When Cat was a girl, in the first years after the accident, she traveled to Mason City with her aunt and uncle, who provided the three McCarthy children with bouquets of daisies to lay among the carpeting flowers, the plush animals, the candles. Each year, the number of visitors diminished. Each year, the number of offerings thinned. The story worked on Claudia’s sympathies, which seemed so much more workable these days. You’re like a brick, Benji observed, that’s turning back to clay.
The insult — who wanted to be called a brick or, for that matter, clay? — infuriated her, but the truth was she had so few girlfriends — so few truly close friends, period — that her softening self welcomed the chance for deeper intimacy. Plus, she liked Cat. She didn’t spend too much time mulling over why. Perhaps her affections overflowed from her outpouring for Max. Or Nick. Or the bracing sense of accomplishment that came with the largest single project ever entrusted to her. Each had the effect of a stone dropped in water. Each rippled outward into an indecipherable complex of overlapping rings.
“Where’s Benji?” Claudia asked.
“He’s meeting us. He wanted to run.”
“Literally?”
Cat nodded.
“That man has changed.”
“That’s what I try telling my sister.”
“She’s not having it?”
“Every boyfriend I’ve ever had she turns into one of her ex-husbands. Benji is Walter.”
“And what is Walter’s claim to fame?”
“Loser. Run-of-the-mill loser.”
“Benji’s sober. Going on a year.”
“People turn their lives around.”
“It does happen.”
“She says, ‘How do you know a year from now he’s not going to be back to his old tricks?’ So I have to wait until he’s dead to see if he stays sober. Then I can date him?”
A bearded sound tech with a bandana took to the stage and rapped a finger on the microphone. “One, two. Testing, testing.”
Cat stopped at a mounted view of the green, the Village hub rising, pale and violet, in the background, while computer-generated residents gathered around picnic baskets, threw Frisbees. “It’s Eden.”
Claudia laughed. “Secular, maybe.”
“I’m not kidding. I would live here.”
“In three years you can.”
“Three years.” Cat spoke the words like a fortune-teller whose vision had disappeared in a confounding mist.
“You say that like it’s thirty years away.”
“It might as well be. You know where you’ll be three years from now?”
“Right here, I hope. Cutting a ribbon. Are you going to be standing beside me?”
Cat flushed. “Who knows? Some of that depends on your brother.”
“The fact that Benji sees a future beyond the weekend is kind of remarkable.”
“He’s all about a five-year plan these days. It’s part of his step program.”
“Five-year plan? He never said. He probably thinks I’d make fun of him.”
“You probably would.”
Claudia raised her eyebrows, as if Cat had her there. “Independent of Benji — you have no idea?”
“So many things. I like teaching. And I’d like to get back to acting. Did I tell you I got a call for an audition?”
“Congrats.”
“Yeah. It’s only the Saratoga Rep, but—”
“No buts.”
“And kids. Maybe. At some point, kids.”
“With my brother?” Claudia burst out.
“You can’t see him as a father?”
“I think he’d be a good father. If he could stay out of his own way.”
They rubbed their eyes against a rolling wave of barbecue smoke, the char of burgers, and, beneath it, the druggy, satisfying singe of lighter fluid.
“So you’ll be here.” Cat coughed. “Cutting your ribbon.”
Claudia waited.
“With Nick?”
“I used to think I was too much of a feminist to have a family.”
“Whatever,” Cat countered with a roll of the eyes. “Feminists can’t have families? It’s not the seventies.”
“Maybe it’s too late. I chose my work.”
“Again: whatever.”
Benji stayed a fair distance from the crowd that lined up on the far side of the field waiting for free lemonade and hotdogs. He’d come straight from a four-mile run and walked up and down the patch of scrubby grass designated for parking, rewardingly wet in his wicking gear, looking for Cat’s car. In the course of the last year, he’d dropped fifteen pounds. He felt firmer, stronger, more capable than he could remember feeling, and he nursed a fledgling fantasy of entering the lottery for next November’s marathon. But Benji’s plans for self-improvement didn’t end with Alluvia High’s drama club or the abs he was just beginning to coax into view. No less than Cat or Claudia, he had committed himself to unveiling a creation of substance and pride. He meant to redesign himself, to focus less on the glittering Vegas hotel he’d always thought he wanted to be and more on something truly habitable. If this meant trading lights and the promise of a gaudy but scintillating existence for life on a humbler, more human scale, then that’s what he would do. He had Cat. He had Max. He had his students. He had his no-longer-quite-so-shaky sobriety. But there was more. More than racing Cat from their shaggy gray dock to the diving platform in the middle of the lake. More than continuing to shave seconds off his nine-minute-mile pace.
Finding Cat’s black Volvo, the rear window decoupaged with stickers from Greenpeace and Planned Parenthood and Obama 2012, Benji opened the passenger’s side door to retrieve the glossy college folder he’d left on the seat. He stood sixty credits shy of a bachelor’s degree, two short years, and then a door he thought forever shut would swing open on a teaching certificate, on a classroom of his very own. SUNY Albany was not Princeton or Yale; it wasn’t even Skidmore, where he’d started out, but he was learning to look at life with a lower wattage bulb, less glitz, less glamour. It’s enough, he had to keep telling himself. It’s enough.
He leaned against the sunbaked side of the car and flipped open the course catalog to pages Cat had helped him dog-ear the night before. He leapt between this description and that — Topics in Contemporary Drama. Play Analysis. Acting III (for certainly he could bypass I and II) — as the festivities, in their official capacity, got under way. Someone from Nick’s office tapped on a microphone and tentatively began, “Hello? Ladies and gentlemen? Hello?” while a man who looked like he rode a Harley made adjustments to the sound.
As Nick took the stage to scattered applause, the crowd still more intent on free barbecue than canned speeches, Benji scanned the mob for Cat. Separated from the few remaining protesters who stood on the unsociable side of a single sawhorse police barricade, who looked about as revved up now as a shed full of unplugged power tools, Cat stood at the foot of the stage, awaiting her moment. When Benji looked at her, his mind, like a leashed dog racing round a tree, tended to make tighter and tighter circles around thoughts of diamond rings (how could he afford one?) and proposals (what would he say?), but he willfully pushed his attentions in another direction, turning back to his catalog to read a description of Shakespeare after 1600.
“Excuse me. Sorry to bother you, but you’re Benji Fisher.”
Benji looked up to find a man of medium build with a trim waist and a salesman’s smile. He had a formal, old-fashioned style of casual dress, as if he’d come straight from the set of Mad Men: white polo, tan slacks, navy blazer, tasseled shoes. His short blond hair thinned at the crown. And the heat of the day splashed large pink roses on his pale white cheeks. Sweating indecorously, he mopped his forehead and neck with a patterned pocket square and said, “You’re a hard man to find.”