Did You Ever Have A Family

June

After the maze of rock-strewn, erosion-destroyed dirt roads leading away from Bowman Lake, the smooth asphalt of Route 93 south of Kalispell is a relief. When she sees the sign for Butte, she drifts toward the exit for Interstate 90 and, later, takes another exit when she sees the sign for Salt Lake City. A few miles into Idaho she can feel the wagon pulling to the left. It gets worse, so she gets off at the next exit, and by the time she finds a Texaco she can barely keep the car moving in a straight line. The kids at the register have no idea how to change a tire. The place is more of a grocery store that happens to sell gas than a gas station where anyone knows anything about cars. She waits for someone to pull in who looks like they know what to do. Soon, an older guy with a thick head of white hair and closely trimmed beard, wearing a red flannel shirt, backs his truck up to a pump. When she asks him if he knows how to change a tire, the amused look on his face makes it clear she’s picked the right guy. He puts out his hand and says, Brody Cook reporting for duty. She shakes his hand but says nothing. All right then, he says, still cheerful. He smiles and finishes pumping and paying for his gas. After he pulls his truck away from the pumps and parks next to the Subaru, he asks where she keeps the spare and she says she isn’t sure the wagon has one. One of two places, he says, heads or tails? He looks at her expectantly and she has no idea how to respond. Okay, let’s try heads. He pops the hood and after one quick look around the engine says, Tails it is. When he steps to the back of the wagon and opens the hatch, she hears him ask where she’d like him to put the bags. He asks again. When she doesn’t answer, he walks around the car with a suitcase in one hand and a duffel bag in the other and puts them down on the asphalt. I’ll leave you in charge of these, he says before returning to extract the spare tire from under the panel beneath the rug.

They had been with her all along. Shoved in the back of the Subaru, packed and ready and forgotten. Is it possible, she wonders, that she hasn’t opened the hatch since she started driving? She’s had no reason to go back there. She brought nothing with her, acquired nothing on the way besides the toothbrush and paste she picked up at a gas station in Pennsylvania the first day. How long has it been? A week? Two? She lost track of time almost as soon as she left Connecticut. Even now she can’t remember how many nights she slept in the wagon next to Bowman Lake. Three nights? Four? She stayed until the bottles of water and bags of peanuts and raisins she’d stocked up on in Ohio ran out. However long she’s been on the road, these bags have been with her the whole time.

It is obvious who belonged to each one. Will’s is a sleek arrangement of zippers and pockets with wheels and collapsible handle; Lolly’s is a frayed olive canvas duffel with taped leather straps and ink stains. Lolly would never have been so organized as to pack everything the night before and have the bags waiting in the car. This was Will’s handiwork. Will was the son-in-law Adam always dreamed of: the kind of guy to read up on infectious diseases in foreign countries before traveling there, who paid all of his bills on time, filled the coffeemaker with water and ground beans and set the timer the night before. The kind of guy to make sure the bags for his honeymoon in Greece were packed and waiting in his mother-in-law’s car the night before his wedding. June can hear him walking Lolly through the schedule. Wedding at one, reception from two to six, out the door and in June’s car by seven so that June and Luke would get them to Kennedy Airport no later than 9:30 for their 11:45 flight to Athens. He even e-mailed the itinerary to Lolly, Adam, his parents, and Luke and June so that no one was unclear when everything needed to occur.

Lolly’s duffel is only half zippered, and at one end, sticking out just a few inches, June sees the edge of a pale blue towel. Brody turns the jack to raise the front left corner of the car, and she feels like walking away. From him, the car, the bags, the towel. As she steps back, quietly, one foot slowly behind the other, she hears Lolly calling to Will, Wait! I forgot my vitamins! This is after the rehearsal, after the dinner, after Luke has cleaned up the mess from making chili for everyone. After Adam has gone to bed and Lydia, a little tipsy, has gone home. June is at the kitchen table sorting neglected piles of mail. Wait! Lolly calls from her room after Will is already out the front door with the bags. She slams down the back stairs like she always has — loud and fast and sounding like an avalanche. She flies out the door in bare feet clutching in both hands a light blue towel from the upstairs bathroom she’s made into a makeshift satchel for her bottles of vitamins. Come back! I have no shoes! June hears them laughing just outside the house and thinks, with a loose knot of nostalgia and envy, that this moment in their relationship, in their lives, is as good as it will ever get. The before. The top of the Ferris wheel, a man she went on a date with in London once told her as they rode above the city in the newly opened Eye. This blind date was arranged by a pushy but well-intentioned colleague at the gallery. The man was her colleague’s uncle and a widower, and for both of them it was too soon. Most of that evening has faded from memory, but when they reached the top of the great wheel and saw the golden lights of London fan out in gorgeous chaos below, she remembers him explaining his theory with an exhausted patience she had gotten used to in English men. This is the pivot between youth and age, the thrilling place where everything seems visible, feels possible, where plans are made. On the one side you have childhood and adolescence, which are the murky ascent, and, on the other, you have the decline that is adulthood, old age, the inch-by-inch reckoning of that grand, brief vision with earthbound reality.

Listening to Lolly and Will whisper and giggle outside, she imagines them swinging in a golden seat atop a Ferris wheel. She lets the image linger. She has not opened any of the mail spread out before her on the table. She pictures London that night, a maze of light stretching glamorously in every direction. She sees Lolly there, above it all, laughing. She pushes around the bills and letters, absentmindedly arranging them by shape and color. Then she hears Lolly, calling to her from the still-open front door to come and unlock the wagon. It is chilly and she puts her linen jacket on and, when she does, feels in the left pocket the card Luke borrowed earlier to get cash to pay the kids he’d hired to fix up the lawn. She grabs the keys from the brass tray she usually tosses them in and goes out to the driveway to open the car for Will. When they return, Lolly is barefoot on the front mat in her ratty sweatpants, elegant blouse still on from the evening, waiting for the two of them to come back inside. She is laughing her goofy laugh. When she sees June in the floodlight beams in front of the house, she calls out Mom! ridiculously, without thinking, like a teenager with an easy relationship with her mother. The top of the Ferris wheel is a giddy and thoughtless place, June thinks, and so briefly enjoyed. When she gets to the front step, she hugs her daughter for as long as she will let her.

They go inside and Luke makes chamomile tea. The four of them sit on the screened porch talking about the rehearsal earlier and the chili and deviled-egg dinner. Will is teasing Lolly about being late to the church the next day, losing the ring, and flubbing her vows. Feeling unusually playful with Lolly, June chimes in about how as a kid she’d been in the bathroom when she was meant to make her one, brief appearance in Babes in Toyland, the school play in eighth grade. The talk is jolly, the teasing gentle, but gradually Lolly becomes quiet, as if she’s suddenly realized she’s dropped her guard and forgotten to maintain a safe distance. She recedes, and the talk moves on to Will’s upcoming second year in law school, what he’ll do once he’s graduated — internships, clerkships, jobs. After a while and out of nowhere, Lolly asks Luke if he is going to ask her mother to marry him. All talk stops. No jest is in her voice, no play at all. Luke meets her eyes and her tone. I have. But your mother doesn’t take the question seriously. Or me seriously. Hard to tell which. At first I thought she blew it off because of you, but now that you’re older and out of college and practically married, I’m beginning to wonder. Lately I’ve been hoping all this wedding stuff would rub off on her, but it hasn’t. So the answer to your question is yes, and the answer to mine, asked twice, is no. This isn’t the response Lolly expects. No one does, including, by the look on his face, Luke. The only sound is the dishwasher humming in the kitchen and the impenetrable sound of the cicadas, which has graduated from an electric buzz to a droning roar. After a few uncomfortable seconds, Lolly stands and pulls Will with her. They leave the porch as Will apologetically says good night for both of them. See you in the morning, he calls from the top of the stairs, before Lolly’s bedroom door slams shut. They are gone.

A long flatbed stacked high with sheets of plywood bangs loudly by. June is walking against traffic, head down, past the Arby’s, the Taco Bell, the Exxon. She sees Luke’s shoes, the brown, buckled ones he bought from one of her mail-order catalogs just for the wedding. They are shined perfectly, but on them she can see drops of tomato that must have fallen when he was cooking dinner. Tiny thatches of freshly mown grass whisker from the edges of the soles. A small clump falls on the bluestone as Luke nervously kicks at the leg of the wicker coffee table. Neither has spoken since Lolly and Will went upstairs to bed. Luke continues to fidget and she can see white gym socks peeking out from his khaki trousers. His hand moves to her leg, his thumb begins to rub her thigh before she pushes it off and gets up to leave. He reaches for her hand, and in smacking it away, she grazes his cheek with her nail just below his left eye. He winces and pulls away. She does not apologize, does not stop to see if she’s drawn blood, does not hesitate as she steps from the porch into the kitchen.

Over the sound of passing cars, she hears someone calling. Lady! LADY!!! She knows she should stop but the feeling is far away.

She is at the sink filling the kettle with water to boil for more chamomile tea. Her hands are shaking. She wishes she could return to how it was earlier in the day. Everything until now had gone on without incident. Even with Adam, who arrived in the morning from Boston, alone and without a girl, thank God. June had at the last minute tried to persuade Lolly how much easier it would be on everyone if he stayed at the Betsy, where Will’s family and others were staying, but her response was instant and volcanic, and despite June’s delicate approach and stated worries, Adam was installed in the guest bedroom upstairs. Still, he’d been friendly to Luke, which was out of character and surprising given how he’d behaved when they met last year at Lolly’s graduation from Vassar. Adam refused to acknowledge Luke, and all afternoon muttered cradle robber and cougar under his breath. Regrettably, June responded on his level and reminded Adam that he’d been raiding the nursery long before their marriage was over. She remembers how quiet Luke became and how only later that night did she see the afternoon through his eyes: two middle-aged, bitter exes pointing fingers at each other for dating younger people. It was humiliating. She swore she’d avoid this kind of squabbling at Lolly’s wedding, and to her surprise, so far, it had required no effort. Adam had been respectful. No barbs, no bite. The last person she expected to upset the applecart was Luke. But by letting Lolly rattle him as he had, he’d opened up a can of worms she believed, or at least hoped, had been closed.

The kettle is full but she can’t move it from beneath the faucet. It is overflowing, but the gushing water, the weight of it in her hand, is soothing. She has no idea what to do next, so she does nothing. She feels cornered and angry and wrong. She wishes she could return to the front walk just an hour or so ago, hear Lolly call to her when she saw her step into the beams of the floodlights. Mom! She wishes she could start the evening over from there, steer it away from where it is. She watches the steady flow of water from the faucet, how it spills from the top of the kettle and disappears down the drain.

Cars whiz by, horns wail. She is walking faster, but the voice is closer. LADY! What on earth?!? She begins to run and soon someone grabs her arm. STOP, the voice shouts. What the hell are you doing? it asks, more bewildered than angry. She looks at the source — the beard, the flannel shirt, the white head of hair — but she does not see the man who helped her earlier. I’m sorry, she says, but not to this man. She is looking at the loose water, her trembling hands. Oh, God, I’m so sorry, she says again, dropping to one knee and then the other. For the first time, far enough away and next to someone she does not know, she cries.