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There was time, yet, for Froot Loops before her mother and Calvin arrived. She poured a bowl and ate it standing at the counter, Peep lurking at her ankles until she put the milk dregs down for him to finish. Ten ’til eight. She had better put some socks on; her toenails were ragged, and who knew what kind of garbage this Calvin guy might decide to report to Perez or TMZ?
She could hear her mother’s voice chastising, her, telling her to relax already. Right, relax. Re-lax. “Chill,” she said, heading back down the hallway. That her mother wanted to introduce this latest companion suggested he was, in Nancy’s estimation, higher caliber than most. Even so, after years of exposure to the public’s appetite for gossip—guilty, herself, of spreading it now and then—Blue preferred to be overly cautious. Live by the sword, die by it.
Calvin K., as he was introduced to Blue, was in every visible way her mother’s counterpart. Silver hair, pierced ears, rangy and kind looking. According to her mother’s earlier account, they’d met at the co-op on Lake Park one Saturday morning, buying organic vegetables. Calvin had an endearing passion for rutabaga.
“Calvin, meet my oldest, Harmony Blue—or just Blue, if she prefers.”
“She prefers,” Blue said. “Is it Calvin Kay, K-a-y?” She’d need to know in order to have him checked out. Her practice of getting background checks on her mother’s companions was another of the subjects neither of them spoke of, or not to one another at any rate.
“No, it’s the letter K, for K-r-z-y-z-e-w-s-k-i,” he spelled it out, then told her it was pronounced sha-sheff-ski. “It’s Polish. Ya’d think someone would anglicize it, but there you go.”
“Well,” she said, taking her mother’s coat, and his, “Good to meet you, Calvin K.”
“Hard to beat ‘Kucharski,’ huh?” her mother said.
Which was why Blue had chosen Reynolds.
Though Calvin’s accent had already answered her next question, she needed something with which to make conversation. She did not, after all, know a single thing about rutabaga. She said, “Are you a Chicago native?”
“Nah, Winnebago. I came here in ninety-seven, I guess it was, to run a bookstore in Hyde Park—my brother’s. He had colon cancer.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Is he—?”
“Gone? Yeah. Saw that special you did on it, though. I appreciate that.”
Her mother, hair down, wearing a form-fitting Impressionist print top and jeans, told Blue, “We watched the show today. Calvin’s been a fan for years. What was with the tears? Do you have a cold?”
“A cold?” Blue closed the closet door and led them into the living room. “No, I’m not sick.”
“When you were little, I would always know when you were coming down with something because your emotions would be all over the map. Could be early menopause—are your periods irregular? Are you having hot flashes?”
“No! Really Mom, it’s nothing,” she lied. “I’m tired is all. Hey, I have some of that red wine you like; can I pour you a glass? Calvin?”
After they’d settled onto the L-shaped sectional, Blue listened while her mother brought her up to date on her sister Melody’s latest. For as intertwined as their lives had been as children, she and Mel had a tenuous connection as adults. Blue relied on their mother to keep her current about Mel, while Mel had their mother and the tabloids to keep her updated on Blue, either of which she seemed willing to regard as reasonably authoritative. The question now was whether their mother or the media would be first to alert Mel to her on-air outburst.
Currently, Blue’s mother was saying, Mel and her husband Jeff were leasing out two hundred tillable acres of their central Wisconsin farm to Green Giant and, using the rent income, had just bought themselves an RV. With their sons both grown and out of the house for the first time, they were planning to spend the coming summer touring the country, one KOA campground after another until they’d crossed off all twenty-nine of their sightseeing goals. “They’ve never traveled; Jeff refuses to fly.”
“So they’re gonna knock ’em all out at once, eh? Carpe diem,” Calvin said.
“I can’t get over how differently you and Mel turned out,” her mother went on. “No way can I see you in an RV—or on a farm, for that matter.” She told Calvin, “She’s never been one to settle for what’s ordinary.”
Blue shook her head. “That’s not true.”
“No?”
“No.” She craved ordinary. Grocery shopping. An afternoon in the park with a blanket and a book. “If you mean my career, you know that a lot of my success is owed to luck.”
Calvin chuckled. “A pretty good run of luck, then.”
“You laugh, but I’m sincere. I started out as a production assistant. I never saw myself hosting a talk show; I wanted to do the news.” If she threw herself into her work as though it was a life raft, if she appeared to be far more dedicated than her cohorts, that was only because she’d used work to fill the empty spaces that others filled with spouses or children, with bar-hopping or hobbies or sports.
In her defense she added, “I had Froot Loops for dinner.”
“You just made my point,” her mother laughed. “How many times have you been there, to the farm?”
“I don’t know—three?” She knew exactly. Each exhausting visit had seen her treading the narrow line between tolerance and envy. In spite of Blue’s support of her sister’s choices and admiration for everything Mel and Jeff had accomplished, Mel was still inclined to defensiveness. It seemed her every sentence began with a version of, “I know it isn’t as glamorous as your life, but …” Blue hadn’t been there in years. She’d wanted to attend the boys’ high-school graduation ceremonies but Mel insisted her presence would detract from the events. “No offense, but we just don’t want it to turn into Blue Reynolds Day.” The sad thing was, Blue couldn’t fight the logic. She’d sent each boy a generous check and invited them to visit her at will.
“You know,” her mother said, “we should all get together soon. Then Calvin can see for himself what I mean.” She turned to Calvin. “My girls don’t think alike, and they don’t look a bit alike, either. Melody’s taller, kind of stocky, with wide blue eyes and a little bit of a cleft chin. She’s been blonde since she was a toddler.”
“My oldest son’s my ex-wife’s spitting image—well, bigger nose and more facial hair now, ya know—while my daughter’s me to a tee. Could be true for yours—one like you, one like their dad.”
“Not that we’d know if that was the case,” Blue said. She hadn’t meant to sound bitter but the words, once out, had an edge. “We don’t know anything about him.”
Her mother looked at her over the top of her wine glass, then finished her sip and said, “For your own good—and what difference would it make if I’d told you every detail? He was gone even when he was in this world, no practical use to me and none to either of you.”
Which Blue was sure was true, but she had been there on those long Sunday afternoons when her mother played Fleetwood Mac’s “Go Your Own Way” over and over again on the console stereo. Watching her mother towel off after a shower, she’d stared at the black script “L” on her mother’s right hip and wondered, Lou? Leonard? Larry? Lance? The absent presence of L in their lives had gnawed at them all.
“I did the best I could with you; God knows I wasn’t very sensible in my younger years.”
Calvin said, “Who is? All I got to show for my early adulthood is five years’ experience driving a fuel-oil truck, and a perfect memory of the words to every Crosby, Stills and Nash song there was at the time.”
Her mother started singing “Teach Your Children” and Calvin joined in. Blue shook her head, but a part of her, a reluctant, soft part that she liked to forget she had, was captivated. That her mother sang well was no surprise; her singing had always been the cue that Blue and Mel could ask for bubblegum money or, later, new jeans. The surprise was in how her mother and Calvin harmonized so well, and with such obvious mutual pleasure, and in exactly the manner Blue had wished for as a child when she’d watched The Sound of Music and imagined that for her mother there could be an add-on father. Their Maria would be a long-haired, soft-souled, Peter Fonda sort of guy.
If the likes of Calvin had come along back then, everything would have turned out so differently … There would be no past to hide away, no lost son to track down.
Branford has a lead.
But she could not think about that right now.
“Something to eat?” she asked, heading to the kitchen without waiting for an answer.
Through the kitchen window Blue saw that the snow was slowing and, out against the dark horizon, whole floors of lights still glowed in the skyscrapers that separated her from the vast black of Lake Michigan. Who was working this late? Who, like her, had little reason not to work any and all hours, or was so disconnected from those reasons that getting home at nine o’clock, ten, had become par?
She refilled wine glasses and brought out another bottle, along with cheese, bread, olives. Her mother was in the middle of a tale from Blue’s childhood.
“Now this would’ve been around the time Mom died,” she was saying, “so who knows what those girls were thinking, we were all such a mess, but I came home from work—was it the laundry, then? No, no, I remember, I was cleaning houses in this snotty part of Milwaukee, for women who filled their days getting their poodles groomed. Anyway, I finally got home and there were the girls, in the kitchen, very serious-looking, water and flour and paper towels spread everywhere.”
Blue remembered too; she’d been ten, Melody nine. A spring evening shortly after they’d moved to Jackson Park, on the south side of Milwaukee, when Mel, on a let’s-test-the-new-kid dare, had climbed their new school’s flagpole just after school let out. She was already near the top when Blue came outside—not that Blue’s protests would have stopped her—knees wrapped around the pole, one arm waving to the growing crowd of kids below. Blue’s mouth was just opening to yell, “Be careful!” when Mel lost her grip and fell backwards, skimming partway down the pole and then landing hard on her right side. The school nurse—Blue couldn’t recall her name or even quite what she looked like—thought the arm was probably broken. But when she failed to reach anyone at Nancy’s work number, she had reluctantly let Blue persuade her to take Mel home.
Blue remembered how grown up she’d felt, how capable, standing there somberly in front of the nurse, Mel equally somber, not even crying. If Mel had been hysterical, the nurse would never have let them leave. But faced with two little girls who swore their mother was going to be home soon, was probably on her way that minute and that was why the nurse couldn’t reach her, the nurse let them go. “You tell your mother Melody needs to see a doctor today,” the nurse had said, making Blue promise.
“I was thinking that Mel’s arm was broken,” Blue said now, “so I was making a cast.”
“Oh, the two of you,” her mother laughed, “with wet flour clumped in your hair and Melody practically mummi-fied.”
“Cute kids,” Calvin said. “Resourceful.”
And Mel’s arm was broken, and needed surgery, and their mother had been forced to take a second job to pay off the hospital bills.
“Resourceful—oh, you don’t know the half of it!” her mother said, pouring herself another glass of wine. “There was one year when Miss Harmony Blue here was so determined that I should have a cake for my birthday that she took Mom’s old car while I was gone—oh my God, she couldn’t have been fourteen—so that she could get the cake mix and be back home in time to surprise me with it already made, frosted, everything.”
This was after they’d moved to Homewood, outside Chicago, where a friend had offered her mother a job at a florist’s—a good fit, finally, for her mother’s earthiness, but their apartment had no grocery store in close walking distance. Blue had driven that car, a worthless Chevelle with rusting, busted-out floorboards, quite a few times before she was licensed to drive. To buy peanut butter and saltines when there was nothing left in the house to eat. To track down her sister, times when Mel failed to come straight home from school.
Once, during her senior year, she’d driven all the way into the city in the middle of the night to rescue her mother from a parking deck where the “good” car, a ’77 Ford LTD, had broken down. To rescue her from a date, downtown, with a man who had turned out to be “too corporate” for her mother’s tastes. That time was in the dead of winter and the Chevelle’s heater didn’t work; she’d driven hunched over the steering wheel, shivering, wiping the windshield every few minutes to keep it clear. Wishing her mother had not missed the last train. Vowing she would not live this way forever. At a stoplight she’d waited, peering out the side window into the vast black sky. There was Orion’s belt and there, there was Sirius, and she had said, “Please get me out of here.”
And it had been the very next day—she would take this as a sign—when her high-school English teacher, Mr Forrester, told her that his wife was looking for someone to work for her part time. Receptionist for a commercial realty office, where she’d have time to keep up with her homework. The pay was half again what she’d been making cleaning cages at a pet store—and then there was the added benefit of potentially more chances to see Mr Forrester’s handsome English professor son: Mitch, whom she had first seen when he visited their class in October to encourage them to pursue liberal arts degrees when they all went off to college. He had to know that fewer than a third of them would go to college at all, and those who went would go mostly on scholarship, choosing professions such as accounting and engineering—practical, good-paying occupations that would free them from repeating their parents’ worries about how to pay the gas bill and still buy groceries. Liberal arts degrees were for people who could afford to be idealists. An hour in Mitch’s presence that October and she’d decided that, affordable or not, she wanted to be one. She took the job.
Calvin checked his watch. “We got a nine-fifteen reservation,” he said. “Point me to the restroom, and then, Nancy, we better scoot.”
As soon as he was down the hall, her mother leaned close to say, “He’s The One.” She was nodding as she said it, eyes bright.
Too much wine. “You’ve known him for a week,” Blue said.
“Almost three, actually. Doesn’t matter. When you know, you know.”
“I know you’re being brash.” She, Blue, had been brash a time or two, so she knew what it looked like, how it sounded. She had imagined, once, that she knew.
Her mother stood and stared down at her. “Harmony Blue, I did not get to fifty-nine years of age by being completely stupid.”
“That’s not what I’m saying.” Blue got up and began gathering the plates and glasses. “Just, think about it. The money—”
“Your money, is that what you mean? He’s not seeing me because my daughter’s rich and has generously padded my own accounts.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time.”
“He has his own money—and a little thing called integrity.” She held up her hand to stop Blue’s protest. “Yes, I know, some of the others were lacking. Irrelevant. I was sowing my oats.”
For four decades in all. A lot of oats in Nancy Kucharski’s bag. “Fine,” Blue said, going into the kitchen. “Still, these things take time to play out. You need to see how you feel about him after you’ve been together a year or two—”
“How old am I?” her mother demanded.
Blue set the dishes in the sink and turned. “Mom.”
“How old am I?”
“Fifty-nine,” Blue sighed.
“How many of my friends have died in the past ten years?”
“I don’t know … three?”
Her mother held up six fingers. “Cancer, cancer, stroke, drunk driver, cancer, heart disease. Now tell me I should suspend my judgment for a year or two.”
“You’re as healthy as I am.”
“Today.” She kissed Blue’s cheek and left her standing in the kitchen.
Calvin joined Blue while her mother took a turn in the bathroom. “I’m glad to get to meet you,” he said, and when he smiled there was no evident avarice, only the refreshing sense that, in his eyes, she was equally Blue Reynolds and Nancy’s daughter, or perhaps even more the latter. His pale gray-blue eyes made her think of huskies, those reliable sled dogs of the Inuit. She wanted to like him. So much as she knew him she did like him. He could sing. He owned a bookstore. He paid her mother more attention than he paid her. If her usual discreet inquiry into this man’s background proved out, well, that would be a start.
What a strange concept: her mother in love after all these years.
“All right then,” her mother called, heading for the foyer. “Have a good trip to the Keys. Watch out for pirates.”
“And sharks,” Calvin said, as he and Blue joined her.
“And I love you,” her mother added, kissing her forehead.
Blue watched the elevator doors close after them with tears welling—envy? longing? She wasn’t sure, and didn’t want to think about it. By the time she was back inside her apartment she had willed the tears away.
Chapter Three (#u16723e4b-046e-5242-b128-b579a8e9c660)
Outside Mitch Forrester’s Chapel Hill office window, the trees were a green haze of new leaves, the only real color on this gray, rainy morning. Spring weather had a solid hold on North Carolina, as was evident by the number of students who’d been showing up to class in shorts and flip-flops this last week before spring break. It was scheduled late this year, so they were more than ready. Today would be a mess of dripping plastic ponchos and wet umbrellas, slick floors and poorly attended classes.
An oak tree’s branches brushed his second-floor window. He’d been startled more than once by scratching sounds, nights he’d sat here on an old slip-covered couch reading journals or grading essays, nights when he’d thought all was calm outside. Shut away in the English department, he’d be unaware of the storm rolling in until the wind began rising, the trees swaying like so many lithe dancers in one of those troupes his ex-wife Angie had liked dragging him to see. Now he saw the rain stream off the tiny narrow leaves without paying it much attention, as what he was hearing on the telephone preoccupied him.
“Let me see if I understand correctly,” he said, returning to his desk. It was piled with scholarly books whose pages had long since yellowed, books with cracked spines and worn corners, and opinions, within their pages, that were hardly credited anymore. By contrast, Dr Seuss’s The SleepBook was face-up with a note stuck to the front, reminding him to bring it for this afternoon’s tutoring session with a third-grader named Chris; after hearing Mitch’s story of how his son Julian had loved the book when he was a boy, Chris had grudgingly agreed to try reading it himself. A potted purple orchid with a name Mitch could never remember sat atop four copies of his most recent publication, a slim book that considered the role of women in Ernest Hemingway’s fiction. The legendary author hadn’t been too successful with women, a problem Mitch unfortunately shared.
He said, “I’ll need some sort of filming permit from the city along with whatever I arrange directly with you folks there at the Hemingway Home, yes?”
The man on the other end of the phone call, a volunteer with a gravelly voice, said yes, he believed so. However, he said, September was thick into hurricane season and if Mitch came then, he was taking his chances.
“I know—my parents live there in Key West. But I appreciate your advice. Unfortunately, I’m working against a number of factors, one of which is my, er, crew’s availability, and my own. I only have the fall semester to pull this project together. As I said, I’ll be down tomorrow and hope to start getting things in order. Can you give me the name of the person to contact about permits?” When he had the information jotted in his date book, he thanked the man and hung up.
Literary Lions, his under-construction biopic series about classic American authors, had seemed uncomplicated when he’d first come up with the concept, which he envisioned as ideal for public television. The money he might earn was likely to be modest—but as a tenured professor, he was doing fine. And as Julian had reminded him recently, he already had a lot more of everything—time, money, security, opportunity—than most of the world’s citizens. Mitch had admitted this was true, and said, “Now do we sing a chorus of ‘We Are The World’?” It was a nervous tic of a joke, he knew it even as the words left his mouth. Julian had been generous about it, though, saying, “Sure, Dad—you start.”
Mitch propped his feet on his desk and leaned back. His old leather chair squealed with the motion, testifying that, secure as a professor’s job was, there were no luxuries in the academe. If he could make Lions fly—the image made him chuckle—he would reward himself with a new chair.
That “if ” was a big one, however, and “uncomplicated” was proving to be a bit enthusiastic. To begin with, writing the script for the first episode, the “pilot,” as it was called, had been more challenging than he’d anticipated. He’d imagined it as something like prepping a lecture for twenty students. However, a few torturous nights of script writing had proven that a low-stakes lecture was nothing like crafting an entertaining and informative hour-long program for a million viewers, all armed with remote controls. Okay, maybe a million was a little zealous, to start. Thousands, though—surely he could count on thousands.
The script was coming along.
Overcoming his anxiety about inviting Julian to direct and film the pilot had been difficult too. He’d had to face the fourteen-year-wide chasm in their relationship, which had been only minimally bridged when they were together at the hospital in Miami last fall after Mitch’s father had a stroke.
Without the usual buffer of his parents and an occasion like Christmas or graduation, it had been hard to know how to greet Julian. He’d wanted to hug him, something he hadn’t done since Julian was a pre-adolescent, but sensed the desire wasn’t mutual. He patted his shoulder instead.
“Dad’s going to be all right,” he said, “but it’s good that you could get here.” Julian had been at the beginning of his Afghanistan assignment then. “How are things?”
“Busy. You?”
“Oh, fine—busy.” He searched for something more to say as the silence dragged out. Then, inspired, he’d blurted, “Hey, one of my grad students is a portrait photographer on the side.”
“Yeah?”
“I thought you’d find that interesting. A lit major who’s also a photographer.” He knew he was trying too hard, knew his eagerness would be plain on his face. He was one of those people whose expressions translated every thought, every emotion as it happened.
But Julian wasn’t looking at him. “Sure, interesting,” he’d said.
“So … are you getting a lot of work?”
