky. Maybe get a nap in. God, I wish I could steal time for a nap! You should see my kitchen counters – do you think Keiffer and Evan could get their lunch plates past the clay mockup of Mt Doom and into the sink? Anyhow, I better go; I hear Tony screaming about something, and Todd’s out in the garage.’

Meg smiled at the happy disorder of her sister’s home. ‘I’m glad you called.’

‘Tell Dad to call me. Kisses to all,’ Kara said, and they hung up.

Meg simply stood there holding her phone for a minute afterward, wistfulness and loss washing over her. She missed Kara and Beth and Julianne, but they, at least, were still walking the Earth. They, at least, were accessible by a half-day’s airplane journey. But their mother, snatched away so suddenly that Meg still sometimes picked up the phone to call her before remembering, was lost to her, to them, forever. How was a girl – all right, a woman – supposed to manage without her mother? The notebook diaries gave her windows through which to view her mother in their past, but what of today, when she needed a supportive arm around her shoulders?

‘Oh Mom,’ she sighed. ‘Is this as good as it gets?’

The dark quiet of the screened porch, late that night, soothed Meg only a little as she sat on a chaise and sipped gin, straight. Brian and Savannah both had been asleep for hours, but she had yet to even feel like closing her eyes. She was tired – so tired she couldn’t even calculate how many hours it had been since she’d slept. But her thoughts swirled and tumbled like river rapids, making sleep impossible.

Her mother, she knew, had lived with turmoil most of her life – she was the youngest of eight kids whose father died in Normandy. Then she married into it; Meg’s father was always launching some half-planned scheme that inevitably failed. The first was a citrus farm like the McKays’, with thousands of young trees that were killed in the second year by some blight he hadn’t known to look for. Next he bought the land that would later become their horse farm and built a huge greenhouse, for the supposedly easier job of growing rare orchids to sell to collectors. Yet neither he nor her mother, who by then was also tending her, could master the expensive, sensitive plants, which died off steadily while the debt blossomed.

Just after Kara’s birth, when Meg was five, he gave up that particular dream; they sold off all the orchid paraphernalia at a loss and built stables, with the goal of not just boarding thoroughbreds but also breeding them. Her father was sure his powers of persuasion wouldn’t be lost on the horses or the people who liked to buy them. He succeeded just often enough to encourage him to sink more money into the venture, and by the time Julianne was born, nine years after Meg, the family was firmly shackled to what would become her father’s most enduring obsession.

She remembered many times – whole seasons, in fact, when all she and her sisters ate for lunch was bread and jam, or eggs from the noisy, skittish chickens they raised. They wore shoes from the thrift store and clothes bought at Saturday-morning yard sales. They learned early how to answer the phone and politely tell the bill collectors that their parents were busy but could they please take a message? She had coached her sisters, the three of them standing in front of her looking like uneven stair steps, each taking a practice turn with the phone. She’d been twelve, maybe thirteen. ‘Show them all,’ her mother had directed. ‘You know how Julianne likes to run for the phone.’ Julianne, at three, was easiest to train – she was happy to imitate, to earn Meg’s praise, while Beth and Kara had asked questions Meg couldn’t answer and knew better than to forward to their parents:

‘Why do the people keep calling, Meggie?’

‘Why won’t Mommy or Daddy answer the phone?’

Only when some large man or another showed up – always in an ill-fitting suit – did her father deal with matters himself. From her bedroom window she would watch the men leave, her father putting them into their nondescript sedans with a smile and a handshake. Making dubious promises that had, a few years later, led to one of her own.

Her affluent adult life could hardly compare with the craziness her mother endured for so many years, but she liked that they shared a steady temperament. For as far back as she could remember, she too had weathered what crises came by trusting that solutions would present themselves – always with the help of the Blessed Virgin, of course, or so her mother wanted her to believe. Meg endured, too busy minding her sisters, or feeding the chickens, or currying the succession of horses her father always insisted were Triple-Crown winners in the making, to do anything else.

Tonight the low chirping of crickets outside the porch spoke of good luck, something she felt sorely short of just now. Yet as quickly as this self-pity reared up, she pushed it down; she had no right to feel sorry for herself, none, and she buried the urge by remembering that, short of the unstoppable medical crises she’d faced now and then as a doctor, she was responsible for everything in her life, good and bad.

Responsible, that was the trait that made her rescue her parents from looming foreclosure and allow her sisters to finish growing up there on the farm, instead of crammed into some tiny, roach-infested apartment. That was the trait that kept her from seeking out a definitive answer to Savannah’s paternity. The trait made her a popular, respected doctor – and tempered her guilt when things went wrong even after she’d done everything right. She was always careful, responsible, even when she didn’t want to be. Almost always.

But in the same way her mother could not, despite valiant efforts, save the family from the ruin that seemed sure until Meg married Brian, Meg’s effort had not been able to save the Langs’ baby. Nor had it secured the satisfying life she’d rationalized would follow her marriage in due time. You could work hard, stick to all the rules, and still fail.