For a few years, the Shanks continued to visit on holidays — Stephanie had the photos, if not the memories — but after Robbie and Bry were born, the Shanks must have felt left out. Or maybe they had no interest in her new brothers. All Stephanie knew was that they stopped visiting, and it was up to her mother to take her for visits. Which she did, at Christmas and Easter. But it was always so stilted and overly formal that as soon as Stephanie was old enough to say no, she would rather not go, she did. And her mother let her get away with that. From age eleven to seventeen, Stephanie didn’t see her grandparents. Stephanie felt guilty about that now, but it was a guilt mixed with anger. Because why didn’t her grandparents insist? Stephanie’s mother said they were workaholics, and that their marriage had gone bad a long time ago. They were unhappy.
When Stephanie finally visited the Shanks again, in the fall of her senior year, she found that her mother was wrong. Her grandparents seemed quite happy together, proud of their growing franchise and eager to show it off. They’d had Stephanie meet them at one of their newest branches in Frederick, a small city about an hour east of Willowboro. They took her on a tour of the store, giving her samples from the deli, the olive bar, the bakery, and the Cheese Cave, the innovation for which the stores were most famous. At the back of the store, adjacent to the parking lot, was an outdoor café with a stone patio and an artificial pond with a fountain that her grandfather referred to as a “water feature.” Stephanie ordered a wheat berry salad for lunch, wheat berries being something she had never tried before, and she remembered their gummy, foreign texture in her mouth while her grandparents held forth on Nicole and her various missteps in the wake of Sam’s diagnosis. There had been a question of malpractice, because the doctors might have caught the disease earlier. And then, there was the general shabbiness of the hospitals in Hagerstown, the city closest to Willowboro. They had begged Nicole to take him to Johns Hopkins, but she wouldn’t because the long drive made her “anxious.” And Stephanie just listened, chewing her way through her fibrous salad, thinking they sounded a little manic but at the same time wondering if what they said had any merit. At home, she asked her mother to show her the medical files pertaining to Sam’s illness, a request her mother had honored without question, pulling down the ceiling ladder that led to the attic and handing down the dusty boxes. Stephanie couldn’t make much sense of the files — it was mostly insurance billing — but she found a snapshot of Sam’s leg, postsurgery, and she could see it was a young, muscular leg beneath the angry red stitches, the leg of a boy she might know. And she could see no point in blaming her mother, or even the doctors, for never suspecting that a young, muscled leg could conceal a large, soft, festering tumor.
But her mother felt blamed, and instead of telling Stephanie about Sam, she told Stephanie about the way she had been treated in the aftermath of his death. How the Shanks had basically abandoned her, leaving her alone with her baby, their grandchild! How her parents had been in serious debt, scrambling to save the farm, too preoccupied with their own problems to help her. How Joelle was the only one who seemed to care. But Joelle was in college at the time, and she could only visit on the weekends. During the week, Stephanie’s mother was left by herself. That was the first time that she began to feel what she referred to as “the dread.” But she told Stephanie that it felt like the dread had always been inside her, like it was waiting for an excuse to get out.
“I know a stronger person would have handled it better,” she told Stephanie. “I know I let you down. But I was dying of loneliness. I talked to you — a little baby. I told you everything. You listened, it really seemed as if you were listening.”
And as Stephanie’s mother spoke, Stephanie felt cast in the role of listener again. For the first time, she was aware of how angry she was to always be put in this position. Here she was, asking for stories about Sam, and what did she get? More stories about her mother. About her mother’s pain.
Finally, one night, when her father was out at a Boosters event, Stephanie’s mother brought out a small album Stephanie had never seen before, a cheap-looking drugstore album with clear plastic sleeves for pages. It was from a trip, her mother said, a trip that she and Sam had taken to Chincoteague Island when they were in college. It was on this trip that Stephanie’s father had proposed. And as Stephanie’s mother stared at the photos, she began to cry, saying it was difficult to talk about Sam because she didn’t remember him as clearly as she once had. And then she started telling Stephanie a bunch of random, disconnected facts about him. She told her that he had big, fleshy hands. That he wasn’t as tall as he seemed. That he loved mustard — he put it on everything — and that on game days he always wore the same blue-and-white-striped tie. That he had a good singing voice and for a while he was in a rock band. That he didn’t read very much but he liked books about Civil War history. That he’d considered volunteering for the draft but his parents had objected. And then, after he got sick, he wished he had gone into the draft, because maybe he wouldn’t have passed the physical and then he would have known earlier. Either that or he would have died nobly, for his country. Sam had actually thought that would be a better way to die — in a foreign country, away from his family. Being sick hadn’t given him any clarity. It hadn’t made him a better person. He didn’t die in peace or in love. Instead he died angry, not knowing what he wanted to do with his life or what it had meant to him.
Once her mother started talking, it was as if she couldn’t stop. Stephanie was quickly overwhelmed. She’d gotten what she’d wanted, but it didn’t answer the question that seemed to grow more and more with each passing day, expanding to fill her body as well as her mind, the question of Who am I? And who will I become?
The Shanks told her she looked like him, an observation Stephanie wasn’t sure how to take. Sam had been attractive in a masculine way, with a jutting chin and a heavy brow. Stephanie had always felt that her features were lacking in delicacy and that her jaw was perhaps a bit too pronounced. She could pass for pretty with plucked eyebrows and mascara to bring out her hazel eyes, but she wasn’t like her mother; no one would ever compare her to Tuesday Weld, or any movie star.
And that was okay with Stephanie, for the most part. She felt that people were inordinately fixated on her mother’s beauty, especially after her death, as if it was beyond them to imagine how anyone with symmetrical features could be unhappy. As if her mother’s death could have been averted by her looking in the mirror. It dawned on Stephanie that the whole culture of women’s magazines was premised on this idea, that if you seemed healthy and pretty you just wouldn’t die, and now when she saw the glossy covers of magazines and catalogs with their smiling blond models — everyone was always blond! — she wanted to rip them off. And yet listening to Courtney Love and Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney and all the riot-grrrl bands she loved didn’t make her feel better. Instead she listened to John Denver, because her mother had loved his voice and Stephanie felt guilty for all the times she’d made fun of her taste in music.