Summer People

Chapter 8

T he most amazing aspect of life, Beth thought, was the way that time passed-the days, the months, one following the next without slowing down or stopping for tragedy or triumph.

They returned to New York and-how else could she say it?-resumed their lives. It took two weeks for Beth to readjust to New York, but then one day she woke up and realized everything was back to normal. The laundry was done, the apartment had been cleaned, the last of the Nantucket bread and tomatoes had been consumed-now the kids were devouring bags of apples and gallons of cider, almost faster than Beth could buy them. Winnie had her first physics quiz and she rattled off formulas in a cheerleader’s chant. Garrett had his first soccer game at the end of the week, plus his application for Princeton was due soon, if he wanted to qualify for early admission. One night, Beth found him in Arch’s study on the phone-odd, because he normally took calls on the cordless in the kitchen. He was sitting at Arch’s desk doodling on a legal pad, and with his head bent, he looked so much like Arch that Beth caught her breath, inadvertently announcing her presence-she had planned to slip out of the room unnoticed. But Garrett looked up and saw her and she asked, “Who are you on the phone with, honey?” The typical response whenever she asked either of the kids this was, “None of your business,” but this time Garrett moved his mouth away from the receiver and whispered, “Piper.”

Beth stood in the doorway for a beat. She wanted to ask, How’s she feeling? How’s the baby? What does the doctor say? She wanted to talk to David. The phone line led directly to Nantucket, and although she was now back in New York, Beth yearned to transmit herself there. Instead, she nodded and closed the door.

Winnie started her senior year at Danforth a changed woman. She was no longer the naive goody-goody spoiled brat child of privilege whose life had been torn apart by the untimely death of her father, she was no longer a girl who thought it was okay to wear her father’s Princeton sweatshirt as though it were a mourning band or torture her body by denying it food. And she was no longer a virgin, physically or emotionally.

While it was true that her relationship with Marcus changed- there was no way to keep up the intensity of their friendship when they lived apart-it ended up being okay for both of them. Winnie’s time was occupied by school. She nurtured the friendships that she’d all but ignored as of March sixteenth, and she tried to foster friendships with one or two of the African American kids at her school, although she soon realized that just because these people were black did not mean they had an excellent character like Marcus. Winnie did her best to eat as much as she could and three afternoons a week she worked out in Danforth’s weight room as she prepared for the upcoming swim season. She was going to surprise everyone on her team by trying the butterfly this year.

Marcus’s life got incrementally better. During the summer his father had cleared the apartment of most of Constance’s things, which helped. Marcus had school which he took seriously; he studied hard. He, too, went to the gym three afternoons a week, and he got a job working two evenings plus Saturdays at a pizza shop in the student union at Queens College. It was a job that could easily have gone to a work-study student, but Marcus’s old boss at the grounds department put in a good word for him, even though he knew about Marcus’s mother. Marcus didn’t actually make pizza-no tossing or spinning of dough, no painting of sauce or collage of toppings-but he did become proficient with the pizza peel, the pizza cutter, and the cash register. He made $6.75 an hour and by mid-October had saved almost two hundred dollars toward his debt to Dome Books.

On Sundays, Marcus took the seven line into Manhattan to watch the Giants game at Winnie’s apartment. Those afternoons on the leather sofa were a quiet fantasy. They snuggled under a fleece blanket, and although there was no opportunity for sex- Beth was always around-they reveled in the warmth of each other’s body, just as they had on those nights in Horizon when they’d done nothing but sleep. Beth served them Cokes from a silver tray and made delicious pub food-potato skins, chicken fingers, mushrooms stuffed with sausage and Parmesan cheese. Sundays that autumn made Marcus glad to be alive.

Thanks to Beth, he’d met four times with Kara Schau, who actually traveled to Benjamin N. Cardozo High School to speak with him during his study hall. Mostly, he talked and she listened, but she left him with a few helpful sentences: You can be related to someone who’s done a bad thing and not be a bad person. You can love someone who’s done a bad thing and not be a bad person. You can even be someone who’s done a bad thing and not be a bad person. It helped Marcus to think this way, and he cut a deal with his father- sometime before the holidays he would go up to Bedford Hills to see Constance. He refused to partake in the weekly phone calls with Bo and LaTisha. When he was ready to talk to Mama, he told himself, he would do so face to face.

The first Saturday in November he rescheduled his work shift and he and Winnie went to the prison together, on the train. They were as solemn as they would have been at a funeral, holding hands and gazing out the window as the last of the fall leaves in Westchester County passed them by. Since Marcus had never been to the prison before, Bo told him what stop to get off at and how to catch the free bus to the prison grounds.

“It’s not a pretty place,” Bo said. “You know that, right?” Marcus knew it intellectually, but that was different from actually seeing the Bedford Hills Correctional Institute-the barbed wire, the armed guards, the stench of lost hope, the absolute concrete and metal desolation of the place. It was hell on earth. When Marcus and Winnie stepped down from the bus, they were herded into a huge waiting room filled with other visitors. Marcus gripped Winnie’s arm and led her to a space on a vinyl couch. There were glass-topped coffee tables with torn magazines and coloring books and broken crayons-because the waiting room was filled with little kids. It could have been a pediatrician’s office except for the edgy way the adults acted, sneaking glances, both shameful and interested, at one another. Everyone in the room loved someone who had done a bad thing.

During the wait, Marcus nearly fell asleep. He felt his body wanting to check out, shut down. Because it was too much to handle-the prospect of seeing his mother. Winnie was reading her English assignment, Macbeth, and Marcus wished he’d brought something to read, though he doubted anything would distract him. Finally, over the buzz of the room, Marcus heard his name. He helped Winnie up and walked toward the heavy black woman who was waiting for him. He tried to clear his mind as he would before a swim meet.

Constance, when he saw her, was behind glass, but Marcus marveled at how familiar she was. His mother. Mama. He’d expected her to look sad or tired; he’d expected her to look older. But, in fact, she looked much the way she had his entire life- with smooth brown skin, wide brown eyes, and the hair she always claimed she could do nothing with. At home, she wore silk scarves over her head, but here she made do with a navy blue bandana.

In those initial moments of studying her face-and yes, she looked as terrified and unmoored as he did-he waited for his anger to surface. This was what he was worried about-his anger. But instead he felt a profound sadness-his mother had ruined her life. Marcus’s life-as the summer had taught him and as his father had promised-would move on past the murders. But for Constance this prison was the last stop.

Constance sat and Marcus sat and they both picked up the phone.

Her voice was the same soft-and-scratchy tone, forever irritated by constantly explaining the basic tenets of the English language to kids who didn’t want to learn.

“Hello, child,” she said. “I’m glad you came.”

When she spoke, Marcus remembered one of the words Kara Schau had given him: “acceptance.” He didn’t have to forgive, he didn’t have to understand. All he had to do was show up. And here he was.

“Hello, Mama,” he said.

Winnie was standing a foot or so behind Marcus, a mere observer to the proceedings, but she teared up as she watched Marcus and Constance. She wondered what it would be like to see her father again for fifteen minutes. She would be tempted to give him news-about falling in love with Marcus, or about Beth being married before, or about Garrett becoming a father himself-but then she realized that she would do what Marcus was now doing: telling his mother he loved her.

Winnie couldn’t hear Constance’s voice, but she read her lips: I know, child, I know. Just the way Arch knew, wherever he was, that Winnie loved him and would keep him alive every way that she could.

It might have been the sound of Winnie crying that brought Marcus back to himself. He pulled Winnie forward, closer to the glass.

“Mama,” he said. “This is Winnie Newton, Arch’s daughter.”

Winnie had imagined this introduction twenty times the night before as she tried to fall asleep. She imagined Constance falling to her knees in gratitude, waxing on and on about what a great man Arch was. But now, in the actual moment, when Marcus handed Winnie the phone so that Constance could speak to her, what Constance said was, “I would have known you anywhere. You look just like your father.”

And this, of course, endeared Constance Tyler to Winnie forever.

By holiday time, Piper was six months pregnant. As Garrett moved through the days of his life-classes, the end of soccer, the beginning of intramural floor hockey, weekends with friends at the movies, even the occasional date (which he kept secret from his mother and sister)-it was easy enough to forget that the first girl Garrett had ever loved and might still love a little was suffering physically and emotionally as Garrett’s child grew inside her on an island thirty miles out to sea. At times-when Garrett took Brooke Casserhill out to dinner at a Peruvian chicken place, for example, where they were able to smuggle in a bottle of wine lifted from Brooke’s father’s wine cave-Piper seemed far away and less than real. She seemed like folklore. But at other times, mostly in the dark hours when Garrett should have been sleeping, Piper and her plight took on a gravity that nailed Garrett to his bed.

He tried to figure out what she expected from him. She accused him of being a kid. Well, yeah-he was seventeen years old, a senior in high school, just like she was. Had she wanted him to marry her?Raise the child?If that was the adult thing, and maybe it was, then Garrett conceded: it was out of his reach. He couldn’t do it.

He called her every month after her doctor’s appointment, and their conversations consisted almost entirely of the clinical: how much weight had she gained?(Fifteen pounds.) What was she measuring?(Twenty-four centimeters.) Did the AFP screen come back normal?(Yes.) Did she test positive for ges-tational diabetes?(No.) When would she sign up for Lamaze classes?(After the first of the year.) The baby kicked all the time now, Piper said, and the girlfriends who’d shunned her when they found out she’d let that summer kid impregnate her were now the ones who were most eager to lay their hands on the firm sphere of Piper’s belly and feel the baby drum from the inside.

Garrett had had no idea that a single baby could consume so much mental energy; always, in these conversations with Piper, it seemed like there were a hundred small points of discussion all revolving around the baby. In history class, Mr. Rapinski spoke of women in Third World countries who excused themselves from the assembly line of whatever factory they worked at, gave birth in the restroom and handed the infant off to a family member to care for at home. But it was nowhere close to that easy for a couple of white American upper-middle-class teenagers.

Garrett didn’t tell anyone in New York about Piper or the baby, and he forbade Beth and Winnie to mention it to anyone but Kara Schau. His mother understood. “Every man, woman, and child is entitled to one secret,” she said. “I had mine, now you have yours.” Garrett hated putting himself in a similar situation to his mother, and he wondered if the adult thing to do was to come clean, confessing to everyone he knew that he had impregnated his summer girlfriend and then left her to deal with it by herself. Then he could accept blame; he could wear the scarlet letter. You want to be back in New York where you can pretend none of this ever happened, Piper had said. She was right! Garrett didn’t want to be whispered about; he didn’t want the information fermenting his teachers’ opinion of him as they wrote his college recommendations. He didn’t want to lose any friends. He couldn’t wait until March when Piper would birth the baby, then give it away, and the ordeal would be ended.

The holidays came, and because they were the first holidays without Arch, they could only be described as bearable. In January, Beth took the twins to Hunter Mountain to ski, and for the break in February, the three of them flew to Palm Beach and stayed at the Breakers. Garrett praised his mother for these trips, these distractions, and helped out as much as he could-carrying luggage, arranging the limo to and from the airport, and being as amiable as possible.

While they traveled, he found himself thinking about the baby more often. He’d never realized how many children inhabited the world. Babies in car seats and strollers clogged the train station and airline terminals. Garrett heard their cries during takeoff and landing. He noticed, in every public bathroom he used now, the beige Koala changing station bolted to the wall. These had been there all along-they hadn’t been installed to torment him-and yet he never remembered seeing one before. At Hunter Mountain, Garrett, Beth, and Winnie ate dinner at a Mexican restaurant and Garrett became so preoccupied with a blond two-year-old boy at the next table who did a fire engine puzzle over and over, shrieking with delight each time he completed it, that Garrett barely touched his fajitas. At the Breakers, he separated from his mother and sister and lay on a lounge by the baby pool where he watched the little ones cavorting in their water wings. A baby, an actual baby, lived inside of Piper and this time next year that baby would be crawling or walking or swimming. His child. His little boy or girl. It hurt him in a way he couldn’t name. It was worse than heartbreak. It was worse, in a way, than losing his father.

Beth thought that March would never arrive, but then, of course, it did. They marked the one-year anniversary of Arch’s death quietly-dinner in the apartment with Arch’s mother. Trent Trammelman called Beth in the morning to say that the law firm was donating money in Arch’s name to establish a scholarship fund at Danforth. Arch’s secretary, now the secretary for a new attorney, sent flowers, and a bunch of thoughtful souls sent cards. Beth hated the idea of a death day as an anniversary, and yet once it was past, she felt relieved. A milestone survived. Since Christmas, friends had been inviting Beth over to meet men-single, divorced, widowed-and once Beth caught on, she always begged off, saying, “Please, it hasn’t even been a year.” Now that the anniversary had come and gone, her excuse vanished. And yet, Beth couldn’t bring herself to think about dating. All she could think about was their impending trip to Nantucket.

Beth spoke to the headmaster at Danforth: this was a very important family trip (she did not call it a vacation), and for reasons she couldn’t specify, she didn’t know how long they’d be gone.

Everyone at Danforth accommodated them. Winnie and Gar-rett both had excellent grades and they’d both been accepted to college. Garrett got into Princeton on early admission, and Winnie had been accepted at NYU, though she was still waiting to hear from Columbia, Williams, and Brown.

They were free to stay on Nantucket as long as they cared to.

Marcus was coming along for the week of his spring break. He, too, had been accepted to college-Queens College, a short bus ride from his apartment, and Colgate University, upstate. Colgate was a white person’s school, but his English teacher, Ms. Marchese, encouraged him to apply. He wrote an essay about his mother. The admissions committee was so impressed by the essay that they offered him a full ride for all four years, giving Marcus an opportunity worth much more than thirty thousand dollars. Marcus spoke to the swim coach and the head of the black student union, both of whom encouraged him to come. But the deciding factor was the enthusiastic call from one of the English professors who’d read his essay. You have a way of turning words on a page into pure emotion, the professor had said. You have the makings of a fine, fine writer.

Beth had never been to Nantucket in March, and as soon as she stepped out of the Rover onto Horizon’s shell driveway, she understood why. The wind was brutal, whipping across Miacomet Pond in cold, wet sheets. The sky was low and gray and the ocean was a roiling black. The town had been practically deserted-less than half of the businesses showed any signs of life. In New York, trees had already started to bud; crocuses were up. But not here.

This time, Beth had brought her cell phone, and as soon as she sent the kids to the Stop & Shop for firewood and groceries, she called David. He’d sent a Christmas card-no picture, no note-just the three names signed in his handwriting at the bottom. She was nervous dialing his number and not because of Piper. A couple of times over the winter she caught herself repeating his words of the previous summer. I thought about kissing you. I thought about making love to you. When she got very lonely- weekend nights at home when the kids were out and she could hear New York frolicking outside without her-she entertained the possibility of her and David together. Not married again, but together. As companions-that’s what she wanted as she grew older-someone to spend time with once the twins left. Would it be so crazy if that person was David?She went so far as to wonder if he would ever visit her in the city. He’d never been there to her knowledge. She could show him the city the way everyone should experience it.

When David answered the phone, she said, “Hi, it’s me.”

“Me?”

“Bethie,” she said. Flirting with him already. “How’s Piper?”

“Two centimeters dilated, ninety percent effaced,” David said, sounding like a doctor himself. “She’s as big as a house. I mean, huge. I can’t believe this is my little girl. I just can’t believe it.”

“Yeah,” Beth said. They were silent a minute, listening to the static of the cell phone. “You’ll call us as soon as…”

“As soon as,” David said. “The doctor said any time now. How long are you staying?”

“We’re staying until Piper has the baby,” Beth said. “That’s why we came, after all.”

“Right,” David said.

“Has she… changed her mind about adoption?” Beth asked.

“No.”

“So, how will it work, then?Will they come get the baby? Take the baby away?”

“There’s a procedure, yes. The people from the agency are professionals, Beth. They’ve met with Piper and gone over the range of emotions she can expect. They give her twenty-four hours with the baby, then she signs a document and the baby goes. Piper made it clear that she and Garrett want to name the baby, and that’s allowed.”

“She and Garrett want to name the baby?” Beth asked.

“Yes.”

Beth took a deep breath of the shockingly cold air inside Horizon. The house felt stingy without any heat. They were all going to spend the night on air mattresses and sleeping bags in front of the fire. Roast hot dogs, that kind of thing. It would be fun for about three hours.

“I don’t know if I’m going to be able to handle this, David. Watching some stranger carry away my grandchild. How about you?”

He sighed. “Oh, Beth. I’ve lived with this decision every day for the last nine months. I’ve had to deal with people coming up to me on the street, telling me how irresponsible I am as a parent and Piper is as a person. She lost two of her closest friends, she says the kids at school stare at her all the time, and her teachers treat her differently, too. They treat her like she’s stupid. But she’s not, of course. She got into BU and BC, and was wait-listed at Harvard. Her grades are the best they’ve ever been and she’s going to college, just like she said she was going to. But it’s been hard. I guess you haven’t had to give it much thought while you were in New York.”

There he was, using the same old refrain-I had to live with the pain while you were away. God, this was a bitter man. But no, that wasn’t quite right. He had a point; she was lucky. She had always been able to lead a double life; she had always been able to escape.

“I gave it a lot of thought,” she said. “I thought of it every day.”

“Did you,” David said. “Well, I bet Garrett didn’t tell his buddies. And I’ll bet you didn’t report it to his teachers. In fact, I’ll bet no one in New York knows why you’re mysteriously off to Nantucket this week.”

Where was all this anger coming from?“Not true,” Beth countered. “My therapist knows.”

“Your therapist,” David said. He breathed forcefully into the phone, then chuckled. “God, I need a therapist. We’ll see you at the hospital then, Bethie?”

She was grateful that he used the nickname. “Okay.”

She hung up the phone and stared at it for a moment, wishing that the conversation had gone better, that there had been some kind of connection between the two of them. This was the man she fantasized taking to brunch in Soho?

It was true that none of the kids had acknowledged the real reason they were here. On the ride up, Marcus and Winnie perused the Colgate catalog and admission packet line by line, trying to figure out what Marcus’s freshman year might be like. (“It sounds cool,” Winnie concluded. “It sounds cold,” Marcus corrected her.) Garrett drove the entire way and didn’t take his eyes off the road except to collect money for tolls. Now, all three kids stampeded into the house with bags of groceries-a pile of Duraflame logs and every kind of junk food imaginable. This was a camping trip for them. Winnie and Marcus braved the icy staircase to the beach because they wanted to check out the ocean, and Beth sent Garrett to the basement to switch on the water heater. When he came back upstairs, she said, “I just spoke with David on the phone. He said any day now. He said he’s going to call us.” God, even she couldn’t say it: Piper is due any day now. He’s going to call us when the baby is born.

Garrett’s face was wooden, expressionless. “Okay, thanks.”

Beth touched his shoulder. He pulled away. He was so foreign to her. In six months, he would leave for Princeton and she would never know him again, not really. Such was the sadness of sons.

That night in Horizon was unlike any Beth had spent there. Because of the cold, she supposed-the cold changed things. For a few years, when Beth was in college, she had arrived in early May, when the house was chilly and damp. She kept the fireplace lit and walked around in her grandfather’s Irish fisherman’s sweater and jeans and thick socks. But those days didn’t come close to this kind of cold-a cold that required the Newtons to sleep in fleece jackets inside their flannel-lined sleeping bags in front of the fire. Winnie and Garrett brought the same gear they wore to Hunter Mountain-Bodnar ski jackets and Patagonia microfiber pants. Marcus had to make do with layers-T-shirt, long-sleeved T-shirt, sweatshirt, a fleece that he borrowed from Beth when the leather jacket he brought grew stiff and almost cracked.

They got a fire blazing, and when the sun went down they roasted hotdogs, made popcorn in an old-fashioned popcorn maker, and Beth got the stovetop working where she warmed up cider. They all took showers-Beth was the last one in and her hot water conked halfway through. She dried off as quickly as she ever had in her life and jumped back into her clothes.

They arranged their sleeping bags lengthwise so that everyone’s head faced the fire. Winnie and Marcus were in the middle, Beth and Garrett on either side. The kids talked about school mostly, and college. Beth drifted in and out of the conversation; her mind was consumed with her conversation with David and with her own discomfort. She interrupted them.

“Tomorrow,” she said, “we’re checking into the Jared Coffin.

” Before they could protest or cheer (Garrett and Marcus were all for it; Winnie liked things just as they were, cozy like this), the phone rang.

Piper was in labor.

“Her water broke right in the middle of The West Wing, and now her contractions are a minute and a half apart,” David said. “We just got to the hospital a few minutes ago. You can either come now-it might mean a long time waiting-or I can call you when the baby is born.”

Beth looked at the kids. Even Marcus’s expression was that of the keenest interest. They would never sleep, that much was clear.

“We’ll come now,” she said.

Compared to Horizon, the hospital was positively tropical. Beth shed a layer of clothing before they reached the admitting desk.

“Which way is labor and delivery?” she asked.

A nurse directed them upstairs. Standing in the elevator, Beth squeezed Garrett’s hand. He squeezed back.

“It’s going to be okay, honey,” she said. “Babies are born all the time, every day, all over the world.”

“I know, Mom,” he said.

The elevator opened on the second floor and they followed signs. Beth was hurrying, though she, who had been in labor for eighteen hours with the twins, knew how long it could take. They came upon a pastel-colored waiting room filled with overstuffed sofas and chairs. The kids flung themselves all over the furniture-yes, it was more appealing than sleeping on the floor of that icebox. There was a woman on one of the couches reading a copy of Martha Stewart Living, and she looked up, alarmed at the invasion. She was very attractive, with honey-colored hair tied back in a braid. The woman looked them over, no doubt wondering what they were doing there-this was a maternity ward, not the common space of a college dorm. The woman opened her mouth to speak.

“Beth?” she said.

Beth smiled, politely at first, flipping through her mental Rolodex. Who was this?Then a quiet panic infiltrated and she fought to keep her smile steady. She really had been out of touch in New York. Because although she had given the impending birth of this baby hours and hours of thought, never once had it occurred to her that she would have to see Rosie. But here she was-of course- Rosie Ronan, Piper’s mother. The other grandmother.

“Oh, God, Rosie,” Beth said. In her mind, Beth realized, she had filed Rosie away as “absent.” Like Arch. Not there. Beth went to the woman and took both her hands, even went so far as to kiss her on the corner of the mouth. This was so awkward. More awkward than the cocktail party so many years ago when Rosie introduced Beth to a friend as “David’s old flame,” right in front of Arch. At the time, Beth had swilled deeply off her glass of Chardonnay, and Rosie laughed and said, “Well, we’re all adults, right?What’s passed is past!” Now here she was-hadn’t aged a day in six years-if anything, she was prettier than ever. Beth turned Rosie toward the kids who were halfway to sleep-who could blame them?it was eleven o’clock and the day had been long-and said, “Winnie, Marcus, Garrett, this is Rosie Ronan, Piper and Peyton’s mother.”

Her kids, always polite with other adults, took a few seconds to process what Beth was telling them. Garrett groaned under his breath; he knew he should be the first one to his feet, knew it by the way his mother hit his name the hardest-this woman was, after all, sort of like his mother-in-law. Before Garrett could summon energy to stand, Marcus jumped up. Garrett was grateful for this; it gave him a few seconds to think.

“Marcus Tyler,” he said. “Congratulations on your impending good news.”

“Thank you,” Rosie said, with such a sense of entitlement that one might have thought it was Rosie who was having this baby. Beth wondered what she was doing out here in the waiting room, but before she could ask, she watched Garrett rise from the love seat. With a gallantry Beth rarely saw in him anymore, he introduced himself and then he introduced Winnie. “Garrett Newton, Mrs. Ronan, and this is my twin sister, Winnifred Newton.”

“It’s nice to finally meet you,” Rosie said. “Piper and Peyton and David are down the hall in a labor room. I’ve been banished for making too many suggestions.” She smiled sheepishly at Beth, and Beth, against her will, sympathized with her. It was always the mother who took the brunt of a teenager’s anger.

“Is Piper making any progress?” Beth asked. Just standing so close to the maternity ward brought it all back to her-how delivering a baby was a fight for ground, a struggle for centimeters, one painful contraction at a time.

“Some,” Rosie said. “She wants to wait for as long as she can before she takes the epidural. She read somewhere that it slows labor. She was moaning pretty loudly in there and she lost her dinner. The nurses here are outstanding. There’s a nurse back there with Piper now who was here when I had both Piper and Peyton. Of course, it wasn’t that long ago.”

“Only seventeen years,” Beth said, then felt like she had stated the unstatable. She removed her layers until she wore only a turtleneck and jeans. The hospital’s heating system blew hot, dry air out of a vent directly under Beth’s feet. “So I guess we’ll just wait then.”

“Is it okay if we drift off, Mom?” Winnie asked. She was curled up in a large armchair and Garrett and Marcus were each spread out on a love seat. That left a space on the sofa next to Rosie, who had returned to her magazine-perhaps hearing the blunt declaration of her daughter’s age upset her. Beth sat down, then said, “Garrett, do you want to at least tell Piper you’re here?In case she wants to see you?”

Garrett opened his eyes and stared at the acoustic tiles of the ceiling. He was so tired, this all seemed like a dream. He looked to Rosie Ronan, and she nodded at him. “That might be a good idea,” she said.

Garrett rose.

“You can ask one of the nurses where she is,” Beth suggested.

“I’ll find it,” Garrett said, walking away.

Beth removed her boots and propped her stocking feet on the glass coffee table. She fell asleep before Garrett returned.

When she woke, the waiting area was dark, though the lights in the adjoining hallway were on. All three kids snored shamelessly, and when Beth glanced next to her, she saw Rosie Ronan sitting right there, legs crossed at the ankle, eyes closed. Then, suddenly, Rosie’s eyes opened and the two women gazed at each other.

“Beth,” Rosie whispered, as though she were seeing Beth for the first time. “Beth Eyler.”

“Beth Newton,” Beth said. “I haven’t been Beth Eyler for twenty years.”

“In our house,” Rosie said, “you’re always called Beth Eyler.”

Beth didn’t like anything about that statement, and she sensed she wasn’t supposed to.

“Any news about Piper?”

“They gave her the shot,” Rosie said. “She’s sleeping.”

Beth nodded slowly, then tried to close her eyes, as though drifting off to sleep. Rosie allowed it for a few seconds before she spoke again.

“I was very sorry to hear about your husband.”

Beth opened her eyes. “Thank you.”

“David told me what a difficult time you had this summer.”

Beth resented this even more: the thought of the bereaved Newton family as a topic of conversation between the Ronans.

“We’re doing okay now, thanks.”

Rosie uttered what sounded like a soft laugh, egging Beth to look her way. “I was just thinking about the circumstances that led the two of us to be sitting here together,” Rosie said. “It’s extraordinary.”

“I guess it is.”

“To think your son impregnated our daughter.”

Beth thought about telling Rosie that Piper was hardly an innocent in all this. Those halter tops, the way she clung to Garrett-but she had no desire to fight. Instead, she stood up and turned toward the lighted hallway, thinking she would grab a cup of tea if she could find a vending machine-anything to get away!

“You’re leaving?” Rosie asked. A challenge.

“I’d like something to drink,” Beth said, and then to be gracious, “Would you like anything?”

Rosie rested her head against the back of the sofa, her eyes at half mast. “I’m all set,” she said. “But you might ask my poor husband if he wants a Coke or some coffee. We’ve been here since nine-thirty.”

Beth blinked; the heat was drying out her eyes. “Your poor husband?” she said. “You mean, David?”

Rosie answered with her eyes closed. “I mean David.”

It wasn’t the woman’s words, but her tone of voice that informed Beth. It was the slight smile of victory on her closed lips. David and Rosie were back together. Beth was shocked, incredulous, and crushed, a part of her. It wasn’t fair, was it?For them to reunite just as Beth was beginning to glimpse the possibility of moving on, and the desire, if only nascent, to want to move on with David. She brought her hand to her mouth and bit down on the diamond of her “We Made It” ring. It wasn’t fair because Beth was, once again, left alone.

A hand touched her shoulder. Beth turned to see a nurse. Gray-haired, big-bosomed, with the kind of weary and wise face that seemed to answer Beth’s thoughts by saying, You’re right. It’s not fair. But you’ll manage. Everyone does.

What the nurse actually said was, “She’s pushing. We’re very close. Would you ladies like to come watch the birth of your grandchild?”

Rosie followed the nurse down the hall.

The thought of being in the same room with Rosie and David addled Beth, but that baby was the reason she was here. She walked alongside Rosie, love for this new child rising to heat her skin like a fever. Halfway down the hall, she remembered Garrett and she hurried back to the waiting room to wake her son. Her son who, due to the miracle of life, was about to become a father.