“Cal,” their stepmother said. Just his name. She was driving and she didn’t want to get into it but she flashed her big Jackie Onassis sunglasses in the rearview mirror to show him she meant business.
“They’ll send you back too,” he said to her, his face turned to the window. “Sooner or later.”
After Cal died, there was never any mention of Jeanette and Holly and Albie going back to Virginia. Every now and then their father would fly out to Los Angeles and take them to SeaWorld and Knott’s Berry Farm, take them to that restaurant in West Hollywood where girls swam in the giant fish tank along the wall while you ate your dinner, but the endless unsupervised summers of the commonwealth were over. Albie, of course, moved back later for a single, disastrous school year after the fire, and Holly went back for two nights as an adult in an attempt to measure just how much peace and forgiveness she had mastered through the dharma, but Jeanette wrote off both the state and its residents, including, but not limited to, her father, both sets of grandparents, her uncles and aunts, a handful of first cousins, her stepmother, and her two stepsisters. Goodbye to all that. She hunkered down with what she considered to be her real family: Teresa, Holly, and Albie — the three people who were with her in the house in Torrance when she brushed her teeth at night. It was a funny thing but until that point she hadn’t fully understood the extent to which her father was gone, that he had left them years ago and would never come back unless it was to spend the day at an amusement park. Her mother slept alone in her room like Albie slept alone in his. Jeanette, thank God, had Holly. She would lie in her bed at night watching Holly breathe and make a promise to herself to hate Albie less. Even if he was simultaneously irritating and unknowable, he was also her brother, and she was down to just the one.
But those were lean years for emotional charity, and no matter how many nights Jeanette tightened down on her resolve to be kinder, kindness failed. Without her father, without Cal, the four remaining members of the Southern California Cousinses became more profoundly themselves, as if whatever social ability each had achieved in his or her life had been wiped away in the time it took a bee to sting a boy. The speed at which their mother ran from work to school to the grocery store to home had doubled. She was always arriving, always leaving, never there. She couldn’t find her purse, her car keys. She couldn’t make dinner. Holly found a box of cancelled checks in the desk drawer in the living room and practiced her mother’s signature, Teresa Cousins, Teresa Cousins, Teresa Cousins, until she could do it with exactly the right amount of pressure, the pen angled perfectly against the paper. Holly’s hard work at the art of forgery meant they could still go on field trips and turn their report cards back in. Holly, who believed in credit where credit was due, took her good work straight to her mother, and Teresa put Holly in charge of paying the bills without ever telling her if it was punishment or reward. Teresa’s inabilities in household accounting were legendary, going back to the time when she and Bert were happily married. Before Holly took over the checkbook, third notices and disconnection warnings arrived in the mailbox and were promptly misplaced, so that once or twice a year the house snapped into darkness. The electricity wasn’t such a loss if you didn’t count the television, and candles flickering in the middle of the table while they ate cereal for dinner made them think of the very rich and the very much in love. But when the toilets stopped flushing and the showers went dry, well, that was intolerable. Everyone agreed the water bill had to be paid on time. Holly, who at almost fourteen was good at pretty much everything, was good at math. She started balancing the checkbook the way she’d been taught in home economics (a class that had also enabled her to do emergency mending and make inventive casserole suppers). When she was able to identify the disaster that was their financial state, she taped a rudimentary budget to the refrigerator every week just like her teacher Mrs. Shepherd had told the girls they would need to do later on in their married lives. The last line Holly wrote in red Magic Marker: This is what we have to spend: $___. Even Albie paid attention to that.
For her part, Jeanette dragged the kitchen stepladder out to the backyard and pulled the low-hanging oranges off the trees, then carried them back to the kitchen in a bucket to make juice with the old metal juicer. It was a lot of work but she did it because orange juice was the way it used to be in their family. At night their mother took the pitcher out of the refrigerator and made herself a screwdriver. She never asked which one of them had been so thoughtful as to make orange juice, and Jeanette, unlike her sister, couldn’t bring herself to say. Their mother was still capable of responding to a situation — had she spilled the pitcher of juice she would have mopped it up — but she exhibited zero curiosity. She never wondered about anything except Cal.
For the most part she didn’t talk about Cal, but there were little things that gave her away, like the fact that they used to get stacks of Tombstone frozen pizzas from the grocery store and now their mother visibly flinched if they so much as walked by them in the freezer aisle. Was it because Cal had eaten so many Tombstone pizzas with sausage and pepperoni, or was it really just the name she couldn’t stand? Not discussed. Now they called for delivery and the pizzas came to the door.
But then one night when they were all eating pizza and watching television, their mother came right out and said what was always on her mind. “Tell me about Cal.” They had been watching an old Jacques Cousteau program. It had nothing to do with anything.
“What about him?” Holly asked. They really didn’t know what she meant. It had been more than six months since he’d died.
“What happened that day,” Teresa said, and then added, in case they didn’t understand what she was talking about, “At your grandparents’ house.”
Had no one ever told her? Hadn’t their father explained things? It wasn’t fair that everything fell to Holly but it did. Jeanette kept her eyes on her plate, and Albie, well, Albie didn’t know the story either. That was when Holly was grateful to Caroline for having given her a script to follow. Otherwise she wouldn’t have known what to say. She told her mother the girls had left the house after Cal because Franny decided she wanted to go back and change into long pants because of the ticks, and how there were two ways you could go to the barn from the Cousinses’ kitchen door, how Cal and the girls had taken different routes because they found him when they were coming back. Her mother knew the Cousins house, of course. She and Bert had been married on the front porch and danced in front of two hundred guests beneath a tent on the lawn. There was still a cream-colored leather album of wedding pictures in the hall closet. Their father was handsome. Their mother, freckled and pale, with her tiny waist and dark hair, had been like a bride in a fairy story, a child bride.
“Why would you wait for her to change her pants?” their mother asked. “Why wouldn’t her sister have waited with her?”
“Caroline did wait,” Holly said. “We all did. The girls stayed together.” She told her they saw him lying in the grass, and how at first they thought he was playing a joke. The other girls ran back to the house but Franny stayed with Cal just in case.
“Just in case what?” Teresa didn’t like the fact that it was Franny who stayed.
It was hard for Holly to say the words because they came from a time in her life when she still believed in the possibility of a different outcome. “In case he woke up,” she said.
“I saw it,” Albie said, still looking at the television screen. It was a commercial, a pretty woman spreading peanut butter onto a slice of bread.