One year-he must have been seven or eight-he’d crawled under the tree during his parents’ annual boozy Christmas party and watched the drunken kaleidoscopic proceedings from there. Over the course of the evening, two or three of their guests noticed him back there and asked his parents if he was okay, and they responded that yes, he was fine. He remembered feeling fine. His father had spiked the eggnog that afternoon, forgetting to reserve some for Griffin. His mother said he couldn’t have any of the spiked, but his father felt guilty about forgetting him and let him have a big glass before anyone arrived. During the party he kept wishing somebody would slide him a plate of Christmas cookies, but otherwise he felt warm and happy and tipsy tucked into his own private little corner. He’d fallen asleep there, staring up into the magical branches, and eventually one of his parents must have pulled him out because the next morning he woke up in his bed, the sheets full of pine needles. Which one of them had remembered him? he’d wondered at the time.
“It’s okay,” Marguerite said, taking his hand, and only then did he realize there were tears running down his cheeks. He was pretty sure he’d never told that story to anyone before, not even Joy. He might have expected all manner of comment from the trunk, but there wasn’t a peep.
After he’d gathered himself, he said, “Okay, enough about me. Tell me about your parents,” but Marguerite shook her head. “Let’s just say that if you knew them you’d understand how I ended up with a man like Harold.”
It was the first bitter thing he could remember hearing her say, and it begged an obvious question, one he didn’t want to ask but did anyway. “And a man like me?”
“Nobody’s ever been nicer to me than you,” she said, squeezing his hand. He appreciated the vote of confidence, he really did, until she added, “I’m going to miss that.”
He started to ask her what she meant when her cell rang. It was Beth, the woman she’d left in charge of the flower shop back in L.A., with a question about inventory. By the time Marguerite hung up, they were rumbling up onto the Sagamore Bridge. “What’s that you’re humming?” she wanted to know.
He’d been humming?
They scattered his father in a cove near Barnstable. It was serene there, with views of a marsh redolent of bluish-purple wildflowers and the sunrise. For his mother they chose a tidal inlet on the Atlantic side, mid-Cape. Across the water, a quarter mile away, sat a posh restaurant with a huge deck from which the breezes carried the sounds of moneyed voices and the occasional pop of a champagne cork and, when the wind shifted, the sound of surf. An older couple, strolling past when he was emptying his mother’s urn, saw what he was doing and came over to Marguerite, who was quietly weeping (as she’d done for his father), and offered her their condolences. “You take good care of her,” the woman told dry-eyed Griffin, as if she’d taken his measure at a glance and doubted he was up to the task.
Back in the car, Marguerite said, “Okay, I’ll tell you this much. My father hanged himself when I was a little girl.”
Now it was Griffin ’s turn to take her hand. “That’s terrible. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. I don’t really even remember that much about him. Only what my mother said to me.”
Griffin didn’t want to ask, but there was no way not to.
“She said, ‘There. Happy now?’”
When he suggested they splurge on a fancy restaurant in Chatham, Marguerite again scrunched up her shoulders and said, “I have a better idea. Let’s go back to that restaurant where we met.”
Griffin couldn’t imagine why she’d want to return to the Olde Cape Lounge-when he’d left her there with Harold last year, she’d been in tears-but if that’s what she wanted it was fine with him. Spending the evening around there made sense, making the morning’s drive to Logan and their flight back to L.A. that much easier.
Because he wasn’t sure he’d be able to find it again, they decided to look for the restaurant first, then book a room nearby. He meant to avoid the B and B where he and Joy had stayed, which he remembered (correctly) as being about half a mile down the road from the restaurant, but thought (incorrectly) there’d be someplace to turn back onto Route 28 before he got there. “Oooh, that looks nice,” Marguerite said when they passed the B and B, so Griffin, unwilling to explain why he’d have preferred anywhere else, turned around and went back. The same woman who’d checked him in last summer did so again, though if she recognized him as repeat business-no reason she should, given his massive dark glasses-she gave no sign. When she showed them to the same room he and Joy had occupied, he considered asking for a different one but decided not to. Late middle age, he was coming to understand, was a time of life when everything was predictable and yet somehow you failed to see any of it coming.
Exhausted by the day’s emotion and the long drive down from Maine, they took a nap before dinner. Marguerite awoke from hers refreshed and buoyant, while Griffin was slow and groggy, his already low spirits having ebbed even further. And why, for God’s sake? His daughter was successfully married and halfway to Paris by now. The checks he’d written weren’t going to bounce and, thanks to Marguerite, his parents were finally at rest. By rights he should’ve been ready to celebrate. Was he coming down with something? That would make sense. Like his parents before him, he often got sick whenever he could afford to, like at the end of the academic term. Back when he was writing movies with Tommy, he’d hand a just-finished script to their producer and sneeze in the same motion. So maybe.
In any event, for Marguerite’s sake, he meant to soldier through whatever this was. In the bathroom he swallowed a couple of ibuprofen (vowing not to call them I-be-hurtin’s anymore, even to himself) for the headache he felt gathering behind his eyes, and took a shower, hoping it might wake him up.
“Let’s dress up,” Marguerite suggested when he emerged.
“It’s not a very fancy place,” Griffin reminded her.
“Us,” she replied. “We’ll be fancy.”
And Griffin, knowing she was about to scrunch up her shoulders again, purposely looked away.
“Oh, good,” she said twenty minutes later when they slipped onto bar stools. “They’ve still got that funny sign.”
The Olde Cape Lounge was as mobbed as before, and the hostess had warned them it would be a good hour before they got a table. Marguerite seemed to enjoy being overdressed. Her outfit wasn’t one Griffin had seen before, but it was very Marguerite, showing plenty of skin, the kind designed to make Unitarian comedians perspire.
“How does it go again?” she said, squinting at the sign.
“Drink a couple of these and it’ll make sense,” the bartender said, setting down her cosmo and Griffin ’s martini. A communal joke, apparently, since this was a different bartender from the one last year. “You know there’s a law against spouse abuse in this state,” he told her and nodded at Griffin, who’d slid his dark glasses down his nose so he could look at the sign.
“But he’s not my husband,” she said.
“My mistake,” the man said. “In that case, do whatever you want.”
“I can’t remember how you’re supposed to read it,” Marguerite said when the bartender was gone.
At just such a juncture Griffin ’s mother would usually chime in, wanting to know where this bimbo had done her graduate work, but she was mum. In fact, now that he thought about it, she hadn’t voiced a single opinion since they’d left Chatham. Was it possible that by scattering her ashes they’d silenced her? Forever? That possibility, while remote, should have raised his spirits, but somehow it didn’t.