Twitter, our goldendoodle, had been stretched out beneath Grace’s bare feet, but at the mention of “dinner” he was instantly at my side. Not so my daughter.
“In a minute,” she said. “I have to finish this.”
I couldn’t see the screen from where I stood, but I was quite sure she was typing an email rather than doing her homework. I knew she was still behind. That was what happened when you taught at your child’s high school; you always knew what was going on academically. Grace had been an excellent student and one of the best writers at Hunter High, but that all changed when Sam died in March. Everyone cut her slack during the spring and I was hoping she’d pull it together this fall, but then Cleve broke up with her before he left for college, sending her into a tailspin. At least, I assumed it was the breakup that had pulled her deeper into her shell. How could I really know what was going on with her? She wouldn’t talk to me. My daughter had become a mystery. A closed book. I was starting to think of her as the stranger who lived upstairs.
I leaned against the doorjamb and studied my daughter. We had the same light brown hair dusted with the same salon-manufactured blond highlights, but her long, thick mane had the smooth shiny glow that came with being sixteen years old. Somewhere along the way, my chin-length hair had lost its luster.
“I’m making pasta with pesto,” I said. “It’ll be done in two minutes.”
“Is Ian still here?” She kept typing but glanced quickly out the window, where I supposed she could see Ian’s Lexus parked on the street.
“He’s staying for dinner,” I said.
“He might as well move in,” she said. “He’s here all the time, anyway.”
I was shocked. She’d never said a word about Ian’s visits before, and he only came over once or twice a week now that Sam’s estate was settled. “No, he’s not,” I said. “And he’s been a huge help with all the paperwork, honey. Plus, he has to take over all Daddy’s cases and some of his records are here in his home office, so—”
“Whatever.” Grace hunched her shoulders up to her ears as she typed as if she could block out my voice that way. She stopped typing for a second, wrinkling her nose at her screen. Then she glanced up at me. “Can you tell Noelle to leave me alone?” she asked.
“Noelle? What do you mean?”
“She’s always emailing me. She wants me and Jenny to—”
“Jenny and me.”
She rolled her eyes and I cringed. Stupid, stupid. I wanted her to talk to me and then I critiqued what she said. “Never mind,” I said. “What does she want you and Jenny to do?”
“Make things for her babies-in-need program.” She waved her hand toward her monitor. “Now she’s on this ‘community work will look great on your college applications’ kick.”
“Well, it will.”
“She’s such a total whack job.” She started typing again, fingers flying. “If you could compare her brain with a normal brain on an MRI, I’m sure they’d look completely different.”
I had to smile. Grace might be right. “Well, she brought you into the world and I’ll always be grateful for that,” I said.
“She never lets me forget it, either.”
I heard the timer ringing downstairs. “Dinner’s ready,” I said. “Come on.”
“Two seconds.” She got to her feet, bending over the desk, still typing furiously. Suddenly she let out a yelp, hands to her face. She took a step back from the keyboard.
“Oh, no,” she said. “Oh, no!”
“What’s the matter?”
“Oh, no,” she said again, whispering the words this time as she dropped back into her chair, eyes closed.
“What is it, sweetie?” I started toward her as if I might somehow be able to fix whatever was wrong, but she waved me away.
“It’s nothing.” She stared at her monitor. “And I’m not hungry.”
“You have to eat,” I said. “You hardly ever eat dinner with me anymore.”
“I’ll get some cereal later,” she said. “Just…right now, I have to fix something. Okay?” She gave me a look that said our conversation was over, and I backed away, nodding.
“Okay,” I said, then added helplessly, “Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”
“She’s having a meltdown,” I said to Ian as I walked into the kitchen. “And she’s not hungry.”
Ian was chopping tomatoes for the salad but he turned to look at me. “Maybe I should go,” he said.
“No way.” I spooned the pesto-coated rigatoni into my big white pasta bowls. “Someone needs to help me eat all this food. Anyway, it’s not you that’s keeping her away. It’s me. She avoids me all she can.” I didn’t want Ian to leave. There was comfort in his company. He’d been Sam’s law partner and close friend for more than fifteen years and I wanted to be with someone who’d known my husband well and had loved him. Ian had been my rock since Sam’s death, handling everything from the cremation to the living trust to managing our investments. How did people survive a devastating loss without an Ian in their lives?
Ian set the bowls of pasta on the kitchen table, then poured himself a glass of wine. “I think she worries I’m trying to take Sam’s place,” he said. He ran a hand over his thinning blond hair. He was one of those men who would look good bald, but I knew he wasn’t happy about that prospect.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” I said, but I remembered Grace mentioning that he might as well move in. Should I have asked her why she said that? Not that she would have answered me.
I sat down across the table from Ian and slipped the tines of my fork into a tube of rigatoni I didn’t really feel like eating. I’d lost twenty pounds since Sam died. “I miss my little Gracie.” I bit my lip, looking into Ian’s dark eyes behind his glasses. “When she was younger, she’d follow me everywhere around the house. She’d crawl into my lap to cuddle and I’d sing to her and read to her and…” I shrugged. I’d known how to be a good mother to that little girl, but she was long gone.
“I imagine everyone feels that way when their kids become teenagers,” Ian said. He had no kids of his own.
Forty-five and he’d never even been married, which would be suspect in another man but we’d all just accepted it in Ian. He’d come close long ago—with Noelle—and I didn’t think he’d ever quite recovered from the sudden ending of that relationship.
“Sam would have known what to say to her.” I heard the frustration in my voice. “I love her so much, but she was Sam’s daughter. He was our…our translator. Our intermediary.” It was true. Sam and Grace had been two quiet souls with no need to speak to each other to communicate. “You could feel the connection between them when you’d walk into a room where they were sitting, even if one of them was on the computer and the other reading. You could feel it.”
“You’re such a perfectionist, Tara,” Ian said. “You have this expectation of yourself that you can be a perfect parent, but there’s no such thing.”
“You know what they loved to do?” I smiled to myself, stuck in my memory, which was where I was spending a lot of my time lately. “Sometimes I’d have a late meeting and I’d come home and find them sitting in the family room, watching a movie together, drinking some coffee concoction they’d invented.”
“Sam and his coffee.” Ian laughed. “All day long. He had a cast-iron gut.”
“He turned Grace into a caffeine addict by the time she was fourteen.” I nibbled a piece of pasta. “She misses him like crazy.”
“Me, too,” Ian said. He poked at his rigatoni.
“And then to have Cleve break up with her so soon after…” I shook my head. My baby girl was hurting. “I wish she were a little more like me,” I said, and then realized that was unfair. “Or that I was a little more like her. I just wish we had something more in common. Some activity we could share, but we’re so different. Everyone at school talks about it. The other teachers, I mean. I think they expected her to be into theater, like me.”