I decided not to call Ann Slocum that night. I would sleep on it. In the morning, I’d decide what to do.
When I went upstairs, Kelly was out cold in my room, curled up on her mother’s side of the bed.
Saturday morning, I let Kelly sleep in. I’d carried her back into her room the night before, and peeked in on her as I headed down to the kitchen to make coffee. She had her arm wrapped around Hoppy, her face buried into his (her?) furry ears.
I brought in the paper, scanned the headlines while I sat at the dining room table, sipping coffee and ignoring the shredded wheat I’d poured.
I wasn’t able to focus. I’d settle on a story and be four paragraphs in before I realized I wasn’t retaining anything, although one article interested me enough to read it to the end. When the country was going through a shortage of drywall-particularly in the post-Katrina building boom-hundreds of millions of square feet of the stuff that was brought in from China had turned out to be toxic. Drywall’s made from gypsum, which contains sulfur, which is filtered out in the manufacturing process. But this Chinese drywall was loaded with sulfur, and not only did it reek, it corroded copper pipes and did all sorts of other damage.
“Jesus,” I muttered. Something to be on the lookout for from now on.
I tossed the paper aside, cleaned up my dishes, went down to the study, came back upstairs, looked for something in the truck I didn’t need, came back indoors.
Stewing.
Around ten, I checked on Kelly again. Still asleep. Hoppy had fallen to the floor. Back in my office, sitting in my chair, I picked up the phone.
“Fuck it,” I said, under my breath.
No one locks my daughter in a bedroom and gets away with it. I dialed. It rang three times before someone picked up and said hello. A woman.
“Hello,” I said. “Ann?”
“No, this isn’t Ann.”
She could have fooled me. Sounded just like her.
“Could I speak to her please?”
“She’s not… who’s calling?”
“It’s Glen Garber, Kelly’s dad.”
“This isn’t a good time,” the woman said.
“Who’s this?” I asked.
“It’s Janice. Ann’s sister. I’m sorry, you’ll have to call back later.”
“Do you know when she’ll be in?”
“I’m sorry-we’re making arrangements. There’s a lot to do.”
“Arrangements? What do you mean, arrangements?”
“For the funeral,” she said. “Ann… passed away last night.”
She hung up before I could ask her anything else.
ELEVEN
Sheila’s mother, Fiona Kingston, was never a fan of mine. Sheila’s death only served to reinforce that opinion.
Right from the outset, she’d believed her daughter could have done better. Way better. Fiona never came right out and said it, at least not to me. But I was always aware she thought her daughter should have ended up with someone like her own husband-her first husband-the late Ronald Albert Gallant. Noted and successful lawyer. Respected member of the community. Sheila’s father.
Ron died when Sheila was only eleven, but his influence persisted. He was the gold standard by which all prospective suitors for Fiona’s daughter were measured. Even before she’d reached her twenties, when the boys she went out with were unlikely to become lifelong companions, Sheila was subjected to intense interrogations about them from Fiona. What did their parents do? What clubs did these boys belong to? How well were they doing in school? What were their SAT scores? What were their ambitions?
Sheila had only had her father for eleven years, but she knew what she remembered about him most. She remembered that there wasn’t much to remember. He was rarely home. He devoted his life to his work, not his family. When he was home, he was remote and distant.
Sheila wasn’t sure that was the kind of man she wanted. She loved her father, and was devastated to lose him at such a young age. But there wasn’t the void in her life she might have expected.
Once Fiona’s husband was dead-a heart attack at forty-whatever tenderness she might have had as a mother, and there was never that much to begin with, was displaced by the burden of running a household solo. Ronald Albert Gallant had left his wife and daughter well fixed, but Fiona had never managed the household finances and it took her a while, with the help of various lawyers and accountants and banking officials, to figure everything out. But once she had it all down, she became consumed with overseeing her business affairs, investing wisely, studying her quarterly financial statements.
She still had time, however, to run her daughter’s life.
Fiona didn’t take it well when her little girl, whom she’d sent to Yale to become a lawyer or a titan of industry, who with any luck should fall in love with some high-powered attorney-in-training, met the man of her dreams not in law class arguing the finer points of torts, but in the ivy-draped building’s hallways working for his father’s company, installing new windows. Maybe, had Sheila not met me, she would have completed her schooling, but I’m not so sure. Sheila liked to be out in the world, doing things, not sitting in a classroom listening to someone pontificate on matters she didn’t give a rat’s ass about.
The irony was, of the two of us, I was the one with the degree. My parents had sent me north to Bates, in Lewiston, Maine, where I’d majored in English for reasons that now elude me. It wasn’t exactly the sort of degree that had prospective employers begging you to submit a resume. When I graduated, I couldn’t think of a thing I wanted to do with my piece of paper. I didn’t want to teach. And while I liked to write, I didn’t have the Great American Novel in me. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to read another one, at least for a while. I’d had Faulkner and Hemingway and Melville up to here.
That fucking whale. I never did finish that book.
But despite that piece of paper, I belonged to that class of people who were invisible to Fiona. I was an ant, a worker bee, one of the faceless millions who kept the world running smoothly and whom, thankfully, you didn’t have to spend a lot of face time with. Fiona probably appreciated, on some level, that there were people to build and renovate houses, just as she was pleased there were others who picked up the trash every week. She lumped me in with the folks who cleared out her gutters and cut her lawn-when she still had her big house-and tuned her Caddy and fixed her toilet when it wouldn’t stop running, even if you jiggled the handle. It didn’t seem to matter to her that I had my own company-granted, it had been handed down to me by my father-or that I employed several people, had a reputation as a reliable contractor, did okay for myself, that I was not only able to put a roof over my, my wife’s, and my daughter’s heads, but that I was able to build the damn roof myself. The only person who worked with his hands who might impress Fiona would be the latest darling of the gallery crowd, some twenty-first-century answer to Jackson Pollock whose paint-stained trousers were evidence of talent and eccentricity, not just of trying to make a living.
I’d had clients like Fiona over the years. They were the ones who wouldn’t shake your hand, afraid their soft palms might get scratched by your calluses.
Since I’d first met Fiona, I’d had a hard time getting my head around the fact that Sheila was really her daughter. While there was a physical resemblance, in every other way the two women were different. Fiona cared deeply about maintaining the status quo. That translated into protecting tax breaks for the wealthy, praying that same-sex marriage never became legalized, and double life sentences for petty thefts.
Fiona’s horror at Sheila marrying me was matched only by her disdain for her daughter’s occasional volunteer work at a legal aid clinic and the time she spent volunteering on Democratic senator Chris Dodd’s campaigns.
“Do you do it because you really care? Or because you know it drives your mother nuts?” I asked her once.
